What to Look for When Hiring WordPress Developers?

The toughest part about hiring WordPress developers is that you don't really have an idea about what you don't know! Quite evidently it sounds like stating the obvious. Some of these "how to do" tips are really practical and will be easy to follow.

So this is what to look for when hiring WordPress developers:

Portfolio:

OK - this again may seem supremely obvious - but I have seen a lot of people offering WordPress customizations or design services (especially as WordPress grows, there are plenty of people jumping into this arena) - however, they don't have any sample work with them.

What's the Process?

a. Are you going to communicate over the phone?
b. How frequently are you going to do that?
c. What is the time period?
d. Will you receive updates?
e. Which kind of communication processes can you expect?

Design/Graphics:

When your graphics are finally done and your site looks fantastic - who ultimately owns the right to the final work? Do you have the right to use the artwork/graphics however and wherever you want to?

If you have paid for custom graphics, you have to make sure that you have the luxury and liberty to use them as and when you want them to! However, on the other hand, if you are using stock pictures, then you have to strictly follow the copyright guidelines enlisted on the site from where you have purchased the work.

Skills:

Yes, this is indeed another point that seems pretty obvious, isn't it? I had a few clients who recently hired individuals to make WordPress customizations, however surprisingly enough; they were not really acquainted with WordPress.

There are situations where the clients hired individuals who were graphic designers. They worked mainly with Dreamweaver; numerous client pages were made in Dreamweaver, and then pasted on to the WP editor. In such instances, if the client attempted to adjust things without understanding the HTML, they ran the huge risk of throwing the entire page off.

If you bring in somebody to help create a custom WordPress theme or create a WordPress customization, ascertain the fact that they really understand the features of WordPress! If you can't use the things that make WordPress what it's intended for - it is defeating enough and it seems like a vain uphill journey.

Functionality:

This relates straight to training. If additional features /options are uploaded on your website (as for example: shopping cart, video & audio plugins etc.), are you aware as to how to use them productively?

What exactly is included with set up? Let's take a shopping cart for example:

- Is the autoresponder integrated properly? (If at all possible)
- Are your products being effectively added?
- Is the Thanks page for purchases being set up?
- Are Product images (cropping/ editing, etc.) included?
- Is the Payment gateway installation included?

Many of these functionalities demand additional effort and time. Strive hard to understand in a crystal-clear manner what is being included for any such additional features.

Support:

When your website is done completely and your contract also is complete, is there any support available?

a. Enquire whether the support is handled through help desk, email, or a phone call?
b. Enquire about the charges for support?
c. Can there be an option for monthly maintenance/ support?
d. In case your designer does not offer support, are they able to refer someone else?

So, these are some of the important criteria, I would suggest that you consider when hiring anyone to create a WordPress website for you. Hope this can help!

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?What-to-Look-for-When-Hiring-WordPress-Developers?&id=8047568

Social Media Marketing And What You Can Do To Get Help

Social media marketing gives an indicator of the most popular trends today. You have to understand how much success social media marketing but it's best to include it. The advice here should help you begin if you know nothing about social media marketing.

Widgets can help out your site's visibility of site.

Facebook makes it fairly simple for your followers to share your content. If somebody leaves a comment on a post, all their friends will see a mention of this in their feed.

These tools allow you find users who belong to your target audience as well as influential followers. You can subscribe to the users you find, and hope they will follow your updates too.

When you post your article, it appears automatically as a LinkedIn update. This helps to save time and you'll enjoy more exposure in the blogging community.

Be flexible with updating your page is updated. When you are promoting an important new product, your customers will want to be updated more frequently. If you frequently find that you have nothing to post, you may want to post less often.

Make it a habit to respond to all the comments that pop up on your social media pages. You should do this for negative comments also. If your followers know you care about what they say, they will be more likely to stay loyal to your brand. Always respond to customers as soon as you can so they don't feel ignored.

Be prepared for the negativity that goes along with social media. Social media is awesome when you get praise, but there is also a negative side to it.Do not ignore them but answer them and help those customers who are unhappy.

Keep checking on your competitors' activities. Find them on social media sites and pay attention to their methods. You could either use a similar method or think of something outside the box to outperform them.

Social media is a powerful way to help with company brand very recognizable. Your logo should serve as your avatar and/or background of all profiles. Keep the same color scheme among your various social media profiles. Be consistent and use branding to your business's advantage.

A photo contest is a fun way to increase excitement and exposure of your brand.Offer followers an appealing prize for the user that posts the most entertaining and creative picture including your products or logo. This will help others to see your page as the users post them, exposing you to new markets.

If you are thinking about creating a Facebook page for business promotion, you should take some time to investigate what other businesses similar to yours are doing. When you go over their pages, and what isn't, and what isn't going to work. Make your page appealing and appealing.

Marketing via social media can be quite easy once you really learn the ropes. The truth is, marketing through social media is a great method of offering a useful, interactive experience for your advertising audience. If you thoughtfully implement the above advice, you will enjoy fresh and continued success from your advertising efforts.

Source:http://blogs.siliconindia.com/imperiastructuresltdcomplaints/Business/Social-Media-Marketing-And-What-You-Can-Do-To-Get-Help-bid-s8IU6SOv3998351.html

Really are the Education Industries do marketing activities as like eCommerce Portal?

“If you have command over English, you can command anyone”. This is the proverb used to say someone is expert in particular subject or particular business so that he has command over power compare to other team members. The Education System also started like that someone might be in the teaching profession couple of decade of years and he would have awarded by many of the Non-profitable organizations and Educational Body’s as “Best of the teacher”, “Award-winning headteacher”, “Teacher of the year”, etc…

The person mind & soul is full of upliftment of education for the nation. Being the education upliftment for nation as ambition he may start the school in very small way that too even without infrastructure because he is not the Businessman or not funded by Venture Capital (VC). But by the word of mouth, he would be getting overwhelming admissions for his schools though he doesn’t have any school infrastructure, process, standards, etc… Nowadays, we have 1000s of schools in the market but we can count it those kinds of schools being very few schools that too it may be single digit.

We would like to take this opportunity to introduce one pre-school in Bangalore which has started in very small in last year that too less than 30 students (Without any marketing activity or marketing strategy). More than the education, they are doing as profession. You can’t imagine the kind of care or Toiling and moiling effort to improve the kids wisdom in all the aspects. You would be wondering even the 15 months old kid what they noticed and given the annual report. It’s amazing! Marvelous. Please find the sample report here. (Download). It’s our wishes to success in their academic excellence.

Important Note: Pramiti is one of the only schools along with Inventure Academy in Karnataka that is part of the India Inclusion Forum launched on 26th of January 2014 on the occasion of Republic Day.

Today the schools are opened by the business people as another business entity part of their business. It becomes chain of schools. It’s another way of revenue generating model. Recently we observed one chain of school opened nearing to our area BTM, Bangalore which has done 1….N Marketing Activity (we can say there is no more marketing activity) to fulfill the admissions. Even the corporate generate Crores of business everyday they might not be done such a Huge Advertisement. It’s called as Killer Strategy. Usually, the Killer Strategy would be implemented ONLY product based company to compete other product or services. But Schools are doing it’s unvitable. Because end of the day all this marketing expenses going to bear by parents.

It’s NOT only the schools are doing these marketing activities. Even most of the colleges, universities, B-Schools are doing these marketing activities. One of their key marketing activities or strategies is Bulk SMS Promotional Activities with the key Targeted Audience. i.e.)  ABC Company is offering B-School(MBA Course) as part time course, they go to Job Portal and target all the fresh graduates and download their contacts and keep sending them SMS Communication about the advantages of B-School, features, etc… and convert them to become the B-School enrollment.

Conclusion: It’s quiet common nowadays each educational institutions targeting their student base and keep sending the SMS Communication to convert them into admissions. It becomes one of the basic marketing activities for Educational Institutions.

Source:http://blogs.siliconindia.com/bulksmscompany/Business/Really-are-the-Education-Industries-do-marketing-activities-as-like-eCommerce-Portal-bid-fP9gkbI221215141.html

Five tips to get started with big data

Everyone seems to be talking about "big data" these days. Do you wonder what you’re missing out on? Let’s take a look at how you can get started with Big Data.

    Learn what it is, and what it is not. While we are all comfortable with the concept of data, why the emphasis on "big" data now? The world of data has changed. The speed at which data is produced and often is required to be consumed is nearly at the speed of thought. With data from sensors, geo-spatial tracked data and the discourse of human conversation being captured in social media today, our heads are left spinning with the amount of data being collected. And this is not just facts about dollars and cents or counts of activity. These are complex data points, often verbose text data that must be interpreted to identify the relevant meanings to your business. Big data simply means that you have a lot of data, and it is quite complex to use.

    Get with the program. Organizations can no longer stick their collective heads in the sand about the amount of data they must handle.

    Find the right people. Notice people come before tools. Data analysis tools are often touted as the “magic solution” to big data. While they will help you get there, you must have the right people that understand business strategy and data analysis (including statistical analysis, business modeling, and data mining).

    Find the right tools. The centralized IT group cannot keep up with the business’s demands for data and analytics. Self-service BI and analytics is the name of the game here. You want tools with features such as in-memory analytics that provide high-powered analysis on desktop-sized machines that your analysts can use.

    Be an IT-hugger. So often, once the business users and analysts get their hands on high-powered tools, they decide that IT is no longer needed. This could not be further from the truth. Often, IT has developed complex solutions to integrating data from large and diverse systems, providing standard methods for retrieving the data you need. In addition, IT is trained to plan for critical elements of your environment such as security and scalability. Figure out what the business needs, develop solid business rules around these requirements and learn from IT all you can.

Not so hard, right? Now, the next step? Go analyze. Go figure out how to turn your good company into a great company with the power of analytics.

Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/blog/2014/05/five-tips-to-get-started-with-big-data.html

Screen scraping: how to stop the internet's invisible data leeches

Data is your business's most valuable asset, so it's never a good idea to let it slip into the hands of competitors.

Sometimes, however, that can be difficult to prevent due to an automated technique known as 'screen scraping' that has for years provided a way of extracting data from website pages to be indexed over time.

This poses two main problems: first, that data could be used to gain a business advantage - from undercutting prices (in the case of a price comparison website, for example) to obtaining information on product availability.

Persistent scraping can also grind down a website's performance, which recently happened to LinkedIn when hackers used automated software to register thousands of fake accounts in a bid to extract and copy data from member profile pages.

Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero Network Security, explains the origins behind the phenomenon, how it could be affecting your business right now and how to defend from it.

TechRadar Pro: What is screen scraping? Can you talk us through some of the techniques, and why somebody would do it?

Ashley Stephenson: Screen scraping is a concept that was pioneered by early terminal emulation programs decades ago. It is a programmatic method to extract data from screens that are primarily designed to be viewed by humans.

Basically the screen scraping program pretends to be a human and "reads" the screen, collecting the interesting data into lists that can be processed automatically. The most common format is name:value pairs. For example, information extracted from a travel site reservation screen might look like the following -

Origin: Boston, Destination:Atlanta, Date:10/12/13, Flight:DL4431, Price:$650

Screen scraping has evolved significantly over the years. A major historical milestone occurred when the screen scraping concept was applied to the Internet and the web crawler was invented.

Web crawlers originally "read" or screen scraped website pages and indexed the information for future reference (e.g. search). This gave rise to the search engine industry. Today webcrawlers are much more sophisticated and websites include information (tags) dedicated to the crawler and never intended to be read by a human.

Another subsequent milestone in the evolution of screen scraping was the development of e-retail screen scraping, perhaps the most well know example being the introduction of price comparison websites.

These sites employ screen scraping programs to periodically visit a list of known e-retail sites to obtain the latest price and availability information for a specific set of products or services. This information is then stored in a database and used to provide aggregated comparative views of the e-retail landscape to interested customers.

In general the previously described screen scraping techniques have been welcomed by website operators who want their sites to be indexed by the leading search engines such as Google or Bing, similarly e-retailers typically want their products to be displayed on the leading comparison shopping sites.

TRP: Have there been any recent developments in competitive screen scraping?

AS: In contrast over the past few years, recent developments in competitive screen scraping are not necessarily so welcome. For a site to be scraped by a search engine crawler is OK if the crawler visits are infrequent.

For a site to be the target of a price comparison site scraper is OK if the information obtained is used fairly. However as the number of specialized search engines continues to increase and the frequency of price check visits skyrockets these automated page views can rise to levels which impact the intended operation of the target site.

More specifically, if the target site is the victim of competitive scraping the information obtained can be used to undermine the business of the site owner. For example, undercutting prices, beating odds, aggressively acquiring event tickets, reserving inventory, etc.

In general, we believe there is a significant increase in the use of automated bots to gather website content to seed other services, fuel competitive intelligence, and aggregate product details like pricing, features and inventory. Increasingly this information is used to get a leg up over the competition, or to increase website hit rates.

For example, in the travel and tourism industry, price scraping is a real issue as travel sites are constantly looking to beat out the competition by offering the 'best price'. Additionally, the idea of inventory scraping is becoming more common. The concept of bots being used to purchase volumes of a high value item to resell, or to increase online pricing to deter potential buyers.

With the high availability of seemingly legal software bundles and services to facilitate the screen scraping process, and the motives we've just described, it's really a pretty powerful combination.

TRP: How long has screen scraping been going on for and is it becoming more or less of a problem for companies?

AS: Screen scraping has been going on for years but it is only more recently that victims, negatively impacted by this type of behaviour, are beginning to react. Some claim copyright infringement and unfair business practices while in contrast, organizations doing the scraping claim freedom of information.

Many website owners have written usage policies on their sites that prohibit aggressive scraping but have no ability to enforce their policies - the problem doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.

TRP: How does screen scraping impact negatively on a business's IT systems?

AS: Competitive or abusive Screen scraping is just another example of unwanted traffic. Recent studies show that 61% of Internet Traffic is generated by bots. Bad-bot scrapers consume valuable resources and bandwidth intended to serve genuine web site users, this can result in increased latency for real customers, due to large numbers of non-human visits to the site. The business impact manifests itself as additional IT investment needed to serve the same number of customers.

TRP: Ebay introduced an API years ago to combat screen scraping. Is creating an API to provide access to data a recommended form of defense?

AS: Providing a dedicated API allows "good" scrapers access to your data programmatically and voluntarily observes resource utilization limits however it does not stop malicious information harvesting to be used for competitive advantage.

Real defense can be obtained by taking advantage of technology that can identify and block unwanted non-human visitors to your website. This would allow real or 'good' users to access the site for their intended purposes, while blocking the bad crawlers and bots from causing damage.

TRP: How else can an organisation defend itself from screen scraping?

AS: Using techniques such as IP reputation intelligence, geolocation enforcement, spoofed IP source detection, real time threat-level assessment, request-response behaviour analysis and bi-directional deep packet inspection.

Many organizations today are relying on Corero's First Line of Defense technology block unwanted website traffic including excessive scraping. Corero helps identify human visitors vs. non-human bots (e.g. running scripts) and blocks the unwanted offenders real-time.

TRP: Are there any internet rules governing the use (or misuse) of screen scraping?

AS: Screen scraping has been the topic of some pretty high-profile lawsuits for example Craigslist vs. PadMapper, and in the travel space for example, Ryanair vs. Budget Travel.

However, most court cases to date have not been fully resolved to the satisfaction of the victims. The courts often refuse to grant injunctions for said activity most likely because they have no precedent to work with. This is primarily due to the fact that there few if any internet rules really governing this type of activity.

Source:http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/screen-scraping-how-to-stop-the-internet-s-invisible-data-leaches-1214404

Internet Marketing - A Beginners Guide

Every new website owner is faced with the problem of getting visitors to their site, and if the website happens to be a commercial venture it needs to happen fast, even non commercial sites need visitors to survive. A quick look at some of the online tools to find expired domains show just how many websites fail every hour of every day. To help prevent your site joining the daily list of failures effective marketing is essential.

Marketing does not necessarily mean spending lots of money, however if fast results are needed then some money will have to be spent. As this article is aimed at beginners, I'll only briefly look at paid marketing and concentrate mainly on the free or low cost options to promote your site.

Paid Marketing:

In many respects online marketing is not dissimilar to offline marketing and many of the tactics used to promote an offline business will work equally well for websites. For example newspaper or magazine adverts although sometimes expensive can produce excellent results for websites, and occasionally magazines will supply cover cd's with links back to your site, an excellent way to get more visitors.

For larger campaigns television or radio ads can work, and with the expansion of satellite TV stations costs for this type of campaign are coming down all the time. For most new site owners however these options will prove to be too expensive and specialist online advertising will be the preferred choice. In the online paid sector directory listings and Pay Per Click (PPC) are probably the most popular. PPC quite simply work as the name describes and you pay a set amount every time a potential customer clicks your link. This has the advantage you only pay when someone visits your site and the obvious disadvantagethat it's open the click fraud where others click the links to increase your bill.

Most of the providers of PPC offer protection against click fraud and block multiple clicks from the same IP address, although for the site owner this is difficult to monitor, and suspicion is always there that the PPC provider has little incentive to police their policies as it would lead to loss of revenue. From experience PPC advertising can become very expensive and although it's quite easy to set up yourself through companies like google, it can sometimes be worth paying a specialist to run your campaign, as they will know how best to target the clicks to make best use of your money.

Free Marketing:

In business like all walks of life the general rule is that you get nothing for nothing, with Internet marketing this rule somewhat goes out the window as there are many free resources for promoting your website. In this section I'm going to take a look at a few of the most popular, this is of coarse only scraping the surface and as you develop your strategy further you'll find new outlets and tools that will get lots of visitors popping by your website.

Search Engines:

Without question the most effective free source of visitors are the many search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN... the list really is almost endless. Most new website owners believe to get listed in these popular search engines the best thing to do is submit your site to them, this is not the case. All the main search engines these days use crawlers which automatically browse the web and store the contents of the sites they visit.

The search engines then use this content (along with 100's of other criteria ) to rank sites for specific search terms. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a whole different subject, however in brief what you need is links from other website, and some of the marketing tips below, along with attracting visitors to your site will help with your SEO efforts. The truth is that many people use website marketing solely to increase ranking in search engines, in my experience however I've found that if you promote your site for real visitors the search engines will follow.

There are many SEO companies who specialise in getting your site up the rankings, you do need to be careful as many will make great and exaggerated claims, some of which are simply not possible. The best advice I can give here is to research thoroughly and look at, and if possible contact past customers for a reference. Good SEO can be the most cost effective way to promote your site but you do need to work hard at it or employ someone else to do it for you.

Forums:

Internet forums can be very useful for getting visitors to your site, the biggest advantage with forums is that you can target forums related to your area of interest and most will allow members who contribute useful posts and replies to have a link back to their own website in their signature. You should take care not to just post links as most good forums will consider this as spam, and even if the moderators don't delete the link, visitor looking at it will clearly see what's going on and your sites reputation will suffer.

Blogs:

In my opinion every website owner should have a blog, and for SEO purposes it's probably best to have the blog on a different domain. There are lots of free blog sites like blogger.com which offer you easy to use blogs. The biggest advantage with your own blog is you can write articles and provide links to different areas of your site, this provides different entry points and is also very good SEO practice.

Another use of blogs is comments, a great way of getting visitors back to your site is to search for other blogs relevant to your website and leave comments with a link back to your site. As with forums care should be taken not to spam the comments as it's a bad practice and unlikely to help you long term.

Article Submissions:

If you're up to it, writing an article can be a good way to get links back to your website, most good article distribution sites like EzineArticles.com will allow you to have a short bio at the end of the article, which can direct visitors back to your websites. If possible the article should be about a subject related to your business, but as you can see from my bio below it's not essential :-)

Well that's about it, as I said at the beginning this is only an introduction for beginners and as your site and business grows you'll find many new and exciting ways to market your online business.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Marketing---A-Beginners-Guide&id=1729653

Sample Essay Writing - What Must Be Considered

You may be looking at it or you may be required to write on it.

This is a particular type of writing essay that is often put for view by online research and writing services. As a student, you should not only consider looking at classification essay, you should also consider writing a sample essay that can be viewed as a sample paper by other students.

In most cases, students will turn to these essays because of the factor of time. Most students will keep research and writing till the last minutes before actually beginning the write-up. One of the most important aspects in any academic writing is the issue of time. In everything you do in academia, it is always necessary to make use of an outline. The outline guides you as you write from start to finish. The outline is there to ensure that you start and finish on time. Writing without an outline is what makes you get caught up by deadlines.

When an online research and writing service offers a sample paper for view, it is asking you to consider its services in writing your essay. There is nothing wrong if you rely on it, but make sure you consider the issue of plagiarism seriously. Your essay is supposed to be something ingenious. Fortunately, there are anti-plagiarism tools over that internet that you can use to check for the authenticity of what has been written for you and to also check the references linked to your reflective essay.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Sample-Essay-Writing---What-Must-Be-Considered&id=1194732