Ouriken Blogs - Implementing Innovative Solutions

Cloud Consulting, CRM Software, Web Push Notifications

3 Best Cloud Migration Strategies You Must Know About

For Business purposes companies nowadays have adopted cloud computing platform. There are hardly any companies we’ll find wh does not use cloud today, such as the popularity of cloud. For the successful run of business, there might be many reasons but it is essential to migrate to the cloud platforms in cloud consulting services.

Why Should We Migrate?

As the introduction and updation of newer technologies take place, it is highly recommended to use and adopt these technologies n order to stay in the competition. IT does have many advantages in terms of speed, storage, processing of data, cost and much more it’s the go-to platform every company is adopting right now. Migration isn’t something which can be done overnight, significant planning is required wit required resources. Inclusion of planning should be why you want to shift, what you’re keeping with you, and where is the destination where you will keep all the data again. Let’s dive deep into the strategies.

Strategies

With the necessary resources, the planning of migration is concrete, for achieving the desired result, we can follow a strategy. Though there are many strategies we can use to complete the job, today we will look at the three R’s of the cloud migration strategy. It is very essential to determine the current environment, its dependencies, licenses, types of applications and servers. Organizations that opt for the migration of data and applications to the cloud use these strategies. They are as follows:

Rehost
Revise
Refractor

Rehost

It’s also known as “lift and shift strategy”. This is the most commonly followed strategy when the applications are needed to migrate to the cloud. Involvement of lifting a part of the application or whole application from one on-premise or existing cloud environment and shifting it to another cloud environment, that is why the name. in the process of shifting of an application to the new cloud platform, sometimes there is a need for change in the host configuration. Is your business concerned about operational cost and quick migration without any need of disturbing the existing application workflow?

Revise

Unlike the rehosting strategy, in this strategy, a part or whole application is optimized before migrating to the cloud. This strategy is also known as “re-platforming”. Preoptimization of application really helps in better performance of application rather than improving the entire code architecture. Organizations can leverage more cloud benefits by optimizing the applications rather than just moving them, but rehosting is way cheaper as compared to revising strategy.

Refractor

Not at all similar to the other two strategies. It is too complex as compared to rehosting and revising. It is also known as “re-architecting” because even though this strategy is the most expensive one amongst all three, but it offers the best possible benefits when it comes to cloud migration of data and application in an organization and the refractor approach makes changes to architecture structure of the application. The requirement of time, as well as knowledge about the cloud platform itself, is necessary for the refractor approach and services offered.

There are two types in this strategy namely, partial and complete. In Partial refractor, only a part of the application is modified, since it happens in sequence it results in faster migration whereas, in complete refractor approach, the entire modification of application takes place, which is pocket-friendly and high in performance.

Conclusion

It is not easy to choose an appropriate migration strategy for an organization. Many factors must be considered before taking a decision which includes the right cloud service provider, optimization of necessary application processes, migration strategy, overhead, costs, and more.

Ouriken’s cloud consulting services identify and prioritize cloud applications, optimization, cloud migration which helps your business. Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Business Process Management, Digital Solutions

What is Business Process Management?

Introduction

Set of activities required to accomplish a common goal is Business Process. These activities are completed either sequentially or parallel and may be performed by people or systems. The acronym for ‘Business Process Management’ is BPM.

In every business, we hear the term business process management or BPM. BPM can be defined as a discipline of design, execution, modeling, optimization, and monitoring business processes to increase profitability.

That is the reason why BPM is considered more of a discipline rather than a tool or technology. It’s a very important concept. It is not just a software you can purchase and install to repair business issues, there are people involved who play a significant role in the business processes management. BPM software goes merely beyond the automation work to helping others with continuous process improvement, this is the key difference between workflow and BPM.

What is Business Process Management?

Business Process Management Services is a management approach concentrated on aligning all aspects of the organization with the needs of clients. Business Process Management tries to enhance processes constantly so that, it could be described as the “Process optimization process.” It is said that BPM allows an organization to be more efficient, effective and more capable than a functionally focused =, traditional hierarchical management approach.

Related Post: What is Agile Methodology?

Types of Business Process

It is very important to realize that processes differ greatly when starting our BPM. You can categorize your business in many different ways, which includes:

Complexity
Duration
Volume
Industry
Department

Some businesses are not very well suited to being managed within the BPM software that is why it is important. Let us take an example, where highly repetitive or regulated processes tend to be excellent candidates, unpredictable and unstructured processes are not.

The Process Lifecycle

There are 5 main phases of business process management: design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization. Lets further dig into it

Design

Both the identification of existing processes and the design “to-be” processes get encircled within the Design Process. Representation of the process flow, the actors within it, alters and notifications, escalations, standard operating procedures, service level agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms are some areas to focus.

Good designs reduce the number of problems over the lifetimes of a process. A correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared is the only aim of this step. The improvement which is proposed could be in human-to-human, human-to-system, system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market or challenges which are capable of competing faced by the businesses.

Modeling

By taking the theoretical designs and introduction of combinations of variables takes place.

Execution

If you want to automate the process, one of the ways to do it is to develop or purchase an application that executes that required steps of the process. But on the contrary, these applications rarely process all the steps properly to get the optimum result. Another great way to do it is to operate it with multiple software and human intervention, but then again this process is tedious and complex, the documentation part becomes very difficult.

To overcome these problems, the software has been developed that enables the full business process to be defined in a language that will be directly executed by the computer itself. To perform business operations, the system will either use services in connected applications or when a step is too tough to automate, will ask for human input. Directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easy to improve compared to either of the previous approaches. For process execution and resolution, a business rule engine can be used.

Monitoring

In this phase, process performance is measured. Monitoring is completely included in the tracking of individual processes, so the information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided. Apart from this, to improve their connected processes, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers. The generation of measures are examples of statistics on quickly an order of the customer is processed or how many orders were processed last month. They fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate, and productivity.

What information the business wants to evaluate is totally dependant on the degree of monitoring, and analyze and how a business wants it to be monitored, in real-time, near real-time, or ad-hoc. However, BAM (business activity monitoring) extends the monitoring into generally provided by the BPM system (BPMS).

A collection of methods and tools related to process mining is known as Process mining. To analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with a priori process model is the aim of process mining.

Optimization

Retrieving process performance info from modeling or monitoring phase. Look for potential or actual issues and the potential opportunities for cost savings or other improvements then applying those enhancements in the design phase of the process hence, the creation of greater business values.

Conclusion

The most important aspect of BPM is one of the most often overlooked perhaps, is continuous improvement. Because, as time changes with technology, processes change too. The cycle begins again once the potential process change is identified and the best suggestions are implemented.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations. Ouriken works with you to optimize productivity, improve performance and reduce time-to-market. To accelerate your business growth with our Business Process Management services.

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Digital Solutions, Website Designing, Website Development Company

Common Problems in Web Designing and how to Avoid it

While developing a website you can face a lot of problems which can ruin your whole development process, the precious time you had invested in developing the project and the resources as well. In this blog, I will be sharing a few common issues, time-suckers, and other things that arise that can deviate a project.

Each Website project is different, but according to my experience, there are a lot of common problems that arise in the phase of website designing. And we do our best to acting in advance to deal with the expected change guide course of designing very clear of any issues so we can save our client’s time as well as budget in Website Designing services.

Here is a compilation of 4 common problems/issues we have observed in web design projects over the years and how to avoid them effectively. In order to keep your website production smooth and at a budget.

Wrong people in Charge

Many clients think that we are vendors they pay us to do the designing the websites, so all the responsibility is our own.

It’s very important to know that it’s a collaborative effect whenever we are beginning a web design project. To help you achieve your goals, we take our knowledge of the web, best practices and your option to create a website. To get there we need to have a point-of-contact that will be engaged, communicative, well-organized, and understand the large goals of the project.

We have run into issues where this does not go as expected, so once there was this client running the project without seeking approvals or feedback from anyone else on the team. Without the knowledge to us, we received approvals on things and then we got to the final stage. But when the CEO saw what we made, she hated it and we had to start over.

Assigning a wrong person in charge can be very destructive for the project’s budget and timeline – according to what we have seen. We should manage our time in terms of communication because the person in charge was not doing what they’re supposed to do, the less time we need to create a beautiful website.

Ignoring the budget

The trickiest subject to deal with when it comes to a project is its budget. We arrange our projects based on the number of hours we think it will take. Based on historical data from previous websites, we come up with our estimates. We estimate our deadlines accordingly.

We give updates on where we are with a budget, as we move throughout our web design project. Just address the concern and try to be mindful of the hours if you find out that the design phase is already wasting the development time.

Some clients have requested that we keep updating the design and hope that we will have enough for the rest upon knowing this information. It does become an issue sometimes and clients end up getting very close to their budget or exceeding it.

You should hear those concerns and make any important adjustments to preserve the budget for the remainder of the project if your web designer is bringing up a budget in the design phase of the project.

Radio Silence on Feedback

There are many website projects which are based on approvals. We typically start with a sitemap/wireframe whenever we begin with a new project. And once that is approved, we go ahead with the design.

It’s important to really review the drafts you are given and make sure its what you want, it’s typically a red flag that they didn’t really review it and will probably change down the road if clients are too swift to approve a design. Make sure your review is thoughtful and specific.

Assumption of the Template is a Right Method

We will sometimes recommend using a template to keep the budget low. Website templates help us put out a product quickly. But many clients opt for the template for the wrong reasons and don’t consider the long term consequences.

It doesn’t work in the long run, while the templates help us keep the budget less. A template has its own limitations. It could be further edited beyond its capabilities which will force the designer to use the custom website design, which will make the cost to custom website design so there is no use of using the cheap template for the use.

Conclusion

It doesn’t mean that every website project is doomed from the beginning, but if you are aware of the common problems, you can work with your company to avoid it effectively. We work hard to make our clients happy and to make a successful product that produces amazing results. And by collaborating to work on issues.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Application Development, Digital Solutions

9 Tips to Reduce Mobile App Development Cost

Since the past five years, there has been a major growth seen in the migration of consumers from desktop to mobile because smartphones allow users the accessibility at any time from anywhere. That is the reason why the businesses are shifting a major part of their development from desktop to mobile, with a goal of developing mobile apps will give exposure to the business, improve the loyalty of customers, and therefore building a stronger brand altogether. It will happen because mobile apps enable customers to interact with a brand personal space. However, extravagant app development cost acts as a discouragement to the company when developing a mobile app for their brand.

Costs for developing mobile apps shouldn’t be expensive. So we will discuss some of the points to reduce unnecessary costs without compromising on the quality.

Efficiently Planned Mobile App Development Process

Mobile App Development is a complex process that requires several iterations and modifications before achieving the final product. The basic requirement of the mobile app is that it provides the user experience which customer likes, for making it possible there are many changes in the process and each change ascends the app development costs. To lower costs from the initial stage is to have many ideas of how the customer can get the best version to enhance the user experience. By weighing the pros and cons of various ideas and brainstorming with the team at the initial stages will be very effective in cutting down some costs. You can choose to implement only the feature in which users want reducing a sufficient amount of costs in the development process itself by reducing too many alterations.

Preparing a Sketch of Final Product

Coding is just a base of the development process, it is very important that the developer has the vision of a clear goal of expectations from the app or the kind of the interface that needs to be provided by the customer. You can easily communicate the expectations of the customer to the developer by sketching the app and its interface so he can use it at his initial point for designing the interface and workflow to match the expectations of the customer. It will prevent unnecessary reworking of the app design that adds to mobile development costs.

Related Post: 8 Free Ways To Promote Your Business

The decision of Platform for the App

There is a various platform where you can develop your app – iOS, Android, Windows, always ensures that the app reaches more users when the company is trying to keep the costs low, it might make more sense to target a single platform. The best way to choose a platform to work on is to analyze what major consumers like and to work on it. By choosing one platform out of three, you automatically reduce the cost of app development to almost two-thirds. And chosen by many of the clients, cross-platform development is an economical way to make the app ready to be deployed on multiple platforms.

Outsourcing the Project

Many companies think to outsource as a loss for their development project, but on the contrary, it comes with a host of benefits. First, since you hire the development team only for a short time, paying them hourly, the app development costs cut down significantly than if were to hire an in-house development team as you would continue to pay them a fixed salary. Without knowing it, the number of hours they worked on the task. Secondly, you get access to not only to the skills of the expert developers who have experience in app development but also to much more design of the app.

Use Existing Technologies and Resources

Like we discussed in the above point, outsourcing the mobile app development to a developer with a skill set is that you can make optimal use of existing templates and frameworks he has developed for previous builds. By opting for pre-existing frameworks that meet your requirements you can significantly cut down development time, reducing app development costs in the process.

Framework Testing

Many companies make the mistake of not testing their app thoroughly in a rush on making it live in the market which results in not only a loss of reputation of the brand but also an increase in the app development cost for correcting the flaws. Testing the framework before launch will give us the idea of what is not working properly and fix them as soon as possible cutting downtime as well as costs.

Look for an Expert Mobile App Development Company

The mobile app development process requires skilled experts in various areas working together to build the app. That’s the reason you should look forward to hiring a mobile app development company who provides app development services who has good experience in app development for the various platform, besides offering end-to-end services, app development, design, and marketing. By doing this the cost of app development will be lower than if you have to outsource each service to a different agency.

Don’t Rush for the Launch

Reduction of development times will lower the costs, its no brainer to not rush in the process without following a systematic approach that includes, testing. Otherwise, any imperfections or bugs will be noticed only once the app is used by the customers, which will diminish the user experience, and affecting the brand value.

Keep it simple

It doesn’t mean that more features mean good experience. The Excitement factor in the initial stage of the app development process is understandable but it not only increases cost but also makes the app too heavy and also lengthen the development process. Highlighting the best features of an app that are essential for rand or business will keep your costs down.

Ouriken application development & support services help you maintain your business-critical mainframe applications & replace legacy applications. Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Website Design and Development, Website Designing

Maintaining a Website’s SEO After a Redesign

Planning to redesign your website but afraid of the SEO rankings? There need is some need to considering the maintenance of SEO rankings and your website’s DA before, after and during the redesign process. The aesthetics of the site is not the only thing you need to worry about when you think of redesigning your website, but we also need to take some time to look into the maintenance of SEO for your website and ways to improve it as well.

Many companies, since maintaining SEO for a website is a big deal nowadays, fail to understand the importance of attention to SEO while the redesigning of their website, but it affects them a big-time after in time. You could wipe out all your previous SEO efforts if maintenance of SEO is not done carefully. With major Web Design and Development activities, there are both technical and non-technical areas to consider for. Specific steps must be taken care of to ensure that you don’t demolish your SEO quality when transitioning from old site to new one.

Core Areas to Consider

There are three main areas to look upon in order to maintain the SEO rankings when redesigning your website:

What is acceptable with your current SEO efforts
During a redesign, what might be the possible common challenges
Changes that will come with a new website

You will be able to find out your weakness in SEO by focusing on these areas so you can improve it later.

Monitoring your SEO

If you have campaigns in place and currently monitoring your SEO rankings regarding those keywords then you have a good amount of data to analyze. In that case, one must be really aware of the keywords they rank for, the mapping for each keyword, the exact placement in rankings and the pages that deliver the highest organic traffic.

Common Challenges to Face with SEO in Redesigning Process

There are a lot of issues that may pop up when you work on a site redesign, focus on rebranding, improving User Experience, and updating of backend. There is a list where one could face challenges:

Removed Content
Changed Content
Movable content based on the new site’s navigation or site map
URLs might change
Changes in Page-level optimization
Addition of new content, sections, technology, new features
New Technical difficulties
Internal Link structure edits
Changes in Domain or Sub-Domain
Changes in Protocol

These are the areas which may impact SEO in a redesign. It may be very hard to identify exactly what needs to be addressed with so many possible changes. Out of the above-mentioned challenges, changes in a domain are one of the biggest challenges as compared to other challenges, but each and every challenge must be overcome and the more challenges you have the more difficult it will be to maintain your SEO rankings.

How to not lose your SEO rankings checklist and redesign at the same time

Before starting the redesigning process it’s very important to undertint the best practices to preserve your SEO rankings. Some of the parameters are as follows:

An SEO audit must be run on your current website

Understanding all the keywords you are attempting to rank for and with what the pages are associated with. You should be concerned about pages and specific on-page optimization beyond redirects, which go from the Dev. to the live line state.

Setting up 301 and 302 redirects

First and foremost, you must redirect the old URLs to new ones. You’ll need to have a spreadsheet of all needed redirects if you’re making changes to permalink structure. Crawl the old list of URLs to ensure that everything redirects as it should once you have the new site live.

A permanent redirect from one link to another is called a 301 redirect. This redirection is used for website visitors and search engines, a 301 redirect is better for SEO over a temporary one because it transfers the internal link as well, approximately 90-99% of the time. This redirection method is the preferred method for new sites.

And a temporary redirection is called 302 redirects, redirecting users and search engines to the desired page for a short period of time until it’s removed. In order to give your users a seamless experience, you should use it during the update of a web page. What they say is right, excess 302 redirects will affect your SEO, so be careful when using it.

Multiple Tests

Assuming the live site will perform the same as a dev. site is kind of stupidity. A lot of time and resources are probably invested in testing, but in the real world, things can change. Usage of technical tools for site audits like Moz, Ahrefs, or DeepCrawl, these tools provide insights on technical issues. Also, running your domain through the mobile-friendly testing tool and the loading speed of the new website must be checked too. Last but not least, schema markup on the new website should be done and must not be forgotten.

How to Avoid Mistakes

We’ve covered almost everything that you should do, but how can we avoid mistakes that can cost you your SEO rankings.

Don’t start over on the content: If the content on your website is ranking, then you must not abandon it. If you do it will affect the rankings.
Redirects are your friends: when a 404 Page Not Found error is displayed to the user, which means the pages have dropped off Google’s index.
Internal linking is the key: Always remember to push this to the new website.
Outbound links must be added on need.
You can use Ahrefs to find these pages that have high rankings and multiple backlinks, try to preserve or transfer them.

Conclusion

As the brand evolves, redesigning a website is a move that most companies should make. In order to maintain the SEO rankings, you must follow these best practices from a website redesign. Never start over on the content like your old website never existed, it will affect the rankings so bad. Feel free to add your tips, tricks, and suggestions in the comments below.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Web Push Notifications, Website Designing, Website Development Company

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Development Company

Choices are very good as well sometimes confusing factors. Humans are gifted with quick decision-making capabilities, so the choices we get to choose from helps humans to decide completely depends upon the choices. Nowadays choices are ample, but the time to choose it very less. That’s is why we come up with some set of rules, regulations, and principles of our own to choose what is good for us. In the same way, choosing a Web Development Company for our business is a tedious task as well since there are almost 10,000+ companies to choose from Countrywide. Let’s look at one of the examples of what I’m trying to say.

In 1980, at the headquarters of Crest Toothpaste, there was a grand party. Due to a knowledge-intensive environment, the chief operating officer suggested coming up with new ideas and a new marketing strategy must be invented and implemented. And after brainstorming for a while they came to the conclusion of introducing new variations in the toothpaste and it will be good for the company, business-wise. Within the organization, this idea was well received. Without wasting any time, they came up with 52 new variants of the toothpaste, which were given shelves in the major supermarkets.

But, when Crest was working on its 52 variants, unfortunately, another company named Colgate launched ‘Colgate Total’. It was just a single toothpaste claiming to clean the mouth totally.

Now, what happened was whenever a customer visited the store he had choices. Either they can choose one Colgate toothpaste or they have to choose one from 52 variants of Crest toothpaste. According to me, the customer will choose Colgate over Crest. So after offering so many choices, humans get confused with its natural tendency because they want the best for them.

So, if you are planning to start a business or already have one, an obvious first mandatory factor is to have a website for the business. In order to achieve it, you can either use your internal resources for building a website or finding companies to build a website for you. And there are so many companies to choose from that is become almost impossible to choose the right one for you.

Let’s see some tips which you must consider before handling your website development job to a new agency.

Check Internal Resources

In this process, we take a look at our available resources in the firm, and according to it, we can set a budget for ourselves. The development of an e-commerce website requires serious skills. UI/UX design sense, what type of content needs to go on the website, testing, development, and quality control. After all this, we must decide on what e-commerce software platform to use. Later comes the digital marketing part containing SEO and so on.

If you and your team have an above-mentioned list of skills then it will play a vital role in getting your website launched quickly and will reduce the cost of the company. But let’s be real, no one has that kind of expertise laying on their hand ready to work, and most of the small businesses and even big champs didn’t have that type of skill set readily available and they didn’t have time as well. Here comes the Website Development Company into the picture, getting a website developer on board becomes imperative for a successful website launch. Let’s see the factors that one must consider before hiring a website development company for your e-commerce store.

Portfolio Enquiry

One does not think twice while asking for extras at a restaurant, so we must not hesitate t ask the portfolio of the company. A website is a medium where people will visit and make a purchase and you will make money out of it, so make sure you design your website is very well optimized and built according to your needs. Do not leave everything on the hands of the developer, they don’t know your requirements in and out unless you tell them to do so.

Ask them for their finished as well as ongoing e-commerce website projects, in that way you’ll come to know about their work as well as you can get ideas for your website, regarding UI/UX as well as components that will solve your problem. A simple background check of the agency is an optional thing to do, but it is possible just to be sure.

Handling Deadlines

This factor can be judged easily in the first few meetings with the client. The amount of time a vendor invests in each project can be checked by their portfolio. Enquire about the contingency plans and challenged the Website Development Company faced to build an e-commerce website for their previous customers. The company will be able to provide a clear-cut plan if they are experienced.

Response Time of Agency

In the first meeting, it is impossible to know how efficient the developer is, but in 2-3 presales meetings you can be sure about the levels of commitment and speed of delivery is the vendor going to show after you’ve hired him. Get ready for not only missed deadlines but also unfulfilled commitments if the representative of the agency is not addressing your request for more information quickly and they provide unjustifiable reasons for the delay.

Do Your Own Research

Because of the advancements of the telecom sector, the digital world has become one big family they are always in touch with each other. For the search of perfect developer what you can do is ask our friends or friends of friends if they can refer anyone they can know. It’s the best way to find potential vendors as it can save time. Reddit and Quora are filled with good developers, you just have to search properly. A lot of good Web Development Companies and their customers are using these platforms to search and talk to each other. Pay attention to the reviews which people are writing about the company, if they are good then the company is actually good if they are bad they have a talk with the company about what went wrong and let them clarify the things and let them fix the situation to provide you better service.

Opt for All-In-One Package

Most of the companies usually have all in one package, to release some pain from the budget. It is a very wise decision of hiring an agency that has a team that makes sure that the website not only attracts scores of the customer very well but also website functioning perfectly. When you get all the information in one place, it becomes easier for you to stay updated with the progress that agency is doing, for creating something new and extraordinary a diverse team I required to brainstorm properly with your involvement as well. Always remember, more heads means more innovation.

Conclusion

Starting a business is a very daunting task, which makes it way harder is to maintain the workflow run business smoothly and generates leads. That’s why a working website is a very crucial thing to have. If not taken seriously, the dream of success and money you want to generate will never come true. Try to provide the best experience otherwise, the customer will bag the product in the cart but not from your website. Keep these tips in mind and concentrate on getting the best website designing services.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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CRM Software, Digital Solutions, Website Designing

8 Free Ways to Promote Your Business

Every business wants their products or services to be seen by potential customers. But, most of the traditional ways for promotion costs money and not everyone can afford it if they are just starting up the business. Well, there are ways to promote your business without spending a dime. So, let’s get into the list of the ways of 8 ways to promote your business. These ideas will not cost you money but they will surely cost you some of your precious time.

Optimization of Website for Search Engines

In this digital world, what people do when they want to buy something? Well, they search for the product or service on Google or other search engines of their choice. The process of information gathering takes place about the product. They try to collect data from the internet so if your website is not the list which they are searching for their information on, so you virtually do not exist.

The easy fix for this is to hire a digital agency that can do the optimization of your website for you but, even in that case you need to be aware of the process, so that Google cannot penalize your website for some wrongdoings or against its algorithm. By reading some guides on SEO you can tweak your website and rank higher on Google and on other search engines as well. The good thing is agencies would not be able to fool you if you know some of the processes.

Business Listing

Vendors are being searched on business directories by buyers. If your products are mostly B2B, add a free listing on IndiaMart, Trade India and Indian Yellow Pages. These are some popular business to business directories.

And if you’re products or services are B2C then you can list your business on Just Dial, Ask Me and Get It for free. The biggest advantage of these platforms is that they have mobile apps and that attracts a huge audience.

If your business is selling software’s then SoftwareSuggest is a very good directory to list your business. The categorization of the software’s on this website is quite good, like HR, CRM, ERP, etc. Many small businesses have been profited by this.

Listing On Google My Business

Google is trying to make the search personal and now displays results that are tailored for your location. For example, if we search for McDonald’s, Google will show you the outlets in your city with a map. So, if your list your business on Google, it will be very beneficial for you, and it is necessary to get listed on Google as the rate of competition is increasing very rapidly.

Adding your business is very easy, Google made sure that the process is simple for addition and managing the added business for the location on the map.

Social Media is Powerful

Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, not only help you get more customers but also the engagement to get quality feedback from them for your products or services. One can get around 20% of traffic only from social media.

The key point in achieving most out of social media is the frequency of our posts, if we post regularly, the rate of popularity and loyal customers will increase. Business updates or news related updates can be shared with your industry. Competitor analysis on social media is very easy as well; we can follow some influencers and monitor their activity. Recommended is to post twice to thrice a week on Facebook and 2-3 times a day on Twitter.

Answering Questions

It happens most of the time that people don’t get their desired answers on the Google search, so they turn up towards forums on the internet to solve their problems. QnA sites like Quora and Yahoo answers are one of the popular places where you can find new customers. There are LinkedIn Groups that are also used for the QnA website.

How can we benefit from these sites? We first have to create accounts on these websites and start searching for your product or services; we will get a lot of questions related to your product or services. People will ask about the top companies that sell this product and they will compare different products and so on.

Always start by answering easy questions and then move the levels up a bit by bit. For Example in Ouriken, I searched for a web design and development company on Quora and got hundreds of questions related to the topic. Then, like I said start answering easy questions and keep recommending your website in the answers so that you will get organic traffic to your website that too, free of cost.

The same thing could be done on Yahoo answers and LinkedIn groups, all 3 of them are a good source for organic traffic and very influential. Talking about good things, all these websites are crawled or indexed by Google so your answers will get displayed on Google whenever someone will search for it. Tip for answering in these websites is to have the intention of helping the needy first then we can sell our things in between. Nobody likes hard upselling.

Attending Networking Events/Meetups

The Concept is to visit Events/Expos/Meetups and increase your network in order to find new customers. You can just search for “Business events in (your city)” and Google will come up with the list of upcoming events if there are any. Most of the events are free of cost, you just have to bear the travel expenses and they attract potential customers as well as distributors/resellers/consultants.

Gradually, there will be a realization in you that people attend these events just to meet other people and increasing their network, eventually increasing their customers. Meetup is a site through which we can meet a lot of entrepreneurs and startup owners meet frequently using this site. People with open minds come here to meet and or open for new ideas sharing and partnerships in the existing startups.

Uploading Videos on YouTube

Over 4 billion videos are played on YouTube every day, and this number is growing exponentially. So, uploading videos on YouTube of your product or service is a no brainer. The best part is, search results of your videos will appear on the Google search result page giving your website more visibility.

For product, a 2 min demo video of the product will do, and for service, you can upload a testimonial of the client and upload it. You should always remember to put keywords in the title or description of the video so it ranks up. If you come up with interesting content that has the potential to go viral and hit the jackpot, leads will flood into your inbox.

Offering a Deal to Customers

Deal sites like Groupon and Coupon Dunia attract millions of users to their portals. So, have a meeting with the deal website guys, brainstorm with them and come up with a deal that your customers cannot resist. And you can a good number of buyers at no cost.

Once you have decided the discount to give to your customers, the deals website will do the promotion for you. Since they have a large database of registered users. This process of offering deals will be more or less will remain similar in other websites as well.

Conclusion

These are just 8 ways, there can be or there are many more ways of promoting your business. You just have to be creative and have an out of the box thinking. Some of the points mentioned above will yield results instantly, and some will take its own natural time. If you’re on a tight budget for marketing you have to invest your time in it instead to promote your business. There are some startups who succeeded with literally ZERO marketing budget. If you have any other ideas to add in this list, I know there are. Feel free to comment down below.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Digital Solutions, Web Beacon, Website Designing

What is Web Beacon (Bug)?

A Web Beacon is also known as Web Bug, pixel tag, invisible GIF, Clear GIF. In order to know what the user has accessed in emails or web pages, web bug is used. Mostly used for web analytics, a Web Beacon is mostly invisible. A Web Beacon arrives in the form of an image and can be detected by the user, only if the back end source code is checked. Web Beacon can work easily because it is a small graphical image with very little size and low bandwidth and weak network connection is not a problem to it.

Web Beacon is still a controversial topic and is still debatable whether to use it or not since it comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Some take it to be a good thing because of its ability of high-level real-time analytics for business. On the other hand, some people consider it as a tool for data theft and are causing disruption. Some find it extremely concerning.

While in many cases, Web Beacons also constitutes an image which has a pixel size dimension of 1×1. But, Web Beacon has so many positive aspects and it could be used in the tracking of the following statistics:

The exact time for the web bug was used or accessed or viewed.
Type of Web Browser of a user who has fetched the web bug.
The physical Internet Protocol address of the system that accessed the web bug.
User Preferences are stored in the Web Beacon to use it later for remarketing Ads.
Advertisers have the ability to build up browsing profiles for customers to display a healthy amount of relevant ads.

For validating email addresses a Web Beacon can be used by spammers. The sender can validate if the user has accessed the email, therefore, the sender can validate the authenticity of an email address.

Working of Web Beacon

Images within the web page also get rendered when the browser tries to render a web page. A request by the browser is made to the server to download the images within the web page, with this request server keep a log of some information such as IP address, timestamp, and other few details. The process of tracking how many times you have accessed the web page could be done with the help of Web Beacon with the location information and few additional user specifics. Reference to an existing can also be made by this request which was sent to the server by the browser. By the means of this request, the webmaster understands the user preferences and builds a profile based on user preferences. It’s placed on the website by website design and development company in the backend, making it completely invisible. Web Beacon can not only be used over emails, but it can also be work over websites. Tracking and monitoring emails and their click rates is a common practice. Open Tracking, a Method that is used to insert images right in the emails. So whenever the email server tries to download an image in the mail, an alert is directly sent to the web server. In email marketing, it is an important part of analytics since they know if their email was opened or clicked.

Web Beacon can also be a part of embedded links, most probably in the form of a reference ID within the URL. By clicking on the embedded link, one can identify if the email was opened and when it was opened. In 2007, Facebook implemented its own beacon which was also referred to as “Facebook beacons” existed. Facebook Beacon collected data from users profile from beacons partners of what that user accessed and other information. But without taking any prior consent, Facebook displayed this data on users profile’s which a breach of privacy and security, which was without really letting the users turn on or off this feature, which was a huge security issue. That was past, Facebook learned its lesson owing to privacy concerns they revoked the Facebook Beacons and had to suspend it from the website.

Difference between Cookie and a Web Beacon

Most of the times both the components are used for a similar purpose, which is to track information. The purpose is to provide a better user experience. Perhaps they sound similar, but the working is different. Many of the times Web Beacons are used in conjunction with cookies. Cookie could be identified as a session cookie or a persistent cookie. Cookies are targeted to improve returning customer’s user experience by enabling faster interactions. Cookies have an upper hand that they can be accepted or declined. By default, cookies are turned on, but most browsers give users to choose the cookie preference.

On the other hand, Web Beacons are a part of images and are not visible to users in any way unless the user checks the source code. Web Beacons do not provide user preference to accept or decline them. But there’s a way to block the Web Beacons by just going into the browser’s privacy section. But this has to be done manually on all the browsers the user is using. By doing this few of the other websites or user interface may not work properly based on the configuration of the website.

Advantages of Web Beacon

It has some advantages that are the reason many websites and email marketing campaigns focus on this.

Based on interest, Web Beacons allows advertisers to display ads to users very effectively.
Easy to implement and extremely cheap.
It enhances user experience with the help of selected personalization
Data Insights are provided, which is data gold mines.
It increases the Retention of customers and user engagement.

Disadvantages of Web Beacon

Basically, there are no disadvantages for Web Beacon, but there are some concerns which annoyed some users, they are listed as follows:

Coding Expertise is required.
Since it is technology dependent, and hence implementation can vary based on technology.
To avoid any privacy-related issues it should be implemented carefully.

Related Post: Push Notification – Modern Advertising Channel!

Conclusion

Web Beacon can provide great insights making it a powerful tool. If implemented properly can provide great data insights. Without the requirement of any expensive analytics tools, Web Beacon is the most affordable option.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Agile Methodology

What is Agile Methodology?

Agile Methodology is a process that promotes continues iteration of development and testing throughout the software development life cycle of the project. Unlike the waterfall model, both development and testing activities are concurrent. It’s also a hyped word in the IT industry where they use it to describe the alternative method of project management. A process that provides quick and capricious responses to the feedback they receive on their project. During the development cycle itself, it creates opportunities to assess a project’s direction. Assessment of the project in regular meetings is called sprints or iterations.

It’s very empowering in nature that helps companies to design and build the right product. It is beneficial for software companies because of the management process and it helps them to analyze and improve their product throughout its development which enables companies to make a highly valuable product so they stay competitive in the market.

Origin of Agile

A small group of people in 2011, tired of all the traditional approach for management of software development projects, so after brainstorming for while they came up with the agile manifesto. It is a more practical and improved method for managing the progress of software projects.

Four Important agile manifesto values:

Instead of processes and tools focus should be more on individuals and interactions.
Rather than comprehensive documentation, working software is a priority.
Contract negotiation is a bad practice in agile, customer collaboration is more vital.
Instead of the process working like a robot and following a plan, it must respond to changes.

Business advantages of Agile

Whatever the common risks that are associated with the delivery, scope, and budget of the project, it gets reduced with the help of agile management. It focuses on the encouragement of collaboration between the customer and the team, offering mutual benefits in the migration of high risks during the development of the software.

In 2009, Dr. David F Rico did a comparison between agile and traditional methods of software project management. He analyzed 23 agile processes during his research and synthesis, comparing them with 7500 traditional projects. There he found 20 projects where agile was beneficial, in terms of business value 41% were better, 83% showed quicker time-to-market speeds, Quality-wise 50% were high, 50% were inexpensive, and 83% were more productive. Since then, agile consulting services are offered to boost the performance of their software development life cycle.

Agile Methodologies

There are many agile methodologies that share similar philosophies, characteristics, and practices. Subsequently, each agile has its own practices, terminology, and tactics at the point of implementation.

Scrum

A management framework with far-reaching abilities to manage the iterations and increment in all project types. Scrum is lightweight and can be used with other agile methodologies for various engineering practices. Because of their simplicity and having a higher productivity rate scrums have grown in popularity within the agile software development.

Lean and Kanban

Lean Software development

Originally developed by Mary and Tom poppendieck, lean software development is an iteration methodology where many of its principles and practices in lean software development came from the lean enterprise movement, and Toyota was the first company to utilize it. This value-based method focuses on delivering an efficient “value stream” mechanism that gives the value to the project. This methodology works on some of the principles those are, eliminate waste, amplify learning, make decisions as late as possible, deliver results as quickly as possible, empower the team, build integrity, and envision the whole project.

It works as a first choice only the features that have real value to the system, delivering and prioritizing them in small batches leads to the elimination of waste. It emphasizes on speed and efficiency relying on rapid and reliable feedback between the customers and programmers. Ensuring Everyone’s productivity this methodology concentrates on efficiencies of team resources.

The Kanban Method

Kanban Method is used to manage the project’s creation while concentrating on the continued delivery and not over pressurizing the development team. Just like Scrum, Kanban processes help teams work together and efficiently.

Three principles of Kanban Method

Visualize what you do; see all the items within the context of each other.
Limit the amount of work in progress (WIP): balance the flow-based approach so teams are not committed to doing too much work at once.
Enhance the flow: as soon as one task is finished start on the next highest job from the backlog

The promotion of continued collaboration is encouraged and ongoing learning and improvements to provide the best possible workflow for the team.

Extreme Programming (XP)

Originally described by Kent Beck, Extreme Programming is one of the most well-known and controversial agile methodologies. It’s a highly disciplinary method of continuously delivering high-quality software faster. To perform continued planning, the customer is actively involved with the closed knit team. The extreme programming method is based on four simple values, Simplicity, Communication, Feedback, and Courage.

Crystal

In developing software, crystal methodology is one of the most lightweight and adaptable approaches. Including Clear, Crystal Yellow, Crystal Orange, and other uniquely characterized methods, it’s made up of several processes. The factors which drive processes are the size of the team, the criticality of the system, and the priority of the project. There are several essential values of crystal method, they are, Team Work, Simplicity, Communication, Reflection, Frequent Adjustments, Improve Processes. Like other methodologies, this agile process promotes early and frequent working software delivery. Encouragement of high user involvement, adaptability, and eliminations of distractions and bureaucracy.

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)

Firstly known as Rapid Application Development (RAD), which originated in 1994, the Dynamic Systems Development Method provides an industry standard framework for project delivery. Although the RAD approach developed in an unstructured fashion it was very popular in the 1990s. Now DSDM has evolved and matured, it provides management, execution, foundation in planning, and scaling of the agile process and iteration projects. It has six key principles revolving around the business needs, Value, Active User Involvement, Empowered Teams, Frequent Delivery, Integrated testing, Stakeholder Collaboration. Approach for delivery and acceptance criteria, DSDM uses “fitness for business purpose”. The main formula for DSDM is 80% system development in 20% time.

Feature Driven Development (FDD)

Feature Driven Development was developed by Jeff De Luca, along with contributors, A.M. Rajashima, Lim Bak Wee, Paul Szego, Jon Kern, and Stephen Palmer. It begins by first establishing the shape of an agile model, it is a short iteration process and it is model driven. Because they are small and useful, these features appeal to clients. By using these eight practices the FDD is designed and delivered, Domain Object Modeling, Development of Features, Component and Class Ownership, Feature Teams, Inspections, Configuration Management, Regular Builds, Visibility of progress and results.

Conclusion

A very exciting and fascinating approach to software development is agile management. The result is a more rewarding experience for everyone involved, by integrating the product developers and customers in the planning and implementing processes. If done properly, organizations can continuously find ways to increase the value to their customers. It produces more generous end results for the company by those who are actively working on the project and create a more positive experience for the customer. As Agile Consulting says “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, CRM Software, Digital Solutions, IoT

Why Businesses Must Integrate Artificial Intelligence [AI]?

In 2017, Artificial Intelligence became one of the hottest topics and is still attracting attention and investments. There was a void in businesses without AI – Artificial Intelligence, before that social networking, mobile apps, the Internet of Things, and Data Analytics have filled that void. Scientists have been working upon the technology and been talking about the benefits of AI from the past four decades, it’s about time that society’s AI dreams are coming true.

When the term AI is told, people think of the AI we encounter in personal lives which is web ads dependent and based on our search history, facial recognition on Facebook, or the IVR of banks or other companies. Or perhaps, some people think of personal digital assistants namely, Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft), and Google Assistant (Google). But AI applications impacted both consumer and business operations. For example, a Harley Davidson dealer implemented an AI-driven marketing platform into his marketing mix and the results were astonishingly high. He witnessed a 2930 percent increase in sales, which literally tripled his business over the previous year. But every AI integration is not as successful as that dealer. Social Networking and Smartphones were into the consumer world first then they moved into Business, in the same way, we can expect AI to seep into business applications in a natural way. However, with an increase in the volumes of people, places, and things plus there is also an increase in computing speeds and real-time processing power. AI applicability and business benefits are becoming a reality with immediate effect.

AI Estimations

A survey of Cowen and Company, currently 81% of IT leaders are investing in or planning to invest in AI. CIOs are also heralding to their companies for the integration of AI into their entire technology hub. Meanwhile, 43 percent are doing a proof of concept for AI, and 38 percent of organizations have already implemented AI and been planning to invest more into it.

Estimation from McKinsey research states that tech giants spent $20 billion to $30 billion on AI in 2016. Of that, R & D and deployment will get 90 percent and 10 percent to AI acquisitions. Artificial Intelligence will grow to a $47 billion market by 2020, says industry analyst firm IDC with a compound annual growth rate of 55%. Companies will spend around $18 billion on software applications, $billion on software platforms, and $24 billion on services and hardware, states IDC. Your business will risk irrelevancy if your business doesn’t already have a strategy to incorporate AI or machine learning (ML) into your development efforts by 2020 that too with this level of investment.

Related Post: What is Internet of Things [IoT]?

Exponential Growth of AI

Google, Amazon, and Facebook are leading the AI race right now, with Microsoft just behind between those three are catching up rapidly with the investment of a lot of time and resources in AI. With access to thousands of researchers on staff and billions of dollars set aside for investing in capturing the next generation of leading data scientists, proving these organizations a head start over the rest of the market. For example:
1. Google’s 25,000 engineers, only a few thousand are knowledgeable and proficient, that makes roughly 10 % and they are making efforts to make that number 100 percent.
2. The AI and research group at Microsoft grew by 60% through hiring and acquisitions in the first year of its operations.
3. FBLearner Flow is being used by over 750 Facebook engineers and 40 different product teams, which helps them leverage AI and ML. Over a million models have been trained on the new software.

Moreover, Infor, Microsoft, and Salesforce have also been researching and implementing AI in their business. In the market today, these tech giants are just a few of the serious artificial intelligence contenders. It makes smaller companies very tough to attract and retain the skilled work required to make their AI dreams a reality. Recruiting efforts won’t just be it to create an impact, but also the time required to conduct a new employee onboarding, supervised learning, and training to effectively scale AI programs.

Most companies lack analytical infrastructure and general knowledge needed to apply AI and ML to its full potential. Secured access of data without having to deal with multiple authentications must be enabled by engineers. Often it’s a case if the company has several isolated data warehouses or enterprise resource planning application systems. IT leaders must have the ability to bring large data sets together from several unique and varied data sources into centralized, scalable and observed data repository, for this they have to attempt to successfully deploy and conquer an enterprise-wide AI strategy.

Development of AI Applications Market Place

When it’s clear that the use of AI is important, not all companies have the IT budgets to hire the employees required to build AI-fueled applications that too in-house. For that reason, we can expect to see on an immediate effect, the rise of AI services marketplace in the near future. There is already an emerging form of companies providing AI self – service tools that are very easy to use for the non-data scientist and not that expensive to acquire. These AI market places will resell AI services and specialized algorithms that companies can completely buy and implement within their business, which will make the business process management more easier to handle. To compete in this race of AI, this marketplace will provide companies AI services which are in a modest budget.

Conclusion

We have only seen a few examples of the major AI benefits, we will see a rise in the integration of the AI in the coming future. Having the roots in computer science since, a few decades. It is only now that this concept is getting popular among the organizations as well as the consumer applications, and the need for it increasing day by day. By embedding AI into the core functions of the software enterprise software providers are making AI a necessity. We can see this integration more in the coming years. For businesses, this will mean that they no more need to hire computer scientists or invest large capital to develop their own AI systems.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.