It’s common knowledge that you can’t predict the future, especially when it comes to business. An industry is always subject to the ever-changing (and usually random) whims of consumers and advancements in technology, which can occur in rapid succession or during long intervals. That doesn’t mean businesses have to go in blindly, because we can still make some educated – and calculated – guesses where things are headed based on a variety of factors and trends.

When it comes to mobile users, there are several trends going on that point to an even greater world of information mobility, such as the fact that data storage shows signs of doubling every 18 months, or that the number of smartphone users have already reached more than 1.5 billion worldwide. Additionally, statistics point to the average US adult spending nearly 2 and a half hours using a mobile device per day. The age of information mobility is already at hand, and it will affect your business in the coming years.

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In order to be successful in the future, businesses need to take full advantage of the burgeoning mobility trend, as it allows remote employees access to mission-critical files anytime and anywhere they want. The increased emphasis on mobility will provide improved communication and collaboration, and will allow businesses to cater to any customer regardless of their location. (more…)

Redesigning a website is not a matter that should be taken lightly. Mainly because a website will decide your audience’s first impression of your identity, whether you’re an individual or a business. If you choose the wrong design, it could cost you a great deal in terms of reputation. Additionally, redesigning a website takes time, effort, and maybe even money – so you can’t switch back and forth between different designs at the drop of a hat. However, there are signs that you need to look out for because they indicate a need for a site redesign, regardless of the risk. These signs include:

You’re Not Getting Any Results

You could have the best looking site in the world. It’s very intuitive, looks sleek, and has killer content. But if the visitors aren’t coming or you’re getting a high bounce rate, then maybe it’s time to reassess your approach. This is not to say that poor results automatically require a redesign, but you should take it into account when you go back to the drawing board, since the site’s aesthetics and the user experience it provides can play a huge role.

Your Site’s Purpose Has Changed

It’s normal for a website’s purpose to change, especially if it’s serving mostly as a marketing and branding tool for a business. Even in cases where the website is the business itself, its purpose can still change depending on the goal and strategy being used. There’s no need for a complete overhaul every time the purpose changes, but it’s a smart move to regularly check if the website design is still aligned with its goals.

You’ve Learned How to Improve Your Strategy

Even if your site is already working well and bringing in lots of satisfied users, it’s still normal to learn new things along the way or discover new advancements in the industry. Sometimes the benefits aren’t worth the hassle of a redesign, but it adds up eventually until you’re stuck with choosing between adapting via a redesign or being left behind by your competitors. (more…)

The speed in which technology, particularly IT, advances these days is a bit of a double-edged sword for developers. On the one hand, it means that opportunities will be in abundance and they will never have any problems with regard to demand for their expertise.

On the other hand, there is pressure to continue progressing and adapting to new advancements as they come along, because choosing to remain stagnant in the face of rapid progress is a surefire way to get left behind by the competition.

While majority of developers choose to obsess over which new programming language to master or which technology to focus on, their time and effort is better invested in learning (or improving) a number of skills that a developer and programmer should have, such as:

Problem Solving Skills

Programming languages will come and go, and while mastery in one can help you in learning another, the real skillset that a developer can carry from one environment into the other is his ability to solve problems. After all, software has always been designed to solve one form of user problem or another, and software development is primarily about solving problems, not learning programming languages. This is not to say that mastering a programming language isn’t important. It is, but it comes second to learning how to apply critical thinking to solving problems.

Improving your problem-solving skills requires an entire article on its own, but basically, don’t be content with cookie cutter or template solutions. From time to time, review problems that you have already solved and try to come up with new solutions or at least, read up and research on a lot of theories, see how other developers solve problems and understand their approach instead of just copying their methods.

Self-Teaching Skills

The ability to learn on your own is one of the most important and useful skills in life. For developers, it’s common knowledge that all of your years in schools and universities will only teach you theories at best, and that application in the real world will still require the ability to study and learn on your own. In fact, there are many successful programmers who started out as self-taught coders.

If you learn how to teach yourself, you’ll be removing all the limitations that are preventing you from progressing in your chosen career. There are books and various resources available for everything – all you need is yourself and enough time to learn on your own.

Naming Skills

The previous skills outlined above can be considered common sense. The ability to name things, on the other hand, is frequently overlooked. After all, we’re software developers, not archeologists or fiction writers. What do we need naming skills for?

The thing is everytime you write code, you are effectively naming things. Your success in reading code that you or someone else has written will hinge on your understanding of the code based on the names of things in said code. Being able to explain your methods and logic in the names you use in your code will put you ahead of developers who just churn out codes that “just work” but can’t remember how they did it nor explain it to a co-worker.

Last, But Definitely Not the Least: People Skills

Unless you’re only developing software on your own and intending your output to be private, you’re going to have to deal with other people. In order to really succeed in life as a software developer, you have to learn some people skills. Technical aptitude is no longer enough, especially these days when projects become so complex that they require an entire team of developers working closely – and efficiently – together.

No matter how good you are as a programmer, if you’re constantly getting into arguments with your team or even if you’re nice but can’t communicate your thoughts well, you’re going to be the weakest link.

So take time out and socialize, learn how to work with other people and keep your ego in check. Make friends and learn how to approach and communicate with different kinds of people. We’re not saying you have to be the most likable person on the planet, but you need to be the kind of person that people can easily approach and talk to, especially when it comes to difficult work-related problems.

When it comes to making money over the Internet, the secret is that you can’t just throw everything at the wall and waiting until something sticks. That method will take too long and will drain too many resources. The most effective way is to find a niche that you can sell into.

Niche markets are very effective because your strategy will be very targeted and competition will be minimal at times. Additionally, a niche market is the ideal balance between a marketer trying to sell something and prospective customers who are looking for something specific to buy – it’s basically seller and buyer meeting halfway.

For far too long, marketers have been trying to market to a general audience, resulting in wasted opportunities and resources. All because they didn’t take the time to find an untapped niche. The truth is that niche markets exist in just about every industry, and in order to maximize your success rate, you need to find untapped ones, but how do you do it?

1. Keep Your Ears Close to the Ground

Many untapped niche markets usually start out as fads or trends, but they don’t magically appear out of thin air. They’re usually coming from something else that got people’s attention and piqued their curiosity. You have to really pay attention to the things that are happening around you, and to current events.

The news is one great way to keep an eye on things, as is pop culture. This is particularly true if you are planning to enter the market via products that are related to pop culture or current affairs. For example, when the local news did a story about using sounds in certain frequencies to affect mood – the niche market for binaural mood enhancers came into being. Be mindful of what people are currently interested in, and see if there’s a product related to that. This works especially well for new problems or concerns, as you can just create or find a product that will address said problems. (more…)

A couple of decades ago, businesses only wanted websites for vanity purposes, mainly because the Internet wasn’t as widely used and building a presence online didn’t really have much of an effect on their operations. Fast-forward to today and you’ll see that having a website is almost always a necessity. Businesses find themselves missing out on opportunities for branding and marketing straight to their customers all over the globe for a fraction of the costs of an extensive marketing campaign in other platforms and media.

However, too many businesses fail to maximize the benefits of a website because they commit one of several big mistakes when they first set up their websites or in really unlucky cases, commit all of said mistakes, leading to an online presence that is not only failing to provide any benefits to the business, but is actually turning out to be detrimental. If you want to make sure that you have not committed these mistakes or want to avoid committing it in the feature, you should take a look at the following list of mistakes business owners make when setting up their website:

1. They Don’t Have a Top Level Domain Name

Many businesses fail to realize that free hosting services and the sub-domains they come with only have one benefit: it’s free. But that single benefit is negated by all the cons that come with a sub-domain, some of which include:

A. Your website loses credibility – people, and search engines themselves, don’t put a lot of weight on sub-domains. It reeks of amateurishness, and it shows that the owner doesn’t care enough about the site and what it represents to even bother investing on their own domain name. A multinational company that is still using a free subdomain URL will almost always get beat by a basement blogger who had the smarts to build an online presence around a top level domain name. (more…)

The past few years has seen a steady increase in the number of people who are using the web as part of their daily routines, and this year the upward trend is likely to continue, especially since advancements in mobile technology is happening in such a rapid pace that there are more and more devices – much cheaper and more portable than the average laptop – that can go online and browse the web. Naturally, this also affects the web dev industry in a number of ways. While it’s still too early to be 100% sure, based on what happened for the better part of 2013 and what is expected to happen later on this year, there are a number of safe web dev predictions for the year 2014, such as:

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Smartphones Will Finally Take Over

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Mobile devices have long been touted as “desktop killers,” and while desktops are not going away anytime soon, the sales of smart phones have already exceeded both portables and desktops last year and are still experiencing massive growth in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe. Smartphones, for their part, have become more powerful and versatile as new ones come out. It’s not going to kill any other device right now but this year it may finally take over desktops as the most used method of accessing the internet. For web devs, this means this year will see an increasing need to take mobile users into account when designing pages.

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HTML5 Web Apps Will Be More Widely Accepted

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HTML5 has been around for some time now, and has proven to be a good alternative to other APIs like flash and java, but so far support has been less than expected as more devs still continue to support old tech. However, this year more native mobile app developers will be making the switch to HTML5 as it is cheaper to develop due to being cross-platform. It also has the means to provide support for different screen sizes, and provides access to various hardware functionality without being crippled by bizarre policy restrictions or extortionate charges imposed by an app store.

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The Appeal of Client-Side Flash, Silverlight, and Java Will Wane

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As mentioned above, HTML5 will start proving its mettle this year, resulting in other technologies like flash, silverlight, and java losing their appeal to web developers, at least as far as client-side application is concerned. Flash seems to still have a lot of life left because the advertising industry has already invested a lot in it and are still using it aggressively, but you can expect that click-throughs and revenues will start to go down.

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IE12 Will Finally Be Released

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A lot of people haven’t noticed it, but Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer, has actually become a viable piece of software these past few years, to the point that it can actually serve as your primary browser now and no longer need to resort to third parties (any new software dev should look at Microsoft’s case as a lesson in what not to do if you don’t want to struggle under the weight of past failures). But yes, IE is actually a really capable browser nowadays, and the development time between versions has dramatically decreased to around 12 months, so we can at least expect IE12 to come out by October, and possibly earlier if they have few essential features to add or tweak.

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Opera Will Fall Out of Favor

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The browser market is currently dominated by Chrome, with IE coming in at a not-so-close second. And then we have Firefox and Safari. Opera, on the other hand, is losing market share for years and it’s all coming to a head. They recently decided to switch to Google’s Blink rendering engine, but it was a case of too little, too late as Opera users have been disappointed with Opera 15+ and have started migrating to other browsers.

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Page Weight Will Become a Concern

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One alarming thread is the rise of page weight, with last year seeing a 30% increase in page weight in many sighs. It’s common knowledge that a slow loading page will affect both user experience and search engine ranking (Google has publicly admitted that their algorithms account for loading speeds, and there’s also the fact that unsatisfied users will result in a high bounce rate). Thankfully, this year should see the peak in page weight as more and more people start to realize that they need to trim down on their pages. Or at least, they’ll reach the limit on the amount of unnecessary fonts, widgets, libraries and images that can be added to a page.

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Lastly, The Return of Machine Readable Data Feeds

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Machine-readable data feeds, microdata, microformats and REST URLs are practical SEO techniques, but this year’s growth in mobile users means that these feeds have another purpose to them – make it easier for mobile devices to read and access content on your site. Mobile devices are more responsive towards content syndication over visiting individual sites, and once webmasters find out a feasible way of monetizing machine readable content, we may see a greatly renewed interest in them.

Most people think that the process of improving a site in order to make it more SEO friendly requires big changes and major overhauls of the structure and content, but the truth is that there are simple design changes you can implement to make your site more SEO Friendly, and none of them will require additional purchases or weeks’ worth of coding to do. Such as:

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1. Less is More

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Less text is better. Less images is better. Less messages is better.

Remember that the brain is capable of processing only one piece of information at a time. The more you crowd your site with information and images, the greater the chances of the visitor turning away. Make it clean and make it direct.

Say what you want to say in one sentence and yes, you have to say only one thing.

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