precautions while using websites

A common way that hackers break into financial or other accounts is by clicking the Forgot your password? link on the account login page. To break into your account, they search for the answers to your security questions, such as your birthday, hometown, high school class, fathers middle name, on your social networking site. If the site allows, make up your own password questions, and dont draw them from material anyone could find with a quick search.

Hackers can break into accounts and send messages that look like theyre from your friends, but arent. If you suspect that a message is fraudulent, use an alternate method to contact your friend to find out. This includes invitations to join new social networks.

When you join a new social network, you might receive an offer to enter your e mail address and password to find out if your contacts are on the network. The site might use this information to send e mail messages to everyone in your contact list or even everyone youve ever sent an e mail message to with that e mail address. Social networking sites should explain that theyre going to do this, but some do not.

If you click a link to your site through e mail or another website, you might be entering your account name and password into a fake site where your personal information could be stolen.

Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. You will be providing personal information to this website, so use the same criteria that you would to select a site where you enter your credit card.

Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print photos or text or save images and videos to a computer.

Many social networking sites allow you to download third party applications that let you do more with your personal page. Criminals sometimes use these applications to steal your personal information. To download and use third party applications safely, take the same safety precautions that you take with any other program or file you download from the Web.

The Web hosting requirements for multimedia websites are considerably different from standard sites. The sizes for large media files can add up quickly, and you must have the hosting capacity to store all of your content. If you plan to stream video or audio from the site, your bandwidth requirements will be higher. A significant amount of traffic can cause you to outstrip the alloted bandwidth on a standard hosting plan, which will make the site crash. When in doubt, call your hosting provider, explain your site requirements and ask about recommended hosting plans.

When you are managing a variety of multimedia files, it is important to ensure that each file has a size that will work on a website. Video files, for example, can have extremely large file sizes that are impossible to stream over an Internet connection. The same applies to streaming audio. Large photos, illustrations and graphics can slow the load time for each page, forcing users to wait and increasing the risk that they will leave your site in frustration.

Optimized content is an important part of controlling the format and file size of your multimedia files. When creating video, animation or music files, choose export settings that are designed for Web streaming. Most editing programs have a range of preset export options to choose from. Save image files at the pixel size that you will use on the website and set the resolution to 72 dpi. Larger resolutions will not make a visual difference and will slow load times.