Get Serious or Get Out
Posted On: 2011-10-27
Yesterday was almost pure insanity on our office down town. Not only did we have plenty of regular work to keep us going through the day ... and for plenty of days to come ... but it was also one of those days when the phone just didn't stop ringing.
Now having the phone never stop ringing is a healthy sign for any small web design business because most of those calls are people wanting quotes or letting you know that they want you to start work on their projects ... and those calls are great.
But yesterday many of the phone calls were the sort you really don't want because they're going to totally disrupt your day. These are the phone calls from people that you have never done work for before ... or people who thought your quote was way too high and took their business elsewhere.
These are the people who suddenly find that their site has been hacked or is loaded up with trojans and desperately need someone to fix it. These are the people who find that the cheap web designer they thought would do a much better job than we could ever do now find that their designer has taken their money and skipped town. These are the people who expect you to drop everything and rush to their aid.
And usually that's what we do. We don't like seeing people get ripped off ... we don't like seeing businesses go down the drain because they've been hacked ... so we try and help them.
Yesterday just seemed to be a day filled with calls from those sort of people. There was the owner of a popular local business ... someone who thought that our quote was too expensive ... who called after she discovered that her cheap designer had skipped the country with her money and left her with a site that is only half finished.
Sadly for her that wasn't her only problem ... when I looked at her site I also found that it had been hacked by an Islamic Group as well.
Then there was the guy who had a website for his wholesale business. It had been built by a friend who may not have been much of a friend because the guy who called had just discovered that his monthly hosting bill was huge even though his storage space and traffic were minimal. He need of that server before he got slugged with another very large annual hosting fee and he only had two days in which to move his entire site.
He also got more bad news from me ... his site had a particularly nasty trojan that had been injected into the code behind the site.
So what do those two business people ... and the others that called yesterday ... have to do with anyone in this industry? Quite a lot actually.
They thought that websites and doing business on the web could be done on the cheap ... they thought that they could take the easy options and get their sites built by friends and those who may have been able to impress them by talking the talk but ultimately couldn't walk the walk.
In both of those cases the people who had built ... or started to build ... the websites had used WordPress but never updated them. They had used simple logins ... logins that any script kiddie could crack in their sleep. They had chosen to do those things because it was easy ... it was simple ... it didn't take much effort and they were either lazy or clueless ... or both.
So how serious are you about your online business? Are you like those business people I talked to yesterday and always looking for the cheapest option? Are you like those web designers and take shortcuts with the sites you build and use easy-to-remember logins simply because it's just too much of a pain to use more involved logins?
If you haven't realized it before now then let me tell you in plain English. Your online business is a serious business ... if it makes you money then you need to be serious about your business and you need to protect your business.
If you're going to use a content management system to run your websites then make sure that you keep it up to date. Yes ... I know that it can be a pain to keep everything updated ... but that's the cost of being serious about your business. You either keep those systems up to date or you let the hackers walk right in and screw you.
It's the same with your access codes. Make them hard to remember ... use separate access codes for each site you ... and be prepared to change them occasionally. Never go with the default options for usernames either. Every time you use the default option for a username you're making it much easier for a hacker to get into your site or onto your server.
This is a serious business and you need to either get serious about your business or get out before some hacker destroys your business and leaves you with nothing.