Do I Need A Website Privacy Policy?

If you’ve noticed an increase in companies emailing they’ve updated their privacy policy it’s largely due to the EU (European Union) court case win against Google plus the data mining battle Facebook is facing.  Most of us don’t engage in business with Europe so this isn’t critical, for now.

What has accelerated is the FTC Privacy Laws and California’s own set of rules.
CalOPPA applies to any person or company in the United States (and conceivably the world) whose website collects personally identifiable information from California consumers. CalOPPA requires the website to feature a conspicuous privacy policy stating exactly what information is collected and with whom it is shared; it also requires the operator of the website or online service to comply with the site’s privacy policy. Those who fail to do so are at risk of civil litigation under the state’s Unfair Competition Law.” Read more. California’s ruling applies to US states and any countries whose website visitors are from California.

You’re collecting data if:

    • If you’re using Google Analytics
    • If you collect email addresses for a newsletter, either via your website, mobile app or correspondence
    • Website has a Contact Us Form
    • You email clients
    • You collect Name, Phone Numbers
    • You text clients
  • Your website collects cookies-and all websites do.

For most of us we simply need to state what we collect, steps to keep it confidential, give people an opt-out, state use of cookies and inform users they can turn off cookies in their browsers.  Most is logical and common sense, but it’s required to be stated. If you do have a privacy statement, great – make sure it is updated. I’ve just updated my own. DO NOT TRACK is a new item.  The policy must be in certain locations on your website – easy to find, etc.  Follow the guidelines and eliminate one potential headache for your online presence.

You can Google “Privacy Policy” and find options.  There are websites which will generate a Privacy Policy for you, some free, and sometimes the “free” turns into $48.00 and up.  I found some of the questions asked to be filled in puzzling.  My clients can contact me with any questions and to make this addition to your website.

Privacy Policy for Website

Website Slide Show, Gallery

Deciding how to show your products is part of creating your website. Trying to decide the difference and choosing can make your head spin.

A photographer needs his work to be prominent – with the page layout framing his work.  Keeping in mind your website’s performance is critical if you’re looking for organic search engine results. To that end page loading time is a factor. If the slide show or gallery is bloated the website’s performance suffers, and equally important – the user is annoyed.  Here we used a quick loading JavaScript show which allowed more images on the Home page.
JavaScript Slide Show
DouglasSimon.com

The Staging category needed the full breadth of the image. While this meant larger files, we reduced the number of images in the slide show to compensate.
staging photographyDouglasSimon.com

Portrait portrait (versus landscape), thus the difference.  Keep in mind the best display for your product.Executive PortraitsDouglasSimon.com

Presentation can be a fabulous supporting framework for your product.  In this case the whimsical art is beautifully showcased using a book which pages turn.
Book Slide Show, Turn Page
a-lil-whimsy.com

So many choices. When you find something you like send your web designer the link. Enjoy exploring!

Proofreading Websites

For my clients writing website content is time consuming and usually painful.  So much rests on your website’s accuracy.  Each visitor evaluates your business based on website content.  The visual design and photos are critical to keeping a visitor, but typos can be the deciding point for a user looking to make a purchase of services or products.

Everyone makes typos and spell check has its limits.  Recently a typo got past a team of three.  The result was a kitchen “pantry” became “panty” and a bit embarrassing.  It happens, but a website with multiple typos or poor grammar can be the tipping point for a visitor to decide to leave your website.

An affordable solution is a proofreader.  Services range from simply checking copy for typos or grammar proofing to suggest better sentence structure – choose which services you need.

A Google search will yeild resources.

Poker League Website

This was such a fun project – my client was so upbeat, enthusiastic and full of energy for developing his website: PubPokerUSA.com
Some photos were taken by DouglasSimon Photography & Video as I knew what I wanted, but couldn’t find stock photos to do the trick. It gives such a polish. Creating the graphics was equally fun. Defined, because cards have the four suits, but how to present these in a fresh colorful way was a fun task.
Beyond design was searching for a leaderboard system to handle the back-end. PlayBarGames was a gem to work with. I am happy to recommend Chuck, great to work with and a great product – it fit my clients needs exactly.

PubPokerUSA.com

Custom Website vs Template

Too many clients come to me after trying a template website, or do-it-yourself company. They are completely frustrated and often have spent too much money either not completing the site, or letting it go month after month and paying a sizable monthly fee.

Template sites from  major telecommunication companies (Yellow Book, AT & T, Supermedia) sound simple for a busy business owner, and do-it-yourself/create-your-own-website companies sound promising to ge you up and running in hours.

There are times when these might be ideal for business owners who are aggressive in learning basic code, SEO and photo editing, or needing something up quickly while developing a custom site.  Here is a side by side comparison to help you find clarity in what to choose.
custom website vs template

 
 

http://www.brendasimon.com/custom-website-vs-template-website.html

Veterinarian Website

Had fun with this website. The blue works nicely for the pet medical field. Payne Ranch is a small clinic, but has a long history in Chino Hills. A simple ten page layout worked well for their content.

Veterinarian Custom Website

Veterinarian Custom Website

Photos by Douglas Simon Photography

Does Website Design Matter?

There is a constant stream of advertisements for “create your own website” for free, after 30 days pay only $7.99/month or simple sounding ads like “Design your website in minutes.”

It’s sounds so easy and the price sounds unbeatable.  In the early days of the internet this might have been just the tool for many businesses.  As a web designer who codes these templates are cumbersome to use. For the novice they require a lot of time and frustration to learn the software.  You will still need your content: photos and page copy.  Your photos need to be optimized to download  quickly, so you need some photo editing skills and learn how to choose what compression is best.  You need to spend time learning at least some basic search engine optimization (SEO) and learn about meta data to compete for organic results.  All of the above are the nuts and bolts of using a template website.

Websites need “call-to-actions” which are eye appealing and well placed.  Navigation needs to be simple – easy to figure out so customers can quickly find what they are looking for.  Frustrated visitors won’t become your client.

Beyond all the code and functionality, yes, design matters.  A welcoming website sets a tone for your business, the same as a showroom displays your products.  The layout and design bring all the elements together.  The bottom line is people will judge your business based on the looks of your website.  Statistics reveal over 90% of people said they trusted or mistrusted a website based on design alone, less than 10% said it was content.

It’s much like packaging of food.  Yes the generic brand is cheaper, but the jar/box isn’t nearly as creative as the name brands, who give great thought and expense to their brand.

While it doesn’t have to be award winning you want your design to send a message of trust, professionalism and quality.  You know your business, hiring a professional to create your website is a good investment.

Web Design Fire Dept.

Newly launched is the Montague Vounteer Fire Dept.  serving Montague Township in New Jersey.  I love getting to know my clients’ businesses.  This fire department has an enormous amount of equipment and training for their firefighters, and all as volunteers!  With a history dating back to the 1950’s they were fortunate to discover images of the original fire truck at the fire department’s beginnings!  The dedication from these volunteers is inspiring.

Montague Fire Dept, New Jersey

Red and black are “the” colors for fire department websites. It was fun to create and great people to work with!

Yahoo Verizon Block Forwarded Email

Business owners deal with spam. Our inboxes bulge, our email addresses are spoofed by spammers and sold on mailing lists tagging us as legitimate email, so we get even more spam.

Many website owners use an email for their domain (info@yourdomain.com) and have it forwarded to a different email account from any of these: Outlook.com, Gmail, Verizon, EarthLink, Yahoo and more.   The advantage is one less email to maintain each day.

Until lately it has been an easy configuration. Enter spammers. Spamming uses web hostings’ servers, thus affecting all website owners as spammers maliciously use bandwidth.  Recently WordPress blogss were under attack to such extremes there was an urgency plea to update WordPress software and change your user name and password to something other than “admin” and “password”.   This particular combination seems to have been so rampant spammers trolled blogs finding those with easy combinations and began to wreak havoc.

With so much spamming going on some webmail clients began to block anything being forwarded from a domain into their webmail, i.e. Yahoo and Verizon in the forefront.  These two are smaller players in webmail compared to Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook.com, each which have enormous resources behind them, which seemed to equate to being less stringent in blocking any forwards, thus their action.

The first word from Yahoo was they would begin to allow the emails through, but no exact time table.  I began seeing the email pour in five days later; then stopped, again and finally I gave up on Yahoo.  With Hotmail/Outlook and Gmail happily reconnecting me with all forwarded email it was an easy choice.

Why does this happen? Since the forwarded email is passed straight through your domain on a forward it bypasses any spam filtering your web host may have, despite whether you enable it or not.  When the clogging begins Yahoo “throttles” email – like stacking airplanes in sky, within no timetable on hand.  These blocks (aka blacklisted emails) can be lifted eventually, but Verizon may take up to 3 months to sort it out.  For business owners a few days is acceptable, but indefinite is not.

What to do? You can enable the spam-filter on your host which is dependent upon a “score”. The problem is some spam email will still get through, and some legitimate email will tagged as spam, not be sent.  The tradeoff is no matter what you set the spam threshold to all you can really specify is whether you want to receive less legitimate email or more spam email.  Under this solution, either your forwarded email would be missing valid email, or you’d be so permissive that the forward would eventually be blocked again.

  • The best scenario is to download email by connecting to the server into such as Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, or Mail.app within Mac OSX.  You will receive all your email–spam, too, but you won’t lose legitimate email.  Outlook lets you “block senders” allowing you to tag repeat offenders.
  • The easy fix: forward to Gmail or Hotmail.
  • The simplest yet: put your destination email (Verizon, Yahoo, etc.) as the primary email on your website.  While you lose the branding of your domain name in your email it removes any future forward issues.   Yahoo and Verizon don’t send out emails notifying us they’ve made a change – you just stop receiving your email.

Website Design Colors

When it comes to designing your website color is the first decision. If you have a logo you have already established a branding, perhaps.  You can still work a new color theme around your logo for a new look.

Here a simple easy to understand article on color use for your website.  You may change the colors of your walls at home, too!

Here we added splashes of vibrant color, for effect without overpowering the visitor’s eyes.
veterinarian website