How a small business website service should handle your information

Why this is worth asking about

Any time you type your name, phone number, or a description of your business into a form on the internet, you are trusting whoever built that form with what you send. For a small business owner, that is not a small thing. Your information should be handled carefully, and you should not have to take that on faith.

Here is a plain look at what good practice looks like, and what MaxLynk actually does.

Encryption in transit

When you send information through a website, it should travel over an encrypted connection between your device and the server on the other end, the same basic protection your bank's website uses. Without it, anything you type could, in theory, be read by something sitting between you and the site. Any information you send through the MaxLynk site travels over that same kind of encrypted connection.

Saving your information before anything else happens

A well-built intake form should save what you send as its first step, before any other processing happens. That way, even if something downstream has a problem, your message is not lost. When you send us your information, we save it first, before anything else happens. The intake page where you tell us about your business is the only place on the MaxLynk site that collects information from you.

Logins are not something a website service needs

A website service does not need your username or password for anything, your email, your social accounts, your booking system, to build or manage a site with you. If a service is asking for your logins upfront, that is worth a second look. We never ask for or store your logins.

No payment fields, anywhere

Some online forms quietly collect more than they say they do. A plain rule worth applying to any small business website: if a form is not clearly a checkout, it should not have a password or payment field anywhere near it. Our site does not collect payment details. There are no password or payment fields anywhere on it.

A person reviews what changes on your site

Automation can speed up the routine work of keeping a website current, but a website is still a public-facing part of your business, and changes to it should not go out unchecked. A person reviews changes to your site before anything goes live.

Who is actually behind the service

It is fair to ask who is running a service before you hand over your business details. MaxLynk is a Maxwell Industries LLC product line, the same company that builds and runs RiseLynk, our software for elevator service companies. It is not an anonymous form on the internet, it is one business, building both.

Questions worth asking any website service

Before you hand your details to any small business website service, it is reasonable to ask a few plain questions: Does information I send travel encrypted? Is it saved before anything else happens to it? Will you ever ask me for a password or a login? Will you ever put a payment field somewhere I was not expecting one? Does a person look at changes before they go live, or does everything happen automatically with no one checking?

You should be able to get a straight answer to each one. For MaxLynk, the answers are the ones above: yes, information travels encrypted; yes, it is saved first; no, we never ask for logins; no, there are no payment fields; and yes, a person reviews changes before they go live.

What this adds up to

None of this is complicated. Your information should travel encrypted, get saved before anything else happens to it, and never require a login or a payment detail you did not expect to give. Changes to your site should have a person looking at them before they go live. That is the standard we hold the MaxLynk intake to, and it is a reasonable standard to expect from any small business website service.