As mentioned in our previous blog posting, we are moving our datacenter to the US; this means we now have space on a server in the US and a server in London, ensuring that our clients in both countries get the fastest possible response for their websites.

Our server uptimes are still exemplary, as we show on our Server Status page (http://www.kpdirection.com/serverstatus.php). We're proud of this, and our monitoring is done in real-time by a third party company to prove that we're not just making the figures up.

As you can see from the uptime graph, both servers are showing an uptime more than 99.99% for 2008. And, of course, we *don't* guarantee this! Why? Because we live in the real world. Our aim is to make sure that your websites and email are available as much as possible, but for us to guarantee this would involve paying for insurance against downtime. This cost would have to be passed onto our clients - who would therefore end up paying more for the same level of service, and subsidizing a guarantee that is virtually worthless because of the myriad of aspects that can stop a particular user accessing a website.

So, what if you need a guarantee? Call us to discuss a dedicated server for your company.

How much will hosting cost? Less than you expect for business class hosting, but we charge more than companies like GoDaddy and Hostgator, and we don't offer unlimited bandwidth and diskspace. This is because we are a business that wants to understand your business and offer you the services you need. We deliberately don't overload our servers with as many websites as we can fit on them, and we keep our customer base down to a manageable level; we know all our clients by name, and they know they can ring us at any time day or night and we'll sort their web hosting problems for them. We run our business for businesses!

Labels: Business, Clients, IT Support, Web Design

Just a quick note to say that our servers will be upgraded on Tuesday 10th June 2008 (for Swift) and Wednesday 11th June 2008 (for Mentor). This is the first scheduled outage for both servers since we started offering web hosting to our clients, and our published statistics (http://www.kpdirection.com/serverstatus.php) - monitored by a third party company - show how reliable our business-class hosting is.

This upgrade is for a major version change of PHP, seeing us remove PHP4 from the servers and upgrade to the latest PHP5 version. We will also roll out other minor version upgrades of various system and service packages at the same time as this maintenance for PHP. Finally the server will be rebooted towards the end of the maintenance window to boot to a new kernel version and run any required disk check (FSCK).

All upgrades will commence at 10PM UK Time (3pm MT). We anticipate completing the maintenance prior to 7AM (UK Time) (Midnight MT) the following morning.

During the maintenance window the control panel will be unavailable, all other services remaining online and functional including your websites and email services. Towards the end of the maintenance window there will be approx 2 minutes of downtime as we reboot the server.

Labels: Business, Clients, Development, IT Support, PHP

In our opinion, website development isn't quite a professional industry. There are pockets of professionalism, but certainly on the Small/Medium Business side there is certainly a high proportion of 'Nephews' (as in, "My Nephew does computers at school, so he's doing our website for us"... really? Well, that's the sort of client KP Direction would rather not have anyway!).

One of the aspects where an amateurish approach really shows through is in dynamic websites created with PHP - specifically, the Testing area. A web development company we know of recently told us that they'd almost finished a large scale website for a major client, and were now ready to test it - how could they show their client that they had a formal testing process in place? We fell off our chairs. What they were asking is, "How can we pretend to our client that we do something that we don't really do".

Testing a dynamic website properly is the same as any major software engineering project - and as such, it starts at the start of the project. You can test your PHP class definitions as they are written, which reduces the time required at the end of the project - at which point, testing should not pop up any major surprises. Testing properly is a career in itself, similar to Designer or Programmer.

At a simplistic level there are two ways to test a site; White Box and Black Box.

White Box testing means that a test designer (who should *not* be the programmer at this stage) is able to see the specification for the internal class definitions used in the program. He then designs a series of tests which test every possible combination of input - valid and not - to see if the program handles them correctly, returning valid results or user friendly error messages as appropriate. Remember to test *every* input field (e.g, name, address1, zip code) for No input, short input (1 character), long input (More characters than are allowed), extended character input (e.g Quotes, backslashes), invalid input (deliberately put an incorrect value in to see if the system handles the error correctly). All tests should include database accesses.

Black Box testing comes after White Box. This time a second tester does not have access to the specifications of the system. Their approach is to use the system normally and abnormally - they should use it as normal users, and document their results, but they should also try to break the system - by unscrupulous means as well as valid ones - such as xss attacks etc.

After Black Box and White Box testing, you then move to Beta test - invite certain people to just 'use' the system. If you've created and proved valid test plans already, they shouldn't be able to break it. You can do that before, during, or *instead of* (yes, I've had clients do that!) User Acceptance testing - let the client play with the system and see if it does exactly what they asked for. It's not unknown for a system to get to this stage, then the client sees what you've built, and admits that they really wanted something else...

The deliverable to the client is sight of the test plans at each stage, which shows that you're taking testing seriously. To give an idea of size, a test plan I did for a contact form (OK, a reasonable complex one which wrote the information to a database, sent emails etc) was 281 separate test cases.

As you can see, then, testing is an intrinsic aspect of web development. Odd things can still happen, and requirements can change - you can never allow for absolutely all combinations of strange user inputs - but a good testing plan shows that you care about your product.

As you may have guessed, we care. If you care as well, let us know, and lets discuss your next web site development. And if you're a developer who needs to show a client that you have a formal testing procedure in place - call us on (801) 928 6953. We can work with you to develop procedures, or you can outsource your module or system testing to us.

Labels: Business, Clients, Development, PHP, Web Design

We're always looking for the best ways to keep our computers and children secure and safe, so this morning I decided to upgrade our antivirus software. Bad move, as you will find out...

Obviously we don't want to go into too many details about our network security, but at a high level, we run the following software;

MailFoundry - runs on our mail servers to reduce the amount of spam we get - we see about two or three a day now (we supply access to this free to all our hosting clients as well)
cloudmark desktop - puts the final clean and polish on spam - with this in place, we reduce spam to essentially zero, and more importantly, we don't see any false positives (valid emails marked as spam)
AVG Security Suite - Provides anti virus, firewall, antispyware, anti-rootkit... all you need to surf without fear
NetNanny - Stops access to inappropriate content and websites - of which there are more and more these days. We *know* that we and our children can surf without fear of accidentally accessing adult websites - can you say the same?

Anyway, back to the story. I upgraded to AVG Internet Security version 8; everything seemed to go OK, until I tried to access the internet. No go. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Both Mozilla and Internet Explorer just sat there waiting, and wouldn't show me any web content. Usually when this happens, NetNanny is sitting underneath another window, waiting for my input. But not in this case - it simply wasn't listening.

A deinstall of AVG 8 followed, quickly followed by another deinstall (the first one was completely ignored by AVG, and it restarted when I rebooted the machine). Once I had it deinstalled, I searched the internet for help, but found little help except a few posts claiming the same problem, and more than one response from AVG technical saying that AVG 8 will not work with NetNanny. Fortunately, this is incorrect!

The problem, I found, was that AVG 8 has a module called 'Web Shield', which works in a very similar way to NetNanny - and the two were conflicting. Turning off webshield in AVG didn't solve the problem, but deinstalling AVG8, reinstalling it using the Custom Install option and deselecting Web Shield did the trick. OK, I may have lost a little (minor!) level of functionality, but I think we're more than covered in that aspect.

A happy ending, and now I can continue with my day - 4 hours behind!

Labels: Business, Clients, IT Support

After a long development (starting in September 2007), KP Direction launched a redesign of the Greyhound Gang website in February.

The challenge was to redesign a successful website whilst keeping (and hopefully increasing) the sites existing visitor numbers and Google Page Rank. A further challenge was taking another companies page designs and turning them into a website with a consistent look and feel.

The site was initially all in HTML apart from Auction software; the new site is designed entirely in PHP, using MySQL as the database.

Challenges include the bimonthly updates of auctions, contests, special offers and ad-hoc updates of news items. Many of these were done on the old site manually, which was extremely labour intensive on the Monday-evening turnarounds. The new site has a time-sensitive staging area so that these changes can be constructed days, weeks or even months in advance, and the system will automatically switch them over at the designated time.

The site has been live since the middle of February, and the visitor numbers are staying stable, with the site now back up to it's previous Page Rank level. The sites owners have a website maintenance contract with KP Direction, and we look forward to the imminent redevelopment project to integrate auction software into the look and feel of the site.

Labels: Business, Clients, Development, PHP, Web Design

Today's award for the Worst Bank In The World goes to Abbey Business, in the UK.

I phoned them on Thursday...

Me: I'm in the US, and I'm going to be using my bank card over the next few days to withdraw large amounts of money. Is that OK?
Abbey: Yes, that's fine - there was already a note on your account saying that you are in the US.

So, Thursday evening I went and withdrew some money from the cashpoint. Lovely...

Saturday, I go to withdraw some more money, and the card doesn't work. After a few minutes ranting about absolute idiots in the UK Banking business, I paid for an international telephone call to the number on the card, only to find out that they all go home at 1pm on a Saturday.

I go home, and use the internet to check my balance; sufficient money there, but they've cancelled all cards on the account. More ranting and raving.

I ring the lost/stolen cards line to tell them that my cards were NOT lost or stolen - but they can't do anything for me. They can lock cards from future use, but can't unlock them.

So now I'm left without access to that account until Tuesday, when I can get on the phone and call them various names. I can accept them blocking my cards if I *DIDN'T* tell them where I was, but that's exactly *WHY* I rang them. Which specific part of the phrase "I'm in the US" didn't they quite understand?

My second call on Tuesday will be to an alternative bank. Grrrrr.

Labels: Business

A question for all business owners out there... how much thought do you give to users with accessibility issues?

If you have physical premises, then the answer is quite a bit; you're required by law to provide certain facilities, such as ramps where stairs are, elevator access to multiple floors, special bathroom facilities etc; all of which can cost considerable amounts of money.

So, how many of your customers could potentially have a disability of some sort. 1%? No. 2%? No. Try 20% - according to this report, almost 1 in 5 people in the US have some sort of disability. This is exactly why there are laws requiring business owners to give thought to accessibility issues.

On the web, then, how many of your site visitors have disabilities? Very few, I think you'd guess; one of our clients several years ago asked us why we gave attention to accessibility issues; "How many blind people buy cars?" He was surprised when I told him what we're about to tell you.

Around 30% of all traffic to KP Direction is from blind users.

Sounds a lot - but most of that traffic is from search engines. Google is the largest blind web user in the world.

What does that mean for you? Simple; if your website looks good for blind users, it will look good to Google.

Easier said than done, but KP Direction can help you by developing a new website which works well for blind users, or we can provide consultancy helping you convert an existing website to present your information better to Google.

On our side, we have a few tools we use daily in web development;

1. Mozilla

   Internet Explorer is broken - Standards are taken as just guidelines, so a site developed in IE might not display correctly in Mozilla. We develop for Mozilla, then make any necessary adjustments for IE.



2. Lynx

   Lynx is an assistive technology browser. We use the Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer tool to show us exactly how a web page is displayed to a blind user.



3. Turn images off

   Not actually an accessibility issue, but we feel that any good webpage should work just as well with images switched off as on. With so many inappropriate and un-christian images being displayed on even innocuous web pages these days, it's just the safe, easy way out. We have images turned on only for web pages we are actually working on. This helps us also to focus on the content of the page rather than the tinsel around the edges.

So, giving a bit more thought to web based disability accessibility issues now? Then contact us, and lets discuss how KP Direction can help you and your website.

Labels: Accessibility, Business, Clients

Unfortunately for those of us who live their lives on the net, Spam is a fact of life. Most users have two choices - spend lots of time dealing with it, or ignore it and hope it goes away.

KPDirection clients have another choice; let us handle it using our MailFoundry system.

Traditional spam filtering provided by other hosts (such as Spamassassin) uses keyword scoring to 'guess' which emails look like spam, this results in poor performance and often genuine email being trashed as spam - which none of us wants. MailFoundry uses human created definitions, rather than guess work, to identify known spam email messages and remove them fast and accurately.

Here are some numbers;

Every five minutes the anti-spam defintions are updated by a real live human being. That's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (we're sure it's not just ONE human being doing this...!)

Less than one in every million emails will be a false-positive (i.e, a valid email for you that is marked and deleted as spam). 100% of all known viruses and 99% of all known spam is deleted at the server without you having to do anything at all.

And what do you have to do? Nothing. Just host your website with KPDirection, and it will all happen automatically. MailFoundry is a free addition to our hosting services, and it saves our time (and your money) by completely off-loading the spam issue to someone else. So we're happy to pass that benefit and saving on to you.

But I don't host with KPDirection!

Not a problem. We seriously recommend the Cloudmark Desktop Antispam solution; again, users don't need to do anything, just watch all that spam simply disappear, never to be seen again.

If you'd like to talk more to us about hosting at KP Direction, Web Site Design, or IT Management solutions in the Syracuse and Salt Lake / Wasatch Front areas, just drop us a line. Our policy is Best Advice - if we can't help you, we'll help you find someone who can.

Labels: Business, Clients

Firstly, what is a Scam? Merriam-Webster (Scams) has it as 'a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation', and the Domain Registry of America is certainly being deceptive with its marketing activities. Domain Slamming is another term used for these marketing practices.

As a service to our clients, KP Direction (and our technology partner Acute Computing) provides domain registration facilities. We know that our clients have many more important things to do than play with technical issues, so we handle as little or as much of the clients DNS and Domain information as they wish. We handle all the client invoicing in-house, so we were surprised this week when two separate clients contacted us regarding their domain renewals through the Domain Registry of America (click here to see a sample letter).

On reading this letter closely, it's actually a request for the user to switch their domain away from KP Direction and to the Domain Registry of America. The text of the letter stresses how urgent it is to do this before your domain expires ('Act today!'), so that the reader will process the 'invoice' immediately, without contacting their technical support people. The letters usually come out between three and five months before the domain renewal is due - in order to beat real renewal invoices, which are usually three months before.

How to handle these letters

1. Know your Domains You should always know where your domains are registered and hosted, and have access to any usernames and passwords required to make changes. At KP Direction we notify all clients of this information, and keep a secure copy of this record in-house - available on request, in case the client loses it!



2. Use a Purchase Ordering System If you purchase something which will result in an invoice coming your way, keep a record (Excel is fine for starters) showing the item, a unique reference, and the amount. Give the unique reference to the supplier as a 'Purchase Order Number', and if they do not specify the PO Number on the invoice they send, you can then query the invoice in-depth - if the number matches, it can be paid immediately. Companies like Domain Slammers never contact you in advance for this information, so will never have valid PO Numbers for you.
   
   
   Any domain renewals will generally be handled by ourselves, and the invoice will come from KP Direction or Acute Computing, and will have a PO Number on if you supply us with it. If you see a suspicious invoice, clients are welcome to contact us for further directions - which may involve a circular filing cabinet (the bin!).



3. Don't Pay! Never - EVER - send any payment until you are sure it's a valid invoice. In the case of the Domain Registry of America, all fees are final. If the transfer is declined, or doesn't complete for ANY reason, you won't get a refund. Note that KP Direction has Domain Locking switched on by default for all .com and .org domains, and this is one reason why a transfer would fail.

If in any doubt, search the internet. Scams can often be identified by checking out Google and/or Snopes with the company name.

KP Direction prides itself on giving clients 'Best Advice'. If you ever need to move hosting or domain registration away from KP Direction, we will unlock the domain and provide all the help required, and standard transfers away are free. We will, however, validate that the company you are transferring to is not a domain slammer, and that you are transferring the domain in full knowledge of any technical implications that may occur (loss of email, website, etc). If in doubt, call us!

Labels: Business, Clients

We'd like to extend a warm welcome to our newest clients!

Trinity Group Resources, Inc. deals in insurance such as Final Expense, Medicare Supplement, Cancer Insurance and other services aimed primarily at the 40+ age group in several states across the US. KP Direction will be initially working with Trinity Group to redesign and restructure their website to appeal to both potential clients and prospective agents.

First Fire Protection provides sprinkler systems and maintenance services to construction companies and building contractors in Utah. KP Direction will be redesigning and updating the existing website to provide more relevant information, and developing a database driven system which will open up new business opportunities for First Fire; we're not saying any more, you'll just have to wait until it's done!

We're looking forward to building our partnerships with each company, and making them - and us - more successful in 2008!

We're growing fast, and so can you! If you want to see how KP Direction can improve your profits, contact us. We work with clients throughout the US, UK and Europe, and we'd love to hear from you.

Labels: Business, Clients, Development, PHP, Web Design