14 Signs That Let You Know Your Website Needs a Refresh

Courtesy of Media Connect Partners

By Hector Cisneros

Today, the number of websites on the internet seems innumerable. Yet, how many are actually effective at producing business. The World Wide Web is the most dynamic business environment on the planet. It can be said that it evolves on a daily basis. However, few businesses update their web pages very often. In 1994 there were fewer than 3000 published websites. The web was so new that few businesses had heard of the internet. In a mere two decades, the number of websites has exploded to a quantity never foreseen.  The milestone of 1 billion websites was reached in 2016 and today there are 1.7 billion of them. Yet, it seems that only about 200 million are active. These, in my opinion, are the winners of the web. Why don’t businesses update their websites? Is it because they are following accounting practices where they depreciate the cost over a specific period? Or, is it because they are ignorant of the importance of the need to update their investment? In this episode of Working the Web to Win, I will explore the costs, benefits, and ways to maximize the return on your website investment. We will explain the current evolution of website ranking factors, traffic generation, and financial return. So, open your browsers and be ready to evaluate your websites as we decode how to get a real return on your website investment.

Are You Currently Living in Digital Update Hell?

Or are Companies Providing Updates Too Often Without Testing them?

By Hector Cisneros

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Have you noticed the huge increase in updates lately? Over the last three years, we have seen a tremendous increase in the number of monthly (sometimes weekly) updates for digital devices (i.e., computers, tablets and smartphones, etc.). If you’re exclusively an Apple or Linux user, you aren’t feeling the same pain as those who are using a Windows 10 or a Windows-Android mix. However, if you're using Apple products mixed with other platforms, you would have noticed the increase in the frequency of updates as well. The problem is growing, and the increase in update frequency is eating into employee productivity and increasing the cost due to mission-critical digital device downtime. Last week alone, my Windows 10 computer received an update that took four restarts to complete (about an hour of time). After the update was finally completed, I received several unexpected black screens when trying to post pictures to our blog while using Chrome. This is not an isolated event. These types of issues are being reported on an almost daily basis, and there is no end in sight to the increase in the frequency of updates that are likely to take place in the future. To make matters worse, each OS update causes a cascade of out of synch revisions where antimalware apps, browsers, applications, IoT systems and smartphone apps become unstable and begin to crash unexpectedly.  In this episode of Working the Web to Win, we will explore the growing problem that the current state of update frequency is causing and will provide some guidelines to help mitigate the problem. So, break out your update scheduler and set your calendar as we learn how to tame update hell.

Massive Data Leak Exposes 340 Million Americans Personal Data - Now What!

Courtesy of Flickr

By Hector Cisneros

How valuable is your Personal Data? It’s extremely valuable, at least according to the data aggregation company Exactis. They collect and sell consumer and business data to marketers and resellers all over the world. They have collected information on 218 million individuals, 110 million U.S. households, 88 million verified email addresses and 112 million records with residential phone numbers. The fact that you have probably never heard of Exactis, or that they have collected so much personal data isn’t surprising. What’s very scary is the fact that this data was easily accessible to anybody with only a little internet search knowhow. In other words, any hacker could (and may have) downloaded this massive database, making it easy to profile, imitate, or go after almost every citizen, family, and business in the United States. In this episode of Working the Web to Win, we’ll discuss this massive data leak along with several other huge data breaches that have just taken place in the last few months. So, hold onto your internet passwords and lock down your social accounts as we explore the ever-growing massive data breaches that are making U.S. citizens vulnerable to hack attacks.