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Choosing Password Software For Your Website
By: Miles Galliford
It is common in the internet world for a website owner to want to add login and password software to an existing specialist content website. Their usual intention is to protect part of the website with password access and then charge their site visitors to read their premium content.
Why do Website Owners Want to Add Password Protection?
In our experience the two most common reasons for wanting to add password protection and paid subscription to an existing website are:
The site owner intended to generate revenues from advertising, but the income they are currently making is lower than they had projected. As a result they decide to move to a subscription model.
A website publisher has built up a loyal user base by providing free content. They then decide to add a premium content area so that they can charge for some content. This is most common with blogs which build a sizeable and loyal following
Login and Password Protection Software Checklist
When deciding to add login and password protection software to a website, these are some of the points that you should take into account
Check 1 ? How Integrated will the Login and Password Protection be?
It is very likely that you will want to have different levels of access, for example gold, silver and platinum. This might not be at the outset, but is likely to be the way that your membership plan will evolve. Your password protection software should enable you to specify which member sees what content.
Check 2 ? How well does the Password Protection Integrate with the Payment Processing?
One of the most common problems we find with people who ?bolt on? password protection to their existing website is they have no way of telling which members have renewed their subscription and therefore which passwords should be active. Once you have more than a hundred members you must ensure payment processing and password verification is fully integrated.
Check 3 ? Password Fraud and Multi-Login Protection
Ensure that the software has multiple means of detecting password fraud. This is when a single paying member shares their password with multiple people or someone steals a password and makes it available to other people, often by posting it on a forum. The login and password protection software should be able to detect more than one person trying to login at any one time, multiple different IP addresses, international logins and other suspicious activity.
Check 4 ? Ensure People Can?t Still Access your Premium Content Via the URL
It is amazing how most password protection software does not stop people typing a URL directly into the browser address field to access premium content.
Check 5 ? Allow the Search Engine Spiders in, But No People
The best password protection software enables the search engine spiders to get access to the premium content so it can be indexed, but blocks all human efforts to get through the protection. This software will allow a premium content page to be displayed to non-members with just the title and a page summary visible. Visitors should also be shown information about how to become a subscriber to the website. This is an extremely important and powerful marketing tool
Check 6 ? Turn off Page Caching
When a legitimate member logs in and accesses premium content to read, the page will be cached on one or multiple servers around the world. This means the next time that someone searches for this content they will be able to view the complete cached version of the page without paying for membership. Ensure that your premium content pages cannot be cached.
Check 7 ? Members Should be Able to Choose their Own Password
Ensure members can choose their own password. Nothing reduces membership satisfaction and increases customer service calls than issuing complicated, hard to remember passwords.
A Word of Warning
Most login and password protection software providers will not make you aware of these issues or explain how you should ensure that your premium content is secure. You must tread carefully when using ?bolt-on? applications to your website when revenues are involved. There are a lot of people who know about the above loopholes and will exploit your website if you leave any of the doors open.
Best Solution
The best solutions for ensuring a secure and bullet-proof subscription website is to use a platform which has been built bottom up to seamlessly integrate the content management, password protection and membership database. This is your best chance of closing off all the common loopholes and maximising your revenues. You will also greatly reduce customer service and member administration problems, which can be monotonous and time consuming.
Miles Galliford is the founder of SubHub- http://www.subhub.com. SubHub is focused on helping individuals and organisations design, build and launch websites which can take subscription payments to get access to premium content. Subscription and membership website publishing is one of the fastest growing areas of business and the market is expected to be woth more than $5bn by the end of 2007. To learn more about this exciting opportunity visit http://www.subhub.com. |
