Once you've been through your website objectives, you may want to consider one or more of the following.
These days the design of a website has to consider not only the public face, but how the site will be managed from your office - a practice given the term web content management. The last thing you need is a three week latency between wanting something put up and it actually happening. Web content management allows you to effect changes immediately.
It's quite normal to have data passed back from a web form either into an email - to which you respond manually - or to a web-hosted database system which provides the visitor with something useful or tangible. This is the basis of much ecommerce.
It starts getting really clever when you move from ecommerce to ebusiness - the difference being that the latter integrates with your back-office computer systems directly. This is quite a big step since your back-office systems have to sport the same availability levels as your web and database hosting. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is familiar with providing uninterruptible power and resilience lines (alternative routes to the Internet), but your IT manager (if you have one) may not be.
Our entry level of commerce is refreshingly simple in operation. Credit card transactions are managed on secure web pages and an email notification of the completed transaction is sent to the website owner. The owner then returns to the secure pages to pick up the details, which are then processed manually.
One of the huge advantages of this system is that it's easier for a human to spot fraudulent transactions than a machine, and duplicates are quickly eliminated.
When the website transactions exceed 25 a day, manual processing becomes too cumbersome and visitors expect a more complete 'round trip' where they not only get notification of the transaction (ie it's happened, we know about it) but also confirmation of their place on a course (ie You're booked in) or goods in the post (ie Your order's on its way).
From the point of view of running a web business, particularly one that has integration to your back-office, it's imperative that your revenue stream isn't brought to a halt by nefarious folk. It's still a problem even if you aren't running a web business, but you may be able to handle a breakdown of operations more easily without that 24/7 pressure.
Any computer system connected to the Internet, whether owned by IBM, Microsoft or Mrs Higgins at No. 22, is subject to the same kind and volume of attacks. This is because these attacks are frequently done by fully automatic systems and they neither know or care at what they are pointing. Basically there's no relief for being a small business or individual.
Security of your entire system, including laptops and remote workers, needs to be considered if you are not going to be struck down. Caz Limited can help you develop a strategy in this area.
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