Index Tools Blog

Does it all mean that you risk less when going for paid solutions? No. What it means is that before making a choice on what PC security software to choose depending on your particular needs you should consult with someone with sufficient experience, or read some reviews at least. This effect continues until the antispyware cleans the spyware.

More and more parents realize they shouldn’t impose any direct control over their child’s online activity thus trying to find out what their children are doing online. This task finds an easy solution in special keylogger software. Such software monitors computer activity and saves the report in special files so that the parents can later check it out and make conclusions. Keyloggers usually show what applications were used on the controlled computer, what sites a child visited and what he actually wrote to his online pals. There are enhanced search and sorting options, so any suspicious activity can be easily traced. Data loggers, key loggers are just a few programs which harvest info from your computer. Winclear is the only program created specially to auto remove such spywares. 73. That is why every computer owner needs winclear.

Protect With Winclear :Internet Explorer History Delete
However, because of Spector’s ease of use, it enables almost anyone to become a cyber criminal. According to Robert Graham, security executive at Atlanta based Errata Security, 99% of the people who download programs like Spector do not use it for legitimate reasons. Winclear is the only software which is capable of removing keylogger programs. However if malware or spyware is installed on your computer it may be possible for it to access those cookies and start retrieving your login email and personal information and sending it back to whomever installed the spyware. Winclear has been the industry leader in fighting keyloggers for the last 8 years.

Winclear:
Ever wondered why your computer is so slow? I downloaded Netdetector only to find 20000 viruses on my computer. That is the reason why you need Winclear installed onto your computer. If you are one of the people who would want to keep an eye on the computer and Internet usage of your children staff and spouses what you need is computer spy software. Protect your computer security by using Winclear! More about Winclear here: Computer Security.

Make sure that malware doesn’t take over your computer. Most computers are not protected and are at risk everyday. Issues happen when people go online and are attacked by malware and have no idea how to protect themselves. Keylogger software usually operates in the invisible mode and children don’t know their parents have an eye on them.

Reporting and alerts are a must, that way you can pinpoint the culprits and then have a talk with Bill about the reason his computer is always so slow - the spyware he keeps downloading. Alerts are critical so that if someone else uses Bill’s computer and loads spyware/malware, you find out immediately. Data loggers, key loggers are just a few programs which harvest info from your computer. Winclear is the only program created specially to auto remove such spywares. Instead they wrote the program to be used “legitimately” to keep tabs on business employees spouses concerned about affairs and keeping a watchful eye on teenagers’ internet surfing habits. That is why every computer owner needs winclear.

Protect With Winclear :History Of Internet Advertising
Every time we are required to supply a password we need to use a new and different password. For example, suppose you need a password for a bank account, an email account, an internet forum you visit, and maybe you use a password to log on to your own computer (you should). These should be four different passwords. Otherwise a hacker or identity thief only needs to discover one password and then try it out on some bank accounts, email accounts, web forums or anything else associated with your name. Winclear is the only software which is capable of removing keylogger programs. How to prevent this from happening? Do you really have to use evidence eraser? Or can you just erase the important file that you stored and carry on with your life? You can’t hide from this people even if you put some anti spyware or adware remover they can still penetrate from your personal information. Winclear has been the industry leader in fighting keyloggers for the last 8 years.

Winclear:
It would be silly. That is the reason why you need Winclear installed onto your computer. Some forms of spyware immobilize antivirus and firewall software thereby reducing the user’s security setting leading to further infections by several viruses. Protect your computer security by using Winclear! More about Winclear here: Winclear Reviews.

Nowadays, Adsense maybe considered as the biggest money making program for website owners. If you are an Adsense publisher wanting to earn more money, I have outlined some tips below.

1. Use Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites - Forum and directory websites now offer adsense revenue sharing on their sites. Most offer 50% sharing which means your adsense code will be displayed on your forum posts or article post pages 50% of the time.

2. Use Blogger Blogs - Blogger blogs are easily crawled by major search engines.It is an great way to get your new websites listed in Yahoo, MSN and Google. Within your account, you can easily enable Adsense Ads to show to your blog pages as well.

3. Post Articles with Your Adsense Code - www.GlobeArticles.com is a growing Article Directory site which allows authors to include their Adsense Publisher codes in all their article postings and the authors unique publisher ID with be displayed 100% of the time on the Adsense Ads appearing on their article url’s.

4. Use Google Adwords - Advertise your adsense pages using Google Adwords program. To do this you need to build a keyword list of at least 200 and just bid a minimum amount for all of them. If you target a good niche market, you will profit using this technique.

5. Build Web Pages Using Low Competition Keywords - If you are subscribed to Wordtracker.com, you can easily build a keyword list of these low competition keywords. You can easily find keywords or phrases with only 100 competing websites or less. Get some basic SEO knowledge, build your web pages around these low competition keywords and easily get search engine rankings for those pages.

Submit Articles with your Google Adsense Ads

Knowledge Management for beginners

Knowledge Management (KM) can be defined simply as the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Knowledge assets are often grouped into two categories:

(1) Explicit Knowledge
Generally, everything and anything that can be documented, archived and codified. Examples include patents, trademarks, business plans, marketing research and customer lists.

(2) Tacit Knowledge
The rest. Tacit knowledge is the know-how contained in people’s heads. The challenge inherent with tacit knowledge is figuring out how to recognize, generate, share and manage it.

Most often, generating value from such assets involves sharing them among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to reach - or go beyond - best practice. For explicit knowledge, the focus can usefully be described as “connecting people to things”, whilst for tacit knowledge, the focus is “connecting people to people”.

Search technologies made simple

There are essentially two types of search technology: structured search and unstructured search:

1) Structured Search:
In a structured search (example Yahoo) the user clicks down through a directory of categories to find the material sought. The tree structure of the directory is called a taxonomy, with a root node at the top that applies to all objects and nodes below that classify more specific subsets of the total set of objects. A well-known example of a taxonomy is Carolus Linnaeus’s Scientific classification of organisms. The root node is (implicitly) “organism” and nodes below are Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.

In Yahoo, the root is “Directory” and there are 14 main nodes, including Society & Culture, Social Science and Reference. If I were searching for best man’s speech tips (which I was not so long ago), I could try (on Yahoo) clicking down the branch of the tree: Directory > Society and Culture > Weddings > Speeches and Toasts. Alternatively, I could try Directory > Social Science > Communications > Public Speaking.

There are obvious pros and cons to structured search. The main con is that I might head down several blind alleys on the tree before finding the most useful branch. The main pro is that - once I have found that branch - I am likely to find a whole collection of relevant material gathered together in one place.

For the librarian (maintaining the taxonomy), there is another key con. As our wedding example illustrates so well, there are often two or more places one could put any given information. Oh the agonies of choice!

2) Unstructured Search:
In an unstructured search (example Google) the user enters a series of keywords into a search engine, which searches an index of content (regularly crawled) and brings back results, ordered by closest match to the search string.

The main pro of an unstructured search are that I do not have to second-guess where the right branch is on the taxonomy tree, but rather leap in at the leaf I am looking for. The cons are rather less obvious and the main one is that some materials I might actually find very useful may not come up in the search. This can be due to my poor selection of search terms, deficiency in indexing / search algorithms or poor metadata in the content itself.

Should I implement search functionality and, if so, how?

Search invariably scores well on any prioritisation of intranet functionality and is generally “out-of-the-box” with your portal solution, so I would definitely recommend you include it in the scope of your project.

It may not surprise you to hear that the most effective search implementations allow the user to chose between structured and unstructured search options and to easily navigate between the two. For example, my unstructured Yahoo search on “best mans speeches” takes me straight to a relevant document, but also tells me where it sits in the directory. By clicking on the directory category, I can bring up all the other materials in that area (where I ultimately find the best resource for my need).

To implement the structured search part of your solution, you will need to develop a taxonomy structure for your organisation and the information resources your people need to do their jobs. This can be quite a challenge! For example, should an HR grievance policy be found under ABC Co > Human Resources > Employee Services Unit > Policy or under an ABC Co > My Employment > My Rights > Grievance branch?

My advice is to keep it simple and give it room to evolve and change. An ideal taxonomy should be flat and broad (having no more than three levels) and should suit the provider or creator of information rather than the user of it (as they are the people who will populate your library and you need it to be easy for them to do so).

To ensure the unstructured component of your solution is effective, you need to ensure firstly that people avoid jargon in the body of their documents (using instead keywords that users will recognise) and secondly that a high percentage of documents contain decent metadata. Metadata can be simply defined as “data about data”. For example, the grievance document metadata might include author: Tessa Jones, job title: Employee Relations Officer, department: Employee Services, function: HR, subject: Employment, title: Grievance policy.

Can search help with tacit knowledge sharing?

Absolutely! Many organisations fail to recognise this. Connecting people to people (for that 10 minute telephone conversations that could save a week’s work) is often much more valuable than storing documents.

You should create a well developed yellow pages database, where people have entered augmented their white pages details (job title, email address, telephone number) with information about their skills, experience and interests. Then - when someone searches for grievance - in addition to (a) the word document policy, the results also include (b) a link to Tessa Jones’ Yellow Pages entry and (c) a link to the Employee Relations teamspace, where Tessa - and her line colleagues across ABC Co - collaborate on policy development and employee relations management.

Some final thoughts

The humble search function can be the most powerful agent for improved knowledge management your organisation has ever invested in. By extension, therefore, it can become the definitive “killer application” on your intranet portal. However, it is vital that the search capability can acccess all the information and people in your organisation and that result relevancy is high. This is not as easy as it sounds and requires proper planning and detailed work.

About the author:

David Viney (david@viney.com) is the author of the Intranet Portal Guide; 31 pages of advice, tools and downloads covering the period before, during and after an Intranet Portal implementation.

Read the guide at http://www.viney.com/DFV/intranet_portal_guide or the Intranet Watch Blog at http://www.viney.com/intranet_watch.

Remember trading stamps? If you’re over 40, chances are you will. Every time you shopped at a participating grocery store or gas station they gave you stamps to paste into a book. When you’d accumulated enough stamps, you could cash them in for “free” gifts.

These stamps were one of the first loyalty programs. They kept customers loyal to a particular product or merchant because they offered an incentive that encouraged the customer to keep coming back - and spend more money.

While trading stamps are a thing of the past, a wide range of industries still use loyalty programs to establish long-term relationships with their customers. By far the most successful and well known is the frequent flyer program.

On the surface, frequent flyer programs appear to be all about rewarding customers with free flights just because they choose to fly with a particular airline - the more miles you fly the more free miles you get. But, if you asked the airlines who really benefits from these programs, chances are you’d hear a resounding, “We do.” Ask them to explain, and they’ll likely tell you that frequent flyer programs allow them to collect data on individual customers, help them tailor their mailings and special offers to the customer’s specific needs, allow them to promote higher fares, and ultimately increase their sales.

But, as popular as frequent flyer programs have become they only work if the service offered by the airline is good enough to earn the customer’s trust. And that means not only offering a quality flying experience but great customer service and on-going communication.

For smaller businesses, the benefits of establishing a loyalty program are no different to those enjoyed by the major airlines. And equally, the program’s success depends on first establishing the three most important elements of building that loyalty:

1. Treat your customer’s right, and they’ll be yours for life.

Your customers will not only judge your company by the quality of your product, but also by the level of service you offer. Offer one without the other and you may as well give up now.

Great customer service includes, among other things:

Credibility: Your customers should be able to trust you. No one wants to be on the alert for the small print or hidden charges. They want to know that your company can be trusted and has their best interests at heart.

Flexibility: Never use the words, “I’m sorry but it’s not our policy.” Always solve your customer’s problems, even if it means losing the sale. There’s nothing worse for a customer than a company that will not go out of their way to accommodate their needs.

On-time Deliveries: If you’ve ever ordered a product and been told that the delivery time is 6-8 weeks, you’ll understand the frustration a customer experiences. Unless the product is out of stock, or is an international delivery, there’s no earthly reason why a product should take 6-8 weeks to deliver. Similarly, if you promise a certain delivery time, you must abide by it. If you say the product will be shipped within 72 hours, then ship it within 72 hours. If for some reason you find you can’t meet the delivery time, notify the customer and give them the option to cancel their order.

Accurate Billing: We all know mistakes happen. But when you make a billing error or you overcharge, you immediately lose credibility. Add to that the time is takes for a customer to contact you to complain or get you to adjust the bill, and you may well have lost a future sale - and the potential sales of friends and family they’ve complained to.

Hassle-free refunds: We’ve all been there. For some reason we change our minds about a product, or it doesn’t work properly, or it’s not quite what we expected. And we want our money back. Make sure your customers know this is an easy process, up front.

2. Obtain Customer Information

If you want your loyalty program to succeed you must obtain background information from your customers. A program that only requires a name, address, and proofs of purchase isn’t building a long-term knowledgeable relationship with them. And it makes sense that a customer who will take the time to complete an enrollment form is going to be more interested in the product than a casual purchaser. When designing your enrollment form make sure you get information on product usage, purchasing habits, attitudes etc. That way you can tailor your products and services to your customer’s specific needs. And build a database of customers who actually want a long-term relationship with your company.

Keep Communicating

One of the easiest ways to keep customers loyal is to establish on going communication. This can be in the form of emails promoting special offers, letters announcing new products, electronic or print newsletters or even offering educational materials. Another good way of continuing communication is to send them something useful with your company name on it. These simple, inexpensive gifts keep your name in front of a customer, and help to keep them loyal.

Need some help thinking up a loyalty program for your business? Here are some suggestions.

• Gift certificates: Offer your customers a gift certificate when they spend a certain amount of money. For example, if they buy $200 worth of goods during a six-month period offer them a $25 gift certificate.

• Offer point programs: Give your customers points for every $10 or so they spend. When they’ve acquired a certain amount of points they can exchange them for selected goods or services.

• Free Shipping: This incentive is a sure-fire winner for mail order and online companies. Offer free shipping on orders over a certain amount or on future orders.

• Communications: Newsletters, pamphlets, direct mailings, postcards, magazines, white papers etc. All these can be used to increase customer loyalty. They don’t need to include a special offer or discount, but it will help.

Properly implemented loyalty programs are a long-term marketing strategy that takes a lot of work and commitment. But, getting new customers takes a lot of work too. So, it makes sense to do everything you can to make sure that every one of those customers keeps coming back time and time again, and recommends you to others.

About The Author

Julia is an independent copywriter and consultant specializing in advertising, search engine optimization and search engine marketing services. To learn more about how Julia can help boost your company’s profits visit her site at www.juliahyde.com. You may also like to sign up for Marketing Works! Julia’s monthly ezine. Visit www.juliahyde.com/form.html to sign up or email Julia at mailto:info@juliahyde.com for details.

Do you find there are not enough hours in a day to earn the sort of income you think you deserve? Have you reached an income ceiling and feel there is little chance of developing further in your current job? You may be good at what you do but there is still too much month at the end of the money. Think about it!

When a colleague of mine mentioned she was going to set up an internet business I was intrigued but wasn’t tempted myself. I didn’t have the expertise and wouldn’t know the first thing about creating and setting up a website let alone the business side of it. However, when after a few months she started to earn some serious money my attitude changed.

After doing a bit of investigation I purchased a product that would do most of the technical stuff for me and set about deciding how I could earn an income from my PC. It really wasn’t quite so difficult as I had imagined it to be. This is not to say it doesn’t involve a lot of work. It does! But for me it quickly become almost like a hobby and doesn’t feel like work at all. If you want to get rich quick this isn’t the way to do it - but let’s face it, that isn’t how things work.

Yet, if you want to build your passive income then this is the way. You will have to buy a few products to set you up but if you do your research properly this will be money well spent - it should pay back many, many times over.

Now you may ask - what expertise do I have that could earn an income? This is the big question and a pretty important one to! Sit down with a pencil and paper and write down all the options you have, these could be

Your expertise in your current job. You may be a fitness coach who has a skill of bringing out the best in your clients, you could create an ebook with your own specialized routines and motivational tips. You could be responsible for the computers at your workplace and have picked up some useful ways to optimise PCs, which software is best for certain tasks or where to get a good deal. We spend many hours a week working and can learn some very useful information that others would be prepared to pay for.

Your hobby Everyone has a hobby so why not take it further. Earning an income from your hobby is a great idea. Imagine if you could earn enough to live on! Do you enjoy messing about with motorbikes? Building model aeroplanes? Keeping pet rabbits? You get the idea. People want to know things about this sort of thing. Where do most people go for information these days - the internet! When my son wanted to make a paper mache Roman helmet I didn’t have a clue. I typed it in on Google and guess what? Sites that will tell you just exactly how to do it!

All you need to do is to recommend places to buy a rabbit, specialist motorcycle parts or the best models (so long as the provider has an affiliate scheme) and you could be earning commission from your knowledge gained from your hobby.

A special area of interest Perhaps like me you are fascinated by military history and visit battlefields or go on tours. Why not write about a particular period of history, the battles and the soldiers. You could recommend books, model soldiers and the best tour companies to use and again earn a commission. A popular topic for an ecommerce website is travel. Do you have a favourite holiday destination you visit on a regular basis? Do you know of great places to visit that a casual visitor would miss? Travel reviews written by ‘real’ people who have been there are very popular. Potential visitors want to know the real story behind the glossy brochures. You can tell it how it is, recommend the places to visit and the places to avoid. You set up a program with the hotels, villas and resorts and earn a commission!

An unusual/ interesting past time Okay this could be included under hobby but it gives me another subheading. Are you a member of an historic society who dresses up and re-enacts the lives of our ancestors? What a wealth of information and interesting stories you would have to share. Do you work in a wildlife sanctuary as a volunteer? Restore vintage cars? A part-time DJ or children’s party clown? Your knowledge and experience could be of interest to other people. This makes you the expert and they will listen to what you have to say AND your recommendations with commission involved of course.
There are plenty of opportunities to exploit your knowledge and experience to make money. Choose a topic you have a passion for and it won’t seem like work at all!

The internet is growing rapidly with many thousands of new users appearing every day. Never before has it been possible to reach such a huge potential market with very little outlay. If you are willing to put in the work and experiment, you could build a substantial second income, and who knows, one day you could give up the day job and become an internet entrepreneur.

Roy Palmer is a teacher of The Alexander Technique and has studied performance enhancement in sport for the last 10 years. In September 2005 he decided to start an internet business using his expertise in fitness to sell online fitness programs. More information can be found at http://www.fitness-programs-for-life.com/build_an_ecommerce_website.html

Dental coverage is normally not underwritten by insurance
companies because the treatment and medication of dental needs
are predictable and follow a time table. No individual would opt
for a dental insurance plan if he were to pay more in premium
than in annual dental charges, and the insurance company would
lose money if they pay more in claims than the premium collected
for each policy they underwrite.

Despite these drawbacks, some companies offer dental benefits by
group discount schemes. These are also called discounted dental
plans or affordable dental plans. These are a kind of “clubs”
where membership costs a little money monthly or annually where
the members can avail of dental services at a discounted rate.
The dental service providers or dentists affiliated to these
“clubs” have agreed to provide dental services at a discounted
rate. The payment is made directly by the patient to the
dentist, no paperwork or claims or future hassles. These “clubs”
only do matchmaking between the patient and the dentist, earning
money in the process. The dentist in turns gains to earn due to
larger volumes of work. The patient gets the service at a
discounted rate. It’s a WIN-WIN for all parties involved.

Dental Insurance when offered is again a complicated issue. The
insurance company generally stresses upon background checks and
pre-existing conditions. After this goes through you have to
wait out until the coverage starts. When the treatment is
actually undergone, a lot of paperwork regarding claims, %age
exclusions etc. come to the fore where it becomes more of a pain
to actually undergo and finish the process of reimbursement.

However insurance has its own benefits and plans have their own.
A lot of employers also provide dental insurance whereupon the
need for plans ceases for the individual. It’s for the
individual to decide between the two as per their requirement,
needs and current situation.

Technology has been able to change our lives incrementally and sometimes drastically. According to Chanaron & Jolly (1999), this impact is more pronounced on businesses, as computers and other technologies are here and not going any time soon. The proliferation of technology in products and services show an insight into how many companies across industries are investing in technology (Papers4you.com, 2006). This insight provides a lesson for managers on how to run and grow a business in a volatile and competitive market place. This has resulted in the rise of electronic businesses across the globe in the last decade.

The diffusion of the internet and commerce has been the center of discussion both by the academics and the practitioners due to its growing importance in the developed countries. This has largely been contributed due to the high penetration of internet connectivity and online transactions of business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) nature. E-businesses have evolved from plain text websites to interactive e-commerce hubs that use internet and mobile technologies to reach their current customers and attract the potential customers (Karen, 1996). Theorists (Chang & Kyungdoo, 2005) believe that the evolution of internet itself has been staggering in the last decade and therefore more ways to conduct businesses have emerged. The use of internet has provided firms with the ability of ‘lean’ and ‘agile’ value chain, which means that firms can keep their operating costs at minimum along with the flexibility to grab any window of opportunities.

Current improvements in the internet services and its inherent characteristics like improved security, reliability, user friendliness, two-way communication, low costs, accessibility and customizability, have been the driving forces for e-commerce (Papers4you.com, 2006). The use of internet offers value to all the stakeholders. Drawing upon Dawes & Rowley (1998), it reduces the operating and distribution costs of the businesses and provides products and services to the customers sitting at home at any time.

The use of internet has opened new avenues for the adoption of innovative business models based on the proliferation of this technology. Tendering via reverse auction also called “e-reverse auctions” or “B-2-B reverse auctions”, for example, have been a common method to source production and non-production goods and services by many Fortune 2000 companies since 1995 (Richards, 2000). Similarly internet has provided the opportunity for affiliate marketing, which optimizes marketing spending by only paying when the particular marketing objectives have been met. Another example of e-business is online bartering, which according to Copeland (2006) is the process by which two parties strike a deal to exchange goods or services without money changing hands.

Refernces:

Copeland, Michael V. (2006), “The eBay of Swap”, Business 2.0, May2006, Vol. 7 Issue 4, p19-20, 2p

Chang E. Koh, Kyungdoo (2005), “Business use of the internet: A longitudinal study from a value chain perspective”, Industrial Management & Data Systems; Volume: 105 Issue: 1; 2005 Research paper

Chanaron, J. & Jolly, D. (1999), “Technical Management: Expanding the perspective of management of technology”, Management Decisions, Vol. 37 No. 8, pp 613 - 620

Dawes, J. & Rowley, J. (1998) “Enhancing the Customer Experience: Contributions from Information technology”, Management Decision, Vol. 36 No. 5, pp. 350- 357

Karen A. Forcht (1996), “Doing business on the Internet: marketing and security aspects”, Information Management & Computer Security; Volume: 4 Issue: 4; 1996 Research Paper

Papers For You (2006) “P/EI/84. E-business models: theory and reality”, Available from http://www.coursework4you.co.uk/sprtecom18.htm [22/06/2006]

Papers For You (2006) “P/EI/73. E-business models: benefits, opportunities and threats”, Available from Papers4you.com [21/06/2006]

Richards, B. (2000), “Dear supplier: This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me…”, E-company Now, 1(1), 136-142

The IPOD craze is sweeping across the world. With millions of units sold, and millions more on order, it has become clear that there is allot of opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur.

An IPOD is a portable music player than allows you to download music from a computer and play it where ever you are. You can now download and store hundreds of songs on an IPOD.
Compare that storage power to your standard disc player that is limited to the number of songs on a compact disc.

You can capitalize on the growing popularity of the IPOD with these innovative strategies.

Strategy #1

Sell IPODs. You have two approaches you can take. Buy brand new IPODs from wholesale and overstock sources, then resell them at a decent profit. Or you can advertise that you are looking to buy used IPODs. People who are upgrading to a newer model, or have simply grown bored of it will be happy to sell you their IPOD for a fraction of what they paid for it.
You can then sell the IPOD on eBay, at a flea market, or through a store front.

Strategy #2

You don’t have to sell IPODs to profit from their popularity. You can also make money by selling accessories to IPOD users. Contact manufacturers and wholesalers that provide IPOD accessories and set up an account with them. You should consider importing IPOD accessories since you can sometimes obtain them for pennies.

Then use your regular sales channels such as eBay, flea markets, and stores, to reach IPOD users.

Strategy #3

Launch a website geared towards the IPOD market. You can write articles on the latest developments, including song availability, new models, and new accessory sources. Once your site is set up take advantage of the affiliate opportunities available online. Many IPOD related sites will give you a commission for referring IPOD customers to them.

Donny Lowy runs http://www.closeoutexplosion.com an online wholesale and closeout business that supplies eBay sellers, retailers, and flea market vendors.

Nearly every ecommerce site revolves around a database to support inventory, listings and transactions. Building out the database can be a challenge. Here is what to expect.

Issues You Will Confront When Using Third Parties To Build Out Sites

Experienced web site database developers will leave plenty of time for debugging, troubleshooting and the unexpected instances. Even the best database development companies will run into set backs along the way though. Ensuring that you work with your developer to achieve a realistic time line is very important. At times, a database development company may estimate a project overly optimistically to win a bid. Choosing a company based on the shortest time line can often lead to trouble.

Also, relying on a deadline to be met can cause trouble if unforeseen occurrences pop up. Often these occurrences are the result of the originator of the work not foreseeing a business process necessary for the system. ‘Oh by the way, for that auction you’re working on, I also need integrated forums so that every auction item can have a forum thread.’ This type of added on item is sure to stretch a timeline. If you are not realistic in dealing with timelines, relations between developer and originator can sour easily.

Another favorite of database developers is the old agree on a proposal in October, client disappears for six months, then show up and expects the same timeline. Obviously if a developer estimates a project will take four months, waiting to start the project may result in delays because other clients will have come along.

Another favorite of web database developers is the push to show progress. If the originator of a project pushes for an update in undue time, a developer may rush to get to the coding and show an update. The first steps are the architecture of the whole system. This includes planning where data is stored, how it is most efficiently referenced and how the system can be expanded. Just like a construction worker needs a solid blueprint, the database coder and designers need a solid plan before building. Insisting on a plan for your database and not a code update is a good step to avoiding the pitfall of a poorly planned database.

Designing a database driven web site for heavy traffic takes considerably more time than designing a database for low traffic sites. Designing a database for heavy traffic sites generally involves designing processes to minimize hits on the database. For starters, don’t even think about storing images in your database. Instead, store references to your images.

Moving beyond the novice level of database architecture, one can reduce database hits by publishing flat HTML pages from the database periodically, so the database is not hit on each page access. Advanced web database architecture for high traffic sites might include publishing flat pages for often searched terms to once again reduce hits on the database. Slow databases kill sites, so limiting access wherever possible is important.

Similar to high traffic site considerations, search times can be dramatically reduced by designing databases for high volume traffic. A simple example is to have a separate table just for keywords that are likely to be searched that references the related pages to those keywords. This allows a search function to search this small table of keywords as opposed to one large table of pages with all of the content in it. This concept can be related to a card catalog in the library. Instead of reading every book on the shelf, one can simply go through the card catalog and find the specific book one needs.

You need backups. Automated backups at that. If things can go wrong, they will go wrong. At the worst possible moment. That is just how it is.

With backups, there are several types. You can have a RAID system that will mirror hard drives. You can also have a server-to-server backup system that transfers data to another system. There can also be a secure download backup automated from a local machine.

Security is of course a huge issue with any web database. Even if one is simply storing personal data with no financial information, the database can be a target of spammers or identity thieves. There are a myriad of different security methods. Of those, encryption of data should be used, not just during transfer through an SSL, but in the database as well. Keeping forms secure is also very important. A periodic security audit on any major web database system is essential.

“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” This statement is as true with web databases as any part of life. Perhaps the Unforeseen Instance is an extra requirement that only became apparent after the project was started. Perhaps it’s a hard drive going bad at just the wrong time, or maybe even the dog ate your…laptop. Whatever it is, the Unforeseen Instance is almost inevitable, so be sure to put away a little extra time for this.

To wrap things up, when working with database developers, first ensure they have a solid work history designing databases. Be sure to insist on architecture and not to push your designer into rushing the project. Make sure to have a plan for backups and go over your security time and time again.

Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com - providing internet marketing services.