The holidays are right around the corner, and both consumers and shop owners are taking advantage of the internet during this period of time. Online shopping has grown dramatically in the U.S. over the years. As a matter of fact, in 2014, Cyber Monday, which is basically the online version of Black Friday, surpassed $2 billion in sales. Each year, the number is expected to increase. The reason for this is likely due to many trying to avoid the chaos of holiday shopping in person. Packed shopping malls, long-lines, and cramped parking lots? No thanks.

Now, although online shopping is making the lives of both buyers and sellers easier, cyber hackers are doing a good job of making it complicated.

October was National Cyber Security Awareness Month. In this day and age, with people flocking to the internet instead of retail shops, online security needs to be at the forefront of every company’s strategy.

Social media is a great tool for your WordPress business account. By adding social media to your WordPress site, you are opening up the avenues of your business and potentially adding traffic to your other sites. There are several ways to link your social media sites to your WordPress site, which include:

• Adding Links
• Using a WordPress Plugin such as a Social Media Widget
• Adding your social media to the “About You” section on WordPress
• Adding a “Share This” button

Hashtags were invented by twitter to tie different posts together in a single stream.  Hashtags are now used on various social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Hashtags are used for various reasons like allowing someone to find your post, marketing, and awareness.

WordPress is a great platform for businesses and blogging. In fact, there are many wonderful ways to add media, content and photos to your WordPress website that will aid in growing your business. When you have a blog, there are many ways to engage your audience. One way is to add visuals.  You can add photos, or you can add a slideshow. If you have a WordPress website, you can typically do this one of two ways: by using a WordPress plugin for slideshows or by doing it manually yourself. Adding a slideshow manually all by yourself is not as hard as it may sound. It really is relatively easy if you follow these quick and easy steps.

What is the difference between http and https?

The answer is simple and important for both users and site administrators to understand.

HTTP

HiText Transference Protocol is the default protocol for the web. Through it, your browser requests a server for web pages.Thanks to HTTP, you access blogs, send forms, emails and etc.
HTTP is insecure because it is text-based only, which allows intruders to intercept, alter, and steal the transferred information. That’s where HTTPs comes in.

Video marketing is where you incorporate videos into the way you market your business. In fact, in this world of social media, video marketing is a great strategic plan to help promote your business and increase your foot traffic.

Video marketing helps you reach a higher audience, helps your Google ratings and is an important SEO tool to use. You can create all kinds of videos and put them into different media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, Instagram and other places online. Video marketing is also very useful on your WordPress site.

With more than half of Internet traffic coming from Google Chrome users, it’s no surprise that there are thousands of browser extensions available. From extensions comparing price trends of your favorite items to ones that block advertisements or hide spam, there are options for all types of users. For those who are passionate about productivity, the amount of adds-on can seem endless – and that’s why we decided to take the time to show you some of the most productive extensions out there to get the most out of your day!

What is a virus?

A computer virus is simply a computer program that executes malicious code on your machine.

To make the concept of a virus simple to understand, consider this example. A computer program has a particular function. Microsoft Word, for example, is a text editor program. Excel is a program for creating spreadsheets. A virus is also a program, except its function is to perform tasks that delete your files, steal passwords from your computer, and many others.

Almost everyone has a cell phone in this day and age. But the big question is: what do you use it for? Most people use their mobile device for leisure and entertainment purposes, but how many people do you know also use their cell phones to simplify their lives?  There’s an app for everything.  So, we searched and found some of the best organization apps for you to download and try.

Over the years we can see that the use of conventional passwords are not enough to protect ourselves online. Accounts are easily invaded through the discovery of personal passwords, social profiles are violated, increasingly sophisticated malware is spread, and mobile threats have become increasingly present in our day-to-day lives. Several attacks are enough to prove that the security provided by traditional passwords are no longer as efficient as they used to be. This is due to the fact that the technologies used by malicious users have evolved.

One of the last (already ineffective) methods formerly used are the one-time acronym passwords (OTP), which basically give you a specific time-frame to insert your sensitive information. If it takes too long for you to insert that information, then your login is delayed. All of this is done in an effort to circumvent robots or malware who may try to break into your private accounts. However, this has already become useless because the malware programs used by hackers are now able to slip through these techniques. Although this tactic is still active and employed, it is considered by many to be 70% ineffective.