Netconcepts

If Website Is Broke, Don’t Go Broke Fixing It

Jeff Muendel — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:54:28 +0000

Traffic down? Conversions starting to wane? It could be any number of SEO issues. Finding free online tools to hone search optimization for an ecommerce site can be tough. There are a lot of them out there, often promotional in nature, and they offer varying degrees of features and reliability. Some spit out data that is simply erroneous and applying this sort of information to website design can be useless at best and deadly, in Internet terms, of course, at worst.

In this article originally published on Practical eCommerce Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, writes about Aaron Wall’s Website Health Check tool, a beneficial “free” SEO tool that offers easy-to-read, uncomplicated reports on a number of issues that includes missing title tags and meta descriptions to checking for duplicate content and verifying your error pages are returning the correct code.

Jeff also recommends some of Stephan Spencer’s previous articles for more SEO tool information and suggestions “on developing an SEO toolkit, Google Webmaster Tools, and SEO: Tools For Link Building.”

Information As Power

Stephan Spencer — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 11:00:00 +0000

Most companies don’t even realize their competitors are “eating their lunch” online - ranking higher in the search engines, getting more traffic, converting more visitors into buyers and enjoying better returns on their website investment. They simply don’t know how well their website is performing. And they are missing out on valuable e-business opportunities.

What do you need to know? For starters: how well your site is performing. And how it stacks up against competitors.

How Effective is Your Site?

Measuring the effectiveness of your site’s design, content and functionality is a business imperative. The following metrics will give you information critical for maximizing your ROI:

Abandonment. What percentage of visitors gets no further than your home page? What percentage abandons shopping carts? What is the ratio of abandoned carts to completed purchases per day? How many items are in an abandoned cart? In a purchased cart? What items do people abandon?
Conversion. What percentage of visitors become customers or, at least, take some action? What is the cost per conversion?
Retention. How many customers make repeat purchases? Retained customers are cheaper than new ones.
Lifetime Value (LTV). What’s the value of a given customer relationship over his lifetime? Improve a customer’s LTV by up-selling, cross-selling, increasing buying frequency and reducing the cost of sales and support.
Referral Source. Determine which websites (search engines, industry portals, partners and affiliates), email campaigns and online promotions deliver the most sales, inquiries and customers.
Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value (RFM). How recently did a given customer visit your site and/or make a purchase? How often do they visit or purchase? How much do they spend? Take good care of customers that rate high in all three areas.

Other web metrics include stickiness, slipperiness, attrition, churn, etc. Two great sources for more on web metrics include Jim Sterne’s book, Web Metrics, and his “E-Metrics” white paper, available from www.emetrics.org/articles/whitepaper.html.

Competitive Intelligence is Available Online

How much traffic are your competitors getting? Find out with the Alexa.com site, which provides traffic data, historical graphs showing traffic trends, and even what other sites your competitors’ users visit. (You can also track site competitor site changes with Alexa’s Wayback Machine (www.archive.org), which shows changes to web pages since 1996.)

How many pages do you and your competitors have in Google and in Yahoo? Find out by searching both search engines for “site:” followed by your domain name (for example, “site:amazon.com”). Or, even easier, use our free tool at netconcepts.com/urlcheck to check all major search engines.

How “important” is your site in the eyes of Google and Yahoo? An important site enjoys better rankings. Find out by installing:

The Google Toolbar ( http://toolbar.google.com) to check any web page’s PageRank score, a numerical representation Google’s importance scoring algorithm.
The Yahoo Companion Toolbar ( http://companion.yahoo.com) to check your Webrank score - Yahoo’s equivalent to PageRank.

Who links to you? Find out by searching Google for “link:” followed by your web address (e.g. “link:www.amazon.com”) and Yahoo for “linkdomain:” followed by your web address. Or easier yet, use our free link popularity checking tool at netconcepts.com/linkcheck.

How are your PR campaigns, advertising, email marketing and search engine optimization affecting your market share? Consider signing up with a service like Hitwise for day-by-day monitoring of your online market share.

What’s the word on the e-streets? Search for discussion about you and your competitors on the forums at groups.google.com. Search news sites for articles mentioning competitors and your own company.

What are your competitors offering? Subscribe to your competitors’ email newsletters to stay informed on what offers, contests, sales, products and features they’re launching.

Automated monitoring services can make keeping up with your competitive position easy. GoogleAlert (www.googlealert.com) monitors chosen Google search results and emails you when the results change. ChangeDetect (www.changedetect.com) can “watch” any page on the Web and email you when the page is updated.

Collecting and monitoring site data and your site’s effectiveness in the context of your competition will allow you to identify weaknesses that need to be fixed and competitive challenges that need to be met.

An online wine shop seized the web metrics opportunity. Metrics guided its redesign efforts and allowed it to laser-focus web marketing initiatives. Breaking its visitors into five distinct audience segments revealed that one segment - less than 10% of its total audience - accounted for over 80% of revenue. This knowledge allowed the site to target that sector aggressively. New site visitors from that segment received special treatment in the form of discounts and customized content. Metrics also revealed other opportunities: for instance, cross-selling bakery products and white wine was particularly effective.

Remember, the first step toward maximum return on your website investment is building a clear understanding of your website’s effectiveness.

Stephan Spencer’s Top 10 Tips for E-Commerce Sites

Stephan Spencer — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 22:29:35 +0000

Stephan Spencer’s top 10 tips for e-commerce sites
1. DON’T FORCE YOUR VISITORS TO THINK

Ensure your site has intuitive navigation and usable site architecture, not just an appealing look and feel. Visitors should be able to accurately guess what a button or link does before clicking on it.

The search function (you do of course have one!) should appear in the navigation bar, preferably at the top right, where users expect to see it — and not as a button but as a type-in field, which saves the visitor from having to go to a search page to do their search.

Upon a keyword search, automatically check spelling and, when appropriate, suggest corrections. If their search is too generic, suggest alternatives (for example,”You just searched for ‘cameras.’ If you’d like, you could try a more specific search like: ‘ canon eos cameras” ‘nikon digital cameras,’ … “).

2. LEAVE A TRAIL

Incorporate “breadcrumb navigation” into your online catalogue pages. This will show where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located and it will give the visitor shortcuts to instantly jump higher up the hierarchy (for example, “Online Catalogue > Home Furnishings > Lighting > Table Lamps”). It’s good practice for usability and for search engine optimisation.

3. CUT TO THE CHASE

Make maximum use of screen real estate to minimise scrolling. Put the most important stuff (like your 0800 number) “above the fold.”

Minimise the number of steps required to locate products and make purchases. Amazon.com’s 1-Click ordering is the epitome of efficiency.

4. BE A LIGHTWEIGHT

Optimise images for small file sizes and fast downloads, strip out extraneous HTML and remove unnecessary graphics. Ideally, a page should load in less than 10 seconds.

5. BE OPEN TO ‘OPEN SOURCE’

Don’t waste budget on unnecessarily expensive software licences when an open-source solution exists. Open source offers a highly customisable, stable and low- or no-cost alternative to proprietary software.

6. STUDY YOUR CUSTOMER’S EVERY MOVE

Watch how your customers use your website and learn what frustrates them. Analyse your visitor’s traffic patterns (for example, what are the top exit pages, what are the most popular searches that return results), invite customers to complete a survey after they purchase and have informal brainstorming sessions with your most valuable customers.

7. DELIGHT YOUR CUSTOMERS

Service your customers like your survival depends on it, because it probably does. Reply to email within hours. Keep your commitments to your customers; make “under-promise and over-deliver” your mantra. If your site promises delivery in three days, that doesn’t mean five or 10.

You’ll also need 24-hour server support to effectively manage traffic surges.

8. SING TO THE SEARCH ENGINES

Each product or category page has its own unique “song” and should be made to “sing” for its own set of keywords. Your home page can’t be everything to everybody; it can’t be ranked in the top 10 for every product your online shop carries. The numerous pages that make up your online catalogue can serve as a virtual sales force.

To illustrate, the home page of Netconcept client SmokeCDs.com ranks in the top 10 in Google for “buy CDs” but it’s their category pages that rank well for genres like “drum and bass music,” and product pages that rank well for artists like “Trick Daddy” and albums like “The Matrix Soundtrack.”

However, there’s no point in making your pages sing if they aren’t being picked up by the search engine spiders. Some of America’s largest online cataloguers have problems getting their full catalogues fully indexed by the major search engines, as detailed in our analyst report The State of Search Engine Cataloguing 1.0 (published by Catalog Age).

SmokeCDs.com has tens of thousands of product pages in Google, whereas major US music retailer SamGoody.com only has a few hundred. Check how many pages your site has in the major search engines with the free tool at http://web.archive.org/web/20040708075116/.

The best results are achieved when spider-friendliness and search engine optimisation are built into the site from the ground up rather than added as an afterthought.

9. FLOG YOUR PRODUCTS

Merchandising on the web means making clever use of your virtual shelf space. Choose some products to feature on your home page and rotate through them.

Consider having a “Top 10 List” of products (as in the top 10 products you most want to sell). People are like lemmings when it comes to top 10 lists.

Also offer related product recommendations and user-contributed reviews on each of your product pages. Consider promoting limited-time, limited-use special offer codes as a way to stimulate sales.

10. BE FULLY FUNCTIONAL

For starters, visitors should be able to add items to a “shopping cart.” Furthermore, they should be able to abandon their carts and and return days later and still have the cart intact.

They should also be able to create user accounts for ease of repeat ordering and checking order status.

If it’s a consumer site, they should be able to buy and redeem gift certificates.

Online ordering should of course be secure, with a 128-bit secure server certificate installed.

Finally, hopefully you have an admin interface that allows you to add, remove and update website content yourself.

Also, regarding the up-and-coming trend for e-commerce sites to offer online forums and the question of how they can add to the site’s value proposition and also serve as search engine fodder, here’s an example of one Netconcepts did.

Website Briefs and Specifications

Stephan Spencer — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Essential Ingredients to Web Site Redesign Success

So you’ve decided that your Web site needs an overhaul. Before you start work, however, you and your Web design firm need to do a bit of planning. Going off building a web site half-cocked is a sure fire recipe for disaster. This up-front planning takes the form of “briefs.” The briefs, once approved, get fleshed out, and turned into “specifications,” the blueprints for the functionality, layout, and programming of your Web site.

First, we’ll start with the briefs. There are a number of briefs that then must be drawn up before moving forward on the site development.

The strategic brief outlines the strategic direction for the site. It includes a mission statement, marketing goals, competitive analysis, user requirements, branding strategy, and the metrics that you will use to measure your success.
The technical brief describes the visitors’ equipment, including their monitor size, connection speed, computer processor speed, amount of RAM, color depth, installed plug-ins, etc.
The functional brief delineates what the site should do for visitors, both now and in the future. Be careful to separate the functionality from the execution, keep the technical constraints of the typical user’s PC in mind, and avoid “feature creep” (enlarged project scope due to poor planning in the initial stages), if at all possible.
The creative brief lays out the proposed visual design directions to explore, the objectives of the upcoming creative exploration, the audience, the “story” the site should tell, the tone and imagery that the site should take on.
Finally, the content plan, although not a brief, is just as essential and delineates who is responsible for what content and when. The columns of the content plan should include: description of the deliverable, content provider, writer/editor, due date, date submitted, and priority.

The strategic brief is completed first, and it involves both your Internet team and your Web development firm. The creative, technical, and functional briefs then follow, and these primarily involve your Web development firm.

After the briefs come a number of specifications that will need to be developed then maintained through the course of the project. These specifications - or “specs” - include the technical spec, engineering spec, creative spec, markup and layout spec, and functional spec.

The technical spec describes the basic approach and technologies that will be used in the markup and layout of the site, but not the functionality. This spec will address issues such as whether the site will be database-driven, have cascading style sheets, require plug-ins, or be optimized for a particular color depth, screen resolution, platform, or browser.
The functional spec is a continuation of the functional brief and describes, in non-technical terms, the actions (functionalities) of the site but not how those actions are to be accomplished.
The engineering spec explains how the desired site functionality will be achieved. This document helps determine what functionality will be included in the site, weighing costs with benefits.
The creative spec is an extension of the creative brief, and it fleshes out the site structure, navigation, and several mock-ups (storyboards) of the home page and a secondary page. Choose the winning mock-up using a “criteria matrix”.
Finally, the markup and layout spec describes how the mocked up pages are to be implemented in HTML, including dimensions, font faces and sizes, and use of animation (animated GIFs, Flash).

The good news is that it’s primarily the responsibility of your Web development firm to author the specifications for your Web site. However, it is still your responsibility as the client to make sure that you are happy with those specs.

Further reading: Secrets of Successful Web Sites by David Siegel, ISBN 1568303823.

Legal Risks of Doing Business Online

Stephan Spencer — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Web Site Legal Issues: Navigating the Landmines

No I’m not a lawyer, but I do play one on TV. Seriously though, in the case of operating an online presence and the subsequent legal issues that follow, what you don’t know may very well hurt you.

Operating in the virtual world entails the same - or potentially greater - legal risks as operating in the real world. These risks take many forms: copyright infringement, trademark infringement, copyright ownership, liability, breach of confidentiality, libel and slander, just to name a few.

A surprising number of companies don’t post a Terms & Conditions of Use agreement on their site. That mistake could become a costly one. Of those companies that do post legal notices, many such documents are horribly incomplete.

Unless you specifically disclaim otherwise, you are implicitly endorsing other sites when you link to them. Thus, a dissatisfied - or worse, ripped off - user of one of the sites that you link to could sue you for “recommending” them.

Disclaimers of liability must be in ALL CAPS to be legally enforceable. It’s not uncommon for a Web designer to reformat content that is in ALL CAPS to lower case (after all, ALL CAPS is considered screaming on the Internet, and thus, in bad taste). In doing so, of course he or she has concomitantly invalidated the disclaimer, albeit unwittingly.

If you have an online community on your site, such as a discussion forum, newsgroup, or chat room, you’ll need an expanded Terms & Conditions. In fact, a separate “Discussion Forum/Chat Room Agreement” may be in order (see www.writers.net/legachatroom.php for an example). You will need to assert that:

You do not guarantee that the user-contributed content is truthful, accurate, or reliable.
Nor do you endorse any of the opinions of your users.
Nor are you responsible for monitoring material posted by users.

In addition to posting legal notices on your Web site, you should also post a “privacy policy” conspicuously on your site. A privacy policy addresses what you’ll be doing with the user’s information, both now and potentially in the future, who you will share it with, and in what circumstances.

Some businesses will refuse to do business with you if you don’t have an adequate privacy policy posted on your site? IBM for example, will not advertise on sites that do not post a privacy policy that they find acceptable.

Of course posting a privacy policy means that you will have to abide by it, with no exceptions. Don’t think for a minute that you can revoke or weaken a privacy policy once you’ve already published it on your site, or you may end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit!

Don’t forget to display copyright statements at the bottom of every page of your site, not just on your home page. This will help protect you from copyright infringers using “innocent infringement” as a defence, whereby they claim that they didn’t know that the page was copyrighted. This is an issue because web visitors can enter your site at any point through search engine queries. They may never even see your home page.

U.S. law provides further protection against copyright infringement to those who register a copyright with the Library of Congress. The cost is a mere $20 and a few forms to fill out. The benefit is that you can claim statutory damages for future infringements in a lawsuit rather than having to prove actual damages.

You may be shocked to learn that you may not even possess the copyright to parts of your Web site. If you contracted with outside vendors to develop your Web site, they own any and all graphics, HTML and programming code that they created for you. You can obtain copyright ownership from your contractors by executing a “work for hire” agreement, copyright assignment, or Web development contract with them.

While there’s no substitute for having a good lawyer, many of these legal landmines
can be dealt with cost effectively with standard legal “templates.” The book Internet
Legal Forms For Business (ISBN 096391734X) offers a dozen such templates.
Commentary from the authors accompanies each form, including an overview of applicable
situations, a checklist of relevant issues and tips for negotiating with the other
party. The book includes a sample:

copyright assignment agreement;
content license for text, photo, or video material;
Web site Terms & Conditions of Use;
Web site development contract;
Internet advertising contract;
Internet use policy;
clickwrap agreement
linking agreement
permission-to-link form, and
domain transfer agreement.

The Criteria Matrix

Netconcepts — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

The Criteria Matrix

The Criteria Matrix will help you rate the mock-up designs and objectively choose the winning design from the group.

Use the following Criteria Matrix as a starting point. Determine your criteria and the importance of each criterion (weighting factor), taking into account the goals and objectives of your site.

WEIGHT	CRITERIA
0-20	Appeals to target audience?
0-10	Downloads fast?
0-15	Works in all browsers?
0-20	Works on low-end systems?
0-20	Generates interest in the company’s products/services?
0-10	Informative?
0-10	Ease of navigation
0-15	Encourages exploration?
0-15	Conveys the proper brand positioning and theme?
0-10	Easy to contact the company electronically?

PHP versus ASP comparison

Netconcepts — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:54:50 +0000

Price

PHP is cheaper to implement that ASP.

Capability

PHP gives us additional capability than if we were to code with ASP.

“Open Source”

We are strong proponents of the “Open Source” movement. Open source software is a collaborative effort amongst a worldwide community of volunteer programmers with a passion for technology. People of disparate backgrounds and experiences join together to solve problems in new ways, thus resulting in better software.

Open source software is free to use, copy, and modify, which makes it a great deal for our clients.

It is also highly flexible, because it allows us to extend the software and customize it for our clients’ requirements.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel when we embark on a project for a client, as there is an amazingly extensive library of software written in PHP that’s free and available in source code form. Whenever possible, we repurpose our own extensive code library. But if we haven’t already built a similar web application before, we look for the best open source software to meet the functional requirements and pick up where that software left off. Adding such enhancements and customizations to the software’s source code wouldn’t be possible with proprietary closed-source software.

There are no requirements to purchase commercial licenses and pay continuously for upgrades. For example, to perform binary file uploads, retrieve a file via FTP or HTTP, encrypt passwords in MD5, or send email from a Web page require 3rd party commercial software packages in ASP. It’s all available for free in PHP.

PHP is platform-agnostic

It will run on Linux, Solaris, Windows, and other operating systems as well. With ASP you’re also forced down a path that is very costly and painful to extricate yourself from. For example, what if you wanted to switch web hosting providers to one that was more reliable and had better customer service but was Linux-based? ASP only runs reliably on Microsoft Windows-based web servers.

PHP is the most popular web programming language on the planet

It’s more popular than ASP, Cold Fusion, Perl, or any other web programming language.

All else being equal, PHP is faster than ASP

ASP supports multiple programming languages. This architecture is inherently slower and more memory intensive that PHP’s model because each ASP language compiler runs in its own process. So when ASP detects a Begin ASP tag () it will do a context switch back to the HTML parser.

PHP is secure

IIS Server is notorious for its security holes.

Coding in PHP is more efficient than in ASP

Typically the same functionality can be accomplished in less code with PHP than with ASP. This is because the HTTP GET and POST variables are created automatically by PHP as global variables, thus eliminating the step of extracting them from the ASP Request object. PHP’s HTTP header manipulation functions are easier to use than in ASP.

Want more?

More justifications can be found at http://php.weblogs.com/php_asp_7_reasons

Your Web Site Should Not Need a Manual

Stephan Spencer — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Usability. Boring but crucial, it’s about making your website easy and intuitive to use.

Users shouldn’t need to learn how to use your site. Put stuff where people expect it. Don’t put the navigation bar on the right or the bottom (www.fullyequipped.co.nz); or make non-clickable content indiscernible from clickable content (see www.sinalei.com). Don’t force users to hover their mouse over a button to see what it does (like the old bottle cap navigation on www.coke.co.nz). And never obscure the user’s browser toolbar (the bit that contains the back, forward and refresh buttons) like www.max.co.nz.

Designers like to show off and be different, but different isn’t always better on the web so be prepared to reel in your designer.

Here are some tips:

Have a search function on your site. Many people prefer searching by keyword rather than browsing.
Don’t have a “Flash” intro - a multimedia presentation that’s played upon entering your site. Your website is not a television commercial. If you had to sit through an ad every time you phoned a supplier, you’d soon be taking your business elsewhere.
Keep the navigation consistent across your site.
Include navigation on every page of your site. Visitors may find your site through a search engine so will not necessarily enter through your home page.
Place a “Contact us” link on every page. Don’t just link to your email address, provide a fill-in form, telephone number and postal and street address.
Use “breadcrumb navigation” to show the viewed page’s category and subcategory. Make each of those category levels a clickable link. Essentially you’re leaving a trail for users to follow so they can jump back a category or two without continually using the “Back” button. For example, at the top of its billing requests page, www.telecom.co.nz displays: Home page > Personal > How can we help? > Help with your bill > Billing requests.
Don’t use “frames”, where parts of the web page scroll but others stay fixed. Frames make it difficult, if not impossible, for users to bookmark your pages. Try bookmarking the membership page on www.aa.co.nz, for instance. Search engines don’t like frames, either.
Name things intuitively. www.coke.co.nz has a section called “Spill It” - not helpful.
Minimise the number of clicks required to perform important functions on your site, such as placing an order or making an enquiry. Amazon’s “1-Click Ordering” is the epitome of efficiency.

Want more? Read Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, and Designing Web Usability and Homepage Usability by Jakob Nielsen.

By Stephan Spencer. This article first appeared on Unlimited in February 2003.

PHP versus Perl comparison

Netconcepts — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:49:19 +0000

We recommend writing web scripts in PHP, not CGI / Perl. PHP is much better suited to the Web and takes less “overhead,” meaning that scripts will run faster and the server will be able to handle more simultaneous users on your site. Here’s Why…

Perl (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language) is a great language for some things, just not for programming web pages. Perl is indeed “mature” in that it’s been around for a long time, prior to the Web in fact. But that doesn’t mean it’s the most suitable tool for web development. Indeed it’s not. We know this first hand because we used to code web sites in Perl in Netconcepts’ early days (1995 & 1996). In fact, we were honored with a case study in the book “Using CGI” (published by Que) back in 1995 because we were so ahead of the game in regards to building dynamic database-driven web sites. We were the only case study in that book and had 2 full pages devoted to profiling some of our work. But I digress….

I should preface all this by saying: PHP owes a lot to Perl. PHP was first prototyped using Perl. PHP still shows traces of its Perl ancestry in its string manipulation features.

BUT, Perl has a lot of deficiencies compared to PHP. I’ll highlight the main ones:

PHP is built from the ground-up with database functionality built in, particularly MySQL functionality. Perl is not.

PHP code gets embedded into HTML pages, unlike Perl. This makes it very fast to code web pages and fast to deploy a new site, thus speeding up Web development and lowering overall cost of ownership. An important code management technique for programmers is separating code from data. This allows us to make changes to the code or data without affecting the other. PHP uses the tags to indicate “code inside”. In Perl, however, programmers are encouraged to use print statements to generate the HTML. True it is possible to implement templates in Perl (with more difficulty than in PHP) to separate code and HTML, but 90% of sample Perl code on the web doesn’t do that.

PHP is secure. Perl scripts tend to have more security holes. This is because PHP has built-in a lot of the internal operations of dealing with web page requests and serving information.

PHP is easy to learn in comparison to Perl. It’s easier to learn than C, Python, Java, and most other programming languages used in web development, for that matter. The Perl style of programming is unique, and thus not universally applicable to or from other programming languages. Accessing web form variables in PHP is straightforward, but in Perl requires either detailed knowledge of either HTTP header formats or one of many Perl CGI libraries.
PHP takes less “overhead” than Perl, meaning that PHP scripts will run faster than CGI scripts written in Perl, and you’ll be able to handle more simultaneous users on your site. Benchmarking tests show time and again that PHP runs faster than other web programming languages. Check out these benchmarking analyses done by major computing magazines.

PHP code tends to be more consistent and modular than Perl.
Don’t just take my word for it. Webmasters are switching to PHP in droves. In fact, PHP has now become the most popular server side language for writing dynamic web pages. More popular Microsoft’s ASP (Active Server Pages), JSP (Java Server Pages), Macromedia’s Cold Fusion, and Perl. PHP is being used by over nine million web sites, that’s over 24% of the sites on the Internet, thanks largely to the benefits outlined above, such as quicker response time, improved security, and transparency to the end user.

(Note that a lot of the above reasoning also applies to why we’ve chosen PHP over ASP, Cold Fusion, etc.)

Legal Landmines

Stephan Spencer — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 11:00:00 +0000

If you’re operating a website or conducting internet-based business, what you don’t know may hurt you.

Dangers abound: your contractors could infringe on others’ copyrights and trademarks; others could infringe on yours; you could be held liable for mistakes or omissions on your website; your legal contracts with your online customers could be deemed unenforceable; and your visitors’ behaviour on your site could land you with a libel or slander lawsuit.

In fact, the better your site’s content, design and search engine rankings, the more tempting a target you become. Take Dave Blyth of Auckland-based Webdesign. German and Hungarian web “pagejackers” pilfered his entire home page design, including his logo and brand name. And a Japanese web company placed one of his ad banners in their online portfolio. (He modified the banner to state: “This image stolen from world-webdesign.com.”)

I recently discovered a Russian web development company taking credit for some of my company’s best work - proudly displaying a screenshot of one of our client’s sites on their portfolio page.

How do you shield your organisation from the multitude of online legal perils? Chasing overseas infringers can be an impractical and expensive proposition. But you can minimise some of the risks. Start by consulting your attorney. These tips may also help:

Disclaimer: What if the outbound links on your site are construed as an implied endorsement? Or a typo in your online prospectus results in an investor losing money? Display a full disclaimer on all site pages.
Terms and conditions: Don’t stop at the disclaimer; create a comprehensive terms and conditions of use agreement for site visitors. Want it to be enforceable? Make users click an “I Agree” button before they can proceed with their transaction. Woolworths.co.nz, for instance, would do well to integrate this into their registration process. Without it, Woolworths can’t necessarily withhold delivery, change prices or payment policies, discontinue products or limit quantities.
Arm’s length: If your site includes discussion forums or chat rooms, make it clear that you don’t endorse your users’ opinions, aren’t responsible for monitoring user-contributed material and don’t guarantee that such content is truthful, accurate or reliable. Invite users to inform you of potentially illegal postings, then act on such notices.
Check for rip-offs: Regularly trawl search engines for unique phrases that appear on your pages. Some website owners purposefully incorporate misspellings into their pages to ease the process of unearthing and proving infringement. Email the infringers. An email to the abovementioned Russian company was all it took for them to remove our work from their portfolio.
Cover yourself: Display copyright statements at the bottom of every page, not just on your home page, thus making it harder for infringers to claim “innocent infringement” as a defence. Remember, visitors can enter your site at any point through search engine queries.

Disclaimer: This article should not be construed as legal advice.

This article appeared in the November 2002 issue of Unlimited magazine.