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.
At this point of time it would be superfluous if to say that Flash is the most prominent and widely utilized multimedia platform on the cyber space. It has substantially demonstrated its mark in several areas of games, banners, applications, and videos. However, given this fact, several IT enthusiasts across the globe accentuate that the launch of HTML 5 will supersede Flash and sound its death knell. In today’s context, is this relevant? HTML 5 will obviously take some more time to hit the market officially, yet subsets of HTML 5 are already employed in popular websites like YouTube, Google, Vimeo, etc. While anything can happen in future, it is certainly not possible for us to predict if HTML 5 and browsers will end the Flash era. By all means, future is unexplained and we do not know who our competitors are, for tomorrow!
The chief pros and cons of HTML5 and Flash are discussed here and we hope that it would help you to some extent in choosing the right platform for your projects.
Significant Facts on HTML 5:
• HTML 5 is an open source platform and hence developers can work based on their preferences.
• It is extremely adaptive.
• HTML 5 is supported well by desktop browsers, mobile browsers, and IOS.
• HTML 5 applications runs by own, without the need for plug-in
• With HTML 5 simple interface enhancements can be implemented effortlessly.
• As of now, it is not suitable for advanced video features like streaming, video effects, interaction etc.
Flash: The Crucial data
• Flash on the other hand is a fully proprietary concern.
• The technology is time tested and a bulk of the websites use Flash. With its goliath presence in the online world, it is simply difficult for everyone to learn and switch over to a new technology like HTML 5.
• Complex applications perform better with Flash and they are amazingly user friendly. Flash tools are highly powerful.
• It is faster and has minimal technical limitations when used for multifaceted interactive applications.
• Flash does not perform as expected in MAC OS. Mobile browsers do not support Flash. According to Steve Jobs, it is not compatible with touch screen devices and it is a CPU hog consuming huge amount of battery power.
• Moreover, Rich Internet Applications using Flash are Plug-in based.
HTML 5 is a comprehensive collection of technologies and there are still several discrepancies in features when used in different browsers. There is no single methodology deployed to enhance cross browser compatibility and even HTML 5 does not back IOS Safari in many areas though it is compatible. Nevertheless, the mobile browser market is growing rapidly and Flash not supported by IOS Safari and others is indeed a matter of concern. Google affirms HTML 5 as a great platform, however it banks on Flash for Google map street view and multiple file loads in Gmail. While HTML 5 strives hard to perform efficiently on light interface enhancements, Flash concentrates on advanced applications and features. On the flip side, we have encountered countless powerful user interfaces in the market that have failed miserably. Ultimately, the bottom line is that developments have to be user-centric aimed at endowing quality user experience. Technologies that follow this simple yet critical rule will surely succeed despite facing hitches in a few domains when employed.
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.
Have you thought about the right Data type which you should use?
Is VARCHR bad? Do you review the SQL statements that you have written? Do you know what sort of impact indexes produce? How to leverage the query Caching techniques? Do you follow the naming standards?
This simple slide teaches you the best mySQL practices to be followed up within 15 minutes.
Taking out the best from mySQL will improve the application performance, if its part of your day to day life get into these standards and practice the everyday. This presentation s from Ronald Bradford. Thanks to Ronald for sharing.
Keyword cloud represents most used keywords in a site visually, by showing it in different font sizes and it is known to be a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) term. It differs from larger to smaller in font sizes. Keyword that has been used more around the site and blog, which we call as keyword density, are shown in larger fonts. According to the keyword density the font size varies from larger to smaller. On looking at the keyword cloud size variation, users can see the importance of the keywords that relates to web site or a blog.
Benefits of keyword cloud
Keyword cloud is benefited to find relevant and useful web pages for user who looks for certain information.
By using the keyword cloud, popular words (density rich words) are shown and it is as well clickable for users. When users find a keyword listed in keyword cloud useful then he will be going for a click on the particular keyword and he will be taken to the category search results page were all pages or blog posts will be listed related to the tagged keyword.
Make sure the keywords in the cloud section are not overlapped and ugly. Have it in a place were users could find it easily. The better option is to have it in the side bar of a site or blog.
Keyword cloud generators
Here is a site that helps to generate a keyword cloud by mentioning your web link.
Codeigniter is an open source web application framework for building dynamic websites with programming language PHP. Its main aim is to facilitate the developers to develop projects much faster than writing code from the scratch. If you are a developer who want to meet the clients’ deadline and tired of tediously large and painstakingly undocumented frameworks, Codeigniter is the way to go. When compared to other PHP frameworks, Codeigniter is often distinguished for its speed.
CodeIgniter
Now is the real time to know about the power of Codeigniter. So ignite yourself and initiate reading to know why you want to choose Codeigniter. It will suit if:
You require a framework which can be set up very quickly and efficiently.
You need an outstanding performance.
You are a developer who needs methodical and clear documentation.
You need a framework that does not call for sticking on to restrictive coding rules.
You want a framework that needs nearly zero configuration.
You need a framework which is compatible with many environments
Some of our developers always prefer to use CodeIgniter, write me if you want to see some samples and know why they used CodeIgniter. If you want to start using CodeIgniter start right here at: http://codeigniter.com/
Months back, I made a post similar to this, But I believe another post emphasizing on the best practices is not considered bad.
Working with PHP is something you enjoy everyday!. You always wanted to do your best to your clients. But when the deadlines are pressing and when the clients are on your shoulders people start doing messy codings, and the standards got ignored. But you practice the best ways of programming everyday, it becomes your style and you have no alternate choice of doing quick and dirty work. Here are some simple best practices discussed by Matthew Weier of Zend technologies. Use them when you get an opportunity, and they will become your style of programming.
If you are hiring freshers they need to know or learn PHP programming, learn your own standard way of programming which should be derived from the best practices. Its good to introduce the best practices from the day one, and not after you loosing clients because of the messy procedures and codings you follow. It would be easy to adapt them before you start doing serious coding.
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