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Using Professional Service Providers to Grow Your Business
InsightsOriginally posted by Mark Hendricks on Entrepreneur
After you have owned your own business for a while, you know how to run it. You’ve probably done everything from answering the phones to hiring a general manager, and you can justly claim to know your business inside and out, in general and in detail. In case there’s any operation you can’t personally undertake, one of your employees probably can. There are, however, exceptions to this rule. Highly technical matters of law, accounting, management and marketing are usually best handled by outside experts. Attorneys, accountants, and management and marketing consultants have specialized knowledge about niche areas that you couldn’t–and shouldn’t–hope to duplicate either personally or in the form of an in-house employee.
Having access to legal, accounting and other expertise is important to help your business grow as rapidly and efficiently as possible. Given enough time, you may be able to master the intricacies of law and finance. But why bother? Hand these duties off to professional service providers. They can do them faster and more effectively than you ever could. Besides, your skills are needed in helping your business expand.
Legal and Accounting Help
Why do you need a lawyer to grow? It’s generally worthwhile to consult an attorney before making any business decision that could have legal ramifications. These decisions could include setting up or altering the terms of a partnership or corporation, checking for compliance with regulations in new locales where you hope to do business, negotiating loans to fund expansion, obtaining trademarks or patents, preparing buy-sell agreements, tax planning, drawing up or revising pension plans, reviewing business forms, negotiating and drawing up documents to buy or sell other companies or real estate, reviewing employee contracts, exporting or selling products in other states, and collecting bad debts. Many of the same considerations apply to the use of accountants by growing firms. You should at least consider running by an accountant any decision that could have accounting, financial or tax ramifications.
You probably started your business with a lawyer and an accountant available to answer questions, help draw up documents, and solve the inevitable problems of launching a new company. Now that you’ve been underway for a while and success seems to be a given, shouldn’t you keep working with the professionals who helped you get here? Not necessarily, because the needs of a growing business are different from those of a startup. The professional service providers who aided you in the beginning may not be good matches for your current needs.
Giving your professionals a checkup is largely a matter of assessing your need for professional services and judging whether your current advisors measure up. When you were starting up, issues such as the legal form your business would take–sole proprietorship or partnership, for example–were pressing. Today, you may be looking at how you should structure an international subsidiary. The odds are good that the attorney you started with won’t be able to provide you with one-stop service as your business grows.
Likewise, accounting problems in the beginning, when your business was funded entirely with your own personal savings, may have revolved around little more than making sure you filed state and federal payroll tax forms and income tax returns properly. As you grow, however, you’ll have to deal with depreciating plant, equipment and real property; setting up financial controls; and, most likely, the tax laws of entities beyond your startup state and city. Even if your original accountant was a whiz at the jobs you needed early on, it’s not likely that you and your accountant will continue to grow in the same directions.
Marketing and Management Consultants
When it comes to marketing and management, many entrepreneurs are on firmer ground than when venturing into accounting and law. But nobody knows everything, even about general management and marketing. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that and seeking outside help in an effort to execute your company’s management and marketing as skillfully as possible. In narrow disciplines, such as managing mergers and acquisitions and marketing to ethnic groups, the use of an experienced specialist makes even more sense. And even if you feel there’s nothing you don’t know about a topic, hiring outside experts will allow you to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily have time for and don’t want to hire permanent employees for.
Hiring a consultant is different from hiring almost any other kind of employee, and it’s different from purchasing most outsourced services, too. For one thing, consultants are expensive. They can cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars a day. Make sure you know what the consulting fees will be and exactly what you will get for paying them. Consultants should provide a more customized solution to your business problem than most outsourced providers. Make sure any consultant you hire asks lots of questions about your needs and listens to your answers. Be sure your description of your needs is specific, and avoid consultants with preconceived notions about solutions.
Upgrading Professional Service Providers
Referrals are the best way to get a new professional service provider. The best source of referrals is other entrepreneurs. Make a point of asking people in the same business sector (service, retail, restaurant, manufacturing, etc.) for referrals. You can also get good referrals from other professionals. That is, ask your accountant for an attorney’s name and your attorney for an accountant’s name. Other service providers, such as recruiters and bankers, are also good sources. Don’t forget to ask suppliers and customers. Trade associations can also be good places to find names of professional service providers.
The Interview
Once you’re outfitted with a few referrals, contact several to gauge their interest in you and your interest in them. Then personally interview at least three prospects.
At your first interview with a professional service provider, be ready to describe your business and its legal, accounting or other needs. Take note of what the provider says and does, and look for the following qualities:
Evaluating Credentials
Some jobs, such as auditing financials to satisfy the requirements of lenders or investors, simply must be done by a professional with specific credentials. A certified public accountant is a good example. If you’re looking for legal advice, you certainly want an attorney with a juris doctor or equivalent degree who is a member of the bar.
You have more flexibility in looking for other credentials. The initials MBA after a person’s name suggest that, as the holder of a master’s of business administration degree, that person is well-trained. However, highly experienced people may be just as effective even if they lack the diploma and the initials. Evaluating the worth of credentials can be tricky. Check with associations such as the American Bar Association , the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants , or the government agency in your state charged with granting CPA credentials.
Negotiating Fees
The professional services marketplace is a buyers’ market these days. Here are 10 steps to keep your costs in check without hurting your chances of growing:
1. Choose the right professionals. The key is to match your needs with the skills and resources of the provider. Most small-business owners simply don’t need a large, major-city law firm or international accountant. The overhead expenses of such megafirms are passed on to their clients in the form of high hourly rates. Instead of a big name, look for small-business expertise.
2. Examine your fee agreement. Once you find a professional with whom you feel comfortable, read the fee agreement letter carefully. Focus on hourly rates, expenses such as postage and photocopying, and travel time. Ask candidates for a sample of their standard fee agreement for your review. Be suspicious of any professional who balks at this request.
3. Use paralegals and bookkeepers as part of your professional team. Certain legal tasks are straightforward enough that utilizing a paralegal instead of a business lawyer can result in significant savings. The same goes for using a bookkeeper instead of an accountant.
4. Do your own footwork. Keeping organized records, indexing volumes of documents and writing out memorandums can reduce your professional fees significantly. Professionals will do all this for you–but at their hourly rates, and on your tab.
5. Meet with your professionals regularly. At first, this may not seem to be a very effective way to keep fees down, but you’ll be amazed at how much it actually reduces both the number of phone calls your provider has to make and the endless rounds of telephone tag.
6. Use your attorney as a coach for minor legal matters. When you have a customer who owes you money and refuses to pay, do you turn the case over to your lawyer? Some entrepreneurs do, but some handle small legal matters on their own by using their attorneys as coaches. Lawyers can be very effective in coaching you to file lawsuits in small-claims court, draft employment manuals, and complete other uncomplicated legal tasks.
7. Demand and examine monthly invoices. While most professionals are diligent about sending out monthly invoices, some wait until the bill is sufficiently large. If yours doesn’t bill in a timely manner, ask for a breakdown of the time spent and costs incurred to date, and for similar monthly invoices to be sent thereafter. When the invoice comes, check the work description to be sure you weren’t inadvertently billed for work performed for another client.
8. Negotiate prompt-payment discounts. If you’re paying a retainer fee, request that your bill be discounted by 10 percent. (A retainer fee is an amount of money that acts as a fee pre-payment; the remainder is refunded to the client.) Even if you didn’t pay a retainer, negotiate a prompt-payment discount if you pay your fees within 30 days of your invoice date. You may not get as much of a discount using this method, but even a 5 percent discount on your monthly legal fees can add thousands of dollars per year to your business’s bottom line.
9. Don’t make impromptu calls to your professional. Most attorneys bill under a structure that includes minimum time increments for repetitive functions such as phone calls. This means when you call your lawyer for a quick question, you’ll be subject to a minimum time increment for billing purposes. For instance, if you place four impromptu calls a week to your professional at a minimum time increment of a quarter-hour per call, you’ll get a bill for an hour of your lawyer’s time–even though you only received five minutes’ worth of advice! Keep a list of subjects you need to discuss, and make a single call to discuss them all.
10. Negotiate outcome-based fee arrangements with attorneys.Although this is a relatively new concept in the legal market, more and more firms agree to such arrangements in this competitive marketplace. An outcome-based fee arrangement is a risk-sharing plan. Simply put, if your lawyer accomplishes a particular favorable outcome, the bill is adjusted to increase the fees by a preset formula. But if the outcome is not favorable, the final bill is adjusted downward (though not eliminated.)
Writing Professional Service Contracts
Get everything in writing when dealing with professional service providers. Your written agreement should cover the scope of the services to be rendered, the duration of the agreement and the fees. The fee schedule should state whether fees are to be based on an hourly, daily or project rate, and who is responsible for paying expenses. You should consider having fees based at least in part on performance to protect you from having to pay top rates for shoddy work.
Your agreement should also specify who will be performing the work for your company. Some professional services firms have certain people whose primary job it is to solicit business, while others do the actual work. However, you may not want a lower-level attorney or junior accountant working on your project.
Finally, the contract should explain how the agreement can be ended prematurely, typically with some kind of notice to the other party. This will allow you to get out of an unsatisfactory contract without having to pay the full amount.
What’s in it for You?
Having access to top legal, accounting and other professional service expertise is essential to your business’s long-term health. With these professionals on your side, you can deal effectively with legal, tax and financial issues that might require years of study to master. So instead of trying to do a professional’s job, stick to doing what you do best–growing your business.
Magento Enterprise 1.14.2 is here!
InsightsWe’re excited to announce several new developments that expand the capabilities of the Magento platform and reinforce Magento’s leadership in accelerating business growth.
Today Magento are announcing the following:
Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.2
Enterprise Edition 1.14.2 software is available today and includes several new features and functionality.
More Visual Merchandiser Category Sorting Rules
Five new automated product category sorting rules give Enterprise Edition merchants even more power to drive customer engagement and incremental sales from category pages. Selecting a sorting rule enables merchants to completely re-arrange a category page to feature best sellers, highest-margin products, lowest-stock items, or the newest products at the top of the category. Merchants can also sort products by color within a category to easily implement color groupings or seasonal campaigns.
As products are added, removed, or changed, the category sorting rules continue to make adjustments, so the merchandising strategy is maintained without requiring any intervention from the merchant.
Google Tag Manager
Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.2 now comes with Google Tag Manager so merchants can more easily add tracking tags to a Magento site for audience measurement, personalization, retargeting, search engine marketing, and more without modifying code.
Using Google Tag Manager can enable faster time to market for new marketing campaigns because marketers can add tags on their own, without waiting for IT. It can also enable more accurate data collection, which supports stronger campaigns and better marketing results.
Another benefit is that Google Tag Manager can directly transfer shopping events to Google Analytics™ Enhanced Ecommerce and other third-party analytics solutions, giving merchants a clearer picture of how well their site, products, and promotions are working.
Other Technology Updates
Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.2 includes the latest versions of the Zend 1 Framework and Redis integration, as well as refinements to full-page caching that enable more pages to be served from cache. The release also includes many quality enhancements.
Magento Community Edition 1.9.2 is Coming Soon!
Magento Community Edition 1.9.2 will be available to download in the next few weeks and will include underlying technology updates, along with many product quality enhancements. Stay tuned for more information once the new version is released.
2. Magento Mobile Software Development Kit for iOS
The Magento Mobile SDK enables Enterprise Edition merchants to more easily create a full-featured Magento iOS app that includes all the important ecommerce features businesses expect, such as the checkout process, customer accounts, promotions, and store credits, as well as an API for connecting the app to a Magento store.
The SDK provides a full library of resources that helps significantly reduce development effort and time to market when creating custom iOS applications for the Magento platform.
Also a sample, fully-functioning iOS app is provided to help merchants quickly learn how to use the SDK, and they can even choose to customize the sample app to accelerate development of their own applications.
3. Automated Functional Testing Framework
Both Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Community Edition merchants can now access nearly 170 automated functional tests, which can help improve implementation quality and time to market by making it easier to do basic acceptance testing when adding extensions, making customizations, or upgrading.
4. New Relic Partnership
New Relic, a leading software analytics provider, is now a Magento Gold Technology Partner. Magento will soon release a New Relic Reporting extension that will give merchants visibility into their hosting environment health and application performance, so they can quickly identify the root cause of issues and consider new ideas for improving site performance. Magento Customer Support can also leverage this information when enabled to help resolve issues faster.
The extension will also allow merchants to create customized dashboards in New Relic Insights to track Magento order activity, average order value, catalog size, installed modules, and more so that they can get a better understanding of how site configuration and performance influence conversion. Magento merchants can learn more and sign up for a free trial by visiting the Magento information page onNew Relic.
5. Lagrange Systems Partnership
Lagrange Systems, another new Magento Gold Technology Partner, has a solution for improving web application performance and availability in cloud deployments, ensuring merchants can provide an optimal customer experience no matter where they host their sites. Their CloudMaestro solution proactively optimizes website performance, dynamically scales with traffic demands, increases cloud throughput, and self-heals server resources to help ensure cloud-hosted Magento sites have the capacity they need—even during periods of peak demand.
To learn more about Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.2 and how it can help merchants accelerate their growth, review the release notes. To start using this new version, visit the My Account page to download the software today.
Good Customer Service Made Simple
InsightsOriginally posted by Susan Ward, on About
Good customer service is the lifeblood of any business. You can offer promotions and slash prices to bring in as many new customers as you want, but unless you can get some of those customers to come back, your business won’t be profitable for long.
Good customer service is all about bringing customers back. And about sending them away happy – happy enough to pass positive feedback about your business along to others, who may then try the product or service you offer for themselves and in their turn become repeat customers.
If you’re a good salesperson, you can sell anything to anyone once. But it will be your approach to customer service that determines whether or not you’ll ever be able to sell that person anything else. The essence of good customer service is forming a relationship with customers – a relationship that that individual customer feels that he would like to pursue.
How do you go about forming such a relationship? By remembering the one true secret of good customer service and acting accordingly; “You will be judged by what you do, not what you say.”
I know this verges on the kind of statement that’s often seen on a sampler, but providing good customer service IS a simple thing. If you truly want to have good customer service, all you have to do is ensure that your business consistently follows the eight rules following:
Answer your phone
Get call forwarding. Or an answering service. Hire staff if you need to. But make sure that someone is picking up the phone when someone calls your business. (Notice I say “someone”. People who call want to talk to a live person, not a fake “recorded robot”.) For more on answering the phone, see How to Answer the Phone Properly.
Don’t make promises unless you will keep them
Not plan to keep them. Will keep them. Reliability is one of the keys to any good relationship, and good customer service is no exception. If you say, “Your new bedroom furniture will be delivered on Tuesday”, make sure it is delivered on Tuesday. Otherwise, don’t say it. The same rule applies to client appointments, deadlines, etc.. Think before you give any promise – because nothing annoys customers more than a broken one.
Listen to your customers
Is there anything more exasperating than telling someone what you want or what your problem is and then discovering that that person hasn’t been paying attention and needs to have it explained again? From a customer’s point of view, I doubt it. Can the sales pitches and the product babble. Let your customer talk and show him that you are listening by making the appropriate responses, such as suggesting how to solve the problem.
Deal with complaints
No one likes hearing complaints, and many of us have developed a reflex shrug, saying, “You can’t please all the people all the time”. Maybe not, but if you give the complaint your attention, you may be able to please this one person this one time – and position your business to reap the benefits of good customer service. Properly dealt with, complaints can become opportunities.
Be helpful – even if there’s no immediate profit in it
The other day I popped into a local watch shop because I had lost the small piece that clips the pieces of my watch band together. When I explained the problem, the proprietor said that he thought he might have one lying around. He found it, attached it to my watch band – and charged me nothing! Where do you think I’ll go when I need a new watch band or even a new watch? And how many people do you think I’ve told this story to?
Train your staff
Train your staff (if you have any) to be always helpful, courteous, and knowledgeable.
Do it yourself or hire someone to train them. Talk to them about good customer service and what it is (and isn’t) regularly. (Good Customer Service: How to Help a Customerexplains the basics of ensuring positive staff-customer interactions.) Most importantly, give every member of your staff enough information and power to make those small customer-pleasing decisions, so he never has to say, “I don’t know, but so-and-so will be back at…”
Take the extra step
For instance, if someone walks into your store and asks you to help them find something, don’t just say, “It’s in Aisle 3”. Lead the customer to the item. Better yet, wait and see if he has questions about it, or further needs. Whatever the extra step may be, if you want to provide good customer service, take it. They may not say so to you, but people notice when people make an extra effort and will tell other people.
Throw in something extra
Whether it’s a coupon for a future discount, additional information on how to use the product, or a genuine smile, people love to get more than they thought they were getting. And don’t think that a gesture has to be large to be effective. The local art framer that we use attaches a package of picture hangers to every picture he frames. A small thing, but so appreciated.
Whether it’s a coupon for a future discount, additional information on how to use the product, or a genuine smile, people love to get more than they thought they were getting. And don’t think that a gesture has to be large to be effective. The local art framer that we use attaches a package of picture hangers to every picture he frames. A small thing, but so appreciated.
Good Customer Service Pays Big Dividends
If you apply these eight simple rules consistently, your business will become known for its good customer service. And the best part? Over time good customer service will bring inmore new customers than promotions and price slashing ever did!
Rags to riches to rags: The rise and fall of Internet Explorer
InsightsOriginally posted by Brad Jones, Digital Trends
Few will mourn the death of Internet Explorer in its current form, but those who remember its early days may look back fondly at the program’s early years. The browser’s story is one of rags-to-riches-to-rags, and serves as a reminder the breakneck pace of technology can turn one mistake into a fatal error.
Mosaic takes shape
The first version of Internet Explorer was released on August 16, 1995. Back then, the browser was based on software called Mosaic that Microsoft licensed from Spyglass Inc., as other companies eager to enter the nascent field of browser development had done. However, none of those companies had the necessary infrastructure to make their software the household name that Internet Explorer would soon become.
For a technology geek, there isn’t much more satisfying than knowing that millions of people are using code that you wrote.
Microsoft had agreed to terms with Spyglass that would see the company pay a quarterly fee and a percentage of non-Windows revenue for rights to use the Mosaic Source Code. However, in 1998 the two firms had a falling out, which was resolved by an eight million dollar settlement paid to Spyglass by Microsoft. That was a lot for Spyglass at the time, but for the talent that worked on the software, cash wasn’t the most important reward.
“For a technology geek, there isn’t much more satisfying than knowing that millions of people are using code that you wrote,” said Eric Sink when asked about his contribution to Internet Explorer. Sink was Project Lead for the browser team at Spyglass in the mid 1990s — a time that he reflects upon in an excellent essay on his Website entitled Memoirs From the Browser Wars. Sink was working on software that would eventually be used by hundreds of millions across the globe, but at the time he was just a young programmer learning his trade as he went.
“I was early in my career, so I didn’t know much, and I didn’t know that I didn’t know much,” Sink says of his tenure at Spyglass. “Working with Microsoft on browsers at that time was one of the best learning experiences I could imagine.” Today, it’s strange to think about the browser as a budding tool built from scratch by bright-eyed coders rather than iterated upon by programmers crushed under the weight of years of development and the needs of millions of users. Sink isn’t oblivious to the way the software is viewed years later.
“I suppose the overall effect [of Internet Explorer] was negative,” Sink told us. “But hindsight helps a lot here.” Sink went on to speak about the early and “immature” idea of the Web browser as a platform that began to as early as 1997. Supporters of the idea argued that a browser could be used to replace some functions of software or even an operating system, an idea that was often met with hostility within Redmond’s walls (today, even Microsoft embraces the idea with Office Online).
He can see how Microsoft slowed the advance of the concept, but he still credits Internet Explorer 4 as a “huge part of this ‘browser as a platform’ story” because of its aggressive support for JavaScript, a programming language that enabled the development of new browser applications and games.
Now, Sink has enough distance between himself and the project to think about it rationally. “Internet Explorer’s reputation has suffered at times over the years, but nothing gets that much hate without being incredibly popular and successful.” Don’t expect him to be leading the campaign to bring Internet Explorer back, though. “I’m not really attached. These days I use Chrome most of the time. I used Firefox for quite a while. And I never committed my life to the ‘browser as a platform’ religion. I always found working on browsers to be a lot more fun than working in them.”
The most popular browser in the world
Internet Explorer may have started as a small project, but it grew rapidly over the first few years of its life. When development began, it was the responsibility of just few people and was miles behind the competition in market share. Within a decade, it was the browser of choice for 95 percent of Web surfers.
Netscape Navigator was the software to beat when Internet Explorer hit the Web. At that time, more than 90 percent of people surfing did it with Netscape’s browser. Compared to the height of Internet Explorer’s popularity, though, it didn’t have anywhere near as many users. Microsoft could see the Internet reaching the mainstream, and had the good sense to build Internet Explorer as a means of capitalizing upon its growth. To combat Netscape, Microsoft aggressively pushed development of IE while bundling it into Windows, a tactic that gave it a distinct advantage over any alternative (and eventually became ammo to be used against Microsoft in an anti-trust case).
By the late 1990s, it was clear that Internet Explorer was pulling away from Netscape Navigator. The latter would never regain any semblance of market share under that brand, though the technology behind it would sow the seeds for a future rival to IE. In 1999, Netscape was acquired by AOL, but not before the company released the source code for its browser and established the Mozilla Organization to help cultivate it. In 2002, Firefox was released as the first step in using the foundation of Netscape Navigator to set a course for the future of the Internet.
By the end of 2005, Firefox had managed to attract more than 10 percent of Internet users. Crucially, that number didn’t come from other niche browsers; it was pulling people away from Internet Explorer and towards something new. At its peak, Firefox was used by about a third of the Internet audience, a number which has since dropped to a little more than half of that. Firefox took a swing at Microsoft, but another browser was destined to knock IE from its perch.
Google released the first version of its Chrome browser in 2008, and in just four years it overtook Internet Explorer
Google released the first version of its Chrome browser in 2008, and in just four years it overtook Internet Explorer in usage. In many ways, its strategy was taken directly from Microsoft’s playbook. Chrome leveraged the popularity of Google’s name and its many brands, such as Gmail, to rapidly expand its user base. Having debuted more than a decade after Internet Explorer, though, Chrome was always going to be a fresher product.
Today, Chrome still enjoys a healthy lead on any other browser outside of the mobile sphere. But, as many popular products have demonstrated over the years, there’s always the capacity for a fickle public to opt for the newer alternative.
The decline of Internet Explorer’s empire
Internet Explorer was the most widely used browser by 1999, four years after its release, but popularity brought its own challenges. At the beginning of the 21st century, people were becoming more comfortable with the Internet. Sites like eBay and Amazon were tempting shoppers to take their business online, and that meant people were entrusting their browser with sensitive data like credit card information and shipping addresses. Attacking IE became the primary objective for crooks looking to take advantage of the way others used the internet.
Microsoft were under pressure to produce a new version of the software that could keep pace with the changing face of the Internet. However, the end product fell short of that task. Released in August 2001, Internet Explorer 6 played a big part in damaging the browser’s reputation. Its security issues are still legendary. One piece of malware, for example, took advantage of a breach to install a keylogger and a backdoor automatically when a user visited a particular page.
Millions of people were using Internet Explorer 6, and in turn they were being exposed to some of the least desirable qualities of the Internet. Vulnerabilities could be fixed via patches and Service Packs, but users affected would look at the Internet Explorer brand in a very different way. For many, Microsoft was the company that shepherded in an age of computing, and security issues in one of its flagship products damaged the trust that the company had established. A host of experts would begin recommending that users stop using the browser.
In the years that followed, Internet Explorer’s crown began to slip. IE’s market share hit its peak in 2004, and would see a steady decline for the rest of its lifespan. Public perception of the browser had changed — it was no longer a portal into the exciting new world of the Internet, but an outdated tool better suited to the Web’s pioneer days than the time of its acceptance into the mainstream.
Going down with pop songs and anime mascots
Microsoft didn’t give up easily, though, and it set about recapturing the youthful audience that had turned away from its Web browser. A slick advertising campaign for Internet Explorer 9 featured the song Too Close by Alex Clare, and attempted to capitalize on the newly refreshed software. The ad sent the song to the top of the charts in Clare’s native United Kingdom, but was less successful in tempting users back to IE.
The Inori campaign came about partly out of jest. We jokingly ended the post with ‘Microsoft, call me!’
That was just one of several Microsoft campaigns intended to change the face of Internet Explorer. A bolder attempt employed the help of design agency Collateral Damage Studios. “The Inori campaign came about partly out of jest,” says KC Ng, project manager at CDS. “There was this image of personifications of Firefox, Safari and Chrome. We felt that we could do the same for Internet Explorer, so we did it — it turned out to be quite popular with our Facebook fans, so we developed the concept further. We jokingly ended off the post with ‘Microsoft, call me’.”
Shortly afterward, CDS representatives were approached by a regional lead for Internet Explorer at a convention. The anime-inspired Inori Aizawa was to be the next attempt at freshening up IE’s public image, a character designed with what KC described as an “ugly duckling approach”. In a blog post detailing the character’s creation on the studio’s Website, Inori is described as “a clumsy girl who tries to do too muc,” which KC says is a direct reference to Internet Explorer’s “checkered past.”
“I think the immediate response took everyone by surprise, because it was such a fresh, unexpected approach from a company you would usually consider stuffy and corporate,” says KC. “IE became ‘cool’ and ‘fun’.” While Inori might not have grown into a household name, the project exceeded expectations for Microsoft, and may well have played a part in the company’s browser efforts beyond IE. Although Halo’s Master Chief couldn’t be much further from Inori in terms of design, Microsoft’s new browser borrows the word Spartan from the iconic battle armor, a move that demonstrates just how crucial it is for modern software to possess some kind of personality.
The future
Even though Internet Explorer hasn’t been phased out just yet, we’ve already heard plenty of chatter about its successor, Project Spartan. The new browser looks set to cherry-pick some of the more desirable traits from IE’s twenty-year history. Microsoft’s desire to distinguish it from the Internet Explorer brand demonstrates that the company sees a need to start fresh.
But Spartan is more than just IE with a fresh coat of paint. Its all-new user interface and support for modern browser essentials like extensions are features that suggest Project Spartan won’t just learn from the failings of its predecessor. It will also benefit from the strengths of IE’s competition.
Finally, the legacy of Inori Aizawa and other such marketing efforts can be seen in the branding of Project Spartan. Much like Microsoft’s virtual assistant software Cortana, the browser is set to leverage Microsoft’s success in the sphere of video games for the benefit of a new product. Rather than personify the software itself, Microsoft has simply re-purposed the popularity of an existing character to fit the task at hand.
Still, in spite of its differences, Project Spartan is inextricably linked to Internet Explorer. The new browser is being built as a response to its predecessor, and IE’s successes and failures will both be integral to decisions made during its development. On the surface, Project Spartan might seem to be evidence that Microsoft is keen to forget their hugely popular browser. In truth, it may turn out to be an ode to what Internet Explorer could have, and should have, been
Coder humor #45: Funny CSS
InsightsOriginal image posted on 9gag
Here at the PSD to Final office, we don’t like to take ourselves too seriously. Coding can be dead boring, and really hard – so taking a few minutes every now and then to have a bit of fun is really important for morale and productivity.
We spend our working lives dealing with HTML, CSS and a myriad of other technologies. Every now and then we find a great bit of humour that only programmers will “get”. This is one of those times:
Why Search Engine Marketing is Necessary
InsightsOriginally posted by Mozilla | Image courtesy of Pixbay
An important aspect of SEO is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, they still can’t see and understand a web page the same way a human can. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users.
A Common Argument Against SEO
We frequently hear statements like this:
“No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code, and still find a way to return the most relevant results, not the ones that have been ‘optimized’ by unlicensed search marketing experts.”
But Wait …
Imagine you posted online a picture of your family dog. A human might describe it as “a black, medium-sized dog, looks like a Lab, playing fetch in the park.” On the other hand, the best search engine in the world would struggle to understand the photo at anywhere near that level of sophistication. How do you make a search engine understand a photograph? Fortunately, SEO allows webmasters to provide clues that the engines can use to understand content. In fact, adding proper structure to your content is essential to SEO.
Understanding both the abilities and limitations of search engines allows you to properly build, format, and annotate your web content in a way that search engines can digest. Without SEO, a website can be invisible to search engines.
The Limits of Search Engine Technology
The major search engines all operate on the same principles, as explained in Chapter 1. Automated search bots crawl the web, follow links, and index content in massive databases. They accomplish this with dazzling artificial intelligence, but modern search technology is not all-powerful. There are numeroustechnical limitations that cause significant problems in both inclusion and rankings. We’ve listed the most common below:
Problems Crawling and Indexing
Problems Matching Queries to Content
Make sure your content gets seen
Getting the technical details of search engine-friendly web development correct is important, but once the basics are covered, you must also market your content. The engines by themselves have no formulas to gauge the quality of content on the web. Instead, search technology relies on the metrics of relevance and importance, and they measure those metrics by tracking what people do: what they discover, react, comment, and link to. So, you can’t just build a perfect website and write great content; you also have to get that content shared and talked about.
Take a look at any search results page and you’ll find the answer to why search marketing has a long, healthy life ahead.
There are, on average, ten positions on the search results page. The pages that fill those positions are ordered by rank. The higher your page is on the search results page, the better your click-through rate and ability to attract searchers. Results in positions 1, 2, and 3 receive much more traffic than results down the page, and considerably more than results on deeper pages. The fact that so much attention goes to so few listings means that there will always be a financial incentive for search engine rankings. No matter how search may change in the future, websites and businesses will compete with one another for this attention, and for the user traffic and brand visibility it provides.
Constantly Changing SEO
When search marketing began in the mid-1990s, manual submission, the meta keywords tag, and keyword stuffing were all regular parts of the tactics necessary to rank well. In 2004, link bombing with anchor text, buying hordes of links from automated blog comment spam injectors, and the construction of inter-linking farms of websites could all be leveraged for traffic. In 2011, social media marketing and vertical search inclusion are mainstream methods for conducting search engine optimization. The search engines have refined their algorithms along with this evolution, so many of the tactics that worked in 2004 can hurt your SEO today.
The future is uncertain, but in the world of search, change is a constant. For this reason, search marketing will continue to be a priority for those who wish to remain competitive on the web. Some have claimed that SEO is dead, or that SEO amounts to spam. As we see it, there’s no need for a defense other than simple logic: websites compete for attention and placement in the search engines, and those with the knowledge and experience to improve their website’s ranking will receive the benefits of increased traffic and visibility.