[HTN News] More About Mobile

Last month our newsletter centered on mobile sites and mobile apps. We recognize that folks who have e-commerce websites will want an easy and cost-effective way to add a mobile website to their online presence. As the percentage of smartphone owners increases (over 50% of the cell phones in the US will be smartphones before the end of the year), more customers are looking for the convenience of doing business through their phones rather than through their laptop or desktop machines. The goal is to give the smartphone user a way to readily navigate and purchase your products on your mobile web site.

What makes a mobile-friendly web site? Lots of things that you really don’t want on your regular web site. For instance, a mobile site will avoid as much keyboard entry as possible. A mobile page will do one thing well as opposed to a regular website page that will do many things well – at the user’s option. A mobile site will use large buttons (easier for fingers to press accurately). A mobile site will avoid graphics because of both the limited screen real estate and the load the graphics may put on the phone, slowing the page load. A mobile site will follow specific paths, relying on the phone’s own “back” button to bring the user to points where other choices can be made. A mobile site may send the user to your regular site for actions that are too complex to render well in the mobile version.
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Smart Phones and Changing Expectations

Mobile Matters
Or, Why You Might Want to Consider a Mobile Site (or App)

Mobile phones are getting smarter all the time. No matter how you personally feel about smart phones or whether you carry (and use) one, the world of mobile phones is changing expectations. People can readily work and shop and entertain themselves wherever they happen to be, with surprisingly readable small screens, tiny keyboards and easy connectivity. Increasingly, a person’s on-line experience is more immediate and, in some ways, richer from the smart phone than from the workstation or laptop.  If you have a website or a web-based business of any sort, you might want to start thinking about how this segment of users interact with your site. Chances are that it is not a pleasant experience.

If you have a smart phone like an Android or iPhone or Blackberry, a simple comparison of the Target.com mobile site and the Target mobile app against the main Target.com “regular” website will give you a good idea of what is out there right now. If you don’t have such a beast, you can get a feeling for what folks are talking about by checking Target’s mobile page where they have a nice animation of how the three main “buttons” on the app work on a phone.

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Securing Your Website

Session Hijacking is Easy
Or, Why SSL certificates are generally more important than you think

A recent announcement at Toorcon in San Diego (Firefox extension makes social network ID spoofing trivial) makes it painfully obvious that logins to sessions in many sites are not enough to secure the interaction between site and user. A Firefox extension (Firesheep) makes it trivial for anyone in a public wifi setting to hijack logged-in sessions and to behave as that user. The keys here are three: a public wifi setting where all users will be sharing an IP identity, folks using internet sessions that involve logging in to identify themselves for a session, and no end to end encryption of the session (meaning that the user visits a mix of secure and insecure pages in a session).

Should you be concerned? That depends on whether the specifics of the case match your situation. Do you frequent websites like this in public wifi settings? Are you comfortable with the notion of your session being hijackable? If you have a corporate presence on some of these sites (like Facebook), you may want to be aware of how and where you access it.

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Understanding Open Source

Open Source Software
A Different Business Model

Folks sometimes feel that if something is free, it can’t be much good. They sometimes wonder why open source software exists and why people make it. Because they don’t understand the business model, they are uneasy using the product.

HTN happens to believe strongly in open source in general. We have deliberately provisioned our Cloud Hosting platforms with an array of both for-free and for-fee programs which are among the industry leaders. If you are using HTN Cloud Hosting, your server is running on the software commonly referred to as LAMP (Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP/Perl/Python programming languages). All these are open source software, meaning they are available to use under an open source license without fee. Commercial sites of all sizes use this robust stable website infrastructure. HTN has also selected several industry leaders for part of the infrastructure that happen to be for-fee, including Rackspace servers and Parallels Plesk control panel.

Fact is, you probably are using (and have used) open source software without ever being aware of it. If you have ever sent an email, you have used the SMTP, POP, and IMAP protocols that were developed for free. If you have a website anywhere, chances are overwhelming that it is running on the Apache web server. If you use WordPress, you are using one of the most popular open source content management systems.

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Don’t Be Invisible

Bringing in the Customers
Getting from New to Noticed

Maybe your site has just recently gone public, possibly for the first time, possibly after a redesign. You have the site, the content, all the searches and forms and images in place. And the world is not flocking to your virtual door. Something must be wrong. Is there something else you need to do?

If you already also have a physical store, this is not a new problem. And you know that advertising – some method to get noticed, to be visible, to stand out – is the missing piece. Internet-based commerce makes this age-old problem both harder and easier.

You are one fish in a much larger sea of vendors/suppliers/competitors online than in a physical store, no matter what your product or market. Your potential online audience is also far larger than you might expect to find walking through your physical doors. The challenge to get seen is greater and so is the potential payoff.

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