Just got notified from a client who noticed several orders in her store failed to go through - she uses Authorize.net as her payment processor. It’s 8:00am PST and we just verified that indeed, you can’t get to Authorize.net. Found this discussion about Authorize.net being down, allegedly due to a fire, but I can’t confirmed this. Here’s another posting about Authorize.net being down.

We called the number here:

10800 NE 8th St, Suite 600
Bellevue, WA 98004
Tel: 425-586-6000

But the recording said they were closed for the holiday.

UPDATE: 7/3/09 8:24am

We’ve tried unsuccessfully to contact Wells Fargo and whenever they transfer us to Authorize.net, the line is busy. We did manage to reach a Wells Fargo person who said they have been in contact with Authorize.net this morning and that there was some kind of power outage. The representative said she didn’t know when they could be back up.

UPDATE: 7/3/09 8:27am

From http://twitter.com/authorizenet

We apologize for this disruption and ask for your patience as we work with the team at our datacenter to restore service.

We are down due to a fire at our primary data center in Seattle. We are working to restore services, but no ETA at this time.

UPDATE: 7/3/09 11:13am

My client tells me that her Authorize.net is back up and her online store is working again.

From http://twitter.com/authorizenet

Transactions are up except for Global processing and Concord. No ETA on those, but we are working on in.

I am frequently contacted by folks looking for small business web design. My business is hopping, so I can afford to be a bit picky when selecting which clients I will and won’t work with. For those of you who are shopping for a web designer, I wanted to share with you the 10 most common things that will cause me to turn down a job.   I know this isn’t unique to web design. Have the following happened to you?

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All of the credit for this blog article goes to one of my clients who received this inquiry and did her own investigation to conclude it was a scam. This is apparently known as the “Asian Domain Registration Scam” and the company or person is attempting to trick people into registering domain names they don’t need. My client received an email from the NTWifiNetwork.com that claimed to be concerned that another person in Asia was trying to register the .com version of her domain as .cn (China), .hk (HongKong), .asia (Asia), etc. So if her business was bluewidgets.com, their was an alleged person trying to register bluewidgets.cn, bluewidgets.hk, and so forth, and the email was saying “hey, there’s someone else out there trying to register your domain name and if you don’t do anything in 5 days, we’ll process his application”. The email is posted below:

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Every once in a while, I run into an issue and get ready to bang my head on my desk. But today, just before I did that, I Googled a problem I was having and was so very delighted with the solution I found, I wanted to give them a link with thanks. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a client contact me today because she wanted to let folks know about her experience with SuperPages.com and her pay-per-click campaign. If you have a Pay-Per-Click campaign with SuperPages.com, and you’ve paused that campaign to avoid getting charged, please read this article.

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I just read about this. If you have a Facebook account, I highly recommend clicking on the link and watching the video from WebCastr.com:

“Computer security specialists warn that Facebook users have been hit with a series of data-stealing attacks in the past week as cyber crooks increasingly stalk social-networking websites. This attacked is called 419 Scam.”

Here’s the link: http://webcastr.com/videos/informational/facebook-cyber-crooks-target.html

Anytime someone contacts you via the internet asking for money, whether it’s via email or via a social networking site like Facebook, it’s a good idea to be skeptical and attempt to verify directly with the individual - even if the individual is someone you think you know.

Like many of my blog articles, this one is written based on one of my client’s experiences that I’m hoping others won’t repeat. She has an online real estate tools website that helps real estate agents improve their marketing. She decided to outsource her search engine optimization (SEO) to a company she found on Biznik. After paying money to this company and waiting a month for the work to occur, she asked me to review what they had done. This article will focus on the link building portion of that work. Based on my investigation, I believe this is an excellent example of a link building scam.

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I had a prospective client ask me the following question: “Should I trademark my domain name?”. I had no idea. But I knew who to ask: my local Seattle trademark attorney, Jefferson Coulter.

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I wrote an article about a bad experience I had with Citysearch in January of 2007 and since that time, have received many comments from readers detailing their experiences with Citysearch. Due to my bad experience, I haven’t had any interaction with Citysearch until recently, when one of their account executives (a salesperson) contacted me via email with an offer. Unfortunately, this experience wasn’t pleasant for me either. (As you read this article, which is lengthy, please understand that in my former pre-webdesigner life, I was a Directory of Quality for a fortune 500 company - and part of my job was to improve customer satisfaction and prevent engineers from cutting corners on quality. This perspective and past experience greatly influences my strong desire to help small business owners avoid getting caught up in online marketing schemes.)

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You know how when people are on vacation, they tend to be more trusting of other people than they would be in their own city? I think that Biznik and other social networks have a similar effect. People who use Biznik (including myself) are typically using it to network with other people in their region. It’s a friendly place where users post smiling photos and information about their businesses. Everyone is nice and happy to offer you free advice. But don’t let down your guard, because the bad guys are on Biznik too.

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I ran into an issue the other day with one of the browsers that I use to check websites I develop. I had installed Internet Explorer 6 (yes, my web stats shows that 8% of my visitors use IE 6) and it stopped working. On this particular operating system, I hadn’t installed another web browser. So I was stuck. I needed to reinstall IE6, but without a working browser to download it again, I was faced with the icky task of reinstalling the entire operating system. But then I found a solution.

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How safe is it to store private and sensitive information in an online database?

Well, I’m no security expert, not by a longshot.

But I wanted to share a recent experience with a prospective client who was using an online database to store some of his business information and hopefully it might help you avoid some very unpleasant consequences. In this case, no harm was done and the sensitive information was destroyed - but it could have been much, much worse.

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One of my fabulous clients forwarded me an spam SEO email she received the other day from Marc Shneider, Ph.D. from Global Vibrations in Washington DC and in the course of investigating it, I found some amazing things I wanted to share with you small business website owners who are looking to hire someone to do SEO for your website.

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My website clients often want to be able to send out newsletters to their customers. Sending out newsletters without being labeled a spammer is tricky business. Many folks opt to use a monthly fee-based service like Constant Contact or My Emma, which send out emails using their own mail servers.  But if you have an ECT online store,  you can utilize a “mod” from ECT Modifications called Advanced News Letter that costs around $25 (one time charge). It sends out emails from your website using your ECT online store program.  This article explains how to send out email using this particular mod.

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If you, or your a member of your family uses a file sharing program to share things like music, with others - better watch this video from MSNBC. Apparently it’s easy for identity thieves to get into your computer via these programs and get access to all kinds of person info, like tax returns. Very scary stuff - I highly recommend you watch the video I’ve embedded.

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This seems to be the month for search engine related spam emails. One of my clients just forwarded this one to me, and it’s unique in that their website doesn’t function at all. While the email does have a domain based email address, I found it odd they didn’t list their website in their signature. Read on to find out why.

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Today one of my clients forwarded me a spam email she received from “Victoria Ulter - Business Development / Marketing” and when I read the address, it sounded  familiar: “6556 Mother Load Dr”. Why did this sound familiar? Well, it’s because it’s the same address as was listed in the Valerie Zalburn spam mail. Once again, let’s review how to identify spam: no company name, no company address or phone, no company website and a generic return email address (like this one had vulter@autoemailsystem48.com).

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I’ve just gotten a PayPal phishing email, one that tries to trick people into disclosing their pay account login information. If you get this email, delete it!

Subject: Live IP Verification
From: PayPal (return address is check@mail.com)
Reply-To: noreply@mail.com
To: undisclosed-recipients

We noticed one or more login attempts from a foreign IP address.

Log In now to resolve the problem.

The link goes to: http://windowmevision.co.za/live/read.php which of course isn’t PayPal, in fact, it’s a website that is redirected to: http://sa-in.com/catalog/images/.live/id.htm and this website has duplicated PayPal’s logon screen.

Again, this is NOT a PayPal website, it’s a phishing scam.

You can report fake PayPal emails here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/securitycenter/antiphishing/PPPhishingReport-outside

And fake PayPal websites here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_external-webform&f=pps_spf

This website is still live, so the more folks that report it, the better.

Lately I’ve been on a mission to get my business certified as a green web design company. As part of that effort, I have been doing research online into how exactly to accomplish this. I wound up on one online store that looked legitimate and I started to purchase carbon offsets. I quickly lost trust in the online store and wanted to share with you the red flags I found.

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Great news for those of you who have competitors who you think might be spaming Google Map listings (adding more than one listing for a single business): a representative of Google Maps has just emailed me with a new private form!

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