How to change VAT in Magento

The UK VAT rate is changing in January 2011. Companies using Magento based systems can change this amount easily in the administration area of their website.

To do this, log into your administration area and choose the following option from the drop down menus: "Sales > Tax > Manage Tax Zones & Rates".

Locating the correct page in the main menu

You will now find yourself on the Manage Tax Rates page. Here you will see a list of any countries or areas you have tax rates set up for. In this instance we are looking for United Kingdom. Find this in the list and click on it. You will be taken to a new page where you will see the following options:

Editing the VAT Rate

You will see a field called "Rate" at the bottom of this form. Change this to 20 and click the save button. You're website will now apply 20% vat to UK orders. Simple!

Getting More Sales from Less Visitors

If you hired a door-to-door salesman and he called at 1000 houses and produced no sales, would you be happy? You should view your website the same way. If it is not helping you make sales, it is not doing its job and you should do something about it. Most companies nowadays realise that a website is more than just a token on-line presence; it is a valuable marketing tool of increasing importance.

Too often companies attempt to solve the problem of an ineffective website by driving as much traffic as possible to it through use of pay-per-click advertising and other Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques. What good is attracting people to a website, however, if it is not going to convert those visitors into enquiries or sales?

By focusing your efforts on producing and maintaining a website that effectively assists visitors in achieving their goal you can not only generate more sales or enquiries but also save money on expensive SEO bills. You are much better off attracting 100 people to a website and making 70 sales than attracting 1000 and making 2 sales.

Converting Visitors to Customers

So how do we go about more effectively converting visitors to customers? We approach the website with one underpinning philosophy:

“What is the typical visitor's goal and how do I help them reach it?”

Before adding anything to the website you need to ask yourself this question. You aren't trying to trick the visitor into becoming a customer you want to help them understand why you are the right company for the job by making it easy for them to locate and use the information they need to make a decision. There are two main areas we need to address to make a website work.

User Experience
Website Content

User Experience - Make your website a pleasure to use

Creating a positive user experience is a combination of aesthetic appeal and functional simplicity. If your website is a pleasure to use visitors are more inclined to stay longer and find the information they require. So how can we achieve this?

At the most basic level your website needs to work correctly. There should be no broken links, missing images or typographical errors. The website also needs to appear correctly in whatever browser the visitor happens to be using.

Companies often approach the appearance of their website thinking about what sort of layout they would like or what position they want things in. This is not conducive to the best possible end result. What you should be thinking about is what is best for the customer as they are the people the site needs to appeal to. They are the people who are going to be experiencing and judging it. If you design a website based solely on personal preference it is going to fail.

Next up, you need to make your information as easy to access as possible. This means clean, simple navigation that makes sense to the user. If a user struggles to make their way around your site they are much less likely to stay and investigate further. Making a user think unnecessarily is a root cause for many visitors abandoning a website; don't make them work for the information more than they absolutely have to.

A good way to achieve this ease of navigation is to place yourself in the shoes of a typical visitor. This technique is typically referred to as User Journey Mapping. Simulating the journey they will take through the site in order to find the information they need will help you to streamline the process and make it as painless for them as possible.

Ensuring you have a call to action on every page is another useful tool for making the process as easy as possible for a user. When they have found the information they want and have decided to contact you the website needs to make the next step obvious and simple. Ensuring that this guidance is present will help massively as it entices the visitor to act immediately rather than leave it till later and risk forgetting.

A common misconception held by many companies is that the home page of a website is the most important page and anything that does not appear on it is unlikely to be noticed. For this reason it is common to find overcrowded home pages on many corporate websites. This is simply not true. With the improvements in search engines over recent years any page on your website can become a potential point of entry which means a visitor may not necessarily land on your home page at all.

Each page of your website needs to stand on its own merit and do the best job it can at providing the information required by the visitor. All that cramming everything on one page achieves is a sense of information overload that makes it hard for a user to locate the information they desire. The more elements you include on a page, the less impact each of those individual elements will have. This is why it is important to question the merit of every addition or modification to the website.

Trust the Professionals

Creating a positive user experience is no small task; it requires considerable experience, attention to detail, planning and persistence. If you are hiring a professional team to design and develop your website, listen to them! Advice and opinions from these people are often based in prior experience and a lot of research. There is little point paying a professional to do a job for you if you are going to tell them exactly how to do it.

Content, it�s more important than anything else.

Creating the most beautiful and intuitive website in the world without the right content to support it makes your efforts completely meaningless. Although aesthetics and ease of use are important factors in the conversion equation, it is ultimately content that will close the deal for you.

Often content is an afterthought, invented in a few minutes with minimal effort or copied and pasted from an old marketing brochure. This sort of content is highly unlikely to perform the job you need it to do effectively.

If you do not have the time or inclination to write effective content yourself it is a wise investment to talk with a copywriter. Most professional web design and development companies will be able to offer this service to you.

If you are going to write the content yourself there is a plethora of online resources you can read but a good start would be to ensure the following basic principles:

Check all your spelling and grammar. Little mistakes like this can chip away at the professional image of a website.
Avoid overuse of “buzz words”. Many people believe sounding like an expert on a topic requires the frivolous use of “buzz words”. Overuse of these, however, taints your writing with a vacuous quality that, if anything, has the opposite effect, especially if these are cliché.
Keep language relatively simple and accessible. Sitting with a thesaurus or overusing “buzz words” that a visitor may not understand only serves to create an extra barrier between you and them. You want to engage the reader, not push them away by making them feel ignorant.
Don't pad your content with meaningless waffle. Visitors rarely read everything on a web page, most users quickly scan content. If you are not succinct, users will be unable to easily pick the important points out of the copy and the impact of your page will be lost.

Your website is never “finished”

How many websites have you come across that seem to be locked in stasis? When you see a website that was last updated months or even years ago what are your first thoughts? Visitors are reassured by a regularly updated website. Seeing that a website is being maintained conveys a much more professional and proactive image to a visitor than one that has been labelled “finished” and left to gather dust.

The truth of the matter is that your website is never finished. Even if you get it right first time and people are flooding to it and converting into customers, you are not guaranteed future success. The internet is a fickle place and people's browsing habits change over time. Your website needs to react to these changes in order to remain successful. Succeeding on the internet requires your website to undergo a continuous process of evolution.

How to find out what works

This is where your traffic and behavioural monitoring tools come into play. Tools like Google Analytics allow you to track the popularity and effectiveness of pages in your website. Using this information you can make adjustments and compare the visitor response. Repeating this process on a regular basis means you are constantly moving the website towards its most effective possible state and always getting the best out of it as a marketing tool.

If you have a content managed system this process is much easier as you have the freedom to update your website whenever you wish. Assign someone who will be responsible for keeping the website up-to-date and make sure important changes to the business or information that is useful to customers is reflected on the website.

When making changes to the structure or content of the website always keep the philosophy that should underpin everything you do in mind:

“What is the typical visitor's goal and how do I help them reach it?”

Forcing yourself to justify each change is an important aspect of a successful content strategy and doing it right can be the difference between a website that converts visitors and a website that deters them. If your content is not helping them make a decision it is hindering them.

Overview

To clarify, I am not arguing against SEO; it is most certainly a vital piece of the puzzle in making a website work. I am simply saying that excessive expenditure on attracting visitors is wasteful and ineffective if your website is not going to do its best to convert those visitors into enquiries or sales.

Making a website work is not a simple process and this is by no means an exhaustive guide on what is necessary to make your site successful. Good design and development companies will guide you through this process and work with you to ensure the website is the best it can be. Making it a success in the long term, however, requires concerted effort to carry out the necessary refinements to structure and content over time.

How to Buy Bespoke Software

In the case of Bespoke Business Software, as the buyer, you need to understand that you are an expert in your business and the software developer is an expert in software and between you lies the optimal software solution for your business.

Before you even speak to a software company you must be clear on the strategic objectives of your business/this project as these must drive all decision making throughout the life-cycle of your software project. At this stage it would be wise to allocate a budget based on the value of the right solution to your business. When the quotes/estimates start to arrive from prospective suppliers you will quickly begin to appreciate the financial viability of the project before you start spending money on it.

On the basis that the cost/benefit equation stacks up, you should select a suitable supplier based on their reputation and ability to demonstrate how they have delivered similar scale projects on budget and on time.

To help you through the process it makes good sense to allocate or hire a suitable resource to act as your internal project manager. This person will be charged with ensuring the project is continually driven in the direction of your strategic business objectives. In my experience Financial Directors tend to make good internal project managers because they understand the financial mechanics of your business and are best placed to ensure that your project is geared to deliver the additional profit that you undoubtedly seek.

The first phase of any properly managed software project is Requirements Gathering. The scale of your project will determine to what extent you must go to determine the detail of your requirements. You may, for example, need to go through a Business Analysis or Business Process Mapping exercise to generate an informed set of software requirements.

At Bitopia we have adopted the IEEE 830-1998 standard for Software Requirements Specification. The production of a Software Requirements Specification must be a collaborative effort that produces a document written in non-ambiguous plain English. This document will ultimately form the basis of the contract between you and the developer and is an essential tool to ensure you understand each other from the outset.

Once the SRS has been completed you can solidify your budget and begin to talk about the look and feel of the solution. Yes that's right... the SRS doesn't cover cosmetics. So once you have nailed down exactly what the software must do you can work with the developer to agree the look and feel. Wire frames can be a useful tool for defining layouts and gaining a shared visual understanding of the solution prior to all the hard work going into actually building it. Much easier/cheaper to modify wire frames!

Ultimately, as with any aspect of human interaction, Communication is Key to Success, so make sure YOU and/or your Project Manager are in Regular Contact with your Developer throughout the project. The more you are together the less chance you'll grow apart!

Microsoft's IE9 to Remove Sour Taste of Predecessors

With the beta of Microsoft's next Internet Explorer [IE] due for release in the next 7 days I thought I would take the time to review some of the improvements made to a lethargic yet very popular web browser and how its going to improve the Bespoke Software offering that Bitopia provide.

The Acid Test

In 2008 the Web Standards Project launched the Acid3 test which was designed to measure the rendering ability of web browsers. Generally speaking the higher a web browser scores on the test the more standards it conforms to, and more importantly the better its ability to display web pages correctly. You can run the Acid3 Test on your own web browser to see how it fares.

The Acid3 page runs a series of tests and accumulates the results. In order to pass the test the browser must score 100/100 and render the page exactly as described by Acid3. Whilst Acid3 is a great indicator of how well a browser conforms with web standards, it is not critical that a browser scores 100/100 as parts of the test are based on features that are still experimental. Let's examine some of the results of previous versions of IE.

Web Standards

Internet Explorer has a long standing history of not abiding by web standards. When you visit a site your browser receives information from the web server hosting the web page. Your browser then takes this information and displays it to you as a fully rendered page using a specific set of rules based on the web standards defined by the W3C. In an ideal world, no matter what browser you're using your experience should be the same. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as browsers interpret some of the standards incorrectly, sometimes even ignoring them, which leads to inconsistent results when viewing web pages in different web browsers.

Internet Explorer and the Acid3 Test

Unfortunately, IE has always performed poorly on the Acid3 test. When the test was released in 2008, IE 5, 6 and 7 had already been around for quite some time. However, the results of IE in the test show just how poorly the browser has met standards over the last 10 years.

Browser	Acid3 Score
Internet Explorer 5.5	14/100
Internet Explorer 6	12/100
Internet Explorer 7	12/100
Internet Explorer 8	21/100

It doesn't take a technology guru to see that these scores are sub-par, but let's put these results into perspective. At the time of IE8's release (which scored 21/100 on the Acid3 test), Firefox 3 (a popular alternative to IE) was also hitting the web. Firefox 3 scored a 68/100 on Acid3, passing over 3 times as many of the tests as IE8. These low scores haven't been a problem in previous years, as web designers and developers merely bend the rules and create "work-arounds" to make their websites look and feel right in Internet Explorer. However, with the emergence of newer, faster web browsers and certain legal difficulties Microsoft are in danger of losing a growing market share if their new offering doesn't hold up to the hype.

Luckily, the development team over at Microsoft have put together something really impressive if the IE9 Platform Previews are anything to go by. Their latest offering is currently scoring a 95/100 on Acid3. That's over 4 times the score of their previous browser.

SunSpider Test and Internet Explorer

The SunSpider test is used for benchmarking JavaScript performance in web browsers. JavaScript is what makes all our web applications work like desktop applications, and allows us to provide clients' with features such as tab-based interfaces and collapsible menus. The better the JavaScript performance the further Bitopia can push the envelope of web applications.

SunSpider runs several tests to determine how well the browser performs. Generally speaking, the quicker the browser completes the test the better its JavaScript performance. The current iteration of Internet Explorer (IE8) provides an average SunSpider completion time of 3.7 secs, whereas IE9's latest build is completing the tests in around 0.3 secs. Although some people claim that modern browsers are built to perform well on tests such as SunSpider but not in real world situations, we're still looking at a browser with much more capability when it comes to JavaScript execution.

Deploying Internet Explorer 9

The major problem with IE9 is that it will not be compatible with Windows XP, which currently accounts for around 61% of the operating system market share. Businesses have been hesitant to move away from Windows XP because of alleged program compatibility issues and the poor offering of Windows Vista. However, now that there is a far better platform available in Windows 7 and program compatibility is far less of an issue, companies are gradually moving away from Windows XP and taking up the modern equivalents (Windows XP is down 11% year on year).

What does this mean for Bitopia?

As a web application developer here at Bitopia we primarily distribute and deploy our bespoke business systems via IE for the simple fact that it is easier to manage browser settings en masse over a network. If we want pages to print a specific way from our web application running on IE we can make a quick change on our client's domain controller and it will roll out to all users across the network. This is a great advantage to us, but recently IE8 has become sluggish as we continue to push the boundaries of web technology and so a refreshed browser is something our development team is most definitely looking forward to.

Powered by JavaScript and ExtJS, our rich application interfaces rely heavily on a powerful browser engine. Here at Bitopia we believe that the gap between a web application and a traditional desktop application should be barely noticeable, but this becomes increasingly difficult when the browser you deploy on is already being pushed to its very limits. IE9 will unlock a plethora of opportunities for the development team here at Bitopia, all without the hindrance of poor performance.

Making Way For A Mobile Platform

The World Wide Web is the most accessible resource of information in existence. All the information you can imagine is available at any time no matter where you are located in the world. For many users, information need not be available when they are away from their desk. They may casually browse the internet after work or on their lunch hour, catching up on the latest news or logging onto their favourite social networking websites. They consider the internet to be useful, but do not necessarily rely on it from day-to-day. It is, however, becoming increasingly popular to expect internet access on the move, and with the establishment of the ‘Smartphone’ in recent years this has become a realisation.

Mobile web access has been around for quite some time now, but the experience has changed somewhat over the last 10 years. In 1999, Nokia released its first WAP enabled mobile phone (WAP meaning Wireless Application Protocol - a simplified method of sending data wirelessly to a mobile device). It was far different from the mobile browsers that we are so used to working with today. Like other primitive WAP devices, the Nokia 7110 could only view web pages that were specially written in a new language designed specifically for mobiles (Wireless Markup Language). Initially, this meant that businesses would have to invest sufficient time and money developing mobile friendly websites as well as learning new technologies.

Mobile Device Sales in 2009

In recent years, Smartphone sales have vastly increased and, according to business and technological research company Gartner, are up approximately 24% in 2009. The soar in popularity of the Smartphone depicts the change in expectations a typical user has about their mobile device. If we were buying a phone 10 years ago, we would have been more focused on its aesthetics, size and support for multimedia messaging or games. However, we can argue that a modern day mobile phone user would much rather have email support and a rich internet browsing experience than play games or have as small a device possible.

What does this mean for the web development industry?

As a web application developer here at Bitopia one of the most important ideals when creating software is accessibility. A major part of creating an accessible interface is knowing our target audience and, more specifically, knowing our target audience’s hardware. Internet traffic from mobile devices exploded in 2009 and now accounts for nearly 1.5% of all internet traffic. With the growing popularity of Apple’s iPhone and other devices, this will only continue to increase. From a software perspective this means that users may well wish to access websites on-the-go via their Smartphone and may even wish to work with their existing web applications. With more than 32 million users Opera Mini is the most popular mobile browser in the world. It is a strong ambassador for other mobile browsers such as iPhone’s Safari, and provides a rich internet browsing experience with support for the majority of desktop browsing technologies. Such browsers allow for the creation of rich mobile web applications, taking working on-the-go to the next level.

The creation of the iPhone App store in July 2008 saw the birth of the iPhone Application. When initially released, the iPhone’s functional capability was fairly limited and so Apple pushed for the idea of allowing developers to create their own applications for release via their app store. Using this approach, Apple have taken the idea of mobile applications and made them platform dependent. This has had a negative impact on the progression of the mobile web application front. Instead of developers producing applications available through a web browser (hence being platform independent - available via modern mobile browsers and an internet connection) they are developing applications specifically for a target device such as the iPhone (Nokia, Google Android and Windows devices are all now following this pattern).

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is primarily responsible for driving standards across the web, takes the idea of an "Open Web" very seriously. An Open Web is one where proprietary formats are minimal, even non-existent, and content is the same for all users. If developers continue to make iPhone specific applications how is the mobile web supposed to become openly accessible? Recently, it seems that companies who continue to publicly support the idea of an Open Web are caught up in the craze of platform dependent mobile applications. On 17th February 2010 the BBC news website published an article declaring the BBC’s intentions to supply iPhone applications for news and sport content from April 2010. An Open Right Group spokesperson commented on the BBC’s decision, declaring that it would be far more appropriate to concentrate on open platforms to allow everyone to access the same content regardless of their chosen device.

Mobile Browser Share by O/S in 2009

Since its release in 2007 the iPhone has sold approximately 40 million units, a massive feat for a company’s first attempt at a mobile device. Google’s Android operating system has not had as great a success in comparison, yet continues to compete with Apple by recently releasing its own app store to offer Android applications similar to iPhone applications. Nokia handsets running the Symbian operating system are still the most popular platform for mobiles. However, many of these devices are never used for mobile connectivity. To paint a better picture let’s take a look at some statistics from Market Share to depict the most popular mobile web browsing device...

Smartphone Sales in Millions

While Symbian is the best selling mobile operating system, Apple’s iPhone is the most popular device for browsing the web. The iPhone app craze has produced some interesting points:

Currently, there are approximately 134,000 published applications on the iPhone app store
Every 2.5 minutes a new application is submitted (that’s 3600 new applications submitted each day)
To date, 3 billion applications have been downloaded from the app store. Of these applications:
- Only 30% are still being used 1 day after purchase
- Only 5% are still being used 20 days after purchase

What strikes me most about this is the fact that only 5% of the 3 billion applications downloaded from the App Store are still in use after 20 days. This means that of the 3 billion sales to date only 150 million are potentially deemed valuable by the user, leaving a huge 2.85 billion applications redundant. Of course, while these sales figures are only estimates, they still provide an important insight into the craze taking the mobile world by storm.

Apple’s App Store review process makes it a nightmare for businesses deploying their software on the iPhone platform. Even though there are private, small scale deployment options available through Apple’s Enterprise Developer Programme (at an additional cost) I would always recommend businesses taking their bespoke software solutions into the open platform via the web. With Smartphones now supporting many desktop technologies and allowing for a richer internet experience than ever, mobile web applications are the future for businesses aiming to deploy their bespoke software solutions through the mobile channel.

One of the biggest advantages of deploying web applications through the mobile browser is the ability to push updates out to all users without the need for a (re)installation process. In contrast, a platform dependent application such as an iPhone App would require submission to Apple for a successful review process and finally the re-installation of the application on each user’s handset. In August 2009, Apple released (somewhat begrudgingly) their app store approval process. This detailed an app approval team of approximately 40 reviewers. Now let’s take those interesting points from earlier, this would mean that there is around 90 new apps for each of the 40 staff to review. As if that isn’t bad enough, Apple claims that each new app is examined by two separate people, so that 90 apps per week doubles to 180 apps per reviewer per week (approximately 13 minutes per app).Talk about a bottleneck. As a software developer I cannot begin to imagine the frustration felt by thousands awaiting their app to be approved by Apple only to have it placed ‘In Review’ or rejected. What’s more, if a bug is encountered whilst reviewing the application you have to then resubmit the app again after you’ve fixed it.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that iPhone applications (as well as other branded platforms such as Blackberry, Google and Windows) offer some great advantages when developing apps for their devices. Platform specific apps allow developers to utilise the device’s core feature-set (accelerometer, compass, camera, thermometer, GPS etc) to enhance the user experience and bring in a revenue stream if they choose to add a price tag. However, the cost of developing an application for a single platform could cripple a business model and, should a company change their App Store conditions, you could have applications pulled from sale even after they have been approved. There are advantages for both approaches to application deployment, but businesses should realise that choosing to channel their software through an app store leaves them with little control. Businesses looking to offer mobile applications should consider the complications by deploying to specific platforms. For many companies the flexibility offered by an open platform makes it a far more efficient and cost-effective option.

jQuery: King of Javascript

According to a recent poll at css-tricks.com, jQuery is now the most popular javascript library. At Bitopia, we've been using jQuery since the very early days and I can say I'm definitely not surprised. We have seen the framework develop from a small collection of useful tools to ease our javascript development woes, to an powerful and essential addition to any web application that we develop. Almost every release brings dramatic speed improvements and you can be guaranteed to find further functionality and improvements to existing features.

I've personnally lost count of the number of times I've thought to myself, thank god for jQuery. The sheer simplicity of installation (a single simple script tag), and the ease of use (commands can be chained together to form powerful single line actions) should make it the javascript library of choice for any web developer.

The new jQuery foundation hasn't stopped there either. The new user interface optional library should help ease of development for commonly used widgets. It's still in the early stages so there are problems, but it's looking very promising, especially the bespoke "Theme Roller" for quickly changing styles whilst keeping the overall feel of the application style.

If you haven't tried jQuery yet, then head straight over to jquery.com and have a read, I really cannot recommend it enough! The recently revamped API documentation at api.jquery.com has been well thought out and is a pleasure to use. After that, you should also check out docs.jquery.com, visualjquery.com and learningjquery.com for all the help you'll need.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us

A White Christmas

For this year's Christmas Party, it was a unanimous decision to go to the Chill Factor-e Snow Dome in Manchester.

The afternoon began with everyone taking to the climbing wall near to the snow slopes. Despite looking fairly easy, everyone was surprised at the difficulty required to get to the top, but everyone got on the wall and had a great time. With muscles aching, we all took a well earned break before taking to the slopes for a lesson in snowboarding!

Steve Smith had been snowboarding in the past and quickly picked up the technique, but for everyone else it was a brand new experience. At the end of the session, everyone had managed to complete all the beginners’ tasks that were given to us.

For our Christmas meal, we had booked the La Tasca in the snow dome complex, which provided great meals to round off a fantastic day.

On behalf of the whole team I’d like to say a huge thank you to Steve Smith, Karen Smith and Sharon Dutton for organising the day’s events and evening meal. We all had a great time, and are eagerly awaiting the next team outing.

What's up with Google?

I've been working on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Bitopia for a while now, and I've recently started noticing some strange patterns with Google.

We've done a lot of Optimisation work with a client recently, which has lead me to study in depth the changes that we make to the website and how it affects the ranking in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. What I've noticed is that once Yahoo and MSN pick up the changes, the ranking will change for the better or worse, and may fluctuate slightly over the course of the next week, but will stay pretty steady. Google rankings on the other hand, can vary wildly. Below is a graph of the ranking of the website for a certain keyphrase that has low importance for the client and website.

This is a graph showing the changes in Google ranking over a few weeks, with the report being run most working days. The days where there is no marker and the line falls to the bottom of the graph indicates that the report could not find the website in the first 5 pages of the results, which is a big problem.

The site wasn't changed as often as the ranking results graph indicates, and many of the keyphrase reports don't show anything like this kind of behaviour so I'm unsure as to what may be causing this strange behaviour.

Please feel free to offer your own explanation in the comments.

The following graph is a much better example of what we can do for our clients. It shows the changes in ranking in Google for an important two word keyphrase for the client. I'll let the picture do the talking. Thanks for reading and I'll revisit this topic in future.

Dangers of Ajax

I'm always one for exploring new technologies, and in recent months my focus has been on Ajax, and Rich Internet Applications, mainly because this is what I do at Bitopia. One thing that has been bothering me about the resurgence of javascript, is that it places too much emphasis on the client side. People are diving into this more easily accessible technology without thinking properly and considering the dangers.

Imagine an application that relies on processing a form using Ajax. Two methods are used, one to examine and check the form for errors and correct content, and the other to send the form to the server for processing. Using a simple javascript console, or the more advanced Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox, a hacker could easily fill in the form, and manually call the form submission. The server assumes that the javascript on the clientside has already checked the form and processes the information. This presents a clear security risk.

I know, it's a poor example, but it does highlight the need for increased developer awareness of these issues. Relying on javascript for validation is a big mistake, and i've noticed a few sites out in the web that will remain nameless, that could be exploited using the tools mentioned.

Form validation in javascript should only be used to reduce bandwidth and provide better information for the client to understand why a form field contains content that isn't acceptable. It is important to mirror or better the validation on the server side, so that a hacker cannot exploit your website or application.