by Nick Throlson | Oct 6, 2017 | Business, Social Media
Starting a new business can be very challenging and there are a lot of factors that will affect its success. As an entrepreneur, you can avoid most of those difficulties. Making a good website is the first step toward building a respectable and recognizable brand. Your potential customers will go online and search for your service and product. Their experience while visiting your site will form their opinion about your business. Below are some of the most important aspects you should consider when creating a website for your new company.Navigation
You don?t want to hide anything from your clients. Therefore, create a website that is easy to navigate through. That simple effort will ensure that people come back and start trusting your company. Every single page of your site should include plenty of breadcrumbs, so visitors can easily navigate around different categories and pages. It is crucial that they know where they are at any time. In addition, navigation should be done the way it looks pretty. Being functional is just not enough. Feel free to play with basic shapes and lines in order to improve aesthetics of your website?s navigation. Keep it simple and appealing and traffic will most certainly increase.Homepage image
The homepage is the first thing your potential customer will see. Keep in mind that people are visual beings. Because of that, you should pay a lot of attention to your homepage image. Use the visuals to direct visitor?s eyes. You can make people look at any specific area using just simple elements which will cause an immediate reaction. In case you don?t want to have large visual on your homepage, you can do just fine with other design elements available on your site. There are no rules, so go ahead and be creative. The more time you invest, the better your homepage will be.Recent and popular posts
If you decide to run a blog, WordPress which is highly recommended, you should make sure it is well organized and relevant. That means that you?ll need to push your most popular posts on the top of the page. The same action should be done with recent posts. This simple tricks will help your business in at least two ways. First, you?ll be able to see what are your visitors interested in so you can meet their expectations in the future. The second perk is a better ranking of your website in the search engine results.High-quality content
Once your customers clicked on your link and found themselves on your website, they?ll want to know what are you about. Make sure you work on high-quality content and web design which will get your visitors hooked on your brand. Keep up with personal tone while writing content since people are more likely to trust an individual than a big faceless corporation.Before you start creating content, go ahead and find out who?s your ideal customer. Try to define their demographics. Get to know their age, interests, education. All of those will help you to give them the content they are seeking for. Work on keywords, and if you are not into it, feel free to consult one of the available SEO companies and they?ll be there for you.Social media
Your website can?t make it on its own. Regardless of its aesthetics, functionality, and content, it will need help from social media platforms. The whole internet life is happening there, and if you?re not on social media, there?s a good chance you don?t exist. Because of that, consider adding some sharing buttons on your website, so your visitors can share what they like quickly. That way, the word about your business will be spread out, and you?ll be able to see what people think about your product or service. In addition, you?ll get valuable information about the traffic that came from social media, so you can use it for future marketing campaigns.Aesthetics
Try to avoid making a boring website. It should be provocative and unusual, and yet simple and pretty. You don?t have to worry about that since there are numerous talented web designers out there and you can make an audition so they can present their ideas. Make sure to hire someone experienced and up-to-date. Trends are changing fast and you don?t want to hire someone who will design and outdated website. Your website will be the face of your company, so make sure it?s representative.Final thoughts
As you can see, aesthetics is important but not crucial part of your website. Before you start thinking about the looks, go ahead and start working on the content. The best way to lure people to your site is to listen to them and give them what they want. Always meet your customers? needs. Create a place where they can communicate with each other and with you.Take some time to answer all their questions and address all concerns. People will appreciate your attitude and will be coming back. If you treat your customer base with care, they will share their experience online and your website will get even more traffic and your conversion rate will improve in no time.
by Nick Throlson | Sep 20, 2017 | Web Design, Web Hosting
It?s easy to get swept up in adverts for website builders such as Wix or Squarespace that promise the ability to build your own website in minutes. As a small business owner, you?ve got to watch every penny. So why should you pay a couple of thousand bucks to a web designer when you can do it yourself for a low monthly fee?But there?s a catch. There is always a catch. The kind of website that you build with Wix or Squarespace is a million miles away from the kind of website a professional web designer will deliver. As one of your business? key pieces of collateral, it is important that your website does more than looking good. Don?t believe us? Here are five ways a Wix or Squarespace website will let your business down.1. Your website won?t get found
Part of the reason many business owners get a website is to reach a larger customer base. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a great way for websites to attract users through search engines like Google. Website builders have notoriously bad SEO, however. Because these builders are drag-and-drop, they spit out a jumble of code that is so poorly structured it is hard for Google to crawl it. If Google struggles to crawl it, you'll rank badly. And there?s nothing you can do to improve it, either. That means that even if you hire an SEO agency, they will have a tough time working their magic on your website if it?s built using Wix.2. It will look bad on mobile
You look at websites on your smartphone, right? Exactly, and so do millions of other Americans. In fact, more people access Google on their phones than on desktops or laptops. With so many potential customers using the Internet on their smartphone, it?s important that your website looks great on mobile devices. Unfortunately, these website builders primarily care about how your website looks on desktop PCs. There are no guarantees that it will work well or look good on smartphones. A web designer, on the other hand, will usually build up from mobile first to ensure that your site looks great on any device.3. It will be slow
A fast website is key for great user experience. No one likes using a website that takes ages to load. In fact, most users will leave a website if it takes longer than a few seconds to load. If you want to convert visitors into customers, you need your website to be fast. Unfortunately, the bad code that makes it hard to rank a Squarespace website in Google also means your website will be slow. And just like with SEO, there?s very little you can do to improve it. A professional designer, however, will minimize code and images in order to make your website load as fast as possible. Your customers will thank you for it.4. It won?t scale with your business
Most web designers will use a Content Management System (CMS) to build your website. This will usually be WordPress. A CMS lets you add new pages to your website and edit the content of your website after you have built it. So when you need to add a new service or write a new article, it?s incredibly easy to do. This isn?t the case with a website builder. Once you?ve built it, there?s very little you can do to change it. You?re stuck with it.5. You can?t move it
Using a website builder like Squarespace or Wix doesn?t just mean that your website won?t scale, it?s also very difficult to move it if you decide to go in a different direction. Worse still, you don?t actually own the website. Wix or Squarespace owns the website and you must continue to pay them in order to use it. If you want to move away and have a website that you own or control, you?ll have to start from scratch. It?s much easier to hire a professional web designer from the start who can build a great website that is actually yours to own and use as you wish.See? Using a website builder like Wix or Squarespace isn?t all it is cracked up to be. If you care about your business and want to hire a professional web designer, get started with a free quote from us today. We can build the WordPress website your business deserves.http://www.throlson.com/free-quote/
by Nick Throlson | Sep 19, 2017 | Off Topic
There are lots of ways you can take advantage of the huge mobile technology market for advertising. Most businesses are already aware of the most common techniques, like having paid Facebook ad campaigns, using Google AdWords, or simply using Twitter to promote themselves. You can also, of course, advertise on websites. However, one method of advertising that a lot of companies forget about is advertising on free mobile apps and games.Why Do Apps and Games Have Ads?
The app market is pretty well saturated, and so many developers with a good product find that rather than charging money for an app, which would have to compete with rival apps that are offered for free, it is a better business model to give their app to consumers for free but put ads on it to give them an income. This is done with all kinds of apps, but especially games. What Types of Games Have Ads?
Mobile games have several models. Somewhere the game is free but progressing in it at a decent level can cost the player real money for in-game currency (often called a 'freemium' or 'free-to-play' model). Others, where the game itself costs money but is complete and ad-free (usually something only major game studios with good publicity can get away with). The third kind is games that have both an ad-supported and a paid version ? the idea being that people will use the free version as a trial and then like it enough to pay to remove the ads. Then, finally, there are games that are fully ad supported. This means that a lot of games do feature ads, whether they are displayed during play, or whether play stops between levels and the player has to watch an advertisement. Because they are getting the game for free, a lot of people are fine with watching these, as long as they are relatively relevant.Is the Online Gamer Market Compatible with Your Target Audience?
A lot of mobile games are a huge deal, you only have to look at the success of mobile titles like Brawl Stars to know there is a big audience out there playing games on their devices in their free time. The question then, is really whether or not this audience strongly overlaps with the audience you want to reach with your marketing. If you are marketing something aimed at younger people, then popular games can be a good place to put your advertising. However, some more casual puzzle games ? such as word searches and sudoku style games ? are also played by older people. With some market research, you can work out whether the kind of people you want to market to play ad-supported games, and if so, which games to target.Working with mobile games and apps can be a new way to get your ads seen, and if your business is compatible with the audience, you may well find it to be a very effective addition to your strategy.
by Nick Throlson | Sep 18, 2017 | Off Topic
Many organizations large and small are constantly trying to improve and streamline their data management tasks. Whether that?s getting a better handle on data preparation tasks, cleaning data more effectively, or implementing a better standard of data quality, there?s an endless need to better handle data. So how can data deduplication technology help protect your data? Generally speaking, a comprehensive data cleaning tool will handle data deduplication, among several other tasks:- Deduplication and merge purge within and across any number of files from various data sources
- Suppression of existing customers or Do Not Contact from marketing and sales lists
- Advanced record linkage technology for the ability to create data warehouses
- Standardization of business and customer data
Data deduplication, generally speaking, helps eliminate redundant copies of data. In the normal course of a day, information can become duplicated. For example, an email server may have duplicate attachments that were sent to the same 25 people. If data duplication strategies didn?t exist, this same attachment would be available in the server. Fixing and removing duplicate data across an organization can improve performance across various systems and networks. Generally, data deduplication is the perfect task for operations that cause redundancies, such as backups. It can make a big dent in decreasing storage and improving bandwidth, as well as improving efficiencies within a company or organization. It can also save the embarrassment of having duplicate mailings go out to customers. A customer may lose patience and respect for a company if they keep receiving duplicate mailings. Don?t attempt to handle this manually! This will take weeks and cause a massive loss of productivity and valuable time. DataMatch Enterprise by Data Ladder is a best in class data quality tools suite that handles data deduplication, among other tasks for business. The user-friendly tools allow you to narrow your search by the type of file, data, and size. Whether you?re looking to remove duplicate records based on a single field or number of select fields, DataMatch Enterprise can accommodate any number of needs. Poor data quality is one of the quickest way to lose customers. Loss of trust and credibility can damage a business quickly. You want to make sure there aren?t any anomalies; this is done by analyzing the data from its source, and collecting that data to make sure of its quality.In layman?s terms, you want to make sure that the language your computer is speaking is understood to other systems your computer is communicating with, or something could be lost in translation. This is generally the issue with poor data quality, and it could be avoided with some profiling done at the beginning of the communication process.Even with the best of intentions, operating systems and platforms will still misunderstand or interpret some of that data incorrectly, as much as 25%.DataMatch will create a cleansed, deduplicated master file that can be used. The critical master file in question must provide a new point of reference for the staff and management to understand. This new point of reference entails a new structure in the system, which is called ?architecture.? Let?s break this down and understand more about the architecture. It has five separate components:Unstructured: Data found in emails, articles, and product specs, PDF files.Transactional: Data having to do with sales, deliveries, invoices, trouble tickets, monetary and non-monetary items.Metadata: Data about other data, definitions reports, documents, log files, connectionsHierarchical: Data that stores relationships between other data. This is extremely important that this is understood since many times this includes company organizational structures and product lines; also could be stored as part of the accounting system. All of the preceding is in direct correlation to the master data.Master Data: This is the most crucial data to any company: this data has to have a common point of reference for all personnel and management to obtain.All this new architecture the process of creating a completely new master file is costly, time-consuming. While this is being done, there is substantial downtime incurred, not to mention frustration for your business.Accuracy is of utmost importance; one glitch in your master database could prove disastrous since your master database is used by various applications.Intelligent MSSQL de-deduplication projects begin with DataMatch. DataMatch?s software suite will assist with several things:- Import/Export from MSSQL with SQL statements.
- Import/Export from Excel, Access, Text Files, ODBC, and other file types as well.
- Remove duplicates from MSSQL
- Clean data with included libraries on nicknames, abbreviations, states, advanced pattern recognition and more
- Parse addresses, email, and other data with customizable parsing tools
- Find and remove duplicates within and between data sets with multiple fuzzy match techniques
- See graphical reports on your total data quality and duplicate percentage
In addition, DataMatch Enterprise provides superior performance during those critical backup processes. It fulfills more than standard recovery time objectives during the deduplication process. To deduplicate a database, the software suite deploys number of powerful features that expedite the process a great deal. ?Deduping database modules is not an easy task since it must handle the critical databases and sort through the often messy lists, including contact email addresses, list of customers, lists from database retrieval software, offline product and itemized databases, and other related database categories. DataMatch Enterprise dedupes database entries, designed to save both time and money. While deduping databases, it cleans databases for heavy multiple entries or unsorted entries that affect the structure of the database. Both corporate and mid-size companies heavily rely on DataMatch Enterprise to dedupe databases, using it to dedupe highly-controlled CRM databases and other critical documents.Getting your data quality problems straightened out early will only help your business run more smoothly. Discover how DataMatch Enterprise by Data Ladder can help your data deduplication needs and provide your company stronger and better insights through effective, smarter use of data.
by Nick Throlson | Sep 16, 2017 | Off Topic
It won?t be an overstatement if we call PHP one of the most influential languages for web development of all time. Released in 1995 and currently running its 7th version, it was the de facto language for server-side scripting when the internet exploded in early 2000. Out of many well-recognized applications, Facebook is perhaps the most prominent examples built with the power of PHP.Over the next decade, as the broadband became more accessible and mobile devices started to take the center stage, there was a need of more data-driven and responsive applications and that is where Node.js came into the picture in 2009. But before we go any further, it is worth mentioning here that Node.js isn?t exactly a language like PHP but more like a run-time environment that combines the power of JavaScript and Google Chrome?s V8 engine. Netflix and LinkedIn are perhaps the best examples of popular applications running on Node.js.Since these two technologies perform the same basic tasks but are entirely different in their programming structures like syntax, context-switching, among others, there is no point in comparing those subjective matrices. Thus, we will only take a look at more relevant factors like performance, ecosystem, usability, among many others. Let?s see how they stack against each other:EcosystemFor any technology to prosper, there is need of a favorable ecosystem of tools and community around it. Since PHP has been around much longer than Node.js, this is one aspect where it clearly has an upper hand.PHP has a relatively large number of frameworks, many quality tools and scripts, and most of all, a mature community.Node.js, on the other hand, is quickly catching up by levering the popularity of JavaScript. Since it is the language most of the front-end developers are already comfortable in, it has resulted in quick proliferation of Node.js developers and other resources.
Winner- PHPPerformanceThis is actually a tricky thing to measure. Each language has its own structure that gives it leverage over certain tasks. If one is excellent at searching, other may beat it at sorting. So instead of getting into the illusion of benchmarks, let?s take a look at how each of their performance is suitable for different kinds of applications:Real-time applicationsPHP applications weren?t exactly built with real-time applications in mind. So, if you want to create one using PHP, you will need to deploy many standalone processes and still may not achieve the expected level of results.Node.js are built from ground-up to create and efficiently handle real-time applications. Its extensive set of libraries, template design engine, and robust framework makes creating real-time applications a breeze.
Winner- Node.jsDatabase applicationsHere the two technologies take entirely different routes.Traditionally, PHP traditionally has delivered excellent results with SQL database like MySQL.
Conversely, Node.js deploys NoSQL databases like MongoDB.Now, one can well argue on the performance of one over the other, but that is an entirely different debate and we will just declare a tie here.Third-party applicationsNo technology is ever complete on its own and it is its capability to work with other technology that largely determines its usability.PHP works in blocking mode, i.e., it can?t accept new requests until the server responds to it and thus, isn?t much effective for third-party applications.Node.js is a clear winner here. It works on non-blocking I/O and hence, can easily handle multiple requests at a time and is ideal for third-party applications.
Winner- Node.jsWeb serversPHP doesn?t run on its own and requires other servers, most commonly Apache to continuously run in the background.Node.js is again more efficient in this aspect and one can easily create web servers.
Winner- Node.jsHostingYou can?t possibly find a hosting service that doesn?t support PHP, hence, making it possible to avail cheap hosting solutions hence giving PHP web development companies an edge in cost-effectiveness.Node.js is currently far behind in this aspect but there still many decent hosting solutions are available.
Winner- PHPSo, if we go by numbers, the two technologies are almost head-to-head with no clear winner. But if you consider that Node.js is relatively new and still rising, it becomes evident that while PHP web development is holding its ground for now, it may not continue for long. Which effectively means that if you are looking for a cost effective solution immediately, you can proceed to hire PHP developer but if you are willing put the extra effort, Node.js may deliver better results.
