Many online businesses have been thriving throughout the pandemic, some have had an unprecedented 2nd quarter. How? The answer is simple, they have mastered the art of the UX (user experience). Evaluate your sites whole UX and ask these 10 questions about your site from Medium.com. I'd add credibility to that list and that begins with your domain name. The article is from 2018 and is every bit as relevant then as it is today.
For the DNN platform there's an upgrade for the developer's UX too with Vanjaro.com from Mandeeps.com. When you design all day, what you experience matters. The new UX is comparable to Wix, SquareSpace, and Weebly. Featuring a Drag & Drop Live Editor, Responsive Editing, Automatic Revision History, Workflow Management, and in context, user aware, centralized site administration and it's open source. Vanjaro.com is compatible with custom DNN Modules, (including XMod Pro) and hundreds of existing solutions on the DNN Store.
The experience is the journey. Make it better and make more sales.
By now you have probably gotten an email from every company that you have ever visited on their COVID policy. No need to rehash washing your hands and social distancing here. The point that I want to stress is that we are all in this together, locally and globally, and it's going to take all of us to beat this thing.
I work for the government in my day job, maintaining transmitters along the coast of South Carolina. The government is just people. Some very hard working people that perform jobs that in the private sector usually pays much more for the same work. But, boil it all down, and it's just people helping people.
In times of crisis's past, like the hurricanes we've had, we didn't get extra pay or bonuses, just a good feeling at the end of the day that we made a difference. Getting through this is going to be difficult, but not something we can't do.
There are always two options you have in any situation. One is to do nothing. With COVID doing nothing is actually a good thing. Stay at home and you're not part of the problem. The second option is to try harder. I have to credit my father with that one. He was part of what they now call the greatest generation, but the greatest generation is really yet to come. We are all products of these generations, we are the hybrids. Let's try a little harder and figure this out. Figure out what you can do to help.
Sure it's scary, we see exactly how fragile our world is. And, the big brains say it's going to get worse before it gets better, but we will get through it and come out stronger. Helping others is really the name of the game.
Check on your neighbors, have empathy and employ compassion. We are all going through a lot. I want to be able to reflect back at the End of the Plague party and know I had a hand in making the world a better place. I may not invent a miracle vaccine, but I help keep emergency communications online over here, inspire hope and I lend a helping hand. I am very grateful for the medical, fast food, grocery workers and everyone involved in all these chains that keeping us moving forward.
Do your part and work harder. Patience, courtesy and humor go along way, act like you've been somewhere. Maybe this will spark a spiritual revolution when we finally realize that we are all the same, and that we are all connected.
There's a insightful article on The Wall Street Journal about the continued closings of retail stores. The Business Insider had an article earlier about the same topic. It's all the more reason to get your business online or tune it up and expand your marketplaces, no matter what type of products you sell. The article focuses on retail outlets declining and how more people are finding the convenience of online shopping. What the article doesn't say is that the shopping habits of retail are being carried over into all business classes. B2B (business to business) decisions are being made the same manor. If your business isn't found or engaging enough, customers are going elsewhere at light speed. To further that statement, the experience they find while using your site, is exactly how they perceive working with your organization to be. It's your corporate image. It's your credibility and it tells how well run your organization is, be it corporate, a government agency or a charitable organization. Not many people will ever see your place of work, but chances are they will visit your website at all hours of the day. Just ask your analytics guy. People follow up in the evening, weekends and at all hours of the day outside of normal business hours. It's how research is done. The more advanced will employ secondary research groups to dig deeper, but generally what they see in the search results or after trying a few URL's (domain names) is it. Two key points for making more money. Get a great domain name for your business and keeping acquiring them while they are inexpensive. Some businesses own hundreds of thousands of names. Disney has about 20k names, some pharmaceutical companies own even more. The internet isn't going anywhere and isn't going to be replaced anytime in the next 30 years. Names you could have bought 10 years ago for a few thousand will never be available for sale again for less. Buy words in English and .com extensions. These will always be the best most memorable search friendly names that bring affluent customers to your door. Build a scalable and dynamic website. Keep adding relevant content and you'll keep driving targeted traffic. If you sell widgets, you want to attract people buying widgets. Your website needs to the best you can present for your market and dynamic. Dynamic is fresh, evolving content and interactive. Interactivity is how you listen to your customer's needs. This is how to communicate, make it easy and make it fun, gamify it. Read more on web development and building your user engagement here.
2023 WTF - What's The Future
Future predictions are often made from technical analysis, which is more or less mapping past behavior to numerical values to provide direction over time. Consider that everything is in a constant state of motion. Motion in this sense in the flow of money, where resources are being placed and reallocated from.
As a simplified example, let's compare money and water without all the complexities. The amount of water on the planet is always the same. Sometimes it's stored in lakes, reservoirs, oceans, people, crops, but there's always the same amount of water on the planet. You can't destroy it, you can pollute it, clean it, and what evaporates here ends up as rain somewhere else. Glaciers melt, oceans rise etc, but still the same amount of water exists.
The supply of money is much more complicated, but this is a simple example. When I hear that money was wiped away or billions lost from various investment vehicles, most of that growth was fictitious to begin with, sinking below initial investment levels to actual value is the real loss numbers and those dollars end up being reallocated just like water. Crypto was and is a Ponzi scheme. And, those base crypto investment dollars have resurfaced as luxury homes, vehicles, lavish lifestyles by the people who got in at the beginning. Sorry to those of you who lost and thought this was a way to get rich quick, i.e. get something for nothing, but nature has a way of balancing the equation. Money flowed into these investments, but that doesn't justify the value of them. A stock with a P/E ratio of 2000 times earnings is a mistake of the same sort. Long way to a point, but follow the money and make sure your future investments are backed by solid principals.
The future holds a correction in the markets and in so many other areas. Gartner forecasts IT spending to grow 5% overall in 2023 with 11% placed in software development. Read the article here and decide where and why to put your development resources. Domain names are the cornerstone of developing a new company, a new brand, product line or income stream. Get the best names while you still can.
Here's a company I discovered while looking for some keyword analysis on my GeorgiaBeachHomes.com website, Wordstream. Not only does Wordstream offer keyword advice and optimization, they have a suite of utilities to tune up your marketing campaigns. Wordstream is a Google and Facebook Premier Partner leading the industry in search optimization. I like the design of their wesite too and they have a wealth of information for those of you just getting started with online advertising. Spend a little time reading though the Pay Per Click University and learn about bid management and conversion tracking.
The only people I hear spouting about new domain name extensions (gTLD's) are the one's who have a stake in their success as a registry or those looking to recoup their investment. Truth is with the scarcity of good dot com extensions dwindling at less than insane prices, good .com domain names are going up in value. The time to buy is now while traffic is slower over the summer months and before the market starts to pick up again in the fall. If you're unaware of all the other extensions and when they came about, there is an info graphic here at Key-Systems.net from a few years ago.
When buying a gTLD, ask yourself when was the last time you went to one, and where does the the majority of spam come from? I think you'll find that the answer is a .garbage extension. Registering one of these will drive help traffic to the .com, .net or .org domain names respectively above it. There are 882 domain extensions at last count, but your customers just know of the top three. If you're looking to increase your brand or to expand a product line, while the US economy is beginning to soar again, buy now before prices return to pre 2005 levels. There is a market correction coming that will swing .com names up beyond any levels we've seen them at. Get them before they turn into gold.
Several articles came out about US Marshall's using small aircraft to gather data on all US citizens and that's it. There's no follow up, no more that will come of it and the data mining will continue unabated. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple said years ago that privacy is dead. And, to my surprise it went with out a fight or even the smallest hint of a protest.
The right to privacy is one of the fundamental rights in the Bill of Rights, actually it's number 6 on the list of 10 rights that were so important they were added to the Constitution. Except for a few articles, from the Wall Street Journal to Fox News, it doesn't even make the nightly news. Is it that people just don't care, is it a trade off for keeping law and order among the masses? Or is this incident just one of the many ways that our freedoms are rapidly eroding? What happens when you act outside of your profile? How many alarm bells ring then?
Read the full article on TechNewsWorld.com.