technology

“Error 404” (CC BY 2.0) by WarmSleepy

In 2018, downtime for a website which relies on selling products or services to make a profit is borderline destructive. In this day and age, downtime for your website not only costs money, it can also negatively affect your reputation. Website errors not only affect the end-user too; the problems invariably require in-house engineers to resolve the issue, pulling them away from other key tasks as a result.

Website downtime is by no means an issue confined to e-commerce websites, but a rock-solid and consistent user experience is more important for online retailers than any other sector in terms of attracting and retaining customers. It’s all about those fine margins. Leading global marketplace Amazon recently calculated that even a one-second delay in their website’s operations could cost the company up to $1.6bn a year in sales.

Admittedly, the best way to ensure high availability for all in-datacentre and cross-datacentre websites is to incorporate a load balancer into your website’s infrastructure. Load balancing can work for online retailers where they operate using local servers in a single country or global servers in multiple locations around the world. At a local level, where online traffic to your website is shared across a number of servers within your data centre, a local load balancing application can optimise that distribution of visitors equally across all servers to improve the efficiency of your server loads and ensure swift, secure user experiences.

Image: Pixabay.com

E-commerce brands operating from multiple data centres, often in different countries to serve visitors in their native region, can also ensure high availability and dependable website performance with a global load balancing solution. With a global infrastructure, users are funnelled to the data centre with the fastest connection time, although it’s possible to configure the system to direct users to a location-specific data centre based on their geolocation. With load balancing, it’s possible to get real-time overview of the health and efficiency of your web servers and data centres and direct your users to an active data centre. This software can issue health check requests to each server to periodically monitor their performance.

Of course, downtime for any e-commerce website doesn’t just affect sales and reputation, it can negatively impact upon a website’s prominence in search engine results pages (SERPs). Both Google and Bing take a dim view of websites that have regular site outages, which could result in your website being outranked by competitors, although you’re doing the rest of your SEO absolutely right. In fact, Google’s John Mueller recommends that if you’re aware that your website will need to be down for some time, you should use a 503 server code to make search engine bots aware that it’s only a temporary issue. That will allow you to recover your SEO rankings more easily once you’re back online.

For any online retailer, it’s essential not to just be able to quickly respond to a crisis. In fact, it’s better to have a proactive monitoring system that allows you to keep on top of issues before they evolve into potential downtime-worthy problems. The failure of even the biggest retailers such as Amazon should serve as a clear warning to other e-commerce brands that downtime can – and will – happen. Minimise your website’s performance degradation and server failures with periodic testing and load balancing to help things operate on an even keel.

(Image Credit: endomedion / 123RF Stock Photo)

Traditionally, Agile techniques have been the exclusive domain of software companies. Agile, which has been available to software manufacturers since the early 1990s, is a process that companies use to create new requirements and solutions for an application.

It breaks down product development into much smaller increments, minimizing the need for significant upfront design and planning. Thousands of companies have used it to create more efficient software solutions since its inception.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, hardware companies have come to appreciate the many benefits an agile manufacturing approach as well. The informal definition of agile manufacturing is an approach used by a company to manufacture its products. This includes the entire process, such as the training, tools, and processes a manufacturer must employ to get its products to the marketplace.

The main goal of agile manufacturing is to respond quickly to customer needs without jeopardizing quality or increasing costs.

Understanding the Four Key Elements of Agile Manufacturing

A successful agile manufacturing plan must incorporate all four of these elements:

1. Corporate partners: Companies that implement agile manufacturing attempt to leverage business relationships with other companies whenever possible. The rationale is that cooperative and short-term projects can aid with entry or adjustment to new or evolving markets.
2. Information technology (IT): The use of IT throughout the organization ensures that employees have the most recent information and can respond quickly to internal and external communication requests. This empowers them to make faster decisions regarding product design as well as ensures information distribution across several platforms.
3. Knowledge culture: Adopting agile manufacturing means the company is willing to invest in employee training. This results in employee who can rapidly adapt to changing specifications throughout the company.
4. Modular product design: This manufacturing process lends itself to modular products that allow for prompt variation and modification. Workers build modular products from a variety of pieces to ensure that this is possible. As an example, a worker incorporating modular product design would create several small pieces of the product that fit together rather than using a single type of material.

The Example of Wikispeed

Wikispeed, an auto manufacturer based in the United States, uses Agile manufacturing as a type of development technique. It just so happens that Wikispeed’s founder, Joe Justice, had been instrumental in Agile software development using Scrum since Agile first came on the scene. With this background, it was possible for Justice to implement the same techniques to manufacture a car. Wikispeed’s development process for cars dropped to just seven days. The result is a fully functioning automobile that consumes less gas than many other models.

While software and hardware development have obvious differences, the two share enough similarities for hardware manufacturers to seriously consider implementing Agile. Today’s winners in manufacturing aren’t necessarily the ones with the best product. It’s the company who can get new products to market the fastest, a goal that hardware manufacturers can reach easier by switching to the Agile process.

It ain’t easy to be an entrepreneur. Once you have decided to become one, there are a lot of things you need to take into consideration. Whether you are going to run a big enterprise or a small business, you still have to prepare yourself for it. You need to ensure that you get sufficient funds, resources, and time to make it happen.

When it comes to managing your business’ tech side, you also need to know every bit of it. By simply learning even a few tips about technology, you will be able to be a better entrepreneur as well as streamline your daily business operations. Things will definitely be more advantageous when you get to use proper technology in your business. It is just a matter of looking into the right tools and processes to lead your enterprise in the right path.

So, in order to succeed in your venture, be sure to keep these vital tech tips in mind all the time:

Never cheap out on technology

Technology is as significant as the other factors making up your entire business, so you better put importance to it, too. Today’s modern world relies on technology that is why you have to invest in new business technology though it might be costly. As an entrepreneur, you need to put your money into more profitable and necessary software, machines, or tools, like Whois domain search database, to keep your venture off the ground. Choose the right technology and continue to grow your enterprise.

Ensure your technology is up-to-date

One of the most effective ways to boost your business is through the use of latest technology. Businesses that adopt new technology are said to compete excellently with other ventures, increase revenues, improve efficiency, and connect with new markets or customers. By using updated productivity software, cloud-based services, and Internet connectivity in your office and at work, entrepreneurs can make a drastic change to their businesses. You can even make more people do business with you and enhance customer satisfaction through technology.

Make technology a priority

In every business, there are a number of essential things you need to prioritize. You have to guarantee that one of these is technology because it will be of great help in your venture. Without technology, you won’t be able to communicate well with your partners and clients, be a match for your competitors, deliver your tasks on time, and advance your business growth. With this, you need to make technology a priority once you start your own business or when you are revamping your existing enterprise.

Technology is such a broad concept that businesses can benefit from at all times. As an entrepreneur, you have to educate yourself regarding the latest and most useful technologies you can incorporate in your own enterprise. This might be tough to do at first, but everything will pay off once you invest in the right technology. You will witness increased productivity, improved speed, efficient storing and sharing information, and raised revenue in the long run, making your business thrive.

Digital signage is like any other business investment. It has to deliver positive results. If you’re one of the many businesses that have realised and capitalised on this modern platform, you might be asking if it is effective. The answer lies in several factors, but you must define first what success means to you in terms of the use of digital signage, since success can come in various forms.

Defining “effective” digital signage

In using business tools, you initially want such tools to address a particular problem or area. Go back to what drove you to use digital signage, including what you wanted to achieve. If it achieves such goal or goals, then it can be considered effective. Remember that goals can be either quantitative or qualitative or a combination of the two. Your goals can be something like having more customers coming in, or fewer customers asking the same questions repeatedly. It could also be reduced waiting times or happier, more connected employees.

Increased number of people coming in

If there is a significant increase of the number of people coming inside your store after you have set up digital signage outside or somewhere visible from the outside, it’s a good sign that it is effective. Passers-by might be drawn to your sign, be enthralled, and decide to enter.

Improved sales for digitally displayed products

If you use your digital signage to highlight a specific product or collection and you notice a significant boost in sales following the display, it is also a positive sign that the signage is performing well.

Better informed customers

If you use digital signage to educate or inform your customers, they should be more informed by now. Some common questions should be answered through your digital display, and if you notice fewer questions because answers are already provided, it is a good indicator that people are taking time to view your signage.

More social media engagement

If you integrate your social media page into your digital display, you should also improve your social media presence. By now, you should be benefiting from more mentions, followers or likes. Your digital signage should have helped people to find you easily or prompted them to interact with you through your online presence.

It is important to evaluate and learn if your digital signage is performing to your advantage. The reason is not to determine if you need to take it down, but to assess which areas to improve. You spend a certain operational cost on this, so it’s smart to use it to its fullest potential. To know if it is effective, ask if it is doing what you want it to do. If you have not yet used digital signage for your business, consult the right persons and use high quality products from reputable AV mounting solutions provider such as www.unicol.com.

Although recording videos is now easier than ever due to the prevalence of cameras on mobile devices, there is still a certain stigma attached to editing them. Frankly speaking that stigma is well founded, as editing videos can be complicated and often requires a certain level of technical expertise and experience. For lots of tips about working with Windows, you can check out Windows Maximizer or continue reading to learn more about video editing in general.

While you may feel that you can do without having to learn to edit videos and may have successfully steered clear of it up till now, there are actually several very good reasons why you should learn. There are always new software, devices, and tech gadgets coming out, and it is important to keep up. It may take time, but these 3 reasons should help to convince you why it is important that you learn video editing:

• More people are watching more videos – daily

With every passing day more people watch more hours of video, and the numbers just keep increasing. Videos are now the most popular type of content on the internet, and are likely to remain on top for a long time to come.

Considering their popularity it is more important than ever that you learn to edit videos, so that you are able to create content of your own.

• Videos are impactful

Compared to other types of media, videos are able to make a much bigger impact – which is illustrated in their views, engagement levels, and a variety of other metrics. That impact is contingent on several factors however, and it is necessary to edit videos in order to ensure they take fully advantage of that potential.

• Editing is easier than you might think

Contrary to popular belief, editing videos can actually be much easier than you may think. While it can have a steep learning curve, that is largely down to the editor that is used. Nowadays there are more user-friendly editors that are more intuitive and easier to use, and aren’t nearly as daunting as their professional counterparts.

Granted it will still take some effort to learn to edit videos, but many of the horror stories that may have scared you off don’t really apply.

One simple and user-friendly video editor that you may want to try is Movavi Video Editor. It is a video editing software that is designed to be intuitive, and goes out of its way to ensure that its features can be utilized by experimentation rather than having to go through a steep learning curve.

Make no mistake the features in Movavi Video Editor are far from basic, and will let you edit your video in any way that you require. With its help you could enhance the video quality, combine video clips, trim unwanted segments, add captions, include audio tracks, apply special effects, and much more.

Suffice to say if you want to learn video editing but would rather not jump through too many hoops – Movavi Video Editor is a great place to start. Now that you’re aware of the reasons why you should learn to edit videos, why not give it a go and see for yourself how easy it can be.