Discover a free app solution and the essentials you need to ensure that you create an experience that’s just right for your clients or customers.

We all know that we need to design a new site for mobile use and ease first, before translating it into desktop versions. Average web stats show that a substantially higher percentage of people access brand offers on their mobile device more so than any laptop or tablet.

But what about apps? particularly during and post-covid we’re now seeing more businesses invest in them than ever. Why? Because it’s the only way that many businesses can still continue to function and offer a contactless service.

Now is the time to consider whether or not an app would benefit your customers – would it make their life, and in the long term, your life, easier to install one?

Before you stop reading thinking that this is only going to lead to a vast amount of expense. Keep going, we’ve got a free app solution for you that you can create over this coming weekend or in any of your spare time.

Step one to creating your own app

Download bubble.io. This is not an advertisement at all. I’ve interviewed a number of different startup founder’s in my time who have created fantastic apps through this codeless (yes you read that right, no coding involved) system. Bubble’s interface is easy to use so you can get started and very quickly create a framework for your business. Not sure what your clients would  want? Ask them – whizz out an email to your network and see what shortcuts they’d appreciate. Apps are all about making your business easier to make sales or contacts. As your business develops you can update the app. Bubble is a ‘freemium’ service which means that you can sign up and use a certain amount of their services for free and pay a monthly/annual fee to access more features. Your list of app needs is crucial in defining how much you spend – do you want to take payments over the app? Schedule appointments, turn on instant messaging, send offers and news to your app owners? The choice is yours …

Aimée-Louise Carton, co-founder and CEO of KeepAppy, has taken the time to chat to Business Matters about the key elements to consider when designing a new app. Read and apply as you will …

Top List of Essentials for Usability:

• Three Click Rule – users will rarely make more three clicks / taps / swipes to reach a feature before they become frustrated by how hard it is to find what they are looking for.
• Colours 1 – Most people learn to read with dark text on white background, too much colours or white text on dark background actually causes the user to read more slowly
• Colours 2 – humans are very simple, we rely on colours we already know. The most common colours we interact with are the ones we see every day – traffic lights. Consequently, humans associate green with movement … and vegetables, so nice and healthy. While red is a colour of warning – stop and blood. Look closely at colour combinations – conflicting colours will make users uncomfortable and less likely to use product, while neutral tones with blasts of branded colour, like you see on Facebook for example, will increase brand association
• Physical design – Think about the physical aspects as well – very simply, at what point does it become cumbersome for the thumb finger to reach the top of the screen? How often would a user be willing to move their hands to touch the top of the screen?
• A clear understanding of your user is the most underrated yet important aspect of any app build. Look at your Google analytics for your website to find out where your customers are coming to you from – do they prefer iOS over Android? If so, how can you integrate iOS design to increase intuitiveness and understanding of usability? Focusing on what the user has already proven to know and like can increase usability because they will feel more positive towards what they already know.
• Fun! Most people have a competitive streak and competition hacks can really increase the users engagement with an app. For example, Tinder offered the ‘streak’ component (ie. logging in every day), while FitBit awards users with ‘badges’ based on steps achieved. Creating these competitive components can really help
• Tone / voice – what kind of voice will your brand take? Peer to peer or top down lecturing? A peer to peer voice will help people feel more comfortable using a more causal app (eg. Bumble), while medical or professional apps should imitate the voice of authority to help people feel safe / protected (eg. fitness apps)

Read more:
Create your own app for free this weekend and boost growth in a contactless manner

Imagine you are a British person traveling to another country or even continent.

And although you are passionate about traveling, you also love your TV shows and do not want to miss an episode, although you are not at home.

So, how can you watch the adventures of your favorite character? By using a VPN. This will let you enjoy both your holiday and favorite TV series.

Another scenario you could imagine is that you want to watch BBC TV shows as a foreigner. That would be another problem salvable with the usage of a VPN. What that is, the benefits of using one and how it will help you watch your favorite TV shows online outside of the UK – you will find out in this article.

What is a VPN?

VPN is short for Virtual Private Network. One of the uses of a VPN is that it allows people to connect to a different network. This is why it’s perfect in the case of watching TV shows online. What does it do? It connects your device – be it a mobile phone, tablet or computer – to a server on the internet and lets you browse as that connection. This means that if you are in France and using a UK VPN, the entertainment sites you will be visiting to watch TV shows will detect you as coming from the UK. But this is just one of the many uses of a VPN.

Other uses of a VPN

Apart from entertainment, you can use a VPN as a businessperson. I know no one wants to work on a holiday, but if you are away in another country, you can deal with emergencies by using a VPN. Another thing you can do is access your home network to use certain files or play games as if you were home.

More than that, a VPN is a great security tool, perfect for those who access pubic Wi-Fi networks. Whenever you access this type of network, you become vulnerable to the others on the network, as they can, if technical enough, track what sites you are on and invade your privacy or even steal your data. If you want to stay safe, you should get a VPN to bulletproof all your private information.

Do you want to find out more about how VPNs can protect your data in 2020? You should give this article a read: https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2020/02/vpn-myths-and-misconceptions.html.

Other benefits of having a UK IP Address

VPN is not only about entertainment, but it’s also about financial security. If you are traveling to other countries, you will want to have access to your bank account, wherever you are. Because banks use IP address location information to stay safe against illegal activities, you might not be able to access your account if you are in another country. Do not worry, a VPN will help you stay in touch with your finances.

How to use a VPN

Although a VPN might seem very difficult to use, that is not the case. Not only tech-savvy persons can enjoy its benefits. Now, there are on the market all types of VPNs and most of them have a friendly interface to help you enjoy all the benefits you want fast and easy.

Do you want to find out more about the ways of using a VPN? Check this article out! How do you get started? It depends on the VPN – in some cases, you will have to use your email, in others log in to apps or simply create an account. When it comes to payment methods, you do not have to worry: you can use Credit and Debit Cards, PayPal or even Bitcoin.

The installation is easy. Most VPN services offer apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android so you do not have to worry. All you have to do is access their website and download the right version for you.

Did you download and install the app? It’s now time to connect to a server. The closest the server, the greater the speed. This will allow you the freedom that you need. You should know how to access the specific server for BBC iPlayer if you want to watch your favorite UK TV shows.

How to get a UK IP Address in 4 easy steps?

You created an account, downloaded the dedicated VPN app and it’s time for you to connect to a UK server. You will find out how you can do it in 4 easy steps right now!

1. Make sure that the chosen VPN has UK servers. This first step is very important and you must do it before buying the VPN. In this way, you make sure that you do not waste your money and get what you want.
2. Do the technicalities. Download the app, install it on your device and follow through with the instructions.
3. Choose a UK server. Make sure that you choose the right server to be able to watch your favorite TV show.
4. Grab a beer. Or a glass of wine. Now it’s time you relaxed. All the hard work is over and you can finally enjoy watching your favorite TV show. Find out more about working iPlayer VPN and enjoy all the benefits of watching tv series while outside of the UK!

Now you know everything you need to know to watch your favorite tv show while on holiday or just outside the UK. Download the app, install it, choose the right server and just relax!

Read more:
Do you want to watch BBC TV shows online outside the UK?

With the increased busy schedules in our day to day lives, people have become more conversant with finding almost everything online not forgetting seeking online counselling.

Most people if not all, have found themselves facing issues that weigh them down from time to time. In cases where you cannot handle the underlying matter by yourself, it is essential to seek help from a therapist. Finding someone to open up to might seem like an overwhelming task, but, worry not! Visit e-counseling.com in order to find a professional therapist you can talk to without the fear of being judged. Below are some of the benefits that come along with online counseling;

Accessibility

With a proper internet connection in place, all geographical barriers are removed. People living with disabilities as well as those living in the remote areas are now able to access counseling online as all they require is an internet connection. Today, most youths are well conversant with the internet and may prefer the use of online therapy as compared to physical therapy.

Convenience

Everyone in today’s world seeks to find a service that is convenient to them at all costs. With online counseling, comes convenience to both the counselor and the client. You do not have to worry about setting appointments with your therapist or even the difference in time zones. You can quickly login at any time and communicate with your therapist via email and eventually get help regarding certain issues like Bitcoin Profit.

Anonymity

One of the reasons for the development of online counseling is the ability of the client to be anonymous. Most often, people facing difficulties in life fear being judged and stigmatized by others when they share their darkest secrets. Online counseling, Therefore, has come to the rescue of such people as they are now able to share with their therapists and find help.

Affordability

With online therapy, there is a substantial cut in the costs associated with the process for both the therapist and the client. This is so because, on the client’s side, they do not have to worry about transportation fees, parking fees e.t.c as they can get help at the convenience of their homes. On the other hand, therapists do not have to have a physical location that involves paying rent to provide the service; they can as well offer the service while in their homes.

The larger selection of therapists

Online counseling does not limit you to particular therapists from your geographical location as you can have access to a large number of therapists to choose from. Depending on the underlying problem, you are able to find a professional who will guide you through a trying time and help you get your life back. While looking to find a therapist, do your due diligence to find one you can trust and be transparent with each other.

Conclusion

The are a range of benefits of online counseling in the UK, which cannot be overstated. In the long run, it helps you deal with your issues before they become a huge massacre in your life. Fear not about being judged and stigmatized as you can now easily access therapy online.

Read more:
The Rise of online counseling in the UK

WordPress began its life as a no-fuss blogging platform. Over the years, it has evolved into a powerful engine where even complex e-commerce websites are built.

After all, WordPress powers millions of different types of websites on the net. 

While it became easier for non-techies to build a blog or a site using WordPress, those who want more customization control are facing more complicated codes and procedures to deal with.

The dynamism of this platform comes with a longer install time and an overall heaviness since WordPress depends on a database for this. These days, however, developers are slowly getting back to basics. Lightweight blog engines are the new trend.

Of course, this trend doesn’t negate the usefulness of database-dependent dynamic CMS. Depending on the user’s need, there are certain pros and cons to using either one. But if you’re looking for something that will give you lightning-speed loading time and more theme-tinkering freedom, here are five new systems that are lighter than WordPress.

Statamic

This one is pretty much WordPress without the database. Statamic also uses PHP, making it a dynamic CMS capable of generating complex pages. Instead of dealing with cumbersome folders in a database, Statamic uses a flat filing system to store files.

Like all of the blogging platforms we’re going to talk about, this one uses Markdown to write content. Coupled with its emphasis on good-looking designs and intuitive control panel, Statamic is the best choice for those seeking to make something more than a simple blog. Of course, it’s good for pure blogging as well!

Jekyll

Before we dive into what Jekyll is, let’s first talk about static websites. As the name suggests, a static website’s content is fixed. Whatever one has written will be shown to site visitors as is, which makes it load super fast. Static websites do not use databases, so saving new data input from the front-end can’t be done as well. Most of the engines included here make static websites.

With that said, Jekyll is a static site generator. Like Statamic, it uses Markdown for content and the usual HTML, CSS, JS, and a bit of Ruby for everything else.

All you have to do is type using Markdown, upload the file to a server. Note that you will not be able to run Jekyll on most shared hosting sites. You will most likely need to go after more complex hosting solution, for example vps hosting. And voila! You have a website.

There’s a good amount of Jekyll tutorial online if you want to try out this bad boy.

Octopress

One downside to Jekyll is how it requires a foundational knowledge of basic web dev languages plus Ruby, which is a bit more advanced. To help people use Jekyll with more ease, Octopress was developed as a framework. With Octopress, users can now put in themes, plugins, templates, and scripts. Responsive layout and social media integration are made available as well.

Anchor CMS

Speaking of lightweight, Anchor CMS takes it to a whole new level. Clocking in at a mere 150kb, this blogging engine allows users to publish by simply uploading a Markdown file. It’s easy to use and configure as well.

Even with its tiny footprint, Anchor CMS actually uses databases. So while it presents itself as a very simple blogging tool, users do need to know a bit of PHP. Like most of the CMSes here, this one doesn’t have a WYSIWYG editor as well. This lack of a feature, while probably the reason for its lightness, presents itself as a barrier to interested parties who do not know HTML, CSS, or PHP.

Dropplets

This one is created purely for blogging, which makes it probably the easiest one to use out of the five. Do you want to talk about quick installations? Dropplets installs in a mere 30 seconds! Jason Schuller, who developed themes for WordPress, created this. It’s free, simple to install, and comes with some beautiful templates.

WordPress is revolutionary in a way because it made building professional-looking blogs and websites accessible to people with zero web development knowledge. But if you’ve got enough of the basics down, you’ll likely appreciate the advantages that these lightweight blogging platforms are offering.

Read more:
5 alternative blogging platforms that are lighter than WordPress

Due to the fact that Flash was the mainstay standard for online videos for some time, many business videos are stored in FLV format. Outside of online streaming however Flash isn’t a great format for business videos, as it isn’t compatible with many mobile devices.

Rather than keeping your business videos in Flash, you may want to convert them to a more universal format like MP4 – or maybe even using a newer codec with better compression. In any case Movavi Video Converter will help you to do just that, and make it easy for you to switch the format of your Flash business videos.

After you launch Movavi Video Converter, load the Flash business video that you want to convert by clicking on the ‘Add Media’ button then selecting ‘Add Video’. It will appear in the main working area, and you can then click on the ‘Video’ tab and open up the ‘MP4’ category to see a list of the MP4 presets that are available.

Each MP4 preset in Movavi Video Converter will have a different resolution, and you can select the one that you want to use for your business videos. Alternatively you could select a preset for a different format, or one for a specific device that will be listed under the ‘Devices’ tab instead.

Although you can start converting your video at this point, you may want to first click on the ‘folder’ icon near the ‘Save to’ field and set the destination folder. In either case when you want to start converting the Flash business video using Movavi Video Converter, just click on the ‘Convert’ button.

Considering how straightforward it is, you shouldn’t have any problem converting business videos using Movavi Video Converter. On top of that if you’d like to convert audio or image files you can do so as well by following similar steps – and you can use that to create animated GIFs, rip audio tracks from videos, or save screenshots.

As you explore the features in Movavi Video Converter you may notice that it has lots of other tools as well. It can compress videos, resize them, or edit them by enhancing their quality, cutting and joining video segments, adding captions, stabilizing shaky footage, and more.

Now that you know how to convert FLV to MP4 or any other format you require using Movavi Video Converter, go ahead and try it out. Odds are you’re fully aware just how useful it can be to be able to switch your business videos from one format to another, and you will be able to do that along with a whole lot more with the features that are available.

Read more:
Converting flash business videos using Movavi Video Converter

Are you trying to increase the productivity of your small employee team to help build a relationship with your clients and help your company grow? Learn which cloud servers can help you achieve this goal in today’s guide.

The cloud server for small business is a tool that’s supposed to be convenient. And if you’re looking for a tool that can store data or access files, it might cause problems. For a fast copying speed, some of the most valuable backup options are unable to outpace a high-quality local backup solution

For businesses, this gives them the advantage of quicker disaster recovery, fewer problems, and quicker collaborations. You have to use single-disk external drives. The local storage options that are available are inexpensive and powerful; this means that you can create an advanced data backup strategy to help your business.

In this quick overview, we’ll discuss the best serves for small businesses who need an affordable service.

What Server is the Best for My Business?

Getting an inexpensive server isn’t hard these days. Finding one that’s great for long-term business plans is a bit more complicated. The market is always volatile, change, and the opinions can change wildly, but here are the (number) best server options that you can use to improve your company or small business’s backup plan.

Top Cloud Servers

When looking for a server, most businesses want one that’s inexpensive and can be good for helping them manage all of their files in one centralized and safe location. But, they also want one that’s affordable so that they’re not using too much company expenses.

This table compares the top cloud servers that you can use for your business.

Which One Should I Choose?

When looking at the table, you can see which cloud server is great according to its pricing plan and the amount of memory it will hold. If you’re trying to go for a cloud server that has a simple interface and designs, you should try Bluehost or Host Gator. They allow you to drag your files into one space, making it easier to upload and use on your company’s network. Also, they have some of the cheapest pricing options and is easier for you to get started quickly.

For larger businesses, who need over 230+ GB of data for their servers, In Motion has some of the most expansive data storage plans available. However, it might be expensive once you get to the 20TB-30TB range, so make sure that you adjust your budget according to how much storage you need.

If you need a server that can also be used offline, you should look into Liquid Web. Most of these servers are very versatile as they’ll allow you to view data from your laptop or on your mobile phone. You’ll be able to have enough storage space so you can store not only websites but applications, documents, and other important project materials.

No matter which one you choose, you’ll find that a cloud server for small business is a quick and inexpensive option in order to manage your network further. We suggest that you try them all to see which one suits your needs the most. To conclude,

Read more:
Improving your business with cloud servers

A good web hosting is an integral part of creating a good website. It is the major step in how your site is delivered to your audience.

Though it is a good idea to choose a user-friendly interface, create fresh & valuable content on your site, but having a reliable web hosting is equally essential. After all, it ensures the availability of your website to your readers.

Unfortunately, most smart business owners take hosting for the back seat.

In this article, we are presenting the top 5 hosting services for 2018. But before that let’s find out how a good web host can help you in a different ways.

Provides a Good Uptime

If you want your site to be accessible all the time, you must invest in the best web hosting. If you choose a poor hosting the chances are your site will be offline more than online. Make sure; your hosting provider supports an advanced server system. Such servers provide high performance and ensure maximum uptime.

Offers Security

Though no website is 100 per cent secure from hackers, but a reliable hosting company makes sure you get a proper safety against security threats like malware attacks, DDoS attacks, and other viruses.

Improve Website Loading Speed

A good web hosting uses the latest servers that use advanced SSD drives that make your site load faster. When you have a fast loading site, you get good ranking in search engine results as well.

Here is the list of 5 Best web hosting services for 2018.

Hostinger.com

Hostinger.com is a well-known web hosting company which is known for offering quality services at an exceptionally low price. Its basis plan starts at $2.15 for a month.

This fully WordPress optimized hosting service can be a good option for individuals, small and intermediate businesses.

SiteGround

SiteGround in another popular web hosting company that has been used by millions of people across the globe. The company was founded by a group of students in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2004. In a very short period, the company has earned a massive respect in the hosting industry.

SiteGround is also one of the best hosts that give great discounts. You can check out the Top 4 Best Web Hosting Coupons in through this link

SiteGround is known for its fast SSD disks and security measures.

A2Hosting

It is a rebrand of Iniquinet, which was launched in 2001. A2Hosting is a well-established hosting provider that is known to provide blazing fast web hosting solutions. The company offers a wide range of hosting services, including shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Cloud hosting, Reseller hosting, etc.

A2Hosting has servers at multiple locations that ensure your websites get a constant uptime. Its basic plan named ‘Lite’ starts at $3.92 for a month comes with unlimited storage, control panel access, and free SSL.

1&1

1&1 is one more popular hosting company which is run by United Internet. Like companies mentioned above, 1& also offers various hosting solutions under the same roof. Its services range from domain name to shared hosting, to dedicated hosting to cloud hosting.

The unique selling point of the company is its HTTP/2 Network Protocol that helps in reducing the website load time and makes website easier to display on every browser.

FastComet

FastComet Hosting comes with a wide range of hosting solutions. It has servers at various global locations, including United States,  United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, USA, Asia Pacific, etc.

Its lowest plan called StartSmart begins at $ 3.95 a month that comes with features like 15 GB of disk space, unlimited bandwidth limit, SSL certificate, etc.

Wrapping Up

Here is the list of 5 best hosting providers for 2018 that fulfill the requirements of individuals, bloggers, and businesses. Don’t forget to compare their features before making the final decision.

Read more:
5 best web hosting services for 2018

FTTP, or Fibre to the Premises utilizes fibre optic cable lines running from the ISP, or Internet Service Provider straight to businesses.

It’s different from FTTC, or Fibre to the Cabinet because it doesn’t use conventional copper wires from street cabinets. FTTP trumps out other internet solutions because it’s faster, more reliable and more secure.

Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of FTTP below.

FTTP Advantages

Superior Bandwidth. FTTP boasts the highest internet transfer speed among all internet service options. It’s way ahead of most DSL internet packages and coaxial cable connections. FTTC connections may reach up to 70 Mbps while pure fibre solutions can reach up to 1 Gbps. The symmetrical nature of fibre allows subscribers to download and upload data and files at the same speed. Streaming media is rendered without any stutters or loss of quality, cloud applications run smoothly, and VoIP calls are crystal clear even on long distances.

Resistance to Electromagnetic Interferences: In cable installation, sometimes it’s unavoidable to meet interference running from industrial sources, i.e., heating, power substations, ventilating, etc. Fibre optic is a material that’s highly resistant to electromagnetic interference. Moreover, it’s a much more reliable source of web connection when it comes to signal transmissions because it uses light technology, not current.

Secure Transmission: Fibre is one of the best at providing a secure transmission platform. There’s currently no way to interrupt the flow of data as compared to internet services that make use of electromagnetic energy escaping from cable lines and other electron-based transmissions.

Exceptional Durability: Fibre optic is tougher, more durable and not as susceptible to damage, and therefore needs less downtime as there won’t be many repairs and maintenance needed. This brings more uptime for the subscribers. Fibre optic material can last up to 40 years while copper-based lines need updating once every 5 years in order to remain operational.

Future Proofing: The architectural structure behind FTTP is made to be scalable and customizable. This means that it can be improved and expanded easily and within short notice. This allows businesses to change their speed on demand.

FTTP Disadvantages

The most notable disadvantage of having FTTP is the cost of service. Businesses can opt for DSL connections of FTTC service lines but at the expense of reliability and speed. Having an internet connection that constantly goes offline during your operation hours is a problem that you shouldn’t have to deal with. The downtime also affects communication between employees and customers alike.

FTTP is difficult to install and requires a longer implementation period. Since fibre optic lines are buried ISPs will need to dig up public roads and sidewalks to bring you fibre connection. Installing the line straight to your business will take some time to complete, which can prove to be a hassle if you need internet connection right away. The upside is that you’ll get all the advantages- reliability, security, scalability and speed once everything is set up and ready to go.

Since FTTP is scalable you can choose your internet speed now and still have the option to upgrade to a higher speed later. You’ll just have to plan ahead. Amvia has fibre experts always available to give you free advice on how an FTTP connection can best meet your business needs. You can utilise the site’s FTTP Availability Checker to see if fibre is being offered in your area.

Read more:
FTTP: The advantages & disadvantages

Your website nabbing the top spot on a Google search is unquestionably the holy grail for online business presence, and achieving this position in organic search results promises to deliver a higher click through rate as well as leads of higher quality for your organisation.

Unfortunately, everybody who knows what they are doing are running the same race, and with more competitors than ever, chances of grabbing the top spot are growing slimmer. The good news is that even though everyone can be in with a chance, very few racers actually have even the basics in order. Once you’ve got a technically-viable website up and running, there are some top mistakes to avoid making at all costs in order to secure the success of your SEO campaign.

No sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file that processes data about a website’s most important parts to search engines – this data includes date of most recent updates and page ranking in terms of relevance. This data enables its spider to patrol a website more economically and efficiently. Creating a sitemap may not be a guaranteed recipe for success in the search engines, it is a quick and easy win.

Failed canonical domain check

If a domain fails a canonical check, it is likely that the homepage is being accessed through multiple URLs. For example, webdesignermag.co.uk/index.php, webdesignermag.co.uk/home.php and webdesignersmag.co.uk all load the homepage. Multiple URLs loading matching content is an issue, as inbound equity often gets distributed, ruining the site’s overall SEO value. To avoid this, it is important to put proper canonical tags in place or to have 301 redirects rerouting the duplicate pages to one main location.

Slow load times

Although the UK’s broadband speeds are getting better, Google declared back in 2010 that loading times were accounted for in their algorithm, and that slow loading speeds for desktop PCs and mobiles was still an ongoing issue. With Google’s PageSpeed insights tool, pages of any sort can be examined, and reasons for slow processing identified. Popular solutions to this problem include: eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS above – the – fold, leveraging browser caching, optimising images, enabling compression and minifying JavaScript, CSS and HTML (which means removing any unnecessary spaces.)

No header tags

Header tags are the skeleton of content, and guide the search engines in picking out the important parts of a website. Tags enable search engines to prioritise the content of a webpage and poor use of them can confuse the system. The way to solve this issue is to make certain that the main tag is unique and accurately relates to the topics of the site, including relevant keywords. Similarly, any subheadings should also be tagged where appropriate.

Missing image description

Search engines cannot decipher images, which makes it important to attach pertinent descriptive texts in the form of an Alt attribute to them. This enables the search engine to comprehend the image, and offers a great chance to make the page more keyword rich than it was. Being too vague with image descriptions is a classic mistake. Remember, a pair of blue trainers can be elaborated into blue and white limited edition Nike running shoes.

Poor metadata

Title tags are considered one of the top priorities for making onsite SEO successful, perhaps because it is the first thing users see on search engine results pages. It should be unique and to-the-point, a maximum of 70 characters, and keyword optimised to the content. Meta descriptions are another key solution, effectively there to tempt the user to click on the page in the form of ad copy. This should be very easy to do and edit on any reputable CMS system.

Keyword spamming

For any copywriter, achieving the fine balance of targeted keywords in website content is a challenge at the best of times. Too many keywords runs the risk of the page looking spammy, but too few may result in search engines not being sure what to rank you for. To overcome this issue, it is a good idea to use a wide range of targeted variations of the page’s keywords, but don’t do this to the extent of sacrificing good, readable content. Engage your readers first and the spiders will soon find you.

Duplicate content

One of the most prevalent mistakes in online content is duplicating pages. This often happens on larger sites or eCommerce sites that have many different product listings, and can have a detrimental effect if not handled properly. Duplication usually occurs when filters are applied to product listings or when several variations of a single product are listed. Once again, the solution is a canonical tg, which can redirect the duplicates back to the relevant main pages, which effectively rolls all of your SEO value into one page.

The way you name your links

Anchor text is the name given to clickable text links on your page. While being crawled, search engines use a site’s anchor text to verify the content and relevance of linked pages. Standard anchor text like ‘click here’, especially when linking to internal pages, is a missed opportunity for refined SEO. Again, use those relevant keywords that you want your page to be ranked by search engines for if you can, but remember that overdoing the keywords can easily tip the scales too far in the other direction, so keep an eye on your keyword balance.

About the author Matt Eldridge:

Matt is the owner and head web, design and marketing master of Melt Design. He has previously worked for Entrepreneurs Circle running Botti Creative and now aims to grow Melt Design into one of the most well respected design, web and marketing agencies in the UK. Find out more: https://www.meltdesign.co.uk/

Read more:
9 Mistakes to Avoid with Onsite SEO

When a new employee starts at your company, why not provide them with free SIM cards for work purposes. Here are five great apps that should be in the arsenal of every small business:

1. Slack

Slack users see 48.6% fewer internal emails and held 25.1% fewer meetings after installing and using the app, according to a company survey. You can download a basic version of the app for free, but if you want to invite guest users or host group calls, you’re going to need to upgrade, which will cost you either £5.25 or £9.75 depending on whether you consider yourself a power user.

2. Trello

If you want to be productive, download the Trello app and sign up now. Create cars that remind you to complete tasks, create lists and add other members of your team to your cards to track who’s doing what, when. It’s completely free and syncs to the web-based version in seconds. We can’t recommend it enough.

3. Tripit

Business travel is on the increase in the UK. Just look at the Eurostar as an example, which raised revenue sales by 15% in the first three months of 2017. Get all of your travel-related confirmations in one place: hotel, plane, train etc. Big organisations might be able to afford a travel manager, but SMEs are more likely to need to organise their own travel. With Tripit, see all of your confirmations in one list, which you can even share with others in your company, meaning that everybody is always in the loop.

4. Fuze

Fuze is a simple video conferencing app that enables quick visual conference calling. Meetings are always clearer and more productive when you can see the person you’re talking to, and Fuze gives you that in high definition fidelity.

5. SurveyMonkey

You might be using SurveyMonkey – or a similar surveying system – to help get to grips with your customers, but what about using it internally? Sending out quick e-surveys to your team is a great way of gauging interest levels, satisfaction and more in just a few clicks.

So there you have it – five great apps for your small business. If you’ve not downloaded these yet, they’re certainly worth your time.

Read more:
Five Apps for Small Businesses

Read more:
E-commerce tips: One web-portal oг multiple websites?

Targets of cybercrime, many of whom have had to spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to recover from data breaches and other cyber-attacks have long known that the consequences of cybercrime are just as stark as any other type of crime. And with some of the latest crackdowns on major botnets, perpetrators are learning it too.

Botnet blues

Many of the biggest and most devastating cyber-attacks come in the form of distributed denial of service attacks and accompanying data breaches. Distributed denial of service attacks, or DDoS attacks, are made possible by botnets.

As DDoS protection services provider Imperva Incapsula explains, a botnet is a network of internet connected devices, like computers, tablets and smartphones, that have been hijacked with malware which allows it to be controlled by the botnet owner from a remote location, generally without the device owner ever even knowing it.

Having control of or use of a botnet gives an attacker a tremendous amount of computing resources they can use for malicious purposes. In the case of a distributed denial of service attack, these resources are used to either flood a target website with a huge amount of malicious traffic, or overwhelm its network infrastructure. Whatever the strategy, the goal is to deny the services of the website to its users by either slowing down the website to the point that it is unusable, or taking it entirely offline.

Real-life consequences

Getting taken down by a DDoS attack does a real number on a website or business’s reputation, often causing a loss of trust or loyalty amongst users and customers and potentially leading to a loss of revenue. Distributed denial of service attacks have also been found to cause damage to hardware and software. And if that all isn’t enough, these attacks are commonly used as smoke screens for intrusions or data breaches that result in the theft of users’ personal information, financial information or intellectual property.

It has also been found that for a sizable organization, dealing with an unmitigated DDoS attack can cost an average of $40,000 per hour.

Turning up the heat on botnet bosses

For years it’s been highly unfair that untold thousands of organizations and individuals have been dealing with the consequences of botnet activity and DDoS attacks while the people behind this criminal activity have been seemingly getting away with it. But thanks to major advances in detection and cooperation between nations and law enforcement agencies, that’s all starting to change.

In October of 2015, the United States and United Kingdom worked together to bring charges against the Moldovan administrator of the Bugat/Dridex botnet, a botnet that had been behind the theft of banking information and other highly sensitive credentials. The Bugat botnet, which has been disabled due to the actions of law enforcement, had reportedly been linked to the theft of $10 million from 2011 to 2015. The administrator received a nine-count indictment.

Similarly, the FBI worked with Microsoft to put an end to Dorkbot, a family of malware worms largely spread through Facebook. It was shuttered in December of 2015. And following the arrest of more than 70 people in connection to a raid on cybercriminal forum Darkode last year, one hacker was recently sentenced to jail time for running a botnet and stealing Bitcoin.

Not all good news

Cybercriminals, unfortunately, are nothing if not resilient. After all, the Bugat botnet mentioned above was created to fill the void left when the Gameover ZeuS botnet was the subject of an international takedown in 2014. And while the Darkode forum has been shuttered, its successor is up and running.

Cybercrime and the efforts to stop it are constantly advancing right alongside each other. And while every indication is that cybercriminals are going to be facing more and more real life justice (not to mention prison sentences), botnets, distributed denial of service attacks and other malicious online activities aren’t going away anytime soon.

So let the FBI, the Department of Justice, Europol and other law enforcement agencies worry about taking down the big botnets and their administrators. For your part, invest in professional DDoS protection and other online security to keep from becoming a victim. Save the real life consequences of cybercrime for the cybercriminals.

Read more:
Fighting back against botnets: real life consequences for cybercrime

With no experience, there are multiple tools available out there that will allow you to create your own website without learning any code or stressing over what acronym means what (SSL, SSD, FTP, SSH…what do they all mean?)

So, if you’re an SME just starting out and looking to build your very own site, here’s a quick guide:

Make use of a website builder

A website builder is a ready made tool, that allows you to pay a fee and create a personalised website featuring your content on a pre created template. For those starting out they are a great option, although they are not as flexible as you might like them to be when it comes to customisation of design. A builder gives you the satisfaction of a plug and play site. If you can’t afford a developer it’s well worth it.

Or use a blogging platform

WordPress and Blogger allow you to create websites in the same way a website builder does, using a template, filling it with content and publishing pages and posts as and when needed. For more advanced templates you may have to pay a fee, but sometimes it is worth doing this to ensure your site looks professional and appealing. You can even add store elements if you buy into a professional business plan with these sites, that allow you to sell securely through your site.

Purchase a domain name

It’s so important to register your domain name before you even begin creating your website. You can find these on domain register sites, where you pay a fee and then own the domain for a year or a set period before renewing again later. It’s important you renew when needed and choose a domain that looks reputable (.co.uk and .com are preferred but if they are not available you could go for .net or .biz). You can take this domain with you, even if you move your website to another host, so it’s worth investing in.

Choose a website builder that hosts too

Web hosting is tricky business, there are servers to manage and security to install, but using a website builder allows you to skip this step as they cover these bases for you. This is definitely recommended, as it protects you from hackers and if you have a store on the site it ensures it is safe for visitors to buy through.

As an SME, building a website with no experience means leaning on the professionals and using every free tool to your advantage. Backtrack ten, even five, years ago and this would not have been possible but drop and drag builders are so common and affordable now everyone can have a great looking website without the stress of learning code!

Read more:
SME’s guide to building a website with NO experience

As we also know, first impressions are the most important and if your virtual door is ugly, uninviting and more complicated to enter than Fort Knox, you’ve got a real problem on your hands.

When it comes to web design, the key question you should ask yourself at all times when you’re piecing together your landing page is: will it convert visitors into customers? The sole reason for building a landing page is to draw people in and give them enough reasons to keep on clicking.

With this in mind, we’ve compiled some top tips on how to design a landing page that not only looks great, but has more pulling power than an industrial-sized magnet.

Start from the Bottom

“Elegant Themes – Multimedia” (CC BY 2.0) by  mazzwyn 

One of the major problems small businesses often have when it comes to web design is cost. According to the Mud Blog, the average cost of a freelance web designer in 2014/2015 was £200 per day and of those surveyed, 20.5% had an average project value of £2,000 while 15.3% cost between £5,000 and £10,000.

Essentially, when it comes to building a website, it’s going to cost and if you’re a fledging business then it can be tempting to DIY it. Fortunately, in recent years, it’s become markedly easier to create your own website thanks to drag-and-drop services.

For example, the landing page creator by Active Trail not only lets you create a page without any coding knowledge, but each template is built around designs that are proven to convert. Using this strategy is not only simple, but it’s also cost-effective as it gives you expert knowledge for a fraction of the cost.

Be Concise Yet Detailed

“Click here!” (CC BY 2.0) by  wiredcanvas 

It might seem like a contradiction of terms, but one of the best ways to convert visitors is to be as concise but detailed as possible. An example of how this is possible is by using a call-to-action (CTA) button in conjunction with a series of boxouts. This structure has the benefit of making the CTA as bold as possible while giving the page enough additional information to satisfy Google’s SEO rankings.

Indeed, by using a bold header and a highlighted button that says “click here” at the top of the landing page, a site can instantly capture people’s attention in the fewest words possible. However, while this is great for attention-grabbing, it doesn’t work so well for SEO purposes as it lacks the written content/information to make the page “valuable” in Google’s eyes.

Fortunately, you can get around this by combining images and detailed text inside boxouts. Placed at the bottom of the page (i.e. under the CTA button), these boxes are small enough to avoid detracting from the main message (i.e. “click here”), but bold enough to allow people to learn more about the site. Moreover, they should provide just enough SEO and information for search engines to crawl and, therefore, rank.

Do You Want to Join? Check!

“checked_tick” (CC BY 2.0) by  o.tacke 

Another sure-fire yet underrated way to convert visitors is the humble checkbox. While some web design gurus will say that this is just another unnecessary step that a customer won’t want to make, companies have found that the addition of one can improve conversion rates by 11%.

Placing a checkbox before a lengthy application form or survey essentially primes a user and pushes them into something that amounts to a subconscious contract. This small psychological trigger is often enough for them to feel committed and therefore follow through with whatever process you want them to do. The end result in this instance is more conversions and all it took was a simple little box.

Entering into the online arena as a small business can be a daunting task, especially if your website doesn’t generate sales as you’d want it to. Fortunately, there are multiple ways you can win customers and influence people. Whether that’s being direct about your message by designing a clear CTA or using a subtler tactic like the check boxes, converting more users is easy when you follow the steps we’ve outlined in this article.

Read more:
How to Convert Landing Page Visits: Three Steps to Success

The tech giant’s Apple Music service will distribute the series to its members in 100 countries worldwide. Apple sees the show as a natural vehicle to drive online activity for its streaming-music venture, reports Variety.

“Carpool Karaoke” segments, in which Corden drives around in a British iconic Range Rover car  with a musician or celebrity singing hit songs, has been a spur for sales and streaming activity for the songs featured in the segments — which made it a natural acquisition for Apple Music. The show sparked a bidding war among cable and subscription VOD outlets because of the segments have been such viral sensations for “Late Late Show,” which impressed by nabbing an Emmy nomination for talk-variety show in its first year of eligibility.

“We love music, and ‘Carpool Karaoke’ celebrates it in a fun and unique way that is a hit with audiences of all ages,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services. “It’s a perfect fit for Apple Music — bringing subscribers exclusive access to their favourite artists and celebrities who come along for the ride.”

The most recent instalment with first lady Michelle Obama and Missy Elliott has grabbed nearly 32 million views on YouTube since July 20. “Carpool” segments to date have generated more than 800 million views, according to CBS.

“We couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with Apple Music on this exciting new series of ‘Carpool Karaoke,’ ” said Winston. “The joy of ‘Carpool’ is both the intimacy it creates, while seeing the love our passengers have for music. Where better to showcase that than with Apple Music.”

Apple has licensed 16 episodes of the show, to be exec produced (but not hosted) by Corden and “Late Late Show” exec producer Ben Winston for the pair’s Fulwell 73 banner and CBS TV Studios. Scott Koondel, CBS’s chief content licensing officer, spearheaded the sale process and helped drive the initiative to adapt the segment as a regular series. Cue, Apple’s senior VP of Internet software and services, Jimmy Iovine and Robert Kondrk steered the deal for the company.

“We’re delighted to bring one of the biggest viral hits, ‘Carpool Karaoke,’ to Apple Music, where our new series will be available on this phenomenally popular subscription service,” said Koondel.

While centered around streaming music, Apple Music has been turning to original video content as an exclusive bonus for its 15 million-plus paying subscribers as it fights in the competitive segment against the likes of Spotify and Google Play.

Apple is still in the nascent stages of developing original TV-style content, and given that it’s still new to the process of traditional series licensing deals sealing the deal with CBS took nearly three months.

The tech giant is said to have greenlit a scripted series from Dr. Dre, co-founder of music company Beats, which Apple acquired for $3 billion.

Apple Music will release the “Carpool Karaoke” episodes on a weekly basis. Production is expected to begin soon with a premiere date to be announced. In becoming a regular series, “Carpool Karaoke” will emphasize a travelogue element with celebrities taking the host (who is still be cast) on a trip to places of personal significance to each guest.

Read more:
Ex British Salvation Army boy Corden snapped up by Apple Music

Especially when all you hear from your boss is “why aren’t we ranking on Google for ….…. “- you can fill in the blanks. However, there’s much, much more to SEO than just Google and you don’t have to go very far to find them.

The universe of search

Much like the universe, SEO contains a wealth of different things that ultimately work together to create this single entity. It’s huge, and a lot of the time all everyone talks about is ‘Google’ but have you thought about how visible your brand and where its potential market is with other search engines? 

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine (next to Google) with over 3 billion searches every month. That’s a lot of people looking for a lot of video content. The question to ask yourself is, how much of your target market are using YouTube and how people could be looking at your content on it? YouTube is often under-rated or overlooked. I think the reasons for this are (a) it takes too much effort and time to create a video and (b) it’s not somewhere people typically think about visibility.

Creating video content doesn’t have to be time consuming and the likelihood is your potential audience doesn’t want long videos anyway. There’s also a lot of different video content you could consider doing to take advantage of this search space such as explainer videos or  interactive video content.

Facebook search

The giant of a social platform has a search engine. And people can easily find your company on here (if you’re on there of course), this is another search engine to give you more visibility.

In fact all the social platforms have their own search engine. Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter all have a mechanism through which you can discover content based on a particular set of queries. Being visible within these search engines also means being visible to them.

Voice search

Voice activated searches really kicked off in 2015 with search engines getting much better at understanding and interpreting questions, language and dialect. Voice search has been growing, rapidly. According to a study by Google back in 2014 41% of adults used voice search. That was more than a year ago and I would suggest the figure is a lot higher now.

Voice search is changing how people potentially search for your products and services. It will get bigger and it will become more popular. It’s another channel to think about. Google has voice search, but so does Microsoft and Apple. In the future many more apps, websites and online services will likely have this too.

Location search

With the advent of mobile the way people search and where they search from has become much more diversified. Location based search is obviously key if you sell a localised product or service or have a physical location from which you trade. It’s another form of search, providing content and information to users beyond simply web pages.

Thinking about how localised search affects you is important. This doesn’t mean to say that you should be thinking like a corner shop. You should be thnking on a much wider scale. Local search is tied into other aspects of search too. Google for example, ties in their Google+ product to business information, local information, web and social. Bing has Places for Business as well as local search, both of which tie together.

Forums

If you sell a product or service that’s very niche or has a particular following it’s more than likely you can find that following on forums. These have their own search engines too. The types of searches here will invariably be different to those found on more standard search engines such as Google and Bing. None the less, it’s another channel of search where potential buyers could be making searches and trying to find information you could be providing gaining more brand visibility and more revenue as a result.

Think beyond Google

Search isn’t all about Google, There many more search engines out there and they could be gaining visibility for your company and your brand depending on where your niche is and who you’re targeting. Take the time to research and explore other search engines, you’ll be surprised what additional traffic you could gain.

Chris Pitt Head of Marketing, Vertical Leap

Read more:
SEO Doesn’t Just Mean Google

Achieving the perfect balance between work and play is something we all strive for, but few manage to attain anything like an ideal equilibrium between the two.

Amid the stress of work, household chores and raising children, there’s often little time left to pursue the things we want to do — be it going to the cinema, eating out or even travelling the world.

With the start of the New Year just weeks away, now’s the time when many people pledge their allegiance to a handful of New Year’s resolutions. But rather than sticking to a fad diet or promising to be less stressed when January comes around; we think the following the mobile apps could help you live a happy, healthy and generally more balanced life in 2016.

Trello

If you want to oversee your life with military precision, Trello lets you keep all aspects of life in check through the use of digital boards and cards. By assigning different tasks to individual boards, you can keep track of on-going projects from start-up to completion — perfect for the busy SME whose life is a veritable whirlwind of meetings, deadlines and events. 

AroundMe

Whether you spend a lot of time on the road or find it hard to think of things to do during moments of downtime; AroundMe lets you find nearby services and amenities at the touch of a button. Perfect for those that regularly find themselves in new, unfamiliar places on business; the app is great for finding places to eat, sights to see or even somewhere to nip to the loo.

Mint

Paying bills and managing your finances is without question one of the most time-consuming and troublesome of monthly errands; if only there was an app that could make it a little easier. Enter Mint, an intuitive money-management tool that lets you pay bills and monitor all of your accounts from one secure, remote location. 

Evernote 

Take life-organisation to a whole other level with the Evernote app. With a tagline like ‘The workspace for your life’s work’, this incredible app is full of carefully considered features that can help streamline those niggling daily tasks. It’s great for smaller things too, and has a handy list feature that’s ideal for grocery shopping. 

The Dry Cleaner App

Juggling a hectic work and social life is difficult enough, and that’s without accounting for those tedious household chores — like doing the laundry. Download The Dry Cleaner App, however, and you can find local laundry care services in your area at the touch of a button — so you can make that stack of dirty clobber someone else’s problem.

Waze

During the lifespan of the average commuter, they’ll spend around a year’s worth of time stuck in traffic — a truly depressing statistic. If you want to avoid wasting time in queues, download the Waze App and find an alternative route that’ll see you home safe and sound in a jiff.

Couch to 5K

Forget expensive gym memberships and exercise equipment; if you want to get fit, download the Couch to 5K app. The premise of this app is simple: through a strict exercise regime, you’ll be able to successfully run 5km in a finite amount of time. The great thing about the app is that the runs are fairly short, so you can fit them into your hectic daily schedule. 

BigOven

Packed with thousands of quick and easy recipes, BigOven is a useful app to have on those days when you need to eat but can’t think of anything to cook. No matter what your dietary requirements or budget, this comprehensive recipe and cookery app is sure to have some quick dishes to suit your taste buds.

Read more:
Mobile Apps for a Healthy Work Life Balance in 2016

As the dust settles following the Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness, now is the time customers start to complain.

New research reveals that almost three out of four customers that use social media to complain to a company get a response within 24 hours. This compares with just 40 per cent of those who choose to complain via more traditional methods like email or letter. If you need your complaint resolved super quick, 39 per cent of social media ‘moaners’ get a response within an hour, compared to 19 per cent of those using the ‘official route’.

Social shaming is popular among the under 25s with over a third claiming they use social media to lodge complaints with companies if they are unhappy – for 16 per cent of these it’s their first port of call.

For those that use social media to raise a grievance, 57 per cent quite rightly claim it’s the quickest way to get a response. A further 40 per cent say it’s cheaper and quicker than calling customer services and 35 per cent do not think companies make it easy to complain through other channels. One in four do not have time to write letters of complaint and 19 per cent of social media ‘moaners’ think it’s a great way to jump the complaints queue.

The most popular channel for complaints is Facebook with almost one in five using this channel. Just one in ten take to Twitter; maybe 140 characters just isn’t enough complaint space. When it comes to the frequency of complaints, 24 per cent have complained on social media up to five times in the past 12 months.

Hannah Maundrell, Editor in Chief of money.co.uk comments; “Complaining over social media seems to be the quickest way to get your problem sorted. Wrong doings are exposed and companies want to be seen fixing them fast. This isn’t right: all complaints should be treated equal and have the same amount of man power behind them no matter how they’re lodged. Organisations really need to address their customer service priorities and create a level playing field for all customers. It’s not fair that people not using social media are losing out.

“You can’t blame anyone for social shaming, understandably people just want their issue sorted as quickly as possible. If you need help quickly or haven’t had any joy calling or writing it’s definitely worth a try. Companies clearly need to up their game if they don’t want frustrated customers to shout about their problems publically.”

Read more:
One hour response for social media ‘moaners’

Historically, we have had to add physical tools or boxes to get more connected whether it’s manually installing a car phone or plugging in a Tom Tom. But the beginning of connected cars has seen Bluetooth and GPS physically installed into our cars and this is just the beginning.

The rise of black box insurance

The little black box is another add-on that has seen popularity over the last few years. Also known as a telematics box, it is simply the size of a smart phone which you install onto your dashboard and using GPS and satellites, it will measure your mileage, speed, braking and steering.

This data is shared in real-time with your insurer who may potentially lower your insurance premium because they can see you are doing less mileage or being a safer driver.

There is also a theory that just having the black box installed influences driver behaviour. The idea of almost having your insurer in the passenger’s seat can make your more conscious about your driving and therefore drive more responsibly.

How Connected Cars will impact car insurance premiums

A report last year by Call Wiser highlighted the trend in black box insurance has helped their customers save around £200 off their annual car insurance premiums.

But again, this is just the beginning as major car manufacturers are looking to have telematics automatically installed into the vehicle, and hence become more ‘connected.’

The data can then be shared straight to a partner insurance company or encourage the dealership to provide their own insurance, potentially opening up a huge revenue stream for the car company.

Theoretically, this sharing of real-time data could provide the most accurate car insurance quotes possible – whereby drivers will literally only pay for their mileage and get a more accurate quote based on their steering and braking.

This offers far more accuracy than the current way of assessing car insurance premiums which is largely based on estimated mileage, purpose of driving, type of vehicle and the assumptions of your driving due to your age, occupation, marital status and residency. But this can be flawed as two drivers of the same age, living in the same area and the same vehicle can be very different drivers on the road.

Furthermore, the telematics technology in every car could also shed some light on future claims and accidents. By analysis the speed and braking of two cars, you could potentially tell who was really at fault for an accident and to what degree – thereby changing the way we pay for claims.

Using Ecall to make your car connected

The EU has stated that from October 2015, all cars must be fitted with tracking device, Ecall. This technology can help locate lost vehicles like in the event of an accident or if airbags are deployed, it will automatically send a text message to emergency services with the location and vehicle ID number.

So as cars become more connected, we can expect not just an evolution in the car insurance industry but also a way to save lives.

Read more:
Connected Cars – Is this the future of car insurance?

Ecommerce is the fastest growing business in Europe. According to data, this industry brought in £132.05 billion in UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Italy, Poland and Spain in 2014.

The desired action could differ depending on your objectives. Here we talk about the desired action being to get your visitors to buy your products or services on your ecommerce website. There is a lot of competition in the ecommerce market; with customers becoming meticulous about the products and services they want. If your business is not careful, you might end up losing customers to your competitors.

In this article, we will look at how you can optimise your ecommerce website to cater to your clients’ needs and ensure you are competitive enough to take advantage of this lucrative industry. We will provide you with a few tips on how your business can turn this online traffic to sales.

Basic information

Your ecommerce site must have all the basic information such as your address, name of your business, products or services you offer and your contact information. Your potential clients have to be able to find this information with ease on your website.

Use “my” instead of “your”

This might seem innocuous, but your wording plays a pivotal role in how your potential clients think. “Click to view the delivery price of my product” will have a bigger impact than “click to view the delivery of your product”. The word “my” emphasises on ownership. A potential client will feel a sense of owning the product before they buy it. People are more likely to select the product when they feel the sense of ownership.

If the product is free, highlight it to your customers

Customers usually do not spend a lot of time on a single ecommerce website. It is crucial to make sure when you have a free offer, your customers will see it. Words like “100% free”, “get started for free”, and “own it for free” will go a long way to boosting your sales.

Insist to your clients on privacy

Your business has to insist on its website that any information a client gives is confidential. This gives customers peace of mind knowing that their information is safe with you.

Use orange buttons

However strange this might seem, customers respond to colour orange. Experts at CNN credit the popularity of colour orange to online stores such as eBay and Amazon. Many people seem to respond to orange colour on buttons. Your business should use such buttons to boost its sales.

Placement of content

Most of your customers read from left to right. It is important to make sure when your client is going through your webpage, they see appropriate information. Your ecommerce website design should have images and videos on the left, and the call to action on the right. This tweak could have a huge impact on your business sales.

Long videos are unwanted

Videos are a very good tool as they visualise to your clients what your product or service is about. However, just as how videos can be used to attract customers, it can also be a deterrent to your ecommerce sales. If you have to use a video, make sure it is short enough. Customers tend to get bored after 90 seconds and if you have not made it clear by then, you may lose them.

Build trust with your clients

Customers will feel comfortable buying your product or service from your ecommerce site if they trust your business. One way to build this trust and credibility is by including genuine customer testimonials on your website. Make sure you include how the product or service you offer benefited this customer.

Another method of enhancing credibility is including your experience or expertise in the industry your business is involved. This will make your client confident that you have what it takes to solve their problem or cater to their needs.

Your headline should include benefits

Often, the first thing your ecommerce site visitors see is the headline. If it does not impress them, chances are your visitors will just shift to another site. Therefore, it is important that your headline grabs their attention with all the necessary information.

A good headline will have the problem your potential client is facing, and show how the product or service being offered is the solution. A client has to know what the product is and what it does for them.

Use images

If you are selling tangible products on your ecommerce site, you should use images. They will make the product seem tangible and your clients can envision themselves using it. If you offer a service that cannot be reduced to a picture, a video can be used as an alternative.

Format and change appearance of your business website

Most visitors will not read every word on your website. Usually, the human eye will scan as you scroll down the page, reading words or phrases that stand out. It is imperative for your business to make sure “scanners” will get the most from your website. You can do this by changing the format and appearance. You can catch the attention of scanners by doing the following:

• ine You can use bold and italics to emphasise the most important benefits of your service or product.
• for for For the paragraphs not to look like a block of uniformly formatted text, you should vary their lengths.
• use use Use sub-headings to emphasise your key message. This will tempt the scanner to look at the bottom paragraphs
• use Use bullet lists (like this) to stress on key points or benefits.

Follow up strategy

Depending on the product or service you offer, customers may not necessarily buy from you the first time they visit your website. It may take several contacts between your business and consumers before they eventually buy. It is crucial to set up automated email (auto responders) for your subscribers.

In the follow up emails, state your offer to new subscribers, letting them know the benefits of what you sell. Digital marketing experts recommend at least a month’s worth of emails, sent every three to five days. This strategy could also be used on your existing customers. It will allow you to build relationships and give you the opportunity to sell backend products.

In summary, ecommerce is a thriving business with huge revenues all across Europe and globally. It is very important for your business to optimise its website in order to improve the ecommerce sales. This article has provided a lot of tips that could be useful in turning your online traffic to sales.

As technology becomes available in almost every household in the world, your business has to position itself, ahead of your competitors, as the number one ecommerce site for products or services in your industry.

Test each one of the tips we have given you and see how it might work for your website in relation to improving sales. Lastly, ecommerce sales in Europe are expected to grow by 18.2% in 2015. Optimising your website will enable your business to be part of this growth.

Read more:
Boosting ecommerce sales

Plenty of people around the UK are working on side projects when they get home from work. Those extra hours in the evening or weekends allow you to develop new skills, work on something you are truly passionate about and above all generate extra income.

Some people will earn extra money by selling things on Ebay or at a car boot sale on the weekends – but for those more entrepreneurial types, setting up an online business in your spare time is a fantastic opportunity.

It has never been easier to set up an online side project and if it really takes off, you could be one of the people that have ended up leaving their jobs to pursue their online business full-time.

Here are the ultimate tips to setting up your own online business on the side.

What to sell

Ideally you want to sell something that you are passionate about and will allow you to gain traction and income when you can only spend a few hours a week on it.

Some of the best questions to ask are:

Is there a gap in the market?

Is there anyone else selling what I’m selling?

Is the market saturated or is there room for one more?

Are there high barriers to entry?

Is there a popular trend I can capitalise on?

Some good examples of online side projects include ways to sell old jewellery, customised bags, fashion blogging, sports writing, property in your area, comparing financial products such as car insurance, credit cards and payday loans. These are the types of things that have high-conversion rates and will get people clicking.

When you consider the barriers to entry, you will have to consider the investment of buying stock, creating partnerships or needing a license.

Creating the website

There are several cheap website platforms which allow you to create a functional website.

Wix.com is very easy to use if you are looking to set up a cheap and brochure looking website.

However, for something a little more sophisticated, it would be better to use WordPress to create quality designs and a more efficient ecommerce setup. You can always speak to a professional designer to help you make the most of a WordPress site.

Buy a clever domain name

A good domain name will cost around £10 a year and it is best to pick a name which is catchy or does exactly what it says on the tin.

Picking a specific keyword in the domain will allow the page to rank better on Google and also tell your potential customers exactly what you do.

Advertising your business

Once your site is up and running, you need to think about how you are going to advertise it and get customers on board.

Posting on your social media pages is the most obvious and free way to gain some traffic. If you are willing to spend a bit more, you can use Facebook advertising or Google Adwords to target specific keywords or locations – so you can reach out to your audience.

Other options include practicing search engine optimisation by trying to rank on Google’s organic searches, however this can take a number of months for your website to show up.

Long term plan

Once you have customers on board, you can start thinking about the long-term plan for your side project website. Do you want to grow it? Do you want to sell out? Do you want leave your job to work on it full-time? The possibilities are endless …

Read more:
How to create your own online side project

It might surprise you to know that this statistic has shifted from 48 per cent in 2010 to 84 per cent in 2015. The conclusion being that Cloud is certainly helping organisations meet their business objectives, with a significant proportion of Cloud adopters managing to reduce their capital expenditure, improve the reliability of their IT and reduce the risk of data loss.

What’s even more telling and thought provoking than the overall cloud adoption rate, however, is that the speed of cloud adoption is also increasing at a much faster rate than many in the hi-tech industry anticipated.  That the migration to cloud would be vast and all-encompassing has long been accepted as inevitable, but the pace of this adoption has still been a bit of an open question.

That question, it seems, has now been answered.

According to a recently published report by Dell’Oro Group, a research group focused on telecommunications, networks, and data centre IT industries, starting in 2015, cloud data centres will emerge as the sole growth driver for server shipments, as unit shipments into enterprise data centres decline. Server unit shipments are expected to continue to grow overall during the forecast period.

“Our recent interviews with end-users, component vendors and system integrators, indicate that Cloud adoption is occurring faster than industry expectations,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Director at Dell’Oro Group. “The substantial increase in Cloud uptake stems from both a declining scepticism of the Cloud among enterprise accounts, and the willingness of Cloud vendors to hear their customers’ concerns, mainly related to security and resiliency, and to provide platforms to meet their needs. We currently expect Cloud servers to reach 50 percent of total server shipments by 2017; a year earlier than previously projected,” stated Boujelbene.

Dell’Oro Group’s findings are being corroborated by other research from various organisations across the industry.

SteelBrick, a Configure, Price, Quote, (CPQ) solution provider, says that 72 per cent of high tech companies reported an increase in the average volume of sales quotes year-over-year from last year. “Our new barometer for the high-tech economy shows that sales of enterprise technology are growing at a robust clip as cloud and mobile adoption accelerate,” said Godard Abel, CEO of SteelBrick.

So as the speed of cloud adoption quickens, undoubtedly there will continue to be questions and concerns about how to successfully migrate to a cloud platform. There will be questions surrounding possible technology barriers, seeding of data, pricing and operational concerns.  Concerns around visibility of costs, how best to manage SLAs and so on. 

As more and more organisations contemplate the risks versus benefits of cloud migration, it is important to keep in mind that cloud migrations are not an all-or-nothing proposition. Organisations do not have to go “all in” with cloud migrations. In most cases, it makes sense to move certain services to the cloud while continuing to operate others on-premises, or to move in a staged way.  At iland we have over 20 years of knowledge and experience of hosting the workloads of our customers, seamlessly migrating organisations to the cloud in order to reap the many widely talked about advantages.  So as adoption of cloud speeds up, you need to make sure that your company doesn’t get left behind.   Remember 84 per cent of UK companies are now using cloud and that migration need not be the headache you were anticipating.

Written by Jennifer Brenner, Senior Vice President Marketing, iland

Read more:
The speed of cloud adoption is accelerating

Developed by cybercriminals intent on disrupting, damaging or disabling computer systems and networks; malware has augmented beyond recognition in recent years, and is now capable of infiltrating some of the world’s largest organisations.

But large organisations aren’t the only group vulnerable to malware cyber attacks. Recognising the prevalent IT security failings among smaller businesses, cybercriminals regularly target SMEs in a bid to reap sensitive corporate data and information — a tactic which often instigates loss of revenue and massive privacy theft among management and employees.

In order to comprehend the sizeable security threat malware poses to your organisation, it’s necessary to understand just how the malicious software is able to enter your corporate network – only then can businesses implement the relevant security provision required to eliminate incoming threats before they cause internal issues.

What is Malware?
As touched on above, malware is a type of malicious software cybercriminals use to infiltrate computer systems and networks — primarily with the aim to procure sensitive information or, to a lesser degree, disrupt day-to-day operations. Malware takes many forms, and most computer users will be familiar with some types of the software (specifically viruses, spyware, trojans and bots) — not to mention the damage they can cause.

Whilst a working knowledge of malware is advantageous from a business perspective, it’s vital that organisations employ an experienced IT security practitioner whose expertise extend to malware’s various sub-types and categories. After all, malware is merely an umbrella term for an expansive subset of malicious programmes — each demonstrating its own behaviours, targets and unique features.

What Makes an Organisation Vulnerable to Malware?
Striking the perfect balance between enhancing the customer experience and maintaining web security is a problem organisations face on a daily basis. As companies look to integrate emerging technologies such as mobile apps and social into their business model, the threat of malware infection is subsequently elevated — making the risk of a security hack the by-product of progress.

That said there are several pitfalls some organisations seemingly fail to recognise in the security of their IT infrastructure. IT security experts, AVR, explain some of these typical pitfalls: “Disparities in website code, unsecure cloud connections, and failing to install the latest software updates are just a handful of the technical issues capable of impacting network security. For businesses, each of these discrepancies can significantly increase the risk of inadvertently hosting malware on the company site — putting both the organisation and its customers at risk.”

How Easily Can Organisations Become Infected?
Given the dynamic, fluid nature of web content, new malware infiltration points continuously emerge across the network, making it very difficult to track areas of vulnerability. This makes it extremely easy for sites to be infected with malware, particularly when the cyber attack is carried out via PHP, HTML or JavaScript infiltration.

To make the problem worse, in recent years, ‘packaged’ attack software kits called command-and-control toolkits have emerged — granting prospective hackers a powerful new tool in the effective infiltration of a corporate network. These exploitative malware packages allow hackers to develop and deploy malicious software at a much faster rate — making it nigh-on impossible for an organisation to recover from a sustained cyber assault.

Read more:
Why malware is a big threat to your organisation

This volume of data held is good thing in a number of ways – for example it has never been easier to shop online or to quickly find a customer’s details. But, as with everything, there are a number of drawbacks.

A key risk is that if data that an organisation holds, whether about customers, suppliers or even their own staff, falls into the wrong hands it can have some very serious consequences. For example a data breach of this kind will not only damage an organisation’s reputation and standing, but it is also going to be very expensive too.

What’s more, the costs are rising year by year. According to figures included in research by the Ponemon Insititute in 2011 the average cost to an organisation for a data breach was £1.75 million but by 2013 this figure had risen by 15 per cent to £2.04 million. And while the most serious data breaches tend to hit large organisations, smaller businesses can be victims too – with possibly even greater consequences as they may not be as well equipped to deal with the incident.

The best cure – prevention
That’s why it’s absolutely vital that every organisation is aware of the risks and already has plans and policies in place long before any incident occurs. The last thing any business wants to have to do is create them after the breach has taken place.

Again, it may be one thing for large organisations to be able to create dedicated teams with responsibility for data security but the situation will be very different for a small to medium sized enterprise. Nevertheless, precautions can be taken and plans can be made.

One of the first, and most critical, steps is to educate employees both about the importance of keeping data safe and the ways in which breaches can occur. This can be done via regular employee training sessions, and can be built upon by a periodic risk assessment. Doing this allows you to analyse potential security holes as your business develops, allowing you to be proactive rather than reactive to potential digital security risks.

If you are a small to medium organisation without your own dedicated security team it is recommended to hire an external digital consultant for your risk assessment. Doing this allows you to utilise the most modern practices, as well as identify flaws that we often become blind too when using systems constantly.

If many of your staff use laptops or mobile devices to access data, it is also recommended that you provide specific training sessions on how to deal with data security when accessing data and sending emails from unsecured or remote servers.

Secondly, it’s a wise move to limit the amount of data you hold about third parties to as little as possible and to limit access to data to staff who really do need it. Sometimes this cannot be helped depending on the nature of your business, however if your SME is reliant on using large amount of client data across a variety of staff it is recommend to try and compartmentalise your data into folders with separate access logins.

This ensures that if there is a data breach in one section of your company there is a smaller probability that it can affect all of your client data. Some companies have taken this further and created a variety of virtual or real servers and created a clearly defined access structure for each.

Thirdly, it’s never a good idea to just assume that your standard encryption procedures will keep data secure. Many people falsely believe that if a standard encryption procedure is broken you are automatically notified and able to attempt to stop the breach.

However online criminals are becoming ever more sophisticated and often we won’t know about a breach until it is way too late, with some criminals simply harvesting data undetected for months until they get the data they desire.

A prolonged data breach is worst case scenery for your company. The only way to stay a step ahead is to always ensure that your security software is the most up to date there is. This isn’t just anti-virus, but all forms of software that help create a line of defence from your server room all the way through to your staff PC’s. It is also important to clearly define with all external data consultants and security firms your rules and standards prior to work being done. This allows you to build a data policy from the ground up.

Plan B – dealing with the breach
Of course, even the most prepared organisation can be hit by a data breach and if it happens to you, the way you deal with the situation is critical.

Ironically, being open about data being accidentally exposed is vital and there is one key group who need to be kept informed. These are the individuals or organisations whose details have been disclosed. It is important that all affected parties are satisfied with the handling of the breach due to the fact that as there is a confidentiality agreement regarding your holding of personal data, you are technically in breach of confidentiality and as such this can lead to lengthy and costly contract disputes. This has a tendency to compound the issue between the business cost and the bad publicity.

What’s more, you should give as much information as possible and be as open as you can be about the possible consequences for them of their data being released in this way.

This may seem like you are opening yourself up to scrutiny, however if people are aware of the data being taken it becomes easier to create new ways of storing it. Such as keeping names, dates and prices on separate worksheets that can all be easily collated when necessary. If you work with firms to develop a way of storing their data that is hard to decipher if stolen, you run less risk of any serious losses financial or otherwise for you or the client.

It is also critical that you discover just how the breach occurred and take positive and effective steps to prevent it from ever happening again. The best way to do this is through an objective and neutral party, and certainly a different person to one that undertakes your period risk assessment.

A neutral party will allow you to develop a clear and credible picture of what went wrong without worrying about damaging personal relationships if human error is at fault, or about their own career if a flaw is revealed that should have been identified sooner.

Do all these things, and do them promptly, and you’ll help to minimize the consequences for your company. And, although it’s going to cost you money and possibly tarnish your reputation in the short term, the way you do behave will be a key factor in just how quickly you manage to put the problems behind you.

Image: Data breach by Shutterstock

Read more:
Dealing with a Data Breach

Social Media Recruitment—what’s not to like?

When discussing social media recruitment, the questions I am asked most frequently are “what is in it for me?” and “what do I stand to gain from sourcing talent using social media platforms, as opposed to traditional recruitment methods?”

There are a multitude of answers. Firstly, social recruitment saves money. Job boards and agencies drain recruitment budgets fast, whereas building referral programmes that drive applications for vacancies on social media have much lower costs associated with it.

Recruiting through social media also helps you build and sustain a strong employer brand, as the amplification created through these channels provides a clear snapshot of what your business stands for, outlines its culture and enhances its ability to attract and retain star performers.

Social recruitment does not just help you find talent, it helps you find digitally savvy talent faster.

Increasing numbers of candidates who are interested in your company and possess the skills you are looking for already use social media for networking and job searching.

Many of the candidates you need to develop and grow your business are ‘millennials’—a group for whom communicating through social media platforms is second nature. They are digital natives, having grown up with the entire internet at their fingertips. To engage with these potential employees you must connect with them on the platforms they frequent and direct interested individuals through your ‘talent pipeline’ into the application and hiring process.

However, in order to get the best out of using social media for recruitment, it is essential to have a plan in place. Below are my top tips for developing an effective social media recruitment strategy:

Get connected

When planning your recruitment strategy, deciding on which social media platforms to use is easier said than done. Whilst each platform has its own merits, Jobvite’s research speaks pretty clearly in favour of the major platforms: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

67 per cent of active job seekers are using Facebook in their job search, so it is worth setting up a company career page, separate from your corporate page, with a focus on showcasing company culture and activities. You want to make it easy for interested candidates to spot job opportunities and connect to your online application straight from Facebook. It is also important to set up dedicated career pages on Twitter and LinkedIn, as this will allow potential employees to find your career-related news quickly and easily.

Follow and be followed

You want candidates to connect with you on social media, but you also need to connect with others. Once you have set up accounts on the Big Three networks, you can import email contacts extremely easily. Generally speaking, the more you follow or connect with people, the more people will follow or connect with you in return.

When you are looking for people to connect with, be sure to get your existing employees to follow you. Employee referrals are gold to recruiters and, when you connect with your colleagues, you gain the power of their connections in return!

Enagage with your audience

There is little point in accumulating followers on social media if you do not have anything to say. It is important you know what, where and when to post. The easiest way to organise this is to set up an editorial calendar and share with your connections a few months in advance.

Posts should be targeted to generate interest and engage your followers. These will likely include items like links to company blog posts, industry news, or anything that promotes the values and message of your company.

It is important to strike a balance between engaging with your followers and saturating the attention span of your connections, so think carefully about the frequency of your posts. Automated tools such as Hootsuite and SproutSocial allow you to schedule posts for specific times, as well as providing metrics on people’s engagement with your posts.

Readying relationships

The problem many companies have with social recruitment is figuring out the disconnect between advertising alongside directing engaged and interested followers into your recruitment ‘funnel’. Candidate relationship management tools can bridge this gap. These platforms make it easy to communicate with your talent pool and feed candidates into your application process.

You also want to ensure a smooth transition between social network interactions on mobile devices and your application process. Look for tools that can help you create compelling mobile career sites that feed into your recruitment system.

The world is a workforce

Finally, and most importantly, it is essential to connect with your employees on social media.

Your workforce is the most effective team of brand advocates you have, and the beauty of social media is the ability to exponentially connect with the networks of all your contacts. If you are limited to engaging with your own network, you are likely to reach a few thousand contacts at the most. However, involving your employees in the process broadens your reach to include all their second and third degree connections, and your audience can increase to millions.

Your employees are people who you have already vetted and whose friends are more likely to be of a similar personality, work ethic, and skill level, so it’s not surprising that employee referrals are the top source of new hires! Be sure to encourage your company’s employees to consistently like and share what you post, and integrate incentives for doing so, in order to make this a win-win situation.

It’s essential that you make the referral process as quick and easy as possible, as people are far less likely to help you with your recruitment endeavor if the process is complicated and time consuming for them.

The success of a social media recruitment strategy hinges on its ability to make the process simple. Now is a good time to investigate the tools and technology that will facilitate your social recruitment strategy. Look for tools that help you measure the success of your referral program and tie prospects and applicants back to their social network sources. Alongside this, do not forget the employees who brought them to you.

With these five steps and the help of the right technology, you can become a winning social media recruiter, attracting the best and brightest talent for your business—so why not start today?

Matt Singer, VP of International at Jobvite

Read more:
Taking the talent war social-five fundamentals of social media recruitment

As with any industry there are misconceptions of those within it that are accurate and incorrect – here are five of the most typical examples of the latter alongside the real stories for each.

1) Any decent Web Developer worth his salt will be able to get your product ranking #1 on Google. 

Arguably the most fantastical opinion on the list, and totally illogical unless one is willing to throw big money at the project – and even then nothing is set in stone or screen.

The algorithms that the search engine giant uses to order its rankings are a closely guarded secret, and of course Google likes to keep us all on our toes by moving the goalposts every 18 months or so – Sky News reports on new changes that could punish non mobile-friendly websites, creating a scenario of ‘Mobilegeddon’.

Yes, SEO experts can tell you how to give your site a better chance of gaining traction by creating a clear optimised structure with good links, influence, and content, determining the keywords for which your audience may be searching.

A developer can help you give yourself the best chance of gaining traffic, but remember that any competitor with intelligence will attempt many of the same tactics you will, simply because they know as much about Google as you do – and may be working just as hard.

2) Being a web developer is easy. Working 9 to 5 sounds great to me! 

The best Web Developers are usually wearing oversized headphones and working on a Macbook Pro at 2pm, sipping languidly on a café latte in a downtown Starbucks, right?

Sometimes. And that coffee will really help when a website project collapses at 3am and the business owner frantically calls up in a state of terror for technical support. Or when a long-term project is hitting roadblocks as deadline approaches for a multi-million pound company’s new site.

Every company has pressure points, and in the 21^st century the web developer is often at the hotspot. It’s challenging, it’s exciting, and it’s interesting, but it’s certainly not easy – to find out about some of the exciting IT roles that companies such as comparethemarket.com offer, click here.

3) Web Development is easy! If I can build a website using Wix in an afternoon, then why do I need pay someone else? 

Wix.com, 1and1.co.uk and its contemporaries have given companies or individuals the chance to build their own showcase of work, create an online presence, and harness other vital possibilities of 21^st century e-commerce.

But there’s a tipping point, and one which is obvious; if it were as simple as subscribing for a few pounds a month to a host, with five minutes of tinkering every day, then every company would be eschewing spending hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to build its websites and just spend a few quid.

4) Everybody knows you need to go to university to learn how to code and become a Web Developer. Even then, only the best developers can actually find a job. 

Don’t misinterpret point three – it is perfectly possible to create a coherent, logical and attractive website without the help of outsiders, and university degrees in web development or design will undoubtedly open doors.

It will take time to study from home, or night classes, but the interconnected world of the internet gives you the classes, online courses and feedback to make your own mark within it. If you can prove yourself and pick up the certificates, as well as enough references and inertia to gain a reputation, a lack of degree need not be a deal breaker.

5) All Web Developers are just natural designers – it comes with the territory. 

Just as all house builders are great artists, right? And let us not forget that all

journalists have fantastic shorthand and page layout skills, and all bakers are excellent cake decorators, and so on.

Designing is art, storytelling, problem solving and creativity. Having an eye for what works on a page, having the nuts and bolts ability to build it, and having the bravery and ingenuity to take the process further to create jaw droppers such as these, are three very different skills.

Read more:
Five myths about web developers

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Internet-only stores to overtake retail giants’ online sales this year

Alan Grogan, chief analytics officer of the customer services group at RBS, even suggested developing a cloud service specifically for financial services organisations, despite the financial industry being criticized for lagging behind other industries in technology adoption.

Financial firms need the capability to restore highly sensitive information in a secure infrastructure and recover key systems and data within predefined recovery time objectives — a need cloud technology can fulfil.

But while most financial organisations have adopted some form of cloud strategy, a fraction of firms have steered clear of the cloud. According to the Cloud Security Alliance 2015 Cloud Survey Report, as many as 19 per cent of companies whose customers typically do not interact with banks electronically have a strict no-cloud policy, and 82 per cent of midsized organisations have no cloud strategy in place. What exactly is keeping financial firms from integrating cloud-based solutions into their businesses? The following myths could be to blame.

MYTH: The cloud is insecure

Security concerns are one of the top reasons financial organisations are hesitant to adopt cloud-based solutions for their businesses. In the Cloud Security Alliance survey, 60 per cent of respondents ranked data confidentiality as their highest cloud adoption security concern. Businesses view hacker attacks, data loss and identity theft as a real threat, and it doesn’t help that the UK has been named Europe’s worst country for data breaches.

To ascertain whether the cloud infrastructure is secure enough to handle highly sensitive information, it is crucial to first understand the differences between private and public clouds. Whereas public cloud models store data in a multitenant environment in which customers share the same infrastructure, the private cloud allows businesses to back up their data and entire systems configurations in an environment restricted to a specific community. The perception of insecurity is typically associated with the public cloud model.

To mitigate the risk of security breaches in the public cloud, financial firms can use a hosted private cloud (e.g. BlackCloud) that maintains strict security controls such as data encryption in transit and at rest. For additional control, firms can store critical data in an on-site managed platform (e.g. BlackVault) that integrates with the cloud.

MYTH: It’s the IT department’s decision to adopt cloud technology

It’s a common misconception that it’s solely the IT department’s responsibility to make the decision to adopt cloud technology. However, research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services shows that cloud leaders, or companies that have generated new business opportunities through a mature approach to the cloud, don’t leave cloud decisions entirely up to IT. While cloud leaders are likely to have a CIO leading cloud initiatives, leaders from other parts of the business partner with IT in selecting and deploying services.

In the same way, for a cloud implementation to be successful in a financial organisation, executive management needs to be involved in the decision to introduce cloud backup and recovery to the workplace. Not only will the IT and executive management teams be able to work together to identify a solution that benefits the entire organisation, but employees are also more likely to receive thorough training on using the cloud technology if the initiative is supported by the top of command as well as the IT department.

MYTH: Transitioning to the cloud is too complex

Some financial firms believe transitioning their IT infrastructure to a cloud environment will be too time-consuming and could lead to downtime or data loss during the transition. There is some truth to this myth in some cases. For example, if a small firm’s limited IT team attempted the transition while managing their day-to-day tasks, the project can become more than a single firm can handle.

But implementing a cloud service doesn’t have to be cumbersome and unmanageable. If complexity is a concern, an IT managed services provider can help with project planning, implementation, maintenance and testing to ease the burden on internal IT staff.

Additionally, Harvard Business Review Analytics Services points out that cloud leaders with a cohesive cloud strategy that’s supported across the business have been able to reduce project implementation time and complexity.

With a better understanding of the myths associated with cloud-based solutions, financial firms can challenge what they think they know about cloud technology and realise that the cloud can become an integral part of their ability to meet their customers’ expectations.

Brandon Tanner is a successful entrepreneur with a technology background that spans software, hardware and service solutions for financial institutions and other regulated industries.

Read more:
Three common cloud myths that scare financial firms away

This is likely to mean that sites that are not mobile-friendly may suffer the consequences if they want to rank well in all searches. No-one really knows what Google plans to do exactly, but with many businesses relying on having an online presence it is worth taking note of the changes.

This does not apply to apps which are specifically designed for mobile phones and often have special features.

In principle most websites can be viewed on your pc, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. However not all websites adapt well to all three. Google knows that more and more people are now browsing using mobile devices so they want to encourage all website owners to make the necessary upgrades.

Many small business owners may have a website that is a few years old but is working perfectly, so they may not know if it is important to ensure that their site is mobile friendly or responsive. Basically mobile and desktop sites will be ranked separately, so in order to do well in both you will need to be optimised.

If you are a small business with a website how can you tell if your site is already mobile-friendly and do you need to worry if it is not?

According to iProperty Front End Web Developer Debbie O´Brien it depends on a number of factors. “If your site is not mobile friendly it doesn´t mean that it will disappear from normal Google searches but may not be as highly ranked in mobile searches.
The most important thing to consider is whether or not your own customer base is likely to use your site with a smartphone. If they are, you should probably consider optimising your site sooner rather than later.”

You can tell if your website is responsive or mobile friendly by using the pinch test. That means that if you view your website on a smart phone or tablet and you have to pinch to see the page, you are not optimised for mobile.

To test if your website will past the test you can go to: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Image: Twin Design / Shutterstock.com

Read more:
Will your business survive Google’s re-ranking day on 21st April?

This marriage of marketing and advertising technologies empowers marketers to create more measureable and engaging digital marketing programs that span customer acquisition to sale to advocacy.

This solution solves three core problems that many digital marketers face, including: Providing access to richer data, firmographic and profile information, to help them serve highly relevant and personalized ads to only the prospects in which a marketer is most interested.

Ability to automatically export offline conversions tracked in Marketo (e.g. lead qualified, opportunity won, etc.) directly back to AdWords, thereby allowing marketers to quantify the impact of their Google AdWords spend against actual revenue or revenue-generating events. Armed with this information, marketers can now increase their return on advertising by focusing their bids, budgets and attention on the keywords that deliver the best results. This includes enabling them to leverage AdWords’ bid automation solutions.

Ability to link additional Marketo data such as firmographic and profile information of known and anonymous customers with their Google Analytics platform hence allowing them to better analyze how key audiences behave through the marketing funnel and optimize their ad spend across the full funnel.

“Paid advertising has lived in a silo for long enough,” said Sanjay Dholakia, CMO at Marketo. “With our integration to Google AdWords and Google Analytics, we are breaking down that wall and enabling marketers to look holistically at how they are engaging audiences across different channels. In today’s world, engagement marketing means delivering the right message at the right time over the right channel. The combination of Marketo and Google makes this possible.”

For example, let’s say that Jennifer, a marketer at a large manufacturing company, bids on the phrase ‘high-definition broadcast equipment’ in AdWords so that her ad shows up when someone searches Google for that phrase. When a website visitor arrives at her company’s website after clicking her ad and signs up for a demo, Jennifer can track that online conversion in AdWords.

Now with Marketo’s integration with AdWords, Jennifer can automatically export offline conversions tracked in Marketo to see how each keyword contributes to each type of offline conversion (e.g. lead qualified, opportunity won, etc.).

In addition, let’s say that Jennifer is tasked with managing the marketing campaign behind her company’s move into the automotive market. Jennifer is concerned because she currently has no visibility into who from the automotive industry is visiting her website.

Using Marketo’s integration with Google Analytics, Jennifer now has insight into the relevant firmographic and profile information of visitors to her site and can serve even more relevant remarketing ads to those visitors who would be most interested in automotive information.

This integration aligns with a recent study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and Marketo, which found that marketers’ most critical investment over the next 12 months will be in digital marketing and engagement. As well, a recent study conducted by Edelman also found that 87 percent of consumers demand a meaningful experience with a brand. For more information about the Economist study or the Marketo and Google integration, please visit the Marketo blog.

Image: Gil C / Shutterstock.com

Read more:
Marketo integrates with google to deliver personalised digital advertising

Whether a company is newly-formed or simply needs to update their website, there are several layout styles and platforms to use.

Improving your web design bolsters business sales by not only providing innovative, interactive ways to capture an audience, but by acknowledging the development of modern technology and access across platforms.

These essential web layouts trends of 2015, when added to an already interactive website, have proven to expand a business’s online reach.

Split Screen Layouts
When a company offers multiple services, it can be difficult to decide a hierarchy as to what should be the primary focus of a page. Split screen layouts divide the page vertically, allowing two focuses or products to be displayed simultaneously. When deciding to use the split screen layout, most businesses opt for contrasting or complementary colours that denote the separation of product or service, while keeping the two related.

• Desktime App

Modular & Grid Based Layouts
The grid format of a website has become popularised by websites like Tumblr and Pinterest, where ideas are combined to show innovation and creativity in an organised manner. This layout has become associated with organised, practical products and information, and is pleasing to the eyes with hard lines for structure.

Longer Scrolling Layouts
The diverse layouts of the Internet have given society a greater desire for information, yet less motivation to discover it. Longer-scrolling home pages providing as much information as possible are the most beneficial to companies as they can spread out information in a way that is not overwhelming, yet all questions can be answered. The more clicks a company places between their clients and their products, the less likely said client is to remain on the page.

Storytelling & Interactive Platforms
Another of the essential web layouts trends of 2015 incorporates multimedia with impressive CSS and HTML capabilities. Being able to combine across platforms to tell a story, create a game or otherwise embrace a viewer’s attention makes them more likely to stay on the page. Studies show that with a video or other interactive piece on a company’s website, a customer is 50-100% more likely to use said product or service.

For example, Absolut Vodka sponsored the creation of a short film, “I’m Here,” in 2010, earning the company hundreds of thousands of views to their website.

Another example is Hello Monday, a digital agency focused on unique visual experiences. The more you scroll, the more opportunities you have for videos and information about various businesses.

Hidden & Blended Navigations
To emphasise an image of a product or service, hiding the navigation bar can be beneficial and clean. In some cases, if a user hovers over the top of the page or even clicks a menu button for the navigation to appear, the experience can be much less distracting. Hidden navigations allow customers to explore all a page has to offer without being overwhelmed by the selections provided on other pages.

Site Speed & Performance
Now a portion of Google’s quality guidelines, site speed and performance bolster visitor engagement and retention. Studies have shown a user will leave a page if it takes longer than six seconds to load. For the best impression on users, sites utilising this essential web layouts trends of 2015 will see a boost in average time spent on their site and an increase in views.

By applying one or more of these techniques to website designs, companies are likely to see a large increase in user involvement and engagement. For questions about company branding, digital resources or advertising, contact Creative Spark. We have bright ideas and look forward to continuing to share them.

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Essential web layouts Trends of 2015

There is no doubt the Internet has transformed our lives and will continue to do so. For many of us it’s hard to remember how we did business before the web changed everything.

Some of us even used to write letters and make phone calls – remember those! Meanwhile an entire generation has grown up knowing no other way of doing business.

Yet perhaps we have become too relaxed. While we gain from the convenience and new business opportunities the Internet has given us, another group has benefitted also: cyber-criminals.

Cyber crime has reached unprecedented levels across the world. High profile hacks of companies like US retailer Target and Sony Pictures has demonstrated the resources and sophistication of organised gangs and the impact they can have on the long-term stability of even the biggest organisations.

But it’s not just big corporations. We are all at risk, consumers and small businesses alike. According to UK Government figures over one-third of adult Internet users reported experiencing a negative online incident. And that was in 2012.

Criminals are increasingly targeting smaller businesses as they believe them softer targets with potentially rich pickings. Smaller businesses lack the resources to employ dedicated IT security teams.

According to consultancy firm PwC, the average cost of a breach to a small business is between £65,000 and £115,000.

However, you can reduce your risk of such losses by not giving criminals an easy ride.

Cyber gangs send out millions of emails each day which carry malware (software which is specifically designed to disrupt or damage a computer system) designed to catch out the unwary.

These phishing emails look like they come from a trusted source like your bank or even a customer. But they contain a link which, when clicked, downloads a piece of malware.

Such malware could spy on your employees’ activities to record logins and passwords. Or it may launch a electronic ‘worm’ that enters the company network looking for data or personal information it can steal and send back to the gangs controlling it.

Cyber criminals are interested in one thing: money. They do not have a political point to make or much interested in bringing down your networks. In fact they much prefer networks to continue running so that they can steal as much as they can over the long term.

It’s a bit of a myth that cyber-criminals break into bank accounts and siphon cash directly. They prefer to look for, and steal credit card numbers and sell these on to other criminals who use them to make illegal purchases.

They actively look for businesses that store such data – and that means the myriad number of small businesses that now sell direct to the public.

Very small businesses and home users are prone to a particularly nasty form of attack called ransomware.

This will freeze your PC and the only way to unfreeze it is to pay a ransom to the attackers. Many victims pay up simply because its cheaper than the grim alternative – a frozen business or a computer rebuild. Many incidents go unreported.

Most of these attacks are not that sophisticated and can be avoided with some common sense and small investment in security software.

Keeping antivirus installed and up to date on all company PCs and devices will go a long way to stop attacks by neutralising malware, yet it’s surprising how many businesses overlook this simple and cost effective measure.

However it can’t stop everything getting through. The best defence against cyber attackers is ongoing security education and awareness.

Educate yourself and your employees on the dangers of phishing and how to spot bogus links in emails, and which sites on the web are more likely to contain malware.

Install filters on your web server to prevent access to ‘dodgy’ sites or social media, a known hunting ground of scammers and cyber-criminals.

Tell them not to write down or share passwords and always report anything that looks suspicious.

Finally, if your business stores any kind of confidential data such as payment details it must be encrypted. That way, even if criminals do get hold of your data it is useless to them.

A good place for more tips on securing your business is Get Safe Online which contains excellent advice.

Colin Tankard is managing director of data security company Digital Pathways, a specialist in the design, implementation and management of systems that ensure the security of data, whether at rest within the network, mobile device, in storage or data in transit across platforms.

Image: Concept of the internet via Shutterstock

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Time to start practising some Internet common sense

British maternity line Madderson were totally unprepared for the honour and the rush on its website caused it to almost immediately go down.

Whilst Madderson couldn’t have predicted when the Duchess of Cambridge was going to wear their ‘Camilla’ dress and have the right stock levels in place to meet the demand, they could have had their website ‘live’ to sell out their maternity range capitalising on this unprecedented interest in their products.

So what should they have done to ensure their site could handle the traffic?

We asked Kate Craig-Wood, MD of web host Memset to talk about how businesses can ensure that they have the ability to scale resources up and down based on demand.

Choose a UK web host with UK-based data centres. More than ever the location of your web host is incredibly important to the performance and security of your website. You want people to find you, and choosing a UK hosting provider will enhance your SEO. Make sure you look for a genuine British company who does not outsource any of their servers or staff. Just as Kate Middleton flies the flag for British business, choose a British web host who can support your business as it grows and can also serve up your webpages to visitors more quickly.

Know what you are getting. You are a small business, money is tight, it’s easy to choose the cheapest hosting package around, but do you really know what you are getting from your web host? The usual things like customer support, the resources you will get, reliability and uptime, and the location of the web host should all play a part.

However be wary of being ‘uphold’ an expensive package on the off chance that the ‘Kate’ effect might happen to your business. There is no point wasting money on resources you don’t need or use, especially as cloud hosting enables you to pay for just the resources you use and, when you no longer need them, you are no longer charged for them.

Make sure the provider offers 24/7 UK-based support. When things do go wrong you want to be able to speak with trained professionals, and you want to be able to get hold of them. Not enough value can be placed upon great technical support, and this means having access to that support at any time. Choose a web host who is upfront about their support levels, check their SLA (service level agreement) for their guaranteed uptime and trawl social media looking for any reviews on that provider.

Add on active-monitoring. Some web hosting providers, like Memset, offer fully customisable services and have technology in place to actively monitor the availability and performance of your website which can ensure problems, like a spike in traffic, are identified quickly and dealt with.

Scalability. One of the primary advantages of cloud computing is its scalability. If you’ve signed up for dedicated server hosting and you need immediate additional resources you do not have time to wait for your web host to scale up additional resources for you. Similarly, with shared hosting, you cannot afford to lose the fight for additional resources. With virtual or cloud-based hosting you can increase your dedicated available resources immediately, when you need it. This can save you a lot of stress and may even save some customers because the process is seamless.

Backup and Disaster Recovery. They sound like terms that only big businesses need to worry about, but even small businesses like Madderson London need to have these things in place. Cloud storage has become incredibly cheap so it shouldn’t be a financial burden to your business to not only have a backup service in place, but also hold a separate / mirrored copy of your website with another provider in case disaster strikes!

For Madderson’s sake, and any other British labels that specialise in maternity clothing, please take a look at your current web hosting arrangements and ensure you have the capacity to ramp up resources during the remaining four months of Kate Middleton’s pregnancy, on the off chance that she steps out in one of your dresses!

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How can retailers cope with the ‘Kate’ effect

Not only is repeat buying an acknowledgement from your customer that they liked their first purchase, it provides you with an extremely cost-effective method of increasing, if not doubling, sales of products or services.

Additionally, it is possible to give your business the best possible chance of setting the path down for repeat buying during the customer’s initial purchasing experience. Often, business owners spend a great amount of resources, from time to money, giving intensive thought into how to entice the website visitor to make a sale. From the landing page, to the visual merchandizing, from blogging and to easy functionality, all the marketing efforts are made in order to drive the customer to one place: the shopping cart. Once they have arrived at the functional and secure shopping cart page that your website includes, the customer is ready to buy.

So is the job of the marketing team done at this stage? The customer is buying, and that surely means success? Not necessarily. This is where you have the opportunity to set up the foundation for repeat sales, and here is how.

Step 1: Make Sure the Check-Out Process is Simple and Secure

If you want to encourage repeat sales, make sure that your customers believe that shopping with you is easy, efficient and secure. It goes without saying, but is nonetheless important to reinforce, that safety of online payments and the security of their online-bought packages are important to consumers. According to Comscore, half of shoppers state that the ability to track their order is important to them. This only goes to further demonstrate the opportunity in the functionality and design of the shopping cart to reconfirm your efficiency and credibility as an online shopper. By proving that shopping online with you is a positive experience, you have laid down the very necessary foundation to support their motivation to shop with you again.

Step 2: Consolidate Your Brand Image

If your online shopping is secure and efficient, you have proven that you have the basics required by consumers to be happy to shop online with you. These are minimal expectations.

There is now an opportunity to go even further, and make yourself stand out in the market against your competitors. After all, marketing opportunities within the shopping cart are often overlooked, which you can take advantage of. Show that you care beyond the sale. This will show the credibility and quality of your entire brand.

At this stage, you can leverage online marketing content to communicate a message of care and credibility. If you have developed blogs, articles, documents or guides about how to best make the most of your product as part of your marketing strategy, this is the time to make sure that your customer has seen it. It is within the layout of your shopping cartthat this is possible. By integrating your blog feed into the page, and introducing the information within as further guidance about the products and services available, you offer a beneficial both for your customer and for you. Not only does this show that you truly care about the problem that your product or service promises to solve, it also encourages your customer to revisit your site for reference again and again. This provides you with an opportunity to entice further purchases. The sales possibilities of a blog are endless, with surveys indicating that, amongst the companies surveyed that maintained a blog, 55% saw more sales than those that did not own a blog.

Make sure that your customers are benefiting from your blog before they leave you; they will be more likely to come back.

Step 3: Build a Connection with Your Customer

A study by Forbes showed that there are well over 100,000 online retailers in the US—and the number only continues to grow as the trend of online shopping becomes even more deeply ingrained into societal buying behaviour. So the question remains: how do you deter your customers from looking and shopping elsewhere? Geographical barriers no longer limit the opportunities for consumers to shop around. Furthermore, with the increasing popularity of price comparison websites, comparing the hard data of different products is made easy for your customers.

So how do you encourage your customers to come back and not be enticed to your competitors? It is possible to go beyond the hard data such as the price and the features of a product or service that are easily comparable, variable and searchable by creating a more personable connection with your customer.

There is no doubt that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create one-to-one relationships with each and every customer that buys with you. If it were possible, it certainly would not be economically viable. However, there are certain tools that can be included within the shopping cart that to inhibit a feeling of belonging to your brand. By leveraging the human need of belonging, as demonstrated in Business Psychology according to Maslow’s theories, a greater loyalty to your brand can be encouraged, which goes beyond the product’s hard facts.

Specifically, the features that you can include to encourage loyalty and a connection within your shopping cart can include, but are not limited to:

A personal profile for customers, rewarding them for their former purchases by making future buying easier. This also permits you to provide exclusive offers to your existing customers.

Blogs and email marketing sign-ups. By regularly providing fresh, useful and relevant information and guidance to your customers, you can gain their trust and keep you in mind for when they require relevant products

Read more:
4 Steps to an Optimal Shopping Cart That Will Bring Your Customers Back Again & Again

You only get one chance
The old adage that you only get one chance to make a first impression succinctly describes ecommerce websites; if your content is bland and uninteresting, looks sloppy or is difficult to navigate, then your visitors will immediately career back off into cyber-space, never to return again. The average website has only seconds to entice a potential customer into staying to look around, so make sure the first impression you create is a good one.

Go it alone, or hire a professional?
One thing you may be considering is whether to hire someone to design your website, or to go it alone, building your own using a web hosting platform. This is a choice that ultimately boils down to how much money you are willing to spend. Hiring a web designer is not cheap, but it is often money well spent. They will provide you with a professional-looking, superior product that is easy to navigate. Not only that, but it will be uniquely built to your personal specifications, presenting you with the opportunity to stand head and shoulders above your competiton.

In comparison, the web designs featured on hosting platforms are generic, and used by hundreds of businesses. However, they are most definitely the cheaper alternative, and there is no denying that for small or new businesses, this could be the determining factor. Furthermore, with only a little web savvy and research it’s possible to tweak existing website themes to make your own unique design. So if you know your way around the basics of HTML you can likely make a great, individual website using an existing platform like Tumblr or WordPress.

User-friendly homepage
To keep your readers around for more than a few seconds, your homepage should pique their curiosity, satisfy their initial requirements and impart an overall impression of quality. The design needs to be uncluttered and simple, with muted colours and a readable font. Blazing reds and tiny writing in a contrasting colour may look cool, but they will play havoc with the visitors’ eyes. The homepage center-piece should be you: who you are, what your company stands for, and what you can offer them above your competitors.

It is also a good idea to include your contact details, as this automatically raises the trust of your visitors. Other information included should be pertinent, useful and brief. Don’t bamboozle visitors with too much information in one go. Navigation tabs should be clear, and if you include a search box, place it in a prominent position.

Clear and easy navigation
There is simply nothing more frustrating to visitors than viewing a website that is difficult to navigate. They don’t want to hunt for the information they need. Try to keep the navigation tabs in the same place on each page, as this will allow visitors to find relevant information and products quicker.

Similarly, make the titles simple and unambiguous. This is one instance where less is definitely more. If you need some clues with regards to easy-to-use navigation, visit the site of an established competitor. Check how easy it is to move through their website, considering what works well and what you would do differently. Thinking as a customer, rather than a business owner, should offer some clarity over what is most suitable for your own customers.

A customer focused approach
Customer service and communication are an integral part of an online business, just as they are in physical commerce. That said, it is difficult to replicate the positive effect of a smiling shop assistant in the virtual world. What you can do is concentrate on the ways you do have of communicating with your customers. For example, make it easy to get in touch with you, by providing several alternative methods of contact. This way, problems can be resolved more effectively. Maintain your customers’ interest by sending out regular emails or newsletters, and set up pages on social media sites where you can share your business’s latest developments and answer any queries.

Providing excellent customer service goes beyond an easily navigated site and open communication; it is also about adequately protecting your customers’ sensitive personal information, especially with regards to processing payment and credit card details. It’s essential that you use a secure, reliable online payment solution such as the ePDQ options from Barclaycard.

The importance, and potential impact, of your website can’t be stressed enough. It’s your way of connecting to existing and new customers. Competition these days is rife, so if you fail to impress at the first hurdle, your business is going to suffer. Your failure is your competitor’s success. Getting it right, by offering your customers a pleasant, straight-forward experience, will ensure that they gladly return for repeat business.

Read more:
Building an ecommerce website for your SME

Given that I, as lead on digital at All about the Idea, advise brands on their social media strategy and handle the social process from the production of shareable content right through to the management of brand pages, engaging with key influencers and customer service interaction on social channels, it might strike you as odd that I, in fact, agree with him.

For those of you that work in the consumer space, you’ve probably been awake and engaged with social media for brands for the best part of 5 years or more. Non consumer-facing businesses however, are only just starting to wake up to the fact that social is not going away and, rather like waking to the sound of an aggressive alarm clock, they’re coming round in a state of anxiety.

If I had a (rather odd looking, dodecagonally shaped new) pound coin for every time a colleague has approached me on behalf of their small to mid cap business client, with the vague words, “Oh yes and they want some social media”, I’d be a rich woman. With no clue as to how the channels operate, who uses them and what they want to achieve, these corporates have now heard of the ‘social’ phenomenon – perhaps they’ve come across the various (car crash) Twitter Q&As that were in vogue last year – and they’re panic buying. And there are plenty of agencies out there that’ll happily take their money.

Part of the problem, as Rachel Bridge reports in the Telegraph, is that few businesses seem to realise that being on social media only makes sense if your potential customers are there too. Social is like any other channel in that regard. What is the point in advertising on German TV if your target customers are based in Latvia.

That said, it should be noted that social platforms are increasingly the go-to method for customer service related queries, even for irregular users of the platforms. In a digital world in which telephone calls are rapidly outdating, the ease with which a question or complaint can be put publicly to a company and be guaranteed to illicit a quick response or risk being hauled over hot Twitter coals is attractive to customers, even business ones. So when this option isn’t available to customers, it can be frustrating.

But this does not mean that every business should be a social one. I have likened social media in the past to the Wild West. It also has similarities to the playground.

For all its many uses, social is still predominantly where people go to relax, to ‘plug in’ to the latest news from their friends or the big wide world and share stories that they find interesting. In the social playground, you’re no longer in the classroom and should be free from the shackles of the serious, should you so wish.

You can ‘like’ a picture of a cat in tights if you want to; this is play time. You don’t want the teachers to be reminding you about events and classroom topics while you’re busy making daisy chains on a grassy knoll. So, businesses need to bear in mind that when they go social, they’re walking into the playground in a suit and tie, and not everyone will want to play with them.

The third thing to note – and please, please pay attention to this bit – is that it’s not all about figures. I know many of you are accountants at heart, but measuring your business’s social success based on number of followers is tempting yes, but foolish. Ultimately, the value of social needs to be approached in the same way as any marketing activity: Clearly determine your objectives, work towards achievable goals, test and adjust along the way.

Don’t think of social as standalone. It should integrate with your overall communications plan, otherwise you’re not really making use of it at all. Invite people to be social at POS, let them know there’s a conversation that exists online, encourage them to feedback and be part of the business’s journey.

Oh and buyer beware, social agencies offering pay-for-like services are cowboys. In the case of Facebook, for instance, fake fans are likes without engagement that ultimately lead to decreased visibility in newsfeeds, so don’t be fooled by the lure of the numbers

Read more:
Smashing the smoke & mirrors of social for business

iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices are making it easier to use the web on the move, with 41% of us now surfing while away from home. Even at home, 59 per cent use their smartphone to shop.

Mobile commerce is already worth $25billion a year, and is growing exponentially – eMarketer predicts it will hit $86billion by 2016.

Unfortunately, as Nick Evans, Technical Director at ExtraMile Communications, explains many websites have not kept pace with technology, making them hard to read and forcing potential customers to visit rival, more user-friendly sites.

If a user has to scroll, pinch and zoom to find the information they need, they are unlikely to spend much time on the site.

Some companies have addressed this by investing in a mobile, cut-down version of their website, with less content than the original, to suit the smaller screen.

While that approach may solve the scrolling issue, it creates problems of its own.

For example, there is another site to maintain and optimise, adding another layer of administration and inflating costs. Every change made to the main site has to be replicated on the mobile one.

And it is only designed for smartphone screens, so the problems of usability on the varying screen sizes of tablets have not gone away.

The answer is a responsive, or adaptive, design.

Responsive websites use code that determines whether the site is being accessed from a smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC, Mac or web-enabled TV, and changes the layout accordingly.

The layout can also adapt to the orientation of the screen, whether it is vertical or horizontal.

This optimises the user experience and helps them achieve their objectives without having to switch between devices.

Examples of responsive sites are Facebook and other social networks, news sites like the BBC and Mashable, and ecommerce sites like Currys and PC World.

More surprising is how few mainstream retail sites are responsive. Visit many of the main supermarkets and household goods sites, and they remain stubbornly fixed.

Research suggests responsiveness has a major impact on conversions and transactions, with increases of up to 500% reported.

According to eConsultancy, brands like clothing retailer Bench have seen conversions double since implementing a mobile-friendly design.

Skinny Ties reported a 42.4 per cent increase in revenue from all devices within weeks, as well as a 13.6% improvement in conversion rates. Revenue from iPhone visits grew by 377.6 per cent!

And Time Magazine saw an increase in traffic, unique visits, and page views, and a reduction in their mobile bounce rate.

There are various reasons for this.

The site can be accessed by anybody, anywhere, using any device, and because the company has one site, rather than multiple sites, visitors can complete their transaction in a single visit.

There is no need to filter out content, so the full product range can be displayed.

Mobile sites, on the other hand, often have to remove important information, like video, and in some cases, whole ecommerce sections.

Above all, responsive sites are much more cost-effective, because there is only one site to maintain and optimise.

Content only has to be written once, and changes made once.

Responsive sites are also very SEO-friendly – Google loves them! Shoppers are increasingly demanding a user-friendly experience when they shop online – whichever device they are using.

Although responsiveness does not improve your rankings as such, the improvement in user experience encourages users to stay on your site, and gives them better access to your products and services.

So responsive websites are simply a must-have for any business which wants to retain customers and market share.

Read more:
Why responsive design is a must-have for any online business

When companies known for their innovative approach are eagerly investing in and adopting open source technologies, it’s a sign that we should take a closer look and find out what all the fuss is about. This blog post examines the nature of open source and discusses practical applications for your business, and future implications for the wider business community.

What is Open Source?
In essence, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is publicly available for both use and modification, free of charge. It is characterised by collaboration, diversity, openness, transparency and rapid prototyping. Open source relies on universal access via free licensing of a product’s design or blueprint, and peer review for finding and eliminating bugs. It is usually a collaborative effort of a developer community, within which any changes are shared and improved upon.

Open source can also refer to entities beyond software (although this use is somewhat contested), described as ‘the open source way’ – a phrase that denotes a certain attitude towards work and creation: willingness to share, collaborate transparently, and embrace failure as a means to improvement. It is a belief that to continually improve our circumstances everyone should have free access to the source code, the blueprint, or the design underlying everything we do (including government, education, law, and many other things). This approach is also described as ‘open knowledge’.

Today’s Trends And Applications

Today, open source seems to be ubiquitous – and more corporations than ever are jumping on the bandwagon, embracing the trend to varying degrees. The list of successful products is long: Linux, Bitcoin, Android, Mozilla Firefox, PHP, WordPress, Joomla, Ruby, Drupal, Python, Eclipse… For some companies, however, open source software remains something of a mystery, and its adoption is delayed by fear of the unknown. But don’t let your lack of knowledge stop you benefiting from the open source revolution – fortunately there are many quality resources and guides online:

• Opensource.com is an online publication that contains a great number of educational resources to further your understanding of open source and its applications to different areas of life, including health, business, law, education, and government;
• Osalt.com offers a catalogue of open source alternatives to well-known commercial software;
• If you would like to find and / or contribute to open source applications, head over to http://opensource.com/resources/projects-and-applications;
• Already have open source software and would like to share it? You can do so at sourceforge.net.

Apart from open source, there is also a trend in collaborative software development called ‘free software’. Whilst they both rely on open code and the freedom to modify it, the difference is philosophical: the proponents of free software believe that software should respect “the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of ‘free speech’, not ‘free beer.’” (Richard Stallman from Gnu Operating System).

Tomorrow’s Trends
As open source is gaining momentum, it is definitely a trend to watch if not adopt straight away. Some of the most exciting initiatives in development include:

• Open Compute Project – an initiative announced in 2011 by Facebook to openly share designs of data centre products. We will see more innovation being put in the hands of expert users and data centre managers that will be driving improvements;
• In this spirit Intel has released MinnowBoard, an open source PC for less than $200;
• The increasing availability and accessibility of computers like Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard are encouraging a new generation of young hackers who grow up not accepting things as they are and feeling the need to drive forward improvements;
• 3D printing is a very exciting trend on its own, but in conjunction with open source it promises to transform the manufacturing industry by democratising production and disrupting monopolies. We will see an explosion of the development and improvement of 3D blueprints;
• The medical industry will remain one of the most difficult to transform due to the Big Pharma companies’ tight grip on research, production and distribution. However, open source is permeating even that hermetic environment, with The Open Prosthetics Project leading the way in sharing medical information and innovation;
• In the emerging sphere of the Internet of Things open source aspires to fill the gap in the market for a unified platform on which all Internet of Things devices can connect and communicate. Projects to watch are: The Open Source Internet of Things, OpenRemote and Contiki.

Open Source And SMEs – Why Choose Open Source?
What does all this mean for you and your business? How should you respond: convert to open methods, absorb some aspects only, ignore the whole thing and hope for the best? The initial reaction may well be that of distrustful rejection; after all, the idea of competition is so deeply ingrained in our business education that throwing resources at a collaborative project might seem against common sense.

On top of this initial hunch the more rational concerns kick in: security and reliability. Both of these concerns have been proven unfounded, however. Both open source and proprietary technology always involve security risks, and no actual evidence exists to suggest that open source is any less secure. Just because the source code is available, it doesn’t make it more vulnerable. In fact, often the opposite is true: having an army of independent developers devoting their time to improving the code means that all issues and bugs are identified and resolved promptly.

Similarly, the widely held belief of open source being unreliable is also becoming mythical as we witness open source software driving innovation whilst delivering feature richness and rock solid reliability. As reliance on a single vendor is negated, the development time to innovate new solutions to known issues is considerably shortened. An extensive network of guidance and online forum support exists in place of traditional customer service and support, which becomes a strength where the breadth and depth of available expertise is concerned.

So why adopt open source? Apart from the obvious financial factor, freedom from vendor lock-in has been cited as the primary reason in the past, whereas last year it was quality that attracted most attention. Big data, lower costs and system integration are the top three business problems open source is solving. Sectors leading open source adoption include media, government and healthcare.

Apart from the more immediate, individual benefits, adoption and modification of open source brings about a broader qualitative transformation to our software ecosystem. On the whole, not being tied to any particular corporate interest, open source developers are evolving a network of systems that is not only driving innovation and stimulating competition, but also prevents the formation of monopolies.

Of course, there are downsides to open source too: no one is obliged to support you (as you don’t pay anyone to do it), the risk of abandonware (usually due to in-fighting between key programmers, which stalls the project’s development when they quit), potential user confusion stemming from parallel development efforts, and a learning curve (sometimes you might have to employ someone to guide your staff through the intricacies of a particular piece of software).

When considering your company’s IT strategy it is important to take all factors into consideration and make an informed choice. In most cases, a mixed strategy – of adopting both proprietary and open source software – will work just fine, as long as you know what your specific IT needs are and how software products can address them.

Open Source, Open Mind
All signs point towards open source being the future of software (and beyond): as the problems facing us complexify, so should our approach to solving them. The benefits of collaboration and collective intelligence seem to far outweigh any potential security and reliability concerns.

Open source as a way of thinking presents us with a chance to overcome many issues created by the rules of unrelenting competition that has in so many cases led to the monopolisation of various industries. Finally, open source offers an avenue for innovation that is not tied to the individual corporate interests of leading companies and venture capitalists too afraid to invest in products competing with already existing products that belong to the industry giants.

I would hope that at some point in the near future both the pressures that open source exerts on quality, cost and accountability, as well as the open way of thinking that support it, seep through to all industries so that we can start taking full advantage of the increasingly collaborative information environment we are steeped in (cloud computing, big data and so on). If adopted fully, open source has the potential to become a revolution similar in magnitude to that of the development of the internet and the rise of a networked economy.

Do you need help with your IT strategy? Give us a call today to discuss what we can do for you and your business!

[box]BUNKER48 provides a full technical & digital service for SMEs, including building websites and managing your IT needs.[/box]

Follow @bunker48

Read more:
The Future Is Open Source – What Does This Mean For Your Business?

That’s right – of the social network’s $1.8 billion (£1.1 billion) generated in the third quarter of 2013, 49% of it was made up of mobile advertising revenue. Last year, the channel represented only 14 per cent.

In January, Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg declared: “There’s no argument, Facebook is a mobile company.”

Are you? Mobile – particularly social through mobile – is increasingly emerging as one of the core digital avenues through which companies use a social media advertising agency to connect with consumers.

In the case of Facebook, it’s easy to see why the company is enjoying phenomenally strong mobile revenue. Its News Feed product – the central hub of the network – is seeing growth as advertisers start to switch from its right-hand ad column over to the middle.

Mobile is becoming big business because consumer behaviour is changing. A few years ago – and it’s easy to forget given its inexorable rise – mobile didn’t even exist.

Now, it’s commonplace for people to check social networks, read news and shop on their mobile phones, wherever they are – on the train, in the pub, on the couch at home. In 2013, there will be 30.9 million smartphone users in the UK, according to eMarketer.

Research this year from the Internet Advertising Bureau shows that mobile spend now accounts for 10% of overall digital spend, a figure only set to rise in the coming years as firms harness insight from a direct response advertising agency.

Today’s digital playground is more diverse today than it has ever been, with mobile making up just one important part of it. At first glance, the dizzying range of digital platforms might seem off-putting to companies looking to engage in this new and exciting sphere. But the investment is worth it.

Read more:
Facebook is a mobile company – are you?

O2 will provide educational content from Twitter, specific to the small business audience, with marketing tips and best practice advice. Eligible UK SMEs will also receive a share of £1million free advertising credit on Twitter’s self-service advertising platform — which also launched today.

In addition, O2 Business is today launching a unique O2 social insights tool to provide small businesses already using Twitter with advice to improve their social media outreach and activities, including:

Social League: a social media leader board where small businesses can track and rank themselves against all the other companies that have signed up. This allows each business to compare themselves by size, region and sector.

Dashboard: this enables small businesses to check how their social activity is performing and monitor their influence and outreach, milestones and achievements. The dashboard helps businesses understand how their social media performance changes over time based on their activity.

Social Toolkit: content delivered straight to each member’s account, providing useful tips, guides, FAQs and case studies on social media best practice.  Content will be sourced from the UK’s best social media channels and news sites.

The announcement coincides with Twitter’s news that it is today opening up its self-service advertising platform to small and medium-sized businesses in the UK.

To celebrate the partnership, O2 Business is giving qualifying businesses that sign up to its social league a kick-start with a £50 credit to spend on Twitter’s new small business advertising platform. In addition, O2 is running a two week-long competition on Twitter from November 18 through its business channel, @O2BusinessUK, that will see one business win a year’s free advertising on Twitter.

Ben Dowd, Business Director at O2 said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be partnering with Twitter to equip Britain’s small businesses with the tools they need to succeed and grow in digital Britain. We truly believe our O2 social insights tool is one of the best free resources available.

“During conversations with our small business customers we are often told that what they really need is advice to understand how they can use platforms like Twitter, and we believe that it’s our responsibility as both a large corporate and a digital services company to  guide them. That’s why we are investing our time, money and expertise in this new O2 social insights platform.”

Barry Collins, Director of SMB EMEA at Twitter added: “People around the world use Twitter to grow their small businesses by connecting with existing customers and reaching out to new ones. We are excited to be working with O2 to help SMBs in the UK effectively market themselves on Twitter, both organically and using our self-service advertising platform.”

The O2 social insights tool is live today and can be accessed at [ilink url=”http://o2socialinsights.o2.co.uk”]o2socialinsights.o2.co.uk[/ilink] .

To find out more on Twitter’s advertising platform visit [ilink url=”http://www.business.twitter.com”]business.twitter.com[/ilink]

Read more:
O2 & Twitter announce partnership to support UK SMEs with £1M ad credit

Passle is free to use. Users simply create an account, drag the Passle button to their browser and customise their fully-hosted blog to match their brand. The Passle blog can also be embedded in a company’s website.

So what next? Well, when users are browsing the web and see an article or post relevant to their business that they have a view on, they simply highlight the section of the article they’d like to comment on and click the Passle button. They then add their thoughts and press the publish button for a beautifully presented blog post. This can be made visible to the public and used to power social networks, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Key blogging facts:

1. Research shows that 15 posts per month result in 10 times the website traffic and five times the leads

2. While most marketers and businesses know that blogging is important, only 1 in 8 are actually doing it

3. 63 per cent of businesses that have updated blogs can also run a successful Twitter and/or Facebook account compared to just 13 per cent of businesses who do not have an updated blog (the blog feeds the social networks)

Crucially, Passle can be used by every person in a business, from sales to IT to HR, to the CEO. Employees simply drag the Passle button to their browsers and share any relevant content captured from the web along with their thoughts on it. Now, companies can harness the expertise and opinions of all their staff members and effortlessly funnel it into their blog.

An appointed person, such as the in-house marketer, can then manage, edit and spellcheck this content and decide what gets published, and how it gets published. A selection of short blog posts could be merged into one long-form post, for example, or even a white paper or infographic.

Essentially, the ideas for blog creation, arguably the hardest part of any business blog, now come from across the company as a whole, and in real time. They’re no longer the responsibility of just one (poor) person but are part of the entire company’s working day.

Read more:
PASSLE: making business blogging a cinch, not a schlep

1. Phishing & Spoofing
Phishing is the process of trying to dupe you into disclosing private details – it could be your email, social media accounts, your bank account or credit card details, anything that’s useful to online criminals. The financial and reputational loss that can occur as a result of handing over these account credentials is easy to imagine.

While individuals are always a target, businesses often provide richer pickings for online criminals. The scams regularly involve receiving an email or online message that appears to come from a trusted social media connection or business contact, but is actually a carefully-designed fake.

Phishing emails will often contain links to spoof websites that are practically identical to the real sites they are trying to mimic. Some will collect your login information then link you back to the genuine site, covering their tracks in the process.

To stay safe, always be wary of emails or messages asking you for personal information, or requiring you to click website links to verify personal accounts. Check for the padlock symbol on domains, that they’re spelled correctly, and be suspicious of websites that have long, confusing addresses.

2. Fake software
A common technique used by online scammers is to panic you into downloading their software. You may receive an email or pop-up alert that your computer has been infected by a virus and that you urgently need to download a new piece of software to repair it. Don’t get caught out. Often, nothing has infected your computer and the software you to download to fix the non-existent problem actually implants malicious code onto your computer.

Some rogue software might also lure you into a fraudulent transaction (for example, upgrading to a non-existent paid version of a program), steal your personal information or disable updates to legitimate antivirus software.

To protect your computer, always be sure to have firewall, antivirus and antispyware software installed – and switched on. Be wary of downloading freeware or shareware unless you’re sure they are from a reputable source.

3. Fake Twitter accreditation
Verified accounts on Twitter allow you, in theory at least, to tell the difference between a real person or company’s account and those of potential imposters. Accounts verified by Twitter feature a blue tick badge on the profile page. Scammers will create Twitter profiles that look similar to official Twitter accounts and purport to be from the verification team. They encourage Twitter users who would like to be verified to carry out tasks on Twitter, usually following specific accounts or promoting their content.

For a business, the reputational costs of re-tweeting content from bogus accounts or communicating with fraudsters on Twitter can be significant. Twitter will never ask you to re-tweet their content so be suspicious of any official-looking Twitter accounts that ask you to do so. Also, Twitter accounts are always verified themselves, so if you’re suspicious, check that they are. Blue verification badges can be faked using profile background images, so double-check that an account is genuinely verified by hovering your mouse over the blue badge. If it is a genuine verified account, a tool-tip will display to confirm that the account has been verified by Twitter’s team. If no message appears, it’s a fake that shouldn’t be trusted, and should be reported to Twitter.

Read more:
Spotting online scams

The list of apps entering our lives is endless and of course we all love our gaming apps (my personal favourite at the moment being online casino games). And with developments such as Google Now and Siri, the major technology players are locked in a battle to provide us with the best, ever present, ever helpful, all singing and dancing personal assistants. These personal assistants of course reside in our smartphones or tablets – and so are always easily to hand.

Reception and use of these handy little aides so far has been sketchy, as the technology is somewhat less than 100% reliable – the main problem being that the voice recognition software has difficulty in noisy locales or in coping with the multitude of different accents, dialects and inflections that make up the diversity of human speech.

However, the technology is definitely getting better. And with innovations like Google Glass on the Horizon you can only wonder how this drive to provide us with an always on, virtual PA with evolve, (Although what the take up on Google Glass will be is anybody’s guess with some commenters already referring to users as glassholes, and positing the idea that Google Glassers will illicit the same type of internal groans that perpetual wearers of Bluetooth headsets already do with many of us.

Being an Android user myself I’ve been trying out some of the latest features of Google Now – especially the enhanced reminders – which have nifty little features like being able to remind you to do things the moment you reach a particular location for example. These reminders are separate from those within Google Calendar and I find they’re a lot more usable for those little things you need to remember at a particular place or time, as oppose to actual meetings and the like.

These reminders are more discreet and less insistent than the Google Calendar type, with no faffing about dismissing and deleting etc. However the new Now reminders are lacking in some respects. There’s no repeat option and it would be good if you could get a reminder to activate when you’re leaving a location as well as when arriving at one.

In the Google Now vs Siri battle people seem to pretty much agree that both do many of the same things, but that each is slightly better than the other at some things and slightly worse than its rival at others

Generally GN seems to fare better with retrieving relevant information and Siri seems better at integration with other apps. GN also now has its enhanced reminders, search and cards. And Siri of course has its humorous responses to various questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” Siri’s response to this existential imperative will variously return answers such as; “42”, “chocolate” and “I don’t know …but I think there’s an app for that.”  More internal groans – Don’t give up your day job Siri!

Read more:
An App for Everything – the Rise of the Virtual Assistant

You can rest assured that, whatever, your needs, this company will be able to look after you in an understanding and competent manner. You will be looked after by, not only able staff, but by staff who are friendly and will inspire confidence.

1&1 Domain Registration is a large company with its UK headquarters in Slough in Berkshire. They have twelve years of experience in their industry, over 5,400 employees in 10 different countries and can, most certainly, claim to be one of the leading companies in the industry.
If you do not have your own web site, 1&1 Domain Registration will help you on a step-by-step basis to establish a business or a personal web site.

First of all, you can find out whether the name you wish to use is available and, if so, at what price for the first year. High quality designs are available and can be altered instantly as yours needs evolve. You can change the text or the colour to make your web page stand out more, at any time, with just a few clicks. With more than 120 different business sectors to choose from and pre-set text and image options, if required, it could not be easier to set-up your business web site. You can also connect to social networking sites and, therefore, expand your contacts at any time.

Should you wish to establish a personal web site, this option is also available, with the same 30-day, no obligation, free trial which is offered in the business website section. You can create your own website as easily as setting up your profile on a social networking site. Perhaps there is a big family event being planned, a wedding, an important birthday coming up. Why not let your family and friends keep in touch with your plans? Perhaps you would like to share or promote a hobby. If so, again a personal website is the perfect place to do this.

As with the business website, you can choose the basic lay-out and have the option to change text or colours at any time with just a few clicks.

Visitors to your site will be given the opportunity to download documents, thus saving you the expense of large postage bills. You can have a counter to enable you to know how many visitors you have and a guest book so visitors may leave their feed-back. This would allow you to make changes to your website as you think necessary. Website safety is of paramount importance to 1&1 Services and you can choose which areas of your site you wish to leave visible to the public and which areas you require password protected and accessible only to certain visitors.

Yet another option offered by 1&1 Domain Registration is to transfer your existing website into their management. This can be done simply and smoothly in a matter of a few days.

1&1 Services provide an excellent all-round service in their field of website creation and management. Their own website is comprehensive, easy to follow and provides contact telephone numbers for their various departments which is very important. Anyone using 1&1 Domain Registration, whether themselves experienced in this field, or not, can remain confident of receiving friendly and helpful support.

Read more:
1&1 Services – A Company in which you can have total confidence

The ad-fraud botnet, dubbed Chameleon, mimics website visitor traits, like clicking or rolling a mouse over display ads. It is the first, to hit online display advertising, and requires “a surprising level [of] sophistication,” according to fraud analytics firm Spider.io.

“Spider.io has been tracking anomalous behaviour associated with Chameleon botnet since December, 2012, and in February of this year the extent of the Chameleon botnet’s principal web-browsing activity was established,” an advisory by spider.io explains.

Spider.io say that with the help of display ad exchanges and demand-side platforms, has identified “deviant consumption,” which accounted for 9 billion fraudulent display ads served a month.

So far, more than 120,000 host machines have been identified — 95 percent of which come from residential IP addresses in the U.S.

“The bots visit the same set of websites, with little variation,” the firm said. “The bots generate uniformly random click co-ordinates across ad impressions and the bots also generate randomized mouse traces.”

Chameleon is relatively unstable, though. The botnet subjects its host machines to a heavy load, crashing and restarting regularly, and possibly signaling to users that something is wrong.

This recent botnet discovery comes after last month’s Microsoft and Symantec takedown of the Bamital botnet, which also cost online advertisers millions of dollars, according to Spider.io.

Read more:
Chameleon Botnet steals $6M a month from online advertisers

The company which allows people to store and organise personal data on an external server, is thought to have about 50 million users contacted all users yesterday (Sunday) advising that user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords were accessed.

But it insisted there was “no evidence” that payment details or stored content was accessed, changed or lost.

Evernote acts like an online personal organiser, with users able to save data such as video clips, images, web pages, notes and itineraries in an external storage system commonly known as the cloud.

In an email to all users, the firm said its security team discovered and blocked “suspicious activity on [their] network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote service”.

It added: “While our password encryption measures are robust, we are taking additional steps to ensure that your personal data remains secure.

“This means that, in an abundance of caution, we are requiring all users to reset their Evernote account passwords.”

The firm apologised “for the annoyance” caused by the breach, which it said is becoming “far more common” at other “large services”.

The hack came a week after social-networking firm Facebook said it had traced a cyber-attack back to China after some of its employee laptops were hacked.

A month ago, micro-blogging website Twitter announced it had been the victim of a security breach which compromised the accounts of 250,000 users.

The company’s information security director, Bob Lord, said the attack “was not the work of amateurs”.

Read more:
Evernote says security has been breached by hackers

If you’re anything like the typical e-commerce merchant I talk to, you’re probably obsessed with site statistics. Within the space of a few years Google analytics has turned rational thinking retailers into stats-a-holics.

I recently spent a day with a merchant who could tell me everything about his customers, where they lived, the browser and ISP they use and most importantly the paths customers take through the site. However, the one fact he couldn’t tell me was how many people visited his site from an Apple iPhone.

Come to think of it he wasn’t sure if iPhone users could even use his site. With the rapid growth of smart phones the mobile web is truly with us. So in these tips we explore just how ecommerce and mobile are converging.

STAY ON TOP Of MOBILE TRENDS.
The mobile arena is currently both the fastest changing technology sector and the fastest changing ecommerce sector. So monitor what is going on and make sure that you ecommerce site can work with both the most popular mobiles used for browsing the web, but also those that are growing fast.

CATCH ANY MOBILE PAYMENT TREND.
It looks like mobiles are becoming the new device for making payments so stay on top of this trend too.

MAKE THE RIGHT CALL FOR YOUR DEMOGRAPHICS.
Depending on who you are targeting, mobile may be more or less important. So ask the question, how many of MY customers want to buy using their mobile? Who are you trying to reach? Where and how are they visiting your web site? What does the typical visitor do at your site?

HAVE A SMARTPHONE THEME.
The fact that many smart phones can browse the main web can be misleading. Even though it’s true, most sites with their wide screens and nice pictures aren’t suitable for mobiles due to screen size and slow connections. So consider having a theme which provides a much more compact version of your store optimised for mobiles. However, remember that customers often want to see large images and have the convenience of a keyboard so actual traditional ecommerce buying is smaller on mobile than general usage might indicate.

UNDERSTAND PATTERNS OF USE.
Discovering the “where and how” of mobile use is a hard. People use mobile devices in so many different ways and in so many different places. The long standing mantra has always been to make your site usable under the worst conditions possible. Now this may not sound particularly appealing but your mobile site needs to work on both fast Wi-Fi and the slower 3G signal.

It’s the same with screen estate and input devices, catering for both large touch screens as well as smaller devices that may require a stylus or keyboard. Understanding how your customers will use your mobile site is also critical. Are they using their mobiles to purchase goods, check prices or simply looking for store information such as an address? Gaining this customer insight will define the very essence of your mobile site.

MAKE YOUR PLANS.
Mobile commerce is on a tear, and understanding who, what and how needn’t be all that difficult. My advice is simple, do your research. Think like your customers. Put together an action plan.

Read more:
Advanced ecommerce: Be mobile ready

Compared to the devices most of us are used to, supercomputers are beyond anything you can imagine in terms of processing power and capacity, capable of performing complex and high-volume calculations at top speeds. First introduced in the 1960s, today they have evolved into substantial machines running off tens of thousands of processors, and are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as weather forecasting.

Asda parent company WalMart uses supercomputers for inventory and distribution modelling, to ensure their millions of items of stock are in the right store at the right time, while the wonder of this technology brought much-loved characters such as Shrek to the big screen.

Despite the fact that some of the biggest brands in the world use supercomputers, businesses of any size can benefit from this technology as it can be adapted to suit a wide range of applications.

Can SMEs really benefit from this technology?
With small businesses facing a huge number of challenges in the current economic climate, high performance computing can power breakthroughs in product, process or service development, strengthening your position in the market and helping you to compete on a global scale.

Businesses in a wide range of sectors can benefit, including advanced materials and manufacturing, creative industries, energy and environment, financial and professional services, information and communication technologies, life sciences and construction.

For many businesses already tapped into the benefits, it’s a technology that is fast becoming indispensable.

So how can supercomputers help?
Supercomputers have many applications that are invaluable to business, including advanced modelling and simulation, performing complex calculations and rendering high-definition 3D graphics.

Advanced modelling and simulation allows companies to innovate and improve existing products and services, giving them a competitive edge through more efficient product design, increased data analysis and improved manufacturing processes.

It means new designs can be evaluated without physical models, and any design refinements required can easily be tested. Tests can be repeated with different parameters until the desired result or outcome is achieved.

The obvious benefit is that this reduces the time, labour and cost involved in bringing products to market, while improving research and development capabilities.

For example, Swansea-based Calon Cardio-Technology Ltd is using the supercomputing service offered by High Performance Computing (HPC) Wales to develop the next generation of implantable micro-pumps for the treatment of heart failure.

The firm is making extensive use of computer modelling and simulation in its research and development, which significantly reduces the product development phase and, consequently, the time to market.

It’s clear to see that supercomputing has a valuable role to play in boosting the competitive capability of SMEs in a wide range of sectors. The investment it is being given by Government is testament to its value to business competitiveness.

How do I find out more about using supercomputing technology for my business?
While purchasing a dedicated supercomputer is clearly out of the reach of most small companies, there are now a number of services in the UK where companies can purchase server time and access dedicated training and support.

Supercomputing services across the UK are expanding the amount of support available in recognition of the fact that many businesses have no experience of using this technology, meaning you don’t need any previous experience of supercomputing to enjoy its benefits.

Supercomputer services: Handy links

High Performance Computing (HPC) Wales – http://www.hpcwales.co.uk/
Supercomputing Scotland – http://www.supercomputingscotland.org/
Sci-Tech Daresbury – http://www.sci-techdaresbury.com/
Irish Centre for High-End Computing – http://www.ichec.ie/

Read more:
Businesses don’t need to be super-sized to super-compute

Smart companies keep a close eye on their competition. Now a new iOS and Android app called Perch claims it can make that task dead simple.

Instead of hopping between Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare, and various daily deal sites to track what your competitors are up to, Perch shows you all of this data in one place, reports Inc.

How It Works

Perch is powered by Foursquare so it’s location-aware. When you first launch it, the app asks you to identify your company either via a list of nearby businesses to choose from, or by manually entering it into the search bar. From there, Perch provides a list of relevant companies near your or company’s location.

You can put your rivals on a watch list that will show you at a glance if they’ve put out a recent promotion or social post. You can also set Perch to email you daily or weekly reports that summarize what your competition has been up to online.

A New Kind of Competitive Research

Perry Evans, CEO of Closely, the digital marketing firm that developed Perch, says during the process of creating it the company followed the behaviors of about two dozen small businesses, looking at things like how they digest digital marketing noise, evaluate competitor activity, and determine what they should do themselves.

He says Closely found small businesses are very focused on several themes of relevant marketplace information.

Social media is one. “They either feel like they don’t understand it or they feel inadequate in their current Facebook marketing or Twitter marketing. They don’t quite get what they should be doing so they’re very curious to see what other people are doing,” he says.

Competitor promotions and daily deals are another big thing companies like to track. “We had one restaurant owner that spent over two hours a day going from site to site seeing what his competitors were doing on their Yelp profile and promotions, browsing through email lists of daily deals to see who’s doing a deal today,” Evans says. As a result, Closely designed Perch to include a relevant stream that combines location and category so owners can monitor promotions and social marketing. It also aggregates daily deal information from more than 800 sites across more than 110 cities through a Yipit integration.

Closely also found that small businesses react viscerally to Yelp data. “Watching reviews of their own business but also watching reviews of their competitive businesses was very important to them.”

Get Perch for free at in the Apple App Store or in Google Play.

Read more:
Want to spy on rivals? There’s an app for that!

Server load balancing doesn’t sound the most exciting or sexy IT topic for discussion, but bear with me. Until recently, load balancing was something only large enterprises needed to worry about; viewed as nothing more than a costly and unnecessary expense for most SMEs.

But that was back when the Internet was emerging and most SMEs ran their businesses using just a couple of servers. Today, the number of servers used by SMEs has multiplied, while at the same time web traffic has grown exponentially, putting a strain on networks and resources.

So what is load balancing? In effect, load balancers are like the traffic police; they keeping the traffic moving by directing and sharing internal network traffic and incoming connections across multiple servers.

A load balancer solution allows you to plan for handling increased web or network traffic by ensuring that it is directed to servers that are performing best and have spare capacity, based on factors such as concurrent connections and CPU/memory utilisation. And if a server or application fails, the user is automatically re-routed to another functioning server, providing a seamless experience for the user.

This growth in traffic that is driving the need for load balancing is in part the result of more back-end applications, such as sales and order processing, customer relationship management, HR and billing.

These are critical business applications where reliability, scalability and performance are essential. Furthermore, a server that keeps timing-out because it can’t cope with the level of Internet visitors and e-commerce transactions will not help your sales, image or reputation.

To further enhance and secure the user experience, particularly for transaction-based web services, some load balancers also enable processor-intensive encryption/decryption processes to be removed from the servers. This offloading dramatically increases web server performance, while decreasing the time and costs associated secure e-commerce.

The Microsoft Factor
Microsoft also has a hand in driving the demand for server load balancing as SMEs migrate to Exchange 2010 email services. The list of changes Microsoft has made to its core server architecture in Exchange 2010 includes the use of Exchange Client Access Server (CAS) to handle client connections. This makes load balancing necessary to automatically re-route and reconnect users to optimised servers to avoid poor performance and deliver high availability.

For example, when Hyundai UK decided it was time to retire its old Lotus Notes platform and migrate to the new Microsoft Exchange 2010 solution, it had to be a smooth transition and deliver a fast, reliable and resilient service. The new Exchange system supports 200 users split between four sites as well as the remote Field Team that looks after the Hyundai dealership network.

To run the new Microsoft Exchange 2010 platform, the Hyundai IT team built two virtual Exchange servers based on VMWare and installed a KEMP LoadMaster hardware load balancer – Microsoft Certified for use with Exchange 2010 – to ensure that email users get the best experience and optimised performance.

Hyundai configured the new email service and shut down its old Notes system on a Friday evening and had Exchange up and running for Monday morning with no loss of email. In addition to providing load balancing between the two virtual servers, the load balancer also provides built-in SSL acceleration. “Load balancing is a core part of our Exchange 2010 solution now and into the future as the business in the UK continues to expand,” said OJ Chakrabarti, systems & infrastructure manager, Hyundai UK.

But as well as the migration to Exchange 2010, many SMEs adopting Microsoft SharePoint and Lync Server unified messaging technologies are discovering the need for load balancing. For example,
Lync has to support real-time VOIP traffic flows that are jitter- and latency-sensitive. In fact, Microsoft increasingly recommends the use of server load balancing to optimise performance and resilience of all these applications.

The complexity and scale of technology required to run today’s SMEs has brought with it many new challenges to deliver performance, high availability and security, but cost is always a key factor. While large enterprise load balancing solutions have been too expensive and complex for most SMEs, there is a new generation of affordable hardware or virtual load balancers aimed at this market. SME IT is the same as enterprise IT in everything except scale; and if SMEs want the functionality and quality that enterprise CIOs take for granted, load balancing has to be part of the equation.

Read more:
Keep IT moving