Invasion of the dot-coms...nearly

Two years ago I had just set up my first major, live website. I began to notice website addresses appearing more frequently on adverts. Tesco Direct was beginning trials, but there was no advertising for dedicated, Internet-only companies - now known as the "dot-coms".

One year ago, it was coming to the end of 3 months off of school following exams - so I had been watching a lot of TV. Adverts were starting to show more and more websites, with the e-commerce revolution almost in full swing.

The last year has shown the greatest increase in dot-com advertising. I first noticed it with the launch of Jungle.com. This had an enormous advertising budget, backed by the Software Warehouse. In my mind it was the first dot-com advertising campaign to have a big effect. At that point the large Software Warehouse catalogues in the likes of PC Pro still carried the same branding. However, one month later I noticed a change. The red and yellow Software Warehouse pages turned into green Jungle.com pages. This is a symptom of a growing problem - the .com invasion. Even established names such as Evesham Micros have become evesham.com.

...you can't watch more than 15 minutes of the TV... without .com being shoved in your face.

Since then you can't watch more than 15 minutes of the TV, listen to 15 minutes of the radio or even read a newspaper without .com being shoved in your face. The dot-coms are even sponsoring TV programmes. So, .com has invaded company names, the television, the radio, the newspapers - unfortunately the online companies themselves are failing to invade the market as well as they could.

Money Where It Counts

...in the rush to the market they have neglected the key concept - making the thing work in the first place. Both dot-coms and bricks and mortar companies have been spending a lot of money on advertising and branding. This is an essential part of getting and keeping customers, and standing out from the crowd. Unfortunately in the rush to the market they have neglected the key concept - making the thing work in the first place. Over the last month there have been high-profile crashes, serious security breaches and dot-com collapses. What is going wrong? The answer is complex in some ways, simple in others. The companies generally have to cut corners due to lack of time (as they need to get to market first) and, for the dot-coms, lack of finance. This corner cutting then comes back to bite them later when the system fails for some reason. That extra bit of care, time and effort would go a long way to saving face for many of the companies who have recently suffered breaches.

Fear

Why are credit card details anywhere on the public-facing side of the website at all? They should be tucked safely away behind a firewall.

One of the greatest fears of many online shoppers is that their credit card details will be intercepted. With secure connections this is much less of a problem, and the cookie myths are all but gone. Yet, the use of credit cards is still a problem.

This is due to recent security breaches, where various high-profile sites have inadvertently made credit card details available on their websites. It isn't done deliberately, but it still damages consumer confidence and there really is on excuse for it. Why are credit card details anywhere on the public-facing side of the website at all? They should be tucked safely away behind a firewall - put there by a secure form. There is no need for anything other than a customer id to be on the public side.

...what is more dangerous - hackers making a determined (and detectable) effort to break into a system, or plain incompetence...

If more care was taken to protect details (why have a secure form if the confidential information can drift outside of the security zone), consumer confidence would rise. Each new security breach damages the Internet economy - after all, what is more dangerous - hackers making a determined (and detectable) effort to break into a system, or plain incompetence leading to anybody being able to see secure information. What would you feel worse about - burglars being caught by a burglar alarm while breaking in, or burglars getting away because you left the keys in the door and the alarm turned off?