According to the latest statistics from the British Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), 60% of small businesses had a cyber security breach in 2013, slightly down from 64% in 2012. I'm doubting that the stats are any better anywhere else.

Current statistics show you have a better than even chance of having your website hacked!

Often, hacking is just an annoyance, requiring deletion of the existing upload, and reinstalling of a (known) clean backup. Oh, you DO do regular backups right? DON'T rely on your host to do it - mostly they don't care as long as you don't infect their servers. Assuming you have a backup, you can restore. But does your website, or the server it's on, have security holes?

An article I was reading this week talked about one such small business from the UK who got hacked. The owner had had a great holiday away and went to log onto her site to update clients.....and it wasn't there. Gone! Thrashed! It's back up now so it seems she had a backup. Unfortunately, a quick check showed she was using versions of software that were very out of date. This is your first line of

"There's no such thing as a free lunch". It's a well known saying, but do you know just how it applies to the internet? What IS a "free lunch" on the internet?

"Free" download

Yes, there are many great genuinely free programs and content you can download. I run a number of free alternatives to paid programs. Though I actually own a legit copy of Photoshop CS3, I have never invested the time needed to learn it, so I use a reasonable alternative called Inkscape - free download. However, a quick Google search will also give you dozens, if not hundreds, or links to sites offering full copies of Photoshop for free. So why not? Well, because it's illegal (plenty of reason on its own), but also because the download has a high probability of containing one or more viruses.

What you don't know about website add-ons/extensions

So you don't download pirated software or even visit those sites - great! But what's your website designer's integrity like? Are you getting an amazing website with loads of functionality, but it's really cheap? The first question you should ask is why it's cheap - does he really know what he's doing, and

I'm sure most people know the old saying, "The pot's calling the kettle black!" and what it means. Recently, search giant Google has been drawing a lot of attention in Europe for "antitrust" matters and is poised to come to a settlement with the EU. However, there has been some very vocal outrage at this settlement from the likes of Microsoft (read Bing). Just recently, Yelp, who has been critical of Google and its practices in the past, has added its voice to the verbal barrage.

Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, wrote to European Commission chief José Manuel Barroso recently to add its disapproval. Part of his letter says...

Upon reflecting on our discussion about the European Digital Agenda, and my company’s historic role as a concerned observer of Google’s anticompetitive actions, I realized Yelp’s current status as a mere witness within the DG-COMP deliberations was inadequate; in order to truly advocate on behalf of European digital startups, our voice needed to be granted some form of official standing. As such, I have directed our government affairs team to convert Yelp into an official complainant in DG-COMP’s Google proceedings.

I find this very interesting. Firstly, his whole letter assumes that anyone

In early web days, back links didn't exist so this was an easy question to answer,, well, it never got asked! The last 4-5 years have seen back links take on enormous weight, which lead to link farms, and link buying. Depending on who you are, this was either good or bad.

Today, Google takes a very dim view of either of these practices, and regularly penalizes sites caught doing it - even if they did it a few years ago. So it's not uncommon to receive "link removal" requests from webmasters or SEO people in an attempt to get into Google's good graces again.

So, does this mean that all back links are bad? No, but you need to be careful where they're coming from and how. If your site had 5 backlinks yesterday, but today has 500, Google is going to smell a rat. It's about a natural progression. That sort of growth is not natural and smacks of buying or farms. But are back links the be-all and end-all? What about content?

Content v Back Links

Whilst it's true that Google has been shifting some weight away from back links recently, they're anything but dead. However, they

As a web designer and webmaster, internet security is a huge issue. Not only for myself and my company's site, but for all my clients. Part of my job is protecting my clients from my other clients. It's like this.....

For the last couple of months, I've had all manner of high power techs chasing a spamming bot that's very sophisticated and tenancious. As soon as we block one avenue, it morphs and starts using another. We were all convinced it was some sneaky piece of code buried deep in one client's site. But multiple scans and digging revealed nothing. In the end, we've concluded it's very much off-site and, in fact, on my client's computer (one or more of them).

Why didn't we go this route sooner, you may ask? The simple fact is, as a host and webmaster, internet security for my clients is my job, and it's counterproductive running round blaming others unless we're completely sure. At best, it makes one look stupid if you're wrong. So there was a good amount of due diligence.

These 5 simple rules could have saved everyone a lot of heartache, time and money if they'd been followed. Like most webmasters,

This is one question I'm asked from time to time, and it's a great question. Is phoenixwebsitedesign.com the same as phoenix-website-design.com or phoenix_website_design.com? To figure this out, let's look at how search engines interpret these 3 URLs.

Dashes, underscores or nothing?

Simply put, according to Google, they look at dashes as a space between 2 or more words, whereas they view underscores as joining 2 or more words. So, for Google, phoenixwebsitedesign.com and phoenix_website_design.com are the same.

Bing is slightly different. They look at dashes and underscores exactly the same - a space between 2 words.

So, to get the same result from both search engines, you'd be better to use dashes, But does it matter? Aren't search engines getting smart enough nowadays to figure it out?

Why it matters- the ongoing debate

The SEO community has debated for years, and continues to do so, over this topic. In Google's case, their algorithm uses over 200 benchmarks to determine a page's relevancy to a search query. Of course, there are more inportant items in that mix, and less important items. Max Cutts tells us not to get too hung up on keywords in URLs, however, a nice, easy to remember

With your bottom line getting squeezed every day, maximizing - and tweaking - your advertizing spend is vital. Here are 9 things you can do, or look at, to ensure your spend is getting results.

Track your results. One of the most important things you must do. If you're not tracking, you have no idea whether any marketing is achieving a result. So ask every customer this simple question, "How did you find us?" If you're using special campaigns, consider a "hidden" landing page for that so you can more easily track results.

Check your form results. Are you regularly checking online form responses? Or do emails from your forms sit in an unchecked email box, or only get check once a week?

Response followup. Assuming you're not wasting your responses by not checking, what's your follow-up strategy? Do you have one? How many times will you try to make contact - 1, 2, 3....? Don't give up - be persistent!

Wrong target market. Have you clearly identified your target market, and are you pitching to them on their level? There are so many demographics which come into play here; poor choice will result in poor campaign performance.

Not thinking

SEO has gone through so many changes over the years. When I first started building websites in the mid 90s the term didn't really exist. There were so few site (relatively speaking) that you had be be doing something awfully wrong not to rank OK.

Then came metatag stuffing, keyword stuffing, link farms, link building, and it's slowly working it's way round to quality content; which, IMHO, is where it should be. Why should the fact that 10,000 sites, profiles, or whatever link to a certain page make it relevant, good content or even true? We all know that there's an enormous amount of rubbish and misinformation out there on the web. And also a lot of users who don't know right from wrong!

In a video published by Google Webmaster Tools  Google Webspam team member, Max Cutts, talks candidly about the future demise in backlink value as Google's algorithm becomes, as he put it, "...more like a Star Trek computer, so, conversational search..." He also says that, while backlinks still have many more years left in them, their value is going to diminish. I, for one, don't see this as a bad thing, as he also explains that

Social Media Integration for Websites

There's no doubt that social media is here to stay. Early adopters of this trend will remember MySpace, Yahoo 360 and Window Live Spaces to name a few. But, even with a few dying off, there's now more than ever, with even bigger user bases.

Which, what, where, who?

So should your business be on every social media site? Only if you want to spend all day and night on your computer rather than working on your business. There are just too many. So which ones should you be on? We believe there are 3 main ones that you shouldn't be without - Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They all cater for different areas, but all are important.

As part of setting up your website, we can advise on how to go about getting your social media presence started and how to maintain it. Plus we always put links to your pages on your site so visitors can easily find and bookmark you there.

Ongoing maintenance

Generally we don't offer building or ongoing maintenance services for social media, though we do work closely with a company who does this, and just this. However, part of our