THINGS you need to know

THINGS

you need

to know

BEFORE YOU HIRE

ANYONE TO RE-DO

YOUR WEBSITE...

Table of Contents

Introduction... 3 #1: The Right Way To Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly... 4 #2: Never Build Your Website On WordPress... 10 #3: Using The Wrong Hosting Can Get Your Website Hacked,

Blacklisted On Google, And Infected With Viruses And

Malware... 17 #4: Never Build Your Website On A Proprietary CMS... 24 #5: Find Out How Competent Any Web Company Is With Just

Three Questions... 26 Now what? ... 29

Introduction

If you’re planning to re-do your company’s website, make sure you read this report before you do anything else!

My name is Chris Davis. I’m the owner and CEO of DVS Camp Websites. We design,

develop, host, maintain and protect websites for camps. We’ve discovered five things that are very important to know if you’re planning to hire a web design and development company to build you a new website for your camp.

In our experience, the information in this report can literally save you thousands of dollars, and can help you end up with a new website that

vastly improves your camp’s image and brand, and brings in more new campers, revenues and profits.

Considering how valuable this information is to most camps, I decided to write this report and give it away for free so that more camp directors and owners could make better informed decisions when it comes to finding the right web company.

I think you’ll find that the information here is stuff you haven’t seen or heard before.

Sincerely,

Chris Davis

#1: The Right Way To Make Your

Website Mobile-Friendly

You’ve probably heard that your website needs to be mobile-friendly these days.

A few years ago that was true. But now that many more websites are mobile-friendly, including some or all of your competitors, your website now needs to be mobile-competitive.

And there is only one method that can accomplish this for you, and you need to make sure the web company you hire to build your new website will use this method.

Before we go any further, I want to impress upon you how important it is to get your website right on mobile devices.

In 2012, Google surveyed 1,088 adult smart phone users.  Here are just a few of the compelling findings from that study:

•

52% of adult smart phone users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.

•

48% said that if a site didn’t work well on their smart phone, it made them feel like the company didn’t care about their business. 

•

67% of mobile users say that when they visit a mobile-friendly site, they’re more likely to buy that site’s product or service.

•

79% of mobile searchers say that if they don’t like what they find on one mobile site, they will go back to their search results and find another site.

We recommend to all of our clients that they look at their website analytics program and see how many visitors every month are accessing their website on

a mobile device (the better analytics programs like Google Analytics will provide this info for you).

Across our clients, we're seeing about 20% - 40% of people that visit small business websites are doing so on mobile devices.

This means that if your company’s website is not mobile-friendly and is not providing an excellent experience on all mobile devices, that approximately

20% - 40% of the people that visit your website are getting a bad first impression of your company and are less likely to do business with you.

So, your new website must be mobile-friendly.

But that’s not all.

More of your competitors are now building their websites to be mobile-friendly. So, now it’s a matter of whose website is better on mobile devices.

There are a number of different ways to present your website on mobile devices, but there’s only one method that we recommend to all of our clients.

Let’s review all of the available options and then I’ll share the one we recommend to our clients and explain why it makes your website mobile-competitive, not just mobile-friendly.

(1) THE ZOOM ADJUSTMENT

There’s a simple adjustment that can be made to the code of your website that improves the way it looks on mobile devices a little bit. You can have a web developer adjust the zoom of your site so that when it’s called up on a mobile device, the whole website is automatically shrunk to the width of the device that is requesting it. But, the problem is just that—that your whole website has been

substantially shrunk. This means that users will not be able to read any of the text, or click on any of the links on your website without having to first enlarge each area of the web page where they want to do these things. This causes a lot of

frustration for users and they’ll probably leave your site after a few seconds of having to deal with this.

Figure 1 shows the www.bhcarpetcleaning.com

website which has the zoom adjustment. (Please note: B&H Carpet Cleaning is not our client.)

(2) BUILD A MOBILE APP OR SEPARATE MOBILE SITE

Some companies choose to build a completely separate mobile website and/or various different apps. But apps don’t work the same on all mobile devices, so if you choose this option, you’ll likely need to hire a mobile web company to build you an iPhone app, an Android app, an iPad app, and maybe all of the above. Apps and mobile websites do give your users an excellent experience, but this route is much more costly ($20,000 - $80,000) and typically takes 6 – 8 months to complete, not to mention the fact that when you want to make any change to your website, you now have to make it in two or three or four different places since they’re all different apps and sites.

Figure 2 shows the moviefone.com mobile site.

(3) CHEAPO MOBILE SOLUTION

Some companies these days are going the route of finding a mass website “mobilizer” that can make your website mobile-friendly for extremely cheap (or even free). This is one of those situations where you get what you pay for. Using a cheapo or free “mobilizer” solution you’ll get a stock, standard mobile web page with some nondescript buttons and a few photos here or there – nothing that carries over the design of your company’s website, nothing that represents the true feel of your company or what’s different and unique about it. This is the fastest and cheapest way to make your website mobile-friendly, but it also looks the fastest and cheapest and it makes a bad impression with your visitors and new potential customers. That’s why we don’t recommend it.

Figure 3 shows the www.adventurekingdom.com website as it looks on a desktop computer. Figure 4 shows what it looks like on a smartphone. This website was converted by a cheapo “website mobilizer.” This website actually has a pretty good design, but none of it comes through in the mobile version. The mobile version is just a blue background, their logo and some nondescript buttons... what a waste! (Please note: Adventure Kingdom is not our client.)

(4) RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

In the last few years, a cutting-edge technology was developed called Responsive Web Design, which modifies your existing website so it can automatically detect exactly which device (iPhone, Android, iPad, desktop computer, notebook computer, etc.) and exactly what screen size is requesting your website and then, in real time, it rearranges the elements and the layout of your website so that it is presented in the most ideal way on that device, thereby providing an ideal user experience for every user on every device, every time. 
  


And with Responsive Web Design, you don’t need a separate app for every device, so whenever you make changes to your website, those changes will be reflected perfectly on all devices. So you only have to make your changes, edits and updates once, in one place.





But here’s the real important part: Responsive Web Design retains the design and functionality of your regular website on every Internet device. This is why Responsive Web Design makes your website mobile-competitive and not just mobile-friendly. For these reasons, we recommend Responsive Web Design to all of our clients and build it into every website we design and develop.

Figure 5 below shows one of our client’s website (www.campjacobson.com) and how it appears on desktops, tablets and smartphones.

#2: Never Build Your Website On

WordPress

Here’s a question we get a lot from prospective clients:

“Why do you use ProcessWire for the CMS that you build all your websites on, and why not Wordpress?”

Recently, I wrote an email replying to a prospective client who asked me that question. That email I wrote is the best way I can demonstrate the reasons you should never build your website on

WordPress (and the reasons we chose ProcessWire as the Content Management System we use to build all of our websites on).

So, I’ve included a copy of that email here:

[Quick Note: The CMS software we use to build all of our clients’ websites is ProcessWire. We have no affiliation with ProcessWire and receive no remuneration or compensation whatsoever for using their software or talking about it here or elsewhere.]

EMAIL START

-Dear Brian,

Regarding your question about Content Management Systems (CMS) software, just as a reminder, the one we use with all of our clients is ProcessWire and their website: www.processwire.com 





First, a little background: One of my goals at the very beginning when I started my company was to work with my development team to find the CMS platform that gave our clients as many advantages and as much flexibility, protection and freedom (now

and in the future) as possible.  So my development team and I have spent years finding, testing and evaluating all of the most popular CMS platforms available. Ultimately, we chose

ProcessWire because it delivered more of the things mentioned above for our clients than any of the other options.





Here are three specific ways that ProcessWire is superior to WordPress (and some strong arguments against using

WordPress even if you choose not to hire us or use ProcessWire):

(1) Security

WordPress has a lot of problems with security, and we’ve never had any security problems with ProcessWire.

One of the most telling ways to see this is to do two searches in Google.  Go to Google and type in “processwire hacked” and see how many results you get that are either people talking about their ProcessWire site getting hacked, or articles that tell you how to fix a hacked ProcessWire site.

Then go back to Google and type in “WordPress hacked” and see what results you get from that search.  

I did this search recently and I’ll just ruin the fun and tell you what happened, but feel free to do it yourself too.  When I searched “processwire hacked” I went through every search result on the first 5 pages of Google (that’s 50 search results) and I couldn’t find even one account of someone saying that their ProcessWire site was hacked, and I also found no articles advising how to fix it when a ProcessWire site gets hacked.  

When I searched on “WordPress hacked,” on the first page of Google’s search results I found 3 web pages that were people complaining that their WordPress site got hacked and 7 articles advising people on how to fix a WordPress site that’s been

10 results only).  You get many more of both as you go to subsequent search results pages.  

WordPress apparently gets hacked so much that someone created an infographic all about it – you can check it out here:

http://startbloggingonline.com/what-if-your-wordpress-gets-hacked-infographic/

And there’s a statistic in the infographic

indicating that 170,000 WordPress sites got hacked in 2012!  Whether this is accurate or not I’m not sure, but the fact that this person has gone to the trouble of creating an

infographic specifically about WordPress sites getting hacked tells me it should at least be a concern for someone considering building their website on WordPress.  

As for personal experience with WordPress, I own a blog (not related to or built by my web company) that’s built on WordPress and it was hacked, and unbeknownst to me, was

downloading viruses and malware onto my visitors’ computers.

At DVS Websites, my web design and

development company, we’ve heard more than a few stories from clients and prospects who’ve had their previous websites built on WordPress that were hacked and blacklisted by Google and removed from the search engine rankings entirely because they were inadvertently

distributing malware and viruses. As for our personal experience with

ProcessWire, we’ve never had even one security problem with any of our clients.  

Based on all of the above, we would never build a client’s website on WordPress because we know that there’s too much risk of damaging their company’s reputation, damaging and/or losing their search engine rankings, losing existing and new customers, and enduring a lot of unnecessary cost, wasted time and hassle.

(2) Flexibility and Future-Protection

One thing that’s important to know about WordPress is that it was originally designed for blogs, not websites.  

This is important because most blogs are intended to be much simpler than websites and therefore don’t require some of the more advanced features and functionality that websites do.  Now, you can build websites on WordPress, but when it comes to

certain more sophisticated and custom interactive functionality, WordPress starts to have limitations, because it was originally intended for blogs which are less sophisticated.  

You can make these things work in WordPress, but to do so it’ll require your developers to create workarounds, “hacks” and modifications to the WordPress code.  This means you’re now turning WordPress into more of a custom CMS, and this becomes a problem if you ever decide that you don’t want to work with the website company or developer that built this site for you.  

If you do decide, for whatever reason, that you don’t want to work with the company or developer that built your site, any new

developer you hire, regardless of whether they know WordPress or not, will need to spend time going through the parts of your site that are “customized” and “hacked” in order to learn what the previous developer did and figure out how to work with it.

Because of the extra time your new developer needs to spend, it could end up costing you a lot more money than it should just to make simple modifications to your site, or it may even end up being less expensive for you to just rebuild your whole website again from scratch. Either way, you lose. 

With ProcessWire, none of that is necessary because ProcessWire was originally and specifically designed for websites and all their complexity.  

So, ProcessWire places no limitations on what you can do with a website, and if you ever decide that you don’t want to use us anymore, all you’ll have to do is find a developer who knows PHP (which is one of the most popular website coding languages in the world). Because of the way ProcessWire was built (very intuitive and with little additional framework on top of PHP), programmers who are highly-skilled at PHP should be able to program

ProcessWire with a short learning curve, if they don’t already know ProcessWire specifically.

The screenshot shown below comes from a popular website (www.elance.com) where you can find and hire freelance web developers, and it shows that there are more than 150,000 people in the world that know PHP and are available for freelance work, not to mention that there are also many web development companies

that you can hire that have experts who program in this language. So, if you ever decide you don’t want to use us anymore, it shouldn’t be difficult to find a new developer who can quickly come up to speed on your website and make changes for you in a cost-effective manner.

(3) User-Friendly

Honestly, I think that once you come up the learning curve, WordPress is pretty easy to use. Millions of people use it every day, so it can’t be that difficult.  We’ve just found that ProcessWire

requires less learning and overall, is even easier (and more intuitive) than WordPress.  

First, as I mentioned above, WordPress was originally designed for blogs (not websites) and so the back-end interface—the place you go to edit and change your website, is set up for blogs and not websites.  This makes it a little more confusing to find your way around and to make your edits because everything is set up like a blog, which is different than a website.  

Second, in WordPress, the back-end interface is not customizable and it is cluttered with every feature and option available in

WordPress, which makes things more confusing and intimidating for people who are not as tech savvy.

In ProcessWire, we can completely customize the back-end interface and take out everything that is not essential to you

making edits and updates on your website. This minimizes clutter and confusion. And, we can make things much more intuitive because we can customize it for you.

For example, in the ProcessWire back-end interface we can create an input field where you input the name of a page in your website exactly as it will appear in the main menu and we can label that input field: “Page Title As Shown In Main Menu.” This field in WordPress is not customizable, so it will probably be labeled something like “Page Title.”  But this is confusing because “Page Title” could mean several different things.  It could be the words you see in the main menu, or it could be the words you see in the main headline on the page, or it could be the words that are in the Page Title meta tag for SEO.  And, on every web page, these can all be different!

So, because ProcessWire allows us to control and customize the back-end interface, we can control your user experience and make it easier and more intuitive for you, which saves you time and

hassle.  This can’t be done in WordPress.


One more quick thing:







We recommend that you ask the other web companies you’re considering hiring if they’ve heard of ProcessWire.  We think it’s an important question to ask because it can reveal the extent to which they have evaluated and tested the different available CMS platforms.

We think it’s a bit of a red flag when a website company who is supposed to have expertise with CMS (which all web companies must these days) hasn’t even heard of ProcessWire because it tells us that they haven’t really taken the time to find, evaluate and test all the available options. And, it sometimes can indicate that they may just be defaulting to using WordPress because it’s the one that “everyone knows and everyone uses.”

We know for a fact that just because many people use

WordPress does not make it the best solution for our clients.

-#3: Using The Wrong Hosting Can

Get Your Website Hacked,

Blacklisted On Google, And

Infected With Viruses And Malware

Everyone knows that you need hosting for your website. Hosting is what allows your website to be “up” and available to visitors on the internet. The problem is: most web designers and developers think all website hosting is the same, and based on that, they find, buy and recommend the cheapest possible hosting plan for your website.

That is, until they, and you, experience the reality of cheap hosting.

Hosting Horror Stories

Here are a few true stories that happened to our clients related to website hosting.

Just a quick note: Back in the days when we were too naïve and

inexperienced to know, we allowed our clients to take the websites we had built for them and host them at any company of their choosing.

Boy did we learn fast that this didn’t work, as you’ll see in the horror stories below.

We now require our clients to host with us, in a hosting environment that we have complete control of. This way we can rely on our development, hosting and networking expertise to guarantee the safety, performance, maintenance and overall operation of our clients’ websites at all times.

All of the horror stories below are true and happened to real clients of ours, before we started requiring them to host with us. When these situations occurred, they all had cheap hosting plans ($7.95 a month, $9.95 a month, etc.).

HOSTING HORROR STORY #1: Blacklisted by Google and

removed from the search engine rankings ENTIRELY!

One of our clients was hosting 15 different websites with a hosting

company that was charging them $150 a month, so $10 per website per month.

We got a frantic call from the client who told us that they had received a notice from Google saying that their website (that we had built for them) was distributing malware and viruses and that Google had removed their website entirely from all the search engine rankings. So, they were getting no traffic from Google. We contacted the hosting company and checked and

re-checked the website for any problems, but could find nothing. There was no malware, no viruses, no malicious code in the website, nothing—it was totally clean.

Next we contacted Google. We found out that Google wasn’t actually accusing our client’s website of distributing malware or viruses, but rather saying that the website was associated with other websites that were doing this.

So, we went back to the hosting company to find out what that meant. The hosting company didn’t offer us much in the way of help, but after digging,

we found out that our client’s website was being hosted on a server that was also hosting multiple websites that were actually distributing malware and viruses.

We asked the hosting company about this and they pretty much blew us off. Apparently they didn’t care that they were hosting websites that were not only in violation of Google’s Terms and Conditions, but were illegally distributing malware and viruses.

Since our client’s website was in the same network and on the same server as these websites that were distributing malware and viruses, Google

associated our client’s site with these bad sites and penalized our client by blacklisting them from the search engine rankings, effectively removing all their incoming traffic from Google.

HOSTING HORROR STORY #2: “My website was down for 19 hours before my hosting company even responded to me!”

One of our clients had us install their beautiful, newly-designed and developed website on a cheap host—I believe it was $7.95 a month. A few weeks later our client called to tell us that their website was down. We asked if they had contacted their hosting company and they had, but hadn’t heard back from them yet. We informed the client that we couldn’t do anything until the hosting company got the website back up, so we had to wait to hear back from them.

19 hours passed before anyone from the hosting company even responded to our client, and it took another 5 hours for them to figure out there was a problem with our client’s server (which incidentally was affecting many other websites also) and finally fix the problem and get our client’s website back up.

HOSTING HORROR STORY #3: “My hosting company changed something WITHOUT TELLING ME

that broke my website and made it go down!”

We’ve actually had several cases of this situation occur, with multiple different clients.

Here’s what happens: the hosting company makes a change to your hosting configuration or environment that they don’t realize (or don’t care) will break your website and make it go down and so they don’t bother to inform you before, or even after the change has been made.

A good hosting company will always inform you (or your web company) before making any changes to your hosting environment or configuration, including updates of software.

The bottom line is: with hosting, you really do get what you pay for. The companies that offer super-cheap hosting plans just don’t have the level of support, the expertise, the knowledge or even the right equipment to

provide a consistent, reliable, safe, high-performance hosting experience for a website that is owned by a serious small business.

You need different hosting for

different types of websites

Here’s an important thing about hosting that most small business owners don’t know (and most web design companies and hosting companies won’t tell you, or don’t know):

If your website is built on a CMS (and these days it should be), then you need a certain kind of hosting, which is more sophisticated, more

expensive and requires more expertise and support than the cheapo hosting you can get from companies like GoDaddy, BlueHost and HostGator.

But, if your website is static HTML, then you can have just about any type of hosting and you’ll probably be ok, even the cheap ones. (But, you always take a risk when you buy the cheapest available hosting because these companies just cannot provide adequate support, among other things, given the prices they charge and the very large numbers of customers they serve.)

What is static HTML? Without getting too technical, before the advent of CMS, websites were static and only built with HTML and CSS—basic website programming languages. When your website is built on a CMS, it is now a dynamic website because it is built on different software and it is utilizing a database. The primary benefit a CMS adds is that it allows you or anyone (without programming knowledge) to make changes to your website all on your own. In order to accomplish that, the website has to be built using different software (usually PHP) than just static HTML, and it has to use a database.

This is important because PHP in combination with a database creates security holes and vulnerabilities that are more easily taken advantage of by hackers.

Most CMS’s are built on PHP (or similar software) and utilize a database. Therefore, every CMS inherently has these holes or vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit.

These holes and vulnerabilities do not exist when your website is static HTML. Therefore, static websites are more naturally secure than CMS-based websites. This is why you can use cheapo hosting with a static website because you don’t need the extra security of more expensive and sophisticated hosting to plug the holes and vulnerabilities that CMS-based websites all have.

But, you don’t want a website that is static HTML.

Because you and your staff won’t be able to make any changes to that website, unless you know HTML and CSS and have programming

experience. The only way to make changes to a non-CMS site is to call your website company. This takes more time, more money and usually

more hassle than its worth, and this is why having a website built on a CMS is a very good idea and definitely worth it.

But if you’re going to have a CMS-based website (which you should), you’ll need to make sure it is secure, because as I mentioned, every CMS has natural holes and vulnerabilities in it.

There are two places you need to shore up the security of your CMS-based website—the site and CMS itself and the hosting you use.

Getting your website and its CMS secure requires using CMS software that is as secure as possible and using a developer who is competent enough to make sure everything in the website and CMS has been built with the utmost security in mind.

To make the hosting for your CMS-based website as secure as possible…

You need to work with a company that has

real expertise in development, hosting and

networking to be responsible for the overall

operation of your website

Why?

Because your website has to reside in the proper hosting environment that is properly configured for the CMS software and database software your website is using so that everything is as secure as possible.

If your CMS-based website resides in the wrong hosting environment, or one that is improperly configured for exactly the CMS software your website uses and exactly the database software your website uses, then your website will be vulnerable to hackers and infection by malware, viruses and other nasty attacks.

This is why you need someone to do all of this for you—someone who has the right expertise in all of the required areas. Ideally, this would be the

same company and people that designed and developed your website because they know your website better than anyone else.

But, the problem is… Very few website designers and developers have any of this expertise. That’s why they encourage you to just get the

cheapest hosting plan you can find—they don’t know any better! But that’s no excuse—they should know—that’s their job!

And even fewer website designers and developers have all of this expertise.

#4: Never Build Your Website On A

Proprietary CMS

If you don’t already know, a CMS is a Content Management System. In plain language, it’s a type of software that you build your website on that allows just about anybody to quickly and easily edit and update your website, without needing any programming skills.

Most websites these days are

built on CMS’s because being able to make changes to your website yourself is less expensive and much faster and easier than having a web company do it for you every time.

So, CMS is good.

But, proprietary CMS is bad.

A proprietary CMS is a CMS that was custom-developed by a web design and development company.

RED FLAG: If you’re considering hiring a web company and they tell you that they’ve created their own CMS and that’s what they’ll use to build your website on, run to the hills!

Here’s the real deal: With a CMS, you and your staff can make many of the edits and changes you’ll need on your website, like: changing text,

changing photos, changing PDF documents, adding, removing and moving web pages, etc., all with no help from your web company. But, there are limits to what any CMS can do and at some point you will need to make more substantial changes to your website, that cannot be made by you using the CMS. So, these changes must be made by your web company.

But, what happens when your web company raises their prices, or their service starts to stink, or you find someone that’s cheaper and better?

Here’s the bad news: If your website is built on a proprietary CMS, you won’t be able to switch to a new web company and you’ll be stuck with the company that built your proprietary CMS website—stuck paying their higher prices and enduring their non-responsive and lackluster service.

Why can’t you switch to a new web company?

Because, if your website is built on a proprietary CMS, no respectable programmer or web company will touch your website with a ten-foot pole. Why? Because they don’t know how to code your website because it is built on a proprietary CMS, which is custom software.

So, for them to successfully make modifications to your existing website, they will have to first learn how to code in the language of your custom, proprietary CMS, and then actually do the coding. They’re going to have to charge you a lot more money to do that, which you won’t be happy about, and they have to put in time to learn a whole new coding method, which they probably won’t want to do.

So, now you’re stuck. You’re tethered to this one web company forever,

unless you decide to build a whole new website again.

And, that’s why getting your website built on a proprietary CMS is such a bad idea.

How can you avoid this? Don’t hire any web company that uses a proprietary CMS platform.

Instead, insist upon having your website built on a CMS that is used by and can be programmed by many different programmers and web companies. This way, you’ll have more options in the future, when you need them.

#5: Find Out How Competent Any

Web Company Is With Just Three

Questions

Most people don’t know this, but when it comes to building a website for your

business, the level of competence and skill that your web designer / developer

possesses has a direct and significant impact on your company’s bottom line. More impact than almost any other aspect of your website, in fact.

Therefore, it is extremely important for you to be able to determine how competent any

web company is that you’re considering hiring to build your new website. Most small businesses never investigate the competence and level of skill of the web companies they’re considering for hire, I believe, for one or more of these reasons:

1. they don’t realize that the way their website is coded and developed has a greater effect on their company’s bottom line than almost any other aspect of their website

2. they are intimidated because they assume that judging the skill level of technical people requires the same technical knowledge... it does not

3. they make their decision based on their gut or intuition alone

What further complicates this already difficult problem is that most web companies claim to be and look like they are competent and skilled, when they really are not.

For all of these reasons, you need to test the competence and skill level of any web company you’re considering hiring.

I’m going to give you a fast and easy way to do this.

This is not the most comprehensive way to do this, but you don’t need comprehensive, you need something that weeds out the obviously incompetent.

I’m going to give you three questions. Ask these questions (all of them) of anyone who is offering to build you a new website.

I’m also going to give you the approximate answers they should give, and I’ll show you how to judge their answers.

Obviously, if any candidate becomes defensive or irate about answering these (slightly tougher than normal) questions, that’s a red flag and they should be removed from the running.

Here are the questions and the answers they should give:

Questions you should ask any web company you’re considering hiring:

1. What is responsive web design? Please show me three examples of websites that you have built with responsive web design.

2. Someone told me that the Description Meta Tag on the pages of my website doesn’t really have any effect on my rankings in Google and the other search engines. Should I not worry about these tags then? 3. If my website is built on a Content Management System (CMS), does

it require more, less or the same amount of security measures and precautions as a website that isn’t built on a CMS? Why?

Answers competent web companies will give you:

1. If they don’t immediately know what responsive web design is, and cannot succinctly and clearly explain it, forget them. If they know anything about website coding they should know everything about responsive web design—it is one of the biggest breakthroughs in website programming in a long time. And, if they don’t have at least

three websites that they’ve built with responsive coding, forget them —they don’t have enough experience to build you a solid website. 2. Here is the only answer they should give you: it’s true that the

Description Meta Tags have little or no effect on your search engines rankings, but they are still important because what you write in the Description Meta Tag is exactly what searchers (potential customers) will see in Google and on the other search engines when your web page link appears on a search engine results page. This text that they see (that you put into the Description Meta Tag) is the copy that will either persuade them to click on your link and go to your website, or pass you by, so it is still very important even though it has no

bearing on your search engine rankings.

3. Any person who claims to be a website coder or developer must know that a website built on a CMS requires more security measures and precautions than a website that isn’t built on a CMS. This is because a website built on a CMS uses different software—usually PHP combined with a database. Because there is a database

involved, more security is required because databases and PHP have natural security holes and vulnerabilities that are more easily

exploited by hackers. They should also know that a website built on a CMS requires an entirely different hosting environment which forms part of the security measures required for such a website. My advice is: if they don’t know all of this, forget them. Working with someone who doesn’t have all the requisite knowledge to effectively protect your website is going to create a lot of trouble for you. Here’s just a sampling of some of the bad stuff that can happen: your website can get hacked, blacklisted by Google and the other search engines, removed entirely from the search engine rankings, go down for extended periods of time, get infected with viruses and malware, actively infect your visitors’ computers with viruses and malware without you or them knowing, and more.

Now what?

First, thanks for requesting and reading this report. I hope you found it useful.

If you liked what you read in this report and it made sense to you, and if you’re planning to re-do your camp’s website sometime in the near future, check out our website, portfolio of work and the unique interactive features that we include in all of our camp websites to help you get more new campers!

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