Protect your family by teaching them to use “Web Of Trust” (WOT ) to instantly identify whether a website is potentially dangerous. Children can be taught easily which sites should be avoided and it can be used at home, school or in your business. Best of all, it is free.

WOT is an excellent add-on you can attach to the Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers.

The WOT symbol will indicate by a coloured rating if a website is safe or dangerous. The WOT round donut coloured symbols are colour coded from green (safe) to red (dangerous), plus sub-ratings are shown when you click on the symbol. WOT rating icons appear beside search results in Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Gmail, etc. It will work in any computer operating system which can use the Firefox web browser.

Just watch this video, it explains how it works and will save me having to write a long, some may say boring, blog.

Even though WOT is available as an add-on for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox web browsers, I suggest you download and install it on the , Mozilla Firefox browser, so you can use it in conjunction with another add-on I suggested everyone use, “Noscript”.

Read my previous blog on why you should use, plus how to install, Noscript here:

This is how you install WOT:

Download and install it directly from www.mywot.com/en/download/ff

or follow the instructions below.

Windows users will need to have the latest version of Mozilla Firefox version 3 to use WOT. (WOT will work in newer and older versions of Firefox in Linux systems.)

The version 3 of Mozilla Firefox browser, is downloadable from here, www.mozilla.com

Once Mozilla Firefox is downloaded and installed on your computer, and you are connected to the Internet, click on the menu item “tools”, and in the pop down box, click “add-ons”.

When an “add-ons” box appears, click on the “get add-ons” button at the top left hand corner of this box. In the search box that appears, type “WOT” or “Web of Trust” and then press the “enter” button on your keyboard.

Look for WOT in the list and click on it to see a larger description, and then click the “add to Firefox” button, that will appear to the left.

Once it is installed, you will need to shut down and re-open the Firefox browser before WOT will become active.

The first time you reopen Firefox, it will take you to the WOT website. Here you will get information on how to use it. (Noscript can be installed using the same instructions above in version 3 of Firefox.)

Because you can use WOT to determine if a website is safe or not, you can have more confidence in allowing scripts with Noscript, for a particular web site, instead of just guessing.

For those of you who are adrenaline junkies and found this blog too tame, I will make my next blog more frightening, and talk about passwords.