The Library
of website information
A – D
Copyright
Copyright ownership
This information is based on U.S. copyright laws as provided on www.copyright.gov.
Website ownership is something to take seriously. If you have an unscrupulous designer, they may refuse to relinquish control of your site when asked (for instance, if you decide you want to hire a new designer or move your website to a different host). If it’s not spelled out in your contract, they may indeed have the right to retain legal ownership of at least some parts of the site.
At 147, our contracts include a clause that transfers ownership to the client upon payment and project completion. For good. And if you ever part ways with us, you’ll take that ownership with you.
A website has a lot of components and ownership for each can be different:
- The domain name: It’s not possible to own your site name, but you do own the exclusive rights to it. That’s what you get as part of your domain registration.
- The computer code used on your site: Ownership of code depends on the kind of code. Most websites use similar scripts and open source code, so you don’t own that code, but you should retain control over your website’s specific CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. At the minimum, however, you should be given exclusive rights to your custom programming and any files associated with your code.
- The design, images and content of your website: Original work is automatically copyrighted from the moment of creation. Generally, the creator owns the rights to the work and retains those rights, unless a contract states otherwise.
If you do have ownership you can, if you wish, register the copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office. This can be done online or by mail, and requires a fee payment ($45 – $125 in 2020). However, the copyright registration is only for the website as it was when submitted for registration. When you update your site, the new content will not be copyright registered unless you re-register it.
Domain Name
A domain name is a website’s address on the internet (ours is 147webdev.com/). The “.com” part is the domain name extension. There are many extensions available, including .net, .org, .edu, and .gov as well as more than 300 country codes (like .ca, .mx, .uk) but .com is recommended for commercial businesses.
Your site name should be memorable and appropriate, and not too long. Your first choice for a domain name may be unavailable or too expensive, so you may need to use some creative thinking to come up with a suitable one.
Once purchased and registered, you own the exclusive rights to it (see Copyright section), but only for the period you’ve paid for (usually 1-3 years). You must renew your registration for it to remain active.
Prices for domain name registration start at around $13 a year. You can search for a name here.
We’re always happy to help our clients find, choose and purchase a domain name at no extra charge.
E – I
Hosting
You need a hosting service to get your site on the World Wide Web. A web host will supply space on a server to store your site’s content and provide Internet connectivity. A professional website needs a reliable, secure, and fast host. The cost of hosting can vary widely (from a few dollars to several hundred dollars a month) but as with so many other expenses, you get what you pay for.
At 147, we use and recommend only the most secure and reliable hosting. With ultra-fast, cloud-based networks and datacenters around the world, our hosting partners utilize Content Delivery Networks to intelligently route content and protect data with multi-layered security. They guarantee network uptimes of 99.9% and single-site plans start at less than $20 a month.
J – M
Maintenance
Once your site is up and running, it needs to be kept secure and functional. It should be monitored for malicious attacks and malware, and security often needs updating as the internet evolves and hackers grow more savvy. Software should be kept current and backups maintained for emergencies.
At 147, our care packages start at less than $100 a month and include site monitoring, security scans and updates, cloud-based backups, software updates, and customer support.
We offer a range of maintenance solutions that can be customized to fit your needs and budget. Plans may include monitoring your site’s speed and performance, and regular reports on site performance, malicious attempts, malware scans, subscriber numbers and trends, and site traffic.
If you’d like regular updates or changes to the content on your site, we’ll be happy to build a custom care plan to include that, too. You may want to send a monthly newsletter, or post updated blogs or articles. Perhaps you’re running a sale or your opening hours have changed. Remember, content updates help boost SEO.
We’ll always work with you to find the maintenance solution you need at a price that fits your budget.
Mobile-friendly Websites
Please see Responsiveness
N – R
Privacy Policy
The collection and use of your personal data, and the ways it’s saved and secured, can pose serious risks to your privacy and to your finances. And as more and more activities move online, the dangers are likely to grow. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to protect your online privacy.
Responsiveness
A responsive site will look good on every device it’s viewed on: telephone, tablet, laptop or desktop. Sounds simple, right? But there are a LOT of screen sizes in the world—from smartwatches to wall-size LED displays, and countless different cell phone sizes in between…and then there’s the aspect ratio of each device, which basically is a measure of the screen shape.
Mobile phone viewing of websites has now overtaken desktop viewing, but while people shop on their cellphones, they tend to buy on their laptops, especially for big-ticket items. So it really is vital that sites look good on screens of all types. Not only that, but Google now counts responsiveness as a ranking factor in mobile search result listings. This means that if your site isn’t responsive, it may not even appear in a potential customer’s search results.
When we design a website at 147, we start with a responsive layout framework, and we use different text and media sizes for different screen sizes. When appropriate, we use an adaptive approach to the design and customize the site content to various device categories. We test every site on each of the most popular phones and tablets (in 2020: Amazon Kindle Fire, Apple iPad Pro, Nexus 9, Samsung Galaxy S5/S6/S7, iPhone 6/6S/7/8, iPhone 6 Plus/7 Plus/8 Plus, Google Pixel, Nexus 5/6, iPod Touch) to make sure it looks great and functions smoothly.
You can learn more about responsiveness here.
S – Z
Security
It all starts with that little padlock 🔒 next to the website name in your browser. That tells you that the server connection is trusted, encrypted and authenticated, and that the webpage has an SSL certificate to prove it’s valid and secure.
But there’s a lot more to good security than just that. Guarding against hackers is essential to protect your customers, business reputation and revenue. Once a site is compromised, hackers use it to execute malicious activities. When Google finds out about your hacked site, they can blacklist it and your website may be suspended.
Our standard maintenance package includes database backups and security logs, as well as regular and emergency system updates. Our systems monitor for malware, brute force attacks, unauthorized file changes, DDos attacks, spammers and more.
Malware or “malicious software,” is computer code that seeks to steal, encrypt, or delete your data, alter or hijack computer functions, or spy on your computer activity. We use a continually updated early warning system to scan for malware and file changes every day, 365 days a year.
A brute force attack exploits the simplest method of gaining access to a site: trying to guess user names and passwords, over and over again, often using automated tools. We use state of the art security software to provide brute force protection by limiting login attempts, banning a user after a certain number of bad logins. Our network brute force protection takes it a step further by banning users who have tried to break into other websites.
Spam is unwanted email that’s not requested by the recipient. Our websites have easy-to-read clickable email addresses, but behind the scenes these addresses are encrypted to provide protection from spam-bots, email harvesters and other robots. We also protect phone numbers, “mail to” links, plain emails, email input fields, RSS feeds and much more.
A DDos attack is one of the most powerful weapons on the internet, and can make a website or computer unavailable by crashing it with too much traffic. We utilize a hardware firewall to filter flooding traffic and a local software firewall to notify our developers of any unusual traffic spikes. If an attack is suspected, we can mitigate it immediately by activating the “under attack” system. With this option enabled, every visitor to the site will see a processing page for several seconds, while the system verifies and confirms that the hit is coming from a legitimate visitor and not from a bot.
Can we completely stop all attacks on your website? No. Our security is robust, up to date and designed to help improve the security of your site from many common attack methods, but it’s impossible to prevent every possible attack. Nothing replaces good practice and diligence. We do our utmost to apply both.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about where your site appears in a Google (or other) search. The better your SEO, the closer to the top your site appears. Step one of good SEO starts with the design of your website. It needs engaging, entertaining content for your users and appealing, informative headlines for Google to index.
Step two of good SEO is a well-built site, registered & verified with Google Webmasters. It needs logical site hierarchy and navigation, and good title tags, meta tags and heading tags. Data must be structured correctly with the right markup, and links need good anchor text. Images need to be in the right format with HTML image elements and alt text for screenreaders. And it must be mobile-friendly, because responsive sites rank higher in SEO. Speed raises the score, too.
At 147 we focus on those first two steps–design and building–so your website will have solid SEO built right into it. And then you have the power to improve your ranking even more: writing a blog for your site, regularly coming up with new content, posting video bulletins, and building your social media network will all help boost your ranking. If SEO is vital to your business, you may even decide to hire an SEO specialist.
You can learn more about SEO here.
Sitemap
Search engines like Google use a sitemap to find, read and index a website’s URLs (web addresses). A correctly structured sitemap will help search engines crawl the site more efficiently and can help with SEO.
If you are a search engine, robot, or advanced lifeform, please enjoy our sitemap.
Speed
As technology gets more sophisticated, attention spans get shorter, and 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your website is slow, you’ll lose traffic, which in turn means potential revenue loss. Not only that, but your site speed impacts your Google ranking, too (see SEO).
There are many, many things that affect website load time, and a fast site needs to be built correctly and supported correctly.
At 147, our sites are programmed with speed-optimizing code using best practices like grouping files to reduce redirects, “minifying” code to reduce file sizes, and limiting the number of different web fonts used.
We configure our sites to work correctly via HTTPS on a secure connection benefitting from the innovative and faster HTTP2 protocol, not only increasing site speed but boosting security.
Because images add so much weight to a website, image optimization is vital to improving loading speed. We use carefully selected optimization techniques to resize and compress all images, without diminishing their quality.
Apart from monitoring, updating and maintaining the optimizations built into the website, a good website host and a robust content delivery network (CDN) are vital for both speed and, again, security.
At 147, we use SiteGround hosting, trusted by the owners of 2,000,000 domains. This platform is built on Google Cloud, utilizing its ultra-fast network and SSD persistent storage. One of the world’s best hosting platforms, SiteGround guarantees network uptime of 99.9%. They have green-friendly data centers on four continents and use multi-layered security to protect your data.
We also use SiteGround’s CDN for site delivery. The Internet does its best to deliver your website content, but even the ‘information superhighway’ has traffic congestion. This congestion leads to slow load times and a poor user-experience. SiteGround’s CDN intelligently routes content along the fastest paths and encrypts the traffic end-to-end across the network, making the website faster and more secure.
We strongly encourage our clients to partner with SiteGround for their hosting and CDN needs, but will work with any reputable host you specifically require.
You can learn more about speed optimization here.
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