The Holidays Are Almost Here Once Again

To begin introducing our Christmas products, LittleFrenchBoutique.com has once again set up Our Christmas Corner.

You will find the entrance to Our Christmas Corner in the upper left hand corner on any page in LittleFrenchBoutique.com.

Simply click on the "Our Christmas Corner" picture and you will be transported to our Featured Christmas Sachets, along with Christmas tags which personalize the sachets beautifully.

Lavender Budd has donned his Christmas stocking hat, and is counting down the days left until Christmas.

As Christmas draws nearer, you will find more and more products to choose from, so stop in from time to time to see what is new on ...
LittleFrenchBoutique.com's Christmas carte du jour :-).

White Azaleas

Virginia is blest with the grace and beauty of azalea flowers in the spring of the year.

All year you can see azaleas as hedge and border plants, or simply as big leafy bushes in back yards, filling in and being quite useful at that sort of thing.

But in the spring, all these unassuming bushes explode with color. And not just one color either. Many, many colors.

It's amazing to see how the countryside can change so. Of course, the dogwoods are blooming, along with a thousand other different flowers, but the azaleas just seem to set the landscape ablaze with beautiful shades of color, from the white pictured here in this blog, to yellow, pink, orange, mauve, violet and so many more.

Bringing a goldmine of color and beauty, it's no wonder that the arrival of the azaleas are celebrated the way that they are.

Our MerchantCircle.com Page

LittleFrenchBoutique.com has discovered a bit of a gold mine in the web world, too.

We have read all some of the negative things posted online by folks about Merchant Circle, but that seems to be with anything. It does take a little bit of effort to have a somewhat decent MC page. We wanted ours to be a "reflection" LittleFrenchBoutique.com.

In the end it has developed into another great way for folks to find us.

It would seem, that if your business is service orientated, without the need of a platform to sell your products, that you could get away with using only Merchant Circle.

We have noticed a few Merchant Circle businesses that had their own websites, found Merchant Circle, and then discovered that their MC page was more effective than their website, only to let their website go.

One of the nice things about Merchant Circle is that you can start out with them for free. They do post their Google ads on your page, but that is a small price to pay for what you receive. As time goes on, you may want to purchase one of their packages, but this is not mandatory.

We are happy that we found them, and we enjoy our little MC community that we have found ourselves in.

Click on the Merchant Circle link below view our Merchant Circle page entitled "LittleFrenchBotuique's Lavender Drawer Sachets"

Pop-ups in the internet world are soooooo annoying.

Pop-ups, as we roll our curser down the page, are bad enough, but when the command is to load a pop-up when a website is opened, then the internet security is a welcome thing when it says just above the webpage, "Popup blocked, click here to view."

Not only do we NOT click to view, but more often than not we will click away from the site. Who knows what other surprises they might have for us!

That then gets to the matter of trust.

If we trust the site, then we may click on a word link or picture link to see what they have to offer. But if they are controlling the webpage for us, then we automatically tend not to click on anything.

It all depends. It only takes a split second for them to place an add-on to our computers that can be pretty nasty.

To live in the web world in total paranoia is not good, but we can take reasonable measures to protect our computers (and our personal info). Adjusting our internet security settings to our own comfort levels, purchasing firewalls and other security packages are some of the things we can do.

Some times we get that gut feeling about something or someone in the real world, that something just is not quite right, and the hackles instinctively go up. It's not a bad thing, and can save us a lot of headaches and grief. When we feel that gut feeling in the web world, IF we proceed, then it should be with a measure of caution.

That all being said, have you ever noticed as we go from page to page in some sites (sites that we may trust), or we go from one site to another (again, good trust worthy sites), and we may have a security window come up from time to time that says something to the effect that "there are contents on this webpage that have not been delivered using a secure (HTTPS) connection?

What do we do?

What does it mean?

First of all, we need to remember that not all security windows that come up, are from our system, and may not have our best interest at heart. As we use our systems, we become familiar with our security windows. If it's not something we recognize, be wary!

So, back to the HTTPS issue.

HTTP (the little bit of code we typically find in front of the www.website) stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is a standard by which data is transferred on the internet. Simply put, this is for "normal" web use.

However, when we are transferring personal information (names, address, credit card, etc), we want to do so in a SECURE fashion.

This information is typically sent through cyberspace in an encrypted format by the use of SSL (Secure Socket Layer).

The entire website does not necessarily need to be encrypted. Only the pages that gather personal information.

The pages that need the extra "security" have the word "Secure" added to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, making it Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, which would turn the HTTP in front of the World Wide Website name to HTTPS.

So the https in the following address ... https://www.storesonlinepro.com/store/2782146/login
lets us know that the information to be taken will be secure.

Another indication of the secure in HTTPS will be a padlock in the browser field to the right of the web address (much like the illustration at the top of this blog), and the browser field background will many times be a different color than the standard white background. To the right of the padlock will be the name of the protecting source.

Sometimes though, when we click from a secure webpage page (https) to a regular webpage (http), and there are links coming in or going out of that page (perhaps pictures from another website, or ads from other sources, etc), then our computer security system in effect throws up its hands and says "Hey wait! Everything here may not be good!"

So the question. Do we want to view everything in secure mode (basically disenabling all the outside links to and from that page) or do we trust the site, and would like to view ALL the contents.

This is just a simple explanation, and by no means exhausts the subject, and is subject to change, but it gives us somewhat of an idea of what is going on.

Because our personal information is protected on LittleFrenchBoutique.com, we may encounter security questions when clicking from a secure page (i.e. checkout) back to shopping.

Through our StoresOnline platform, you are protected by VeriSign, SecurityMetrics, and ECI-Pay.

HAPPY SHOPPING :-).