Author Archive
Top 10 Reasons Why Every Small Business Website Should Be Built with WordPress
I’ll tell you the same thing I tell every one of my new web marketing clients, “WordPress is incredible – and you should be using it for your website.” It can save you both time and money, while making it far easier to build a beautiful and limitless website that you can manage and control yourself.
Once you learn more about WordPress, you’ll understand why over 80 MILLION websites are built on WordPress, and why now is the time for you to learn what WordPress is all about, and how it can provide immense value to your small business.
Here are my Top 10 Reasons for why you should strongly consider WordPress for your website:
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Building Community Sites with WordPress
By Cameron Chapman
Most bloggers would love to see more of a sense of community among the regular visitors to their blog. Sure, discussions sometimes take place in the comments of various posts, but it all seems a bit disorganized and they never really get off the ground. There has to be a better way to create a real sense of community on a WordPress blog.
Another Choice in Software Outsourcing Apart From India and China
Vietnam has strong potential because of the population of nearly 90 million people. Despite the fact that revenue of this sector in 2005 just reached $200 million, the constant growth rate of 25%, which is forecasted to be kept through 2010, certainly shows ambition and aspiration for technology development of this country’s government.
Currently, the software industry is one of the most subsidized sectors in Vietnam. It is eligible to enjoy privileges including tax and investment incentives, an exemption from VAT and tariff for imported materials which are directly used for the software production, etc. To illustrate, businesses involved in software production and services are exempt from income tax for 4 years no matter they are local or foreign invested ones. Software products are free from VAT (0%) and export tax.
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Party Jan 2010
39 Tools for Marketing Your Small Business Online
Thousands of free online marketing tools clamor for attention, with new ones popping up every week it seems. You know you should be doing more to reach out to your customers, but just researching which tools to use can be a vast time investment, even if they don’t require a big financial outlay.
Below is a compiled list of the most popular (or most useful) low-cost or free small business marketing tools. You might be using some of them already, but you’re sure to find a couple that will round out your small business marketing toolkit nicely. And, if you’re just starting out marketing a new business online, this list may help point you in the right direction.
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Software Compliance Issues in Outsourcing Code Development
The outsourcing of software development to both offshore and onshore development centers has become widely accepted as a part of the business model of many companies. And while outsourcing software development creates efficiencies both in terms of time and money, it comes with its own set of concerns.
By far, the most predominant development model involves the use of pre-built software objects and third-party components. There is enormous time pressure to produce quality software in a shorter timeframe. At the same time, developers mustn’t sacrifice quality for speed. Consequently, use of third-party components represents the most obvious path. There are several benefits, both in terms of more rapid development and also in terms of proven quality. There are, however, licensing issues involved, and these must be managed appropriately. Using third-party components without proper licensing, without paying the appropriate fees or without giving the appropriate attribution can cause a software project to end in disaster.
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Software Development Outsourcing Issues
1. Insurance
The outsourcer should have adequate public liability insurance against loss or liability through injury or damage.
2. Third party suppliers
The arrangements as to which party (purchaser or outsourcer) will hold and which party will administer the terms of any agreements currently in place between the purchaser and other third party suppliers. It is advisable to transfer the Maintenance contracts to the outsourcer unless the outsourcer has agreed to provide maintenance services for all equipment and software.
3. Software licenses
Where third parties supply software used to provide outsourced services, the appropriate licenses must be obtained. Any licenses currently held by the purchaser that relate to services being provided may need to be extended to cover the activities of the outsourcer.
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10 Outsourcing Trends to Watch in 2010
It was a long year of intense ups and downs in the IT outsourcing industry. Consolidation among vendors and interest in remote infrastructure management increased, while overall outsourcing demand and IT services pricing decreased.
The market for IT outsourcing is expected to rebound a bit in 2010, say industry watchers. For instance, more than 75 percent of the service providers polled by EquaTerra in the third quarter of this year reported continued growth in their deal pipeline, which was up 10 percent from the previous quarter and 34 percent from the same period last year.
But don’t expect too robust a revival. Outsourcing consultancy Everest predicts that although suppliers will see a resurgence in demand for IT and business process outsourcing services in 2009, growth rates are unlikely to return to pre-2008 levels.
Both suppliers and outsourcing customers could be in for a bumpy ride in 2010. Here are 10 trends to look out for as the IT services industry finds its feet in the “new normal” of the post-recession.
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35 CSS-based Layouts that Look Awesome
1. Magnifico
Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices
Database operations often tend to be the main bottleneck for most web applications today. It’s not only the DBA’s (database administrators) that have to worry about these performance issues. We as programmers need to do our part by structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and better code. Here are some MySQL optimization techniques for programmers.
1. Optimize Your Queries For the Query Cache
Most MySQL servers have query caching enabled. It’s one of the most effective methods of improving performance, that is quietly handled by the database engine. When the same query is executed multiple times, the result is fetched from the cache, which is quite fast.
The main problem is, it is so easy and hidden from the programmer, most of us tend to ignore it. Some things we do can actually prevent the query cache from performing its task.
// query cache does NOT work
$r = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM user WHERE signup_date >= CURDATE()");
// query cache works!
$today = date("Y-m-d");
$r = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM user WHERE signup_date >= '$today'");
The reason query cache does not work in the first line is the usage of the CURDATE() function. This applies to all non-deterministic functions like NOW() and RAND() etc… Since the return result of the function can change, MySQL decides to disable query caching for that query. All we needed to do is to add an extra line of PHP before the query to prevent this from happening.
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