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New Media Year

Posted on 20 Feb 2006 at 15:15

Paul Ockenden and Mark Newton look at the ups and downs of teleworking and try out a new anti-spam product that actually works

A perfect case in point is the attractive website of the clothes store Dorothy Perkins. This site uses frames in its design - nothing wrong with that, you may think, but let's just imagine a real-life scenario. A woman visits the website and finds an item she'd like for Christmas. What better than to send a link about this item to a friend who can then order it as her present (knowing it will be the right style, size and colour, all those things we blokes have problems with). So this woman simply sends the URL link to the prospective giver, imagining that all will now go smoothly.

However, as this site uses frames, the URL displayed in her browser is that of the frameset, not the page of the item being browsed. If this woman is web savvy, she might find the URL of the actual page by right-clicking and cutting and pasting the URL property into the email to her friend. But even this would be no use, as the link only gives the item page, and the rest of the site's functionality is now broken - and, anyway, we thought the idea of online purchasing was to make things easier.

Other sites offer a link called something like 'send this item to a friend' or 'add it to my wish list', which you can then send to a friend. No such luck with the Dorothy Perkins site. Even if you add it to your 'shopping bag', as they charmingly call it, you can't send this to someone else. The only option is to ring that person and talk them through which item you want, which is hardly encouraging for the user. This is an otherwise perfectly well-designed website, but its usability is messed up by the use of frames. Perhaps a rethink in terms of function over appearance is in order? And are you sure your site isn't guilty of something similar?

Credit Card Changes

While you're checking things out, does your website handle credit cards? If, like most people, you use an Internet Payment Provider like SecPay or DataCash, make sure your site asks the user for the CV2 code from the back of their credit card when they input their card details, because this is going to become a compulsory requirement soon.

If you handle the complete credit card transaction or store customers' card details on your site, there are many additional requirements coming down the pipeline, which could require your web server to be subjected to a security audit. This is known as the Account Information Standards (AIS), and already there are moves to insist that all merchants must become Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security compliant. If you're hosting your own payment pages or storing any form of credit or debit card information, you'll need to undertake an assessment and audit. If you think this concerns you, your company or clients, take a look at the details on the Visa website at www.visaeu.com

No more spam?

While working, Mark invariably keeps his email client open and is alerted to any emails coming in by Outlook's pop-up mechanism, so that hopefully he can respond quickly should he need to. Spam gets dealt with in the client by the superb Cloudmark system, but this still means that arriving spam sets off the alert, which can be most distracting. So when SoftScan (www.softscan.co.uk) rang up the other day to suggest Mark try out its anti-spam and anti-virus system for email, he thought it was worth a go.

The way this system works is that the DNS MX record for your domain gets changed so that all email is redirected via SoftScan's servers, which then clean and quarantine any suspect email, forwarding the known good ones to your mail server. This also reduces the bandwidth that spam consumes on your system: in fact, Mark has found that more than 80 per cent of messages arriving at his server had been spam related.