Data Privacy: What is it and How to Protect Your Data?

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What is Data Privacy?

Data privacy deals with personal information that is obtained on the web, whether that is personally identifiable information (PII) or personal health information (PHI). It is a branch of data security that focuses on the way that data is handled specifically in regards to consent, notice and regulatory obligations (1). 

Why is it Important?

Data Privacy has become an increasingly important issue for companies to address. Closely held company data is one of a business’ most important assets. Data is useful for mapping company performance, making decisions and solving problems faster, improving overall customer experience and measuring the success of your company (2). It provides market insight and competitive intelligence that can give it an operational advantage in its industry.

Data Breaches has Consequences

There are a variety of ways that a data breach can affect your company negatively. The first that will come to mind to most people is the financial repercussions of the breach (4).

 

These financial repercussions factor in a few different ways:

  • reimbursing affected clients
  • response efforts for breach
  • investigating the incident.

 

A negative impact that is less notable, but equally devastating is the reputation damage it inflicts on your brand. Regaining customer trust is difficult after a data breach. There will likely be customers lost during that time period as people become much more reluctant to use your company (4). These effects may not be permanent, but the time and cost to repair the damage can be significant, so it is important to not overlook the reputational impact data breaches cause.

The Alarming Rate of Data Breaches

Data breaches have become fairly common in this day and age. In fact, in 2018, it was reported that approximately 1.244 billion people in the US had their data breached. These data breaches resulted in 466 million records being exposed. That year, nearly half (46%) of US firms had reported a privacy breach. And making matters worse, 77% of IT professionals said that they did not have a plan if a cybersecurity incident occurred (3)! With nearly half of firms reporting cybersecurity attacks, there must be an increased sense of urgency, seriousness & awareness given to cybersecurity. Better prevention and resolution plans to buffer attacks require such focus and resolve.

How Can You Protect Your Data?

Now that you understand the negative effects a breach can have on your company, how can you prevent them from happening?

 

Here are a few tips to help secure your data:

 

  1. Employee Access & Education – Employees tend to be the easiest (and first) route for cybercriminals to access your data, so making sure that only authorized employees have access to crucial data is important. In addition, educating your employees about data breaches and the steps that they can take to ensure they’re only clicking on secure links and emails is critical (5). 
  2. Backup Servers – Having backup servers that can replicate your data is a good preventative measure. This will prevent large data loss that could occur from a breach (5). Ransomware attacks (where data is forcefully encrypted and held for ransom) can be alleviated when backup servers are employed.
  3. Obtaining Data Privacy Software – There is a variety of different software, like SiteLock, that you can purchase in order to protect your site against data breaches. The software SiteLock detects and automatically removes malware and other infections. It also has the ability to increase web speed by as much as 50%.

Contact us at 3PRIME to protect your website with SiteLock!

 

Data Privacy isn’t just good policy, it’s brand awareness

Data privacy deals with some of the most important personal information that users can provide online. Obtaining this data is extremely useful for companies, as it factors into a variety of different things that help to improve overall customer experience, determine corporate policies, and business operations. The way this information is being stored and protected is essential for companies.

Cyber attacks that resulted in data breaches have become increasingly common, affecting nearly half of US firms. These breaches can have serious effects on a company’s operations and its brand image. 

Make sure that you have preventative measures and solutions in place so that these types of data breaches don’t happen to you! A byte of prevention is worth 1.244 billion people needing a cure!

 

Sources:

www.varonis.com/blog/data-privacy/

www.towardsdatascience.com/how-important-is-data-for-your-business-c15a35c6935e

www.statista.com/statistics/273550/data-breaches-recorded-in-the-united-states-by-number-of-breaches-and-records-exposed/

www.itgovernance.co.uk/blog/the-damaging-after-effects-of-a-data-breach

www.entrepreneur.com/article/332794

6 Tips to Make Your WordPress Site More Secure

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WordPress is the most popular Content Management System out there simply because it’s free, easy to use, has great documentation but, more importantly, because it’s secure. However, with that being said, it’s still not foolproof. There are still a few things you can do from your end to ensure it’s as secure as possible. Take a look at some of the following tips to keep your WordPress as secure at all times.

1. Choose a New Hosting Provider

Many hosting providers like Hosting Foundry have years of experience in securing WordPress sites – so why not opt for a similar service to ensure yours is always kept safe? A good, new hosting provider will update their software and hardware on a regular basis to ensure your website is secure.

2. Never Download Nulled Themes

It’s easy to look at nulled themes for your WordPress site, but they are illegal and have many security flaws. The themes might look brilliant and professional, and you may well get all the paid features for free – but it could cost you a lot of money in the long term if you lose customer data.

3. WordPress Security Plugins

WordPress has hundreds of free plugins available for those with an installation of WordPress on their site. Simply search the database to see what you can find – many of them are reviewed in depth so you can install multiple plugins quickly to get your site secured promptly. Take a look at some of these other security tips to add an extra layer of security to your site.

4. Stronger Passwords are Key

Strong passwords are harder to remember but that’s for good reason. It means hackers won’t be able to remember and all their automated software won’t be able to guess them (or certainly not as easily). The longer your password is with as many mixed characters as possible will ensure your password is as secure as it can be. The last thing you want is for your password to be guessed so some hacker can come along and change your site around for fun.

5. Change Your Login Directory

The WordPress admin panel is easily accessible through www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin or something similar. You can change this quite easily in the admin panel to something that’s completely different. There are, of course, ways hackers can find out this link, but it’s still an added layer of security to ensure they’re not going to have an easy ride.

6. Purchase SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate could help prevent data from falling into the wrong hands as far as URLs and processing data is concerned. Simply paying a small fee every month could give you an SSL certificate, which will add an extra layer of security to your site.

The above tips are just a few of the many things available that will help you secure WordPress properly. The more security tips you implement, the higher chance you’ll have of keeping hackers away.

Redirecting to “Thank You” Pages with Contact From 7 for All Browsers

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When you want your CF7 form to do something more than flash a message on the same page, you may want it to redirect to a proper thank you page for many reasons including analytics, metadata, and letting the user know that the contact process has been completed.

Normal redirects using an event listener

Redirecting to Another URL After Submissions

CF7 recommends this line of code to be placed wherever your JS will be set.

<script>
document.addEventListener( 'wpcf7mailsent', function( event ) {
    location = 'http://example.com/';
}, false );
</script>

This will work for browsers that handle multiple types of scripts well such as Chrome and Firefox. However, not all browsers were created equal.

Issues with Safari and IE when redirecting with event

Normally, when you want to redirect to any page after an action or event is made, javascript/jquery can help you with that. Yet in the cases of select browsers such as Safari or Internet Explorer, they may not take to the code as easily as other browsers can. This unfortunately happens when attempting to redirect with the event above. In some cases, the form page will refresh and clear itself even though an email has been sent. This then becomes an issue for the user, as while an email will still be sent to the intended recipient, the customer will not know unless they too receive a copy. Even still, they might re-fill the form out again and again and merely assume the form is broken if it never gives them a confirmation or thank you for submitting to the form.

There are many ways we have attempted to fix this “bug” and all scripting options either wouldn’t work or would result in an email not sending. For example, a script that listens to the click of the submit button can redirect to another page, however it must wait for the email to send before going to a new page or else the email can be skipped altogether which would be bad. So we could go through some loops in the additional scripting, or we can use a simple solution in the form of a plug in.

A plugin for your plugin

Contact Form 7 Redirection

It might sound silly, but there’s no shame in a WordPress plugin asking for help from other plugins. Contact Form 7 forms never had an intention to redirect after completion, although they do suggest code to help with that they have no inherent setting or feature to make it simpler. Contact Form 7 Redirection does all the heavy lifting for you, using support code to help establish and event that will help you redirect to any WordPress page you have created or any external site of your choice by simply editing the form and going to a new tab that should be created called “Redirect Settings”. It does come with a couple extra settings and chances to add scripts if you wish, but the only step you would need to take is choosing which page to redirect to after the form is completed. We highly recommend using this plugin for anyone that has CF7 installed, as it is will make your redirections easier but also get the message across to your users that would like to know if they have completed their requests/submissions. Best of all, it works in all browsers! The plugin code has been tested and we can confirm that it is safari and internet explorer compatible.

Just remember that if your plugin is giving you trouble or having issues in select cases, there may also be a companion plugin out there to solve your troubles.

Featured Snippet Guidelines

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Being an expert in a field is a wonderful thing. Applying that expertise and sharing it with others is even better. By now we’ve all been searching for something Google and seen a Featured Snippet (like the ones in this post) at the top of their organic search results. In looking at these snippets that 3PRIME has helped clients create you will notice that each one provides the best answer to the very specific search query or question in the most succinct and informative way possible. These are just a few of the examples of Featured Snippets that 3PRIME has helped develop. They include very specific car transportation routes, a niche mechanical device for filtering light, and answering what it means to be eligible for SSDI. Featured Snippets don’t replace organic search results and aren’t necessarily directly related to the first or even second organic result of any search. What Featured Snippets do is seek to best answer a search query and show that above any website search results, allowing a user to get a short answer without having to visit a site at all.

How to Get Noticed and Featured by Google

  1. Use long-tail and highly targeted keywords
  2. Be mindful of page titles and descriptions
  3. Create in-depth content with easily digestible and structured information

Use long-tail and highly targeted keywords. Oftentimes Google will show a snippet for very specific keywords or a question that a user searches for. The more specific and targeted your content is to a keyword or query, the more likely you are to get a Featured Snippet. Identifying and utilizing long-tail keywords within your content will ultimately provide Google with more opportunities to feature your content.

Be mindful of page titles and descriptions. The titles and descriptions of your pages provide Google and other search engines with insight into the content of your page. Page titles provide some of the best opportunities to provide Google with highly relevant keyword data and information about page content. Optimizing page titles to include unique and relevant keywords that a user is searching for holds tremendous weight with Google. Optimizing content for all aspects of Google is important for obtaining a Featured Snippet. While it is true that a Featured Snippet does not necessarily correlate to the first organic search result, being on page 1 does help boost the likelihood of being featured.

Create in-depth content with easily digestible and structured information. When writing content that you hope to be featured by Google the first thing is to make sure that you are thoroughly answering the query. Signaling to Google through the use of hyper-focused, long-tail keywords is a great place to start, but certainly not the only thing that matters to Google. Two other pieces that are often missed when writing highly specific content is ensuring that it can be displayed as a Featured Snippet in such a way that it answers the question that someone types into Google. The other piece is to fully develop content. While you want Google to be able to pull a list or short piece of content to fill in a Featured Snippet, the page itself should be robust and full of well-developed and informative answers to the search query. Long-form content is important to Google insofar as ranking a page for providing a thorough answer to a search query or question. What is generally meant by long-form content is a page with over 1,500 words, with very thorough, well-written, and exceptional content.

When creating a page to answer a question and hopefully obtain a Featured Snippet, don’t be afraid to research and provide a long, thoughtful, fully fleshed out answer- it’s exactly what Google wants. Combined with best SEO practices and targeting highly specific keywords and queries you’ll position yourself much better in Google search engine rankings and be that much closer to getting a Featured Snippet and improving traffic to your website. Focus and speed are essential in today’s world, with the average attention span dropping from 12 seconds to 8 seconds over the past 15 years it has become more paramount than ever to give quick, easily processed and understood information. Google wants to provide its users with easy to read and identify information, so the next time you are creating new content or adding to your web presence in any way ask us how to optimize for a Featured Snippet. It will help guide you to positive results. Whether you’re looking for website design, web development, or you’re not sure what you need to take your site to the next level 3PRIME is here to help you figure it out.

Divi WordPress Theme

Divi Mobile Menu Displays “A” Instead of Hamburger Menu Icon

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Does you Divi mobile menu show an “A” instead of the traditional hamburger icon? We recently came across this problem with a few of our Divi-based websites.

After an update we noticed an “A” appearing in place of the hamburger icon on mobile menus. Once the issue was inspected in the browser, it became clear that some core theme files were requested from the child theme folder – but they were not present there.
Read more

WordPress and 3PRIME Web Solutions

When A WordPress Theme Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be

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While we can custom build any type of website, like most web agencies, 3PRIME takes advantage of pre-designed WordPress themes in order to help save our clients’ money and speed up the development process. After our initial discovery process, we determine what WordPress theme may work best for your business and then further customize it to suit your needs.

But sometimes one is not aware of the pitfalls that may occur once you get your hands “dirty” with a theme and begin to customize it. Though our decision on choosing the best theme is based on researching, testing out the demo version, and reading the theme’s documentation, there still may be some roadblocks encountered once development is underway.
Read more

Authorize.net terminating low-volume resellers

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We got this email today from authorize.net reseller support:

Authorize.Net LLC (“Authorize.Net”) is engaged in a strategic initiative to allow us to more effectively work with our referral partners. Authorize.Net has reviewed its current agreements and has decided to focus on its most active partners. As part of this change in strategy, Authorize.Net will be terminating your existing partnership agreement within 90 days of the date of this email. You will no longer receive residual payouts once the partnership is terminated.

We thank you for your partnership.

We’ve been a reseller for a number of years and while we don’t make a lot on it, the customers we referred and helped setup are still active so we make a small residual each month, enough to offset our own authorize.net fees. It was enough that they were our first recommendation and as a result we have lots of experience working with them.

This email, out of the blue, is a surprise to say the least. I am sure they are going to save a significant amount on affiliate fees but I have to say, I expect to do a lot more recommendations of Stripe in the future.

Just sayin’.

 

Learn How to Target Both Online and In Store Customer Moments with Google Partners Connect 8/16

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If you are a current retailer or business and are wondering how you can drive up sales, then be sure to pay close attention to the steps from the recent Google Partners Connect event on 8/16. One of the biggest problems that retailers have been complaining about if the recent decline in foot traffic at stores. What is happening is that more customers are using online shopping than ever before. You have to be there for your customers wherever they are: both online and in store.

As a retailer, you need to make an online strategy that helps to drive your mobile website to better connect with customers. Even though foot traffic has declined with retailers, this does not necessarily make it a bad thing. In fact, when people actually do shop at a store, they are spending more money. People are now 25% more likely to make a purchase in store, since they are shopping less. In store, people are also spending 10% more on purchases than they were before.

The good side about customers being connected with mobile is that they are prepared before they even get into the store. The can learn all kinds of information about your business from it’s location to it’s current sale items. Stores are assuming people want to be educated in stores, but people are doing that themselves with online research and learning about the hottest trends. Mobile queries have increased by 25%, which makes it so important for retailers to be present on and offline.

Mobile has now become the center of shopping whether it is researching, browsing or in-store shopping for an item. Retailers need to be there for both online and offline moments to connect with their customer. Since trends are driving customer behavior, a retailer must build towards these trends to grow their business. They would rather want the retailer that is there for them in their moment of need rather than be loyal to a particular brand. They also would rather receive a personable and tailored message from a retailer than a one-size-fits-all message.  The shopping experience should also be seamless, since 53% of users leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Make sure the shopping journey is a great experience so you will have return customers.

The power of online shopping with Google is helping retailers to be discovered by new customers from all over. When you are present for your customers, you are 3 times more likely to engage in top positions. If you plan ahead for big events like holiday shopping, you will be better prepared to handle more customers. Plan ahead large promotions and sales, such as planning Christmas promotions right after Halloween ends. Make your whole inventory available on Google shopping during your campaign, to make sure you aren’t losing any business. Stand out by offering promotions like free shipping or coupons. For marketing, remarketing, customer match and marketing similar audience will increase conversion rates. By planning ahead for new customers and offering them a seamless experience online and in store, you will be sure to keep customers and target many more.

Changes to Tracking Contact Form 7 Submissions

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With over 3 million downloads and counting, Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular tools for creating a variety of forms on the WordPress platform. When using Contact Form 7 it’s easy to see why this plug-in has become a favorite of developers and website owners. The ease of use, flexibility, breadth of options, customization yet simplicity all combine to make up one of the most comprehensive and widely used plug-ins to date.

One of the great things about Contact Form 7 has always been the easy and effective way of tracking form completions through either a redirection to a “thank you” page or once the form is submitted or just redirecting users to a new page to encourage further action. For anyone familiar with the way that Contact Form 7 works these two settings for assigning Javascript may look very familiar:

  • on_sent_ok
  • on_submit

However, these settings are in the process of being phased out completely by the end of 2017. One of the only ways to track form submissions going forward will be to use event tracking. Luckily this is relatively simple, especially for Google Analytics users, to implement. In fact, by putting an event tracker similar to the one we suggest below, you can track form completions in much the same way as always but with even more accuracy.

The 3PRIME Solution
When adding event tracking to contact forms, there are a few checks that need to be made beforehand. The very first thing is to check to see if Google Analytics code exists in the header of your page. Without this, nothing else will work as intended. Once that is confirmed, we can get into the scripting/functionality.

We will need either to add a script to the page/template or we can find a dedicated javascript file to handle the work, which I would recommend. A common file such as a main.js or default.js, something that already exists on the page as a source. If there is no js file on the page then we would need to create one and link it, or we can go with the alternate method of just adding script to the page/footer.

Wherever you put your script, make sure there is a way to detect on click events. One common way is with jquery which exists on many sites and in many forms. If jquery is not on the site then we can either have the site start referencing jquery or make a more basic reference for a click event. Then check to see if any “document ready” code is in the js file. If not, you will need to state that this will happen when the document is ready to ensure that the script is not loaded before the form is.

Now in the template/page that has the form, find the submit button and add a class to it in the class field. it can be any name you want that fits the guidelines of a class name but for this example we will call it “contactEmail”. Once a class is set we can start referencing it in our script on document ready. IDs also work but classes are more consistent and user-friendly when used on the same or even multiple pages.

In the script we just have to make sure that the class is targeted correctly now. We can do this through testing. A common method is by using console.log for javascript to print a message to the inspector console when an event occurs. Add an “onclick” event handling function behind the “contactEmail” button class being clicked and simply put console.log(“ok”) inside it. If you click your button now, then the console should print out “ok.” If this isn’t working as intended then you will need to reevaluate your javascript/class/function as any of those could be the issue.

Once an onclick function is set and confirmed as working, simply add the google analytics event handling code inside the onclick function. A basic analytics function works like so:

  • ga(‘send’, ‘event’, { eventCategory: “”, eventAction: ‘click’, eventLabel: ””});

We are now sending a new event to Analytics to record, giving it a category, action, and label. These are important as they help discern and differentiate every action you wish to record in analytics. More details on how the code works can be found here. Putting it all together, we will get a function like this inside of our “main.js” file that is included on our site and on our contact form page.

EXAMPLE USING JQUERY
$(‘#contactEmail’).click(function (){
ga(‘send’, ‘event’, { eventCategory: ’emailclick’, eventAction: ‘click’, eventLabel: ’emailContactPage’});
});

When you click on the submit button with the “contactEmail” class at any point in time when on the page, an event should be tracked and recorded on your analytics dashboard, under the category “emailclick” and labeled as “emailContactPage”. Remember to test extensively and clear caching if your code is not saving/updating properly!

For more information and other form tracking solutions straight from Contact Form 7’s developer click here.

Panera Bread - Order Catering Online

Finding The Best eCommerce Solution for Your Catering Business

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WooCommerce POS - Point of Sale IntegrationIf you’re looking to bring your catering business online, and provide ordering through your website, there are many options to consider for the best solution. 3PRIME recently started working with two local caterers to help them offer their food and platters to customers. We researched the latest technologies and came across popular platforms such as WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce. Read more