After an initial interaction with a prospective client, I immediately know if this is an organization with whom our company can partner. How do I know? From a strictly business sense, we have the skills and experience to recognize a need that we can fill, and fill well. Yet, there is another, more interpersonal aspect of organizational match and agreement on establishing a path of success that are just as important for a true partnership. As with the start of any deep, committed relationship, what you do in the first meeting is crucial. If you are looking for tips on recognizing true partner material, read on!

Over the last several months, as new versions of Chrome, FireFox, and Internet Explorer have been released, we have experienced a much higher report of “connection is not secure” messages, especially for sites that collect sensitive or private information. These can be as unassuming as a red unlocked icon near the URL, or as intrusive as a pop-up message indicating pure doom if a viewer continues to the website in question.

Has something changed on the site? No. What has changed is the engineered deprecation of non secure sites on the internet, meaning that your web browser is now reporting sites to you that are not using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), indicated by “https” at the beginning of the URL rather than “http”.