Our Journey...

We made a cosmetic change to our GRID image. That is the main page image with all the advertisements. When we first started the site, we had initially had the GRID setup as a GIF image. The reasoning for this was it allowed us the ability to create an animated gif if required. We had plans to have either flashing squares, or holiday themes, all possible with animated gifs. However, we had been noticing that some of the more colorful logos of our partners were not looking as sharp as they could. So, in order to have a cleaner and sharper look of our main page, we changed the background GRID image to a JPEG image. We will keep the other image around still (and update it as frequently as we do the main GRID image), but will be referencing the JPEG image.

You can do a side by side comparison, and you can see the differences:

The GIF image (10-million-dollar-page.gif):

The JPEG image (10-million-dollar-page.jpg):

It took a bit of doing (a couple of hours) but our site is now encrypted. We used https://letsencrypt.org. for our certificate. Nice program they have running there. They provide a certificate for 3 months, and free of charge to boot. After 3 months, a job runs on our server which renews the certificate for another 3 months.

Why did we encrypt? Well, the other day we received a notification for one of our other sites from Google. The notification stated that the next version of Chrome will sound a "warning" if a site has information gathering pages (for example our contact page) and the site is not encrypted. We do not want to alarm any of our visitors with such a warning, so it only made sense to upgrade to an https site.

After we implemented the encryption, we are noticing the occasional exclamation mark showing on our browser when we provided links to client / partner sites which are not encrypted. A bit of growing pains, but we believe we can resolve this issue. We know a couple of our partners offer https type ads, so there will be a bit of a migration strategy to encorporate these secure links of the next couple of days.

One of the added benefits to having our site encrypted is that search engines favor encrypted sites when determining SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Ultimately all browsers will display a warning if a site is not encrypted, so we are keeping up with the latest waves of advancement with our page.

https://10milliondollarpage.wbca.ca. Yeah, we like the look of that!