Can an email sent from an employee to a client be classed as legally binding?

Many organisations give wide open use of the company email to an employee. There is often no checks in place to ensure email is used properly and for the good of the company.

There have been many cases where an email sent from an employee to a client or even to another employee has become legally binding.

One that springs to mind is the employee who emailed their manager to ask for an extension to the holiday form deadline. The manager replied by email ‘yep, no problem’, but then the company turned down the holiday form when it was presented late. This was deemed as wrong and the reply of the manager was legally binding.

So what can you do?

1) Add a disclaimer to all your email signatures. This must be uniform across the whole organisation and always used, even when replying to incoming email.

2) Publish an email usage policy. This should be issued to every employee (perhaps as part of the company handbook). It should clearly detail the way the email should be used and implications if it is not used properly.

3) Walk the talk. Use your own email properly and encourage others to do the same.

D.

Companies that provide search engine optimisation often charge hundreds or thousands of pounds to acheive the magical number 1 spot for your chosen keyword.

Tremendous - but not for small businesses. Small businesses do not have the money to support vast search engine campaigns so they miss out.

Well - many do. The few that get suckered in to signing on the dotted line are presented with an array of keyword phrases that are then shoe horned into their website pages.

These keywords provide the search engines with the meat on which they will rank the page. Get the keywords right and it’s a winner. Sounds so simple - and here lies the con.

On the face of it, search engine optimisation is simple. It’s a carefully mapped out process to implement and monitor over a period of months.

Search engine companies can easily pick 10, 20, 30 or more high ranking keywords to use. They can put them into your pages and they can submit the site to the search engine.

And here’s the bit that annoys me.

Once the site is submitted, the search engine company can do absolutely nothing and still take the money. Why?

Because the process is self-policing. They can cut the figures any which way they like to prove anything they like. They are the experts so the client has to believe them or why did they bother employing their services in the first place?

Very frustrating. I know of several search engine companies (one employs over 120 people) that work on this stealth technique and can string clients along for several months very successfully.

That’s the bad news … now here’s the good news.

Over the years, I’ve being monitoring and implementing various search engine optimisation techniques on our own websites. I’ve found out what works and what doesn’t.

And, more importantly, the system is completely open book. It can be easily monitored by the client and nothing can be hidden.

This is our test site:

Public Speaking Advice

Here’s how it ranks for some of the 90 or so keyword phrases:

Free Anniversary Toasts

Graduation Toasts

Public Speaking Jokes

Funny Speeches

Free Best Man Sample Speeches

Instant Best Man Speech

Public Speaking Advice

After you’ve reviewed the ranking on the above links, please take away three things:

1) They are a wide variety of keyword phrases.

2) Each one is delivering a small proportion of traffic, but is ranking high in the search engine.

3) The results are there for you to see. Nothing is hidden.

The site is currently getting over 8,000 unique visitors per month. And these visitors are spread across the whole of the keyword phrases.

If you want to chat about how this could work on your website, please call 0870 486 2995. I’d be happy to help.

Regards,
D.

I had to chuckle when I read this article

Click Here

With the launch of Microsoft Windows Vista (the latest operating system), came the confident statement that Vista represented a major step forwards in secure computing.

Less than four months later, the first patch appears. Hmmm… not perfect after all.

As I write web software, I know the feeling. With the best will in the World, you think you’ve covered everything and produced a brilliant script - and then someone uses it.

This is always the acid test. Users will generally hit it every which way they can until it breaks - figuratively speaking of course.

Being bombarded from every angle always highlights weaknesses and this is exactly what has happen to Windows Vista.

Naturally the Vista audience and therefore the potential for finding the weaknesses is greater which means the problems have more impact.

With our web software the problems are usually smaller, but still require the same amount of commitment to get them sorted. Once a problem or weakness is highlighted, users will swarm around it like moths around a lightbulb. It will become their main focus - this is why we sort them quickly. To reduce user stress (and our stress!).

D.

It struck me how easy it is to become complacent about data security.

Everyone has multiple passwords, PIN numbers and ’secret’ words they have to remember which, I’m afraid to say, are mostly stored on paper or in a non-secure document (normally Word or a plain text file).

Barmy really. Even with a low level password, a criminal could gain access to some very serious data and potentially cause havoc.

So what is data security and how do you use it to protect your data?

Data security is the process of locking/ encrypting /hiding/ disguising important information to prevent it being accessed and read.

This could apply to any kind of information from passwords through to entire documents.

It would be quick and easy just to type the information into a Word document and save it - ready for use.

But it’s not very secure and the information could easily go astray.

It is much better to encrypt the data so that it cannot be read without using a master password. Encryption is a technique that substitutes the correct text with a code. The code is produced using an algorithm to make it extremely difficult to crack. This means that only a master password (’key phrase’) can decrypt the information.

It is very safe and should be used for all critical information.

Here are a couple of useful sites that offer encryption programs:

http://www.pgp.com/

http://www.truecrypt.org/

If you need more information, please give us a call 0870 486 2995.

Regards,
D.