The CW Corner – Trademark and Copyright Familiarity

In the web world, copyrights and trademarks can get business owners in hot water. Many experienced web developers have an awareness of when legal assistance may be required to resolve such issues.

While I am not an attorney, I can say with a fair degree of certainty what items are safe to use on one’s website.

First and foremost are graphics that you create yourself or have created for you by someone you hire to produce them. However, an exception to that is if the graphic created is similar enough to a copyrighted work to create confusion to the viewer.

Next are photographs. Usually using your own photographs is pretty safe. Photos not taken by you is always risky unless you have permission to do so.

There are various sources on the Internet for pictures and graphics that allow unlicensed or licensed use – otherwise “free to use” graphics or photos. Pixabay.com is one example. It has many items that can be used covering many topics, classifications and so forth.

I recommend you use an experienced, seasoned web developer. A general familiarity with trademark and copyright issues is more apt to be found by using a seasoned website developer. When in doubt, as a business owner you should consult a trademark or copyright attorney.

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The CW Corner – WordPress Proficiency and Training

We’ve mentioned the term WordPress previously. Over 1/3 of all websites on the planet are built using WordPress. It is the most popular website platform. The platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed.

An important aspect of website operation is determining whether the platform is optimized for your WordPress coding. That’s difficult for most people other than server operators to know. We recommend you find out two things from your web developer:

First is whether the latest version possible of PHP is used. That’s the actual programming language WordPress is written/coded in. PHP doesn’t have to be the very latest, as there are always new versions being developed. However, your WordPress themes and plugins may not work on the very newest version. But if you are using a version of PHP 5.x you may be asking for security issues. If the plugins and themes won’t run on the newer PHP 7.x then you really need to consider upgrading your site to use newer plugins or themes. WordPress itself is kept up better than most software and works great with the very latest PHP versions.

Second is to check that your WordPress installation is running on a Linux based system. Over twenty years in this business has shown us that there are far fewer issues with WordPress operating in Linux based servers rather than Windows based servers.

Hopefully your web developer is proficient with WordPress through experience and training. He or she should know the answers to these questions. If not, we routinely reassure our clients on such matters.

And, finally, the CharlesWorks team wishes you and yours a very safe and happy 2020!

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