Pros and Cons of a Dynamic Web Presence

[Alan Rogers]

I read some statistics earlier this morning which stated that 99.9% of businesses in the United Kingdom were designated SME and the vast majority of start-ups were as a result of the melt down in job retention by large companies.

That latter statement appears to be very true, but what's even truer is that these new companies, very often one-man bans like the denizens of Networking in Surrey, have gone from an environment where they're used to billing 35 to 40 hours a week, with appropriate support, to one where they are also their own Finance, Facilities, Accounts, Marketing and IT departments, so doing in excess of a 60-hour week.

It used to be said of marketing that 50% of your allocated budget will be wasted, and you'll never know which half. I don't know how true that is these days but the cautionary spirit of the quote is still valid. Indeed, any small or start-up business needs to maximise return on investment, which is not the same as paring back the costs.

Most small business who manage their own web sites use a Content Management System, or CMS. The most popular one by far, probably because it's very easy to learn, is WordPress. You install it on your web space, or get me to do it for you, and off you go.

The challenge with popular software, and WordPress is sadly no exception, is that there are nefarious types out there in/on the World Wide Wait that prey on the unknowing and unwitting. They do this by searching for and exploiting vulnerabilities in the software, which the developers then patch.

The onus on deploying those patches is however on the owner of the web site. Most CMS software notifies the administrator of any available updates, but they don't (and never should) automatically install. As your own web content manager, you need to satisfy yourself that these updates won't break your site before you install them.

Conversely, you can't afford to ignore them simply because your site is working fine just now. If an exploited vulnerability is patched by that update then your site will be in an decreasing minority of available sites which is prey for the hackers can attack. Statistically, you're stacking the odds against you more by doing nothing than doing it!

As a small business owner, you are good at what earns you money, or you wouldn't be in business. You are however not obliged to be good at everything else, especially that which potentially eats into your earning time. Give serious consideration to outsourcing those things, by which I mean the functions of the departments mentioned above, to a similar small business who'll provide you with the level of service that you deliver to your customers. 

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One of the many services I offer to small businesses is internet presence, which means/includes broadband provisioning, domain registration, web hosting, email accounts and software configuration. In partnership with Bojangle Communications, we can get a business online and marketing their products or services with minimal cost, knowledge and effort.

Our web hosting customers enjoy:

1. their web site hosted on a secure platform provided by the largest reseller of web hosting in the United Kingdom
2. the option to run a test site in parallel with the live site, on which to test and play, and break it, safely without destroying the live site
3. the option to subscribe to a monitoring service that will advise when upgrades are available, and how compatible they are with extensions installed, installing those upgrades if safe, after a full backup
4. knowledgeable support to rescue your site after it's been hacked, if you didn't follow the advice above