Our information’s security can be based on two main points. The first one is to protect our personal data and our privacy. We are going to give you some tips about them that may help you keep your information safely:

•    Use access passwords for all your devices so you will make it more difficult for strangers to access to your information related to you or to the products you sell.

•    These passwords should be complicated, that is, try to avoid using your birthday or the name of your pet as password and try to mix capital letters and lower case, some numbers and any of the ‘strange’ characters like $ or #.

•    If you need some kind of raw material for your activity, when you use e-commerce, for example, always access to safe web sites (https) and never make a payment through other pages.

•    Also avoid making payments in hotels, bars or restaurants where the Wi-Fi may not be completely trustworthy. Only do it when you know in advance that it is completely safe.

•    Please never give any personal information that you are asked for in an email or through a phone call. If you suspect that the call could be authentic, call to the company yourself and ask them if they are doing any kind of telephone campaign asking for this information to users.

•    Another option is to encrypt the information we send through email. There has been lately much advance in this sense and there are several programmes that allow us by means of mathematical algorithms to encrypt and decrypt messages to avoid your information being accessed by strangers.

•    It is also important to back up your information in your personal devices. This way you will avoid losing your contacts list, high-quality photos of our own products or any relevant information about you or your business.  

•    We also recommend you save your files in the cloud. The advantage here is that you are not saving the information in your mobile phone or in your computer. In the case your device’s information was in the risk of being stolen, you would have your data externally saved and would have easy and quick access to it.

•    Do not store your security passwords in your devices. If someone accessed to your data through your computer, it would be the same as giving them your house keys.

•    In the social networks, personalize the information you share with the rest of users. Do not make certain information public like where you live, your birthdate or where you work. It is as well important to watch your online reputation. 

•    Verify your privacy settings frequently as they usually change in social networks and you will need to adjust them to new clauses. 

•    Do not accept unknown people in your social networks. It may sound good to say you have many friends, but you do not really know them and least their intentions. If you want to have many ‘friends’ you can create different groups of friends to distinguish your real friends, with whom you will share your experiences, from the other ‘friends’. Other solution would be to have different profiles and give them different purposes to avoid problems.

We are going to give you some tips for personal safety and also safety for your devices that help you avoid certain problems:

•    Update your programmes to avoid being a hackers’ target. Normally the programmes we have installed in the computer offer updates to improve the shortcomings the programmes’ authors find out. As long as you can, update your programmes and if you can, you should automate them so you do not have to keep an eye on this issue.

•    Always use an antivirus programme and a firewall so that you avoid people getting to your system and filter virus or install spy programmes. 

•    Be careful when it comes to open attached files to emails or to WhatsApp messages, above all when they come from unknown sources. It is easy that your device is infected with some malware through this kind of files.

•    It is also very important to have installed anti malware programmes that detect malicious programmes, not detected by normal antivirus programmes. For example, Malware bytes Anti-Malware can be found on the link https://www.malwarebytes.com/. It has a free and a paid version.

•    When you change your device, make sure you do not leave any sensitive personal information in the hard disk of your old device. You can either degauss it, shred it or use any programme designed to delete the existing information in your hard disk. Another option is to return it to its default configuration so no one will have access to the information you had saved there.

•    Once we stop using our devices it is advisable to turn it off and avoid unauthorised access.

•    Activate the remote location. In case of loss or theft, you will be able to know the exact location of your device through another of your devices, as long as the lost one is on.

•    Disable the bluetooth. Even though it offers many advantages it also makes your device more vulnerable to lose efficiency. It is not enough with ‘invisible mode’ to be safe, we should have it completely off.

•    You should block your devices after some time without using them. Most of tablets and mobile phones have this option. This helps us in case we lose the device so no one will have access to our personal data. 

•    Be very careful with the apps you install. Not only can they slow down the device, but also they can access to your personal information in the background or even share your location through GPS from your mobile phone or tablet. 

•    If any of the owner company of our social networks’ profiles suffers any attack, the first thing you have to do is to change your access password. Then verify if you could have been affected or if your data may have been accessed. If we had some sensitive information like bank account details, we’d better make contact with our bank and in case it is necessary, cancel our cards and get a new one. This way those accounts will automatically stop being active and won’t be used fraudulently.

When it comes to commercialize our craft goods or services, it is easy that we face technological problems. We are going to skip basic problems and we are going to list another series of problems we can find and how to solve them.

The first decision we have to make is how to sell or commercialize our products on the internet. We have to choose among CMS platforms like WordPress or Joomla, or an online shop or a tailored products catalog. If we’d like it to be easy to use and have a personal style, then it should be customized programming. If we look for speed and saving then we should choose a software application to create and manage web sites (and its contents).  

Currently the 31.7 % of web sites are designed with WordPress. Joomla, the following system in the list, is far from it with a 3.1 %. 

However choosing a system like WordPress, is not the panacea as it needs someone who has some experience and knowledge to be able to manage the settings panel, although when we have those skills it could be ourselves. 
Another problem that WordPress presents with regard E-commerce is that it works with templates and once we pick one we may find out that it can’t do certain things or show our products as we’d like or even we have to buy it to do such things. Templates are not expensive though, but it would be an increase of our inversion.

A sensitive issue is hacking. It is not the same to hack a tailored web page than a WordPress page. If there is a security breach within WordPress, which are frequently found, every web page designed with WordPress will be vulnerable to that breach. That is why it is important that we always have our version updated and have a backup copy of the web and its content. Imagine how easy is to hack a web page that there are already tutorials on the net teaching how to hack a WordPress web site.

Plugins updates or WordPress updates are also another issue. The most serious problem we can have working with CMS is the called WSoD (White Screen of Death). 

That our web page becomes a white screen is the worst case we could face. Good news is that it can be solved. This can be due to any of these reasons: the installed theme, a plugin or lack of memory (exhausted memory).

If the problem lies in any of the plugins we can do any of these two things: disable last plugin installed in case we know which one was and check if everything gets back to normal. If it is not the case then we have to take more drastic measures and disable all plugins at once and activate them again one by one until we find which one is causing the error.
If the problem lies in the theme because it may have updated or have an error, the easiest solution is to change the name of the folder where the theme is saved. WordPress will think then that you have uninstalled the theme so it will put a new one by default. Other option would be to install again the theme from the beginning.

When it is not due to any of these things, then it means we have a problem with memory. It is also easy to solve, we only need a text editor, open the file wp-config.php and inside the tab php we have to add the following to increase the memory up to 64Mb:

 

If we have not been able to delete the white screen though, we still have a chance to find our error: activate DEBUG mode of our php. We get back to our wp-config.php page and look for the following line:


 

When we find it we add // at the beginning of the line:

 

Then we add the following two lines:

 

With this, we’ll see on the screen the errors of php code that we have on our web site and prevent our site from being seen. 

When we create our own web site we tend to think that only with that we are going to sell and be visible for millions of people. That is not true at all as what we need is to position our web site and make it visible for our target customers. We can only achieve it through an expert of web positioning.