St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for January, 2006

It seems that Microsoft is always looking for the easy fix to big design flaws. Now usually I’m all for the easy fix, but if it does more harm than good, it’s certainly time to put some extra effort into fixing the design flaw. This usually saves all kinds of problems down the road.

Microsoft seems to be extras at making “features” that do more harm than good too. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine why they put so much effort into such a bad idea. For instance in Win XP you were no longer able to make any folder you wanted “private”, only the ones that were under certain users profiles and in certain spots. Another example, with WinXP whenever you copy a folder from one disc to your hard disc, or one hard disc to another, it automatically becomes a “Read-only” folder that can’t be deleted or renamed. These were “features” according to Microsoft.

We’ve all been hearing about the mostly bad changes due to come out in IE 7. This latest one is going to screw up a lot of newbies and cause more support tickets for any web sites with log ins. The new “delete browsing history” feature under the “tools” menu wills not only clear the history, but also:

• the cache
• all cookies
• all saved passwords
• all saved form data
• all e-mail attachments in Outlook Express

Imagine all the new messages in your inbox reading “Please help, can’t log-in” and “I can’t remember which e-mail address I signed up with?” and “Why doesn’t your web site remember me?”

Read the source story here

First impressions really do count, especially for web sites according to the Behavior and Information Technology journal. According to a study they’ve just released, a web user makes up his or her mind, thumbs up or thumbs down, within less than a twentieth of a second.

This could explain a lot of pages that mysteriously have high “Bounce Rates.” While the researchers couldn’t seem to pinpoint the reasons for poor or positive ratings by these viewers, they were able to determine that the results weren’t random. They flashed some of the sites on screen more than once and they consistently got, well, consistent ratings.

The lesson learned? If a page has a high bounce rate, try changing it’s look.

Read the quoted news story

The companies that sell people cell phone records – such as all calls made to and from a certian cell phone (read my first story on the subject), are finally the subject of an investigation into exactly how the got the data in the first place. ¹

Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts asked the FCC to launch an investigation into how these companies that sell persoanl cell phone data got this information in the first place. Currently the FCC is investigating the Cell Phone companies to determine if they are protecting our cell phone data as the law requires.

Good luck to the FCC in both these investigation!

There’s a new spambot in townm and it’s very tough to detect wether it’s been browsing your server because it’s actions imitate real humans so well.

But good webmasters know that you can just assume that spambots will visit all your site and to break up e-mail addreses links with ascii code so the spambots can’t read them.

Seems the press has dubbed it the “Covert Crawler“

A web site for government contrators was shut down by the General Services Administration 3 weeks after a flaw was discovered enabled contrators to view and edite the financial ionformation of other contractors.
Aaron Greenspan discovered the security flaws when he tried to register his company as a government contractor last month. He is the president of Think Computer, a computer security firm based in Dallas.

Why did it take a full three weeks to sut down the site? Jennifer E. Millikin, deputy director of communications, said ” . . . the agency acknowledged that the flaw compromised the integrity of the Web tool but that it “believes the problem was brought to the agency’s attention before it became a hazard to other users.” She said the 20-day interval before the site’s shutdown reflected the processing of the inspector general’s report within the agency.”

Why did they shut the site down instead of fixing the flaw? Mum’s the word on that one, but considering it took three weeks to close the site. We’ve all closed sites before it only takes a few minutes. So can you imagine how long it would take them to actually fix the flaw?

Speaking of which it sounds as though they may have to start completely from scratch.
“ An independent computer security consultant who examined Mr. Greenspan’s written presentation to the agency said that the designers of the eOffer site had made a series of bad design decisions.

“The system relies, rather stupidly, on making it difficult to get in in the first place, by forcing you to get a client certificate for your browser,” a mechanism for establishing the user’s identity, said Mark Seiden, a security consultant who perform tests for corporations. “Well, the 9/11 hijackers also had authentic drivers’ licenses. Perhaps they believe that it’s good enough to know who to go after if they misbehave once they’re in the club.”¹ (Mr. Greenspan is the man who discovered the flaw.)

Well the Million Dollar Web Page finally filled it’s one million pixels of advertising for a dollar per pixel. Maybe now we can stop hearing about this idiotic idea that proves once again, that there is a lot of people out there with more money than brains.

But then again, or trauma isn’t over because there are several other web sites out there imitating the original.