It is our pleasure to announce new changes, we have been working hard to maximise the potential of our search listings.

Today, 11^th November 2009, we have launched a completely redesigned search listings page that delivers further benefits and enhanced advertising for our customers.

Improvements to our listings include:

• Improved SEO, especially for Silver, Gold and Platinum

• Silver, Gold & Platinum promoted to the top of each page

• More real-estate for Silver, Gold and Platinum

• Customisable SEO Tags for your company listing

• Cleaner, more eye catching search results

• Icons to improve navigation

• Pricing remains the same!

New Look Listings
For more information about our update please read our blog post: Advertising just got better on The National Pages

Now grab the attention of potential clients by advertising with us now! We offer a range of advertising options to suit your needs and budget.

To find out more about our new release please refer to our developments page.

Click here to get in contact with us or call us for a FREE demonstration on 08456 219 219.

Kind regards
Chris Kennedy
Communications Manager

Today we have launched Platinum Nationwide advertising!

Introducing Platinum Nationwide advertising, a solution designed to give you more exposure and drive more traffic to your profile.  If you want your advert to be displayed for searches from ‘Aberdeen’ to ‘Aberystwyth’, then Platinum is for you!

Platinum listings are displayed for all locations in the UK within a given category. They will always appear at the top of the search page, sitting above Bronze, Silver and Gold adverts.

We are offering to create professional bespoke imagery for your listing and profile (included in price). Take a look at the examples shown right, under customised design.

Features of Platinum include:

• Advert displayed for all locations within chosen category
• Eye-catching advert designed for you
• Advert displayed at the top of the page
• FREE advertising in our e-newsletter

For example search for ‘Health & Safety Services’ in ‘Swindon’.
For more information on Platinum Membership please click here.

Platinum has only been released for less than 6 hours are we’re already getting inundated with enquires.

Interested?
Feel free to contact us for any additional information regarding pricing or how it works. We have a team here waiting to answer your questions.

Wanted: Meaningful overnight relationship. Find dating services in The National Pages http://bit.ly/1FPJIS #TNP1111

PCI Security: Small E-tailers Face Large Fines if Hacked

Article by Kerry Watson

Many small online merchants don’t understand much about the powerful technology behind their e-commerce store or how vulnerable this technology is to being hacked. We rarely read about a small merchant’s computer system being broken into, because the large ones are so much more spectacular. But some security experts now say it’s not a question of if you will be hacked, it’s when.

The Pain of Non-compliance

Small merchants with on-site credit card processing who are hacked and have not put PCI standards in place can be fined $20 to $30 for each stolen card number (up to $500,000). If the breach is large, they may also be required to undergo a forensic audit (the cost of which starts at $10,000), be subject to more stringent standards than other stores of their size and may be sued. In addition to the horrors of dealing with the original breach, this is enough to effectively wipe out any small merchant.

By using off-site credit card processing, small merchants may avoid many of the hassles and security risks of on-site processing, because the merchant never touches the credit card information.

A Little Background Info

PCI (Payment Card Industry) Data Security Standards (DSS) are designed to be a baseline minimum standard for credit card security. The standard emerged in 2004 when five separate programs (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express and JCB) were combined into a single standard. The group first turned its attention to large retailers processing many millions of transactions per year, dubbed Level 1 to Level 3 retailers.

Small Merchants Now in the Spotlight

Last year the standards council began addressing the Level 4 Merchants who represent the vast majority of online payment transactions. If your online store falls into this group, at a minimum you will be required to complete an annual PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire and a quarterly network scan.

Level 4 small merchants are defined as those with fewer than 20,000 Visa transactions, and fewer than 1,000,000 total transactions per year. Most small vendors will fall into this category.

Beginning October 1, 2009, credit card processors and their agents who accept Visa will begin de-certifying all vulnerable payment applications. This means many small merchants will suddenly receive notices that they can no longer accept credit cards unless they have begun steps toward PCI security compliance. The de-certifications must be completed within one year. The time to take action is now, before your store is de-certified.

What is PCI DSS?

The PCI DSS or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a security process to help you identify all parts of your business that are vulnerable to theft. This ranges from how you dispose of and retain paper records, how your network is set up, and how you transmit and store credit card and other personally identifiable information online.

The easiest way for small businesses to begin compliance is to switch to an off-site, third-party credit card processor and to store no personally identifiable information on your Web site.

Short-form Compliance for Small Businesses with Off-site Processing

In an off-site, third-party credit card processor scenario, your customers temporarily leave your Web site, enter their credit card information on the processor’s site, and then automatically return to your online store afterward to complete the non-financial portion of the transaction. Third-party credit card processor companies include 2CheckOut, PayPal and the recent entrant, CRE Secure by the open source e-commerce maker CRE Loaded.

This group of businesses is required to complete a short, 11-question Self-Assessment Questionnaire A. This can be completed in about five minutes.

Questionnaire A is for merchants who do not store, process or transmit financial information on their premises. The risk of losing customer financial data on your Web site with this group is zero because you do not maintain that info, but the short questionnaire and affidavit is a formality that must be completed each year for record-keeping purposes. You must still maintain good practices with paper and other records.

Merchants who fall into this category also may or may not be required to do a quarterly PCI scan of their system, depending on their credit card processor.

– end article –

The National Pages is defined as a level 4 Retailer with fewer than 20,000 Visa transactions and fewer than a total of 1 million online credit transactions per annum. We use the secure off-site, third-party credit card processing services of Barclaycard Business.

We are certified compliant to the PCI DSS Level 4 standard which is a legal requirement from 1st October 2009.

We are exhibiting at The Business Growth Show, Warwickshire County Cricket Club this Thursday.

Enquire about our Gold Membership and find out how The National Pages can generate leads for your business!

It would be great if you could drop by and we can demo all the latest features.

We would love to hear your comments and we hope to see you there!

Twitter and Facebook were both victims of a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack on 6th August which effectively meant both systems could not be used because of high impact (malicious) usage by a large number of third-parties.

A DoS attack is not an attempt to introduce a virus or cause permanent damage to the software. It is normally just simply a large number of computers programmed to issue  an excessive number of hits on a website or application (twitter) beyond the servicing capability of the servers it runs on. This means the website will run extemely slowly or crash due to overload of its resources (e.g memory).

Denial-of-Service (DoS), or Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), attacks are occasionally made by hackers just to prove they have the power to inflict damage on large companies, often banks, credit card gateways and global institutions. Sometimes it’s an ego-trip. However, the attack yesterday was different in that it was used to prevent blogging by a critic of the Russsian Government.

The traditional press (e.g. newspapers) usually love these stories as it demonstrates how emerging (Social) Media technology can still be still unreliable.

It makes a good story as millions of people worldwide are denied access to an application that has become an integral part of their lives, the ability to share news, photos, gossip and perform business. Not often are millions of people impacted worldwide by a single incident.

We, The National Pages, were affected to a very small degree. Our Home Page has a live twitter feed where we use an API (Application Programming Interface) where we automatically publish our twitter posts (tweets on www.twitter.com/tnpd) on our Home Page. Our customers like this as it means the last five tweets we publish are easier to see on our page than perhaps lost among thousands of other tweets (unless you click directly to our Profile page twitter.com/tnpd).

How were we affected?
The API (realtime extract of twitter data) received a timeout which is where a response is not received within a certain expected time. This caused an error message at the top of our home page (“twitter api not responding”).

Not serious stuff. However it doesn’t look good as visitors may think it’s something we’ve got wrong. All is not lost, we can address the timeout with a more friendly message on our twitter post area on our Home Page, something like ‘twitter is currently experiencing a delay. Call back later’.

Who performed the Denial of Service attack?
First, these things are difficult to track down. It is illegal in the UK for a computer system to issue a DoS attack. On the face of it, fair enough, but say your computer were, unknown to you, issuing the DoS attacks due to a virus your anti-virus software had not detected?

Today’s media allege that the DoS attack was orchestrated by Russia hackers to deny an outspoken Georgian critic of the Russian Government, known as Cyxymu, from having his posts read on twitter. Facebook confirmed that Cyxymu was the focus of the attack.

Interesting … to suppress free speech on the internet hackers are bringing down the vehicles (twitter and Facebook) designed to allow free speech in the first place. Where does this end?

Search for PR Agencies in Somerset

Announcement – free blogging service for Gold customers

The National Pages recognises that our customers don’t always have the time (or website infrastructure) to publish an informative article (blog) about their expertise in their business.

Many customers don’t have websites with blog pages and therefore are missing out on the marketing benefits a blog can bring.

A blog allows you to show your specialist knowledge in your business and brings added credibility. A well written article often delivers subtle and subliminal advertising of your business services as opposed to a full-on marketing material where readers will know it’s biaised.
Furthermore, a blog written (or published) by a third party adds that element of real or perceived endorsement which can add more weight.

For our Gold customers, we offer a free blogging service on our popular blog pages. Articles should be written as informative (non-sales) articles in specialist subjects. We will link them to your Gold Profile to give visitors access to more information, which in turn links to your website (and helps your SEO).

Ideally we’d like blog articles “oven-ready” for publication. However, providing we receive reasonably well prepared information then we will use our copywriters to hone the published blog.

In addition we use twitter to draw attention to our blogs and give Gold customers even more free advertising!

An example of a customer blog is the article on Glutathione benefits written by Jeremy Townsend of Picture of Health

If you’re a Gold customer just email us through your articles and we’ll do the rest. Another benefit for our Gold customers on The National Pages!

Search for:
Copywriters in Exeter
Search Engine Optimisation in Bristol

There’s a lot of discussion happening about the need for company websites to withdraw support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).

IE6 not supported by Facebook

The IE6 Browser was launched in 2001 and uses out of date technology that means many websites simply do not display properly (break).
The way round this is for website designers to have to put complex special instructions (hacks) into websites to ensure they display properly on IE6.
This creates an expensive overhead for every company who is concerned visitors cannot see their products and services and would perceive the company has not made proper investment in a working website.

However, it’s not that simple, as a lot of modern Internet technology just simply is not compatible with a browser written in 2001.
Here are a few examples where IE6 does not fully supporting technology used by many modern websites, including social media sites like Facebook and Twitter:

• Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) technology is designed to display websites on different devices.
• PNG transparency – not supported for .png images
• Security – IE6 has many security weaknesses exploited by phishing websites and viruses

Many larger companies have withdrawn support for their websites working on IE6. Rather than deal with complex programming issues for an increasingly smaller audience not willing (sometimes not able) to upgrade to a modern browser (e.g. IE7, IE8, FireFox, Chrome, Safari) they have denied visitors access to their website if they’re running IE6, as shown above on Facebook.

IE6 did a great job back in 2001 however, understandably, it cannot support new technology and trends delivered many years after its launch (a crystal ball would have been handy!). That’s why Microsoft brought out IE7 and IE8 and other organisations like Mozilla brought out new Browsers like FireFox.
However, new browsers don’t just solve the problem. There are many users who run computer systems with IE6 and reluactant or unable to upgrade from IE6.

There’s a movement IE6 Must die! where websites are refusing to support the IE6 browser and forcing users to upgrade. By collective force this may be the way to deal with the issue. Rather than the web industry pass on the expense of supporting outdated technology, it obliges users to download more modern browsers. Given they’re free then the cost is effort and not financial.

In January 2009 less than 20% of Browser users were using IE6, however that’s still almost 1 in 5. For those of you who like statistics check out the IE6 must die  blog on Limulus.

The National Pages continues to support IE6, however there will be certain advanced features like animation where IE6 simply cannot be fully supported. We encourage all our visitors to upgrade to newer browsers.

If you want to know more about IE6 issues with websites ask for expert opinion from some of our Gold Profile customers:

Image Line Communications in London
Dotsquares Brighton
Zedoary Design Southampton
Cracking Media Bournemouth
Wetdog Creative Oxford
Simplicity in Marketing Banbury
MCC Group Cardiff

Note! These are but a few web design companies who have upgraded to Gold – check out web design companies in your local area

We all know Google is in competition with Microsoft, now the gloves are off!

8th July 2009 Google announced plans to launch its own Operating System (OS) later in 2009. It’s aimed initially to run on netbooks, which are smaller laptops designed primarily for internet access.

It’s called Google Chrome OS. The Google Chrome Browser has been well received by the Browser community with over 30 million using it since its launch in September 2008. Of course, The National Pages has been designed and tested to run on it.

Microsoft is getting into the Search Engine market and 3/6/09 launched its new Search Engine, Bing, which they claim surpasses Google where  40% of search queries go unanswered.

So now, it’s what we were expecting … Google is taking on the stranglehold that Microsoft has on the Operating System.

There’s a great cartoon we found by Italian cartoonist Federico Fieni. Is it pure coincidence the colours in the Google logo are the same as Windows logo? Interesting eh?

The design process for Google Chrome OS logo?

Here’s an extract from the Google blog published 7/7/09

“We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

If you’re interested in more information on Google Chrome or emerging trends then check out the thoughts from some of the Web Design companies on The National Pages, including:

Duck on Water in Cirencester
East Devon IT in Exeter
Creative Rush in Swindon
D-View Solutions in Gloucester
Cognique in Somerset
MCC Group in Cardiff
Somerset Web Services in Taunton
Convallis Software in Devon
Irun Business Intelligence in Newbury
Zedoary in Southampton
Cracking Media in Bournemouth

these are just a few of our Gold Web Design customers, there are many more … just click on the Gold Profiles!

For your local specialist click web design and select your location.

Lakewood Conference centre hosted a great summer networking party on 25th June 2009 to raise funds for Children’s Hospice SouthWest which was our chosen charity for our Exeter launch June 2008.

It was great to see our customers there including:

Lakewood Conference Centre Bristol
Marsh Barton Security Services Exeter
Convallis CRM Software Devon
Secured Opening Systems Somerset
Cooper Bradbury Business Consultants Somerset
TelePA Telephone Answering Services Somerset

An auction of many business services was held to raise funds for the Childrens Hospice SouthWest and around £ 1,000 was raised.
We successfully bid for, of all things, an organic rhythm (40) drum circle training session kindly donated by Organic Rhythm of Somerset

Everyone at The National Pages is ready for the drum banging! We hope to show you a video of just how good (bad?) we are at drumming. Eat your heart out Ringo.

The evening was rounded out by a great band, Limited Edition, headed up by lead guitarist Matt Richardson of Chorus IT offering IT Support Services in Bristol

Tara Gillam, Business Development Manager of Lakewood Conference Centre organised a great evening that everyone enjoyed to the overall benefit of the Childrens Hospice SouthWest.