Business website terms can be important to an E-business website

Does a business need an E-business website?

Many new business website owners falsely believe that every small business website is automatically an e-business website. Most small business websites don't require fully functional e-business features. Conducting your business online, can expose both the seller and buyer to many security risks. If your business is not careful to protect your customer's private or financial information, you could be needlessly exposing yourself to serious problems. Nearly 90% of all customers who buy online goods or services, are still concerned about the security issues of conducting e-business transactions. Do it right, or don't do it at all!

Important business terms information

Important E-business website terms defined and explained

The World Wide Web or WWW was conceived and designed to provide fully accessible PUBLIC INFORMATION. The method by which this public information comes to your computer screen is call HTTP (hyper text transfer protocol). This allows anyone with a web browser, connected to the internet, to access all the information in all the public files on the web. Private information should never be available on publicly accessible webpages!

E-business, E-commerce and E-tail all describe online business transactions. Although the rewards of e-business can be enormous, so can the risks! The small business website owner MUST protect their customers from fraud, identity theft and exposure to other criminal elements. Your e-business survival will depend on how well you protect your customer. (see Security issues and Privacy Issues)

Any attempt to "disguise" the real or common meaning of words or numbers could be called "encryption." The degree of complexity determines the quality of that encryption. All good encryption methods used in e-commerce transactions use 128 bit encryption to "disguise" the information being transmitted, over a secure (single port, https) connection.

Good Encryption is NOT a guarantee of complete privacy and security. How "people" distribute and protect sensitive data is far more important. The really vulnerable time for sensitive information? After your customer gives it to you and you store it on your company computer! Technology advances allow criminals to attack data and databases with alarming regularity. Protecting your customers' personal and financial information, is YOUR responsibility. No encryption code is completely unbreakable. 40 bit encryption was supposed to be completely secure, too!

Like many terms or buzzwords, an online business is a frequently misused term. Any information, from any small business website that was retrieved from the www via a computer (online), was from an online business source. This may have nothing to do with an online payment, which would be an e-business transaction.

Going online with your business promotion ( a website) is now a necessity for most small businesses. It should not be confused with doing business on-line (Caution about e-commerce).

E-commerce is still in it's infancy. As with any cutting edge technology growing pains are inevitable. Although the terminology used in e-commerce would lead the public to believe that every transaction is simple and absolutely safe, its not quite so (yet).

Ecommerce payments will soon become the "normal method" for most business transactions. When the banking industry and government regulators can agree on all the legal requirements for open, instant money transfer, it will reach the status of "very simple and safe." Until then, most business websites are simply relying on private companies to safeguard their customers' information (and money)! Your website can probably avoid the full e-commerce website risks and still be a very profitable (commercial) website.

In the "Information Age," downloading information is a great way to get digital products (programs, games and How-to books) instantly. For a small business dedicated to providing digital information, understanding how your customer can pay for and download your product is very important. Many businesses can benefit by also providing service or product information as a "download" that their customers can store on their personal computer.

Downloading information can create security problems for anyone not familiar with the safeguards. Making a downloadable file available to your customers should always be accompanied by detailed instructions on how to do so safely. Providing webpage information as a Plain Text or .pdf (portable document format) file, is also a safe download method.

"Who" manages and maintains your ebusiness website is a critical decision. Conducting business online requires attention to the details. Information management is a key issue for ebusiness websites. You can certainly manage or "webmaster" a small business website. Conducting ebusiness, usually requires the services of a highly competent webmaster.

Webmaster information is available from many sources. Caution should always be exercised when deciding who will manage your website.

The webhosting service provider is an important component to every business website. Many hosting services are simply resellers for major hosting service providers and do not have any control over the server (s). Avoiding Free hosting service providers is a must for any small business website. If you don't take your business website seriously, why should your customers (or search engines)? It's "free," because you agree to allow the hosting service to sell advertising space on your website. You have little or no control over the ads.

Webhosting Services are available from many providers. Ebusiness websites should only be hosted by high quality service providers. Security and control are far more important than cost. Paying a good hosting service to protect your visitors (customers) and your site's integrity, is critical to your success. Search engines also recognize the value of good hosting services and will rank your webpages accordingly.
See also ( secure sockets ) for important information.

Search engine optimization has been given a bad reputation because of the actions of unethical, or Black hat optimizers, using techniques that are intended to trick search engines into giving web pages a high ranking position. These people are not SEO professionals, they're simply spammers and con-artists. At best, any search engine ranking increases that you might realize with a black hat method, are short term. Confusion about good and bad optimization is common, even among search engines. There are even sites that will tell you how to use Black Hat Seo tricks, so buyer beware! Your site could be banned from search engines for using these techniques. Link farms are another Black Hat trick. These methods are also known as spamdexing and are completely useless in the long term.

Black Hats will get your site de-indexed. The methods change as search engine technology evolves, but the results remain the same. Once a search engine determines that you have produced another spam site, getting it back in the index can be a costly and time consuming process. Search engines have become very good at spotting sites that use tricks instead of good business information.

White hat seo is what good, ethical search engine optimization is all about. Information content, site and page structure, navigation and accessibility features as well as link building effects every website's performance.

White Hats will get you noticed by search engines and new customers, at the same time. Good SEO is mostly about good information and avoiding the mistakes that keep your website from becoming highly ranked. Good links help. White hat SEO creates a user friendly website.

E-business website terms summary

Every small business website does NOT need to be an e-commerce website. E-commerce is a specialized website service and should be carefully considered and researched before your website design mistakes cost you your entire business! "Ecommerce" and "etail" sites should only be designed, built, hosted and maintained by professional business website service providers.

• More business website terms:
• Basic website terms
• Common website terms
• Definitions of website terms
• Important website terms
• Website terminology
• See also:
• Business website design Questions
• What is SEO?
• Believing website myths can be expensive

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