Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

The team at Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business has a great blog posting on how to use the Contact page on your website. You should read it, and see how you measure up! Here are the salient points:

• Always list a physical mailing address
• List all appropriate phone numbers
• List at least one email address that is checked regularly
• Include a photo or map of your business
• If you have a blog, include a link to it
• List the events you attend or promote

One of the reasons we love using Plone for our website services is that we can give our customers access to editing their own contact page - that’s one step closer to using your website effectively!

A colleague at One NW spotted this article and posted a link - many thanks to Jon for pointing this out!

It’s a pretty quick read - 23 Lessons from Eye Tracking Studies. Many key takeaways here, the most notable being that content still wins - better than graphics, better than ads, better than things that flash.  Other key takeaway - is that navigation along the top appears to draw better attention than along the side.

You should read the article, pass it along to your team, and make sure that your web design professional sees it, too!

Social Networking was the buzz in 2007 - and I bet we’ll see more of it in 2008, too. I’m not yet convinced that FaceBook or MySpace can or should supplant your existing methods for reaching your stake-holders. I’d love to be wrong - but I’m not bullish that the hype will meet many expectations.

The good folks at Idealware have a terrific new article out that addresses both some of my concerns AND offers some great tips for those that are ready to try those tools.

It’s well worth a read!

It’s a tough world out there - just when we were all getting used to Virus and Spam problems  - we had to start figuring out how to protect against Spyware. Then along came “Phishing” (when you get email that looks and feels like someone else and they trick you into giving up important information).

There’s another one - it’s called a Root Kit Attack. The folks at the City of Seattle have a great article about it. The good news is that all of the things you’ve learned about spam and spyware and phishing apply - make sure you have great anti-virus, a firewall, you’re up to date on security patches and so on.

If you’re managing all of your own technical infrastructure - you’ll want to read that article and double check your protections. And if you have a vendor - you should ask them to make sure you have the proper tools in place to keep your computers and network safe!

I wanted to repost this information from Salesforce regarding a new "phishing" attempt - as always - beware of email asking for user names, passwords, credit card information, that contain files to download that you aren’t expecting and so on!

Dear Salesforce.com Customer,

Please be advised that there is a new malicious phishing email being circulated that is attempting to mimic the Salesforce Identity Confirmation feature.

What does this phishing email look like?

This goal of this malware is to attempt to collect user passwords to online systems, including banks, credit agencies, and salesforce.com.  It does this using an email attachment that contains malicious software intended to compromise your PC.  Known attachments have been variously named either form.zip or UpdateIElink.zip, but other names may exist.  Here is a sample of the email text:

New Security Feature: Identity Confirmation

To further protect our customers from security threats stemming from phishing attempts, salesforce.com will be implementing "Identity Confirmation." This set of security features is triggered when users attempt to login to Salesforce from a different computer and from an unrecognized location for the first time. Please download and install the security update attached to this email.

What action must I take?
Do not open the attachment.  Delete the email and attachment immediately.
If a user has installed this attachment on his system:

• The system should be disconnected from the network immediately. (It may take up to 72 hours for the major anti-virus utility vendors to update their signatures to block this malware.)
• Compromised users should change passwords for all computing systems to which they have access, including Salesforce, banking, credit, email, and company systems.

How can I tell the difference between this phishing attempt and salesforce.com’s Identify Confirmation Feature?

• The salesforce.com Identity Confirmation feature will always send a link that leads to a secure salesforce.com domain.  For example:
  https://na5.salesforce.com/_nc_external/system/security/ChallengeValidate…
• The salesforce.com Identity Confirmation feature will not ever include an attachment or direct you to download and install software.  Any emails of this nature should be considered malicious.

How can I get more information?
Please visit trust.salesforce.com for additional information regarding this phishing attempt and to get more information regarding online security best practices. 

In addition, your Customer Success Manager or Customer Support Representative work in conjunction with our Technology & Products team and are all equipped to answer questions you may have.

Regards,
Salesforce.com Customer Support

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All rights reserved :: Various trademarks held by their respective owners
salesforce.com | One Market Street, Suite 300, San Francisco | CA 94105

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I’ve had my eye on all of the "web 2.0" hope and hype - and just found a terrific quote from David Brin, courtesy of Jon Stahl. (Jon works at ONE NW, an agency that also implements Plone and Salesforce for nonprofit’s - and the ONE NW team and the NPower team collaborate whenever possible!)

Here’s the context: Edge is a website devoted to promoting inquiry and discussion - it’s new to me - but I like what I see so far. In any case, they invited some smart people to answer the question "What Have You Changed You Mind About?" - and David’s answer has a great quote:

I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

Indeed, most adults won’t have anything to do with all the wondrous gloss that fills the synchronous online world, preferring by far the older, asynchronous modes, like web sites, email, downloads etc.

This isn’t grouchy old-fart testiness toward the new. In fact, there are dozens of discourse-elevating tools just waiting out there to be born. Everybody is still banging rocks together, while bragging about the colors. Meanwhile, half of the tricks that human beings normally use, in real world conversation, have never even been tried online.

I heartily agree. Facebook, Spaces, MySpace, Wiki’s, Second Life - all promise a lot - but I’m not sure that they deliver. We’ll see what 2008 brings - I would love to be asked that same question next year and say "social networking and web 2.0 sites, tools and practices DID help nonprofit’s connect and deliver on their mission!"

If you’ve been looking for a good content management system, you’ve likely encountered what I refer to as the “CMS Wars”: Three of the tools available generate a lot of debate, a lot of interest, and a lot of fierce loyalty.

(If you’re wondering, the tools are Plone, Joomla and Drupal).

They should - each tool is terrific and getting better quickly. The good folks at Idealware continue to publish and host webinars about these tools. And one of my Plone experts just sent along a lengthy and very thoughtful article from someone who has implemented both tools - which makes for a great perspective!

We implement Plone here at NPower Seattle, and have been happy with the sites we’ve been able to create, the speed at which many of our customers learn how to use Plone to update content, and with the broader Plone community, too.

All of that said, though - as the tools get better and better (think about your copy machine!) - I think that you should due your homework about feature set and functionality AND give equal consideration to your local vendor or service provider. Often, the service and breadth of experience of your provider will make a bigger difference than the tool you select!