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April 2008

Backup or go bust!

We never cease to be amazed by the number of businesses that we work with who don't backup their data. Are you happy to risk your entire business on factors beyond your control? Imagine coming into work tomorrow morning and finding that everything has gone: could you continue running your business, or would you simply have to start from scratch, or - worse - call it a day? Hard disks use incredible technology to store billions of bits of data in a space smaller than a paperback book, but they aren't infallible - especially if they are stolen, reformatted by a disgruntled employee or destroyed in a fire!

We recommend that all our customers take half an hour to review their backup strategy. Data can be easily backed up on a daily or weekly basis to CD/DVD and taken offsite for extra security; online backup services are available; and cheap network hard disks can make the whole process fast and pain free.

Check your website meets web standards

As a quality web site developer we are amazed at the number of web sites that we see that don't meet basic web standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are a body who define the standards for the technology used on the internet; and they provide validators to help developers ensure that their sites DO meet these standards. So why don't some web site developers use them? Because they're lazy: they develop a site and if works in the latest version of Internet Explorer 7 they think they're finished. Sites that don't meet these standards are less likely to work across all internet browsers, and risk putting off search engines - such as Google - from indexing their sites, leading to a poor position in search engine results.

So, if you're looking for a web developer, make sure they validate their web site pages using the W3C validators. There are some circumstances (in advanced development) where you need to go beyond these standards, but at Web Sanity this is just one of many basic checks we perform on our web sites to ensure they deliver the best possible results for you.