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Well it's been a while since I gave that title to a column here, or even over in Porn Resource, but it certainly applies to this week.

It's not that the week has been difficult but it certainly has been rather frustrating and Steve and I have managed to waste a heap of time redoing things that were working perfectly until someone decided to have a little fiddle.

How did he do it?
Take for instance the webmaster of a not-for-profit group that we built a rather attractive WordPress website for. It looked clean and was easy to navigate and it displayed all the things that were important for the group.

Then we had to hand it over to their webmaster who assured us that he knew everything that he needed to know about maintaining a website. From his tone we could tell that he didn't have a clue and within days that became totally obvious when he took the clean and tidy website back to a very bad memory of 1997.

Not satisfied with that he then managed to lock every user, including us, out of the website and his latest achievement has been to delete every plugin that had been installed on the site. When you consider that you really do have to work through several prompts to actually achieve that result you have to wonder what he was thinking.

We expected that he would come back to us and ask us to fix the problem but he didn't. Instead he has gone ahead and installed a whole bunch of plugins I've never heard of and now no one in the office is brave enough to have a look at the front of the website. We might all become so angry that we'll start throwing things and that would not be good.

I guess we're fortunate that he didn't come back to us to fix his stuff ups but there have been others who did just that this week.

Was it bedtime for a hacker?
Then this morning there were the 1,000 attempts to hack into another website we manage. It was no big deal, every one of those attacks bounced off the defences and the site is still secure but it slowed things down for a while and all the alerts certainly looked impressive.

I suppose I shouldn't find that annoying but perhaps the sheer incompetence of this hacker got under my skin. Every single one of those attacks came from the same IP address and used the same username that he had found on Google so it wasn't hard to tighten up a couple of our defences just to make sure he wouldn't get in.

It's almost insulting that someone as incompetent as that should waste our time. Those attacks have now stopped completely and the time they stopped probably coincided with the hacker's bed time.

Finally people are talking about the Asian market
The other day I noticed that a well-known WordPress SEO guy has been talking about the importance of considering cultural differences when building websites. That's something I raised over on Porn Resource a some years ago and it's not rocket science.

You only have to take a walk around your nearest city to see plenty of examples of cultural differences in the shops so why wouldn't there be cultural differences in the way that people from different cultural backgrounds looked at the websites and online stores that we build?

Look in the window of an Asian grocery store and see how the display products are arranged and compare that to something similar that's run by a Caucasian and the differences will be obvious.

In the store owned by a Caucasian the items will be displayed in neat rows and there will be plenty of space between the items. In the Asian store the display will be a crazy jumble of items with no obvious order and every spare spot taken up with something.

Now head over to an Asian online store and you will see something similar. The displays won't be quite as jumbled because it's hard to achieve that on a web page but each page will be crowded with products.

So if that works for people from an Asian background what should a porn site look like that is targeting the Asian market. Would the normal sort of free site or gallery work in the Asian market or should we be looking at ways of producing both types of site or gallery?

It's an interesting question and one that you shouldn't just throw into the too-hard basket. Back about the same time as I wrote about the Asian look to websites a well-known webmaster of the time scoffed at me for even thinking that we could ever sell anything into China but times change.

We might still have problems getting cashed up people in China to see our porn websites but there are a lot of cashed up Chinese who are outside of China so why shouldn't we be reaching out to them?

It's just something to think about over the weekend while I try to forget some of the frustrating people that have populated my week.