Why Your Website Should be Professional

You learned that a successful online business rarely comes from a cookie-cutter approach like affiliate marketing, blogging, selling MLM products, and so on. It comes from expressing your talents.
People want to buy from people they know, like, and trust. If you’re an expert at something, it will be easy to establish yourself as an authority and win loyal customers.

Since you’ve spent years in your profession, you decide to quit working for others for less than you’re worth and offer a consulting service.Then you took the plunge.

You created your own online business offering a consulting service and signed up with BidSync to get notified of the best leads, people looking for what you’re offering. In fact, you can even get leads for lucrative government contracts. After you saved enough money, you quit your job and went for it full-time.

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Increase Your Sales Using a Win/Loss Strategy

No entrepreneur wants to lose, but few startups leverage a win/loss strategy, which can improve sales performance. It’s not a complicated matter; using data and customer surveys, your wins (sales) and losses (lost sales, closed accounts, etc.) are analyzed to gain competitive intelligence. The result is an advantage that should help you produce more wins, and thus grow your business in terms of your profitability and reputation (satisfied customers are the best form of advertising).

“Win/loss analysis teaches you how to win more by studying past sales deals,” writes Primary Intelligence, a leading analytical provider. “It helps you detect problems, understand the market, and stay close to the competition by listening to the best intelligence sources: your buyers and sellers.”

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Tips for Having an Appealing Website to Attract Customers

Staying on top of your business's website is one of the best ways to keep the interest of your customers. Consumers and technology are always changing, which is why it's important to keep yourself educated to help your business gain a competitive edge. Use your website to the best of your advantage and let your customers see that you're up to date with the changing trends. Find out the best tips for updating your website based on current trends.

Educate Yourself

If you want to have an effective website, you'll need to educate yourself to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Learn from ADP Compliance Insights to gain more knowledge on tax incentives, payroll, and client setup resources. Spend time keeping yourself up to date with what customers currently like versus website trends that are no longer efficient.

Use Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is important for making your website show up in Google's search results to be seen by your customers. When implementing SEO, it's important to write your own content and give your website a personal touch. Google is always changing, which is why you have to find out the most relevant keywords to use in your content and how to use them more effectively. Use SEO tools such as a meta tag checker, broken link checker, and speed checker to ensure your website functions properly. Implement calls to actions in your content, such as subscribe, call now, share now, buy now, and learn more.

Have a Mobile Site

Most people use their mobile devices to search for content, which is why you need to have a mobile-friendly website. Mobile websites allows you give your customers information in a smaller scale and helps to match the visitor's specific needs. Ensure your mobile site loads quickly, is easy to navigate, offers a good user experience, provides easy-to-read content, and uses a variety of calls to action.

Improve User Experience

Improve user experience on your website by keeping things simple and make it easy to navigate. A card-based interface is one of the most current website trends because it provides your customers with a great deal of information on a smaller scale. Card-based designs allow you to keep things simple and neat. Card-based designs also rely heavily on images, which are known to boost the attractiveness of a website and increase your website design.

Other Tips for a Successful Website

·  Make your website secure from hackers with the proper backup tools
·  Make your web address simple
·  Advertise properly
·  Keep your content fresh
·  Make sure it loads quickly
·  Know your customer
·  Use clean and attractive typography with bold headings

Having a successful website is one of the most effective ways of attracting your customers and holding their attention. Your website needs to be clean, simple, and offer a mobile friendly option. Always do your research on the latest website design trends to stay on top of the game and have a more appealing website. Spend time creating a website that will offer customers a satisfied experience. It also helps to find out what your competitors are doing to determine the best course of action for designing your own website without stealing their ideas.

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Use Your ERP to Target Your Audience More Effectively

ERP is an acronym for enterprise resource planning. It is defined as:

the management of all the information and resources involved in a company's operations by means of an integrated computer system.

Think of the main computer on the starship, Enterprise, and you will have some idea what ERP is all about. If you are of the TNG persuasion, think of Cmd. Data is the operations manager. When the captain needs to get to a destination in 6 minutes rather than six days. He tells Data to, “Make it so!” Data uses the computer (the ERP calculator) to adjust all the parameters to get there.
He trims the shields, takes the weapons offline, and restricts life-support to essential areas of the ship. He sends a note to the IT guy: Geordi, to make the necessary changes in system allocation. Behind the scene, a lot is going on to get Picard’s enterprise to where it is heading. The same is true for your enterprise, as well. Here’s how you can use your ERP to more effectively target your audience, and get where you are headed:

Make Your Target Audience Feel Secure

To more effectively target your market, you need to obtain information about and from the users. There are two ways to get that information: First, you can just take it. That is what every bad actor with a website does. They load their pages with all sorts of spyware and adware that tracks the visitor from the time he happens onto your page, to long past the time he leaves. . The second way to get user information is to just ask for it.
If you have been caught trying to take the information without respecting the user’s privacy, you will never get them to volunteer it, as you have broken the trust relationship. Just ask Sony how the whole root kit thing has worked out.
They need to know that you are not selling their information to the lowest bidder, and that your systems are secure from hackers. Besides customer trust, Trend Micro suggests other benefits of a good cloud security solution:

Not having the right security as you migrate to virtual and cloud environments can lead to security gaps, lost ROI, performance lag, and difficulty proving compliance. You can secure critical data and applications across your cloud and virtualized environments with effective protection that maximizes their operational and economic benefits.

One of the reasons Apple and Amazon do so well is that people trust those companies with their most sensitive information. These companies have proven reliable with credit card, and other personal information. Make your site secure. Make your visitors feel secure, and they will give you the information you need based on a trust relationship.

Be Where Your Audience Is Going

Just recently, it was revealed that there are now more iOS devices being sold than Windows PCs. This is not about comparing systems to see which is better. I don’t care. This is about understanding where the market is going.
It is very clear that consumers are moving to mobile devices and experiences. If you do not already have a solid, mobile presence, then you have already missed a cycle. It is not enough to go there once your audience has already left. You need to figure out where your audience is headed, and be there waiting for them. That means mobile experiences like platform-specific apps and mobile experiences for your products and services are table stakes. It’s probably past time you start developing watch apps.

Figure out Who You Are

Finally, if you want to be better at targeting your audience, you have to figure out who you are. You have to make some hard decisions, and narrow your focus. You have to stop trying to be all things to all people. Under Steve Balmer as CEO, Microsoft completely lost focus, and forgot who they were. For a while, they were so busy chasing Apple’s audience, they forgot who their market was.
Microsoft’s present leadership is changing all that. Additionally, they are emphasizing security, and paying attention to mobile. If slow-moving Microsoft can turn it around, so can you.

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How to Create Ghost Buttons With CSS

One of the most popular web design trend this year is the "ghost button", which is simply created as a basic, flat shape and clickable items with no fill and a simple outline. It is completely (or almost completely transparent) asides from the outline and text. (Hence the name “ghost".)
This button are quite popular on pages that use full-screen photography, one-page sites and those with minimalist or almost-flat design schemes, because this simple style of button is thought to not intrude into the image as much as a more traditional button.

The ghost button seemed to evolve from Apple when they redesigned iOS 7. Many, if not all the UI elements are what we would call a ghost button.

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20 Useful Tools to Test Code Snippets

As a web developer, having a place to quickly test code or work on an idea before going live might be very important. As time go by, more online code editors are created that can help you code from any computer with internet access. These tools let you combine CSS, HTML and often even JavaScript to create and share coding examples.

Below you will find some useful free code playgrounds and sandboxing tools for testing, debugging and sharing your code snippets.

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20+ HTML Elements to Write Better Text Semantics

HTML5 has several new layers, including a new set of semantic tags. While there is still some debate about whether or not we should be using and styling these tags I think at the very least we should start learning them.

The following HTML tags are used to format the appearance of the text on your web page. This can jazz up the look of a web page, however, too much variety in the text formatting can also look displeasing.

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The Expected Specifications of HTML6

HTML5 has most definitely proven to be a transformational platform, giving abundant room to web developers to spread their wings (it rather has given them some blockbuster wings).
With its elements like <header>, <menu>, <nav>, <menuitem> and so on, it has given a new dimension to how developers go about their job of creating web apps of the highest order.
But just when you thought that HTML is going to take some time before it swings something new at us, bam, it's right here. Now HTML6 hasn't been launched per se, but the specs are well and truly in.

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Adding Icon After External Links with CSS or JavaScript

Styling external links with text or icon is common practice for many sites, like Wikipedia. It serves as a simple visual cue indicating that if you click a particular link you will be taken to another site.

You can simply implement this using CSS or JavaScript without having to add any additional elements to your anchor tags or additional image tags to the HTML source.

Example is given below:

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How to Target IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10 and IE11

It gets frustrating when different versions of Internet Explorer displays our web pages differently due to the inconsistent rendering engine.

Sometimes, we might just think tweaking our code to render the same across different browser version is not that important, but that's a wrong idea. Many users don’t care what browser they are using as long as it browses the internet. Sadly, most of these users are on IE7, IE8, and IE9 because that is what comes installed on their PC. Luckily there are now several ways of targeting IE.

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Detection Techniques to Check Browser Support For HTML5 Features

Any website is built with a common goal in mind: to make it work according to the latest specifications and web trends. Since the mobile Internet usage is growing with each passing day, it is becoming needful for site owners to develop a site that is optimized for mobile users. And HTML5 provides the potential to build mobile websites. This is why, HTML5 web development is becoming the most popular web trend used by webmasters around the world.

HTML5 introduced a lot of new and cool functionalities including some great semantic elements, audio and video support and the canvas tag. However, some old browsers don't provide support for HTML5, and thus you may think how to adopt HTML5 if your users don’t have HTML5-compatible browsers. But that's not what you should be thinking, as it is a misleading thought. Remember that the browsers that support HTML5 means that they support different features of it; and rather than detecting whether “browsers support HTML5”, you should detect if the new HTML5 functionality is supported in the browsers or not.

This post will help you explore how to detect browser support for the new HTML5 elements.

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