• 
  
  Hunnybums specialise in providing reusable nappies for your baby. As a new business, Hunnybums required a full marketing package; BF Internet provided distinctive branding, beautiful illustrations and eye-catching leaflets, in addition to an online shop with a unique & clever personal shopper.

• 
  
  PYD are a dedicated yacht delivery company, completing over 200 yacht deliveries a year in all of the world’s oceans. An existing customer of ours, we relaunched PYD with a new content-managed website showcasing the specialist services on offer.

• 
  
  Three Peaks Outdoor Leisure specialise in outdoor clothing and accessories, retailing for over 23 years. Their new online shop can cater for all your outdoor needs with products from all the big brands.

• 
  
  Amber Taverns have over 65 public houses across the North of England, Midlands and Wales. An existing customer of ours, we relaunched their website with a new design and a great new pub finder.

• 
  
  Yodel Internal Communications use communication to bring staff together to create conversations and shared understanding. As a new business, Yodel required a full branding and online package from scratch.

Having worked on web projects since 1996, we have a lot of experience of making a web project run swiftly and smoothly, whilst avoiding obstacles that cause delays. As an agency we constantly refine and perfect our process, but as our customer there are plenty of things you can do to help ensure the project is completed efficiently.

Any project – be it a house renovation, car purchase, or a bespoke web project – requires research, planning and strategy, all of which contribute to its success. These points should be considered in your planning now, to ensure your project is delivered successfully:

1. A web project requires your time too

Although you have commissioned us to plan, develop and deploy your web project, your input as the client is an integral part of the process. The number one delay in a project arises when client input is not available due to other commitments. As a B2B company we understand your company requires large amounts of your time, but we do advise you to consider planning a project aside of things that you know will demand your time – staff holidays, shows and events, seasonal increases in trade, other business projects, etc.

Some project tasks can be delegated to other members of your team, but you should consider how these items will fit into your team’s working week:

• The initial planning of your website, its function and its content
• The creation and supply of content for each page
• Your feedback and sign-off during the design stages
• Your final feedback and sign-off of the web project, once it is built
• An ecommerce site will require product images, descriptions and prices to be prepared and inputted. We can help you with this, but it can require a surprisingly large amount of your time.
• A CMS may require you to create pages and enter content (depending on the package purchased)

2. Establish your online goals

To ensure that your web site works for your business, clear goals and objectives should be set out – what do you want your website to accomplish? Are you simply establishing an online presence and promoting awareness of your company or brand, driving online sales, generating offline sales or leads, improving business process & efficiency or something else entirely? A clear overview of these factors in advance, as well as ascertaining your target market, will make it far easier to actuate your goals further down the line giving us a point of reference throughout the design and build process.

3. Plan your content structure now

Although we offer our advice and experience when planning and developing your content structure (the sections and pages), it is something you should think about from the outset. A clear and well thought out vision of your desired end result will form a basis for us to refine, polish and perfect with you.

If you’re not sure how to get started, we can help you with information architecture – allowing you to formulate an easily navigable and usable content hierarchy, thus ensuring you get the most from your investment. Remember, your website’s visual interface exists to generate interest in and guide users through your content, so the more you know about this in advance the better.

4. Provide content as soon as possible

Put some time in your diary now for content creation. The second biggest delay in web projects is the lack of content to go into pages. Depending upon the size of your project, the creation of high quality content could require many days of your time, so it is important to plan ahead for this. Collecting product information from suppliers, taking photographs, writing about your company and services often takes longer than you might think. You may wish to delegate some of these tasks, or talk to us about how we can help you.

Ideally, the latest your content should be supplied to us would be at design sign-off; typically 3-6 weeks after your deposit has been received. However, it is highly recommended that you have your website content available when the design team begin creating visuals ensuring the end result is more appropriate when we can see the content that is being presented.

Queue Jumper: The advance supply of content is so critical to a project, that we operate a queue jumper scheme; if your content can be supplied within two weeks of project commencement (when your deposit payment has been received) we will jump your project to the front of the queue, and begin work right away!

5. Make arrangements with third parties immediately

Delays on a project caused by third parties may be out of both our control, but by starting discussions as soon as possible these stages can be completed well before the deadline. There are typically two processes you can start now, in preparation for your web project:

Arranging your payment provider

The arrangement of a payment provider and online merchant account can often cause delays for your ecommerce project. Negotiations with your bank, the signing and returning of paperwork, etc. can all take time. Read more about taking payments online here, and then take steps to set up a payment provider today.

Transfer of your domain name and hosting

The transfer of an existing domain name, along with your email and website hosting typically takes between one day and one week. To avoid delays, the transfer arrangements can be made well in advance of your new website being ready, so that the final ‘go live’ process takes just minutes and significantly reduces the risk of a loss of service. Talk to us today about how to make these arrangements.

Now that you’ve read this article, why not take a look at these links too?

1. Read about how we go about building your website
2. Complete a website design questionnaire

The card payment industry has changed massively in recent years, with greater focus on online security and fraud prevention through the introduction of CV2 numbers, 3D-secure authentication and additional layers of fraud checking. These advances have meant that other payment processing options (e.g. PayPal, Sage Pay..) have become far 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 allow payments to be taken online:

1. Sage Pay

   Sage Pay (a subsidiary of Sage) provides secure online credit and debit card payment solutions for thousands of online and mail order businesses across the UK. When Sage Pay has been implemented on a website, the merchant no longer has to manually process credit card details and the secure disposal & storage of credit card details is no longer a worry.

   With Sage Pay, taking payments is as simple as it can be. A customer can get instant feedback as to whether their payment has been successful, whilst the merchant knows straight away that the payment has been taken, the fraud checking been passed and shipping address confirmed. Sage Pay is also integrated with PayPal Express Checkout (a 3-click checkout for your customers) giving you the opportunity to add a PayPal option to your payment pages.

   Sage Pay Go (Small Business Service) is available from £20/month*, with no additional costs for up to 1,000 transactions per quarter.

   More details can be found at sagepay.com and you can sign up to use Sage Pay at yoursagepay.co.uk

2. PayPal – Website Payments Standard

   Established as the number 1 payment network for auction websites, PayPal is now rapidly growing in use amongst e-commerce businesses. PayPal Website Payments Standard is simple to set up and does not require an internet merchant account. PayPal allows you to accept credit and debit cards, bank transfer and PayPal balance payments in minutes.  Your customers do not need to have a PayPal account to pay you.

   Charges for using PayPal Website Payments Standard are made on a per-transaction basis and there are no monthly or annual fees. Fees range from 1.4% – 3.4% + £0.20*, more details can be found at:
   www.paypal.com

3. PayPal – Website Payments Pro

   Website Payments Pro offers all the benefits of a merchant account and gateway with PayPal. You can accept credit and debit cards, bank transfer and PayPal balance payments via Express Checkout (a 3-click checkout for your customers), via an unbranded direct credit/debit card checkout, or via phone/fax and mail. Your customers do not need to have a PayPal account to pay you.

   Charges for using PayPal Website Payments Pro can be made on a per-transaction basis ranging from 1.4% – 3.4% + £0.20*. Alternatively, an unlimited amount of transaction can be made for a set fee of £20/month. More details can be found at: www.paypal.com

* Prices correct at time of publication (5/2011)

If you run a website with updatable content areas, such as an e-commerce platform or content management system, the chances are you’ve been called upon to edit or enhance your own images in order to make them ‘web friendly’. Although Adobe Photoshop has long been the industry standard for image manipulation among professionals, its costly nature and feature-laden interface are generally a turn-off for casual users – however, there are a plethora of free and useful alternatives available for download, a selection of which are outlined in this article.

These free image editors can be divided into two categories:

• Downloadable Image Editing Software
• Web-Based Image Editors

Downloadable Image Editing Software

A great deal of image editing software is available on the Internet for free download, with varying levels of functionality – and which you choose will depend largely on your requirements. The programs are all one-time downloads, with an advantage over web based image editors in that they do not rely on an Internet connection for use, and won’t be adversely affected by loading times and similar.

The GIMP

Quite possibly one of the most used and well known ‘free’ image editing software packages, GIMP is short for GNU Image Manipulation Program. First developed in 1995, this open source editing software is available in many guises and is compatible with Apple, Linux and Windows operating systems. The GIMP boasts a wide range of features that enable images to edited or enhanced and can even be set out to mimic the layout of Photoshop. Since The GIMP is open source there are many tutorials to help guide users through the editing process.

Paint.NET

Originally, Paint.NET was developed to be a free alternative to the Windows bundled paint software but over time has grown to be a simple to use but effective image editing tool.  Although only compatible with Microsoft operating systems, this software offers much of the functionality that its paid alternatives. Again, there are many online tutorials to help guide users through image editing.

Picasa 3

As you’d expect from a Google product, Picasa is a lightweight program allowing locating, editing and sharing of images via a single interface. Picasa will automatically search your computer for images, and allows them to be organised with ease. Also, being a Google product, it allows images to be geo tagged with Google maps and ‘one click’ publishing to online photo albums. Picasa also acts as an image viewer too, enabling the user to create slideshows, etc.

Web Based Image Editors

As the name suggests, online photo editors are accessed directly through an Internet browser from any location, and consequently require no software download or installation.  They allow users to upload images, to which adjustments and changes can be made using a variety of built-in tools and filters, and the resulting images subsequently saved to your local machine.

Pixlr

Pixlr has been designed with both professional and non-professional users in mind. Created using flash, this program allows users that only have simple editing needs such as editing web images to be posted on social networks, or for personal use. However, it can also be used by professionals who need to edit images for websites, etc. Since Pixlr is flash based, the speed of your computer will determine how fast this program will run. Also, Pixlr is in constant development therefore not all editing features may be available.

Sumo Paint

Sumo Paint is another flash based, cloud computing image editor and is compatible with Apple, Linux and Windows operating systems. A relative newcomer to the image editing market, this program offers all the usual editing or enhancement options that the other major applications do. Sumo Paint also allows users to sign up for a free account, giving users some storage space and the ability to save image layers, etc.

Image Editor

Image Editor does not boast as many features as the other image editing programs but is quite easy and intuative to use. This program could be used for simple image editing and has some predefined filters to allow users to apply different styles to text. As with the other online programes, Image Editor is flash based and therefore will perform better on faster machines.

All of these image editing programs will allow you to crop and manipulate images as well as provide some interesting features to enhance the apperance of the final images. Each program will have its own quirks and may perform better at handling specific tasks than others. Finding out which one suits your needs best is trial and error but all of the above will give you the freedom to take an existing image and make it shine.

Freeride Snowboards Freeride Snowboards stock an extensive range of boards, boots, bindings and clothing from all of the top brands in the snowboarding industry. All product information is fully synchronized with an in-store EPOS till system.

Solway Dory sailing canoes provide exhilarating sailing, yet are still easy to paddle when the wind drops. We created this beautiful brochure website where you can learn about the canoes available.

• 
  
  Pooley Bridge Inn is a traditional family run inn at Ullswater, featuring open fires, original timber ceilings and fine selection of real ales, wines and spirits.
• 
  
  Hayes First Aid Training provide bespoke industry and environment-specific first aid courses. We created this attractive, yet simple 2 page website to showcase the courses available.
• 
  
  Bracken Crag offers holiday accommodation in the heart of Bowness-on-Windermere. A tour of the private apartment is shown online on this gallery website.
• 
  
  Bike-Eye is a unique bicycle mirror enabling you to be more aware of traffic approaching from the rear. The ecommerce website we provide allows the Bike-Eye to be purchased all around the globe.
• 
  
  Active Outdoor offer Outdoor Clothing and Camping Equipment to buy online, with product details and stock levels synchronized daily with their in-store EPOS till system.
• 
  
  Cushions Online provide first quality end-of-line soft furnishings, manufactured from a selection imported fabrics, faux fur and faux suede materials.
• 
  
  Kings Mill Antiques is an interesting day out in Lancashire, where you will find an extensive range of antique, vintage and contemporary design pieces to complement any home.
• 
  
  Hest Bank Physiotherapy Lancaster are a team of experienced Chartered Physiotherapists who specialise in the assessment, treatment and prevention of a wide range of musculoskeletal problems.

1. Senior creative web designer
2. Experienced PHP developer & Linux sysadmin
3. UPDATE: We also require a ASP.NET & C# Developer

For more information, please see our recruitment page.

Please apply directly to Chris or Rob using the details given, no agencies please.

Despite campaigns recently to increase awareness about the need for secure passwords in the UK, many web users leave use themselves open to hackers by choosing easy to guess and insecure passwords. A survey by Visa Europe found that “over three-quarters choose passwords relating to friends, family and memorable dates” whilst following a recent phishing attack on the website MySpace it was found that “the five most common passwords are: password1, abc123, myspace1, password and blink182 (a band).”

A recent UK Government report carried out as part of the Get Safe Online campaign found the following information:

• 66% of users use the same password for more than one website
• 46% of users use the same 2 to 3 passwords for every website they access
• 45% of users use passwords made up only of dictionary words or names (the most easily cracked)

The lack of proper password security is one of the factors contributing to the ongoing problem of online fraud in the UK. The UK Cybercrime report identified the following worrying statistics:

• It is estimated that there were 84,700 cases of online identity fraud during 2007. It remains the case that around 40% of all identity frauds are facilitated online.
• It is estimated that there were 255,800 cases on online financial fraud in 2007 (up 24% from 2006).
• Around 830,000 businesses in the UK suffered an online/computer related security incident in 2007/08.

Do’s and don’ts

So how can you help keep your identity online more secure? These 5 points provided a guide to the do’s and don’ts for using passwords online

1. Don’t use the same password for many websites

Using the same password for many, or worse all websites, is like putting all of your eggs in one basket; should one website be compromised, all other accounts are open too. Quite often, if one password becomes available to a hacker, they will try this password on many other major websites – eBay, PayPal, your online banking etc. A hacker will use automated tools to do this, so can try many websites very quickly.

Using a password management tool allows you to store and access many passwords very easily.

2. Do use strong, long, unique passwords

A password that includes a dictionary word or a name can be broken very easily. Password lists are circulated around the internet and are freely available; these not only include names and whole dictionaries, but also common passwords revealed when websites are broken into (such as the MySpace example mentioned earlier in this article).

Using automated tools, short passwords are easily broken too. The website “lockdown” publishes the following examples*:

• 5 character password – 11.8 Million combinations - Instantly broken
• 6 character password – 308.9 Million combinations – 3 seconds to break
• 7 character password – 8 Billion combinations – 1.25 mins to break
• 8 character password – 200 Billion combinations – 35 mins to break
• 9 character password – 5.4 Trillion combinations – 15 hours to break

*Passwords use alphabetical characters, in a single case. Automated software runs on a modern desktop machine.

It is important that your password is as unique as possible. Strong, memorable passwords can be created in many ways; one example is to use a mnemonic. “Richard of York gave battle in vain” could be used to remember the password “RoYgbiv”. To make it more secure you should add numbers and upper/lowercase characters too, maybe replacing letters with numbers, e.g. swapping “g” for “9″ or an “i” for “1″. You could make the phrase personal to help remember; “I love my fat cat Tibbles, she loves her food too” – “1lmfcTslhf2″.

3. Don’t rely on your browser to store passwords

Modern browsers include password storing features for your convenience. Making use of these features is a bad idea for a number of reasons:

1. Almost all browsers have known security flaws which leave your passwords open to hackers and phishing attacks, even recent versions.
2. More often than not, the password managers inside the browsers do not require a master password themselves, so are open to anyone who has access to your computer.
3. There is no easy backup facility, so you can lose passwords if you change computer or have a hardware failure.

4. Do use a password management tool

A password management tool provides many helpful functions to help your security online; storing log in details for different websites, automating the log-in process, creating secure passwords and more. These details are stored in one very secure encrypted file, meaning you will only need to remember one password from now on. Make it a good password however; long, with both letters and numbers (see point 2) and always make a backup of the encrypted file and keep it safe.

KeePass is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. There are versions for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and mobile devices. For a portable solution you can take anywhere, you can even run it on a USB stick!

Password management tools are also built into some security packages, like Norton 360 from Symantec, and often into laptops too.

5. Do change your passwords

A good security policy is to change passwords regularly; in fact in high-security applications (such as the Government) passwords are only allowed to be used once before a new one is issued. Although this is a little excessive for most businesses, changing your password maybe every few months might be a good idea. Using a password management package also means that you’ll never have to rely on remembering these either.

If any of your passwords fail on the points above, change them now.

If you forget your BF Internet passwords

If you forget your password for accessing your email, website statistics or online shop, you will need to contact us by email or phone.

For security reasons we can only issue new passwords (rather than tell you what they were), and will require proof of ID, which we will discuss at the time.

Google was just an idea in 1996 – a research project by Larry Page – and Yahoo! was king of the search engines. When you searched for a site on Yahoo!, you searched a directory of websites that was built by real humans; Yahoo! employees would painstakingly review submissions and rank them manually.

1996 is also when BF Internet was born – originally as Big Fish internet. A bit like looking fondly through old computer games of the 80’s, we take a look through the websites of 1996 and marvel at how far we’ve all come:

To coincide with the new release of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) this month, this article provides an overview as to what a browser is, and why you should upgrade to the latest version.

The Browser

A browser is a piece of software designed to view information on the internet, in the same way that Microsoft Outlook is designed to receive emails and Microsoft Word is designed to help create documents.

Statistics show that at the moment Internet Explorer 6 (released in 2002 and no longer supported by Microsoft) and is still used by 34% of people accessing the Internet (Feb 09, www.thecounter.com).

This is mainly because Microsoft includes Internet Explorer as the default browser in Windows XP and Vista.

How to find out which browser you are running

If you aren’t sure which browser you are currently using, you can click this link to find out which browser you are running

Reasons to upgrade your browser

Now that you know which browser you are running you might be thinking why should I change, or why do I need to update my browser? The simple answer is that you should always update on a regular basis. Some of the reasons are described below:

1. New versions are more secure

   As new threats and new ways to harm your computer via the browser become known, the developers of the browsers have to fix these to keep your computer secure. The only way they can do this is to include these via an update. If you do not update, you do not get a more secure browser leaving you open to attack.

2. New versions are faster

   With the new browser developers battling it out to get the upper hand and get you to use their product one area that has improved leaps and bounds, is the speed that they can process the page (loading the page due to broadband, but how the browser loads the page).

   We saw the most significant difference in page load times with the English-language Wikipedia home page and the MySpace home page. Chrome 2 Beta completed the job of loading Wikipedia in a mere 1.12 seconds, easily outpacing the competition. Internet Explorer 8 chugged to a second-place finish, loading the page in 2.24 seconds on average. Firefox 3.0.7 and Safari 4 Beta lagged behind, however, with average load times of 3.31 seconds and 3.38 seconds, respectively.

   As taken from PC World

3. Improved browsing experience

   As with the speed issues, browsers are competing with new styling features for webpages that allow designers (such as ourselves) to add elements that were not possible in older versions. An example of this is below, where on a modern browsers the webpage elements would have rounded corners, whereas on an older version such as IE6, they are square.

   

   Click to enlarge - Example of rounded corners and some browser differences. IE6 vs FF3.0.7

   Apple has really pushed the boat out with Safari 4 and has included no less than 150 new features such as: Full page-zoom, Animations, font embedding and more. It is expected to be released mid 2009.

4. Not all browsers render the page to look the same

   As all browsers handle the web page coding slightly differently, on some rare occasions the web page might look considerably different and may even appear to be broken. It is another good reason to update your browser to the latest version to get a full, rich web experience, shown in the way intended by the designer.

   In some cases, even newer browsers such as IE8 can render a page to look slightly different. Microsoft have included a button that will pull back the browser to handle as the version before. This is to safeguard in case the website appears broken, a user would hit this button.

   

   Click to enlarge

What options of browsers are there? What do they offer?

Ok so you have decided that you want to update your browser and want to know what options there are and what they offer? Here is a list of the options;

• Internet Explorer 8.

  Internet Explorer 8 is Microsoft’s new browser that has just been released, it has some revolutionary features such as Ebay visual search, Delicious Bookmarks, Suggested Sites, a new security mode called ‘InPrivate’ and ‘Accelerators’, which are a form of selection-based search. View a full feature list here

  Download Internet Explorer 8

• Firefox

  Firefox has grown in popularity in the last couple of years, due to its security, speed, advanced design features and popularity of add-ons that you can install to customise your browser.
  Firefox also boasts a strong feature set including; Smart location Bar, One-Click Bookmarking, Password manager and lots more. View a full feature list here.

  Download Mozilla Firefox

• Google Chrome

  Google Chrome is the youngest browser of the bunch, but it has hit the blocks running with an impressive feature set that includes; Application shortcuts, dynamic tabs, crash control, instant bookmarking and a lot more. View a full feature list here

  Download Google Chrome

• Safari

  Safari has been around for many years, initially on the Mac since 2003, then more recently available the Iphone, Ipod Touch and Windows.

  The soon to be released Safari 4 is leading the field with new and inventive features, such as a “Top Sites” tool to display the user’s most visited sites in a 3D world and Cover Flow, a feature of Mac OS X. For the Windows version, Safari adopted a native Windows theme, rather than the previous Mac OS look employed. Safari 4 is expected to be out in the middle of 2009, but the feature list is available here

  Download Safari 3

• Opera

  The Opera Software company claims that Opera is “the fastest browser on Earth.” Opera too has the best support for some advanced design features and also implements built-in tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, fraud protection, a download manager and BitTorrent client, a search bar, and a web feed aggregator. Opera comes with an e-mail client called Opera Mail and an IRC chat client built in, be sure to check it out
  Download Opera

The future for browsers

The browser developers are busy constantly working on new versions of the browsers and releasing them in to public.
Features you can expect to see and use;

• Improved accessibility
• Extended animation support by CSS
• Even more security features
• Text shadows
• Audio and full video support
• Even more plug-ins
• and more…

Conclusion

There has never been a better time to swap your browser to the latest version. They are more secure, faster and in some cases you get a better browsing experience. With new versions coming out every couple of months we are in for a good ride.

Please note BF Internet holds no responsibility for software installed on your machine and or any data lost due to the process.

Wouldn’t you like to know in more detail how people found your web site, on what pages they entered and exited, and how they moved around when they were there? Wouldn’t it be great to follow trends, compare this week to last, and automatically generate reports on how your website is performing?

One of the clearest ways to analyse website traffic and visitor behaviour is by using Google Analytics. (Click here for a video walkthough). Google Analytics can be set up on any website by inserting the special tracking code into every web page and template. We can do this for you for a one-off charge of £50 + VAT, after which there are no ongoing costs for using the service, contact us now to arrange set up.