Sol Minion Development was recently recognized as one of three finalists for the Tempe Chamber's 2015 Entrepreneur of the Year Award, alongside BioStress Imagery and All About Compression (the recipient). After the Beacon Awards ceremony, I was discussing what we did differently from other Web companies. Let's face it, there are a lot of choices for Web design and development firms, but we do stand out because we are actively protecting our client's data and educating them.
If you've looked at the news just once in the past year, you're probably aware that a lot of sites were hacked in 2014. Just a short time into 2015, we've already seen some new vulnerabilities come to light, including a very prominent one in WordPress, but that doesn't mean that other platforms are immune. It's a numbers game. Only recently has malware targeting Mac OS made the news as the platform's popularity grew. As part of our maintenance (for both sites and applications), we keep an eye out for vulnerabilities and security releases to close them. Even sites we don't manage are vulnerable and it's important to keep site management tools and their extensions (or plugins) updated.
To highlight our commitment to protecting our client's and their customers' data, we purchased a liability policy that specifically covers security breaches in our code. This is something you'll often find at much larger companies, but we feel that it's our responsibility to write great applications that are also secure. Does it mean we're perfect? Just because we haven't had a breach yet doesn't mean it won't happen, but it does mean we're in a position to resolve the issue if it does arise.
If you're running WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal, or even a completely custom application platform and need to make sure it's up to date with the latest security patches, but aren't sure how, contact us and we'll be happy to take a look.
This was something that had to be pointed out to me. I make every effort to keep this blog going with interesting content (which is harder than it seems, especially since some of the things I really want to talk about are highly technical and uninteresting the general public), but I never really considered it education. I've always been passionate about education, but writing articles was just something I did. It wasn't until someone told me how they valued the information that I considered it an asset.
This revelation forced me to consider it further. As part of every project, we build in training time. It's just something we do, not because we don't want the on-going work to maintain the site (quite the opposite), but because we want our clients to be comfortable with their Web site and take an active part in it. They shouldn't be forced to come to us for every miniscule change and it should be considered part of their marketing and not just a necessary, sunk cost. If our clients are able save some money on the little things, we can help them out when they really need it.
It matters that our clients receive value in their Web presence and are provided peace of mind that the job was done right, they are protected, and they know how to use the tools we've provided. These are just a couple steps we can take to ensure the Web site isn't a sunk cost, but something that adds value to their business.