Come get in the Caribbean mood!

The Newton Falls Relay For Life Team – Connect 4 will be sponsoring a Cruise for a Cure benefit Saturday, March 3, 2012, 6-11 p.m. at the Newton Falls Community Center.

There will be food by Guys BBQ, music by Happymon Band and of course, Photos by DoItHere.net

Also available will be computer gaming by The Dragon’s Lair – Ultimate Gaming Arena, Raffle Baskets, 50/50, and a cash bar.

Tickets are $20.

Hope to see you there!

Button Sponsorship Available

DNSTC assists with the promotion of Gaming Tournaments with The Dragon’s Lair – Ultimate Gaming Arena. These tournaments can draw hundreds of gamers to the events; however, we also provide gaming as an activity for other events to help in drawing in attendees to events. We have booked several venues throughout the area and would like to offer the opportunity to other small businesses to be sponsors for our venues. Costs relating to maintaining and purchasing the equipment needed for these gaming events are very high and there is a very limited budget for marketing materials. This is why we have several sponsorship programs where you get “Get the word out” about your business, while we provide marketing materials for our gaming events.

We have an event schedule for 3/3/2012 where you can be a button sponsor. 

Here is what you will get for your $25 sponsorship:

We will distribute buttons with the event name on them. These buttons will be attached to cards that will feature your business name and phone number. We will also have a sign on our tables stating that the event buttons are sponsored by, listing the button sponsors. We will also place the sponsor names on our membership handouts and on the webpage for the event.

Deadline for sponsorship is:  Wednesday, February 29, 2012.

The application form can be found here.

Down on Main street Event - Austintown Ohio

VENDOR TABLES STARTING AT $100.00.  This is a great opportunity to get the word out about your business or the community, and other small businesses.

The Mahoning Valley chamber of The MainStreet Chamber will be presenting the first annual “Down On Main Street” small business expo. It’s an affordable alternative for small businesses in the Valley to showcase and sell their products and services at an affordable price, while creating an opportunity for Valley citizens to buy local.

MainStreet Chamber has already secured media sponsorship, so this event will be highly publicized in the Mahoning Valley. Admission is free to the public and our market research indicates that approximately 5,000 individuals will attend this exciting event. We have vendor spaces available and would like to invite you to join us for this valuable business opportunity.

VENDOR INFORMATION
Austintown Expo Center, Austintown Plaza, 6000 Mahoning Ave. Austintown, OH
Saturday, March 24, 2012 - Operating Hours: 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
(Set up and tear down information will be provided upon receipt of payment.)

Here is a link to the event flyer.

Here is a link to the vendor application.

Blocked Spammers and Hackers List Added to Site

Attention all DNSTC clients.  I have added a new section to the DNSTC website called Blocked Spammers and Hackers.  This page will give you a listing of IP addresses that have been blocked on the server to do failed hacking attempts or reported spammers.

DNSTC reserves the right to block access from anyone who wishes to either attempt to hack our server or spam our clients. We have a zero tolerance policy for this activity, and in the case where we can obtain the IP address, it will just be completely blocked from our servers.

Here is the link to the Blocked Spammers and Hackers page.

DNSTC WSMS Version 2.7 Update Release

It has been almost a year before a major update has been released for WSMS, and this one was a little overdue.  We made a few enhancements and a couple of bug fixes to the WSMS software to make it even better than before.  The software has been operational for almost a year and has even made a server upgrade with no issues.  We now have several clients running this software behind their website and plan on using it from now on as our official CMS system.  For more information about the WSMS system, please visit the DNSTC WSMS Webpage.

As for this update, please see the release notes below:

Testimonial Page Upgrade

Created an upgrade to the testimonials page what will allow visitors to leave testimonials.  This enhancement requires and update to the testimonials table to work correctly.  You also have to go into the configuration table in turn Upgraded Testimonials to Y.  Once this is done, there will be a form that appears on the testimonials page that allows users to submit their testimonial.  When they do, an e-mail is sent to the admin e-mail.  The admin then needs to log in and approve the testimonial in order for it to be shown on the website.

About this page information updated

Added a display for the meta descriptions and the meta keywords when you select the page for editing.  This then allows you to quickly look at the page to see what is configured for the page description and keywords and allows you to select information to be copied to other pages.  You should not have two pages with the same description; however, you can have the same keywords on multiple pages.

Sorting on page catalog listing

Added the ability to sort the main page selection either by page number or by page name which was the default.  When you have multiple pages within WSMS it is not as easy to find the pages so we needed the ability to sort the listing by the page number as well.  Also added the description (text) of the page types to the right instead of the numbers.  This way we now know the page type without looking up the numbers.

Reports and Utilities Section Added

We added a new utility called Reports and Utilities.  This section will be housing miscellaneous utilities and reports to help manage your website.  The first report that has been added is the Meta Page Information report that lists all of the titles, meta description, and meta keywords for all of the pages.

8 Tips to Defend Against Online Financial Fraud Threats

I constantly receive and read e-mails and articles that help small business owners with Internet issues.  As I come across some important information to share, I will post it here to our blog so that others may benefit as well.

Here is an interesting article I came across the other day written by Thor Olavsrud on cio.com.

The tag paragraph for the article reads as followings:

Criminals are increasingly seeking to hijack the accounts of business owners and executives to initiate fraudulent wire transfers that can cost organizations a fortune. Here are eight steps you can take to defend your organization against such attacks.

The following is a summary of the 8 Tips:

1. Talk to your financial institution.
2. Perform regular security audits and risk assessments.
3. Install an anti-virus solution on your computers and network and keep it completely updated.
4. Dedicate a computer for financial transactions and only use it for financial transactions.
5. Segregate responsibility for initiating wires from the responsibility for authorizing them, and ensure that each party uses different computers with different authorization credentials.
6. Keep a suspicious mind when you receive email that asks you to click on a link, open an attachment or that seeks your credentials-even if it's from a trusted source like your bank.
7. Be careful when following links on social networking sites or when asked to give information over the phone.
8. Review your online banking records on a daily basis.

The article goes on and explains what you can do if you think you have been compromised.

For the full article:  http://www.cio.com/article/700354/8_Tips_to_Defend_Against_Online_Financial_Fraud_Threats?page=2&taxonomyId=3089

Code needed to make CSS/text buttons work correctly in Firefox

We are supposed to develop websites to work in all browsers.  There is an issues with the IE CSS settings and the text buttons we use not showing up correctly in Firefox.  In the past, I did not care and just told people, is it what it is; however, this does not work for Smart Phones.

Therefore, the following needs to be added to the CSS block of the navigation buttons in order for them to be displayed correctly.

display: inline-block;

This will fix the display for smart cells phones as well as Firefox display.