Trunk Media

Who is looking after your website?

31 August 2007

Most small to medium size clients think that once their website has been designed and built, that’s it. They assume that the company who is hosting the site is taking the proper precautions to ensure that the site and its content is only accessible to authorised people. While we hope this is the case, it is not always like that as I have recently found out.

A few days ago I had to do a bit of Flash work on behalf of an agency for one of their clients. In the email that was sent to me, there were instructions with what needed to be done and an FTP username and password so I could download the source files and upload the new files once the changes had been made. What I found when I logged on to the FTP was pretty concerning.

The username and password took me directly to the root of the server where all of the agency’s live websites were hosted. This gave me free reign (if I was that way inclined) to go to any of the websites and make whatever changes I wanted to. First of all the source files shouldn’t be put up on the live server. Secondly, the username and password should have restricted my access to that particular site only and finally, a staging environment for the website should be setup so changes can be signed off before being put live. In this case the agency said, make the changes and put them live so that we can check them!!!

While I am sure that most companies who provide hosting services don’t partake in these cowboy-ish ways, it might pay to ask a few questions just to be on the safe side.

Posted in Technical | No Comments »

NZ Herald embracing social media

31 August 2007

It’s not very often that I have something nice to say about NZ Herald but credit where credit is due…

I was reading an article in the NZ Herald this morning and at the bottom of the article embedded in the page was a relevant YouTube video (ok the video was in German but you could still get the gist).

There seems to have been a bit of a shake-up at NZ Herald since the website was re-launched - the focus has shifted to the reader.

A few of the changes that I have noticed:

• Blogs for a number of sections - lifestyle, technology, business etc
• Opinion gathering - reader comments on topical articles
• Reader polls on top stories.

And now YouTube!

Well done NZ Herald on creating a more engaging user experience.

Now if we could just get rid of those annoying 420×400 Flash ads! That is a lot of screen real estate (nearly half the width of the site) for something that only a very small proportion of people will be interested in.

Maybe NZ Herald should poll ad value, or let you rate how annoying and/or distracting an ad is… My most hated ad at the moment is the Shick “ridding the world of irritation” (or flies) by using fly spray ad – stupid, annoying and decidedly distracting. At least there is a stop button…

Posted in Marketing | 1 Comment »

HitTail real-time hits and keyword suggestions

23 August 2007

HitTail www.hittail.com  is a free service that displays in real-time the hits your website receives in search engines, identifying the keywords which actually resulted in a visit to your site.

The advantage of using this method is that you can identify keywords that your website may not be optimised towards. HitTail looks for underperforming terms and shows them in a suggestions area as good candidates for blogging or new Web pages.

We have been using HitTail on our website since March and it has been interesting to see some of the terms our site ranks for.

(more…)

Posted in Marketing | 2 Comments »