Brilliant Thinking

or, “Is open source (e.g. Linux) more secure than proprietary (e.g. Windows)?”

Open source advocates say these platforms are more secure than commercial software because they are open. But Forrester think the biggest reason there haven’t been more hacker attacks on open source is the relatively small footprint these components have within the enterprise. It is not at all uncommon for a company to have 50 Windows servers, three Unix servers, and two Linux servers. So, which platform do you think hackers will target? Companies should not be lulled into a false sense of security with open source. It is open, available to anyone that wants to do harm, and, therefore, needs to have special attention with testing and security.

While it may also be true that Linux servers make up a large percentage of web servers on the Internet, these are not as strategic for hackers to attack as corporate or “higher profile” sites, at least so far … in other words, there are no pickpockets in the desert. If you look at some of the behind-the-scenes data for last Christmas’ script kiddie hacker festival - a time when security response is thought to be lower and so the number of scripted hack attacks occur on server installations - more Linux servers were “compromised” than Windows servers. Compromised can simply mean having a whole load of unwanted content dumped on them as a file share.

Another security issue suggests that since Open Source is “open”, although patch releases may be swift from the open source community in response to security holes being discovered, there is a higher likelihood that any of these patches may in fact be an exploit in disguise and cause more problems than it solves. At least with a proprietary system, only official patches are released which resolve the vulnerability, and these patches are usually applied automatically and require less human intervention to maintain the system, unlike Open Source patches which need higher technical knowledge and a physical presence to apply the patch.

See also “Does Open Source mean free?“.

from NetApplications

Microsoft Internet Explorer - 87.2 per cent
FireFox - 8.07 per cent
Safari - 2.13 per cent
Netscape - 1.50 per cent
Opera - 0.49 per cent
Mozilla - 0.5 2per cent
Other - 0.09 per cent

Yahoo! 20.8 billion vs Google 8.2 billion

But size isn’t everything The effectiveness of a search engine is not dictated solely by the size of its index, and most experts agree that Google still churns out the most accurate results, helping it to maintain a lead in terms of user figures globally.

More at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/09/yahoo_biggest/

Contents

After you have laid out your site and decided how the information is structured, where the navigation will go, and generally the layout of content on the page (all under the User Interface), it’s now time to paint the website’s canvas with the graphic design.

But what makes great graphic design? Eyecatching? Minimalist? Impactful? Pastels? Unobtrusive?

The truth is there is no magic bullet for great graphic design in the sense of the web. Being an art form, it’s impossible to wrap it up in scientific principle. However, whatever the design, it needs to be on-brand and reflect the personality of the company it represents and be effective and not distract the visitor from doing what they need to do.

When approaching a new design project, it’s important to look at other sites in the same market; if you design something so original that it’s not what people are going to expect when they visit your site next in the list of 350,000 they just got back from a search engine then they may dismiss your site as not as relevant to their search as they other 349,999 sites. That said, you must not also copy other sites designs; apart from copyright issues, it’s unoriginal and has the opposite effect of not differentiating your site from the crowd. Therefore, originality plays an essential part, but within the context of the market you are designing for.

There are other factors in the client’s brief which may affect the design choice and approach, the use of technologies such as Flash, and these need to be understood before embarking on the design work itself.

Once the context of the design is understood, it should be relatively straightforward for a good designer to create a good-looking and effective design for the website. Remember that if the designer is not asking about the context or plans to look at competitor sites, your design process could take a lot longer than you first expect.

In the next episode we’ll look at Application Development (aka the Site Engine).

Contents

The User Interface, or UI, is the communication between the computer and a human being, or in the case of the web the mechanism of communication between the website and the visitor. A “good” user interface can mean that the design fulfills a visitor’s expectations. A “bad” user interface only gives you few clues about where you are or what you’re supposed to do, leaving you with the sensation that you’re drowning and don’t know which way is up!

Since the user interface is what every user or visitor of your website experiences first, last and during their visit, it is imperative that you get it right. Unfortunately, it’s not a simple case of making it look pretty (although you can get away with that for 5 page marketing sites) and you have to take into account relevant information about your users (for example demographic and sociographic information) as well as how you want the website to translate their visit into something of value to both them and to you.

Another way to look at the user interface is as a tool for the website to translate the technical workings (the site engine) into a useable form for the site visitor. It’s an effective abstraction of technology into useable systems. A good UI should almost feel invisible to the end user, making the website or system almost effortless to use, but a poor UI will have the opposite effect and turn visitors away.

Poor UIs are most easily noticeable in highly functional sites, such as eCommerce or online (hotel) booking systems where low sales volumes often point to something wrong with the UI. The bottom line is that the more complex the technology, more effort and skill is required to hide or abstract the system from the user and make it easy to use despite the underlying complexity.

As an example, I was trying to find out the prices for a hotel for a business trip to Manchester recently, and I had to go through 4 separate pages of form filling before I was finally told that the dates were not available. As a result, no prices were displayed as prices are dynamically allocated based on availability, and I found that I had to go through all 4 pages again to guess other dates that might be available so that I could finally get the prices I needed. After about 4 attempts, I finally phoned the hotel and found out the information I needed and booked the room. So what was the point in the online booking system, and I wonder how many bookings they actually get from it?

In my case, I had flexibility in the dates I needed, but the system itself constrained me to working around it and insisting that dates were the be-all and end-all of the booking. It would have been nice to have a calendar on the site so that I could enter basic information like the type of room, occupancy and number of nights and see what was available during the period. I could then use the calendar tool to access the booking form for the relevant room or find out prices.

As you can see, with a little innovation and by offering the visitor options on how they want to interact with your technology, you can have a more successful user interface than just following convention and consequently increase conversions, sales or whatever your business goal for the system/website is.

In the next episode we’ll look at Graphic Design.