Resources on Web, Mobile, SEO, Outsourcing and more.

Our SEO team likes Google analytics, But they still generate some reports manually and simplify some of the reports generate by Google to make it readable to clients. Not all the clients will understand the detailed reports from Google Analytics. They need facts and figures, easily understandable. So, always our SEO enthusiasts are looking for some tools to make their life easy, no surprise they wanted some tools as an alternate to Google analytics.

1. Piwik Open source web analyticsa>: A web-analytics software which is free(opensource), is a real good way of calculating website ROI. It gives perfect reports on the keyword phrases and search engines, popular web pages etc.  It also has its own plug-in that are built-in for increased efficiency, with the facility of getting the reports in various formats like XML, PHP, CSV and the likes. .
 
2. Engine Ready Conversion Analyst: Another powerful analytics tool, the Engine Ready conversion Analyst is a alternate to Google analytics. You can generate reports on web site ROI, from keywords used in search engines, emails, banners or absolutely any other online campaigns that you perform. Engine ready is not a free service, but believe the services are definitely worth a shot. You also have a demo option, and only if you are happy, you would need to proceed with the purchase option, which I feel is quite decent enough.

Comments are welcome, if you have even better tools, post them. !  

Cost cutting! – This is something everyone always appreciates, particularly during this slowdown. People want to spend small or no money, however things need to keep going! You need to cut down the development time, so you can save money, execute more projects and manage to reduce the cost of development. This is the time to indentify the ways to reach low cost solutions to customers.

Web development framework to open source developers are not new. There are many Frameworks are available for PHP, Python, Ruby and Java developers. With Frameworks, you get a project skleton, a structure and Libraries which you need to start. Moreover the structure forces you to keep the design and development seperated with MVC. MVC Stands for Model View Controller.

Choossing a Framework is based on the requirments, and the customer. There are simple to complex. I beleive every web development firm should invest time on evaluating few Frameworks in various technology (or atleast in PHP) to provide quick and low cost solutions to the customer. A single Framework may not allow you to fullfil all the features of various web development projects.

There are few popular frameworks widely adopted by developers, for Python there is Django and Pylons, Struts and Cocoon for Java, Ruby on Rails for Ruby, Several for PHP (Zend, Codeigniter, CakePHP etc) – See a very good comparions here.

While we use and recommed few like Codeigniter, CakePHP and Struts, Its better you try, evaluate and get insight on more than one Framework. This will help you/your developers to recommed the right framwork for the requirments and quick completion of the project. Please note reuablity and MVC are the prime factors for using Framworks, But indentifying the right framework which will meet your specification is even more important.

As a developer, you should be able to accomodate more projects if you reduce the development time. My team says you can save around 30%-40% of development time, this should be real good news to you and your clients, right?

Out of my experience in handling various projects for our company, I have realized this one hardcore fact that Project Management is one of the very essential constituents of a project. I was initially going through various PM tools and found dotProject to be a useful tool. Since then our company has been using dotProject as one of our PM tools. We usually give the access to our clients so that they can check the status of the project any time they need. 

Being an open source tool, it also facilitated my fellow colleagues me and to use it the way we need it. I can customize it the way I require, as per the requirements. This comes as a boon to me as I can keep my clients happy by delivering them the project status, the way they need. So contended clients, which means a happy company and a happy me!

To wrap it up, I have listed few of the advantages below that I have experienced in dotProject PM tool, which are 

• Calendar updates  
• Task delegation details  
• Various report generation like approaching deadlines, timelines, modules pending and completed, and much more
• Managing multiple projects and tasks, files with forum support 

So if project management is what is stealing your night’s sleep, then relax! dotProject is the solution!

In a survey, by the Information Architecture Institute, 47.6% of people says “My CMS is not flexible enough to accommodate my design”, as a key issue they face with many Opensource CMSs available in the market. This made me to think about the truth behind this. What prevents them from making a great design for their CMS driven site? Is it the CMS they’ve chosen or they customization skills they lack?

When we offer consulting for Opensource CMS selection, it is not an easy job always. Building websites with the CMS our clients like and to make it work with our own custom design might become a nightmare if we aren’t considering and planning the UI design in advance.

We have customers who supply design for their web sites (as Photoshop source files – if they know Photoshop) since they have good sense of designing and they know how their site should look like. We can happily accept it and build HTML/XHTML and CSS based Static pages without any issues or provide a Custom written CMS easily. The real challenge starts when they want to make their site CMS enabled with an Opensource CMS framework such as Joomla, WordPress or Drupal.

Most of the opensource CMS applications strictly adopt some design standards, and they give clear instructions for UI designing. Your design will not work well with the CMS, if it does not obey their design rules. The primary reason for these strict rules is to help with the CMS applications for design-content separation and for easy user interface maintenance. You can easily change the design without changing the programming sections and vice versa. But can you easily fit your custom design which is created as your mind wishes to an Opensource CMS application? Most of the good CMS applications does not allow you to create an unique site with your own custom design, custom graphics and custom XHTML.

Simply configuring a Opensource CMS application along with a template design (meant for that CMS application) may ease your job, But it will not give your client an user interface, which is unique for them. It will look like one another site made with that particular CMS. I have seen several Ecommerce sites with similar structures; I can easily identify them as “made with osCommerce without added efforts”.

So, how do we deal with this situation?

Take the case of WordPress. If you start designing a site without keeping WordPress in mind, and wanted to enable WordPress CMS at later stage, I am sure you need much experience in XHTML coding  you may have to give up WordPress in order to keep your look and feel remain unchanged.

Few months earlier, we did an Ecommerce web site design with Cubecart; with the help of Programmers and good HTML scripter, we were able to make the user interface which is very unique and no template look. Yes, good PHP and HTML programmers will have to give hands to change the way the application works and to fit your custom design with the CMS. If you need a decent design which does not offer you a standard template based site look, you need an experienced team’s support to make it possible.

Cost is one key factor why people like to use opensource applications and in most of the cases we almost get a free solution. Installing Drupal or Joomla with a pre-existing design, will only help you to offer a cheaper solution, But to give a unique look and feel to your site, you must be ready to invest in application customization too. Your CMS theme or template will need your programmer’s support to provide coherent CMS driven website, which is exclusive for the customer.

Opensource CMS applications are excellent tools for professional web solutions. No objections!. Opensource CMS applications will not cut the cost of custom development completely and making a design which has an exclusive and aesthetic look to your customer will need the time/cost of your developers and designers.  Don’t leave the CMS application to decide your site user interface by cutting the customization efforts.

Did you ever wonder how to work efficiently with your offshore team. I am sure you wish to have some better mechanisms than simple emails back and forth. When you like your customers to interact with your team, without you spending much of your time, But at the same if you can monitor the projects without much of your efforts, I am sure you to need invest on some Web collaboration applications.

Web collaboration tools normally consist of a list web based applications which are capable making people work together via internet. Such suits of set of tools will simplify the communication and information exchange. For example A project team in different locations can work together with Web collaborative tools. Such tools normally consist of shared access to project files, share calendars, schedules and plans. They can have online discussions, share whiteboards and documents.

See my favorite tools below, But I recommend you to evaluate them before you start using them.

1. BaseCamp: Basecamp is a web based project management and collaboration tool, designed for small businesses, lawyers, publishers, manufacturers, and offshore web developers and outsourcing agencies. It has a very clean and interactive web based interface. It presents the clients and projects on one screen, you can make lists, add items, assign responsibility, upload files, categorize, sort and track versions. Message boards keep your communication centralized with no shooting emails back and forth. You can start practicing it with their 30-day free trial.

2. dotproject: This is a opensource application, written by several users, and it has the following features.

• User Management
• Email based trouble Ticket System, (Integrated voxel.net’s ticketsmith)
• Client/Company Management
• Project listings
• Hierarchical Task List
• File Repository
• Contact List
• Calendar
• Discussion Forum
• Resource Based Permissions

3. Twiki: TWiki, a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform and knowledge management system. It is a Structured Wiki, typically used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool, on an intranet or on the internet. Web content can be created collaboratively by using just a browser. Twiki also has several plugins such as, Actiontracker, Calender, Chart etc.

4. Goplan: GoPlan! has number of collaborative features like Track project progress through task management, calendaring, note sharing and issue tracking. Additionally, real-time in-browser chat lets you converse with team members. Goplan also has developer API which allows you to integrate our system to the rest of your infrastructure.

There are number of free, paid script, and paid hosted solutions are available, finding the one for your team and making your client to use it would be bit challenging initially. But once when you start using it, you will make everyone in your team proud of you.

When you plan to outsource to India, or planning to work with a remote development team like us, these tools make make our colloboration easier on information, project details and file sharing.

So you want to blog. But why?

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” – Says Herman Melville.
When you want to link your thoughts with others, when you like others to learn from you or others to make you learn – the good way is blogging. You have a though on personal, business, or social – and you need know what’s others view on it. Blogging helps you to do this – you share your thoughts, and make others to share their thoughts on their thoughts.

Read below, if you need a blog for you:
You need to choose the right blogging tool first, as all are not same, and all doesn’t provide the same. Most of them are Opensource scripts or free services, so you pay a little or nothing.

1. Hosted services:

If you want to start blogging right away, hosted services are the best bet. If you do not have your own hosting space, if you do not know how to install your own blog application, hosted services like blogger, Livejournal or Tyepad would be the right choice. You can straightaway register with them and start with them. Typepad charges a little as monthly fee but the others are free services.

2. Installable scripts:

You need more control with your blog, and want to host under your domain name (eg.blog.yoursitename.com) check with your hosting provider first. Many hosting solutions comes with some default preinstalled blog scripts – with their support manual you should be able to configure it easily.

If you do not like the installed scripts you should evaluate scripts like wordpress (PHP based), Movable type (Perl based), and install them in your server.

I personally recommend wordpress, Reasons:

1. Its free, ever.

2. PHP 4.x based, and most of the hosting supports this.

3. Easy to setup with simple mySQL setup. Again most of the hosting should support mySQL.

4. You do not need to be a big programmer to install, configure or change the designs which you like.

5. Hundreds of free themes are available – You have to just upload and enable/disable them.

6. Easy to configure plug-ins – which are additional features you would like

7. Easy to backup – just back up your database and keep a copy of your data

8. Good SPAM blocking (I like the plug-in akismat)

8. …and many.

We will post regular blogs on blogs, Visit here after some days to learn how a blog can help you to promote your site business.

If you still prefer someone to get your blog ready for you, Just write us. We charge a minimal fee to make your own blog ready under your domain, contact us for more details. In 3 days you will get your blog ready to shout.