Category: Web Development

Top 5 Reasons Why Startups Should Choose WordPress

November 30, 2016

Though not as glamorous as some of the new technologies, WordPress as a CMS platform has been one of the most trusted in business circles. Why? It is not as complex or robust as some of its peers such as Joomla, Drupal and others. Yet, WordPress brings a special kind of simplicity to the table that is hard to ignore. This is precisely why WordPress-hosted websites continue to remain popular among not only startups but also major news websites and publishing companies. WordPress as a content management system has already proved itself, with more than a decade of empirical evidence of its efficacy. Today, WordPress continues to be one of the most popular CMS and it will remain so even in the future. In this article, let us discuss a few more reasons why startups should focus more on WordPress-built websites than anything else. Easy to Install Most people who start businesses do not have technical skills. This means, they will often have to rely upon expensive developers and coders to get their websites up and running. However, choosing WordPress has its own benefits. All one needs to do is buy a domain, host it under a plan, and then do an automatic install of WordPress from the CPanel. The next step is to install a theme that one may like. And the website is already hosted! All these things will not take more than an hour or two, and there is no technical skill required to install WordPress. Moreover, future updates are regularly sent to the website’s dashboard, and all that one needs to do is just click on the ‘update now’ button, and the website gets updated. There is nothing that is remotely difficult in installing a WordPress website. This is probably why it is important for startups to use WordPress. By using WordPress, startups will avoid unnecessary installation costs that they will otherwise have to pay, if they go ahead with full-scale web development. Very SEO-friendly One of the biggest problems that new businesses face is lack of visibility. In a world that is hugely dominated by content, search engine optimization has not lost its importance. Instead, it has taken on a new level of importance. SEO tactics are no more shady practices involving keywords. Instead, search engine optimization is built on using the best keywords that suit a business and building great content around it. WordPress helps startups to key in meta-data, keywords and other such information while also ensuring that blog posts and articles are search engine optimized. Moreover, the way WordPress is built is quite SEO friendly. This helps websites that run on WordPress to appear more frequently in Google search results. This is something that new businesses desperately need. If they receive even a small push to becoming visible in search results, they will gain quite a lot. Certainly, WordPress and its SEO-friendly build helps startups to gain new leads, drive more traffic and ultimately, increase profits and revenue. No need for technical or coding skills Usually, startups do not have a big budget for hiring developers or professional designers. They usually prefer to build a website on their own. This is great if the startup owner knows a little bit of coding or if he or she is a coder. However, a majority of startup owners are not coders and they simply do not have the resources to hire professional web developers. WordPress comes to the rescue of these people as you simply do not need to have any HTML or PHP knowledge to set up the website. All you need to do is simply install the website, and start publishing posts or filling up content. As there are tutorials available on YouTube and elsewhere, anyone can simply start setting up a WordPress website that looks as professional as any other. This is one of the reasons why WordPress is so popular among startup owners. Customer support is always available Though WordPress is open source, it has a network of hundreds of thousands of developers on its forums and groups, many of whom provide free advice and support. While it may take some time to get the help that is needed, free support is always available to those who are looking for it. For those who prefer custom solutions, there is always the option of custom WordPress development, which comes with customer support, maintenance and other features. Startups can go this route as even this will cost a lot less than building an entire website from the scratch. Used all over the world WordPress is used all over the world, and your freelance writer probably needs no introduction to it. If you are planning to set up a website and have someone fill up the content, WordPress is one of the best tools around. Almost every content writer knows how to use WordPress, and you simply have to give them your tasks and your blog or website will be updated with content regularly. WordPress is a universally used content management system (CMS), and if your website ever runs into trouble, you will always find a developer who will be able to fix it for you for a very low price. This is one of the reasons why WordPress continues to be popular among startup owners. WordPress is one of the best solutions for those on a budget If you have recently started a company and are looking for setting up a website, WordPress is a great option if you are on a budget. WordPress is not only cost-effective, it is quite robust too. Firstly, it is easy to install and you will not need to deploy expensive software programs. Second, it is SEO-friendly, which means, you will be discovered easily. Third, you do not need to learn HTML or coding in order to use WordPress. Fourth, it is always easy to find customer support for a small cost. Finally, WordPress is universally used even by large companies. If you need customization

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How Magento Can Kick-start Your E-commerce Store

April 4, 2016

If you were planning to start an online store or an E-commerce website, you might probably be thinking about Magento. Magento is an open source E-commerce platform that holds a market share of almost 30%. It is known for its versatility, ease of use and security. With PHP programming language as its base, Magento has come a long way from the initial days when it was released by a company called Varien in 2008. This open source platform has really grown in the last few years and is currently one of the most popular platforms. In this article, let us take a look at how Magento can help you to kick-start your Ecommerce store: 1. Magento is versatile Magento as a platform is very versatile. You can easily design your store the way you want. It can also be set up for a small or a large store. It can handle complexities of all kinds, making it truly versatile. 2. Magento is affordable Being an open source platform, Magento is affordable. It might cost you money to get it installed by independent professionals but the software itself does not cost any money. It is important to note that Magento also does not require a lot of maintenance, additionally cutting down your expenses. 3. It is user-friendly Magento is very user-friendly and comes with an interface that is easy to handle. You do not have to be a professional to tweak it though it helps to hire one. It can be easily used by even those who do not have any particular software skills. If you are looking for an Ecommerce platform that is simple and easy to use, Magento serves the purpose. 4. It is business friendly and can be customized Magento comes with a number of business features that will appeal to companies. It has easy cart systems and checkout processes that will ensure that more products are sold, rather than be left behind in shopping carts. Moreover, it can easily be customized to suit your needs and tastes. 5. Magento is highly secure When it comes to online shopping all of us are worried about security. Magento ensures that your new store is as secure as those that have been around for a long time. With its focus on digital security and privacy, you can have a sigh of relief and continue to build your E-commerce store, always knowing that your customers’ details are safely stored. Looking forward As seen from the points described above, Magento is one of the most popular E-commerce solutions in the world today. It is an open source program that is cost-effective and user-friendly. It also comes with business features and if you need more, you can always get it customized by professionals. Most importantly, Magento provides the kind of security that is required for a fledgling E-commerce start-up. Indeed, it continues to be preferred by most small and medium business all around the world. In short, if you are looking at starting an E-commerce website or a simple online store, Magento will do what is required for your goal.

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Why Customizing Open-source Applications Is Good For Your Business

February 17, 2016

Most business clients often overlook the appeal of open source software programs. In their minds, open source is tacky, free and not worth a second look unless a business is crumbling and cannot afford proprietary applications. This is very far from the truth. WordPress, one of the best content management systems in the world, is open source. A number of other software programs that you probably believe are proprietary are also open source. CPython, for example, is open source too. What businesses do not realize is that open source platforms have unique advantages that are actually good for businesses. They come with a community support system that is not really possible in proprietary platforms. Open source applications thus designed are actually more advanced than many private apps because developers from around the world put their heads together to create them. One of the major complaints that businesses have of open source platforms is that they are ‘common’. With a little customization, any open source software can be deemed good enough for corporate use, and that is a fact that is understood by a number of people. Customizing helps more than you might imagine While customization services do cost money, the versatility and cross-platform abilities of open source apps cannot be discounted. Even if we take the example of just WordPress, it is quite clear that themes do cost money. When we choose to customize the themes, they will cost a little more than that. In spite of all this, WordPress continues to be one of the most widely used content management systems around the world. Obviously, there are certain advantages to using open source platforms. While we agree basic open source apps may not be great for businesses, customizing them and using them to your benefit will help you to achieve your business targets easily. All that is required is to find a good consultancy that has experience customizing open source software programs for their business clients. In this article, let us take a look at why you should be customizing open source software applications and why it is good for your business. More people than you can imagine currently use open source software programs More than 86% of companies in non-technical sectors use some level of open source software within their IT departments. This is because, open source apps reduce supplier risks. They are also more innovative in nature thanks to the community spirit that drives open source platforms. However, because open source is available to everyone, your competitors maybe looking at the same software program too, much to your discontent. In order to ensure that you have an obvious advantage over your competitors, you can choose to customize your open source apps. Customizing not only involves changing the look and feel of the software but also certain functionalities. After all, it is important to understand that open source programs come with common codes but these codes can be customized to suit your unique requirements. Some of the obvious advantages of customizing open source programs are as follows: 1.      Cost-effective While customizing does cost money, we must remember that it will still cost a lot cheaper than what it probably would if you choose to buy proprietary software solutions. Open source applications that are customized for your business will stand apart from that of your competitors and will also work out financially if you are struggling as a company. Moreover, cost benefits are higher in open source models as you not only save money on initial investments but also end up spending less on maintenance. A number of custom solutions allow you to seek third-party assistance from the open source community once the initial customizations are done. 2.      Access to open source community The open source community is large and vibrant and gathers professionals from all walks of life from across the world. This means, your app might have a bit of goodness from every tech culture possible in the world. Once you have an application built on an open source platform, you will also find it easier to approach any freelancer who works on these platforms in open source communities. It just makes things easier for you as a business owner. You will not have to depend on customer service provided by proprietary software platform vendors. That is a big benefit you might want to look at. 3.      Freedom from proprietary software solutions Proprietary software solutions seem attractive and may include customizations and after sales support. Yet, if you want to switch to a different platform, you will end up losing a lot of money that you initially would have invested. These solutions may not be compatible with other software solutions and you might need additional coding or development to make them compatible. It should also be mentioned that proprietary software solutions come with license agreements that will restrain you from making changes, in most cases, to the original software program. If you are looking for freedom, open source solutions are the way to go forward. 4.      Enhanced security It is a misconception that open source solutions do not offer the same kind of security that proprietary software platforms do. On the other hand, hundreds and thousands of developers work on these open source platforms and when there are security glitches, they immediately come to their notice. Regular patches that are released will help you to avoid security glitches that may arise in the future. You can also choose to encrypt your data at an additional cost as part of the customizations that you request from your vendor. All in all, open source software programs do not pose any security threats to your data. Prospects of using open source programs in future Certainly, as awareness increases, more people will begin to choose open source platforms to build their applications. All it probably requires is some customization work which can easily be done by professionals at a cost that is less than purchasing proprietary software programs. Moreover, using

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Avoid Disasters by Following These Cloud Security Practices

August 26, 2015

Cloud computing has made its place in IT industries, and a lot of companies are storing there data on the cloud. One of the major concerns that prevail is that of security. Security concerns related to cloud seem never ending, but they can’t be neglected as well. A lot of companies who want to use cloud hesitate due to the ambiguity about its security. One of the reasons for the skepticism is, most cloud computing models are based on a shared platform. This means, a company’s data is stored on a server which is also shared by another company. When a malicious company tries to steal data from another company, it could do so, provided it has the technology and capability to do it. However, in reality, this is not quite possible and is only a theoretical risk. While documented security lapses exist, they can always be attributed to the negligence factor or the lack of security measures factor. Taking responsibility Cloud security is a big task as it has different service types like PaaS, IaaS, external and internal. Moreover, you can follow certain security practices and discard your worries. Don’t think that handing over a function to a cloud provider is enough. You must manage it by using policies to secure and monitor. Before signing up with a cloud service you must also ensure that your internal security is up to date. “Cloud services cut both ways in terms of security: you get off-site backup and disaster recovery, but you entrust your secrets to somebody else’s hands”, said Barton Gellman and there is no better way to describe the condition of cloud users.  Although, you don’t have to worry about security measures anymore, follow the given security practices and be assured that you can now avoid security disasters. 1.      Secure-by-design approach Cloud stores tons of data and this creates a sense of worry for the companies about the security of their data. One of the best security practices is securing the data through the way it is designed. IT organizations should focus on finding controls to check the lack of direct access to information. By using the secure-by-design approach, the companies can secure foundation and approach security needs depending on the data present in the cloud. This also helps in implementing resiliency and audit capabilities. It also allows the companies to extend their ideas of secure cloud. 2.      Alternative deployment You can also try to identify alternative deployment locations which you can use as a security strategy. Once you find alternative deployment locations, you can redeploy your data easily. You should concentrate on finding new environments that can adapt to the company’s requirements. Organizations should look for vendors who do not create “lock-in” conditions of cloud. Flexibility gained by this can help organizations to respond to changing trends with minimal hindrance to running a business. 3.      Implement an active monitoring solution Availability or stable conditions of cloud regarding data content is crucial, if there  are problems in this sector, you may lose many of your customers. You can avoid such a situation by implementing an active monitoring system which can have automated procedures to respond to related instances, thus, ensuring customer satisfaction and avoiding loss of customers. Active monitoring helps you to identify problems as and when they are about to occur. This may also help in averting threats and taking preventive measures. One of the advantages of cloud computing is, you can understand potential threats even before they occur, provided you spend your time and resources to avert threats. 4.      Investigate the contracts Before signing contracts, make sure you scrutinize the contracts carefully. Check whether the service provider will take responsibility for your data, and will they provide security guarantees? Is the service transparent about security events and responses? Will they help you in monitoring by providing monitoring tools or will they monitor for you? How often will they send you reports? If you terminate the services then what happens to your data? These are the questions that you should know answers to before even deciding to choose a particular vendor. Security is the most important link to connect to your present and potential clients. Don’t commit blunders when it comes to investigating contracts. While most vendors stick to industry standard ethics and codes, you must speak to an attorney and have him or her run through the contract if you do not understand legal parlance. 5.      Evaluate your own compliance Once you choose a service provider and are satisfied with all the clarifications, don’t just accept the provider’s standard contracts. You can always negotiate and get the best deal drafted for you. Conduct a thorough research and find out what terms suit you the best. Hire a team of lawyers who are compliance savvy to negotiate contracts in a way that you can reap benefits out of it. Can also opt for hybrid model where you can negotiate the control over and the data can be stored internally. It is very important to be satisfied with security on your terms to maintain a healthy productivity; otherwise, you will waste your energy on worrying about security and not concentrate on production or growth of the company. Hiring attorneys can help you to avoid many risks that companies often feel trapped into. Moreover, it helps you to evaluate your own compliance as well, to the contract. 6.      Visibility It is a basic thing to understand that you can only control the things that you can see. Hence, companies must ensure visibility and that too all the time around the clock. You must understand what you have got, how it works and what it’s doing all the time. It may seem very trivial, but with the automated, elastic and highly complex virtual infrastructure, visibility has become a challenge. It won’t be wrong if we call it a blight of modern virtual technology. Once you understand the nuances of your data, infrastructure, applications and users, you can chalk out a

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Can WordPress Be Your Main Website Platform?

August 14, 2015

If you do not know coding and you want a powerful website in a short time, WordPress could be a good idea. WordPress, though not as powerful as a full-fledged website designed by professionals, can be your option if you are a small business unit. In fact, even large media houses use WordPress as their primary platform. What started as a blogging tool has now grown to be a full-fledged content management system (CMS) that is powering several hundreds of thousands of websites. WordPress’s success stories can help you achieve success too, if you know what you are looking for, and if you are clear about your goals. WordPress comes with a number of themes, layouts and options to customize with which you can go ahead and create websites that look as professional as other websites. It might only become a problem if you happen to become a larger corporation. When that happens, you could integrate professional web development and design services in order to rectify WordPress’s deficits. At the end of the day, you need to understand that WordPress started as a blogging tool has now received  a CMS status. Yet, sometimes, it may be a better idea to use other options such as Joomla, Drupal or any other CMS. What can a WordPress powered website do for you? A WordPress powered website can have its own static page, a blog section and some sort of custom content. Themes and plug-ins allow you to have contact forms, slideshows and support for media. WordPress plug-ins are godsend because there are plug-ins for every requirement that a website administrator might have. All you need to do is, go to your admin area and find which plug-in helps you the most. In fact, plug-ins help you to customize your website and add custom content. A little template coding can fix most of the issues you may find with WordPress themes. If you need help with WordPress customization, you could also contact one of the professional agencies. It does not take a lot of time to customize WordPress and it can be done safely at an affordable cost. Moreover, WordPress can also handle high traffic rates and this is one of the reasons why publishing companies use it for their purposes. This just adds to the belief that WordPress can safely be used for all kinds of websites as long as it is not way too complex or does not have special requirements. What about customization? WordPress can easily be customized with the knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP. If you do not have knowledge about these three languages, you could learn just a little bit. Even a little HTML coding skills can help you to fix many of the smaller issues that your website may be facing. Knowing a little PHP also helps with websites, just like CSS helps with layouts. If you are unable to do it yourself, professional WordPress customization agencies can do it for you. Many of the themes come with certain kinds of licenses. Ensure that you have the license to alter a theme. It could turn out to be a legal issue if you purchase a theme on a non-editable license and then proceed further to make changes to it. Ensure that you have full control over the theme that you buy. This will help you to avoid untoward incidents later, which could involve legal disputes. WordPress themes are affordable and they satisfy even the most difficult of clients. If you need help in finding a WordPress theme that works for you, you could speak to professionals who will be able to help you better. Looking forward WordPress is firmly entrenched as a reliable and helpful CMS in today’s design world. It is not uncommon to find WordPress-run websites every other time. If you are thinking about using WordPress as your primary CMS, you could very well do it. However, speak to a professional agency which can help you make the right decision and tell you about other suitable options as well. At the end of the day, the website should serve your purpose and only a professional agency will be able to help you make that decision.

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How to Optimize Landing Pages for SEO

July 29, 2015

Landing pages are very important tools in marketing your products or services or calling your prospects to take action. In fact, most landing pages ask a visitor to take some kind of action. It could be subscribing to a newsletter, reading a message, sharing a link or even going ahead and making a purchase. Landing pages gained popularity simply because they are akin to main websites but have a specific function – call to action. Thus, the importance of landing pages is only growing across the world. With their increasing importance, there also comes the need to design them in a better and more accessible manner. This involves building landing pages according to the changing needs of SEO. As we all know, SEO is something that continuously changes over a period of time. In this article, let us take a look at how you can optimize your landing pages for better SEO and ultimately, get more people to respond to your call to action. 1. Focus on your URL When it comes to landing pages, we often think it is not important to focus on the URL. The idea is, the URL of a landing page is unimportant because one just has to link it from an external website where no one will actually see the actual URL. They would either click on a banner, an image or some sort of textual matter. However, it is very important to have a unique URL for your landing page. It is important to have a custom tail end, which is not only descriptive but also specific. Of course, you need not be stuffing your landing page’s URL with keywords though it helps to keep it descriptive. If it is a Twitter campaign, you could have a /twitter-campaign as your custom tail end. If you have a number of such landing pages, it makes sense to organize all your landing pages with custom URLs so that you can identify your landing pages in a clearer way. It is important to install Google Analytics script on every landing page so that you can measure and track your progress as it happens. A number of people overlook the importance of custom URLs in landing pages but now it is quite clear that they are important. 2. Maintain brand uniformity There are a number of companies, which fail to realize the importance of brand uniformity. They have landing pages designed by someone else in a completely different manner because they fancied a new design. They are making a fatal error. A landing page is a subsidiary of the main page, even if it is able to stand on its own. Thus, you need to ensure that your landing page has the same design, color scheme, font and format as your main page or any other online property. In fact, you can use your landing page to get people to visit your main website. When your website looks completely different from your landing page, the visitor might find it jarring. Even psychologically, it creates a sense of disconnect, which you don’t want to let happen. A landing page needs to, thus, have your core message and core branding factors inscribed into it. Always ensure that you keep your landing page’s design in sync with your regular branding. This helps to keep your landing pages, your website, your blogs and just about anything else in a cohesive fashion, tying everything to the company you are eventually trying to promote. 3. Focus on your content Your copy need not be verbose and professorial. Nobody has the time to read through a lot of statistics and figures when they visit your landing page. Your landing page’s copy is either persuasive or it is not. If it is not, people will simply not spend more time on your landing page, leave alone responding to your call to action. The trick is to write copy that is simple, minimalist and effective. It need not be concise and you need to hire experienced copywriters in order to achieve the intended result. You need not ever stuff your content with keywords and you need not use complex jargons. In fact, we can say that your landing page copy need to be similar to your web copy, albeit much more minimalist and simpler. Do not copy and paste all your landing page content from some other page of yours. This will affect not only your visitor’s perception but also a search engine’s idea of how unique your website is. Write copy in a persuasive way, which answers the questions you probably had asked when a prospect had clicked on the link. Ensure that your landing page answers the questions for which the prospects arrived on the page to begin with. 4. Keep the design minimalist While it is true that your landing page needs to look similar to your main website, it need not also have the same amount of images, texts and other content, which might distract the visitor from the main purpose – call to action. It is very important to keep the landing page plain and simple. This helps to keep the attention of visitors focused. Your landing page need not end up becoming a platform for you to brag, boast or promote aspects of your company that is not related with the actual purpose of the landing page. The design needs to be similar to the main website but it needs to be a stripped down version of it. Also, make sure that you do not ask too many questions to the prospect. Just asking them to fill out their first name, last name and email address would be sufficient. If you ask for too many pieces of information, they will simply close the page and move on to the next website. It is very important to not distract the visitor and ensure that they respond to your call to action. For this, you will need to keep the design as minimalistic and simplistic

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Indus Net Technologies(INT.) – Proud Digital Partner for ICC Website Revamping

July 21, 2015

Yet another feather in our hat! Indian Chamber of Commerce, the premier business and industry body in Eastern & North-Eastern India, launched its refurbished website yesterday; and team Indus Net Technologies(INT.) was the digital partner for this website revamp. ICC and Indus Net joined hands to give a facelift to the old website of ICC, with a brand new mobile-friendly design. This redesigning of the website was done keeping in mind the benefit of its members and staff & the Indian Entrepreneurs’ community at large. ICC partnered with Indus Net(INT.) for the full-scale redesign of their website, which has well-catered to people for the past six years, with a brand new design that includes contemporary responsive design trends. INT was chosen for this website revamp project because of its extensive experience in working with the Government and Public bodies. It has recently helped the District Administration of Bardhaman in designing and developing a mobile application known as ‘Smart Bardhaman’ for the citizens of the district. The citizen governance app was launched by Hon’ble Chief Minister of West Bengal, Smt. Mamata Banerjee. We have even been a part of Hon’ble Prime Minister’s visionary project ‘Digital India’. Team Indus Net Technologies has designed and developed the citizen governance mobile app ‘MyGov’, which was launched by the Prime Minister himself during the opening ceremony of ‘Digital India Week’. Aimed specifically at increasing the ease with which any member can interact with the Chamber, ICC decided to give its old website a refreshed and simplified look, combined with enhanced content & improved search functionality allowing members and even non-members to interact with the Chamber online very easily & in a better manner. Keeping this user experience firmly in mind and to make the website compatible with modernized browsers and mobile devices, team Indus Net(INT.) has redesigned the ICC website using HTML5. The restyled website boasts a modern, colourful design with easy navigation. It now showcases the happenings at different states separately and one can check them from the main website itself. New additions are event booking section with payment gateway integration and media section; and all of these newly added features enable members to submit event registrations, give access to newsletters and publications, help to check events calendar & much more directly from their own offices. To add onto this, members would be able to book auditoriums and reception rooms for business meetings & events at the chambers directly through this website shortly. Also, on the way is the mobile version of the same website for more accessibility. While giving the old ICC website the desired look, we have worked closely with Indian Chamber of Commerce. To quote Mr. Abhishek Rungta, Founder and CEO of INT, “It was really a great opportunity for team Indus Net to work in close association with ICC and help them achieve their goal of creating a website addressing the needs of the Chamber staff and members as well as the entire entrepreneur community in India.”

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How to A/B Test the Home Page of Your Media and Publishing Site?

June 29, 2015

With the onset of digital era, the most important challenge for the Media, Publishing and Entertainment (MPE) industry is to go digital. This newly evolved age has not just brought in a number of new challenges but has even changed the way this industry used to work. Presently, you as a part of this industry have to cope up with a completely new set of user behaviour and meet highly competitive industry standard; and the first thing that you need to do to capitalize new opportunities in this consumer-driven, fast-paced industry is to have a properly functioning home page, if not a easily navigable website. Now, how to know whether you have the perfectly running homepage for your website? It’s easy! All you need to do is A/B test the home page before launching it. Here are some excellent ideas that can help you A/B test your media, publishing and entertainment site’s home page: Testing a Home Page Being the point of entry to your website, the home page gives visitors an idea about your brand value and products & services offerings. Hence, it’s highly important to have a proper home page that can encourage return visits. Here is how to test the homepage of your website: Content that Encourages Return Visits It is said that “Content is the King”. So, the first thing that you need to ensure is that your home page has got content interactive enough to not just attract and engage visitors but even to force them to come back to your site again and again. It’s always better to use short content modules in media and publishing sites as the separate headings attract more attention. Once you become sure that your home page has got interactive content, check whether it is able to increase the number of return visits and page views of your website. Page Navigation Make sure that your home page allows visitors to navigate around the website by category, without having to click on any particular category. This helps visitors consider content that they otherwise wouldn’t have checked. Hover states are even quite effective for attracting visitors’ attention to sections, which they might not explicitly look at. Hence, before testing the hover state, ensure that it includes sub-categories, top stories and imagery. However, too many categories and sub-categories might have a negative effect. Once done with the categorization, check if it has increased your page views or decreased the bounce rate of your home page. Though the test might sound a little difficult, however, you can simplify it by deploying the following methods: Choosing top five clicked sections Selecting top sub-categories in each section Hover displaying of those sub-categories Value Propositions Value prop is another essential aspect to be considered while A/B testing your home page. After all, it is highly important to make the visitors realize what value they would get, if they subscribe to any of your online publications. However, make sure that the content of the main value propositions are descriptive and clear. Once you have promoted the value props of your home page, test the page with and without value props & check which one has an increased subscription conversion rate. Now that you know how to A/B test your home page to get a better customer attention, it is no longer difficult for you to take your publishing business to a new height by going digital. All you need to do is follow all the aforementioned steps carefully.`

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Platform as a Service: A Beginner’s Guide

June 24, 2015

Platform as a service is the most difficult and confusing to characterize as it is often mistaken with Infrastructure as a service or other cloud computing services. The key factor that defines PaaS is the fact that it allows developers to build and deploy web applications on a hosted Infrastructure. PaaS has an elastic quality that helps in expanding the cloud to accommodate infinite data. PaaS has its own unique set of characteristics that makes your experience of using Platform as a Service more enjoyable one and it can save your time and cost. With increasing costs and unavailability of resources, models such as the PaaS are growing in their stature & importance. It is not only the small and medium sized companies which use PaaS but also the larger ones. There are both technical and economical reasons to adopt PaaS as a preferred cloud computing model. In this article, let us take a look at what PaaS is and how it is used. PaaS for developers A common misconception that prevails is that cloud computing is only for network administrators and this forces us to lose out on many benefits & solutions to tackle certain problems. In a typical setup without PaaS, the tasks involved in setting up a server are acquiring and deploying server, installing operating system, configuring operating system, testing & running it to check whether it works and a hundred more steps. Setting up a new server and hosting an environment while copying the existing data can be really painstaking but if you have PaaS, you would have something called a Virtual Machine (VM) through which you can pass the information to the server like in a USB Flash Drive. This reduces the need for IT infrastructural investment and encourages developers to focus on what they need to really be doing – developing. Some of the advantages of PaaS are as follows: 1. Rapid testing and deploying PaaS provides you an opportunity to the development teams to try different configurations, multiple machines and different locations to assess performance by running stress tests and also check compatibility & response in novel ways that would be next to impossible in a local environment. When the testing becomes quick, deploying also becomes quicker. It saves the developers a lot of time and reduces cost. Most importantly, rapid testing and deploying helps you to build a better business by ensuring that your clients and customers are never left waiting for updates, finished products & other such things according to the way your business might use PaaS. 2. Portability Like we mentioned earlier, PaaS has the option of Virtual Machine or VM, which helps in carrying the existing data on a new server without any hassle. The platform needs to be agnostic to the underlying infrastructure and allow companies to move the application from one IaaS to another. Systems that don’t use PaaS have to spend days to reincorporate data and this uses up a lot of employees’ time. PaaS avoids the unnecessary chaos by its feature of portability. This helps to enhance flexibility within an organization and increase productivity. 3. Dynamic Allocation In today’s competitive market, when there are millions of options to choose from,  IT teams need to be flexible enough  to quickly test or put a new feature of an application or a new service in the market. It needs to be ensured that before launching it on a large scale, it needs to be tested on a small section of clients. Although seemingly difficult, it has become much easier with PaaS and cloud computing. PaaS, when hosted on IaaS, gives you the option of multiple accesses again, reducing time drastically. This helps in encouraging the dynamic cloud process, which is also slated to be the future of cloud computing. 4. API     Application Program Interface or API plays a huge role in making PaaS perform tasks such as user authentication and storing & retrieving files and it can also sometimes help in making calls directly to a database; the platform needs to have a well-documented API. This will contribute in making your business have the flexibility of creating and customizing a software application to interface with the platform, which meets the specific requirements of the company. 5. Availability and scalability The biggest concern about any software or a server is its availability and whether it will be adaptable to your company’s requirements. When you choose a platform, it needs to be easily accessible and available anywhere at any time. If you choose something that isn’t available or is difficult to access, it can cause a fatal damage to your company’s success as you will have to invest a lot of time and energy to just install it. Another important aspect is scalability of any service. PaaS gives you the power to scale the improvements or the problems that need to be solved accurately. The platform needs to be smart enough to take the full utility value of the elastic capacity of an underlying infrastructure. It needs to be able to handle all the requirements of an application. If you want your PaaS model to be successful, make sure that you choose a platform that will help your company’s overall outcome. 6. Boosts Internal Entrepreneurship Due to cloud computing, companies no longer need to put in efforts in maintaining and choosing systems. They can focus on the business aspects of the companies, which is the core constituent of any entrepreneurship. PaaS quickens the development and deployment on an online infrastructure possible. This, in turn, helps to empower visionaries and boosts internal entrepreneurship. All a company has to do is to set aside some budget for PaaS and encourage the IT team to utilize the PaaS to come up with innovative ideas and strategies. The best part is they don’t have to worry about the maintenance and any kind of fixed tariff. 7. Security When we talk about cloud computing of any kind, the biggest concern that arises is about the security of

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Differentiation: The Biggest Area for IT Investment in BFSI Sector

June 22, 2015

The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector is considered to be the 2nd largest consumer of technology in the world; the first being the Telecom sector. As a consequence, the entire sector, both globally and in India, is expected to witness an increased momentum for different kinds of cloud based solutions. In fact, this highly-regulated sector in the country of India is believed to bring in a lot of growth opportunities. Which is the best IT investment area in the BFSI sector of India? One of the prime areas, as Oracle, the computer technology giant, thinks it to be is “differentiation”, when it comes to IT investment in the BFSI sector. It is more relevant for the Indian BFSI sector for the following reasons: The big players would be concentrating more on digitalization of their products or services. They are more likely to adopt digital distribution of products and services than opening up new branches on different locations. Termed as “the retirement decade”, this decade is being anticipated to come up with about 3 lakhs vacancies in different banks of the public sector, which in turn would pave the way for a major IT spend towards capital and talent management. Finance and integrated risk is another big area for IT investment. Though, initially, it has never been an investment-worthy area, however, the introduction of IFRS, Basel III regulation and a number of other regulatory prescriptions by RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and BIS (Bank of International Settlements) has led to an increased IT investment in this arena. Does cloud feature in the portrayed IT investment trends? Research says that the conventional technologies are still attracting about 70% of the entire IT investment. However, big players like Oracle strongly believes that it’s not far when the IT investment trend would shift from the traditional back office data management to technologies related to customer interaction, mobility, on the fly analytics management etc. Even different studies by some of the famous research firms speak in favour of this. Let’s see how: McKinsey’s Research A recent study by McKinsey shows that the total number of customers opting digital banking is more likely to rise remarkably on a global level. In Asia, the number is expected to reach about 1.7 billion by the year 2020, out of which the country of India alone has been portrayed to have 450 million digital banking customers by the end of that year. Now, in such a scenario, banks looking forward towards acquiring new digital-minded customers need to explore cloud based technologies. In a nutshell, it is better for banks to deploy technologies that can help them glide into the digital banking era. Gartner’s Research According to this reputed IT research and advisory firm of America, more than 60% of the global banks would resort to the cloud based transaction processing. In fact, this is what is making the IT departments of those banks become increasingly bimodal. Coined by this IT research firm, the concept “Bimodal IT” refers to the IT departments of banks having the following two operational modes: Lights on mode Innovation mode However, in order to catch up with the continued changes in customer behaviours, banks based in different parts of the world would need to continue investing in the traditional technologies and simultaneously adopting cloud technologies. Now, this adoption of cloud technologies would not just be completely cost-driven and triggered by improvements in the efficiency level but would primarily be an effect of the major shift in banking behaviours of modern customers; and banks, which plan to stay ahead need to surely opt the emerging cloud technologies. After all, unless a bank cannot be differentiated from others in the positive sense, it can never stay ahead of its competitors. This is what would call for more IT investment in the BFSI sector. In fact, the sector has already started witnessing the growing IT investment opportunity for “differentiation”. The big technology players in the world like Oracle are thinking of introducing “Data-as-a-Service” in place of the traditional Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service. This newly introduced notion would enable banks to build digital profiles for customers, based on customers’ daily banking behaviours and drive their revenue accordingly; and all of these just points to the increasing IT investment for differentiation in the BFSI sector.

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