Security and Your Passwords

I just wanted to make a quick comment about security. When people complete help desk requests with me, they often send me their main admin user name and password. Normally, I recommend creating a new one for me, and for any vendor. But my main observation is many people are still making the old password mistakes. Following is an article about the top 10 passwords people use, and I've seen several of these in what people send me. I also see a lot of "admin, admin" or "bobsmith, bobsmith" or even worse, "domain, domain" where domain is the actual domain name for the site. This just makes it way too easy for intruders to get into your customer's information, and possibly credit card information.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2113976,00.asp

You should come up with different passwords for everything, and make them secure and random. Use this tool if needed: http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/. If you have trouble remembering your passwords (I know we all have tons of them), check out this article that recommends some helpful software:

http://netsecurity.about.com/od/newsandeditorial1/a/storepasswords.htm

Tracking your Visitors with Analytics

Google has been introducing a lot of new services for Webmasters. My favorite is an amazingly powerful, and free, analytics package where you can see conversion statistics, abandonment rates, including which screens people leave the site from. These analytics are almost as powerful as some of the most expensive analytics packages I've ever seen. Recently, a company has figured out how to best integrate Miva Merchant sites with Google Analytics (GA) and is offering a setup service at a great rate. In fact, their rate is so good, it's better than I could do, so I'm referring clients to them directly. A gentleman named Morgan from the company will speak to you by telephone to be sure they understand your desires, and their rate includes a $30 module:

http://www.ecomiq.com/miva-google.php - Tell Morgan I sent you and he'll treat you right!

Miva Merchant questions?

I am compiling Miva Merchant common questions, and will be working on answers via tutorials, code, examples, etc. at www.merchantanswers.com. Anyone who sends me at least one question that I use I will give a free month to (it's subscription based). Just send me any questions to cal@doubleplus.com.