BF Internet - Established 1996

Taking Payments Online: The Options

February 24th, 2009, by Chris Ward

For many years BF Internet have offered clients the option of taking credit card payments via through PGP encrypted emails. This allowed shoppers to submit their credit card details through a secure form to be processed in-store and offered reduced operating costs, whilst not requiring an internet merchant account.

The card payment industry has changed massively over the last few years, with greater focus on online security and fraud prevention through the introduction of CV2 numbers, 3D-secure authentication and extra layers of fraud checking. These advances have meant that other payment processing options (e.g. PayPal, Protx..) have become superior to PGP, offering improved PCI-compliant fraud protection for the merchant whilst widespread implementation has minimised costs.

This article looks at 3 options available to you to as an alternative to upgrade/replace the PGP service:

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Tags: credit card, online, payment, pgp, secure
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3 ideas to improve your presence online

February 10th, 2009, by Chris Ward

Every company, no matter what size, could benefit from a little more activity on their website. Here are 3 ideas to improve your web presence and generate more website traffic:

• Email marketing: If you’re reading this, then it must be worth doing.
• Update your homepage: Give people a reason to look again.
• Start a blog: Give people a reason to look frequently.

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Tags: blog, company blogging, email marketing
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8 ways to save money on software

February 8th, 2009, by Chris Ward

In this article we list a collection of eight open source programs which could potentially save you hundreds of pounds. But what is open source you ask…read on…

What is open source?

An open source product (usually a piece of programming) is the result of a project that has been contributed to by a collection of volunteers. These volunteers are often spread around the globe and collaborate online. Each contributor works on a section of the project, once the product is complete it is available freely for anyone to use and, in most cases, modify.

“The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, and people fix bugs. This can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.”
(www.opensource.org)

Who’s using open source?

You are, right now, and us too! The open source web server Apache is the most popular HTTP server on the World Wide Web and as of August 2008 Apache served 49.82% of all websites. The Internet Protocol (IP) which carries network data all around the internet is open source, as is Firefox, the record-breaking web browser used by nearly 20% of web users worldwide. The BBC, Google and NASA all support open source projects.

Why should I use open source?

There are many reasons to use open source software, but the key point for many is cost. Open source is free. Even complex commercial packages such as the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office, have free open source equivalents.

The List

Below we list the 8 applications that could save you money.
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Tags: money saving, open source, software, tips
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