Do you?

“My brothers girlfriends dad made it for me….”  is normally the kind of thing we hear during our first meeting with new clients, and upon closer inspection some of the sites our new customers come to us with are bodged together using old, unstable scripts that are potentially exposing customer info and allowing server level access to hackers and script kiddiez of the world – which means not only are you potentially exposing your own online business, you are potentially putting all the other sites on

If you are not familiar with web technologies and coding then you really should employ a company that are familiar with these scripts and technologies so that they can be on-the-case in terms of new exploit releases and can keep your site up-to-date and secure.

eCommerce is a different kettle of fish altogether as this comes with an additional layer of risk due to the fact customer information is stored and transmitted directly from the website. This isnt anything to worry about, as long as you have the correct security defences in place such as properly configured SSL certificates and a software firewall at the very least. Fortunately the eCommerce world involves payment gateways that have strictly enforced security policies and your site is usually checked

This doesn’t mean that over time your once-secure site cant become a risk to your customers – the internet evolves on a daily basis, so you need to ensure you stay up-to-date and in the loop else you may fall behind and actually be causing more harm to your online business, than good.

Contact the Dijitul Security Team today and protect your online business from threats.

So far this year we have developed;

• Bespoke Energy Billing Software
• Bespoke Adobe Air Video Player
• Bespoke CRM Software
• Staff Management Software via WordPress Multi User
• Custom Call Management Software
• Custom Sales Staff Management Software…

And there is also more in the pipeline!

We’re not sure why it seems like all of a sudden everyone wants tailored software for their business, maybe word is getting round that we are good at what we do? Or maybe its because the business world in the UK is getting more ‘tech savvy’ and realising that the not only can they play draw something with their best mate via the Internet – but it can also help them and their business reach out to millions and millions of potential customers!

Do you need bespoke software?

Not everyone does – in fact many people can find pre-made solutions that fit their needs perfectly! Unfortunately for many – the software that’s out there just doesn’t quite hit the spot – to give you an example in terms of some CRM software, a customer of ours found a bit of kit that was 80% suitable but it didn’t factor in Google Calendar for reminders – they already used Google Calendars so they didn’t want to move on to something else and wanted their CRM to slot in with their existing infrastructure. We helped them on the path to having 100% systems integration!

So how do I get some software made?

The first stage is to do some browsing and see if there are any bits of software that already exist that would do the job – you will save a lot of time and money if you can find something pre-existing. If you cannot find anything suitable then start having a think about exactly what it is you require. List features or requirements – maybe even physically scribble some ideas onto paper – the more this is planned the more likely it is you will end up with what you actually need.

Never Assume – what we mean by this is never, EVER, assume anything! If we are commissioned to make some software and you fail to mention something when we are planning it out for you – don’t assume we’ll do it anyway as we wont! When you are talking about online shops, certain elements (shopping cart, checkout procedure etc) are standard and don’t need to be asked for – however when making something 100% bespoke we need to know about every element and every feature so we can ensure we hit the nail on the head, first time!

Contact our software development team today and start planning out your brand new software!

So, here is our own little summary of some of the things that have been going on in the internet world in the first quarter of 2012, enjoy!

Okay, this first one was officially announced in December 2011, but bare with us as much of the discussion over it has come this year, so it counts to us, and that is social networking giant and market leader Facebook unveiled its most radical changes yet, with the introduction of the new ‘timeline’ profile layout.

This saw Facebook user profiles undergo an evolution, which not only changed the layout of things, but made it possible for you, and others, to scroll back through all of your Facebook history in just a few seconds, finding any post from any month at any year since you signed up, and its safe to say it received mixed reviews. The advocates of the ‘timeline’ were quick to praise the stylish new layout and the fact that it was now much easier and quicker to find a previous comment or status update, however the detractors counter argument was that Facebook had again begun to push the boundaries with peoples privacy, and that now information or posts – potentially from years ago – that a person may not want someone to see, can easily be found, and perhaps lead to troubles in personal lives, with employers, family members or  a spouse. Despite this disagreement however, many peoples profiles are now in the timeline format, and its only a matter of time before it becomes compulsory and is rolled out across every page, what affect that will have on user numbers? Who knows?

Away from Facebook meanwhile, in January a massive amount of the internet worlds attention was focused on the United States and the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which was being discussed in government as an unprecedented way to enforce proper copyright laws upon the internet and punish anyone deemed guilty of online piracy, or using certain content without the proper authority. As was to be expected, the internet world expressed total outrage and was quick to point out exactly what SOPA being passed would mean, with plenty of pictures, info-graphics, banners and full scale explanations popping up all over the place to get the point across that, in short, SOPA would mean an end to the days of turning to Google or Wikipedia and having a world of free knowledge in just a few seconds.

In response to this, on the 18th of January, action was taken in protest to both spread general awareness of SOPA and show opposition to it, with the most high profile of this coming as the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia held a complete blackout for 24 hours, preventing anyone from using the service to show what would happen should SOPA take hold. It is estimated around 7000 other smaller websites joined in the blackout, whilst other internet giants such as Google had links or messages of protest on their homepages to show their opposition, without halting service, ensuring that the internet did not completely grind to a halt.

After surviving this however, there were even larger fears that the internet could completely go out in some places, along with power and phone lines, when the largest solar storm since 2005 came to earth and threatened to wreck millions of peoples day by leaving them without internet or mobile phone access – we won’t bore you with the scientific stuff, but lets just say, it passsed without any real effect, and the world, and internet, continued on, at least here at Dijitul!

Moving on to everyone’s (except Microsoft’s) favourite search engine Google, who always have something to tell the world about, and these first 3 months have been no different, several (albeit minor) algorithm changes have been seen this year so far, including further updates to last years major ‘Panda’ update, as they continue to tweak and twiddle things to provide the best possible results for every search, whilst, they have also made some rather significant changes to their privacy policy, although with the same top corner message popping up on the Google homepage on every visit for around 2 months, you probably already knew that…

With that, we reach the first quarters final significant news story, and this is probably one which is still fresh in your head following significant national news coverage, but a young univesrity student has been sentenced to serve around 56 days in prison, following ‘trolling’ comments he made on Twitter, following the collapse of Footballer Fabrice Muamba. The comments he made were certainly vile and racist, and no one can doubt that intense trolling through social media can reach troubling bad levels, but with arrests being made over internet comments has got the world wondering, is the internet any longer the playground for free speech?

So, there we have it, thats my personal take on the internet worlds start to 2012 (feel free to leave your own in the comments below), and what the rest of the year holds remains to be seen, but with UK internet usage having increased 50% in the last five years, you can be sure it’s going to play a big part in life, and that Dijitul will be here the whole way through with our web development services helping to take you and your business online.

There are a number of things it does so much better than the rest, stuff like different pricing groups, one page checkout etc etc etc.

However, there are a few things it doesn’t do too well – one of which was an issue with the TMP directory on the server the sites are on continually getting filled up, to the point where it would stop anything database driven from working.

Now obviously this is a fairly big issue – as most websites nowadays are (or should be) database driven – so we tried various things to see if we could get it to stop filling up, all with no success.

Then our in-house developer Dave noticed some php.ini files within the root, and the /admin folder of all opencart installations, and in these fields was this line;

session.gc_maxlifetime = 12000000;

This number is in seconds, so in hours that would be; 3,334 – which is 138 days!

Im pretty sure these don’t need to be stored for so long, so if we change that to 3600 – which is exactly one hour – we’re pretty confident that this issue will no longer happen.

The statistics – which confirm Twitter’s place as the “second” social network, behind Facebook – show that they actually have around 200 million registered users, however only half of those are active, but around half of that 100 million log in every day.

This still leaves them a substantial 550 million accounts behind Facbook, however given the differing nature of the two sites, and the fact that the number of active Twitter users has risen 82% this year do make for healthy reading for the micro blogging platform.

One of the main areas of discussion around Twitter has been how it will commercialise the platform so that they can make more money out of it, in the same way that Facebook and Google do. One of the ways they have been trying is the introduction of ‘promoted tweets’ – where a company pays to have their tweets appear top of a trending list, so as to draw more people to it – and that is expected to be pushed further soon. The companies chief executive Dick Costolo confirmed that they would be pushing the advertising in to wider areas of the business, however he also said that he did not want to alienate users by over commercialising, and later said the company would not go public, saying they wished to remain independent.

Twitter is highly popular amongst all sorts of users, from the average person, to celebrities, and even businesses – yes, Twitter can be a very useful business promotion tool, and if your business does not have a Twitter presence, we highly recommend you get one now.

For more information regarding Twitter and social media marketing, please call the SEO Nottingham team today on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.

The .xxx domain has been created with the intention of building a so called ‘red light district’ of the internet, where websites with adult content can all be, making it easier for those wanting it, to find it, and those not wanting to, to avoid it.

‘ICM registry’ who are overseeing the launch say that they hope the new domain will lead to a more ‘responsible approach to adult content’.

The .xxx domain will not be compulsory for adult websites and they will be allowed to decide for themselves whether or not they apply, however ICM have also that they will be working with security firm McAfee to ensure that none of the sites harbour malware or other cyber related threats, making them a much safer place for people to visit.

It is also possible for people and businesses to have their name blocked from being used with the .xxx domain, so as to avoid people trying to associate them with adult content – a free between $150 and $200 (£100-£200) has to be paid for this.

We don’t tend to deal with adult websites in our day to day activities here at Dijitul, however, with it being such a huge part of the internet, and formerly the biggest online pastime (only being displaced by the rise of Facebook and Twitter)  a change of such proportions cannot be ignored, and could have quite an impact on the landscape of the internet.

For more information regarding anything web related, from design to SEO, please call the Web Design Nottingham team today on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.

Back in 2009 Ms Bartz took over from one of the companies founders Jerry Yang, in an attempt to turn around its falling fortunes as it continually lost ground in the search industry to Google. However, despite her early job cuts to save money, and enhanced focus on providing personalised search resultds, the fortunes could not be turned, and she has been ‘removed from the board of directors, effective immediately’.

Chief financial office Tim Morse will take over temporarily whilst the board of directors work to find a full time replacement.

In my opinion, this change of captain is hardly surprising, despite partnerships with Bing and continued work to try and establish itself as a true competitor in the industry again, Yahoo! seem to have stagnated and made very little progress, whilst Facebook has emerged and revolutionised the way people spend their time online, and Google remain search leaders have developed their own highly popular mobile operating system, and become a competitor in the social media market.

However, whether or not the change will actually make any real impact remains to be see and turn their fortunes around remains to be seen, either way, something signifcant will need to be done to turn Yahoo! around.

For more information regarding search engines, SEO, or getting your business online, then please call the Web Design Nottingham team today on 01623 650333.

The reason for this, is a customer of ours has an awesome online shop made by us – and all his prices are INCLUSIVE of VAT/Tax. He trades internationally, so we’ve been working on a cool EUVAT/Vat Exempt module so that (example) if someone buys from the EU and is EUVAT registered, they input their EUVAT number, the site instantly checks it for validity and if its OK removes the Tax/VAT from the order.

It has a whole heap of other “conditions” with it, but thats not the reason for this blog post.

We wanted to bulk remove the vat from his products, but our initial plan fell flat on its face, becasue;

£100 + 20% VAT = £120

£120 – 20% VAT = £96

Ah.

The reason for this is that 20% of 100 is not the same as 20% of 120….

So we racked our brains for all those formulas and junk we learnt in school, and asked a few friends who mostly pointed us to cool websites that seemed to do the job – but we were still no closer to actualyl figuring out what the formula was..

Then all of a sudden, bingo!

One of the lads figured it out, and here it is;

(total_price/(100+VAT))*100

So, as we break it down…..

(120/(100+20))*100

(120/120)*100

1*100

£100

Bingo!

These discontinued services are to include social powered question and answer tool ‘Aardvark’, news content experiment ‘Fast Flip’ and note taking service ‘Notebook’.

This is being done so that Google can slim down their range of services, provide more simplicity for users, and to allow them to put more focus and resources into developing on its more popular services. A quote from senior vice president Alan Eustace on the official Google blog said :

“Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. [...] This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people.”

The full list of discontinued Google services is as follows -

• Aardvaark
• Fast Flip
• Notebook
• Desktop
• Pack
• Sidewiki
• Google Maps API for Flash
• Google Web Security
• Image Labeller
• Subscribed Links

It will be extremely interesting to see what Google pulls out of its sleeve with it having much more resources to spread over its existing and future projects, and will they be able to replicate themselves in having the next ‘Google’ moment.

For more information about anything Google or SEO related, or in getting your business online, then please call the Web Design team today 0n 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.

After its fantastic start it managed a peak of 1.86million users in one week at the end of July, however since then has seen fairly significant drops, with 1.79million the next week, and continuing to drop to 1.16million users last week.

It is worth noting that these statistics only include direct visits to the website, and do not take into account mobile traffic or visits from the Google+ notification bar, however, one thing is for certain, that the number of weekly users are dropping, and if Google are to keep up their fantastic early momentum in the quest to topple Facebook, they need to get the name Google+ out more to the regular internet user, and get those numbers back up.

For more information regarding anything Google+ or social media marketing related, please call the dijitul team today on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.