10 July, 2017

British Airways Mystery Tour



BA plane
A family of frequent flyers with British Airways registered with www.britishairways.com for a service that enables family members to pool their air miles via a British Airways Executive Club Household Account. 

Each person who registered received an email from BA, giving a confirmation link to add the new account. Each person is required to use the link to  connect to a specific page on the BA website to complete their registration. Linking from the first few emails worked as expected.

Then something odd happened with the last one...

The link in one email led to an obvious phishing website which was running a video and sales pitch. The family member quickly deleted the tab from their browser. They returned to the email and tried the link again, to be presented with a different sales pitch. Again, they closed the tab and, this time, also the browser.

Starting afresh, they tried a third time and up popped a warning “Your computer is infected. Do not turn off your browser or your data may be lost…" etc. The user shutdown the computer, disconnected their external backup, and called for support (an associate who works with The BPc).

The computer appeared no worse for wear and the B.A. emails appeared to be genuine, correctly formed and with similar code to the other emails that all worked as expected. However, on closer inspection, the link on the 'problem' email was slightly different - the dot was missing after the www giving a link at wwwbritishairways.com rather than britishairways.com

from the air & waiting to fish
leaving the skies for a spot of fishing
And there was the problem: wwwbritishairways.com is a phishing website owned by a squatter!

Copy/Pasting the link from the email into a browser, manually, and inserting the dot in the correct place between the www and britishairways, enabled the link to work as expected, going to the appropriate website page to complete registration.

For some reason, in this one email from British Airways, the link was formed incorrectly.


The phishing website is an opportunistic one like hundreds of others, waiting for an unsuspecting surfer to mistype a web address. Luckily, in this case, there was no harm done. You can TechCrunch for more good & bad examples.

Although you might expect the odd mis-type to take you on an unexpected journey when using the internet, you don’t expect a major corporation like British Airways to direct you to a highly suspect website!

BA has been informed, so hopefully this particular gate will be closed today. We'll keep you posted if/when we hear something :)

01 June, 2017

Clients' Websites Recently Designed & Published


 
 
Of the websites we mentioned as 'under construction' in a previous post, one is still waiting for some final information. The other is the showcase for a family run accounting services company based in London and Hertfordshire. During the design phase, there were a couple of reincarnations but we finally launched the SJ Accounts Solutions website earlier this year.
 
 
 
 
We designed a nice little website for SmithHamiltonLaw but since we've handed it over, the person appointed to update it has, in our opinion, lost much of the design balance. The home page text is too small to read. 'Designed by TheBPc' has been removed from the site but we are quite happy about that in the circumstances. Pity though.
 
 
 
 
Recently, we delivered a website for Jim Germaney Driving Tuition. When Jim became an independent instructor, he was looking for a website designer and was referred to The BPc by another independent instructor who is still very pleased with the unique design we delivered a number of years ago.
 
 
 
We also redesigned The BPc website.

For website design, optimised content writing and meta-data optimisation, regular news posts, social media management, logo design and related graphic design... briefly jot your requirements on an email or call/leave a message and we'll get back to you.



Finally, we have a number of websites under construction, in Herts and London. If you can't wait for our next portfolio update, follow TheBPcUK on Twitter or Facebook.

03 January, 2017

First New Website Design in 10 Years

For several years, The BPc has begun work on a total renovation of www.thebpc.org.uk whenever there was some quiet time, such as Christmas or August, but never to the point of completion. Finally, we have published our brand new website in time for the start of 2017 business.

Tech-note: the original website was hand-coded in HTML and the new website is built in WordPress.

Over time, demands from our clients have followed varying business trends in marketing, graphic design, desktop publishing and business internet services, e.g. optimised website design and social media management.

Of all the designs we could choose, why this one?



Its presentation is simple, allowing viewers to find the information they are looking for as easily as possible (we hope). We've selected images of different styles - some vibrant, some cool, many that we've created ourselves. Above is the a screen shot of part of the home page, the other pages use a side-by-side layout, as shown below.



Amongst our future plans, we shall be adding to the website blog which, in our opinion, has an attractive layout. At present, the following topics have been covered for the launch:




Some other website designs are showcased on our site, with links to their related case studies and further links to the clients' websites, where you can find their contact information to help you with your independent research into the quality of our services.

Visit our new blog posts on our website by clicking the above 'News & Blog' image.