Did we ever anticipate mobile phones to battle computers? On the contrary, it is a well observed fact today. What it basically means is that with technology you should “expect the unexpected.” Through innovative gadgets like tablet computers, smart phones, netpads, etc we can access websites anytime, anywhere as and when required. As a result, responsive web designing is gaining momentum and web designers across the sphere have started to track and emphasize its importance.
Responsive web designing in its simplest form is how your website adapts and responds according to user environment, namely his device and actions. Bearing this in mind, we suggest three major factors that every web designer should mull over while aiming to design a responsive web page.
Fluid grids:
Conventional fixed layout designing was appreciated a decade ago, but today the scenario is different. The extensive range of screen resolutions in diverse gadgets is a matter of concern, when it comes to delivering quality user experience. To obviate this concern, the concept of fluid grids has been propounded which is based on proportions rather than on pixels. Counting the screen size, the layouts automatically adjust and resize in relation to one another. The process of responsive web designing is drastically refined by fluid grids however, on the flip side it is not easy to interact when the screen size is thin involving multiple columns.
Flexible images:
One more important feature in responsive web designing is flexible images. Scaling down huge images in a small browser is definitely a trying task for designers. In addition, optimizing load time is also crucial. Popular techniques that are frequently used to crop images are utilizing CSS and storing multiple image versions on server in varied sizes. If this doesn’t solve the purpose you can conceal unnecessary images, employing media queries. Web designers increasingly recommend sites with minimum image loads.
Media Queries:
Media queries are logical expressions that check for media features like height, width, colour, etc in relation to the device’s screen size. Eventually, with the aid of media queries you can discover the minimum/ maximum width and apply the corresponding CSS3. Crafting a media query is simple, yet to implement an efficient one, it should be thoroughly understood.
It can either be embedded within a style sheet or made external, stacked or overlapped. Besides there are other concerns like what your default CSS style is, minimum/maximum width considerations, orientation, breaking point units, etc. As you can imagine, each condition has its own advantages and disadvantages. Consequently as a designer, you should know the what, why, and how depending on the project and its users.
Mobile browsing is expected to overtake desktop browsing in another 3 or 4 years which means that websites should capably handle a multitude of browsers and screen resolutions. Moreover, it is impossible to create compatible versions for every new device launched. Responsive web designing is therefore, the one and only option!
Social networking has become a huge source of traffic for business websites as much as the conventional traffic from search engines. So optimizing in social networking sites in the current situation will definitely increase your ROI that you are spending for your Internet marketing campaign. Several statistics in the period between 2010-2011 strongly claims that social networking marketing campaigns has generated almost 40 % of the revenue in comparison with search engine marketing campaigns. Facebook currently is the most powerful player in the social networking arena. Commercial business owners were able to retain their clients through continuous engagement with them on the business offers and latest deals. With this social networking sites client retention has become easier. Hence social media marketing now have become an integral part of any Internet marketing campaign. This is great news for business owners and marketers but for one firm and guess who? . Its none other than the search engine giant Google.
Google never may have expected that Facebook would emerge as its biggest nemesis in Internet marketing and search industry. Though Facebook need not be Google’s direct competitor, its started bothering Google from early 2009. Google sensed danger and came out with its own social networking website in 2011 known as the Google plus.
Lets us overview Google plus’ overview and its impact on SEO.
Features of Google plus:
Like Facebook, Google plus has all the basic features such as chat, adding comments to friends’ status updates, sharing photos and videos etc but in an enhanced manner. Additional features such as multiple videos chat have caught the attention of people who were starting to feel the monotony of Facebook.
But on having a closer look, Google plus is social networking product from a company who is the leader in search industry. So Google plus will definitely have some factors supporting SEO. The proof is when any business firm’s name is typed in Google, the Google plus page appears in search results. (It should have a Google plus page). In the near future Google may bring an algorithm update like engagement with Google plus may bring more favorable results in search rankings for businesses. And the above said factor provides a solid proof. So as a proactive approach, the Google plus profile pages should be optimized.
Title of the page:
The one major advantage of Google plus infact any social networking site is that the brand name of businesses can be established. Business owners can use their Firm name as the Title and Google plus itself recommend doing that. When your business network in Google plus grows the brand name gets registered strongly with the clients and retention becomes half done.
“Title is like a label and if it goes wrong everything will go wrong”.
Business Information:
Business owners can enter their business name and descriptions about their business in the name, about you and employment columns. There is a 160-character limit and hence the business descriptions should be crisp and information rich. They should be in such a way that the whole crux of your information should be covered within that. Incase of personal profiles restrictions can be done but case of businesses make sure they are public.
The Midas touch In Google plus:
Google always has the habit of doing things that will literally stun anyone on the planet. And in Google plus, Google has brought in its core factor of “dofollow” straight into the picture. All the text, names and business are dofollow and the get indexed in search engines especially in Google. So keyword rich (anchor text) can be added in the business info and it will make difference in both organic SEO and SMM. And again, they should be done in a polished manner so that your profile does not become an awkward one to view at.
Compendium
Overall Google plus has emerged as a great platform for internet marketers and the combination of conventional SEM and Google plus will be great combination of business development and stabilizing it respectively. Also, Google plus is brand new to the picture and as the time goes by we can expect more from Google.
A paradigm shift
In the famous words of Thomas L Friedman – the world is flat. Business and commerce globally has seen a paradigm shift with the advent of global networking metaphorically represented by the internet. The use of social networking is characteristic of this shift which has taken the world by storm with sites like Facebook and Twitter becoming the modern day lexicon.
Managing perceptions Business today depends far more on modern methods like social networking to reach and service its customers. From firms to film stars – it is now common practice to interact with your target audience for getting a feel about what they think about you, and propagate your thoughts and views on them. But mere conversation is not enough. It is imperative that you selectively leverage your interaction with the target audience to make a perceptible yet subtle change in the way you are perceived. Take the case of what Comcast has done on Twitter. Without making any significant change in the way they service their customers, they have been able to make a change in the way their clients perceive them.
Selecting what works Social networking is more predominant among young ITES organizations, yet conventional manufacturing organizations have also tried to delve into its business benefits. These firms sometimes experiment internally with their business associates through tested options like SharePoint or Web 2.0. This has seen the genesis of a collaborative approach towards innovation on the web. The most revolutionary use of this approach has been the development and use of Linux as a freeware. The choice is yours – see what benefits you most.
Core business benefits You can create and improve your brand image online through social networking. For e.g. in Facebook, you can create a pointer to your website which provides promotional data and introduces clients to your client or website. Similarly, in LinkedIn, you could put up a showcase event or roadshow which your company is sponsoring. Even in audio visual networking sites like YouTube, you could upload a video showing an award your company has won or a prominent speaker delivering an address at a marquee event supported by your organization. The options are seemingly boundless.
In a time and age where b2b and b2c opportunities are endless, social networking is a vital cog in the wheel of corporate brand building, managing stakeholder perceptions and attracting & retaining clients. But given the intellectual property driven business realities, it would be wise to take time to decide the path you would be most comfortable with. So choose wisely and enjoy the plethora of benefits which social networking can bestow on your business.
Facebook Applications are essentially designed to give a custom look to the website and facilitate to attract the attention of Facebook browsers. Though sometimes complicated, they are generally used as add-ons to other software programs or devices to work. The passionately popular Facebook social networking platform has issued an open Application Programming Interface (API) and developers are drinking it up to create applications and new features for Facebook. To work with the data from Facebook, all the third-party systems can make use of this API, which is a combination of OAuth 2.0, REST-style techniques and a mixture of web technologies and are collectively titled as the Graph API.
Facebook offers developers with several code libraries through its developer portal. It includes server-side programming languages and the only one that is entirely client-side is the JavaScript SDK. Both ActionScript 3 and the Flash Platform are compatible for the JavaScript usage. Server-side programming languages such as ASP, ColdFusion, PHP, and JSP are used to write the Facebook applications. Many more platforms which are used in this development are hosted on the application developer’s own server. They seem to be a part of Facebook itself for the users, as they are interfaced directly with Facebook. Using such Applications, developers can combine custom attributes on one of the most demanded websites in the world.
Developing Facebook application is a pretty difficult task as it requires innovative skills with various other things which are different from developing the custom applications. If you are interested in creating, configuring and developing your own application on the Facebook platform, you should be ready to go through a lengthy process. It is inclusive of technical and non-technical skills and requires smart knowledge in Facebook Markup Language (FBML), and Facebook Query Language (FQL). Moreover, it involves utilization of community-supported wiki and bug-tracker and helps to combine the automated and scheduled works. Developers who are unaware of social networking and its depth in Internet may find it hard to develop alluring applications. Such people can make use of the Facebook application development platforms and techniques to create their own Facebook applications.
Here are the links for you to start:
Ethical SEO Companies – (Part 2) – How to identity them?
Ethical practices have no boundaries and the more ethical you are, the more benefits you accrue. Being an ethical SEO company, will not only fetch new clients but also make new clients as long-term clients. The major advantage with long-term clients is they will help the SEO firm to expertise more about the business and it makes the SEO Company to even go for the domain based SEO service.
Candy to Google Engineers
Most of the businesses outsource their Internet marketing objectives to specialized SEO companies because the only reason is Internet marketing is as tough as conventional marketing. So it is extremely important to partner Internet marketing companies with strong testimonials and more importantly companies which are ethical.
SEO companies should be considered, as a marketing partner of your business and the SEO firm should carry out the expectations of the business methodically.
Business owners should be wary of certain aspects other than the factors said in part 1 before partnering with an Internet marketing firm.
1. Check the effectiveness of the portfolio:
Many SEO companies claim to have achieved top rankings for ‘x’ number of keywords but the fact that is to be looked out is the competitiveness of keywords. Long tail keywords are generally less competitive and neither are they going to generate traffic to the site. There are many tools, which shows you the competitiveness of keywords and use them to analyze the competency level and the expertise level of the SEO Company. It is highly important for business owners who are in competitive business to check this because there are tons of SEO companies who are projecting these in such a way people are easily carried away.
2. Review the Testimonials:
There is a general adage:-
“A good word of mouth is bag of Gold”
Business owners should beware of companies providing fake testimonials and it is not only vital to check the effectiveness of the portfolio but should make sure the they are true. The one best thing what you can do is to actually call the company referred in the testimonial and request for a feedback. There is no bigger testimonial required than a good word of mouth for an SEO firm and in that case any company and business.
3. Effective Communication:
Effective communication plays a key role in the success of an Internet marketing campaign and co-ordination between the business owner and the SEO firm is vital to reach the targeted audience. Business owners should be careful in selecting the SEO firms and they should make sure the SEO firm can be contacted anytime by any means in case of urgent needs. The other fact is that, the business owners are ones who are aware of the latest happenings in the line of their business and updating the changes to the SEO firm is the key to success. Also, the SEO Company should be ready to make the changes accordingly in their Internet marketing strategy.
If there is a slack in communication between the SEO firm and the Business then the website is the “blind man in Amazon!!! “
4. Reporting and Reports
Reports and reporting on the other hand strengthens the relationship between the business owner and the SEO firm and also helps the business owners to assess the performance of the SEO firm. Partner with SEO firms who can provide customized reports based on the requirements of the clients and are also capable of analyzing the performance of the website and should be able to provide with suitable recommendations.
5. Technical support:
SEO not only involves on-page and off-page optimization processes it also involves certain design and development changes to be done in websites. A SEO company, which can help in development as well as in internet marketing, would be an ideal choice for business owners because there is room for flexibility. Search engines nowadays provides importance to loading speed and it is extremely important that your business website is hosted in good servers.
About us: “ Macronimous Web solutions, an offshore search engine optimization company is always proud to offer white hat SEO service for its clients. As we follow white hat SEO technique, we are esteemed to call ourselves as a professional SEO firm. Macronimous considers business of the clients as their own business and foresee the SEO process. This makes Macronimous very special because it acts as a marketing team to the company indirectly. Macronimous has a team of SEO experts who are working hard to create a benchmark in ethical SEO. Clients can contact Macronimous web solutions for any SEO related aspects and the team are ever ready to serve the client needs. Macronimous updates the clients with the latest changes in search engines periodically and gives suitable solutions time varying. Macronimous web solutions always feel proud to be a part of clients intellectual business partner.”
There are good and great programmers, what makes a great programmer stand ahead from Good programmers? There are few skills with good practices shows the differences.
1. Attention to details
The mark of a great programmer is in the details. Keep the details under control throughout the programming process by maintaining a daily activity log. 2. Precise, quality, clean and effective code
Keep your code lean and clean. Plan the logic and core code before starting. Become a master of unit testing. Anticipate the worst and build in try-catch and intelligible error messages from the start. In fact, the first function a great programmer puts into a new project is a simple error catching routine. 3. Documentation
High quality code always includes adequate commenting. Anyone should be able to look at your code years from now and understand the functionality and purpose from the comments. Don’t leave a future programmer guessing at your intentions; make them clear. A simple rule is to “expect to forget” – you are documenting for your future self as well as others. 4. Quick absorption of techniques and technologies, and learning from mistakes
Remain open to new techniques, languages and technologies, and welcome every opportunity to educate yourself on the next big thing. Learning new approaches keeps the brain agile. A good use of a daily log is to note your missteps and mistakes as well as seemingly unsolvable conundrums. Analyzing failures is an exercise in humility that will help you avoid making the same mistake in the future. Having a list of tough problems and revisiting it occasionally to keep them fresh adds incentive for paying attention to every new idea as a possible solution. 5. Contributing – supporting and teaching peers.
A good programmer produces good code, but a great programmer helps others learn how to produce great code. Explaining your code or a process concisely to peers will help you to meticulously think through the details. Treating the questions of junior members of your team with respect and providing thoughtful answers and examples are traits that separate good from great programmers. Bear in mind the most junior team member might have something to teach you, and listen to others for their insights. 6. Communication
Participate fully in scrums and team meetings. If there is an impediment to your work flow, be precise in describing it. If you’re stymied, ask for and pay close attention to suggestions from your team. Even if they can’t offer the exact answer, something said may provide the clue you need to make headway. 7. Knowledge of business and social impacts
It is important to grasp the larger purpose of what you are working on. Too often it’s easier to keep your head down and your mind immersed in the small picture. Take the time to step back and gain perspective on where your work fits into the whole.
Like any other year for a web development company, 2010 went with lot of learning. Not even a single day left without the impact of technology advancements and new techniques to learn. At Macronimous, we always try to let our clients know what we learnt: jQuery/HTML 5 instead of Flash, Ajax driven forms, Mobile and Tablet interfaces for websites, Security for WordPress blogs & sites and social networking integration are some of the key considerations for improving the deliverables. Few things were challenging and few attempts didn’t turned up well. At the end of the year, it’s a summary of things will help any business to focus or rethink to make 2011 better for us and most importantly for our clients.
1. Social Marketing: Facebook and twitter will rule next year (or next few years too). Every SEO company which helps their client to succeed online, should help them by letting them to consider these technology giants, which might take them to next level. Social media optimization will not replace Search Engine Optimization, but social media optimization should go in parallel with SEO.
2. Cloud applications and hosting: We started using invoice applications first (Freshbooks) and it ended up with cloud hosting. We moved our sites to cloud. Also helped clients to taste the flour of clouds. Web hosting with Amazon web services was a very different service we offered to our clients. Setting up their sites and web applications with EC2 were initially needed some learning with Amazon, but it became an expert service at the year end. In 2011 we will be providing setting up applications in cloud as a key service.
3. Social Media integration: We learnt FBML, Facebook SDK with PHP and started offering business pages and applications with Facebook , which will continue next year. Marketing those pages is another fruit to reap. Similarly Facebook Like button integration and Twitter API integrations are two important promotional services clients will require in 2011.
4. Blogging: Is blogging dead? No, it has come out in different format. Twits and Facebook status updates are micro blogging and People who do not want to write much, or those who like to share instantly use them. But, still business blogging isn’t dead. Macronimous helped serveral clients to start blogging. WordPress helped us much. We provide SEO friendly WordPress blogs by adding SEO plugins and basic SEO readiness setup as a mandatory feature along with every blogs.
5. Search Engine friendly coding: SEO readiness is no more a value addition. Every site we develop should be ready to for Search Engines. It begins with light weight coding and ends with Keyword setup. Making dynamic sites such as CMS driven content, ECommerce sites and Flash sites with PHP and .NET are offered by us as an expert SEO service.
6. HTML5 for Flash: We started offering HTML5 based presentations and sites. Flash was replaced by jQuery for many clients and they were happy too. By 2011, HTML 5 should be the standard, and Flash will move for interactive applications. The test results made at RWW in March 2010 was an eye opener. With full fledged CSS3 and HTML5, easy to create interactive web applications without Flash should be feasible.
7. Rich Internet Application – Flex was used much in few projects this year. We look forward to work on RIA based frameworks, such as Sencha.
8. PHP Frameworks: We used Codeigniter very much. But MVC is still not very popular, and framework based applications are relatively lower then non MVC based solutions like WordPress etc.
9. Smartphone and Tablet applications: We did much with iPhones this year (including 2011 World Cup Cricket app), moving to iPads. Android development for Smartphones and tablets will be our important strategy for 2011. By the end of this year, we see more Tablets, and thanks to iPad, which regenerated the new platform of business. Building portable applications for the mobile and tablet browsers is another channel. By providing mobile friendly websites we help clients become accessible everywhere. Sencha Touch nd dhtmlx’s JavaScript mobile UI APIs will be a part of the development in 2011.
10. Security for Opensource applications: Many of us believe that Opensource application based development cost is almost nil. This is a lie. The initial cost of a WordPress or Joomla based application/site development might be relatively lower than a closed, custom application development. But the real cost of ownership is affected by the security issues that comes with the Open standards, mainly when they are affected by Security attacks. We will work hardly on providing secure web applications when we develop them with open source in 2011. Even at this year end we have an important announcement with a major security fix from WordPress.
11. Remote project management: Managing projects across the globe was a real challenge a decade ago. Using standards and web based project management tools we provide hassle free project management. Tools like Basecamp, dotproject and Eventum helped us much, and we are working with few cloud based PM and collaboration tools, github etc. Apart from this our agile based PM methods have had some customization. Part of that is a project closure questionnaire.
Overall, many easy and hard ways of learning helped our team to build the next year strategy very much. Leave your comments if you had such learnings to share with others. Looking forward to another technologically challenging year which helps us to help our clients.
Project feedbacks are often missed by teams, which are valuable to building a successful team and company. After completing any project (web, SEO or anything), feedback from the customers becomes self- evaluating tool for the team, more often they trigger process changes within the company. The following are ten few simple questions, your customer might take 10 mins to one hour. If you convince the customer to answer them, remember you have a vital tool that help you to improve. Here are they:
1. Are you happy with the deliverables? Is that what you wanted?
Project feedback questions are tools to improve!
2. Was there any moment(s) that frustrated you? Do you think we could have avoided it?
3. Did our development process go well? Or do you want us to improve?
4. Was there enough questions and communications from the team to understand the scope?
5. Did we provide enough time for you to review interim updates and
6. Did the team work collaboratively with you and your team?
7. Did the team listen to you? or do they need to be more attentive to the details?
8. Do you think we added any values to the deliverables?
9. Will you come back to us? (For new or existing projects)
10.What is your over rating for us on this development. (Note: You can provide a five or ten start based rating system, preferably with Ajax)
I recommend you to make these questions online as a form to Email or Database or both, so that these feedbacks can be reviewed easily at the projects review meetings. Also management can discuss each feedbacks to find out any deficiencies and improve the system or help people for better performance.
If you want to have them as a PHP-mySQL form send your feedback here, and we will send a copy of the file, which you can host at your own server.
In this 6 mins video, Rita Mulcahy, PMP, An expert in advanced project management explains how to start Project management. I hope you can continue to learn with her series of videos online.
In May 15th 2010 Rita expired on breast cancer after suffering for five years, the loss is very big to the PM community.
Our popular E-Book Practical Search Engine optimization techniques is launched for the iPod Touch/iPhones. You can carry this simple iBook in your iPhones and use it as quick reference. Its available at iTunes to download now.
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