We spent part of yesterday in Guernsey Wyoming, at the Oregon Trail Wagon Rut site. We’ve been there before – twice in fact. I have photos of my now 22 year old daughter, when she was about 10, trekking up through the deepest of the ruts.

Previously, we took the trail with the stairs, and went right to those deep ruts. This time, we took the paved trail from the other end. We passed a long stretch of shallower ruts before we even got to the deep ones. Coming at things from a different angle was very enlightening – we saw some new things we had not seen on our previous visits. We also noticed something we had not noticed before – there were more than one set of ruts in some places.

Inspired by that insight, we began looking for places where more than one route had been taken across the rocks. We found them all over! Wheel marks went in all directions in some areas. We hiked down to where the ruts began on one end, and looked for evidence where the wind had blown dirt into the tracks. It was apparent that there were many routes across, some more deeply marked than others. And the deeply marked ones were not always the “best” way, or even the easiest. They were just the most visible.

Those secondary ruts crisscrossed the deeper ones – merging with them, then diverging again. They didn’t completely leave the trail, they just found a different way over some of the roughest parts. And it was a REALLY rough trail. Steep, rocky, uneven, and probably scary to drive an ox team and wagon over. You can tell that those who traveled it first had to carve it out – hacking down parts of the rock, and filling other parts with dirt or wood. So to diverge from the trail to find an alternate course meant a lot of work for those who did it first.

How often life is like this. We see the obvious, because it is pointed out to us. We think that the obvious is the story, or that it must be the best way.  It is only by looking outside the normal expectations and by looking beyond the common that we discover that there are often many ways to do things, and that the best way for us may not be the way everyone else assumes is best.

This analogy extends far beyond that simple correlation. It takes in other factors – the design of the individual wagon, the animals that it was pulled by, the load it carried, the number of people with it, the number of people on the trail and how much congestion there was within a single pathway, the goals and objectives of the travelers, etc. But I don’t really need to expand on that, use your imagination and you’ll find some concepts to ponder.

We had a fun time – but for me, the great thing I took from the day was the discovery of all those other ruts. All of them traveled enough to make marks, but since the marks were not quite as deep and impressive now, largely ignored and unremembered. But for thousands, those secondary ruts where the path of success, the way they made their own piece of history, and the defining element in their life, if only for a day. It made me think about the beaten path, and how much I have achieved by leaving it and carving my own ruts on a little different route.

And I wonder if the marks I leave will still be visible in 100 years, or if they’ll be worn and covered by the effects of time and natural forces.

It was an absolutely DELIGHTFUL story. Charming, evocative, mysterious, fun, and cheerful for the most part. One of those stories that is just made for reading aloud, and which keeps the audience enthralled to the last word, and which provides a simultaneous sense of satisfaction mixed with disappointment when it ends. We read it together as a family, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, it is high on my list of Must Read books for children – oh, not very YOUNG children, because the story is too long for them, and requires connecting the dots between several story lines woven skillfully together. But 10 to 18 year olds – yes, even teens love this story. A lovely way to create bonds of shared memories for families with teens that they aren’t sure how to connect with again.

But the story itself is not what provided the lesson. It was the movie. We bought it, in hopes that it would capture some of the essence of the story. To our great disappointment, it failed in every respect. Other than the name, and a few shared names of characters, and the mention of soup, the movie bore no relation to the story in the book.

The creators of the movie, from some misguided notion that they had to rewrite the story to capture the movie audience, managed to strip it of every defining characteristic, and to create a story that was not only devoid of any of the charm or enjoyment that the book possessed, but completely, and utterly uninspired and pathetic. It was a waste of money to even make such a travesty. Other reviewers have agreed that the movie was on the low end of the scale. In fact, it is something that could only be appreciated by someone who had a very short attention span, no taste, and who had no previous exposure to the original story (the very young kids who appreciated the endless string of Land Before Time movies comes to mind).

It truly was not even the same story! They changed the settings, left out essential elements, threw in completely meaningless and worthless replacements, created environments in the story that had no reason for being there, and in short, utterly ruined it. I am not too harsh, in fact, there are not words available to truly describe the vandalism perpetrated by the unskilled crew who created the appalling monstrosity.

The sailing ship in the opening scene was the first clue that something catastrophic had occurred – the book does not go near the sea at all. The absence of essential character discovery, and the remake of the dungeon into something like the dark side of the rat city from Flushed Away were obvious and unpleasant changes which displayed the ignorance and amateurity of the vandals who posed themselves as screen writers. The cook – a female character with personality and some humorous appeal – was replaced by a male chef who was merely a caricature, and a bad one at that. The movie was replete with illogical changes such as this, bad whims, carried out with no purpose, and with a sense of pathetic uselessness. The crowning atrocity though, was the vegetable man (an incredibly stupid creation of dancing vegetables which completely destroyed the story line without any kind of benefit whatsoever) – which had all the feel of an addition by a recent graduate artist, who had created something like it for a school project, and just HAD to use it SOMEWHERE, whether it fit or not.

This book could have been recrafted as a movie that was worthy of the excellence of the original story. But because this company purchased the rights, and made such a travesty, they not only polluted the world with so much animated refuse, they also blocked those who would do it right from doing so for some time to come. I think that is the saddest thing about it. In the afterlife for film creators, there must be a special torture chamber reserved for the perpetrators of such heinous actions – where they are first blessed with the good taste they lacked in mortality, and then forced to view bad films through eternity!

The lesson is applicable to many business concepts. Great business ideas contain an element of genius – a bit of something different, skillfully woven into the fabric of the business, which define it as something unique and attractive. It succeeds BECAUSE it is different.

Often, a thriving business will be bought out, or will go public and have other voices dictating decisions, or it may just reach a point of growth where the business owner starts to automate or delegate the wrong things to the wrong sources. In the changes, the wrong things are changed – the very things that define the uniqueness are lost, and it becomes like every other mediocre look-alike.

In the case of bringing in other decision makers, they often wish to recreate it in the image of that which is familiar, little realizing that as they do so, the very thing that made it successful is diluted or lost completely. After all, if it were like all the rest, based on familiarity, it would not have grown in the first place! It is the DIFFERENCES which define a good business. And it is those differences which uninspired or uncreative people simply cannot wrap their heads around. Genius works – but is often not appreciated by those who would like to capitalize on someone ELSE’S genius, when they do not possess it themselves.

The moral is, that in making changes to something that works, don’t lose the ESSENCE of what works. The movie of The Tale of Despereaux is but one example of the destruction of something precious, and the lowering of something effervescent to the worst of the common.

The unexpected, the twists, the uncommon brilliance is in fact, what makes it work.

Most security problems online don’t happen because a really brilliant hacker slaved to break into your bank account, website, or eBay account. Most of them happen because you left the house with the doors unlocked and the windows open, and the burglar walked right in.

See, most of them happen because someone programmed a bot to go looking for obvious easy targets. Just like the burglar who goes looking for unlocked doors or open windows. They aren’t looking for a hard job to show off their brilliance, they are looking for a quick and easy mark.

Unless we understand how online security compromises take place, we won’t understand how to reduce the risks. The good news is, that the vast majority of problems occur from things that are VERY easy to stop. They happened because someone made it easy to take advantage of them, and the bad guys are mostly opportunists. Stopping most just means not giving them easy opportunity. In other words, just lock your doors and close your windows. Cyber criminals aren’t much different as a whole than the average burglar – for the most part, they spend a few seconds on easy possibilities, and then move on to find a sucker if they can’t get in.

Some simple rules:

1. Don’t EVER click a link in an email to go to a secure site. Go there by entering the address into your browser yourself. No matter how convincing the email sounds, DON’T TRUST IT. Any email that tells you that a sensitive account (including email accounts, bank accounts, etc) requires validation or it will be shut down is a LIE, and sent for the purpose of stealing YOUR data.

2. If it sounds too good to be true, it absolutely is. If it is on a one page website with tons of hype and dozens of invitations to click here to buy, there is a 99% chance it is not legit. If they pressure you to buy now, don’t. Listen to that voice of caution in the back of your head, it knows what it is talking about.

3. Change default usernames. If you do an install of some popular software into your website, it has a default admin password – Change it! (Joomla users, that means YOU.) NEVER leave a website username as “admin”, or anything else that was there when you got it. Every scammer in the world knows what the default was on that kind of site, and they’ll go looking for sites that didn’t have it changed. Username and password combinations are easier to break when they only have one of them to guess.

4. Use a more secure password. Don’t use just a single word, or two words. Add a number or two. Use a capital letter or two. Make it easy for you to remember, but hard to guess. Adding numbers and changing a letter or two to a capital does that. Symbols make it even harder to guess, but not all systems allow them. Some sources tell you to use different passwords for every site, but really, you can’t. There are too many! The reality is that most people do use the same password for everything. But it is wise to use a separate higher security password for bank accounts, and do NOT use a password reminder or key program to keep the high security ones.

5. If you have a website that uses software, make sure it is up to date. Periodically, someone will find a way to break into a site structure – like Joomla, WordPress, OSCommerce, or whatever. And when they find that way, they publish it to all the other unsavory sorts. If you keep running an outdated version that has a known security hole, it is only a matter of time before one of those persistent little bots finds it, and walks right in through that open door.

6. Don’t share your passwords. Not ever. Once it gets out of your hands, it can go anywhere, and someone you trust may let someone else know, because THEY don’t value it as much as you do. No one can guard your own security quite as well as you can, you are the most motivated person.

7. Don’t trust web professionals to keep things for you. You have to trust some people with access, but give them as little as possible, and always make sure YOU are the one who can kick them out, not the other way around.

No need to be paranoid – just be sensible. Just like closing all your windows, locking the door and throwing the deadbolt. Unless you are in a high risk online neighborhood that makes you a particular target, there really isn’t any need to put up bars or hire a bodyguard. Just like you do the simple and sensible stuff for home security first, do the same with online security.

Don’t make it easy for someone to rip you off.

About a year ago, we were approached by a consultant for a certain Direct Sales company, to create a site system for the consultants of that company. We had no affiliation with the company, we just created a site system that their consultants could use to more quickly set up a working website.

I was unprepared for some of the issues that came from it. Technically, it has been fun, and challenging, as we worked out the details to provide exactly what the consultants needed, with enough flexibility to allow each consultant to customize it for their particular way of doing business.

It wasn’t the technical stuff that threw me. It was the personal and relationship stuff I was unprepared for.

Working with these ladies (ok, there is an occasional man, but most are women) has been great. They are, overall, terrific people, and most are very enthusiastic and willing to work at it. But since they are linked to each other through their signup genealogy, I not only have to deal with relationships between us and the client, I also have to cope with relationships between the clients! This isn’t something we usually have to deal with, since most of our clients don’t know each other unless we introduce them (which we often do if we feel that it will help them both).

I can’t go into detail – that would violate confidences, and I’d not want to make one of our clients feel singled out or embarrassed. But there are some generalities that will give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

• If a consultant does not like their upline, they may come to us for things that are really outside our expertise – we are not experts with the parent company, we are only experts with our own website system.
• If two consultants have a falling out, it may have reverberations through many of the site owners. It challenges our professional ethics to handle things without taking sides, and without being unfair to either client. Standard confidentiality policies are put to the test – in ways we had not anticipated that they would be.
• If one consultant decides that it is too much work to own a site, and leaves with a bad attitude, it may affect many prospective clients – because the consultants are not only networked through the company with each other, but also with a huge body of prospects. It means that we have to have fair policies, and then we have to meticulously enforce those policies.
• If we grant a refund outside our policies, word may get around, and others may purchase, feeling they can get the same refund, even though our policies would normally prohibit it. If we refuse to grant a refund, and our policies don’t clearly back up our position, then word may get around about that. Our reputation is more visible within this community.

The interconnectedness of the clients is a strength – they refer their downline. But that very strength has also meant that there are other challenges with it that we hadn’t expected to have to deal with. It has meant that our policies and standards with this particular line have had to include provisions that we’d never considered as being a potential issue previously.

Overall, it has challenged us in ways we did not expect. But it has also been worth it because this single line, which launched in February, has yielded profit in five figures, in less than a year. Expenses are low, and sales are good, and this line is becoming a significant factor in our income picture. It has provided a means for testing our automation software, and has proven a successful income model which involves partial automation, partial customization, at a fairly low cost to the client, combined with a fairly low workload for us. We spend an average of 1 hour per site sale on personal service, and about half an hour on long term development or maintenance for the entire program (averaged per client). We invest in custom programming as needed to maintain the infrastructure. When we are paid for a new site, the majority is profit, and the workload is light.

I sometimes tire of the soap opera of relationships – it can make me feel like a Mom with a houseful of other people’s kids. But the ladies are wonderful for the most part, and worth those moments of exasperation.

I’ve just really realized with this line of business, how much the individual marketing arenas can change, depending on factors we might not have considered ahead of time.

I was referred to the FedEx support number to resolve an issue with a shopping cart. The referrer told me that they were very helpful. I tried to call – and was shoved into a frustrating and fruitless loop.

I didn’t mind the “press one for this, press two for that”. At least a computer can UNDERSTAND that. After I did that, I was greeted by a recorded voice which demanded to know what I wanted. I’m supposed to tell it, and it is supposed to understand. Only what I needed was pretty complicated. I took too long in replying, so the recorded voice helpfully suggested things I might say – none of which was remotely close to what I needed. I didn’t need help printing labels, and I didn’t need help with their online site.

I took a stab at it – “I need help setting up our shopping cart.” Clear, and a whole lot neater than saying, “We can’t get commercial ground to show up during checkout, and your people told my people that I should call you to find out what the heck you mean when you tell me to generate an XML transaction request to send you so you can diagnose the problem.”

The voice said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Here are some things you might say…” and went back to the same unhelpful things that it offered before.

I don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to play games trying to guess just exactly what a computer wants me to say to get in the front door. I feel like I’m standing in front of Ali-Baba’s cave trying to guess the right password. Hmmm… I didn’t think to try “Open Sesame”, but I doubt the computer would be smart enough to get it if I did.

Are they TRYING to drive their customers away in frustration? While that might be a terrific way to contain support costs, it is NOT an effective way to retain the customers.

At this point, because of the complexity of setting up cart interfaces with FedEx, we warn our clients that it is fussy and aggravating. They now rate even higher on my “Beware” list. I’ve never been fond of them anyway, because they are inherently dishonest about how they handle rural deliveries (they are not the only shipper that does it – you can pay for overnight shipping, but you won’t get it in a remote rural area, you’ll get the item overnighted to the nearest big city, and then sent the rest of the way by Priority Mail, meaning overnight shipments take longer than 3 or 5 day shipping). Their own service reps don’t even know this, but it is standard company practice.

They also are not the only company that has decided that voice recognition is the way to go for telephone support. It has to be one of the most inaccurate, and unfriendly ways of handling things! I HATE talking to computers. It makes me feel like a child being forced to play with a talking toy. That particular technology is one that already offends me, but add to it the inaccuracy behind it all, and it leaves a high percentage of people frustrated because they cannot get past the automated genie who demands that you say just the right thing, but isn’t about to tell you what it is!

It begs the question…

Who, REALLY, thought this was a good idea? And how in the world did someone with so little sense EVER get into a position of enough power to actually do anything about it?

Yes, I’m feeling catty today. A headache and a bad encounter with a senseless system will do that to me.

The continuing saga of the site system theft…

I’m not being vindictive or vengeful. I’m just informing the guy of real problems that he walked into without really thinking about it ahead of time.

Ok, so if someone steals a replicated site system, they are probably biting off more than they can chew. Their actions may come back to bite them in ways they never anticipated. These are the things that have been pointed out to the person who duplicated our site system:

1. Copyrighted material is recognizable. If you copy someone’s site, you are using copyrighted material.

2. You may not just be stealing one person’s copyrighted material. You may be using material created by another person, and used by permission by the person you stole from. You do NOT have permission to use it!

3. When you steal software, it may be highly complex. Copyrighted material may be woven into it in places that are difficult for you to detect. The original owner may be able to spot things you do not even know are there.

4. When you steal a website, it is very difficult to get all of the original ownership information out of it. Your site may in fact send mis-directed emails to the original owner without your knowledge.

5. When you steal software, you have no idea what someone else might have changed. If you steal a software site structure, it may have had custom alterations. If you update the software using standard update procedures, you may break something, and not even know where the problem is.

6. If custom alterations have been made to a software site structure, they may be insecure, or they may have introduced bugs that you will have to troubleshoot, and you won’t know where they are coming from in the code.

7. Images can be anywhere in a site, and identifying images may be dropped into places all through it where they can be accessed by direct URL. You will never be able to find them all. You are a sitting duck for a copyright lawsuit.

8. If you steal a website and use it for yourself, it can cause problems. If you steal a website and then use it as the backbone of your services, you are staking your entire reputation on someone else’s stuff. Not only can the original owner sue you, your clients can sue you also. And if the structure is unreliable or unsustainable, your clients will make you pay!

We didn’t have to do anything other than point these things out to the person who copied our system. They are his problem to deal with.

Frankly, I find it much faster and cleaner to just build my own stuff. Stealing other people’s stuff is just too much work!

One of my associates emailed me yesterday, informing me that someone had duplicated my entire vertical market site system for a particular market. Yes, I’m going to name names here.

We build websites for Norwex Consultants (the domain name when this article was written, was norwexwebsites.com – the domain name has since been removed due to changes in the Norwex policies). We have done so for about a year now. We were the original dynamic Norwex shopping cart provider, and we are the most experienced and successful at it.

One of our clients has taken the liberty of partnering with another technician. I think they thought there was an easy goldmine there (little do they know that anything good takes WORK).

Their site, located at http://www.norwex-websites.com (the hyphenated version of our domain name – this website is also no longer valid, though it was at the time this article was written) contained text straight from our site system, and cloned the shopping cart down to the typos. I saw this myself. I was told that he even used MY templates… Badly edited, according to a reliable source. I did not see these for myself, but this woman knows my work, and has seen the templates I created, and future actions of the site owner would tend to lend credibility to her claim.

My friend took the liberty of emailing him, and informing him that he was using copyrighted information, and that it was unethical. This is where it got fun!

Over the next few hours, we watched as parts of his site became unavailable, then came up again, totally different than what they were before.

His entire template gallery disappeared, and then reappeared one page at a time. It is pretty obvious that he thought if I was using Artisteer to create templates, that he could too. He clearly did not spend as much time learning the fine points of creating good templates with it, because the templates were so easily identified as having been created with a template generator, that you really have to feel sorry for the guy. Artisteer is a GREAT program, and the hands of a skilled designer who takes the time to learn how to use the hidden features and who takes the time to create great graphics in PhotoShop ahead of time, can make this program SING. He didn’t. His templates reuse the same images over and over, and they are all identical, with only some color changes. They aren’t even color coordinated, and they do not use the preferred colors of the target market. The layout and design does not change from one to the next, they have the appearance of having been created in a hurry.

Our templates are unique, color coordinated, and attractive, and we have taken great pains to make sure they reflect the mindset of the target market we are serving. We purchase high quality stock photos for each template, and make sure we are using them according to the terms of use – no shortcuts. We know our stuff, and we know what makes sites work. About half of the consultants want our templates as-is, without any changes other than asking for their site name to be added.

Other pages began to disappear and reappear also. Each time, with new content. Must have given him quite a bit of panic. I suggested to him that he might want to make sure that every bit was removed that was ours, whether he thought it was private or not, because if he failed to, he’d never be quite sure which client we sent to purchase a site and check it out for us.

I guess there are three lessons from this.

1. I don’t think there is a reason to feel threatened by competition. I mean, if someone honestly sets up competition against me, go for it. If they do a better job than I, they deserve the success.

This was different than that. We took action, notifying him that he needed to stop using our copyrighted items, because when you copy something of someone else’s it is THEFT, not innovation.

But I am still not worried about competition from this kind of person. I am not a lazy business woman. I did things right, and I took the time where it mattered. I need not fear anyone who takes shortcuts because they lack the understanding of what makes a website really work, and what makes it fail. There are so many points on which he simply cannot compete with us in quality, and where his site falls down on basic marketing messages that he does not pose any real threat to our business. His sales site is so unattractive (this was the first thing one of my students commented on) and so lacking in essential conversion points, that it is doubtful that he will be able to make a sale.

In this instance, he is actually going to do a LOT of marketing for us – because people remember domain names WITHOUT hypens (and search engines pay more attention to the original than to the knock off. Hyphenated names have absolutely NO higher weight with them, they provably parse both with equal accuracy). So a good deal of his marketing will benefit us, but NONE of ours will benefit him!

2. If you do something illegal (by intent, or by being mislead), you are likely to get caught. And when you do, you’ll spend your time running around trying to cover up the evidence, rather than being able to use the time in productive activities that move your business forward. Not only that, but someone may publish the truth of what happened, to which you will have no defense, and it will give your company a black eye, potentially costing you the time you already invested, or more.

3. When someone does something like this, there isn’t a reason to seek revenge. There are legal steps you can take, and the law can provide its own consequence. That is how it should be.

I’ve never had someone blatantly steal something from me in all my years doing business online. I’ve had clients who reported having their sites cloned by someone else, but it has never happened to me. Having it happen with an entire system was rather a surprise.

I’ve actually had a good evening, peeking in periodically to see what is being frantically replaced next. It has been rather amusing, sort of like pulling the strings on a puppet. I’m also writing a few other emails, informing a few other people who need to know, whose work was also involved in the system.

I really sort of feel sorry for the guy… To be so handicapped in business as to think this is a way to get ahead!