Building Success Websites

1. Building Success Websites What to build and what to look out for!

2. What do you want to do? • Publish company info with an online brochure • Take orders for good and/or services • Provide services or digital goods • Add value to goods and/or services • Cut costs

3. Publish company info with an online brochure • Simple static information that dominated the web in the early 1990’s • How can they fail? • Failure to provide important information • Poor presentation • Failure to respond to customer feedback • Allow info on site to go stale • Fail to track site usage stats

4. Take orders for good and/or services • Ways to fail… • Unanswered questions about products/services • Trust • Ease of use • Compatibility • Wrong product • Bad marketing • Grow to fast

5. Provide services or digital goods • Think information sites (stocks for instance) or digital media (ebook, video, mp3 etc.) • Pros –cheap, immediate delivery • Cons – Intellectual property rights (CISC355) • Ways to fail • Not securing the IP rights to what customers want • Model is not scalable

6. Add value to goods and/or services • Some websites are value added… • Think tracking on ups.com or fedex.com • Support forums for goods/services • Ways to fail • Not providing timely responses (think usps.com) • Not adding the value you think you are (how do you get/respond to feedback?)

7. Cut costs • Providing PDF manuals online instead of printing/shipping bulky physical copies • Replacing brink and mortar stores with online only. • Not having a strategy or understanding your customer base

8. Risks and Threats • Crackers – Secure your site against internal and external threats! • Failure to attract sufficient business • Infrastructure/Scaling issues (power, hardware, network, etc.) • Reliance on Shipping • Competition • Software bugs • Government policies and taxes

9. Security Threats to Websites • Exposure of confidential data • Loss of data • Modification of data • DoS Attacks • Software bugs • Repudiation

10. Ways to combat security threats • The most secure website is one that is not connected to a network… Unfortunately it is not very usable! • Need a balance between security and usability • Authentication • Encryption • Private Key • Public Key

11. Security… continued • Certificates – combine you saying who you are via a Certifying Authority and encryption • Data backups • Physical Security

12. PHP Authentication • Security is not a bolt on afterthought or something you will get to later… • Successful websites have security built into the development process… • But where to start… How about authentication? • There are many ways to implement but most sites only require a username/password combination

13. Some PHP Authentication Examples • Simple Authentication ( secret.php - cool multistate page – very useful!) • What is good about this model? • What is bad about this model? • Improved Simple Authentication (secret2.php) • What is good about this model? • What is bad about this model?

14. Encrypt Passwords • Anyone have an issue with storing a password in clear text? • PHP has several encryption algorithms available… Using one way hash functions • crypt() – old and not very secure • md5() – Message Digest 5 – medium secure • sha1() – Secure Hash Algorithm 1 – most secure

15. Other ways to secure • HTTP Authentication • Sessions (later chapter)