Would you carry on employing a salesperson that was slow, ineffective and unkempt?

If a website were a salesperson

They would:

1. be accountable for their sales performance
2. care about their appearance
3. try to help if you asked them for something they didn’t know
4. call in sick if they were absent
5. suggest alternative solutions to try to find the quickest way to do something

They would not:

1. get away with taking 10+ seconds to respond when you interacted with them
2. say “404 – not found” and provide no further assistance
3. lose a new enquiry and have zero records of it every happening
4. bring the whole team down with a virus
5. continue working their hardest if you neglected their needs

Websites are lead generators, just like salespeople

Businesses that rely on their websites to help generate leads should care about their website’s wellbeing and performance – treat them like a member of the sales team; expect there to be a relative cost to keep them churning out solid results.

Help your website reach its potential and it will reward you with sexy results that contribute towards that all-important bottom line.

A website’s not just for Xmas, they need constant care and sometimes they need a website whisperer.

Be good to your website,
Merv – the website whisperer

Here are two simple options to reduce this risk by preventing the directories from showing their content as browsable lists:

• Option 1: index.html
• Option 2: .htaccess

index.html

One way is to add a blank index.html file to each directory that you do not want prying eyes to browse the contents of.

Though this is a perfectly fine approach, one that’s adopted by many, but it does mean you need to put an index.html file in each and every directory to want to prevent from being browsable.

.htaccess

Another, much quicker way to, is to place a single line of code in the .htaccess file of website’s root directory. This approach assumes your server is using Apache, if you’re an nginx user, feel free to get in touch for more advice (and congrats on a good choice).

If you have access, open the .htaccess file at the root of the directories you want to target and enter this following line after any existing content:

Options -Indexes

If the directory doesn’t have a .htaccess file, then just create one (don’t forget the preceding . to the filename) and add the code.