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Website Design Solutions Incorporating Private / Secure Area

What is a Secure / Private Website Design...

A private, or secure, website design strategy is employed when you wish to close off sections (or possibly a complete website) from view. Access is only granted to 'authorised' users via the supply of a user name / password. A common application of this in E-Commerce / E-Business websites is a members area, where a customer may access and view information relating to a previous transaction and / or update their personal details. But there are many other times where securing parts of a website may be beneficial. For example, it is common for a wholesale business to provide its usual business information in the public domain (i.e. accessible by the public), but require a user name and password before product information and pricing can be viewed. Thus they restrict access to only known customers - a very important factor in keeping their pricing away from the prying eyes of competitors...

In some cases however, it may be required that the whole website be hidden from public view. Of course such extreme measures is a matter of choice, but may be beneficial in certain circumstances. An example of this is where an E-Commerce website is only made available to a specific group of businesses / institutions. The HEeP market place (Higher Education eProcurements) is such an example.

Implementation of Private / Secure areas of a website

Depending upon where and the level of security to be implemented in a website, their are different options available. If your website is hosted by ic-webs.com, then protection can be implemented at the domain level. In this case, as soon as someone types your web address in their web browser, they will be presented with a box in which they must specify a user name and password. In other words, they can not even get into your website without these details.

In other cases, user name and password combinations can be stored in a database on your website, and certain pages can be configured to prompt for a valid user name and password before allowing access. For such an implementation, you could elect a weak security by giving all authorised people the same user name / password, or a stronger security by assigning individual user names and passwords (simple procedures can be built into your website to do this for you).

Other variants in security do exist, for example where a group of people is assigned the same user name and password for general access, but as soon as an authorised person provides further personal details, they immediately recieve their own unique user name / password. This then protects others being able to view that persons personal details, but also saves you the time of having to generate user names etc., every time you get a new customer...