Websites that are encrypted using SSL can be identified in several ways. Firstly, the prefix of their web address is usually “https://”, signifying that they operate over a secure server. Also, the website can be identified as secure by the fact that there is a padlock symbol in your browser’s status bar. If neither of these signs is present, then the website is insecure and it is not advisable to put sensitive personal information into that website as it may be possible that an unauthorised third party could obtain access to the data.

Protecting your website using SSL encryption is definitely a practice that we recommend to all webmasters who regularly ask their visitors to input sensitive information. Of course, the most obvious benefit to you as a webmaster is that it ensures that all of the data that your customers enter is safe, secure and inaccessible to anyone other than those who are authorised to have access to it.

Encrypting your webpages in this way ensures that you, as a webmaster, have peace of mind and know that the data provided by your customers is secure and protected against unauthorised access.

As well as the peace of mind for you, the fact that there are visible signs of how secure your website is means that customers will feel more comfortable. If they can visibly tell that your website has a layer of security protecting it, then they will be far more likely to input their details and thus they will be more likely to buy products from you online.

This in turn means that you will earn more money and sell more products, which is exactly what any online business wants. SSL encryption for your website will definitely pay for itself after a very short time indeed, making it a worthwhile investment for the security-minded webmaster.

Reputation is another aspect of your web presence than can be improved by adding SSL encryption. If your website asks people to enter payment details, then it cannot be reputable unless it is secure. A website that is clearly secure will instantly have a better reputation than one which appears to be  wide open for cybercriminals.

So to conclude, in this security conscience online age, SSL encryption is something that is definitely worth the investment for your website. Without the padlock symbol, potential customers will not have enough confidence to input their sensitive personal information into your website and thus they cannot purchase any of your products. However, the addition of encryption quickly puts their minds at rest and soon your SSL encrypted website will have the customers flying in.

Any business worth its salt now has (or will soon have) an ecommerce system embedded within their online presence in order to provide an extra stream of sales for their company. A well-crafted ecommerce system guarantees you the ability to bring in far more sales than a shop on the high street would, also allowing you to reach a far wider audience eventually.

Unfortunately for the less technically able webmasters amongst us, ecommerce systems are rather complicated to implement. For those who do not have the technical expertise required to code and maintain such a system, it can be a difficult process and any system they design may be inadequate for its purpose. A lack of technological and design skills can lead to the system not functioning at all or being far too basic for the complex purpose that it needs to serve in order to be effective.

However, there are now huge numbers of professional developers who specialise in producing bespoke ecommerce solutions for businesses. These people have spent years honing the technical skills required to create the systems that sell your products to a massive online audience. They will provide you with an excellent, easy to use system that makes it easy for customers to buy from you and also find information about the products before they make a decision as to buying them.

An ecommerce system should contain a simple, yet attractive shopping interface whilst also maintaining comprehensive information about the product. This allows the user to ensure that they can access all of the information about the products on offer before they make a decision on whether to buy your stock or not. The more information you have, the better and products with more information are more likely to be bought as the user knows exactly what they are paying for.

A professionally designed ecommerce system should also contain an interface that allows webmasters to maintain the system themselves. Developers put these in so as to allow the users to keep the system up to date on their own, without having to have the developers repeatedly carry out updates. This ensures that the system can carry on being effective over time as the products and prices the company offers changes.

So to conclude, ecommerce systems are now massively important to any business that wants to maintain its sales into the future. Professionals are now located all over the internet that will ensure the quality of your system and so you should certainly go to one of these instead of trying to cobble together a system yourself.

Ecommerce certainly is the future and your company can be at the forefront of this wave.

Our offices (including telephone lines) will be closed Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Easter Monday but we will continue to offer e-mail and ticket support throughout the holiday period and, of course, be monitoring your web servers to ensure they all work as they should.

Also, it is important for companies to ensure that they have regularly updated content on their website. This is the only way that people are going to return to the website regularly and therefore it is the only way they will come across information on new services and offers that your organisation has set up.

Without doubt, the best way for a company to provide content that is engaging and can be updated is to set up a blog. This means that they can not only boost their content levels, but they can also give the impression of being personable and ready to communicate with customers on more than simply a business level.

There is no hard and fast rule as to what kind of content you should put on a company blog, but usually your content should centre around the subject that you have expertise in. This usually means that your blog content should focus around the product you are trying to sell. Of course, this does not mean that you should limit your content stringently to that one specific subject, but in fact that everything you write should relate to your product in some way. Irrelevant content will not help anyone, least of all your company.

As well as the personal layer a blog adds to your organisation, it also has benefits in terms of search engine optimisation. Blog posts containing key words are always useful to drive traffic to your website through search engines. The more times a certain key word is used, the higher your site will rank in the search pages. Obviously, you have to integrate these words into your work; otherwise it is clear that your content has not had very much effort put into it.

The main danger with blogs is that it is easy to forget to update them and this means that the entire concept of engaging and regularly updated content is thrown out of the window. It is important that you have someone dedicated who you can rely on to produce regular content to the same high quality as they began with. There is nothing worse than a blog which goes off the boil after the first month or so. A blog that does not get updated is absolutely no use to anyone and isn’t going to do your company any favours.

Nonetheless, a blog is a fabulous tool for any company as the benefits of it are huge and it gives your website a more interesting feel and gives prospective customers some information about why your company has the expertise required and why they should buy from you.

Of course, you could use a free website builder to make your website or you could even try a hand at learning some simple coding and knocking up a basic design. You can’t go wrong with some flashing lights and vibrant text colours, right?

Wrong.

In fact, those things and design features are the cardinal sin of web design. So many websites with great potential are ruined by the fact that people do not have an eye for the best kind of web design. People seem to think that adorning their pages with flashing pictures and garish colouration is the kind of design that will bring the visitors flocking in.

Whilst these kinds of design techniques may work on posters that the eye only has to fixate on for a second, a web page that customers may look at for an extended period of time should be simple and easy on the eye. The need for fancy banners is minimal as it is highly likely that the person visiting your site is already interested and thus does not need to be “drawn in” by your graphics.

For these reasons, it is best for your website that you hire someone who has an eye for detail and a level of experience in making a website look exactly how it should. If you are truly serious about increasing your sales with an online presence, what you need is a professional web designer.

It is easy when browsing the internet to tell which websites have been designed by proper web designers and which ones have simply been knocked together by someone with a few minutes and a copy of Microsoft FrontPage to play around with.

A professional is able to produce a reliable website based around a skin that has the correct level of flashiness compared with easiness on the eye. They can produce the kind of website that someone would be happy to look at for long enough to read through the information. If you look at the most popular commerce websites, eBay and Amazon, you can tell that they are both easy on the eye. This is done so that people can spend hours happily browsing these sites without being distracted by stupid graphics and these sites pull in millions of pounds every year.

The moral of this all is that it is certainly worth shelling out the money when making your website to hire someone who can produce a proper design. If your site looks good, then people will buy your products. It is that simple, so make the right decision today and show just how serious about business you are.

simplewebhosting.co.uk can create your professionally designed website for as little as £149 and our talented, award-winning web designers are available today to get you online. Visit www.simplewebhosting.co.uk/web-design to find out more.

Take advantage today using the promotional code ‘summer’.

Our office will be closed on Bank Holiday Monday (31st August) for telephone support but you can still e-mail us or use our ticketing system for fast support when you need it.

Direct Debit makes renewing your web hosting and domain names even simpler. No more worrying about your credit or debit card expiring or having to update your details when you get a new card.

If you’d like to pay your bills by Direct Debit instead of that pesky credit or debit card, login to your client area at www.simplewebhosting.co.uk/secure and click the Direct Debit link.

What are benefits of Direct Debit I hear you ask?

Direct debit is the preferred payment method for over 48% of the UK bill paying population because it provides so many advantages:

It spreads the costs
Spreading the cost of bills across the year, allowing easier budgeting.

Peace of mind
Peace of mind of knowing bills are being paid automatically and payment dates will not be missed.

It’s often cheaper
Apart from eliminating the expense of mailing cheques, it enables you to take advantage of the many direct debit discounts available.

It’s more convenient
Many organisations offer a choice of payment dates giving you the convenience of choosing a date that suits you best.

It’s guaranteed
The reassurance of knowing that every direct debit is protected by three main safeguards: an immediate money back guarantee from the bank or building society if an error is made, advance notice from the organisation if the date or the amount of the direct debit changes and ultimately, the right to cancel.

What’s left is available to spend
Paying regular bills by direct debit means it is easy to see what disposable income is left to spend after all other commitments have been met.

Our office and telephone support will be closing at 5pm on Thursday 9th April and will re-open at 9am on Tuesday 14th April.

Rest assured that we’ll continue to monitor our sysems around the clock throughout Easter period and will be available to deal with any issues via e-mail or live support and via our emergency pager.

If you need any help or assistance over the long weekend, drop us an e-mail and we’ll reply in the same quick way we always do.

Web hosting uptime is VERY important! We get new web hosting customers every day moving to us from other web hosts saying their site’s been down for two days, or a week or even longer! In the web hosting world, this is simply not acceptable.

Here at simplewebhosting.co.uk, we do a lot to make sure your website is online and available for the world to see every minute of every day of every year.

We provide all shared web hosting and reseller web hosting customers with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. That means that we’re so confident of the service we offer we guarantee that your website will be available 99.9% of the time. You may be interested to know that we have NEVER dropped below this 99.9% uptime guarantee on any of our web hosting servers.

In fact, taking the web server that this blog is hosted on, out of the last 33 months, 31 of those months have returned 100% uptime. This data is supplied from two independent server monitors organisations. That’s pretty impressive uptime for budget web hosting.

Of course, if the worse should happen and a web server crashes and become unfixable, we always have three backups of your website taken daily, weekly and monthly and can have your data restored to a brand new web server in just a few hours. Thankfully, we’ve only ever had to do that twice in recent years.

So, web hosting uptime is very important if you want people to be able to buy from you or even send you an e-mail!