calder.io

Having an online presence matters!

It doesn't matter what you do, whether you fix cars, cut hair or sell widgets, your business needs an online presence. These days more and more people are researching purchases online before buying, even when they intend to buy from a brick & mortar business, they still research online first. They want to know what products or services you offer, where you're located, your hours, your phone number and email address. Online presence is essential in this connected world in order to maximize your potential to reach customers. Not having an online presence is limiting that potential.

As the web grows the options for realizing this online presence grow too. Social media has exploded in the past half a decade to the point where major corporations have customer support representatives on Twitter, watching for comments and complaints and dealing directly with customers to resolve issues. Websites, blogs, Facebook pages and groups, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest profiles, there are a myriad of options available and choosing the right one(s) is not always obvious.

Your business is fixing cars, cutting hair, or selling those important widgets. My business is helping you decide whether you should have your own website or perhaps a blog. Do you need Facebook or Instagram? What is Pinterest? Helping you decide which route is best for your business and your budget is what we are all about.

We do a one on one consultation with you to determine the best route for you to create a great online presence that fits your business and your budget. Your budget isn't just how much you can afford to spend. It's also how much you spend to get the maximum return on investment. It doesn't make a lot of sense for a hair dresser working out of their home to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a big fancy CMS website, and we'd never suggest they do that. Helping you understand the options, and their value is important to us.

Helping you make it all work!

Even if you're tech savvy, your business likely isn't creating web sites and dealing with your online presence. So where do you turn for help with all this stuff? How do you know you're making the right choice and not an expensive mistake?

Even if you know exactly which pieces of the puzzle you need, who do you hire to make it all happen and who takes care of it all after it's built? The choices become more daunting at this point. Searching Google is an option, one that will probably add to your confusion rather than alleviate it. There are so many options, companies that build websites for as little as $199, large agencies that charge tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a site there are even companies that tell you that you can build your own site and host it for a few dollars a month.

It's hard not to fill the “Development” section with technical jargon so this part will be short. We aren't a WordPress shop, a Drupal shop, PHP, Ruby or Javascript. We're technology agnostic. What that means is we do web development based on your needs and not based on our preferences. We'll listen to your requirements and work with you to choose the platform that makes the most sense for your needs.

The web is a scary place!

The statistics on cyber attacks are absolutely staggering. This graphic by Sucuri shows WordPress brute force attacks. Hovering over the points will show you the number of attempts to illegally access a WordPress site per day. This map by Norse shows real time cyber attacks world wide.

You are a target!

One misconception many people have is “I am not a target. Who would anyone want to hack a bakery website?” Trust me you are a target, it doesn't matter if you have a major e-commerce website or a simple brochure site to sell your widgets. Cyber attacks are perpetrated by what are called botnets. Botnets are a group of websites that have been compromised and have software loaded on them that allows attackers to use them to work together to attack larger sites. Your individual data may not be a target, the processing power of your website most certainly is!

What can you do?

Software, including open source web platforms like WordPress, Drupal and many others, is very complex. As such there are vulnerabilites. The creators of this software work very hard to make sure their product is safe and secure, but these vulnerabilities exist. Over time more and more vulnerabilties are released to the public, and the companies release updates to fix them. So the most important thing you can do is make sure your site and all its plugins are up to date with the latest versions.

Clicking that update button is better than nothing but...

The problem with website platforms is they are usually built with a number of plugins to add functionality. WordPress for example has thousands of plugins to let it do different tasks. There are plugins to send emails, post Twitter feeds, create forms and literally thousands of other tasks. Each of these plugins has to work together with both the core of WordPress and every other plugin on the site, which adds to the complexity. What it also means is one bad update from a single plugin can bring your website crashing down.

A better way to update!

We offer support packages to help you keep your site up to date and safe, both for you and everyone else on the web! If you have a website running on an open source platform such as WordPress or Drupal you can go to the admin panel and click update yourself on each thing that requires updating. It's a nice simple process and the majority of the time works just fine. However, as mentioned earlier, with each click you're spinning the roulette wheel with your website. Is this the click that makes the whole thing crash? The one thing all these platforms have in common is the inability to roll back a change. Meaning you can update a plugin or the core with a simple click of a button, but if things break there is no button to fix it.

At calder.io we do things a little differently. When we update your website we actually update a local development version of your site and test it thoroughly before deploying the updates to your live website. This ensures that your live website will never be taken down by a bad or incompatible plugin or core update. All updates are tested in a completely secure environment with no affect on your live website and no updates are deployed until complete security and compatibility are verified.