How to judge a good web designer.

Business owners that are looking for getting a website designed must do a thorough market survey and select the best website designer, who gives them value for money and helps them achieve the desired objectives. While considering a website designer or website developer, there are two aspects that you must focus on: his technical expertise and the soft skills.
While you can be certain of one’s technical expertise by browsing through their website, work portfolio and by communicating with their clients, you still need to ensure how well they communicate with you. The way a web designer interacts with his clients suggests how well he knows the business and the skills of handling his clients.
When planning to hire a web designer or developer, you must consider the following points to ascertain that you are making the right choice:

• Website designer or a Graphic Designer: It might be shocking for you, but there are many graphic designers who claim to be website designers, without knowing the actual difference between the two domains. Such designers end up creating beautiful and visually appealing websites, using high-quality images and graphics, but without any functionality. Such websites can only be seen as a piece of art and are of no use for businesses looking to promote their products and services on the Web.


• Does my web designer understand my business? It is important that your web designer has good business knowledge. This is important as only a website developer who understands your business will be able to come up with a website design that suits your business and your industry. Your website should send the right signals to your existing and potential customers. If you make products for left hand basket weavers and all the images depicted on your website show people using right hands then your prospective customers may take offense. OK I hear you, the example I chose is a bad one but I am sure you understood my point. You have to make sure that your website designer understands your target market.


• Lateral thinking is the key:  Your website developer should be able to think laterally. Website designers should be able to improvise. They should be able to develop a website that can stand out from others. Website developers should be able to develop functionality and features that give distinct identity to your business. Think about your website as your sales person. Would you hire a sales person who is un-imaginative and is unable to differentiate your products and services from competition? The answer I am sure is No. So why would you have a website that is similar to thousand others.


• Do you believe in relationships? You will have a long-term relationship with your website developer. Thus, it is very important that your website designer believes in forming long-term relationships with the client. As your business grows and your website becomes popular, you will want to add new features to your website and it could be very costly if you cannot get the original website developer who built your site to update it for you. That’s why it is important to ensure that you can work with your web designer for the long-term.


• Examples of website designs: The first thing to do when you meet a web design expert is to see his previous work. This not only shows his website design skills but also tells the customer they are dealing with a web development firm or web designer that/who has experience and skills to fulfil their web design needs. This is probably the most important aspect to be considered. If the web designer you are dealing with doesn’t have any work to show you, or they cannot produce a few websites they have done entirely by themselves, you should be careful in dealing with them. When you look at the work portfolio, consider the following questions- What do their website development portfolio tells you? Are the web designs clean and professional? Are the websites easy to navigate?


• Get some references: Some people might ask about the validity of this point ( as they may say that their needs are totally different to other businesses). The reason you should always talk to the previous clients of the website design firm you are dealing with is to ensure that you are getting what you have been promised. Talking to previous clients will tell you about their experiences. Some questions you should ask the past clients of the website development firm you are dealing with are:

Outsourcing projects at an affordable cost

1. Freelancer

Freelancer (formerly GetAFreelancer) is the world's largest outsourcing and crowd sourcing marketplace for small business. There are 2,451,843 employers and freelancers connected globally from over 234 countries and regions. Freelance projects cover fields of software, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering and the sciences, sales and marketing, and accounting and legal services.

2. Joomlancers

Joomlancer is regarded as one of the best places for Joomla experts to get high paid jobs. Projects on Freelancers are mainly related to Joomla and Mambo, mostly customizing Joomla! templates or developing extensions, but you still find other types of projects here like design, translation or something like that. Joomlancer is said to be less competitive compared to other freelance marketplaces, only ten projects are posted daily yet the fee is quite interesting.

3. Elance

Elancer, based in California, has been available on the World Wide Web since 1999. Elancer tends to attract employers with a higher budget because of the 10% upload fee per project. On other sites, they normally offer free uploading. It might be good news for freelancers working in more developed countries like US or Canada as they don't have to compete with freelancers from less developed nations such as India, China and Vietnam.
Generally speaking, Elancer is a good marketplace for employers with big budgets looking for quality freelancers.

4. Odesk

Odesk has an online tracking system, which makes it stand out from the crowd. This system checks employees' work every ten minute so that their work is assured to be under progress. This freelance marketplace is different from other sites, which is a good for employers who prefer to pay per hour rather than by project.
Odesk does not charge membership fees to providers. They charge providers 10% of the project fee paid to them instead. Employers can use Odesk for free. Also, Odesk has an online ticket submission support form, which usually takes around one day to get the ticket request submitted back.

5. Scriptlance

The most noticeable thing about Scriptlance is its free registration and free monthly fees. In general, this is a competitive marketplace with hundreds of projects posted every day and thousands of freelancers bidding. Scriptlance provides some withdrawal options including E-gold. Another good thing is its low commissions, which is only five percent of the project amount (minimal fee $5).

6. Vworker

RentACoder is now renamed as vWorker freelance marketplace which stands for "virtual worker". The reason is that freelancers joining this site are not only coders but also experts from other fields like design, writing, assistants and more. Vworker has had some changes, one of which is the payment method called pay-for-time that lets you do both. This method saves money and helps both buyers and sellers have more flexibility in their work.
The site has changed its domain with the resulting negative impact on the Google page rank of vWorker now (it's now quite low). Some people feel hesitant about vWorker due to this reason. However, if someone has experience with Rentacoder, vWorker is absolutely no different in quality.

7. Guru

Guru is one of the world's largest online marketplaces for freelancers with more than one million registered members and more than 8000 projects posted monthly. This site focuses on three main areas: Technology, Creative Arts and Business but over 220 skill-based service categories. The website was founded long time ago in 1997 and operated in Pittsburgh, Pennsyvania now.

8. Project4hire

Project4hire is free of charge for clients to post projects and for contractors to bid for those projects. Only a small fee is withdrawn from the contractors' projects.
You will find here OsCommerce Programmers, Wordpress developers, vBulletin skin designers, Joomla coders, Drupal programmers and xHTML/CSS coders and more.You can also find translation services and translation jobs. You can find plenty of freelancers in Project4hire.

9. iFreelance

In iFreelancer, registered freelancers have to pay membership fees for the services. The basic membership is $4.69 per month, silver for $6.95 per month and gold for $9 per month. The higher the membership, the more benefits you get. Especially, freelancers don't have to pay a commission on what they earn. This site has got a lot of trust from buyers and freelancers and built a strong relationship between them.

10. BizReef

Bizreef is an Israeli owned Freelance Marketplace launched in October 2007 by MeVideo Ltd. The coolest thing about Bizreef is that it has an Escrow system that guarantees that freelancers will receive order services as well as protection of their rights. The payment is kept in Escrow and just released after freelancers approve their delivered work. You can feel safe with transaction. Plus, Bizreef provides a bunch of projects every day that attracts many freelancers in different parts of the world.

Marketing Intelligence

 


Marketing Intelligence (MI) is the information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics. Marketing intelligence is necessary when entering a foreign market. Marketing Intelligence is not the same as Market Intelligence (MARKINT).

Marketing Intelligence determines the intelligence needed, collects it by searching environment and delivers it to marketing managers who need it. Marketing intelligence software can be deployed using an on-premises or Software as a Service (SaaS, or cloud-based) model. These systems take data from disparate data sources, like web analytics, Business Intelligence, call center and sales data, which often come separate reports, and put them into a single environment. Marketing managers can design reports that correlate and visualize data coming from a variety of departments and sources (even, in some cases, external data.) This allows them to see current key performance indicators in real time (or as quickly as sources provide data) and analyze trends, rather than wait for analysts to deliver periodic reports.

Marketing Intelligence systems are designed to be used by marketing managers and often viewed by employees throughout an organization. They may have user interfaces that closer resemble consumer software than the software around individual data sources, which are designed for use by analysts. Business Intelligence for example, can collect highly accurate, timely, granular data, but often requires IT support to build and edit custom reports.

Organizationally, Marketing Intelligence can be the name of the department that performs both the market intelligence and competitor analysis roles. Competitive Intelligence describes the broader discipline of researching, analyzing and formulating data and information from the entire competitive environment of any organization. Business Intelligence of any kind may also be their responsibility, in tandem with (or solely performed by) the Finance department, for measuring market share and setting growth targets, the Mergers & Acquisition group for exploring acquisition opportunities, the Legal department to protect the organization's assets or R&D for cross-company comparison of innovation trends and the discovery of opportunities through innovative differentiation.

How to Make Money on Twitter

 

Twitter is no doubt a great social networking site, and is a great opportunity for people to make money online. There is a lot that you can do for your business on Twitter, and if you engage the right strategy, you can be able to make a tidy sum of money on this social networking site. What many people don’t know is that it is possible to make money on Twitter, and those that realize this are laughing all the way to the bank. Here are a few tips that you can use to enable you to get a piece of the Twitter action.

The first way, and the most common to make money on Twitter is to sell you products on the social networking site. If for example you have 20,000 followers (which is actually quite possible), and are able to make a sale on 1% of your followers, then this will translate to 200 sales. It is therefore quite clear that this is a great opportunity for you to market and sell you products, and make a lucrative business out of it.

Big businesses are also able to earn money on Twitter. This is because Twitter offers a huge number of people that are willing to share their views on certain products or services. Once you identify what you need in terms of what the market is like, you can be able to post surveys and questionnaires which can be invaluable to your business in terms of streamlining your business strategy to better fit the prevailing market share and consumer behavior. This is a great way to tap in to the human power of Twitter, and is definitely a great way to up profits for big businesses.

Social media marketing is another great way to earn money on Twitter. Companies and businesses are constantly on the lookout for marketers this is a great way to make money if you know what you are doing. In this case, you will be literally paid to tweet. You however need to make your messages personal in order to appeal to your audience. Rather than go for the automatic updates options, it is much better to do it yourself, as people are much more interested in personal updates and updates that reflect personal opinion.

My life as a Graphic Designer

Stare at my computer screen for hours.
Music  b l a s t i n g.
Ignore my phone.
Talk to myself.
Outloud.

Teach myself frames.
Coppying pasting the frames
playing the frames one by one
Set up my first successful frame set.
Do a happy dance!

Draw an icon.
Redraw it.
Draw it again.
And again.
And again, and again...
Realize the fifth version looks exactly like the second one.

Take a break.
Chase the puppy.
Sit outside.
Decide on the third version.
Or was it the fourth one?

Thank God every day for Dreamweaver.
Thank God every day for Photoshop.
Thank God every day for Adobe Flash Pro.
Thank God every day for the way my brain works!
Thank God every day that I was not born in the dark ages.

Check the time.
2 a.m.
Go to sleep.
TRY to go to sleep.
Try to quit designing websites in my head.
Try to not have a nightmare about my computer crashing.

Wake up.
Drink coffee.
Surf the web for inspiration.
Drink another cup of coffee :)
Wish I could do the work that others can do.
Feel proud for what I can do.

Internet blackout for thousands coming Monday

 

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hundreds of thousands of Internet users whose computers are infected with a particularly nasty virus will be unable to access the Web starting on Monday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation will shut down Internet servers that it temporarily set up to support those affected by malicious software, called DNSChanger. Turning off those servers will knock all those still infected offline.
Over the past five years, a group of six Estonian cybercriminals infected about 4 million computers around the world with DNSChanger. The malware redirected infected users' Web searches to spoofed sites with malicious advertisements.
In November 2011, the FBI and some overseas partners arrested those responsible, commandeered their servers, and attempted to warn those affected to get rid of the virus.
The FBI did not immediately take down the rogue servers, as infected computers would have lost Internet access, an FBI spokesman said.
To remedy the problem, the FBI had the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium set up temporary servers. That way, computer owners would have time to get rid of their malware.
The servers were supposed to be shut down in March, but hundreds of thousands remained infected. Nearly 304,000 computers worldwide (about 70,000 in the United States) still had the virus in mid-June, according to the FBI's latest report.
The FBI decided to give people even more time to check for the malware, extending the deadline until July. The agency now says the time has come to cut the cord, and the emergency servers will be shut down on Monday.
Though the FBI tried to send notifications to those infected, it could not identify all of them, a spokesman said.

What Microsoft Got Wrong on Windows

 

When you want to make smart decisions for your own company, it's often instructive to see what the big boys are doing, both right and wrong.  And when it comes to branding, Microsoft is an excellent example of what not to do.
I'm referring specifically to the company's ill-fated attempts to extend the Windows brand into product categories beyond the PC.  Microsoft keeps trying to do this, and it keeps falling flat, because they've lost track of what's important about brand: the customer experience.
String of Failures
Every time Microsoft has tried to extend the Windows brand name, they've come up with a loser.
For example, when Microsoft launched an new operating system for ultra-small computers in the late 1990s, it named that operating system "Windows CE." Even though the environment was heavily promoted, Windows CE never took off–and Microsoft lost an early advantage what eventually morphed into the tablet market, now dominated by Apple and Google.
Another more recent failure is "Windows Live," the collective name for about a dozen applications, web services, and mobile services launched in 2005.  Microsoft recently announced that it's retiring the "Windows Live" brand and folding most of them into the Windows 8 operating system.
Writing in the New York Times, author Randall Stross credits the failure of the "Windows Live" brand extension to a lack of consumer enthusiasm about the Windows product line in general.  As he put it, "the brand love just wasn't there."
And that's the fundamental mistake that Microsoft keeps making–and that you need to understand.
Windows Is an Albatross
It's been a long time since I've heard anybody, except the very occasional programmer, praise Windows. In fact, it seems like every time a new version of Windows is released, the main selling point seems to be that "this time Microsoft got it right." Which is a message that gets kinda old after you've heard it five or six times.
Let's face it: From the days of the blue screen of death to today's virus infections, Windows has remained workmanlike, at best. Consumers tolerate Windows, but they don't seem to love it.  And that's been true since the 1990s.
Don't get me wrong.  I'm still using my Windows machine for most of my writing, just like I have for decades. I actually think Microsoft's Office products are pretty darn decent, although they do suffer a bit from the occasional feature creep. However, I no longer own a notebook computer (I used to keep two), and I'm seriously considering whether my current Windows desktop will be my last.  And I don't think I'm particularly unusual in feeling this way, based upon the trends in Windows sales.
Time to Scrap Windows?
There comes a time when a company needs to admit that a brand has outlived its usefulness. Windows has, in my opinion, simply acquired so much baggage that Microsoft would be better off scrapping the brand (along with the code) and simply starting over.
Of course, the likelihood of that happening is virtually nil. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at his keynote at the most recent Consumer Electronics Show: "There's nothing more important at Microsoft than Windows."
But he's wrong; there is something more important.  And that's exactly the lesson that the Windows branding mess offers smaller firms.
True Meaning of Brand
Brand is always a reflection of a product. If the customer's experience with a product line is positive, then the brand is strengthened.
Over time, a string of positive experiences creates a great brand that's resilient, in the sense that consumers will forgive a lemon or two. Apple, for instance, has released a few turkeys (think iPod HiFi) without damaging the brand's overall luster.
Similarly, if the customer's experience with a product line is lousy, then the brand is weakened. However, it takes a long string of great products to get consumers to forget a bad experience. Witness how long it's taken for American car companies to live down the era of "planned obsolescence."
Microsoft's huge mistake has been to consider the Windows brand more important than the customer's experience with the product.  Since that experience is often negative (especially when compared to new environments), it's a fool's errand to try to extend the Windows brand into other product categories.