Krohn Media has been busy, as you may have noticed with our site currently unavailable. We’re tearing down our old service portfolio and rebuilding it from the ground up, which involves a lot of code, as well as a lot of coffee.
While we’ve had success targeting the health care industry, there have been many changes in the web-tech world that we believe present a target-rich environment of opportunity, so much so that we’re renovating to our customer-facing site to bring forth a new portfolio of interactive services for business websites.
What are some of these changes in the web-tech space? Security is more important than ever, as bad actors from all over the world converge onto the United States with the goal of acquiring our proprietary data.
Internet speeds continue to exponentially increase while users’ attention spans shorten. Search engines’ preferences continue to evolve, forcing website managers to stay on their toes.
The web itself is a completely different place than it was ten years ago, or even five years ago. Case in point: in 2012, the iPhone had only been on the market for about five years. The mobile-app craze was at its peak, and social media was still getting its legs while forcing wireless internet speeds to become faster.
2012 was not that long ago, but think about how radically different things are now, especially with tech like artificial intelligence (mainly Siri and Alexa) that we take for granted. In 2012, artificial intelligence (as we know it now) was borderline science-fiction.
Mobile is now an integral part of our lives and accounts for over 50% of web traffic. We used to think of a website as a desktop version or a mobile version; now they’re the same.
To come full-circle, web technology evolves fast; so fast that it leaves in its wake millions of poorly maintained (or not at all) websites, an ocean of security vulnerabilities, gigawatts of burnt mobile battery life from outdated or poorly written code running in mobile browsers, and a society of web users frustrated with their day-to-day experiences.
Our new service portfolio is dedicated to ridding the world of these problems by focusing on three core elements of any website: security, performance, and search engine optimization.
We’re building a back-end portal that will allow our users to identify problems in these areas, monitor ongoing issues, and view the results from the solutions we provide.
Access to the back-end portal will be free and the entry point to create the portal account will be as simple as entering your site’s URL in a form text field. We pull the URL, fetch the web page, process it, and provide a visual overview of your site’s health.
Security
Let’s touch on our new services.
First, security.
We’re consistently amazed at the horrible state of security in the web-tech industry. Through our own experience, we believe that well over 80% of websites have serious vulnerabilities that put users’ information at risk.
For example, it’s far more common than not to discover a site is running jQuery code from 2014. In almost every case, websites don’t have their HTTP security headers set. Rarely is JavaScript code obfuscated, and I’m always surprised when I find a website that takes advantage of a CDN or edge-caching provider.
This systemic neglect of security is not ideal for sites with requirements for HIPPA compliance or legal obligations to protect users’ data, such as e-Commerce sites that collect personal and financial information.
How do we assess a website’s security situation?
The first step is to identify any “low hanging fruit”. Envision this as a hypothetical context where you’re looking to hire a firm to provide security services for your home.
What degree of security would you need for your house? If your door locks are broken and windows won’t completely shut, we’d first target those issues.
Why pay us to install cameras and home alarm if you don’t even have door locks?
These basic checks can be handled in an automated way with our back-end portal, allowing us to provide this basic level of service at no cost.
Once your website passes basic security checks, we can move forward with enhanced solutions. Some of the basics we check are your HTTP security headers are correctly configured, and you’re not vulnerable to attacks, such as XSS or SQL injection.
We also review, patch, and obfuscate your JavaScript code (a practice neglected by most sites) and many other solutions.
We provide several levels of ongoing penetration testing, from probing and enumeration, all the way to gaining access to your network and systems.
We can also provide supplemental services, like intrusion detection systems (IDS) with monitoring, and encrypted email file server. If you have enterprise secrets and house critical data, these are essential.
Performance
Ultimately, security is the foundation of our new service portfolio. Performance, however, doesn’t take a back seat.
Users have short attention spans satisfied by increasing internet speeds and faster hardware. When a site has performance bottlenecks, users get irritated and bounce, resulting in less qualified leads or customers, less advertising revenue, and other negative effects from poor user engagement.
Mobile users account for almost half of web usage. This metric in itself is no big deal, but mobile devices happen to be sensitive to poor performance.
If a web page is blocking user input because it’s chugging through excessive DOM reflow, or burning CPU cycles executing too much JavaScript, the user becomes annoyed by the sluggishness and the device burns through precious battery life (which also annoys the user).
The path an HTTP request takes on its round trip involves server processing, network hops, and browser responses, all of which can contribute to a speed bottleneck, much like traffic encountered while driving your car.
When you go to work, the streets and highways can be empty, your car can be fine- tuned, and it can be a clear day, but if you hit your kid’s bicycle while backing out of your driveway, it slows you down while you deal with it.
When you’re driving, at any point to your destination, you can hit traffic, engine problems, and many unrelated issues negatively affecting your travel time.
Web traffic works the same way, where unrelated issues can create bottlenecks at any point along the journey of the HTTP request.
We have the expertise to locate and fix these bottlenecks, whether it be in code, server configuration, or network.
Search Engine Optimization
A benefit of better performance, as well as better security, is better rankings by search engines. When search engines crawl your site, they not only guzzle your site’s URLs to parse content for indexing, they’re also testing the speed and responsiveness of your website.
The more sluggish the website, the lower it ranks it search results.
This brings us to our remaining service offering: search engine optimization (SEO). There are a million firms that offer SEO services, albeit a few better than most.
With our security and performance services, we have a significant competitive advantage over the field, as we have the technical expertise to offer security and performance services which ultimately improve SEO.
Where we differ from most SEO firms is we don’t guarantee search rankings. We simply follow the SEO guidelines published by the search engines that outline how they want pages and content to be configured. To put another way, we do what the search engines tell us to do.
An SEO firm guaranteeing search results is like a weatherman guaranteeing the weather. A search engine’s algorithm is proprietary and nobody outside of the company knows how they work therefore, they can’t make promises. Anyone promising better search results is lying to you.
We’d advise you to maintain extreme skepticism.
By properly describing content for search engines (per their own guidelines), combined with our security and performance services, we’re confident our clients’ websites will indeed rise in search results and improve lead generation.
Web Development and other services
Our tech team is comprised of systems administrators, software engineers, database administrators, and networking engineers. This means we can provide solutions beyond our core services.
If you need a new custom site, e-Commerce site, social media integration, or anything beyond our core services, we can help with those as well.
Conclusion
How does all this fit into our new website?
When we perform an audit of a client’s website, we have many tools from which to choose, depending on what we’re trying to accomplish. Some tools we wrote in- house; some tools are open source; other tools are a hodgepodge of both.
While this is fine on a case-by-case basis, it can be time consuming when servicing a volume of clients.
Therefore, we’re writing the code to bring them all together into a single UI dashboard.
Some of our competitors provide an input form for a visitor to enter a site URL to check the status of their site’s SEO; others may check a site’s performance. Most, however, do not check security, performance, and SEO in a single portal, broken out visually.
The basic service will be at no cost, where we’ll check the site for free on an ongoing monthly basis. If this automated audit detects an issue, you’ll be alerted, and you’ll be notified on your dashboard.
Why are we providing a free service for an initial audit?
You may not be aware of problems with your website, and you may not be inclined to spend money for an audit. If your site is performing and it looks modern while it looks good in mobile, you may not realize you have an issue.
Your car may be running fine, but if you brought it to your mechanic and they discovered you have an oil leak, you’d likely want it fixed.
With a free audit, you’ll get a look a look at your issues and we can decide if it’s worth spending money to fix. We will continuously value-add our free audit, and keep a principal of “if we can automate it, we’ll keep it free”.
For the paid service, we provide deeper audits, as well as customized reporting for metrics specific for your site. These will require manual intervention to various degrees, and will unlock more options and features within your portal.
If you’re running sites that make money or require more security, this is the plan you’ll likely join.
Security, performance, and SEO are our bread and butter. As we develop our interactive portal, we’ll publish articles that dive into our services in more depth and we’ll even provide screen-shots of our portal prototype to keep you along the journey.
While we are building our auditing and reporting portal back-end, we are still open for business.
If you need us to run an initial audit, we’re more than happy to do so.
Just get in touch:
888-443-2112
Bring Websites To Life 