If you love fishing but don't have the time to get down to your local lake then don't fear, you don't have to go anywhere!
Catcha beast, a new craze from Japan will have players searching out monsters and reeling them in. With over 100 beasts to catch, there is plenty of action to be had!
Catcha Beast is due to hit the shops in August. Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Is your website safe?
Microsoft has taken the unusual step of issuing a security bulletin for something called "Rise in SQL Injection Attacks". Although not a particularly attention-grabbing title, this is an exceptional subject for a security bulletin because it's not about a specific Microsoft product that's patchable, but rather coding practices in general.
"SQL Injection" is a technique used to "hack" websites, and unfortunately, a great deal of websites are vulnerable to it (some estimates suggest "hundreds of thousands", but it may be many, many more). Hackers typically use automated tools to find vulnerable sites, and then "inject" malicious code that can do any number of things. In recent weeks there has been a huge surge in the volume of these attacks.
These range from simply adding code that causes a virus infection on a visitors browser, to editing or changing any content on the website, or in the extreme case, completely wiping out the website. The consequences of an attack should be pretty clear - for less extreme attacks, the website owner may not even realise there's a problem, but it's more likely that the attack may cause inconvenience or embarrassment. In the extreme case, a well-crafted attack can have disastrous implications to a business-critical website, totally disabling a business, or result in the theft of credit card data and associated financial loss.
The depressing thing is that this problem isn't new... SQL Injection has been around since the day programmers started building database-driven websites, but sadly, too many "web professionals" still haven't heard of it, even over 10 years on. It has never been caused by a bug in webserver software, but merely poor-quality web development, and can occur in any website language - ASP, ASP.net, PHP, Java, etc (and is equally preventable in all of them).
We're proud to say that at Design Haus, we've already completed a thorough audit of every line of code we've ever written, and installed extra security tools on our webservers, to prevent attacks like this from happening. It was a huge project we undertook some time ago, but an essential one for any professional web development agency.
It's alarming, yet at the same time reassuring, to see our scanning tools stopping countless numbers of attacks every day. But at least we can sleep well, knowing that our clients are safe. Are you...?
(http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/954462.mspx) Friday, June 20, 2008
Just a decade ago, we conducted the majority of our business communications by speech. Today the majority are typed. Email and texting behaviour, which then would have been thought of as bizarre, is now conditioned into us. In terms of new business activity have we gained from this?
We have just secured an exciting new client, Total Wardrobe Care. The company's principal, Julia Dee has been researching and devloping her product range for the past five years and what a job she has done!
Offering a broad range of wardrobe care products with moth deterrent properties, Julia has managed to fill a gap in the market. Clothes moths can cause significant damage to clothing and upholstery, and will ruin your wardrobe given the opportunity! So check out the site now and say goodbye to those pesky moths!
Here at Design Haus, we are results driven and measure our success based on the performance of our client's websites and marketing campaigns. So we thought we'd do some bragging and tell you all about our latest acheivments in the search engines!
We are currently holding front page organic rankings for the majority of our clients on their desired search terms. Here are a few examples:
Our client, top10-broadband.co.uk are currently ranking in position two for the search term, 'broadband', one of the most competitive keywords in the UK! They are also ranking in position five for 'mobile broadband', again a highly competitve keyword in today's market.
One of our biggest clients, Bandai, are ranking on the front page for all their respective brands and for the majority, are at position one.
Official Space are holding position one for the term 'offices to rent' and so many others we can't list them all, but the best of the lot, position four for 'office space', a very high traffic volume term.
This is just a glimpse of the results we achieve for our marketing clients and please get in touch if you want the extensive list, though you may be on the phone for a while!
If you feel that your site's Search Engine Rankings could be better then get in touch and enjoy the success of our existing clients!
