This time one of my sites that makes me money got hacked. It is a pretty large site with hundreds of products. Gets only natural traffic. Yesterday I went to check on the site and found my index file had been defaced. These are the steps I took

• I logged in to my FTP program (Filezilla) and blew the site
• Went to my backup folder on my computer and uploaded all the files.
• I got it back to where it was 98%. (Some links are broken)
• It is up and running again. It took me 20 minutes to do this.

What I did not do was to check if only my index file was defaced or Iframe was injected. I learnt about Iframe only this morning. It is something very nasty.
“After they put the iframe code into that person’s pages, anyone visiting that site will be redirected to the hackers infection site, where the person’s computer will be injected and infected. The hackers are depending on site owners not knowing their sites have been hacked so that the number of hacked sites will grow (as they have starting in Italy) into the tens of thousands… Please don’t think you can depend solely on your antivirus software to protect your computer. It more than likely won’t help you. For $1000 dollars, the russian hacking bulletin boards are offering Mpack with 1 year support and a GUARANTEE that virus programs will not catch the keyloggers. SO, keep your virus program updated, but don’t depend on it completely!”  – This is from a digitalpoint thread.
Solution
If you are facing this problem and your administrator says it is only your account, just change the FTP password and it will stop. Just changing password is not complete solution but is the first step.

What next?  Your password is leaked that means your computer is sending out the passwords, so I would suggest you to do a clean format first and then install any antivirus of spyware which you think could block it. But the best solution is to clean format the computer.
Just do these two things:

1) Change the FTP or root password of server
2) Clean and format the PC

Things to do

• Always backup your files to local hard drive. (saves you a lot of pain)
• Keep your antivirus up to date.
• Use password generator and change password often and don’t use the same password for all sites
• Keep password secure

I use Roboform and Pareto antivirus to keep me up to date and I still got hacked! Got to step up my security.

• editing without needing to know HTML
• easy to update current events – takes a few minutes
• No uploading of files – like static HTML sites
• post-dating of articles so they can automatically “go live” in the future
• reader participation through comments
• organization of the content using tags – these are like signposts for search engines
• If you already have a site and are switching to WordPress you can retain the URL addresses
• easy addition of new functionality (because it is “open source”)
• free support by the very responsive developer and user communities
• Pinging facility – pings newsaggregators automatically
• You can add gazillions of plugins to add more functionality
• easy to integrate social media widgets – seamless with twitter, Digg etc
• Instant traffic – no waiting 3 months to see a few visitors
• So many free themes and custom themes to choose from
• Add image galleries videos very easily

What more do you want? It is one click installation if you use Hostgator.

I set up a review site last night for a product with WordPress. It is a simple 4 page site with some useful articles. Guess what this morning in my stats I saw 11 unique hits.! If I had done a static HTML site I am sure this would have taken about 2-3 weeks or more. Two keyword searches for the very specific product I was recommending. Now way HTML site can achieve this.

So if you are a small business owner and want some quick exposure online, some targeted traffic  contact me and I can set up a wordpress site for a very reasonable cost. I will train you to update your site and teach you basic SEO functions.

From my experience Google love WordPress.

I am in the process of updating a Wordpress manual I created a while ago. Hopefully I will finish it in a week or so. The manual is a couple of versions behind now.

The purpose of the manual is to help people quickly put up a simple self hosted wordpress site. This can be just for your blog or it can be a full fledged small business site or an affiliate site.

In the Wordpress Manual I will teach you how to

• Find a good hosting company to host your WordPress site
• Install WordPress on your hosting account.
• Upload a WordPress Theme (or template)
• Resources of where you can get free themes
• Custom themes
• Must have plug ins
• Writing copy
• Uploading files to remote server
• Inserting images
• embedding videos

And much more….

I will be asking a small price for this manual as I have put in many hours of work.  At a later stage I would like to set up a forum where people who have the manual can discuss the problems they face or solutions etc.

If you feel you are technically savvy enought to setup WorPress and build a website this manual will make it really easy with detailed screenshots and step-by-step guidance.

Watch this space.

I see a lot of searches in my stats with names of cities other than where I live (wellington). I have local clients and clients all over New Zealand.

With email and skype or phone it is so easy to get what you want these days. I have not met most of my customers face-to-face. They usually find me on Google and email me what thery want. I reply to them within a day. Then :-

• We narrow down the specs
• I give a quote
• They tell me if they are happy or not
• I request them to work on the content and images etc
• I start work on the look and feel
• I train them to use the CMS
• They start using the CMS to tweak copy and images

This process is so easy as they get access to the website on my server at once. All they do is log in and make changes. I also teach them to FTP files. They upload the images or PDF documents. How easy is that?

So yeah I do not have to be local to design your website and get it up and running!
Contact Me to get your website with CMS up and running in not time!