Tuesday, 23 December 2014
Microsoft Ends SharePoint Online Public Website Service
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Microsoft has announced they will discontinue the free website builder that comes as part of the Microsoft 365 Sharepoint service in January 2015. The cost of MS365 won't change. Microsoft says web sites currently using the SharePoint Online Public Website service will be supported for two years, giving customers a chance to switch to another resource.

Fortunately for Microsoft customers, Build111 is available and has many more features for business than the Sharepoint Online Public Website builder. Even better, we can take any existing look and feel and adapt it to Build111, so companies who like their sites can keep their current design. And to make your lives even easier, for a limited time, SOPW users can now sign up for Build111 with no setup fee and three months of free hosting. 

If you are a SharePoint Online Public Website user and would like to know more, give us a call at 877.397.7605 or contact 111 Web Studio for more information.

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Posted on 12/23/2014 9:28 AM by Customer Service
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Monday, 22 December 2014
Improved File Upload for 111 CMS
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We are pleased to announce the addition of a new method for uploading files to your Build111 or Church111 website. This methodology is in place throughout the content management system. For example, in the files section, if you click "Add New File" you should get a new page. At the top of the page you will see some notes and a box that says:

"Select Files"

This "should" allow you to upload very large files - files that you could not previously upload without experiencing a time out error. You can also drag and drop multiple files at one time.

We hope you enjoy this new feature. If you have any questions about these 111 Web Studio website builders, custom programming, SEO and online marketing or other services, please give us a call at 877.397.7605 or contact us for more information. We'd love to hear from you.

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Posted on 12/22/2014 9:47 AM by Customer Service
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Thursday, 18 December 2014
What to Learn from the Sony Hack
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By now, you probably know all about the North Korean government effort to stop Sony from showing the comedy movie about the assassination of their leader. This hacker action was an attack like that is very difficult to stop. Recent research by a Microsoft strategist and a security expert claim that to stop a $100,000 hacking effort, you would need to spend $3 million on protecting your systems. There are few business with those kinds of resources. 

So what can we learn from this? I see several important lessons besides the fact that you can get great publicity for your movie by poking fun at dangerous people!

  1. Pay serious attention to security. Hackers are banging at your virtual doors all the time, day and night, so get sound advice and do what you can reasonably do to protect your systems.
  2. Assuming the worst may happen, change your habits so you use more voice and in-person visits for communications that are sensitive. In Sony's case, tens of thousands of emails were released, some with inappropriate, secret or character damaging content.
  3. Train and retrain your people about clicking on links or attachments to email. Ransomware would never succeed if users didn't click on an exploit. And the same goes for most hacks. The root cause usually is people who let the bad-guys exploit their inexperience and lack of knowledge. 
  4. If you have truly sensitive information, consider keeping it off-line. The old sneaker-net, moving files from user to user via physical media, may be worthy of a renaissance for super sensitive information. 
  5. Consider proprietary CMS software or website builders for your website that don't allow anyone access to the code. If you must use open-source software for your website, be sure to enable auto-updates. Sure they break the site sometimes, but that's better than getting hacked.

So what's in common with most of these ideas? It's people. People are the reason most breeches occur. If we are to foil these hackers, education and training are the easiest ways to succeed. So get training and good luck out there! The bad-guys are busy, busy, busy.

If you have any questions for 111 web studio about this issue or if you'd like to consider a first-class proprietary website builder with easy-to-use content management and lots of features built for business, give us a call at 877.397.7695 or contact us and we'll be happy to tell you all about Build111. It's all that and more. 

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Posted on 12/18/2014 2:29 PM by Customer Service
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Thursday, 11 December 2014
Custom Programming Case Studies
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When building an online business system or web based custom program, it's nice to know your web development programming resource has the experience and knowledge to get the job done. At 111 Web Studio, we have been confronted with a wide range of interesting challenges over our two decades of custom programming. This gives us the ability to minimize the cost of new projects and build on past tools and techniques for a superior result. In addition to checking out our portfolio for some examples of our front end work, here are a few interesting case studies of past projects so you can get a feeling for what goes on behind the scenes:

Distributor Portal:,A large multinational corporation needed a two way communications platform for their managers to more efficiently interact with distributors and help the distributors do more business with their customers. 111 Web Studio helped define requirements and created the tool that allows managers to collaborate with distributors to establish and monitor regular business plans, provide product news and notifications, help them with customer outreach, provide customer performance reporting and all the while interfacing with internal corporate databases.

Opportunity Management System:,A global steel supplier needed an online business system for managing incoming opportunities and turning them into final sales. The system was built by 111 Web Studio to the customer's specifications and allows them to automatically enter incoming opportunities, easily filter them so only the ones that fit their model are processed further, quickly and accurately determine which they should spend time chasing, efficiently source the opportunity from their large list of potential vendors, assemble and send out their quotations, negotiate with the customer, establish a final sale and manage after-sale items such as scheduling and shipping.

Conference Registration and Management:,The client required a unique system that enrolls and manages participants, facilitates communication via email and text between organizers and participants, provides for online payment with consideration for discounts, allows uploading of resource files, creates and assembles PDFs on the fly from those resources, provides a review and approval process, produces multiple dynamic invoices and reports and interfaces with third parties for single sign on capability. The system also provides for the assembly of teams, manages team assignments and room assignments.

Rental eCommerce Site:,We have created a great many e-commerce sites, but this client required a unique take on e-commerce for an equipment rental business. In additional to normal e-commerce sales, the online system had to deal with deposits for rentals and delayed card charging to meet the legal requirements for this type of online commerce. The client has both online and in-store sales as well as timing issues related to inventory control and scheduling of rented equipment.

Online Education:,We have built several online learning systems and education related websites over the years for clients, but two stand out. One is a system designed to manage students and tutors that helped turn a small business into a large one resulting in acquisition by,a national player in the industry. The other is a unique course and student management system that allows anyone who wants to teach an online course to upload their course and easily manage the entire process of dealing with their students from testing to payment.

If you have a need for a custom web based solution to a problem being faced by your business, please give us a call at 877.397.7605 or contact 111 Web Studio and we will help you think through the opportunity and then make it happen.

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Posted on 12/11/2014 9:55 AM by Customer Service
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Thursday, 4 December 2014
A Community Approach to CMS Upgrades
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Community Approach to CMS Feature UpgradesSince this is the season for sharing, we thought it would be a good time to mention that one of the great things about the Build111 and Church111 website builders and content management systems (CMS) is 111 Web Studio's community based approach to feature enhancements. When any one of our 111 website owners needs a new feature, we try to make it available to all 111 clients if it makes sense to do so. Once in a while, the enhancement is done for a single customer because it is not something that others will use, but most times it's something we can offer to all clients. In the most recent past we have done this with project pages, our simple CRM and upgrades to the ecommerce shopping cart system

The latest example of this is another upgrade to the Build111 and Church111 shopping cart systems with the addition of an "In-Store Pickup" option. The option works with all shipping types. To enable it, find the new option under "Shipping" in the cart options. Below the Shipping Types and above Shipping Restrictions there is a new option for Allow In-Store Pickup? Yes/No. The default is No. If you turn it on, the customer will have an option to not pay shipping. If enabled, it will show up as a New Shipping method in the cart. If the client is using a shipping method where there are currently no options, like Percent based or Total based and they turn on In-Store Pickup, they will have a drop list on the checkout page to select "Standard Shipping" or "In-Store Pickup."

We hope you find this new feature helpful. As always, let us know if you have any needs you don't see in Build111 or Church111. We will do everything we can to make yours the best website possible. Give 111 Web Studio a call at 877.397.7605 or contact us for more information.

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Posted on 12/04/2014 9:55 AM by Customer Service
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Tuesday, 2 December 2014
Honest SEO
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Over the years, website owners and SEO "experts" have tried all sorts of tricks to get their website to be one of the top search results and over the years, search engines have developed better and better algorithms to foil dishonest attempts to jump in front of the next guy who might have a better answer to the question being asked.

Back in 1995 when the Internet was young... as were we... the way to get presented to the world by search engines as one of the top search results was to have unique content that was relevant to the subject matter at hand and to make sure the search engines knew you had it. Fortunately, today the same thing is true. We have come a long way in between then and now with people coming up with clever ideas to game the system and search engine algorithms stopping them in their tracks, but over the course of all those years, the web sites that were true subject matter experts have never been far from the top search listings. Those who played games were horrified to discover they fell off search results when Google came out with a new search algorithm, but those who were true to who they really are were not effected.

The lesson in this is that as in all things, honesty is the best policy. There is no need for games if the search engines know you are the thought leader in your field. When someone searches for you, you will show up. So practice honest SEO and find yourself as a top search result.

If you need help figuring out how to be recognized as the subject matter expert that you really are, 111 Web Studio can help. Give us a call at 877.397.7605 or contact us online for a free consultation. 

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Posted on 12/02/2014 9:56 AM by Customer Service
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