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Last month I reported a problem to my acquiring bank for Credit card payments. About half the credit card payments I handle fail for a variety of reasons. They did a investigation and last week finally came to the conclusion that there was indeed a problem.

Their explaination

Basically what happens is that some credit card distributors give out MasterCard cards with Visa card numbers. Because the customer is not aware of this he/she will choose MasterCard (as per the label on the card). This in itself is not a problem as long as the bank can figure out where the number belongs and process the payment.

Due to a small oversight in the handling process it can occur that if you choose MasterCard the bank goes that route and from that point on will no longer take Visa numbers into account. If that MasterCard has a Visa number the payment will fail.

The payment failure can range from a simple “card declined” to a “invalid card” or even a “failed authorisation” error. Depending on the distributing party and what the acquiring bank makes of the number. In some cases the gateway stopped responding completely and a timeout would eventually occur.

They also informed that this will be resolved before too long but can be worked around quite easily. Simply by having to approach the choice of payment a bit differently.

The solution (workaround)

Send a different request to the bank. Let the customer choose a specific method right from the webshop instead of have the customer choose at the banks gateway. And for credit cards always assume both Visa and MasterCard.

Which is what I did;

omnicard-checkout-multi

 

Available very soon in OmniCard. Prettier, more secure and hopefully no more failures.

Note: No security is compromised and strictly technically speaking there are no flaws in the processing of the transactions. The bank in question is fully PCI compliant and with that adheres to the strictest rules possible to guarantee the security of your transaction.

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Over the past days I’ve been struggling with my PC to get it to work after it got unbearable slow. Re-installing Windows didn’t help and made things only worse. With the network throughput being suspect at some point I decided to poke a PCI card in there to “replace” the onboard network interface. After doing so I found out that the PCI slot didn’t work at all…

Fine! PC dead.

So I hopped over to my favorite PC store and bought everything new that was suspect. Including a new Mainboard, CPU and Harddisk.

Wanting to salvage some stuff. Such as the case (Cooler Master CMII Advanced) and almost new Graphics card (an Asus GTX670 DirectCU2) and some other items I took it upon myself to take apart the PC in preparation of the new stuff which should be arriving tomorrow-ish.

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wordpress-statsOver the past few weeks I’ve been checking some of my sites statistics a bit more closely to see where people go on the site. Where they come from and maybe how I can improve the site based on such numbers. One of the plugins I use for this is Automattic’s Jetpack (WordPress stats).

After a few days I noticed the trend where Google would send a whole bunch of people to my site from all over the world. Good. A few days after that I noticed that *every* language Google is presented in is shown as a separate site in my referrer stats.

So for the past weeks every day Google dominates my referrer stats rendering it completely useless to see where people come from. Why not just bunch all Google domains up in one entry/row so other sites get a chance to be visible too. This is kinda useless :(

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getthemessageA quirck I quite often ran into with Apple’s iMessage was that messages didn’t quite sync throughout all my devices. This in itself isn’t such an issue, but if you end up having 3 open “conversations” all with a few messages from the same person that gets confusing quickly.

Apple in part remedied this by allowing devices like iPads and desktop computers to receive messages sent to your phone number. But it turns out that the way you start the conversation makes a big difference also. By chance I ran into this setting and I’ve been trying it for some months now. For me it solved the issue entirely.

How to set up iMessage

To make iMessage start the conversation from the right “sender” is rather easy and takes only a few minutes.

See the below screenshots on how I set up iMessage on my Phone and iMac.

imessage-iphone imessage-desktop
On iOS: Go into Settings > Messages > Send & Receive.
On OS X: Open the messages app and click the “Messages” menu select “Preferences” and look in the “Accounts” tab.

The big trick here is that Apple likes you to be available via EVERYTHING you have. That means, every email address and phone number in your vCard and set up Email accounts. This is crazy. So remove all the ones you do not want to be available for.

I have several email addresses but use only one for iMessage. And my phone number is somehow mandatory. But fine. So 2 ways. It’s also important to set a default starting point on all your devices. I chose my email address as a default conversation starter everywhere.

Set this up on all your devices with identical settings and you’ll find that your iMessages are much more streamlined.

Tip: Some added security for your Apple ID

Since your iMessage ID is by default your Apple ID. My Apple ID is none of your business. And your Apple ID is none of my business. Having a strong password on it is one thing but them having to guess your username as well is just extra safe.
So do not use that email address for sending/receiving iMessage messages. Just a tiny bit of extra security.

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Would you rather launch a finished and good site now and fine tune it based on user input. Or mull over the details, text, photos and every tiny details and pixel for weeks to maybe achieve that higher level or perfection?

The generic announcement

Some seem to think that having visitors look at a “maintenance” or “we are working on the site” page for weeks or even months is good. Because it tells the visitors something is coming.

True. But it may also work the other way around and make people think;

Oh, it’s not finished yet.

They move on, forget and probably never return. Often a temporary page is not engaging enough for people to bookmark it or even remember it the next day. Thus you lost a visitor and potential customer.

The premature launch

The other route many people take is to just get it out there as fast as possible. Delivering a sub-par experience for users. Incomplete information, unfinished elements in the site. Image placeholders. All the silly stuff of an unfinished product. I think this looks very unprofessional and again, pushes people away.

Well, this is crap…

And they’re gone, never to return. Not good. Especially not if you want to sell something to a broad audience.

Launch when it makes sense

I like to build a site, go over the pages and details a few times over the course of several weeks. Then launch it. Even if it’s not 100% perfect. But that way you can start selling your product or service. The site is complete, offers good information and looks quite nice. But *after* launch. It’s not finished. You still have to revisit pages and items multiple times and fine-tune them. Based on your new ideas, analytics and feedback from the visitors.

What I like to do

I like to build a site over the course of a few weeks. A page per day or something. Imagine how you would want to navigate the site as a visitor and follow that thought. Don’t abide by what the theme or plugins decide is best. It’s your site! Think of where you want certain items and elements. Take a few days to work on the theme, plugins and work out obvious bugs and quirks. After a while you end up with a good and complete site.

Also important is text, perhaps images. Write balanced paragraphs. Insert some graphics here and there. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But the gist of the text should be complete and clear. Make sure it looks well formatted.

 

And when that’s done; you launch the site.

It’s not finished. It never really is. Every few days/weeks you browse around the site and find something to improve and redo in the site until you can’t think of anything to improve. Getting a lot of questions about certain items? “where can I find this?”, “How does this work?” You probably didn’t put it on the site or if you did, people can’t find it. So figure out a way to make that part of the site easier to find or read.

And after a bunch of months, you don’t get people asking for stuff that’s on the site. You can’t think of anything to improve… Then, it’s time to build a new site.