Why You Should Not Use the Online Site Builder If

wick — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:07:26 +0800

In spite of the above, when visitors ask this question, Website Design CA normally recommend that they forgo the online web builder and learn to use an offline, standalone web editor. In the short term, this may seem like it increases the hurdle of getting your site onto the Internet, but there are far-reaching long term benefits.

Building your website using a site builder only seems easy on the surface, since it provides the illusion you don't need to dream up the visual appearance of your website. You can simply use their provided templates.
But despite what newcomers think, designing a website is more than creating an pleasing visual look. There are far more important aspects to web design, including usability and search engine friendliness.

As you learn more about these things, you will want to modify your website so that it is more usable and search engine friendly. When you limit yourself to a site builder, you are surrendering flexibility and total control in exchange for initial ease-of-use.

Now, of course it's possible that some site builders provide you with facilities to modify every aspect of your web pages. To do that, you will probably have to spend time learning the interface and working with it (or even around it) to accomplish your task. Why bother? All the skills you acquire in working with the site builder are not transferable. The moment you leave that web host, you have to re-learn everything again. You might as well have spent the time learning a standalone web editor. Your skills will then be usable no matter which web host you use, even if they don't provide a site builder.

Web Applications: An attractive target for hackers

wick — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:51:08 +0800

How do you cost effectively defend web applications from hackers? Website Design CA organization relies on mission critical business applications that contain sensitive information about customers, business processes and corporate data. Moving away from proprietary client/server applications to web applications gives you a simpler, cost-effective, highly extensible delivery platform. These applications are more than a valuable tool to power your business operations; they are also a valuable and vulnerable target for attackers. Web applications are increasingly the preferred targets of cyber-criminals looking to profit from identity theft, fraud, corporate espionage, and other illegal activities. The impact of an attack can be significant, and include: * Costly and embarrassing service disruptions * Down-time * Lost productivity * Stolen data * Regulatory fines * Angry users * Irate customers * In addition to protecting the corporate brand, federal and state legislation and industry regulations are now requiring web applications to be better protected.

As you take action to protect web applications in a timely and effective manner, you must balance the need for security with availability, performance and cost-effectiveness. Protecting web applications requires both zero-day protection and rapid response with minimal impact to operations without impacting performance or changing system architectures.

The number of corporate web applications has grown exponentially and most organizations are continuing to add new applications to their operations. With this rapid growth come common security challenges driven by complexity and inconsistency. New awareness into web application vulnerabilities, thanks to organizations such as the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), has helped organizations identify application security as a priority. But according to a June, 2006 survey (www.symantec.com/ about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20060919_01), while 70 percent of software developers indicated that their employers emphasize the importance of application security, only 29 percent stated that security was always part of the development process. Unfortunately, it is not just application flaws that are leaving systems vulnerable. In addition to application issues, every web application relies on a large stack of commercial and custom software components. The operating system, web server, database and all the other critical components of this application stack, have vulnerabilities that are regularly being discovered and communicated to friend and foe alike. It is these vulnerabilities that most organizations overlook when they're considering web application security. As new vulnerabilities are found, patches become a critical part of managing application security. The process of patch management is complex and difficult to do successfully. Even the most proactive IT team must often reassign critical resources to deploy urgent patches, disrupting normal operations. The time required to patch responsibly lengthens the window of time a hacker has to exploit a specific vulnerability. With thousands of vulnerabilities and patches being announced each year the problem continues to grow. Even organizations with the most efficient patching processes in place can't rely on this alone to protect them from attacks targeting web application vulnerabilities.

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Why You Should Not Use the Online Site Builder If

Web Applications: An attractive target for hackers