Hello

Suzanne here at HotScot with the HotScot May Newsletter. News of a credit card scam that caught us, some netiquette advice and how to avoid spyware .....................

• CCBill.com scam
• Newsletters boost sales
• Netiquette
• Microsoft Vista - our experiences

• Spyware
• And Finally
• Feedback
• Unsubscribe

One of us recently fell victim to having our personal credit card details harvested when making an online payment to a well known online retailer. This only came to light when we noticed a transaction for $29.95 made by a company called CCBill.com on our statement. As we did not recall buying anything from them we made some checks and were appalled to find this is a regular scam.

CCBill.com is a US based card processing agency used by a lot of "grey" sites, and often "obtains" card numbers from disreputable sources which they then use to make payments to themselves. You can see more about this scam documented on RipOffReport.com . We had to contact our card provider and get our card cancelled.

So look out for any small transactions on your card statements to CCBill.com, they start small and if you do not notice keep getting bigger.

Our newsletter brings in a lot of comments, this comes from Frances Powell at Buttercup miniatures http://www.buttercupminiatures.co.uk and goes to prove what an effective marketing tool a newsletter can be:

"One thing you didn't mention in your own newsletter on marketing the website was the importance of newsletters to a site with a web shop. I find an increase in sales of 20-25% in the few days following a newsletter update. I use it mainly for reminding people I am out there and showing them what is new on the web shop and how they can't live without these products-the blog helps a lot but the newsletter usually reaches more people. I know a lot of your clients are not so heavily into e-commerce as I am, but I personally have always found a newsletter to be an effective tool"

So make an effort to use your newsletter tool on your control panel and reap the benefits!!

We have focussed on this before but for the benefit of new clients.........now that website owners have so much more control over the look and feel of their sites thanks to content management, we thought we should flag up some important considerations you need to bear in mind when formatting text on your website if you are going to avoid putting visitors off contacting you, there are few things worse than finding a page with underlined italic bold red and blue text:

• Bold letters are considered to be the same as shouting AND SHOULD NOT BE USED
• Underlining is reserved for clickable links
• Italics are reserved for quotations and can distort on monitors
• Be consistent and avoid using different fonts and colours as it grates on the eye
• Keep content short and punchy so that it can be skip read, do not write epistles
• Get your sales message across
• Use bullet lists to break down long paragraphs

We have been running a machine in the office with the new Vista operating system for a few months now and here is our opinion so far:

Minuses:

• An upgrade installation on to a PC already running Windows XP takes hours and is fraught with problems as Vista does not always have drivers for all your hardware.
• On our PC we had to make some registry edits to get the CD/DVD drive working again, this is probably beyond the average home user who would then require to pay for technical assistance
• If you do not have a hefty graphics card a lot of the cute features such as the Aero desktop do not work, many laptops do not have upgradable graphics cards so this would be a problem.
• Some software needs to be updated to the latest version to work on Vista and this can be very time consuming
• You need at least 1Gb of RAM so many PCs will need some upgrade hardware

Pluses

• Vista is very smooth and stable
• The search and indexing features make it easy to find documents
• The interface is very intuitive and easy to use
• There are some good security features to prevent malware problems

So would we recommend an upgrade? No. If you are buying a new PC then get one with Vista installed but at the moment the upgrade process is not for the faint hearted. Wait until the bugs are sorted out and think about it again, but bear in mind you will probably need to upgrade the RAM and graphics cards on your machine to get it to run properly and this may not be worthwhile on older machines.

Spyware is one of the biggest threats on the Internet and we know of many customers and friends that have innocently had their computers infected with various bits of unwanted software that changes home pages and tracks keystrokes. Google did a recent survey and found that one website in ten had "ghost" software installed that could infect the computer of unwitting site visitors.

You can stop this happening to you with a good anti spyware program and there are many of them out there on the Internet available for free. One of the best we have found is Ad Aware and you can get a free download for personal use from their website www.lavasoftusa.com.

...if you could harness the power used by your brain, you could light up a 10-watt light bulb

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