Man or Machine: Which Protects Your Data?

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. In today’s digital world, businesses of all kinds are operated online which involve the mass generation of data and transfer of that data. As such, there’s a need to protect your data. The following contributed post thus entitled, Man or Machine: Which Protects Your Data?

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There has been a heavy emphasis on data security across mainstream media platforms for many years. With huge amounts of data being stolen from companies, personal information being more important than ever before, and criminals becoming more sophisticated, it makes sense that people want to keep themselves safe. Of course, though, as a business, it can be hard to know who or what you can rely on to make this happen. To help you out, this post will be exploring the roles of both people and machines in relation to your data security, giving you an idea of where you trust should lie.

Machines

Most people would assume that you can trust computers with anything. They don’t tend to operate without instructions, instead performing the tasks which you’ve told them to. Of course, though, it isn’t impossible for people on the outside to take control. To solve this issue, tools like encryption and firewalls are used, blocking access to data which should only be seen by those within your business. These tools don’t always do their job, opening the doors to data being leaked into the world. Of course, though, this isn’t something which you have to worry about if you have the right people looking after you systems.

People

Data leaks and information dumps are often the result of human error, with people clicking the wrong buttons or ignoring prompts which they should be taking action to solve. Updates, for example, are often handled automatically by operating systems like Windows, but will require a restart before they are in place. If a security update rolls out, but your teams don’t reset their machines, they will be vulnerable to attacks. This sort of issue has plagued some businesses, leaving them to rely on increasingly automated systems to handle their data protection, but this doesn’t always solve the issue.

What To Trust?

In reality, you should never trust either of these areas unless you’ve done the work to secure them. Your computers should be managed and maintained by a professional company, ensuring that you are compliant with local laws, while also keep everything updated to deal with new threats. Along with this, using special data storage recruitment companies to find your employees can be a great idea. By following this route, you will be able to fill your business with people who have already proven their ability to look after data. It’s never worth putting your trust in something which isn’t proven, especially when it comes to protecting data.

With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to take on the challenge of protecting the data within your business. Most companies struggle with this area, eventually feeling the impact which can come when you lose other people’s data. Of course, though, as time goes on, you will only have to put more effort into it. Criminals haven’t stopped developing their systems, and this means that companies have to remain on their toes, with new threats popping up all the time.

3 Important Changes You Need To Make To Your Online Delivery Process

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. In today’s digital age, many individuals are moving their products using an online store. If you have an online store, it’s important to be able to deliver your products as efficiently as possible. The following contributed post is thus entitled, 3 Important Changes You Need To Make To Your Online Delivery Process.

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A good shipping process is vital for online retailers. Customers have high expectations and they want their products to arrive as quickly as possible. Even if they love your products and the prices are great, they’re not going to come back to you if you make them wait a week for delivery. You’re not going to be able to match the next day or even same day delivery that the big companies are offering because you simply don’t have the resources to do it, but you do need to make sure that you’re getting products out as quickly as possible. You also need to make sure that you’re doing it in a cost-effective way and products aren’t getting broken in transit. It sounds tough, but if you follow these basic tips you can handle your shipping efficiently.

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Consult Professionals

Supply chains are a difficult thing to manage and there are a lot of different steps to consider along the way. You need to get the products from the manufacturer delivered to your warehouse, then you need to pack them all and plan routes for your delivery vehicles. If this is your first business and you’ve never dealt with a supply chain before, you probably haven’t got a clue where to start. That’s why it’s a good idea to consult professional companies like the Moresby Group and get their advice. They’ll have a lot more experience than you and they’ll be able to help you set up and manage an efficient supply chain so you don’t make any costly mistakes.

Route Planning Software

Giving your driver a list of addresses and sending them on the way isn’t the most efficient way to handle your deliveries. Everything will still get there on time but it’ll take longer than it needs to and you’ll be using more fuel. But if you use route planning software, you can create the most efficient routes possible. That saves your drivers time, saves you money and makes your business more eco-friendly because you’re using less fuel.

Barcode Scanners

Picking items from the warehouse is quite a long part of the shipping process, especially if your employees are doing it all manually. You’re wasting so much time if people are searching the warehouse for products every time they need to load a shipment. That’s why you need to invest a bit of money in some inventory software and barcode scanners. Your employees will be so much quicker if they can scan their picking list and find out exactly where the products that they need are stored.

Consider Outsourcing

If you’re selling products on a large scale, it might be more cost-effective to run your own warehouse and shipping process. However, if you’re a relatively new business and you don’t make that many sales yet, you probably don’t have the capital for that. It’s also not necessary at this stage in your business career. Instead, you should consider outsourcing to a courier company. They’ll already have the infrastructure in place and the necessary experience to handle your deliveries in a timely fashion.

If you don’t have a good shipping service in place, you’re never going to get your online retail business off the ground.

How to Collaborate with an Outsourced IT Company

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. Outsourcing can be very helpful to your business operations. In some instances you can use an outsourced IT company and it’s important to understand how to get the most out of the collaboration. The following contributed is thus entitled, How to Collaborate with an Outsourced IT Company.

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It is now quite evident that many businesses are reliant on IT to be successful but what many aspiring entrepreneurs don’t understand is that they don’t have to be IT geniuses – they just need to hire an IT genius to realize their vision.

Outsourcing is now so fundamental to business that almost any function can be outsourced from PR, HR and Accounting to Cloud Computing. It stands to reason that even the heart of your business idea could be successfully outsourced if you find the right professional to help. Then all you need to focus on is coming up with new ideas and strategies for growth.

Many IT companies such as http://www.sabioit.com/services-solutions/it-consulting-cio-services/ offer a wide range of services from CIO services right through to email management. However, finding the right company and working well with them can be two mutually exclusive ideas.

Here’s how to manage your relationship and make the most of your outsourcing.

Be Clear With Your Vision

As an entrepreneur you really only have one main job: to have awesome ideas and be able to explain them to other people (preferably people with the cash to buy into it!). This is a fundamental skill and yet for so many of us, finding the language to explain a complicated idea so that it can be translated into an IT solution is tough.

If you can’t explain your idea to a company – either because they simply don’t understand or because you don’t have the right approach – your project is going to stand still until you can. A good IT company will try to suggest what you might mean but a great IT company will ask questions until they are sure they know what you mean.

Clarity isn’t always immediate so work on your relationship to develop a common ground you can work with. This should make future collaboration easier.

Welcome Alternative Ideas

Of course, it could be that you are struggling to communicate your idea because your IT company knows that there is a simpler solution. In this case, it is vital that you are able to let go and welcome new ideas. Being more open minded and focusing on the results is the best way to work. Does it really matter whether you use your idea or their idea to get to what you want?

If you are not an IT expert yourself, it is very likely that the company you outsource to will have all kinds of alternative ideas for you to consider. To work well together, you might find that it is actually easier to present them with a problem first rather than a solution. Compare and contrast the solutions you both come up with and you could just find a game-changing alternative to bring to your industry.

Collaboration with an outside company may not seem as sensible as bringing in your own employees but when you are right at the beginning, it is important that you save money where you can but also get the highest quality product you can afford. It makes sense.

How To Run Your Business On The Road

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Money, and Technology. In today’s digital age, it’s now possible to conduct business on the road, free of any office or store front. While this provides many, many advantages you have to the systems to do it. The following contributed post is thus entitled, How To Run Your Business On The Road.

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Whether you’re attracted to the idea of being a digital nomad full time or you just like to travel a lot and know that running an online business can actually allow you the freedom to travel all over the world as you please and still make money from your business at the same time, then you might be wondering how to get started with living such a lifestyle.

Of course, running a business is still going to be hard work no matter where you do it – of course nice beaches can certainly make it more enjoyable, so in this post we’re going to share with you some simple things you can start to implement that will allow you to run your business on the road.

Automate:

Even if you’re running your business from home, then you should still be looking at automating it as much as possible since this is what creates freedom for you and allows you to focus your time and energy on the things that you’re actually going to be seeing make an impact in your business, so using tools like schedulers as well as things like Zapier, and different apps that can work together to automate your systems and processes will really make a big difference and help you run your business on the road so that even if you’re not able to do things manually, they’re still getting done thanks to automation.

Create digital systems:

Having systems in your business is a must, however, if you run a business from home or use a physical office, then you can choose how to set up your systems and have them on paper if you want – although this isn’t recommended. However, if you want to run your business on the road and make your life easier, especially if you’re traveling around a lot between different countries, then you’re really going to want to go as digital as possible with your systems – unless you really do want to be carrying lots of notebooks and pieces of paper around with you between countries.

Use cloud storage:

Cloud Computing and storage systems are one of the best things you can start using for your business – no matter where you run it from, but if you run it on the road, then these are even more essential since they ensure that everything is backed up securely and that even if your computer was to be lost, stolen, or simply crashed on its own, that you’re not going to lose anything important, which is always a big risk when using non-cloud based systems that don’t back up and save automatically.

Sync your devices:

When traveling, it’s not always going to be convenient or possible to pull out your laptop and access something you need, so if you’re able to sync this to your phone, then you could start accessing things from there, which is going to make your life so much easier when running a business on the road or just when you’re unable to access your laptop.

The Business Tasks You Can Easily Automate

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. Whatever you business is, it’s important to consider which tasks you can automate in order to save yourself time and money. The following contributed post discusses this and is entitled, The Business Tasks You Can Easily Automate.

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Automation not only gives you and any employees you may have, more time to concentrate on the kind of work that really needs a human hand and brain and less time on those menial tasks that are necessary, but which are not, perhaps, the best use fo anyone’s time. Not only that, but it can often boost efficiency, and both of these things combined will help you to save money where you can, and potentially make more through greater levels of productivity and creative thinking.

So, I’m sure you’ll agree that it makes sense to automate, right? But where to start? Here are some things most small businesses can easily automate:

Social Media

Social media is obviously a vital part of modern marketing, but it can be pretty time consuming if you let it. Luckily, there are tools like HootSuite which can help you manage your content more efficiently by enabling batch writing of posts, which can then be scheduled and posted at the proper time. Of course, if you have the budget you could always outsource to a social media manager instead, which may be even better than automating.

Online Ads

If you use paid online ads to generate traffic for your business, and you aren’t already, you should think about using some or all of the Top 50 Adwords automation scripts to automate many of the processes such as controlling and interacting with your data. It will free up heaps of time while ensuring that your ads are up and running and doing exactly what they need to be doing for your company.

Email Responses

Okay so you probably don’t want to go down the route of automating all of your email responses because, quite a lot of the time, your customers will need an actual human response that is tailored to their situation, and failing to give them one could land your company with a reputation for bad customer service! However, there are lots of aspects of email contact that can, and probably should be automated such as read receipts/acknowledgements and answers to the most commonly asked question for starters.

Bookkeeping

Unless you’re an accountant or you’re the only small business owner in the world who has heaps on time on your hands, don’t even try to do your own bookkeeping. There really is no need when there are numerous apps and software packages that can do the bulk of it for you just as well, and quite possibly even better!

Recruitment

Sorry, they haven’t invented a robot that will interview candidates for you yet, but there are programs such as ZipRecruiter that will take your carefully crafted job description and post it on all of the best job websites around the web, so that you don’t have to bother uploading it a million times or contacting a million different recruitment companies yourself.

Research

Don’t waste hours looking for the latest research in your niche when you can simply set a Google Alert to tell you everytime car manufacturing, digital sales or HR policy is mentioned anywhere online!

Automate the simple stuff, like this, first and your life as a small business owner will be so much easier. If you can then automate more complicated processes, well that will be of even bigger benefit to you and your bottom line.

Take Your Business In An Unexpected Direction

Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. In today’s digital world, all businesses don’t have to be run in a traditional sense within a ‘bricks and mortar’ setting. Much of business is now carried out online via E Commerce. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Take Your Business In An Unexpected Direction.

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Pretty much every small start up nowadays is being established online. There’s a good reason that many small business owners are taking to the realm of E Commerce to sell their products to the consumer market. When it comes down to it, E Commerce is a lot cheaper to set up than a brick and mortar store. You don’t have to worry about forking out for a commercial property or commercial property rent. You can also wave goodbye to commercial energy bills to keep the place up and running. You don’t have to furnish this space or pay for merchandisers to arrange your products in an appealing manner. There’s no pressure to take on security staff or pay for security equipment. Instead, you can simply collaborate with a freelance web designer on the one-off project of creating your website. E Commerce also provides low levels of commitment. By avoiding commercial property, you don’t sign up to rent a space for a given period of time, meaning you can back out of your venture at any point if things get a bit too difficult or if things just really don’t work out – there really won’t be all too much loss involved. So, we would generally recommend taking this approach if you are operating a small business or planning on operating a small business. One thing to bear in mind, however, is that with the ease of E Commerce has come an influx of small businesses establishing themselves. It seems like every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to try their hand at becoming the next entrepreneur. The market is becoming increasingly saturated and you’re going to have to take bold steps to ensure that your company manages to stand above the rest. This could require a little thinking outside of the box. But how can you achieve this? Well, let’s take a moment to look into the matter further!

The Problem With Saturated Markets

So many small business owners make the mistake of assuming that all companies will have to take some sort of sales in a saturated market. There are so many consumers out there that at least a portion will naturally fall into your path and choose to spend their money with you, right? Well, this isn’t actually the case. When you are operating in a saturated market, you’re bound to face a whole host of problems at some point or another. Saturated markets create stiff competition and the majority will start to pull illogical business moves in order to try to stand out from the crowd – they will significantly reduce the prices of their goods to lure customers towards their company. Sure, this might work. Customers will go where prices are lowest. But by undercutting competition, these small businesses devalue their own goods and significantly reduce their own profit margins. You don’t want to get roped into using the same tactics and devaluing your own goods. However, if you are offering the same thing, you’re going to have to! There is an answer to all of this though. You just need to take your business in an unexpected direction and offer something different! Offer something that nobody else is offering. Even if the difference between your product and other products out there is relatively small, it’s much better than offering the exact same thing as somebody else. Even the slightest difference in your goods could draw people towards you, helping you to make sales and generate more of a profit.

Coming Up with Something Innovative

When you have something that is completely innovative and that hasn’t been seen before, you are going to find swaying buyers your way to be a lot easier. Your product will exist in its own right and people won’t really be able to compare it to other options on the market. But how do you come up with something innovative? Well, we’re afraid that this is purely down to you. You’re going to have to get your thinking cap on! The good news is that there are a few steps that you can take to steer yourself in the right direction.

Identify a Gap in the Market

The first step that you should take on your journey to creating something completely new is to identify a gap in the market. Take a look at what’s already out there and actively seek out a space where you could offer something different.

Offer a Service

Small business owners tend to focus more on products than services. So, why not consider providing a service instead of something tangible that can be packaged up in a box and placed on store shelves? While the market for services still has a lot of competition, there tends to be less of it than in the market for goods. Still try to be innovative. Look at how a service for off highway powertrain has taken off. This might have been something that you would never have thought of yourself, but it takes thinking up something like this to experience success!

Differentiating Your Product

Remember that your offerings don’t have to be an entirely new invention or the most astounding idea ever. They just need to tweak existing designs and items to make them slightly more appealing than current options. If your product is similar to other products on the market, people are likely to opt for whichever is cheapest. However, by differentiating you are giving them alternative choice and they may deem that whatever small addition you are offering is worth paying a little extra for! You may need to really focus on whatever differences you make through advertising and marketing. Really laying emphasis on a slight difference of features can make consumers really focus on it too!

Conducting Market Research

There’s a good chance that you’ve already carried out a little market research at some point in your business journey. This isn’t all too surprising. After all, market research is a business basic and is particularly beneficial for newly emerging businesses. It is a process that allows you to see current market trends, scope out your competition, and to come up with a competitive pricing plan that will encourage customers to shop with you without eating into your profits. However, it is important to remember that you should continue to carry market research out as your brand develops and grows. If you are deciding to take your business in a new direction, you really do need to make sure that there is a market for the innovative idea that you’ve come up with. Sure, making a slight difference to an existing product can help your product to stand out and can make consumers take a second look at what you’re offering. But things could just as easily sway in the opposite direction and a minor change could put customers off and make them step away from your brand. So, conducting fresh market research into any change you make to your products will help you to work out whether your demographic is showing sufficient levels of interest in these changed products in order to buy the final result from you. Take the time to determine how your new and unexpected take will fare in the current marketplace. It really is more than worth the time and effort invested into the process!

Patenting and Copyrighting

Once you’ve come up with something innovative, you need to be prepared for the fact that others out there are going to try to mimic you. This is an inevitability. The good news is that you can hinder their efforts to take your hard work and profit from it themselves. You simply need to protect your intellectual property through patenting or copyrighting. These are legal means of protecting your ideas. A patent ensures that you are the only person who can produce and profit from the product you have created for a set period of time. This gives you the opportunity to become a market leader and generate a significant amount of profit before others can try their hand at selling your idea. Copyrighting is a means of ensuring that other people can’t copy your ideas. If they do, a cease and desist letter can be sent out to them. If they fail to cease and desist, they can face serious legal action!

Constantly Moving Forward

Once you have managed to complete this entire process, avoid being complacent. No matter how innovative your product may initially be and despite your best efforts to copyright and protect your ideas, others are eventually going to catch up. You need to always stay one step ahead of the game in order to ensure that you continue to stand out from the crowd rather than being swallowed up by it.

As you can see, you really do need to take your company in a new and unexpected directions in order to experience success and generate significant profits. Hopefully, the above information will help you to achieve this!

The Highest Tech For The Best Business

Three key focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship, and Technology. If you’re in business, it’s important to know the best technologies to use for your business and purposes. The following contributed post is thus entitled, The Highest Tech For The Best Business.

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Technology is something a business swears by, and if you can’t say this for your business, then you definitely aren’t doing things how you should be doing them. But sometimes we aren’t using the best technology, but you just don’t know what potential is out there! So, if you want to know what the highest tech out there is at the minute, and how it can easily better your business, we’ve got a few tips coming your way. There is a whole world of technology being designed out there, all feeding off information that clients such as yourself provide. The companies developing them adapt and learn, until they get to the stage where they’re at the top of their field. So, keep on reading, and hopefully by the end of this you will have at least one piece of technology that you can look into further, and hopefully use within your business.

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Communication Systems

Every business uses communication systems, and some use them in ways that others don’t. It all depends on the line of work that your business is in, and how you might need to use said technology. But we have to admit, some companies are just completely stuck in the stone ages when it comes to technology and their communication systems. For example, you can now get state of the art gps antenna systems that will allow you to see and therefore communicate with clients, unknown people, and whatever else you might need to find in your line of work. But there are some shoddy antenna systems that will barely pick up anything at all. The same goes for things like your IT serves, which is a different type of communication system in that they will be talking to other components of software to ensure your business is running properly. If you were going to go for a server, you should definitely go for a professionally managed one so that you don’t bear the brunt of a bad server.

Office Essentials

Now to the things that you might use more and more on a daily basis, and one thing we definitely thing you should utilise is software to help you with the day to day running of your business. It really has become an office essential to have software, such as ones that help you run payroll. It’s a long task to do such a thing, but it can be made so much easier with the aid of software. So, sit and have a think about all of the things that you find hard to do in a day, and then have a quick Google search and see if there is software that can really help you with it.

Tech That Will Push For Growth

Now isn’t this something that will have got your ears up. Growth is the number one goal of a business, and it’s best done by using software that allows you to monitor your sales patterns, rather than you trying to work it all out manually. It becomes an easy process to figure out what it is that your business needs, and where the sales might be going wrong.

Liquid Technology Which You Use Every Day

A key focus of my blog is Technology. Liquid technology is around us and something we use daily. Few people know about liquid technology and what its applications are. The following contributed post is entitled, Liquid Technology Which You Use Every Day.

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When most people think about technology, liquids aren’t often the first thing on their minds. Being notorious for killing the devices which people love the most, it’s natural to want to keep them away from the stuff, but this isn’t always possible. To give you an idea of where liquid technology is found in the modern world, this post will be exploring three different options, giving you a clear picture of what you have available in this area. There are few areas more interesting than gadgets which have the power to fry themselves.

Smart Water

Crime is always something which people are working to tackle. Regardless of how much time and resources are put into an area like this, though, you will always find people who are able to break into things. Smart water promises to help with this, but not in the way which most people imagine. By using a special chemical compound which can be altered very slightly for each bottle, companies making this material can leave a criminal’s skin stained with a liquid which is completely unique. This is the modern equivalent of being caught red handed, as you simply won’t have a way to argue with a court if you’ve been found with loads of this material on your body.

Lubricants

Modern cars move faster than ever before, and often have to rely on manufacturing methods which don’t make room for much error. To make sure than engines are able to cope, lubricants are used, usually coming in the form of oil. Companies like Peakhd have been working for decades to create products in this field which are able to outperform their more traditional alternatives. Creating a liquid which doesn’t change its state as temperatures and pressures around it vary is no mean feat, though this is exactly what you need in your vehicle, making it hard for companies to hit the sweet spot.

Phase Changes

Not a lot of people know how their refrigerator works. Much like the radiator in your car, these large appliances use an array of fins to cool down a fluid on the inside. As the fluid changes temperature, it also changes state, becoming a gas as it heats up, and a liquid when it cools down again. This sort of system is found in loads of different types of machine, not just fridges. Of course, though, it also isn’t the only way to cool something down, and there are modern methods which don’t require any harmful chemicals to get started.

With all of this on your mind, it should be a lot easier to see the power which liquids have to support society. A lot of people struggle to see where these tools can fit into the world, even though they are already commonplace, and this keeps the wider population oblivious to the liquids they are using on a daily basis. It’s always worth working hard to build a good understanding of the technology and tools you use on a regular basis, especially when they are so strange.

Looking After Your Most Useful Gadget

A key focus of my blog is Technology. With everything smart phones can do now, they’re arguably becoming more important and powerful than laptop computers and PCs. They can store multiple forms of data, and allow you to do multiple things on the move. As such it’s important to take the best care of your mobile device possible. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Looking After Your Most Useful Gadget.

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Whilst there could be some debate over what your most useful gadget is, as phones become more and more powerful to the point that some smartphones today are more overtaking the power of laptops and even desktop computers of just a year or two ago, many people would argue that their phone is perhaps their most useful gadget, or at least the gadget they most depend on – particularly if you are running a business.

Today, we carry around so many gadgets, that are of such great value, yet we take their value for granted – it’s not usually until we are without our gadget that we realise it’s true value, and perhaps even more pertinent is the value of the data contained on these devices.

Just a decade ago, the idea someone would carry a gadget worth over $1,000 around with them, throwing it in their pocket, on the passenger seat of their car and even holding it over massive drops in order to get an epic photo… whereas today, we all take the precious cost of these devices for granted.

In fact, what’s crazy is that you could buy two cheap second hand cars for the same price of a mobile phone.

Then, in addition to their financial value, the social value they provide is extraordinary; combine this with the extreme value of the data contained on your device and we can quite quickly see the need to be treating our mobile phones with a little more respect.

Mobile phones, today, are the equivalent of the swiss army knife in that they perform so many tasks – yet they are much easier to break and destroy. Indeed, some phones are designed akin to a slippery bar of soap in the shower… so whatever phone solution you use, protecting this precious gadget is of utmost importance.

We’ve all heard many horror stories of people we know losing all their work, contacts, and precious memories in the form of images and videos. The best way to protect against this type of loss is to regularly backup to the cloud, yet, so many people don’t do this – even if they’ve experienced theft or data corruption in the past.

Another thing you might want to consider, if you don’t have it already, is to take out gadget insurance. This type of insurance is becoming increasingly popular as people collect more and more devices, yet it is suprisingly expensive. That said, it’s possibly one of the msot claimed on forms of insurance policy that exist due to the high risks of breaking a mobile phone via accidental damage, leaving it somewhere, or being stolen from you.

Interestingly, the majority of insurance policies have quite a few exlcusionary terms, so be sure to check out the fine print before purchasing as you don’t want to pay out money for an insurance policy to find you’re not covered because of an obscure term of the insurance contract.

In summary, it’s important to appreciate the value of your most useful gadget by backing it up regularly, insuring it, and mitigating the risk of accidental damage by using things such as screen covers.

7 Things Every Website Needs To Be Successful

Two key focuses of my blog are Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. A key aspect of conducting business today is having a functional and user-friendly website. What’s needed for a website to be successful? The following contributed post is entitled, 7 Things Every Website Needs To Be Successful.

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When it comes to building a user-friendly website that is both successful and easy to use, it’s hard to know where to start. There are so many different things to consider in order to run a website efficiently that often, people can get carried away and start to overload their customers with information and widgets. Whilst they may seem useful at the time, gadgets and gizmos don’t make a website automatically successful.

With that in mind, here are 7 things every website needs to be successful:

1. A Pleasing Aesthetic

The first thing people will notice when they visit your website is what it looks like. If they don’t enjoy the aesthetic and find it hard to view, they’re likely to click off and find another website.

Although it may seem as though you have to put thousands and thousands into a site to make it aesthetically pleasing, there are lots of templates available on sites like Etsy.com that you can purchase for as low as $20 – all of which of are perfect in terms of their layouts.

2. To Be Easy To Use And Navigate Around

When designing your website you need to ensure it’s easy to use from a user perspective. The best way to do this is to think about how you would move through your website as a customer. Can you find everything you need? Is your navigation bar easy to find? Is it clear how to reach every single page on your site?

If you can answer yes to all of the above questions, it’s safe to assume your customers will feel the same.

3. A Blog To Share Relevant And Engaging Content

Having a blog on your website is a great way to share content your customers with love and engage with. In some cases, it’s also a useful tool for allowing potential customers to discover your brand and your site. For tips on how to start a blog for your brand, you can visit this website here.

4. A Really Good Developer (Just In Case)

Whether you have built your site your self or hand a developer build it for you, it’s always good to ensure you have a really good developer on hand just in case. They’ll be able to help you should any issues arise, helping reduce the amount of downtime your website has (if any at all).

For some of the top custom software development companies, you can visit the previous link.

5. Clear Contact Details

If a potential or existing customer wants to contact you but they can’t find your contact details, they’re most likely going to take their custom elsewhere. Having your contact clear at the top or bottom of every page on your site is the best way to ensure you don’t lose any customers due to them not being able to ask you an all-important question.

Do you own a successful website? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comment section below.