by Nick Throlson | Mar 19, 2018 | Guest Post
As the internet becomes more and more an integrated part our day to day lives, becoming as commonplace to us as the radio, electricity or zinc, the dangers of it are becoming more apparent. Not just the danger of wasting valuable time watching kittens when you?re supposed to be working, but serious dangers such as cyber-attacks, loss of data, or even the theft of one?s identity.
It used to be you could impersonate anyone you wished on the internet, but developments over the past decade have helped ensure that our identities are more protected than ever.
So listed below are some of the key trends we?ve spotted over the past couple of years within the realm of user identification technology, and how they can help protect you and your identity whenever you?re using the internet.
Two Factor Verification
Usually, when you sign up to a website or something similar, there?s just one line of user verification. Most usually, this is the password. The problem is that even 12-character alphanumeric passwords with one lower case, one upper case, and one special character are actually very easy to bypass. And as most of us ? perhaps unwisely ? link most of our accounts to a single email address, if you find one breach the whole system is at risk.
As such, many sites are now employing two-factor verifications when signing up for an account, making important transactions, or when adjusting your account?s details. For example, as well as having a password, the website may also require a verification code sent to an email address or a mobile phone before any further action is taken.
This provides an extra layer of security so that even if someone has managed to guess your password they still can?t make any major adjustments to your accounts or your data without getting past that second layer. This at least delays them, and for casual attacks, that?s often deterrence enough, and can also alert you personally when they occur.
Use of Mobile Phones
We already mentioned that the two-factor system may ask you to link your account to a mobile phone so that verification codes can be sent if someone tries to access or adjust your account. In general, the growing universality of mobile phones has meant that many websites and companies are making use of them to protect their users and their identities.
Popular games developer Blizzard, for example, offers the option of a mobile phone verification app when users sign up to their online gaming platform, Battlenet. Whenever the user?s account is activated by a new device, a verification code is needed before access can be granted. Likewise, if anyone attempts to change the account?s password, or make any online purchases.
As it?s highly unlikely that the user?s mobile phone will be in the possession of the attacker, it provides a layer of security very hard to overcome.
Some companies, such as Cognito, have started offering similar services for a number of websites. Using their app, you can connect accounts to your mobile phone, thus ensuring they can?t be accessed without a special ID code.
Biometrics
Biometrics are nothing new ? customs and immigration officers have been using biometric data to verify passport holders for quite a long time now. However, we?re starting to see biometrics see more use in our daily lives as well.
Most mobile phones now have the option to be secured using biometric data, typically a fingerprint or facial recognition. The phone then cannot be unlocked without that input, at least in theory. Many phones also maintain a typical pin code or pattern security system, as biometrics are notoriously finicky and do not always work as intended.
While not foolproof by any stretch, they provide a very convenient and quick means of providing user identification for our mobile devices.
New Methods of Data Storage
Recent events in which personal data has been acquired and illicitly disseminated across the internet due to the actions of hackers have also caused a rethink on how data storage is managed. If a hacker can access important personal information, such as your date of birth, address, or mother?s maiden name, they can use this to bluff their way into your accounts and cause all kinds of damage.
One solution is to ensure that no one organization has access to all your information, a process called blockchain. Instead, data is added sequentially in blocks using a ?hash? of data from the preceding block.? Already used for bitcoin transactions, it?s a highly effective and secure method of protecting personal data.
by Nick Throlson | Mar 2, 2018 | Guest Post, Web Design
An adorable and user-friendly website design is essential to keeping visitors on your site longer and to reduce your bounce rate. The longer a visitor stays on your website, the more chances of business and sales are there. In how much time your visitors determine what your company does? If the answer is over 5 seconds, then your website needs a lot of improvement. Web designing is an art, If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to be constantly aware of the latest developments in technology and designing to make your website easier to explore and helpful for your visitors. In this article, I?ll reveal six crucial tips to make your web designing more professional and top notch.
Use Customized Logo
Having an attractive logo is very important to your website and for the branding of your business; your business logo is the icon that symbolically represents what your company is all about. An eye-catching logo will undoubtedly attract new customers. Make your logo visible prominently on the website; many business owners underestimate the importance of customized logo for their company. There are many freelancers and companies available on the internet that can provide you an incredible customized logo which will reflect your business.
Collect Requirements
After logo designing the second step is to collect the requirements of the website which you are going to design. This is an extremely important step since it requires a substantial understanding of the business and its goals. Many designers start the work with all good intentions but end up delivering a website which their client never wanted. So, it is necessary to ask for the requirements before starting the work. Here is the example of some questions you need to ask.
- What your business is all about?
- What features do you want on your website?
- Do you have some specific colors that need to be used?
Use Easy to Read Fonts
A lot of time a font style is a thing which separates a professional website from an amateur look. Choosing the right font style doesn't take much effort or time, but can give a purposeful improvement to your website. Your first point to look when choosing a font for a website should be that it matches the theme of your website. The right and simple fonts will enhance the visitor experience.
Quality Navigation Menu
The navigation bar is among the most crucial elements of a website design, as it literally allows the user to navigate through your site. The navigation bar should be simple and same on all the pages of the website. If your website's navigation is poor, then customers can easily become frustrated and leave your website. The only thing to remember is to always make sure visitors understand what you have done. If users don't know how to navigate your navigation menu, it has failed.
Call to Action
A call to action is a marketing term which is used to direct your audience to take the action that you want. Highly focused calls to action will insanely increase your website's conversions. Make your call to action as simple as possible. Calls to action should be appropriate for a visitor's level of engagement with your company. If your website is new and emerging, only invite them to subscribe to the newsletter. Always remember to include a call to action at least once on every page.
Optimize Images
The longer it takes a website to load, the more likely you?ll lose an approaching customer. If you don?t want search engines to hate your website then you have to reduce your image?s file sizes to improve your website's loading speed. There are a lot of both free and premium tools and programs on the internet, which you can use to optimize your images on the website.
So, there are 6 crucial designing tips for a professional website, by working properly on them you can take your skills to the next level and provide your users with a better and pleasant experience.
Author Bio: Jessica Watson has been writing for websites and blogs for four years now, currently, she is working with Aurion International who is very famous for providing ISO certification in Sharjah and across all UAE.
by Nick Throlson | Jan 9, 2018 | Guest Post, Web Design
We all know what a great website has. It has an aesthetically pleasing landing page that draws your visitor in. It?s a site that has user design in mind and is easy and simple to use. It is a website with great content, stunning visuals, and perhaps even a few videos. Today, great websites are powerful, clean, and modern, but that?s not all. There is so much more to a great website than what is on the page. That is why the greatest-looking website in the world will still not be good enough if it doesn?t have these five elements:
- A Strong Team
A website simply wouldn?t exist without someone behind it. Similarly, a great website won?t exist nor could it run without a great team. That is why you should focus on other areas of your business, aside from just the business aspects. Hire HR advisory services to ensure that your entire business is optimized and ready, creating a greater business value.
- A Focus on SEO
If your website does not have a focus on SEO, then you might as well stop now. Having a website that cannot be found is a website that has minimal organic reach. This means that you will likely have to continue to pay advertising costs to get new people onto your site, only without any guarantee that they will buy from your site, subscribe, or do anything other than click on and off.
- A Focus on Security
Though it might seem like your website is secure, there?s a chance that your website is un-secure, putting both you, your business and your customers at risk. That?s because hackers can access your simple security protocols and can either completely lock you out, hijack your computer, and so much more. They will then either sell the information you have, like names, emails, and passwords, or they will blackmail you. Avoid this by increasing your security, keeping your website updated, and using the appropriate software to keep your hardware and even the cloud secure.
- Organized and Backed-Up Data
If you want your website to be a success, you need to have your data backed up. The better you organize and categorize your data that is on your website, the better you?ll be able to protect your company and your content. Do this, and you at least have a backup option if your website goes down, is hacked, or damaged. Similarly, having this organized and backed-up data will provide better customer service.
- The Human Element
Customer service should always be at the top of every single company?s focuses because without great customer service you have no customers. Even great products can suffer if the service offered by your company fails, which is why it?s important to keep a human element to your website. Contact information, respond to comments and even have a pop-up chat that people can use to get real answers from real people.
A website is your global doorway to your company, no matter how big or small it is. To have a truly successful website, however, you need to make sure your company is running smoothly because a great company has a website that reflects it.
by Nick Throlson | Dec 4, 2017 | Business, Guest Post, WordPress
Almost one out of every four websites on the internet is built on WordPress. From the smallest of businesses to stellar companies like Time Inc. and TechCrunch that garner millions of visits per day, WordPress remains the choice for all.
This makes one thing absolutely clear- WordPress development services are reliable and suitable for businesses of all scales and industries. And it?s perhaps for this reason that despite having dozens of CMS in the market, WordPress comfortably trumps them all. Here are some of the reasons you should use it for your business as well:
It?s free
The most basic factor upon which majority of the businesses focus is ROI, i.e., while they do care extensively about the quality, they are equally sensitive about the price at which that is attained. With WordPress, it's win-win. They get to deploy one of the finest CMS with a broad set of features to help them push their business in digital space and the best part, they don?t even have to pay for it.
Extensive set of Plugins
Though WordPress is a complete package when it comes to creating and managing decent websites, there are thousands of other plugins and themes that you can use for additional functionality and give your website a unique feel. While most of the plugins are free to use, there are some paid themes as well for premium users.
High visibility
Websites built on WordPress are known to be SEO-friendly as they are indexed by search engines much better than other websites. This helps in improving the rank of websites in search results, thus, leading to higher visibility and recognition of businesses.
Simple but powerful admin panel
One of the key concerns of many businesses is that though they can get a website developed by hiring WordPress developers, managing them afterward without technical fluency remains a tough task. But with WordPress, users get a drastically simplified admin panel that required no technical knowledge whatsoever for day-to-day management of the website. Sure, having technical efficacy does have its benefits for its ability to edit CSS code for custom design, but it isn?t necessary to manage one?s website efficiently.
Task delegation and roles
Websites are generally managed by a set of different people, all of whom do not necessarily need the same set of privileges. For instance, if you have guest-blogging enabled on your site, they should be able to only write and not edit anything else. Similarly, for editors, there should be privileges of only writing and editing the content but not modifying the design or other aspects. WordPress has such capabilities built-in and can be easily managed through admin panel by granting or revoking different levels of privileges.
Additionally, since the admin may not be available 24*7 to manage the site, they can easily schedule content that will automatically be posted at a specified time.
Social media and community integration
WordPress websites can be easily integrated with most of the popular social media platforms, and even the on-site community like the comments section can be easily managed through a simple interface.
To put it simply, it creates aesthetically beautiful websites for free, offers a broad range of functionalities that even a non-technical person can easily manage, and yes, is powerful enough to handle millions of users. The only thing you need is to hire WordPress developers to create give a great start to your website and once it gets onboard, you can efficiently manage your business from anywhere you like.
by Nick Throlson | Nov 21, 2017 | Guest Post
Nowadays, all retailers should have a website. This much we know to be true. But as with so many things in life, web design trends come and go. In fact, some websites exhibit strange styles choices that were never in fashion to begin with.
Back in the mid-90s, most websites were pretty horrible to look at. Either that, or they were plain and boring. Today, there are some gorgeous ecommerce web designs out there. But there still exists a wide range of flashing, brightly colored, overcrowded and poor quality websites in the digital ethos, just waiting for some poor hapless soul to stumble across them.
From these shining, Flash-animated, vaguely terrifying examples, we can learn what not to do when it comes to making our own ecommerce websites, and what to avoid when browsing new websites for sale ourselves ? investing in badly designed site may cost you a pretty penny… Don?t do it people!
Arngren.net
Right folks, what do we like about this website?
It?s hard to know where to start with this one…
At first glance, it?s like someone cut up a catalogue and made a collage from their favorite listings. At second glance ? yes, it?s the same. That?s exactly what it looks like.
Here are just a few of the many things wrong with it:
- It?s overcrowded (that?s an understatement)
- There?s no informational hierarchy ? we don?t know where to begin
- The graphics are small and poor quality
LingsCars.com
As you arrive on this one-of-a-kind car rental website, the second thing you?ll notice, after the explosion of color and animation that hits your eyes, is the intensely off-putting music that starts playing automatically.
Here are a few things that aren?t working:
- First off, it?s an assault to the senses
- There?s far too much going on ? sounds, colors, animation, brains?
- Despite this compelling graphic, I don?t know if I do trust Ling
Pennyjuice.com
Now, the first thing you?ll need to do when you arrive at Pennyjuice.com is chosen whether you want to view it in HTML or Flash. Choose well.
Just who is Penny Juice? Great question. As you can see, people have a lot to say about Penny Juice. Finally, a 100% juice that kids will drink! Available in bright yellow, pink, green, blue, purple and orange.
Penny Juice teaches us that:
- There is such a thing as too much color
- The best place for your menu is not in tiny writing at the bottom of the screen
- Adobe Flash is dying
Another Flash-based dominion of terror! Patimex, a Polish charcoal company, has a very special mascot ? a grinning devil barbecuing a sausage. What you can?t see from the image is that the mascot also bounces around the screen and sings. You cannot take your eyes off him.
Here?s what we can take away:
- Audio autoplay is a singularly off-putting feature in a website
- Devils don?t make cute mascots ? consider what your graphics say about your brand
- Adobe Flash is dying
Wait, Suzanne Collins as in the author of The Hunger Games trilogy? Yes. This is her website. It?s not what you were expecting, is it?
The website is bare, and the first call to action we see takes us to another website: one with little on it except a request to download Adobe Flash Player. For a dynamic author of futuristic teen books, it?s surprising that this website looks and acts the way it does.
What?s wrong with this website?
- It?s full of dead links
- It?s designed for 200% zoom, so it looks strange and sparse on a desktop
- It?s dated and unexciting ? downloadable documents galore
Frys.com
Ok, so compared to the others, this one doesn?t look too bad. But it?s not good either.
There?s a scrolling carousel of 32 promotional images that hit you right in the face ? like this one of a very ?stock image? employee. It?s dated and bland ? where the others have over-compensated to give their websites ?character?, this one has done the opposite.
What we can learn:
- There will always be a better menu heading than ?Things We Do For You?
- Some explanatory text on the homepage that explains what you?re about is helpful
- If you have to use stock images, there are better stock images out there
Lowpriceskates.com
Welcome to the black hole that is Low Price Skates. Clearly, there?s something missing from the top section here. Who knows what that could be? More skates pics, one must presume.
Low Prices Skates offers free shipping from $99.99 ? what a great deal! Presumably, it means when you spend $99.99 ? but regardless, it?s not very clear.
We have a lot of images crowded onto the homepage, with tiny text descriptions that even a person with impeccable eyesight would struggle to read from a reasonable distance. The copy also reads like it?s been written for SEO, not users, as you?ll see from this paragraph on quad speed skates:
That?s a lot of keyword stuffing, right there.
So, what can we learn?
- For one thing, make sure your website displays properly
- Keep all text at a reasonable, legible size ? 16px should be the minimum
- Optimizing for SEO requires more than including the same keyword over and over
Gosh! What a lot of things there are to look at here.
We have a tuxedo model ? the same picture twice? ? intermingled in a collage-like style with what appears to be a footbridge. We have no way of knowing how the footbridge is involved.
The menu and copy we see on this page look like it was created in Microsoft Paint. There?s little to distinguish content from links. And the color palette is absolute madness.
We?ve not even looked at the gowns and veils page yet! Here it is:
It?s quite something. Yvette is obviously passionate about what she does. She seems to do many things.
This website teaches us that:
- Too many choices make taking the next step paralyzing
- Updates are important ? it?s not been PROM 2010!!! for quite some time?
- LESS IS MORE !!!!!!!!!!!! **
Now, most of these websites are quite old ? but they?re still out there on the web. Even today, there are plenty of newer e-commerce websites making simple design and usability mistakes that will affect users? impressions of the brand ? and its ability to make sales. So if you?re thinking of creating a website for your online business, say no to bad web design!?
Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. On her blog, Victoria Ecommerce, she shares tips on e-commerce and how writers can hone their craft. She is passionate about using her experience to help e-commerce companies increase their brand reach.
by Nick Throlson | Nov 20, 2017 | Guest Post
The choice of technology is one of the most crucial decisions upon which hinges the future prospects of any startup. Because not only what they choose will end up determining the quality of their application, but is also a decision that can?t be unmade, at least not without incurring considerable time and resources. Also, since startups generally evolve rapidly, their requirements in the future may become much different from what they were at the initial stage.
Keeping that in mind, taking a generalized approach at this stage is the smartest decision to make. That is, pick a technology that can serve all the purpose and is flexible to evolve, support and scale to your changing needs. Exactly something Joomla development services are renowned for.
Cost-effective
Joomla is free to use. This means startups, who are generally low on the budget, do not have to spend anything on technological end and can save it for other more important tasks. Apart from the Joomla itself, there is a host of other free plugins and templates that they can use for additional functionalities and interface. Or if they prefer, there are also many affordable templates that they can deploy to get a feel for a premium application.
Simplicity
Most of the startups in the initial stage do not have ample technical expertise and hiring professionals isn?t feasible for them. With Joomla, they do not have to. Its interactive interface is exceptionally easy to use and even a non-technical person can easily manage the application once it is developed by a Joomla developer. This also drastically improves the efficiency because they do not have to consult developers every time they have to make changes.
Quick deployment
For every startup, the time-to-market holds the key to beat their competitors because the more time the application takes in the development stage, more is the cost, and more is the market they concede to others. With Joomla?s wide range of ready to use modules and templates, web applications can be developed in the minimum possible time.
Quality product
Joomla being cost-effective and simple doesn?t mean that it offers those benefits at the expense of quality. It is the second most widely used CMS in the world after WordPress and supports millions of websites of all scales and businesses. If you aren?t convinced yet, we must tell you that it is well-known for its stability and high security.
Community support
For startups with little experience in the domain, it is almost certain that they will get stuck at one point or another. For that, Joomla has a very large and vibrant community of seasoned developers who are more than willing to help anytime you need.
Easy portability
As mentioned in the beginning, the choice of technology is crucial for any startup and as they evolve, their requirements may change. So, if after few years down the line, startups feel that Joomla isn?t serving them well, it provides an exceptionally simple procedure to port your application to any other technology. Also, if you are facing any problems with servers, the migration process is very swift and simplified.
