This may be alarming to any small business who works with a computer, but number of small businesses who base their business on computers must be particularly alarmed.

Rather then being alarmed, a better course may be to become aware. To ask what measures you can take to protect important information that you have stored on your office computers. Then what measures that you can take to shield your small office computer systems and data from harm.

All good computer data security begins with a regularly scheduled data backup plan. Your own businesses' "Backup or lose it Plan". All data critical to running of your business on desktop PCs and notebooks must be backed up regularly. If it is daily, weekly, or monthly, depends on your business, as long as your business data is backed-up regularly.

Make sure you implement and stick with an automated backup system, where you regularly monitor log files and run test restore jobs. Also be sure to invest in a substantial media rotation plan and rotate your backup media off site on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

Virus Detection

To aid you in maintaining your computer, invest in a good utility software package that includes a computer virus detection utility. Both Norton and McAfee are good packages for this purpose.

If you have not installed a virus scanning utility on your computer, especially if you have a live DSL or cable Internet access -- do it A.S.A.P. Your computer system is susceptible to outsiders probing your computer files or transmitting a virus to your computer system. With one of these Internet connections, you must be even more vigilant.

Be sure to go online and update virus scanning utility on a regular bases so that you can protect your system from latest computer virus circulating. New viruses circulate Internet daily and you will not be fully protected unless your virus detection software is as current as possible.

Another basic virus protection tip -- most computer viruses are transmitted via email attachments. Thus, do not open email attachments from email addresses that you do not know.

If you are in business for yourself, an executive with decision making power, or head of your company, you are probably bombarded with advice, opinions and information about how to build or re-vamp your website and how to use it to your advantage in business.

To be as successful as possible in your e-business, you’ll need to plan ahead and you’ll need to properly fuse disciplines of design, technology and marketing. From conception to reality, process of manifesting a website draws upon a multidisciplinary approach.

The more time and effort you put into planning and building your website, or revamping an existing one, more successful you’ll be. Your new site will have more potential in accomplishing your business goals, your business will look more credible to all people visiting your site, and you’ll increase your bottom line.

The following is a guide for building a new website. It shows how a corporate webmaster or Web department creates a world-class website, and it is same step by step process that every organization, no matter how small, should follow.

Step 1 – Discovery: The first phase involves determining scope of project, timeline and scheduling parameters, everyone’s expectations, and your current human and technical resources.

Step 2 - Concept and Planning: The next step is to determine site requirements, business goals, types of functionality, site features, and a timeline and due date. You’ll need to determine who your site audience is, demographics and psychographics of your visitors.

In this phase architecture or organization of information that will be included on site needs to be planned as well. The most important part of this step is determining your goals for site. You need to ask yourself and any other stake holders exactly what new site ought to yield when completed. What do you expect site to do? What do you want to get out of it? What messages do you want to convey to all people who will eventually view it? What are priorities of site in terms of your business and making money? What types of people will be using site and what will they want to accomplish while there?

Step 3 - Design Specifications: This is when look & feel and a visual design specification are created. Here you’ll determine fonts, colors and size and layouts, always trying to keep consistency paramount. You’ll want to write specifications for images you’ll be using on site as well. It’s also time to decide upon and design technical infrastructure and architecture of site, server, environment and platform. You’ll determine what programming languages and databases will be used, if any, and any other technical features your site will need.

One of secondary benefits of following Step 3 is that you’ll have a document to refer back to later on when adding to site. If you hire a new Web person of company, you can give them this design specification document for them to follow whenever they work on your site