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Gratiot Community Credit Union launched a new website today. The site is a modern design incorporating features that make it responsive to every device used to view it. The design includes a blue and grey color scheme, large banners for current promotions, featured rates, featured products, featured articles and a section for member benefits. The home page is designed to hit most of the initial needs of visitors to their site. Take a look at their beautiful website: https://www.gratiotcu.org/
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Congratulations to Western Division Federal Credit Union on the launch of their brand new site!
The new site showcases a clean and modern design that displays a large rotating banner that is perfect to call attention to the latest marketing campaigns, featured rates, and the direct login widget. Additionally, the site is completely responsive and looks great on mobile devices! This new website greatly improves member experience by providing a modern website that will work on any device!
Check it out!
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1st Community Federal Credit Union has launched a new website today. The new website has a modern and responsive design which looks great on all types of devices. The colors are consistent with the previous site, staying loyal to the red and blue scheme. The home page features rotating banners for featured promotions. It also utilizes a custom “featured offers” section for members to browse through; large red rotating services buttons, a featured rates area and a “News Headline” section toward the bottom. Take a look at their new website: https://1cfcu.org/
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San Antonio Citizens Federal Credit Union launched a new website as part of their rebranding for the credit union. The site is bright, clean and modern combining white, bright green and bright blue colors. The site is responsive so it looks great on devices of all sizes from phones to desktops. It features a minimal menu to make navigation easy. Large rotating banners great visitors with current offers. Below the banners are featured products, member testimonials, an information section, community involvement and member benefits. Wow! That’s a lot of information but people are accustomed to scrolling nowadays so it’s consistent with modern design. Take a look at their beautiful new website: https://www.sacfcu.org/
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One of our plugin vendors, WordFence, wrote a detailed post answering the question “Is WordPress Secure.” “The short answer is yes, but it does require a modest amount of work and education on the part of the site owner.” Fortunately for our hosting clients, we already do much of that work (AND MORE!) for you!
Our hosting environment runs the Plesk hosting control panel on top of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu, Plesk, and WordPress core and repository plugin updates are automatically installed on schedule as they become available.
Your website on our hosting benefits from several different layers of protection, at the network level, the server level, and at the application level. Traffic is continuously monitored by Apache ModSecurity for dynamically updated (Atomic Subscription) patterns of abuse such as brute force login attempts, form POST abuse, excessive 404 request, 404 requests for commonly abused filenames, etc. These automated systems then temporarily ban offending IP addresses using Fail2Ban. Repeat offenders get blocked for longer periods of time. At the application level, the WordFence security plugin is used to monitor WordPress core files and plugins for changes from the official versions, as well as to overlap some of the ModSecurity functionality blocking abusive requests if they make it through the previous layers of defense. We also have systems, Cacti, Graylog, Watchdog, Health Monitor in place to monitor overall server and network load levels that alert us to suspicious conditions outside the norm for manual inspection so that we can respond to and mitigate threats as necessary.
We take your website security seriously. If you have questions about security please ask!
Website Accessibility
Accessibility is an important issue that can produce damaging repercussions when overlooked. It is a challenge that Web Developers must strive to meet, so that each page built is accessible to every visitor. Website accessibility is a legally complicated issue because it varies from one country to another. Following these best practices will most likely help a developer come out with good results.
Evolving Security Threats
Security can be a concerning topic for the modern developer as hackers are constantly finding new and more sophisticated exploits. Keeping up with these security issues can be pretty exhausting. Its important to make sure that data sensitive sites are monitored on a pretty consistent basis. It’s also good to make sure that the site and its plugins stay updated as well as its core files.
Performance
Performance, as with usability, is also something Web Developers have to constantly keep in mind. Every action we take during development has the potential to impact the performance of the finished site. Images are a particular area that should never be overlooked. Large image files impact website performance immensely. Using large image files in the early development stage; even just for testing purposes can come back to haunt later. Its a good idea to make sure that all the images used for a site are compressed and optimized for web use. Also, using CDN’s (Content delivery network’s) can help limit the number of resources used on the server, when not using CDN’s its a good idea to keep all external JavaScript and CSS files minified. Another performance tool to consider when developing a website is the utilization of browser caching. All in all, it can be a time consuming task to make sure all of these things are considered and tested, however it is important to have well performing websites for usability, as well as SEO (search engine optimization).
Certainly, web developers aren’t just creating a pretty looking website. The modern developer must think of things like security, accessibility, and performance measures just to name a few. Luckily, most developers strive to be up to date with the ever-changing field of technology.
