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Surefire ways to protect your email account

If you think your email is safe from hackers, think again. A lack of sufficient email security protocols can lead to data theft, unauthorized access to sensitive information, and successful malware attacks. Here are some tips to secure your email account from unwanted intruders and the many troubles that come with them.

Use separate email accounts

Most people use a single email account for all their needs. As a result, information from websites, newsletters, shopping deals, and messages from work gets sent to one inbox. But what happens when someone breaks into it? There’s a good chance they could gain access to all the stored information and use them in fraudulent dealings.
Having at least two separate email accounts will not only boost your security, but it will also increase your productivity. You can have a personal account to communicate with your friends and family, and a professional email account solely for work-related tasks.

Set strong passwords

Some email users often overlook the importance of having strong email account passwords. You might be surprised to learn that email passwords like “123456,” “qwerty,” and “password” are still the most common around. For the sake of security, set longer passwords or passphrases that contain a good mix of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Make sure these passwords are unique to that account to keep all your other password-protected accounts safe.
You should also consider enabling multifactor authentication (MFA). This creates an extra layer of security by requesting for another method to verify your identity, like a fingerprint scan or a temporary activation code sent to your mobile phone.

Beware of email scams

When you see a link in an email, don’t click on it unless you’ve assessed its authenticity. You never know where those links might lead you. Sometimes they are safe, but other times they can infect your computer with malware or send you to a compromised website.
It’s always good to know who the email message is coming from. If you’re expecting a file from your friend or family, then go ahead and open the attachment. However, emails coming from unknown sources or those that have strange account names such as “@amazon6753.com” are most likely to be email scams.
These types of attacks are known as phishing, and they can be remarkably clever. For example, cybercriminals may masquerade as high-profile companies like Amazon, Facebook, or Bank of America to catch their victims off guard. They create emails with a sense of urgency by claiming that there’s an issue with your account and that you should send them information or click on a link to “confirm” your personal details. This link will either install malware on your device or lead you to a fraudulent site.
Even if there was a genuine issue with your account, legitimate companies would never ask something so suspicious over email. If you get these messages, contact the company directly through a verified website or phone number — not the contact details on the email.

Monitor account activity

Periodically watch over your account activity. Make sure to limit access privileges to apps if you want to ensure maximum privacy and security. Also, check for any suspicious activities in your logs, such as unusual devices and IP addresses that have accessed your account. This indicates that hackers may have successfully broken into your account. If this is the case, sign out of all web sessions and change your password as soon as possible.

Encrypt emails and update your software

Email encryption ensures that any message you send won’t be intercepted and viewed by unauthorized users. Meanwhile, installing the latest updates for your anti-malware, firewalls, and email security software filters potential email scams and fixes any vulnerabilities hackers can exploit.
Protecting your email accounts from various threats can be a daunting process, but with the right support, it should be effortless. Talk to us today for all your cybersecurity needs.

To learn more about how to safeguard your business, or if you are looking for an expert to help you find the best solutions for your business talk to GCInfotech about a free technology assessment.

Published with consideration from smallbiztechnology.com  SOURCE

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Top 5 tips for a successful web conversion

Grabbing people’s attention and converting them to prospective customers is the goal of any professional website. To do that, you need to create a terrific-looking and user-friendly site that encourages visitors to sign up for eBooks, consultations, and other services. Be sure your website follows these five rules that make it easier to convert visitors.

1. Optimize your website for mobile devices

More people are now surfing the web on the go via smartphones, tablets, and laptops. If you want a piece of this traffic, you need to make your website’s design responsive to all mobile devices.

To give your visitors an enjoyable mobile experience, make sure your website design fits the screen of any device. Additionally, all elements of your website, including inner pages, resources, and call-to-action buttons should be easily accessible. If not, visitors will get frustrated and click away to a competitor.

2. Make it easy for customers to contact you

This means displaying your phone number in the upper-right corner of every page and providing a simple, easy-to-find contact form. While some people prefer not to give up their email address for fear it will be picked off by spambots, it can serve as another contact option for those who hate web forms. Ideally, your customers will have more than one way to contact you.

3. Keep it simple

People are always busy. They don’t have time to navigate a complicated website, dig through dozens of pages to find a contact number, or try and figure out what it is that you’re selling because your mobile site doesn’t display content properly.

So when it comes to design, simplicity makes sense. When producing a simple website, every page, word, and image you create must have a singular purpose: to get visitors to contact you. Don’t distract them with excessive information, silly games, or flashy animations. Instead, have a nice clean layout so they can quickly understand what you’re offering and can contact you with a click.

4. Include custom photos whenever possible

Say you have to choose between two different websites that sell the same thing and look virtually the same. The key difference is that one uses real photos of the owner and his or her staff, while the other uses generic stock images of business people. Assuming images from both sites are of the same quality, which one will you more likely choose? Undoubtedly, the one that looks more authentic.

So the next time you need images for your website, invest some time and money in quality pictures taken by a professional photographer.

5. Move social media icons to the bottom of the page

Everyone loves throwing social media icons on their websites. And while it’s not a bad idea to show your credibility, putting social media icons at the top of the page makes your visitors more likely to click on them immediately. When this happens, you just created an exit for them to leave your site and never return, and we all know how easy it is to get distracted on social media.

Instead, place your social media icons at the bottom of the page or in the footer area. Remember, the goal of your website is to convert. If your visitors leave before they get a chance to explore your services, content, and offerings, you’ve lost them before you even had them.

Need a website or another solution to enhance your digital presence? Give us a call and leverage our IT expertise for your business.

Ask yourself what your website is doing for you and whether it’s aligned with your business needs and objectives. The GCInfotech professional web design team is here to help.

Published with permission from TechAdvisory.org. SOURCE

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Small Business Cybersecurity in a Post-COVID World

COVID-19 has forced companies large and small to rapidly retool the way they do business, with even the smallest businesses making remote work arrangements for employees. But while the pandemic has inspired an unprecedented surge of cyber attacks, including a heap of new security challenges for business, many small companies aren’t rewriting cyber security policies or implementing new security measures at the same rate as larger companies, and it seems the smaller the company, the fewer the changes.

With the economy beginning to contract, many small businesses may be struggling to find the funds or staff to address evolving cybersecurity concerns. Small businesses already make up 43 percent of cyber crime targets in the U.S., and in 2019, data breaches cost small businesses an average of $200,000, with 60 percent of those attacked going out of business within six months.

Improving cyber security might cost some money, but it’ll surely be worth keeping your business afloat — and it might even be cheaper than the cost of a data breach. Protecting yourself is often as simple as implementing a few smart policies, and using the right security tools.

Update Your Policies to Address the Realities of Remote Work

If you have employees working remotely during the crisis, you need to implement some policies that acknowledge the unique security risks of working from home. First of all, employees won’t be behind a company firewall, and might not have company security software running on their systems.

Require that employees access company data over a private network — anyone who doesn’t have access to a home network should be required to work onsite, where they can access a secure connection. Public connections, like those in coffee shops or libraries, might not be available anyway, and if they are, they’re not safe — hackers can jump on them to access your data. Clarify that employees shouldn’t save company data to their personal devices, including storage like flash drives, personal cloud storage, or personal email. All of these are insecure places to store data.

Use the Right Tools

Software solutions are available to give you and your employees the tools you need to stay secure while working in a challenging situation. Employees can use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access your company’s internal network and even use a virtual desktop there, which provides both storage solutions and an extra layer of security.

Employees will also need endpoint security, including anti-malware protection and firewall protection. Advanced threat protection will include security for endpoints and other network devices and email, as well as malware protection. The best advanced threat protection offers real-time monitoring to catch breaches and other attacks before they do too much damage.

Train Your Employees

Of course, employees will need regular security check-ins to make sure their security features are optimized. However, they’ll also need additional training in cybersecurity, especially as everyone is on-edge and stressed-out at the moment — in other words, employees are more likely than ever before to be in the perfect state of mind to fall for a phishing email or other social engineering tactic. Regular training, even if it’s just videos and online quizzes, will help keep employees on their toes, and will maybe help you single out individuals who need further attention.

Supply Devices

If you can, it’s safest to supply your employees the devices they need to work from home. It’s more fair to the employees, who may otherwise have to use old or underpowered equipment, or scramble to come up with what they need on their own. But it’s not just about fairness — you have much more control over what happens on company devices, and you can, at least in theory, keep employees from using them for personal stuff. This can help keep hackers from compromising your company data, since you don’t know what emails your employees are answering in their downtime, or which questionable websites they might be visiting. Their personal devices could already be compromised.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been dangerous in all kinds of ways, some more predictable than others. Make sure your company is aware of the dangers COVID-19 poses for your cyber security, so you protect yourself on every front.

To learn more about how to safeguard your business, or if you are looking for an expert to help you find the best solutions for your business talk to GCInfotech about a free technology assessment.

Published with consideration from smallbiztechnology.com  SOURCE

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Password Security
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Think your password is secure? Think again

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created many of the password best practices you probably loathe — using a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters. The NIST now says those guidelines were ill-advised and has changed its stance. Find out why and what this means for you.

The problem

The issue isn’t that the NIST advised people to create easy-to-crack passwords, but their previous advice inadvertently made people create weak passwords using predictable capitalization, special characters, and numbers, like “P@ssW0rd1.”

Such a password may seem secure, but the strings of characters and numbers could easily be compromised by hackers using common algorithms.

What’s more, the NIST also recommended that people change their passwords regularly, but did not specify how and when to change them. Since many people thought their passwords were already secure because they’ve included special characters in them, most only added or changed one character.

The NIST essentially forced everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember but easy for a hacker’s algorithm to crack.

Eventually, the institution admitted that this can cause more problems than solutions. It has reversed its stance on organizational password management requirements, and is now recommending banishing forced periodic password changes and getting rid of complexity requirements.

The solution

Security consultant Frank Abagnale and Chief Hacking Officer for KnowBe4 Kevin Mitnick both see a future without passwords. Both security experts advise enterprises to implement multifactor authentication in login policies.

This requires a user to present two valid credentials aside from a password to gain access to an account. This could be a code sent to the account owner’s smartphone, a login prompt on a mobile device, or a facial or a fingerprint scan. This way, hackers’ login efforts are futile unless they fulfill the succeeding security requirements.

Moreover, Mitnick recommended implementing long passphrases of 25 characters or more, such as “recedemarmaladecrockplacate” or “cavalryfigurineunderdoneexalted.” These are much more difficult to guess and less prone to hacking. As for the frequency of changing passphrases, it will depend on a company’s risk tolerance.

Simply put, passwords should be longer and include nonsensical phrases and English words that make it almost impossible for an automated system to crack.

You should also enforce the following security solutions within your company:

  • Single sign-on – allows users to securely access multiple accounts with one set of credentials
  • Account monitoring tools – recognizes suspicious activity and locks out hackers

When it comes to security, ignorance is your business’s kryptonite. If you’d like to learn about what else you can do to remain secure, just give us a call.

To learn more about how to safeguard your business, or if you are looking for an expert to help you find the best solutions for your business talk to GCInfotech about a free technology assessment.

Published with consideration from TechAdvisory.org SOURCE

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How to avoid a spear-phishing attack. 4 tips to keep you safe from timeless scams.

The hacker’s message is urgent and aimed directly at you. We’ll teach you how to keep from getting duped.

Everyone has access to something a hacker wants. To get it, hackers might aim a targeted attack right at you. The goal might be stealing customer data that’s useful for identity theft, your company’s intellectual property or even your personal income data. The latter could help hackers steal your tax refund or file for unemployment benefits in your name.

Targeted attacks, also called spear-phishing, aim to trick you into handing over login credentials or downloading malicious software. That’s what happened at Twitter in July, where the company says hackers targeted employees on their phones. Spear-phishing attacks also often take place over email. Hackers usually send targets an “urgent” message and include credible-sounding information specific to you, like something that could have come from your own tax return, social media account or credit card bill. These scams aim to override any red flags you might notice about the email with details that make the sender sound legitimate.

Despite corporate training and stern warnings to be careful who you give your password to, people do fall for these tricks. In addition to the Twitter fiasco, there was the release of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, including his technique for making risotto (hint: keep stirring!). Podesta reportedly entered his personal username and password into a fake form designed by hackers specifically to capture his credentials.

Another consequence of falling for a spear-phishing scam could be downloading malicious software, like ransomware. You could also be convinced to wire money to a cybercriminal’s account. So how do you avoid falling for a spear-phishing scam? By taking these security habits to heart.

Know the basic signs of phishing scams

Phishing emails, texts and phone calls try to trick you into visiting a malicious website, handing over a password or downloading a file. This works in email attacks because people often spend the whole day at work clicking on links and downloading files as part of their jobs. Hackers know this and try to take advantage of your propensity to click without thinking.

Despite corporate training and stern warnings to be careful who you give your password to, people do fall for these tricks. In addition to the Twitter fiasco, there was the release of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, including his technique for making risotto (hint: keep stirring!). Podesta reportedly entered his personal username and password into a fake form designed by hackers specifically to capture his credentials.

Another consequence of falling for a spear-phishing scam could be downloading malicious software, like ransomware. You could also be convinced to wire money to a cybercriminal’s account. So how do you avoid falling for a spear-phishing scam? By taking these security habits to heart.

Know the basic signs of phishing scams

Phishing emails, texts and phone calls try to trick you into visiting a malicious website, handing over a password or downloading a file. This works in email attacks because people often spend the whole day at work clicking on links and downloading files as part of their jobs. Hackers know this and try to take advantage of your propensity to click without thinking.

Despite corporate training and stern warnings to be careful who you give your password to, people do fall for these tricks. In addition to the Twitter fiasco, there was the release of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, including his technique for making risotto (hint: keep stirring!). Podesta reportedly entered his personal username and password into a fake form designed by hackers specifically to capture his credentials.

Another consequence of falling for a spear-phishing scam could be downloading malicious software, like ransomware. You could also be convinced to wire money to a cybercriminal’s account. So how do you avoid falling for a spear-phishing scam? By taking these security habits to heart.

Know the basic signs of phishing scams

Phishing emails, texts and phone calls try to trick you into visiting a malicious website, handing over a password or downloading a file. This works in email attacks because people often spend the whole day at work clicking on links and downloading files as part of their jobs. Hackers know this and try to take advantage of your propensity to click without thinking.

Because spear-phishing scams can be so tricky, there’s an extra layer of caution you should apply before acting on a request that comes over email or the phone. The most important of these extra steps: guard your password. Never follow a link from your email to a website and then enter your account password. Never give your password to anyone over the phone.

Banks, email providers and social media platforms often make it policy to never ask for your password in an email or phone call. Instead, you can go to the company’s website in your browser and log in there. You can also dial back to the company’s call customer service department to see if the request is legit. Most financial institutions, like your bank, will send secure messages through a separate inbox you can access only after you’ve logged onto the website.

Beat phishing by calling the sender

If someone sends you something “important” to download, asks you to reset your account passwords or requests that you send a money order from company accounts, call the sender of the message — like your boss, your bank or other financial institution, or the IRS — and make sure they really sent it to you.

If the request came by phone call, you can still pause and double check. For example, if someone says they’re calling from your bank, you can tell the caller you’re going to hang up and call back on the company’s main customer service line.

A phishing message will often try to make the request seem incredibly urgent, so you might not feel inclined to add an extra step by calling the sender to double-check. For example, an email might say that your account has been compromised and you need to reset your password ASAP, or that your account will expire unless you act by the end of the day.

Because spear-phishing scams can be so tricky, there’s an extra layer of caution you should apply before acting on a request that comes over email or the phone. The most important of these extra steps: guard your password. Never follow a link from your email to a website and then enter your account password. Never give your password to anyone over the phone.

Banks, email providers and social media platforms often make it policy to never ask for your password in an email or phone call. Instead, you can go to the company’s website in your browser and log in there. You can also dial back to the company’s call customer service department to see if the request is legit. Most financial institutions, like your bank, will send secure messages through a separate inbox you can access only after you’ve logged onto the website.

Beat phishing by calling the sender

If someone sends you something “important” to download, asks you to reset your account passwords or requests that you send a money order from company accounts, call the sender of the message — like your boss, your bank or other financial institution, or the IRS — and make sure they really sent it to you.

If the request came by phone call, you can still pause and double check. For example, if someone says they’re calling from your bank, you can tell the caller you’re going to hang up and call back on the company’s main customer service line.

A phishing message will often try to make the request seem incredibly urgent, so you might not feel inclined to add an extra step by calling the sender to double-check. For example, an email might say that your account has been compromised and you need to reset your password ASAP, or that your account will expire unless you act by the end of the day.

To learn more about how to safeguard your business, or if you are looking for an expert to help you find the best solutions for your business talk to GCInfotech about a free technology assessment.

Published with consideration from CNET.com  SOURCE

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cyber security
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Why Your Business Is The PERFECT Target For Hackers …

And What You Need To Do NOW To Protect Yourself

Everybody gets hacked, but not everything makes the evening news. We hear about big companies like Target, Home Depot, Capital One, and Facebook getting hacked. What we rarely hear about are the little guys – the small businesses that make up 99.7% of employers in the United States, according to the Small Business Administration. It’s these guys who are the biggest targets of cybercriminals.

Basically, if you run a business, that business is a potential target. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what you sell or how popular you are. Cybercriminals go after everybody. In 2018, a cyber security survey by the Ponemon Institute found that 67% of small and midsize businesses in the US and UK were hit by a cyber-attack.

For the cybercriminal, casting a wide net makes the most sense because it gets results. It puts them in a position where they are able to extort money, steal sensitive information and ultimately profit off of destroying the property, prosperity and reputation of others.

Why do cybercriminals love to target small businesses? There are a handful of reasons why small businesses make sense to attack.

  1. Small Businesses are the most vulnerable. Business owners, entrepreneurs and executives aren’t always up-to-date on network security, current cyberthreats or best practices in IT. They have a business to run and that’s usually where their focus is. Unfortunately, that means cyber security can take a back seat to other things, like marketing or customer support. This also means they might not be investing in good network security or any IT security at all. It’s just not top-of-mind or they may feel that because it’s never happened to them, it never will (which is a dangerous way of thinking).
  2. Small Businesses don’t take IT security seriously. Coming off that last point, it’s true that many businesses don’t properly secure their network because they feel that they aren’t vulnerable. They have the mindset of “It hasn’t happened to me, so it won’t.” Along those same lines, they might not even take password security seriously. According to research conducted by Trace Security, upward of 80% of ALL breaches come down to one vulnerability: weak passwords! Even in 2020, people are still using passwords like “12345” and “password” to protect sensitive data, such as banking information and customer records. Secure passwords that are changed regularly can protect your business!
  3. Small Businesses don’t have the resources they need. Generally speaking, medium to large companies have more resources to put into IT security. While this isn’t always true (even big companies skimp on cyber security, as the headlines remind us), hackers spend less time focused on big targets because they assume it will take more of their own resources (time and effort) to get what they want (money and sensitive data). Many small businesses lack the resources like capital and personnel to put toward IT security, so hackers are more confident in attacking these businesses.

Just because you haven’t had any major problems for years – or at all – is a bad excuse for not maintaining your computer systems. Threats are growing in number by the day. While many small businesses might think, “I don’t have the time or resources for good security,” that’s not true! You don’t need to hire IT staff to take care of your security needs. You don’t need to spend an arm and a leg securing your network. IT security has come a LONG way in just the last five years alone. You can now rely on an IT security firm, like GCInfotech, to handle all the heavy lifting. They can monitor your network 24/7. They can provide you with IT support 24/7.

That’s the great thing about technology today – while many hackers are doing everything they can to use technology against us, you can use it against them too. Work with a dedicated and experienced IT security firm. Tell them your business’s network security needs and they’ll go to work fighting the good fight against the bad guys.

To learn more about how to safeguard your business, or if you are looking for an expert to help you find the best solutions for your business talk to GCInfotech about a free technology assessment.

Published with consideration from TechAdvisory.org SOURCE

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Outlook
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5 Tips to work smarter in Outlook

Microsoft Outlook comes with a raft of features that make managing your busy schedule and boosting your productivity easier. If you find Outlook’s myriad capabilities a little overwhelming, don’t worry — these tips and tricks will have you using Outlook like a pro in no time.

Organize your inbox

Is your Outlook inbox getting a little too cluttered for your liking? Use the Clean Up feature to tidy up your inbox.

From your inbox, click the Home tab and choose from one of three Clean Up options:

  • Clean Up Conversation – reviews an email thread or a conversation and deletes redundant messages
  • Clean Up Folder – reviews conversations in a selected folder and deletes redundant messages
  • Clean Up Folder & Subfolders – reviews all messages in a selected folder and any subfolders, and deletes redundant messages in all of them

Ignore conversations

Besides redundant messages, group conversations that aren’t relevant to you can clutter up your inbox. The Ignore button helps you organize your inbox and focus on relevant emails.

To activate this feature, select a message, then click Home > Ignore > Ignore Conversation. You can also do this by opening a message in a new window and clicking Ignore under the Delete function. You can easily revert this action by going to the Deleted Items folder and clicking Ignore > Stop Ignoring Conversation.

Send links to files

This function is especially useful when you need to send large files to your coworkers or clients. You can send a link to the file instead of the file itself as well as set permissions to allow recipients to edit and collaborate on linked files in real time.

To do this, upload the file you wish to send to OneDrive. Then from the message box, click Attach File > Browse web locations > OneDrive.

Schedule a Teams meeting

Teams is Microsoft’s unified communication and collaboration platform, and it includes the Outlook add-in. This feature allows you to set up Teams meetings directly from Outlook. It also lets you view, accept, or join meetings in either app.

To schedule a Teams meeting on Outlook, follow these steps:

  1. Switch to the calendar view on Outlook. Click the New Teams Meeting tab.
  2. Add individual participants or entire contact groups to the Required or Optional fields.
  3. Type in the topic, start time, and end time of the meeting. There’s no need to add the dial-in phone numbers and conferencing IDs to the invite, as Outlook does this automatically for you.
  4. Create a message inviting the recipients to the meeting, then click Send.

Tag contacts

To get the attention of a specific person in a group email or meeting invite, use the @Mention function. This works particularly well for emails sent to multiple recipients or if you want to convey the urgency of your message.

In the body of your email or invite message, type the @ symbol followed by the name of the person you want to tag (e.g., @johndoe). Doing so will highlight the name in the message and automatically add it to the To line of your message.

You can also search for messages you’re tagged in by selecting Filter Email from the Home tab, and then clicking Mentioned.

These are just some of the things you can do to improve your Outlook experience. For more on how to get the most out of Outlook and other Microsoft products, drop us a line today.

If you are looking for an expert to help you find the best solutions for your business talk to GCInfotech about a free technology assessment

Published with consideration from TechAdvisory.org SOURCE

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Obsolete Firmware
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Obsolete firmware poses security risks

Are you still hanging on to your old work computers since they “still work fine”? While they may still help you get the job done, their outdated firmware can make you vulnerable to security risks that can lead to major problems.

What is firmware?

Firmware is a basic type of software that is embedded into every piece of hardware. It controls the device it’s installed on, cannot be uninstalled or removed, and is only compatible with the make and model of the hardware it is installed on. Think of it like a translator between your stiff and unchanging hardware and your fluid and evolving software. For example, the firmware of a TV remote control processes the button presses and sends that data into a format that the TV can understand.

Why is firmware security important?

To clearly explain the importance of firmware security, let’s use the firmware installed in a router as an example.

When you buy a router and plug it in, its firmware allows it to connect devices to your wireless network with almost zero input from you. However, if the router manufacturer is outside of California, then they might still be using the same username and password for the same router model, if not for all router models. If you don’t change these default settings, you could be exposed to hackers.

Default usernames and passwords is an example of a known vulnerability, and firmware could have other vulnerabilities that cybercriminals could exploit. Black hat hackers could use these to spy on you, steal or corrupt your data, or even damage your systems. Unfortunately, firmware exploits are not rare occurrences. Not too long ago, a cybersecurity professional discovered that sending a 33-character text message to a router generated an SMS response that included the administrator username and password.

How do I protect myself?

The best way to defend yourself from firmware exploits is to immediately roll out firmware updates from the device’s manufacturer. With that said, you need to keep in mind that every manufacturer has different procedures for checking and updating firmware. For instance, if you have a D-Link router, typing “192.168.0.1” into a web browser will allow you to access its firmware and update process, assuming you have the username and password. If you’re unfamiliar with your router manufacturer’s procedures, you can type “[manufacturer name] router firmware update” on any search engine like Google.

But remember, routers are just one example of how firmware affects your cybersecurity posture. Hard drives, motherboards, and even mice and keyboards need to be checked as well. We understand this can be extremely tedious, and that’s why we highly recommend hiring an IT provider to take care of it for you. If you’re curious about what else we can do to help, give us a call today!

To learn more about how to safeguard your business, or if you are looking for an expert to help you find the best solutions for your business talk to GCInfotech about a free technology assessment.

Published with consideration from TechAdvisory.org SOURCE

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Windows 10 PC
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Get a faster Windows 10 PC with these tips

Is your computer taking a lot of time to perform tasks it used to finish within seconds? Just because your unit is slowing down doesn’t mean you’ll need to spend hundreds of dollars on a replacement. We’ve compiled four ways to speed up your Windows 10 computer for free:

Prevent programs from launching at startup

Windows makes certain programs readily available by loading them at startup. While Microsoft likely has good intentions for doing this, this auto-launch feature slows down your computer. To fix this issue, you’ll need to adjust your settings.

Open the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc to see the programs that launch during startup. On the startup tab, you can easily disable any programs you don’t want launching at startup, such as media players and optional accessories that don’t have to be active all the time. But to be on the safe side, keep essential apps, such as antivirus software, enabled.

Get rid of useless applications

Having too many programs installed on your computer uses up valuable memory and hard disk space. This slows down your computer and makes the machine work harder than necessary. Quickly uninstall programs you don’t need by following these steps:

  • Tap the Windows key on your keyboard and type “Add or remove programs” (this will show you all the apps stored in your computer).
  • A link to the system settings will appear. Click on the link.
  • Select the program/s you no longer want, and click Uninstall.

Once you do this, you’ll then be guided through several steps to complete the uninstallation process.

Organize your disks

It’s important to regularly clean out your computer of data you don’t need. Thankfully, Microsoft’s Disk Cleanup tool makes it easy to do so.

To find the tool, tap on the Windows button on your keyboard and type “Disk Cleanup.” If you click on the link, the tool will automatically find files that take up too much memory space, such as temporary Internet and system memory dump files. Just click OK to send these files to your Recycle Bin.

Turn off apps running in the background

You may not know it, but there are a lot of programs running in the background as you use your computer. Microsoft enabled their native universal apps to do this so you can quickly access their features. However, this also slows down your CPU. Disabling them will reduce the burden on your computer and speed it up.

To find out what programs are running in the background, press the Windows button on your keyboard and type “Background apps.” Find the programs you don’t need running and toggle the On-Off button.

By following these four steps, you’ll see a noticeable difference in the speed of your PC. If you want to learn how to optimize your Windows system further or need assistance with your other Microsoft products, give us a call.

If you are looking for an expert to help you find the best solutions for your business talk to GCInfotech about a free technology assessment

Published with consideration from TechAdvisory.org SOURCE

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Why it pays to have a good-looking website

In a recent survey of 1,800 customers, 42% said they’re “very unlikely” to purchase from ugly websites. That’s not so surprising. After all, there are plenty of competitors’ websites that are more visually appealing and user-friendly that they can visit. If your business website fails to make a critical good first impression, it could lose money. You can avoid that by improving these elements on your website.

A variety of professional photos

From pictures of your products to team photos, high-quality images are arguably the most important thing on your website. Blurry, outdated, or irrelevant pictures tell your site visitors that you don’t care about their browsing experience. In-house photos are the best option, but stock images shouldn’t cause any problems as long as they are optimized for mobile viewing and relevant to your content.

Navigation

Aside from subpar images, linking to nonexistent pages is one of the best ways to turn site visitors away. Make sure it’s easy to navigate your site and remove outdated or irrelevant pages. You can’t sell 404 pages to customers, and if that’s all visitors can find, it’s game over.

Clear copywriting

The last thing you want to do is to confuse your customers, so it’s important to keep all of your product or service descriptions as straightforward and simple as possible. If what you’re selling has detailed information such as dimensions or technical requirements, make sure the description is easy to find but not obtrusive.

Promises to site visitors

Any website that ships products should make its returns policy as visible as possible. This establishes trust early. Explicitly stating terms of return is also important because some online shoppers make purchase decisions based solely on the clarity of a return policy.

Even if you don’t run an eCommerce site, you also need to prominently display privacy commitments, such as those mandated by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

About page

Your brand needs a story behind it that customers can relate to. Every company website should have an About Us page that describes your team, its culture, and what sets you apart from the competition. Whatever your story is, make sure it’s accessible from any page on your site.

Design

Not everyone is a web design expert, but in today’s gig economy, one is never too far away from such a career. If your budget is tight, there are DIY site builders specifically geared toward small businesses. Or with a relatively low monthly expenditure, you can hire a managed website provider.

With more revenue originating online, small- and medium-sized business owners can’t afford to overlook the importance of creating a fully functional website.

Ask yourself what your website is doing for you and whether it’s aligned with your business needs and objectives. The GCInfotech professional web design team is here to help.

Published with permission from TechAdvisory.org. SOURCE

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