Terry Young, CEO - Photo courtesy Knox Studios

According to Terry, businesses and their websites need to take advantage of this new opportunity right now by converting their sites to automatically respond to the full spectrum of mobile devices consumers use. Studies show that over 30 percent of mobile shoppers will abandon a transaction if the experience is not optimized for mobile, and this number is certain to grow as consumer expectations rise regarding what a website should do.

"Businesses need 'responsive' sites now, sites that adapt instantaneously to whatever device the customer is using: smartphone, tablet, or laptop," Terry says. "No longer do businesses need to spend large amounts of money on separate 'mobile-friendly' sites just to be able to reach visitors. With the current upgraded technology we provide our clients, their site is automatically adaptable for mobile commerce from any device, instantaneously."

Clients who convert their sites to full-responsiveness gain all the benefits of Internet Marketing and Design's proprietary system, WebUpdate, that Terry and his team use to build fully customized websites from the ground up, using the most secure and efficient tools available. WebUpdate offers what clients truly crave: the ability to update their own site with their own content, whenever and wherever they choose.

"Our system gives our clients complete control over their site, and it's easy to use," Terry assures. "Maintenance is simple and can be done from anywhere."

In addition to saving money by being their own Webmasters, clients who utilize WebUpdate also have access to Internet Marketing and Design's secret marketing weapon: FirstPage, which is an advanced Search Engine Optimization system, or SEO, designed to help a business appear at or near the top of the search results list, regardless of how a potential customer may phrase their search. WebUpdate and FirstPage also offer state-of-the-art tracking capabilities so that business owners know exactly how many visitors are viewing their site, how they got there, and what items on their site are viewed most often.

"These tracking capabilities give our clients incredible, real-time feedback as to which site elements are working, and which could stand a bit of tweaking," Terry says. "This information creates an opportunity for them to always maintain a competitive edge when conducting business on the web."

While the benefits of utilizing the web to grow a business can't be overstated, Terry acknowledges that any paradigm-shifting technology carries with it a shadowy dark side, and the internet is particularly susceptible to those miscreants who would use it for nefarious purposes. When it comes to the growing number of malicious hacker attacks putting businesses at grave financial risk, it's the big companies like Sony, Anthem Blue Cross, Home Depot, and JPMorgan who always grab the headlines.

But a recent survey by the National Small Business Association revealed that it's the smaller, local businesses in communities all across the country that are taking the real hit. According to the NSBA, nearly 50 percent of the nation's small businesses have been hacked, costing them close to $9,000 per incident on average to repair. These initial costs do not include transactions lost during the period when companies have to stop accepting credit cards, or the damage done when their customers' personal data has been breached. These types of setbacks can easily spell doom for a small business.

"Most people think that hackers would never go after their website because they're just a small, local businesses with nothing worth stealing," Terry explains. "But the hacker's motivation is not always about stealing. It's about finding an untraceable forward-operations base, where they can conduct their nasty rackets without being discovered. Such things include spamming, attacking other websites, and running pfishing schemes."

According to a report by security-software giant Symantec Corporation, attacks against more vulnerable smaller businesses can ultimately enable hackers to coordinate much bigger attacks elsewhere to filch precious loot - ranging from employee data and log-ins to customer details and banking credentials - leaving the small businesses to prove they are not responsible for the attacks when the breaches are ultimately discovered.

"When the lawsuits start rolling in, it is up to the business or website owner to prove that they were not the source of the attack," Terry says. "This will obviously be costly and time consuming. The websites we create for our clients at Internet Marketing and Design stop the hackers in their tracks, detecting and blocking them after one attempt."

Terry explains that there are two types of websites: custom-coded sites, like the sites Internet Marketing and Design develops, and open-source sites.

"Open-source is what is sold by many competing web designers," Terry points out. "It is free software for anyone to download. Designers simply install it and add a template to cook up your site. They don't need to understand the coding that makes it work. But the hackers do know how it works, and take the time to go over the code, line-by-line, to exploit its weaknesses. Hackers can't do that with our custom-coded sites, which gives our clients an unparallelled step up when it comes to cyber-security."

According to the National Cyber Security Alliance, of the small businesses who fall victim to cyber-crime each year, many go out of business within six months after an attack. And with automatic hack-bots from across the world scouring the internet every nanosecond for vulnerable sites and computers, small business have to fight the good fight, with a good place to start being Internet Marketing and Design.

Internet Marketing and Design CEO Terry Young and Shopper Publisher Jean Loxley-Barnard