Software Solutions

Modern brand promotion means more than just sending out a few fliers and running some print advertisements.  Today, more and more brands are making use of an online marketing company or a social media agency to help them promote their brand to interested consumers online.

Social media marketing is a complicated issue.  Many companies make the mistake of assuming that online marketing is simply a case of placing a few ads, setting up a Facebook page, and creating a Twitter account.  The truth is that such steps are just the start.  An unused Facebook page, or a misused Twitter account, can do a lot of harm to your brand.

An online marketing company can help you to work out your social media strategy.  One of the first things that a good social media agency will do is work out what networks appeal to your target audience, and help you to establish a useful presence on there.  This will save you time and effort over a less targeted, scatter-spray approach.

For some brands, the right network is Twitter, for others it may be Facebook, or Bebo, or even a more esoteric network such as Identi.ca.  Finding out where your customers spend most of their time is vital.
Once you know where your customers like to hang out, you can start interacting with them.  You must remember that not every message needs to be a sales message.  If you offer your audience useful content - at no charge - then they're more likely to think positively of you and will be more receptive to your message.
Hiring An Online Marketing Company is Not a One Time Job

Hiring a social media agency or an online marketing company should not be a one-time thing.  The work done by an online marketing company goes beyond just setting up the accounts.  A good social media agency will come up with regular campaigns to encourage your users to spread your message, and will also manage your social media accounts - that means talking to people, answering questions, promoting your product or service, and responding to questions from users of the service.

To keep your users engaged, you will need to make sure you update your profiles on the social media sites regularly.  That could just be updates about current events, the occasional funny video, a quiz, or a competition, or it could be re-tweeting messages from your followers, or joining in a conversation.  The trick is to make the communication look natural and sincere, rather than having it appear to be advertising.
A good social media agency will help you by managing these communications, or by helping you to learn how to engage with your community yourself.  The skills that you learn from a social media expert will pass over to other areas of online promotion, and hopefully help you to build a brand that has a good reputation, making future promotion more likely to go viral and reach a much wider audience.

This post was written by James Harper on behalf of Boom Online Marketing. James is an SEO professional who enjoys writing about online marketing.

In today’s fast paced life, people prefer convenience of online shopping from home rather than stepping out of the home to the market for the same. This demand has led to a proliferation of ecommerce and now you can buy everything from a pin to a home over the Interne while sitting in any part of the globe. So if you are not online selling your products or services, you are missing out on a large chunk of potential customers.

Today e commerce software is a must for every online retailer to better his sales, and to improve customer satisfaction. Hence there is huge demand for e commerce development and many companies are providing customized software to meet the needs of your online business. All large brands around the globe now retail at online stores and encourage customers to feel and try the brands online. Technology is evolving at a rapid pace and therefore companies are getting e commerce websites designed for their business to be relevant to their customers. Therefore there will always be a great demand for e commerce development as the Internet becomes all important in our lives.

E commerce development helps you reduce costs by cutting on overheads and improve sales and to take your website to the next level by utilising state-of-the-art applications. It is ideal if you want to take your business global and cater to a worldwide audience. A good e commerce website distinguishes your business from that of competitors and can get you the desired web traffic that will make the website self-sustainable.

A good shopping cart solution is a must for the success of any e commerce website and given that every business is different and has different target customers, go for a customised e commerce package rather than buying a standard one off the shelf. Hence discuss the requirements of your business and your customer’s requirements with the software provider for the best shopping cart solutions for your website.

Ideally a good shopping cart solution will be based on an open source platform like Drupal, Joomla or Zen cart to give you the best efficiency at an affordable cost. The software must be flexible, scalable and have a sustainable development platform. It should be user friendly, have a customer friendly front end. Ideally the software will use flash website design, database inspired shopping carts and should provide for website management and maintenance as well. Moreover it should provide for convenient store management and give the best ROI for the business.

The requirement for optimizing the sites has given an opportunity to a new breed of the programmers and coder who are experts in optimizing the site from start to end. The optimization of the site requires an in depth knowledge of the keywords and the search friendly ad words which are currently over the normal level.

Hire search engine optimizer to maximize the benefits of optimization as it will provide a helping hand in making your site more visible and search engine friendly. If you are working over the solutions to make your site more searchable and be able to always on the top of the major search engine listing then it is necessary to optimize the sites.

Optimization means the usage and high lighting of the meta tags. Meta tags are the keywords which in one or two word cover up the meaning of the whole site. Meta tags can also be referred as tags which have various meanings and provide a specific domain through their meanings. These Meta tags are then written in the index file code of the websites which works as entry point for every site.

The search engine optimizer will also optimize the sites on the basis of the each page and relevant product. The use of keyword and other denomination for a simple product must be mapped so that it can cover the whole page and products. The search engine optimization must be able to direct the persons directly to the page which he is searching for rather than on any homepage or listing page. This ensures continuous hits by the visitors as they get appropriate content in a matter of few minutes.

Any company which is looking for making huge sum of money out of its website than it must opt for search engine optimization firms and hire search engine optimizers who are expert in their domain and can yield better results. For companies who are just startups and cannot afford to have a search engine optimization companies can hire the services of freelancers who offer their services at affordable rates.

Freelancers who work as search engine optimizer can also help in optimizing the site. Companies and search engine optimizers can be bonded over contractual terms to overlook the optimization process for a period of time. One can easily access the services of these companies for a timeframe and make their sites more users friendly and searchable.

A look at it beginnings
The .NET application development had its beginnings during the late 1990’s. History records that work began on this project under the name of Next Generation Windows Services or NGWS as they were called. Using this working title, the very first version of .NET application development, which was a Beta version with the name .NET 1.0, was released in the year 2000. .NET application development originally began as separate programming software but it quickly caught the attention of active pages programmers and was officially included with Windows Server 2008. If a user requires its services, they can be installed with Windows Vista and the entire family of Windows Server 2003 as well. In the year 2010, the .NET Framework 4, came into official existence along with Visual Studio 2010.

Connection with asp.Net
The ASP.NET according to the Wikipedia is “a web application Framework.” Microsoft undertook asp.net development in the early part of 2000 AD and the initial version was released in January 2002. Asp.net development was done using the same framework as .Net and therefore the product was rechristened ASP.NET from its initial name of XSP. As time went on, the Asp.net development focussed on support for mobile devices and was officially releases as a part of Windows Server 2003.

The development journey
When Microsoft decided to hire ASP.NET developers, they struck gold mine in the two people responsible for Asp.net development. Mark Anders, who was a manager from the IIS team, and Scott Guthrie, who had joined the Microsoft’s bandwagon in 1997 were the two people responsible for Asp.net development. After nearly four years of development, testing and tweaking the system after  its beta releases in both 2000 and 2001, the pair were ready for their first official release in 2002 April. This Asp.net was predominantly concerned with providing the framework for building dynamic web pages, applications and services. Therefore their efforts were met with worldwide acclaim.

Fine tuning the system
There is scope for improvement anywhere and this is the same for web - based applications as well. MS Silverlight is the application framework, which allows refining. This framework allows third parties to write and execute browser plug-in which improve the speed of execution of a particular application and improve internet speeds. MS Silverlight mainly focuses on streaming media, multimedia, graphics and animation. These are all supports given by MS Silverlight for CLI languages and development tools. Until now, five versions of MS Silverlight have been released and they are compatible with many different internet browsers.