As your website becomes more visible on search engines, you will soon become the recipient of various techniques designed to scam your business.

One common scam involves a booking or order placed through the website (or by email) for an unusually large dollar amount. The scammer typically insists on paying very quickly using a credit card. The order is later cancelled, and the scammer demands a refund; of course, the original credit card was stolen and the targeted business will suffer a chargeback after they have have refunded the money.

Be very wary of orders that come in which pass several of these tests:

• The order is “urgent”
• The order is unusually large
• The buyer wishes to pay quickly with a credit card or by cheque
• The buyer is from a country with which you do not frequently do business
• The buyer has a poor command of the English language

If you are unsure, telephone the buyer, and ask for some form of identification that can be cross-checked with the form of payment being used (for example, a driver’s licence that matches the name on the credit card.)

Make sure that when a customer does business with you through your website, you keep them informed about what’s going on. For example:

• If they fill out an enquiry form, let them know how long it will take for someone to get back to them
• If they make a booking, let them know if this can be considered confirmed or not, and advise what communication they should expect from you next and when
• If they made a purchase, send them an email when it has been confirmed, despatched, if there have been delays, etc.
• If they sign up for your newsletter, tell them when to expect the next issue

An informed customer is a happy customer!

Make a point of understanding what third-party software, if any, is running on your website. Where a perfectly suitable tool already exists, a web developer will rarely reinvent the wheel. Shopping carts, blogs and discussion forums are examples of common requests that a web developer might choose to implement using existing open source or commercial software.

But popular software is also targeted by hackers, so needs to be monitored more closely and kept up-to-date with security patches.

Ensure it is somebody’s responsibility to know what software is installed on your website and when it needs to be upgraded.

Your business has a backup strategy for its workstations, email, servers, etc. (Right?)

If your website has dynamic content (such as a blog or a shopping cart,) you need to ensure you have a backup of this data, too. You certainly don’t want to lose years of vital customer details because your website tripped and fell. Your web hosting provider most likely has backups, but you never want to rely on a single third party for something as critical as backups.

Discuss with your web developer options for backing up your website data to your office.

A Wiki is a type of website that allows multiple people to contribute and update content within a thematically related set of web pages. Wikipedia is an excellent example of a Wiki.

You can use a Wiki in your business as a collection of articles pertaining to parts of your business. The ease with which users can create new pages (articles) and correct out-of-date information within existing pages makes it an ideal tool for business policies, procedures, systems, training notes, manuals, meeting minutes and ideas.

By password-protecting the Wiki and defining a strict set of trusted users within your company who can contribute content, you can also maintain the security of this information.