Accrisoft Blog

Custom PHP: Why You May Want to Think Again

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

So, you’ve sold a new website, and you’re discussing with the client what they need. You have somebody on your staff who knows PHP, so regardless of what CMS you put the client on, you’ll be able to customize things and offer the client the exact functionality they want. This may seem like an ideal situation, but we can tell you from experience that it might not be such a good thing.

In many cases, doing custom programming on a website can cause more problems than it solves. This may sound counter-intuitive, but bear with us. Here’s why:

Scalability

If every site is a one-off, it will be very difficult to scale your business to the tens, hundreds, or even thousands of websites. Each site will require coding all over again — this is expensive, takes a lot of time, and requires a team of PHP developers. On the other hand, if you create some good HTML templates, you can create sites that look fully custom but can be deployed very quickly. Customizing a template for a client will only require knowledge of HTML, CSS and maybe JavaScript, skills that are much more prevalent than programming. The better your templates and stronger your processes, the more scalable your business can be.

Scope Creep

If you set the expectation that you can do whatever your customer wants, their expectations may become unrealistic, which will inevitably lead to them being unhappy when the job is done. Clients don’t always know what’s most important, and look to you — an expert in your field — to help guide them. If the client asks for something custom, then halfway through the job they change their mind, you’ll have a hard time making money on the deal, and the customer probably won’t be happy when they find out that the launch date has to be delayed. Conversely, if you set reasonable expectations ahead of time, the customer may be slightly disappointed at first, but will be pleased when those expectations are met.

Upgrades

Custom PHP can also introduce problems on upgrade. If something in the CMS changed, your custom code can break — and while the company that releases the CMS has probably tested it extensively before releasing it, there’s no telling how the new version will work with your PHP code. You may not really know if there’s going to be a problem until you upgrade, so for each site you’ll be crossing your fingers, upgrading, then dealing with the blowback from customers as problems emerge.

Support

The more dissimilar your websites are, the more difficult it will be to support them all. If something isn’t working on one of your clients’ sites, your level-one staff won’t be able to tell if it’s because of the custom PHP code you wrote. This means that many issues will have to be escalated to your developers. If the person who wrote the PHP code is no longer with your company, someone else will be wading through it in an attempt to figure out what it does and how it works. Alternatively, if your sites are built on a good CMS without custom code, your staff will have a much easier time identifying a problem and determining its cause.

To Summarize

Members of our staff have been involved with hundreds of website development jobs from many different perspectives: company owner, salesperson, project manager, developer, designer, support person. We also work with a large network of digital agencies who build websites every day. We’ve seen a lot of website projects in process, and can assure you that the ones that are completed on time and under budget are a lot more pleasant for everyone.

We’ve also seen a lot of companies that can manage hundreds of websites with minimal support staff, and there’s a lot that can be learned from their success. An important part of this is finding a good CMS and selling the features that it has. If a client wants something that it can’t do (and it’s not critical), tell them you don’t support that feature. Will you lose a customer or two to a competitor who promises the moon? Maybe, but they’ll probably pay for it in the long run. Will the client be slightly disappointed if they have to temper their expectations ahead of time? It’s possible, but we promise they’ll be thrilled when the project is completed on time, and the site does exactly what you told them it would. If there’s a deal-breaker that they absolutely need, by all means, write a few lines of PHP code; just don’t automatically make it part of every project. You’ll find that you spend less time chasing problems, and more time selling and building profitable websites.

Server Units: Hosting Simplified

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Freedom packages are tiered by the features available. However, there's also server resources to consider. Some of our sites get very little traffic, while others have thousands of visitors every day. How do we make it easy to upgrade a site, and make it easy for our Solution Providers to determine how big an upgrade they need? The answer we've come up with is Server Units, an easy, intuitive way to upgrade the hosting power of your Freedom Unlimited websites.

Each Freedom Unlimited website comes with one server unit; if your website needs additional resources, you can add on as many more as you need.

Adding one Server Unit will double the number of pageviews your site can expect to accommodate per hour: from 2,000 to 4,000. These numbers assume an average amount of content on each page, and will differ from site to site, but this is a good benchmark for estimating how many you need. For example, displaying a page of text doesn't require the same server resources as displaying a page full of embedded videos and high-resolution images.

Why pageviews?
We don't think it's very useful to talk about how much RAM, processing power and throughput these server units have, because these numbers don’t really mean much in real-world applications. What does 512MB of RAM, or a quad-core processor mean to a client who's noticing that their site is slowing down during peak hours?

We wanted a concrete, meaningful metric, and we've decided on pageviews. Anyone who is doing analytics on their site can see their peak hourly pageviews; For example here's a view of a Google Analytics page showing pageviews per hour:

If you're moving a site to Freedom, or the site is sometimes running slowly, check the current pageviews per hour to determine how many you'll need going forward. Just make sure to account for the highest peaks; you need to accommodate for them, or your site may go down or become non-responsive.

PCI DSS Compliance: Should You Care?

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

If you’re a web developer engaged in an e-commerce project, or even just someone thinking of doing business online, you should be familiar with PCI DSS compliance. While many people recognize that this is an important aspect of online security, most people don’t know exactly what it is, and how to comply. Well, we’re here to help!

The term “PCI DSS” stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, and is a proprietary set of payment card processing regulations for online merchants designed to promote the safe handling of consumers’ sensitive financial data. The standards were developed by several of the major payment card brands to help facilitate the broad adoption of consistent data security measures on a global basis. Conveniently, the PCI Security Standards Council has published a brief quick reference guide to understanding these regulations.

Some of the more important aspects of PCI DSS compliance are concerned with how consumer payment card information is stored and processed. For example, the storage of certain pieces of payment card data in any manner is expressly prohibited, even if stored in encrypted form. A card’s CVV number is included in this category (also known as a CVV2, CVC, CSC, or CID number, depending on the payment card being used):

"Do not store sensitive authentication data contained in the payment card’s storage chip or full magnetic stripe, including the printed 3-4 digit card validation code on the front or back of the payment card after authorization [...] Sensitive authentication data must never be stored after authorization – even if this data is encrypted. "

If you are still unsure whether or not PCI DSS regulations apply to you, review the following questions:

Do you process credit card transactions?
Do you store credit card information? (paper or electronically)
Do you take online credit card payments?
Do you handle credit card information on paper, online, over the phone or via mail?

If you answered “yes” to any of them, then the standards apply to you.

Why is compliance important? There are many good reasons, the most significant of which are the following:

To manage your risk
To protect your customer data
To stay competitive in the market
To avoid punitive measures
Potentially significant fines – incrementally increases
To stay in business

At this point, perhaps you may be wondering “So now that I know all this, what are the consequences for non-compliance?” The truth is that so far, while there is yet no criminal liability for violating PCI DSS, the consequences of non-compliance can still be quite severe. At worst, extremely large civil fines can be imposed by a number of agencies if noncompliance is discovered. At best, your merchant processor may not allow you to continue submitting your transactions through their systems if you are not in compliance. Several tools exist for determining whether a merchant’s online systems are PCI DSS compliant, such as the well-known TrustKeeper service from Trustwave. It is a very good idea to periodically use tools such as these to scan your systems for vulnerabilities and correct any that might be found, thus ensuring your compliance.

On a last note, the Accrisoft Freedom CMS is built to make PCI DSS compliance effortless. Please feel free to contact us and inquire about how the Freedom CMS can help make running a PCI DSS compliant online business easy and painless!

Some additional PCI DSS resources:

The AccriCloud: The sky's the limit

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 12:20:00 -0500

Cloud computing has certainly been a hot topic lately, but there seems to be some confusion about what exactly cloud hosting is, and how it relates; after all, isn't all hosting in the cloud?

For us, cloud hosting essentially refers to a website's independence from the confines of an individual machine. With cloud hosting, we can do things like quickly change resource allocations as needed, and move sites around with little or no downtime. It's a more agile, flexible solution that makes it possible to quickly match server resources to each site's needs.

The name for our new cloud hosting platform is the AccriCloud. As a Freedom user, you'll experience better stability and more power on-demand for when you need it. We have complete control over the machines that make up this service, so we can fine-tune everything for optimal performance, and quickly make changes as needed. This will all happen behind the scenes, so for you it will simply mean more uptime.

The best part is, all new Freedom websites will be deployed into this hosting environment. To order a new AccriCloud-based Freedom site, just click Buy Now.

Taking a website live

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The Internet is an incredible source of information on every topic imaginable, I'm sure we can all agree. However, access to this much information can often be overwhelming. Sometimes you need a simple answer, but you're inundated with so much information that you become lost.

Web servers and the Domain Name System (DNS) are excellent examples of this. These are extremely complex topics that can get very technical, but if you just want to take your website live, you don't need to learn the intricacies — you just want to get your site live, and you want a general idea of what's happening.

For this reason, we've created a new video about how to take a Freedom site live. We think it gives non-technical users a good overall picture of what happens in the process without bogging them down with unnecessary details. And while the video is about taking a Freedom site live, the principles apply to any website.

Take a look at the video below, which has also been added to our video library. Would you show it to your clients? Is anything missing? Let us know what you think.

New in Freedom CMS: Form Layouts

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Also new in version 8.2 is complete HTML control over forms in the Forms module. You can customize the output of each input type, add custom attributes, and control the HTML layout of the entire form without losing Forms Wizard functionality like in older versions.

Each input type now has its own module layout, so you can change an input type once and have that reflected throughout your website. This is great if you want to modernize the forms on your site with things like rounded input boxes and borders. It's now all completely up to you.

Take a look at the video introduction, and upgrade all of your Freedom sites to 8.2!

New in Freedom CMS: Global Tags

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The new Global Tags feature takes the content of your site and frees it from the confines of the individual modules. It lets you apply tags to content between modules, so, for example, you could tag your blog entries and use these same tags for your news articles. Then, on your live website, when a visitor is viewing a blog entry, they could see a list of news articles with the same tags.

The possibilities are vast, but one potential use for this feature is to tag content with the author's name; that way, when viewing a blog entry, you could show a list of news articles (or research papers, or press releases) written by the same author.

This feature works with blogs, news articles, events, web pages and custom modules. To learn more about how it works, view the following video:

New in Freedom CMS: Site Backup Tool

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The Site Backup Tool is another new feature in version 8.2. The backups it creates are like snapshots of your entire website. If you need to, you can restore your site to an earlier state with just a couple of clicks. However, there's a lot more you can do with this tool as well:

Migrate sites - This tool also lets you easily migrate a complete site from one server to another. So for example, if you need to migrate your site to a different server (such as to the shiny new AccriCloud) you can order a new site, create a backup on the old site, and do a quick export/import. It couldn't be easier.

Copy sites - You also may want to copy a website. Maybe you've got a new client who likes the design of one of your existing sites. You can copy the existing site to the new website as a starting point, then make changes from there. It's way faster than starting from scratch.

Create prototypes - Here's another interesting idea: If one of your clients is interested in a new site design, you can copy the site to a "prototype server," demo the changes to them on that server, and once the new design is approved, you can copy it back over, overwriting the old site.

This feature is available in the Tools module of the Green Interface. Take a look at the video below for a quick overview of the features:

New in Freedom CMS: Lead Nurturing

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

With the release of Accrisoft Freedom CMS version 8.2 came the introduction of the Lead Nurturing module, a powerful digital marketing and lead conversion tool. This module can help you gather information your website's visitors and more effectively convert them into paying customers.

With this tool, you can effectively market to a large number of potential customers, giving them an automated yet personalized experience through email marketing. Best of all, it gathers knowledge about each of your leads, which can help you fine-tune your message.

To learn more about what this module can do and to see it in action, watch the video below.

Freedom v8.2 has been released!

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

We're very excited to announce the release of version 8.2 of our software. In addition to lots of bug fixes and small enhancements, this release focused on four major features:

Lead Nurturing
The Site Backup Tool
Global tags
Form layouts

Watch the introductory video below, then take a look at our 8.2 bulletin for in-depth video explanations of these new features. We'll address the specifics of these new features in upcoming blogs. In the meantime, we suggest that you upgrade all of your Freedom sites to this new version.