It’s crazy, twitter has to shape up and they have to do it now. A worm/virus similar to the Stalk Daily virus that hit Twitter yesterday.

DO NOT view profiles that mention the word Mikeyy. It’s a viral virus that seems to infect people who in turn view infected profiles, the very same way StalkDaily was doing.

If you are or do get infected, please do the following in hopes of regaining access to your account and preventing this worm/virus from causing more damage;

• Change your password (we doubt the virus grabs your password, but just incase)
• Then, log out and ‘reset’ your password ‘again’
• Clear your Browsers Cache before logging back into your account.
• Use a 3rd party application to browse twitter

This should help although until Twitter steps in we’ll ALL remain vulnerable.
Again, please DO NOT click on ANY profile mentioning Mikeyy.

An example of what these posts will look like can be found via twitter search.

- @tonfue

Twitter is the new online fad, it’s the crazy these days and with a 55% increase in its userbase every single month it’s obviouse, twitter is taking over the world. Ok so maybe we exaggerate, but hey, 90% of those reading this post use twitter, and you’re all not aware of the dangers.

Phishers, scammers and hackers alike are always the first to take advantage of a new social network that’s exploding onto the scene, as is evident recently with many phishing attacks circulating around twitter. So here’s what you need to do to stay safe and to be sure you’re not tricked into losing your account!

Don’t use the same password on you twitter account and email address you registered with, if all else fails and you lose your twitter account to a phisher, you don’t want to lose your email too! Especially if it’s one that contains more important emails with login info to other sites, servers, maybe paypal details? Be very very careful.

There are many sites online now that grab your browser cookies and then extracting user info from it, sensitive information like email addresses, usernames and passwords so be sure to clear your browser cookies regularly.

One site that’s doing this is Stalk Daily now we wont link to this site and are asking you to please NOT visit it, as it’s run by phishers, a bunch of scum that are stealing peoples accounts on twitter in order to advertise their site and god knows what else. Instead, if you’ve been hit by these phishers please email phishing-report@us-cert.gov with information regarding their ILLEGAL activity. Explain how visiting their site led to them illegally accessing your twitter accounts and posting messages to advertise their services, which in turn attract other victims and so on.

Below is an excerpt from an article @KodeSpark wrote recently;

How do you protect yourself?

I can’t guarantee any of the methods outlined below but they should help

• Do not visit the account’s page or the website stalkdaily.com
• Do not browse twitter via your browser, use a client instead
• Do not follow anyone ‘till the worm account is banned
• Do not add the @ to stalkdailywoo if you tweet about it
• Warn your followers about the #Hijack and send a @reply to twitter management

These people need to be stopped, and you need to be careful while using an ever growing service such as twitter, make sure you’re using a unique password for twitter only, and never EVER give any service that is not affiliated with Twitter your username and password. This goes for any service online, phishers are weakest when you’re being careful and don’t get fooled. Always check the websites URL to make sure it’s the site you’re meaning to log into and never give out your info to sites you’re not 100% sure about.

Browse safely - @tonfue

I found a recent post on Toni’s blog to be very informative and it brought up some strong valid points about professional designers having the same inspiration sources. Jacob Cass was noted as having designed a similar logo to a previous 2 year old design. Regardless of whether he was inspired by it or not, Toni asks some simple important questions I think designers need to answer;

are designers so much alike that we can’t seem to come up with new concepts? Are we all so influenced by the same sources of inspiration? or are we now taking advantage of our high profiles and using that to bend the rules?

- Toni Z

Good read, nice find, eye opening questions.

I can’t even call these teenagers real designers. They’re young immature 16 and 17 year old kids running around claiming to be professional designers charging clients outrageous prices only to end up proving these clients with rubbish.

One teenage Designer making the rounds lately on many design communities and news feeds is Julie Kapral, better known as JulieK. She’s 16, and talented, we also apologize for our previous comments about her work, we were in no position to judge her. Just goes to show that even though very few in number, there are naturally talented young designers out there. Thanks to Toni for dropping us an email and enlightening us.

But for the most part, how on earth do these kids get a hold of software like Photoshop and then fool clients into hiring them? We’ve said this before and we have to say it again, to all end clients, people looking for designers, these young designers can not be trusted and should not be taken serious. These kids think they can slap up a portfolio, a couple designs and people will take them seriously. They don’t respect deadlines, they don’t respect other designers work and they certainly don’t care about the quality that you end up getting.

The verdict? Don’t give these young impostors a chance, they’re fake designers for the most trying to make a quick buck to go spend on jelly beans and pink stuffed animal toys. Make sure they can do what they say they can do, and then after providing you with enough evidence that they’re capable, pay them, not before.

Hey guys, today we decided to touch up what you should and should not do when it comes to running a website and driving it to success, what you should think about design wise, why not to trust freelance designers, and how to better target your site to into clicking more.

With the roll out of a new website; the need for an experienced graphic designer is becoming more and more prominent as it relates to how your customers perceive your website, navigate within it and ultimately purchase from it. Following are some tips we have been able to put together to better position your website so it converts at a much higher percentage of the traffic that is being driven to your site:

The use of the term “Instant Affinity“: This is a term that we use for the “that’s what I’m searching for” reaction that customers sometimes have when then find new sites. It’s an important (albeit subjective) measure because many studies have shown that visitors make a judgment about a website in a fraction of a second; normally within 5-8 seconds of landing on a website. If you do not have INSTANT AFFINITY as it relates to your branding and a value proposition message; then you are not maximizing the use of your HTML CONTENT fields to drive home your message while instilling confidence in your visitors to continue to navigate/browse and ultimately purchase from your website.

In our experience, we have found that crisp, clean, well laid out looking sites, with an appropriate image related to your product offerings and a 7-12 value proposition, tend to work well together. We’d suggest shorter landing pages, so that no scrolling is required or at least very little; this is the norm in the industry; you want to keep your HTML CONTENT landing page images to a height/width that conducive in displaying a promo about a particular category WHILE still showing product above the FOLD (Above the fold = what customers see initially after clicking on a link without the need for said customer to scroll down to view product(s)).

Here is an example of a well designed landing page:

Next is Credibility. We’re all wary of scams (like the trafficcoleman.com scam) on the web and due to this it’s important that your customers equate quality of graphic design with quality of product so trust/loyalty can ensure to drive conversion. Thus a certain level of graphic design sophistication is needed so your site SCREAMS credibility! The chances are if your design was “homemade” then it also looks that way to your customers. Wed suggest using an experienced graphic design company when putting together any marketing materials; such as DSR related promo inserts to your eBay customers, HTML CONTENT execution on your website, email targeted campaigns, etc…

But here’s the tricky part, in doing so you don’t want to fall for a scam yourself. There are so many new designers popping up every day, any young kid with a free download of PhotoShop or similar graphic software considers themselves a professional designer, purchases a domain for $10 and sets up his online design company. Many then go to setup a portfolio that does not even belong to them, ripping designs left and right, logo’s from logo galleries, css sites from css galleries and so on. It’s appalling but sadly it’s strongly in effect as we speak.

Also, freelance designers force a 50/50 payment system where you pay 50% of the full project costs before they start, then the remaining 50% after everything is finished, many times they don’t finish it and you’re stuck chasing them and filing chargebacks on top of that wasting your time.

We suggest you don’t hire a designer that does not have a real contact page with address or phone numbers, or office details of some sort. Serious designers that wont give you a hard time wont mind providing their personal details for contact purposes. Use Escrow when you can so you’re safer when it comes to dealing with payments and please, whatever you do, ask to have the designer call you so you at least have a number and know they are really who they say they are.

Freelance designers are NOT the way to go, they’re for the most part untrustworthy so aim to deal with graphic companies rather than individual freelance designers. Companies may charge more but you get your monies worth!

Lastly is Focus. This feeds directly into ‘clutter’ and how customers perceive your site. If there is TOO MUCH going on in terms of links, flash animation, promos, animated .gifs, scrolling advertisements, etc…then you value proposition of who you are and why customers should shop or continue to browse your site; will be last in translation due to a cluttered site. Like Einstein said,

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”

We’ve found that an effective concept in any number of web marketing areas (as mentioned above). We feel that graphic design should contribute to usability and simplicity by helping those customers determine where there next clicks are going to occur on your website; based upon what your customers are looking for. We’re huge fans of simplifying navigation options by predicting what the majority of your site visitors will be looking for via the use of KEYWORD reports from your Google Analytics account as well as by using your upcoming NEXTOPIA advanced search module which contains a REPORT section that delivers to you an even more robust list of search words by your customers; then act upon these finds and then offer visually prominent links to those items; for example the use of images on your BRAND menu.

With that, you’re one step closer to driving your site steady on the road to success, good luck!