Tushar, Author at anteelo

Tips for Consultancy Firms on Developing a Website

Posted on 26/04/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

There are consultancy firms in all sectors but the one thing they have in common is that they are experts in their field. Indeed, as a consultancy firm, your expertise is your product. When it comes to landing new contracts, it’s vital that potential customers can find out everything they need about your business, the expertise within it and the different services you offer. In the digital age, not only do you need a website; you also need to make sure it does the right things. Here, we’ll offer some tips designed to improve consultants’ websites.

Promote your uniqueness

You know better than anyone what makes your company unique and why that uniqueness makes you the best choice for your customers. With many consultancies offering similar services, this uniqueness is your key value proposition and something you need to communicate quickly and clearly as soon as a visitor arrives on your homepage.

To improve how well your website works for you, your USP should be clearly shown, above the fold, on the homepage. It should encapsulate, succinctly, what your company does, who you provide services for and why your business is the right choice.

Doing this right at the start of a visitor’s journey drives potential customers to other parts of your website where you can convince them you are the best company for their needs.

Think carefully about website design

When thinking about how to design or redesign your consultancy website, don’t start with the premise ‘what do we need?’; instead, think about what the customer needs? Putting yourself in the position of a potential customer can help you create a site that has the right design and organisation to help you generate more new business.

It will end up being more user-friendly, mobile-friendly and useful. Not only will its design be better suited to the needs of the user, so will the way information is organised across the site and how it is presented. The more user-friendly it is, the better experience customers will have and this will give them an indication of the quality of the service you offer in your consultancy, too.

The benefits of a blog

Not all businesses need a blog, but for consultancies, they can be invaluable. A blog, essentially, is soft-sell content marketing. Each post should be created to solve a problem that your customers may face. In doing so, you can showcase the unique expertise within your company and subtly mention and link to the services you offer that solve these problems.

Such blogs also have other very useful benefits. Firstly, the use of specialist content can be very helpful for SEO, enabling your website to rank much higher in search engine results so that it attracts even more visitors. What’s more, as each blog post is searchable on the internet, potential customers who may never have heard of your company before might get introduced to your expertise and choose to partner with you as a result.

Of course, blogs can contain a variety of different content: written text, images, infographics, video, etc. – a mix that makes it more engaging and which appeals to different audiences. Blog posts on your website can also be published on social media so that anyone who wishes to read them is brought straight back to your website.

Simple interaction and communication

The easier you make it for website visitors to interact and get in touch, the more likely they are to do it. At the top of the list here, is getting in touch. You need to provide clear and obvious calls to action that anyone will find simple to follow. If there is a ‘call us now’ CTA, for example, use a link that immediately dials your number on mobile phones, saving the user the trouble of having to type it. You can do the same with email links or provide an easy to fill in contact form conveniently located in the footer of every page. Increasingly, businesses are making use of online chat to answer queries in real-time and advanced chatbots are being used to offer this service 24/7.

When it comes to engagement, make it easy for users to bookmark pages and share information with colleagues or on social media. Also, make it easy for them to like your content by providing social media buttons – especially on those blog posts.

A reliable and trustworthy website

If you want your website to be taken seriously, it has to be reliable and trustworthy. Partnering with the right web host and selecting the most appropriate hosting type for your needs ensures your site will always be available, load quickly and respond effortlessly to customer interactions. This all boosts the confidence that customers have in your business.

Also important is choosing a web host that can provide the web security you need to protect you and your customers. You’ll need an SSL certificate to have your site labelled as secure on browsers and which encrypts user data; spam filters to prevent malware and phishing; email certificates to verify your emails are genuine and to encrypt content and attachments; a robust firewall, together with intrusion and malware protection, to keep your server secure; and a backup solution that enables your site to recover quickly from cyberattacks and data loss.

Conclusion

As you can see, your website can play a vital role in promoting your consultancy firm and in generating new business. Hopefully, the tips provided here will show you where you can make improvements to your site and your web hosting .

How Google’s New Ranking Factors Will Affect Your Website Page Experience

Posted on 25/04/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

Changes in the way consumers behave mean customer experience (CX) is now the major battleground over which businesses compete. While this will affect your company directly, in the sense that you’ll need to improve CX to stay competitive, from May 2021, you’ll also need to improve the CX of your website to rank well with Google. Under pressure to improve their own CX, Google has now decided to add ‘page experience’ as one of its ranking criteria. Here, we’ll look at what this will mean for your website and individual web pages.

1. Largest Contentful Paint

How will Google measure loading times going forward? One of the main ways will be the ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ metric. Basically, rather than looking at the loading time of a whole page, it will look specifically at the loading time of the largest element of that page, usually the largest block of text or image. With Google expecting these to load in less than 2.5 seconds, it means you will need to optimise images and break large sections of text into smaller chunks.

2. First Input Delay

While Largest Contentful Paint looks at loading times, First Input Delay focuses on response times, in other words, the time it takes your website to respond to any user interaction, such as carrying out a search, clicking a link or inputting information. The response time is a measure of how long it takes the user’s browser to start processing your website’s response to those interactions. With Google expecting this to be less than 100 milliseconds, not only is the speed of your hosting important, so too is the location of your server. To overcome latency, having servers located nearer the user will speed things up. For customers further away, websites might need to make increasing use of content delivery networks (CDNs).

3. Cumulative Layout Shift

As websites load the elements of a page in stages, it can cause the layout to shift slightly. A common problem is when a user sees a menu, goes to click on it and by the time they have done so, the menu has been pushed down by an advert or privacy banner and they click on this by accident.

Cumulative Layout Shift is a metric that measures the visual stability of a page, looking at how it changes layout during loading and how this impacts the experience of a user. In future, website owners will need to minimise this as much as possible, especially in the ‘above the fold’ layout.

4. The mobile experience

The mobile experience is the area where Google has to put most of its effort. Today, we carry out the majority of our internet searches and spend most of our online time on smartphones. The key difference between desktop and mobile for Google is that with a desktop, we predominantly use Google to find things; on mobiles, much more time is spent on apps. Google needs to claw back some of its lost ground by making its mobile search just as smooth and seamless as using an app.

While Google has got things working effectively at its end, the Achille’s heel in its mobile customer experience is the websites it displays in its search results. What’s the point of having the world’s most advanced search engine if half of the websites that users visit don’t work well on mobile devices? The solution is simple, it will stop ranking websites that are not mobile-friendly, at least on searches carried out on mobile devices – which is most of them!

The solution is a mobile-first website design. Instead of creating a website for computers and then using a responsive theme to convert it for mobile devices, work the other way around. Create the site specifically for mobiles first (the biggest audience). This will improve the way a site looks and responds on mobile devices and prevent common issues that can occur with responsive themes such as text being too small and links or buttons being so close together that users frequently tap the wrong one.

Loading speed also has to be improved on mobiles. While laptops generally connect only to broadband, smartphones are taken everywhere, often where connections, both network and wi-fi, vary in strength and stability. Regardless of connection strength, a good website should still load quickly.

5. SSL, safe browsing and intrusive interstitials

Other key ranking factors to be aware of are the installation of SSL certificates to provide secure HTTPS connections and encrypt the sending and receiving of payment data; ensuring your website is free from malware and links to malicious websites; and the removal of ‘intrusive interstitials’, the jargon term for popups and other intrusions that affect the users’ browsing experience.

Conclusion

From May 2021, Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift will become ‘core web vitals’ in Google’s algorithm. At the same time, there will be increased importance on mobile-friendliness and security and far less tolerance of intrusive features, like popups.

Steps to Improving Data Security

Posted on 24/04/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

As Clive Humby famously said, ‘Data is the new oil.’ It’s a commodity so valuable that cybercriminals go to great lengths to get their hands on it. And when they do, they use it for extortion and to sell to other criminals on the dark web. If that isn’t worrying enough, the means by which they try to acquire it can also cause havoc. They will infect entire systems with malware, take systems completely offline with ransomware and use sophisticated techniques to steal login credentials or brute force their way in. Today, it’s every firm’s business to keep their data secure. Here are some of the ways to strengthen yours.

The impact of a data breach

Data breaches can put companies out of business. 60% of those that suffer a cyberattack go under within six months. For the rest, there are significant repercussions. According to IBM’s 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report, incidents involving data security, such as malware, phishing and device theft, cost UK companies almost £3 billion to recover from. It’s a prolonged process, too. The average company took around nine months to discover and recover from an attack. On top of all this, of course, are lost income, reputational damage and the potential of large fines from the ICO.

1. Use tech and training to prevent phishing

Phishing attacks, usually sent via email, are one of the main ways that cybercriminals will try to steal login credentials or infect a system with malware. Making sure that you have a robust spam filtering tool, such as SpamExperts or Mimecast, will help filter out the vast majority of phishing and malware containing emails.

Of those that manage to get through, statistics show that around a third are opened and clicked on by recipients. This is often because cybercriminals go to great lengths to make these emails look genuine. The key to reducing such incidents lies in training staff to spot the tell-tale signs of phishing emails: poor English, lack of addressee name, email address not matching up with the name of the sender, dodgy-looking logos, etc. Employees also need to know how to deal with these emails: not to open them or any attachments or click on any links, how to report them and safely delete them.

2. Two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds another layer of security to the login process, usually asking employees to input a six or seven-digit security code sent to their phone. The advantage of implementing 2FA is that even if a cybercriminal gets hold of the username and password, they won’t have access to the additional code unless they also have the employee’s mobile phone. What’s more, as security codes are only valid for a few minutes, it doesn’t give criminals the time needed to crack them.

3. Virtual Private Networks

A virtual private network (VPN) provides employees with a secure environment in which to work. It does this by securing the connection to the network and encrypting data sent over it. It is particularly vital for those working over wi-fi networks, especially the significant number of employees now working remotely.

4. Automated software updates

Vulnerabilities in outdated applications are one of the biggest threats to data security and are actively targeted by cybercriminals. Updating applications as soon as a patch is released is essential to minimising the risk of a data breach. Unfortunately, too many businesses have paid the price of being slow to update their software.

There are several ways to automate updates. With a managed hosting solution, for example, your provider will automate the patching of your operating system, while you can use tools like Patchman to carry out patching on CMS websites like WordPress. Auto-updates can also be implemented using cPanel and Plesk and from within the admin panel of some website platforms.

Another way to keep applications up to date is to use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, such as Microsoft 365, instead of having standalone software installed on the network. Here, the provider will update the software automatically for you whenever they release a new version.

5. Encryption

If your data is encrypted, no-one can access it even if it is stolen. Encryption makes it useless to any cybercriminals and ensures that your important information and customer data isn’t used illegally. You can encrypt data in multiple situations. For example, your host can encrypt data stored on your servers, SSL certificates encrypt data transferred between your customers’ browsers and your website and email SSL certificates will encrypt your emails and attachments while verifying the authenticity of your email address to the recipient.

6. Remote backups

If in attempting to steal your data a cybercriminal deletes, corrupts or encrypts it with ransomware, the effects can be devastating. However, it’s not just cybercrime that can result in data loss, so too can hardware failure, human error and various other problems. The solution to not losing your data permanently and getting your systems back up and running quickly is to have an effective backup solution in place.

While there are many ways to do this, one of the most effective is to use the services of your hosting provider. At Anteelo, our backups can be scheduled and automated to take place at the frequencies you need, are stored remotely from your server, encrypted for security and integrity checked so you know they will be uncorrupted if you need to use them.

7. Secure hosting

A good web hosting provider will help keep your server and the data stored on it secure by using advanced security tools. At Anteelo, for example, we use powerful next-gen firewalls with intrusion detection and prevention tools to stop hackers and malware from getting access to your server.

Conclusion

Data is increasingly sought-after by cybercriminals and their modes of operation are getting more sophisticated. Companies need to put cybersecurity at the top of their priorities to prevent attacks that could potentially put them out of business. Hopefully, the measures mentioned here will help you increase the security of your firm’s data.

Cloud computing in construction industry: Benefits

Posted on 23/04/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

The cloud is already widely adopted within the construction industry; however, for companies that are still considering it and for those whose use is limited, here, we look at seven important benefits it provides.

1. Cost savings

Every penny matters in the construction industry, so the cloud’s ability to help companies work more efficiently and effectively is one of its chief attractions. Savings come in multiple forms. From an IT perspective, the move to the cloud and to a vendor’s infrastructure reduces the company’s need to run in-house datacentres that require expensive cap-ex investment in hardware and the ongoing datacentre costs. The scalability of the cloud, together with its pay-as-you-go charging model provides further opportunities for efficient usage.

Additional savings also come from using the cloud to monitor operations. Combining data analytics with artificial intelligence yields insights into business processes that invariably throw up more efficient ways to run businesses and thus reduce costs without affecting quality.

2. Access information from anywhere at anytime

In the cloud, all your data is stored centrally and is available online, regardless of where your teams are or what time. This makes it incredibly easy for employees to collaborate and access the most up-to-date, synchronised files.

This is highly beneficial for construction companies as the very nature of their projects means they are working on sites away from the office. It also makes it much easier for employees working on large sites or projects with multiple sites to get hold of the information they need.

3. More competitive bidding

While cost savings help improve the bottom line, they also help construction companies to be more competitive when bidding for new projects. By using cloud-based business intelligence, they will have a more detailed prediction of the project’s costs, a better understanding of component availability and can give a more accurate indication of other influential factors, such as the environmental impact of their work or how energy efficient the completed project will be. All these can help make the bid more attractive to potential customers.

4. Manage growth better

Opportunities are everywhere in the construction industry, but the nature of the sector means companies need to be clear about those which are right for their business. Today, when researching new market segments or territories, organisations are increasingly making use of cloud-based analytics to evaluate a wide range of internal and external indicators that give them a clearer picture of the challenges and advantages of these potential expansions.

5. Building Information Modelling (BIM)

Today, the construction industry is making far greater use of Building Information Modelling – a process that results in the development of a centrally stored project model that can be accessed, shared and updated by all parties. Based in the cloud, the BIM enables the company to collaborate with all stakeholders, including planners, designers, suppliers, those from other disciplines and other construction companies taking part in the project. By clarifying the exact project for everyone, this removes uncertainty and thus helps overcome budget, timescale and supply challenges while reducing the potential for conflict between the different parties.

6. Improve employee safety

Construction sites and the materials and machines used can be inherently hazardous and this makes employee safety one of the chief concerns of any company. Increasingly, organisations are looking at how cloud-based solutions can help minimise risk even further. Using the cloud enables companies to simplify and centralise the reporting of incidents over the internet, share data with collaborators and suppliers and then analyse that data to provide safety insights and develop new safety procedures and equipment more speedily for use on sites.

When predictive tools are used, this can then help companies better understand the safety risks of each new project, enabling them to put improved measures into place during the planning stage rather than as a reaction to an incident that happens once construction work has begun. It also helps factor safety into the price and timescale of the project.

7. More effective communications

The number of people involved in a construction project can be vast and includes not just the company but the customer, architects and planners, suppliers, sub-contractors and other construction companies. Keeping everyone in the loop and up to speed is vital to keep the project on schedule and budget, and to ensure that issues are dealt with swiftly and effectively.

Cloud-based communication systems make this far easier and quicker to do and ensure that communications can be accessed and traced more effectively. What’s more, rather than having to send copies of files in email attachments that can quickly go out of date, attaching links to files stored centrally in the cloud means information accessed will always be synchronised and up to date.

Conclusion

Construction companies have a lot to gain from using the cloud and there are many ways in which it can benefit. The biggest advantage, however, for those who have yet to adopt, is that doing so will put you on par with the majority that have already begun to make the leap as part of their digital transformation.

Which is Better for You: Managed or Unmanaged Hosting?

Posted on 22/04/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

If you have been looking for a hosting plan, you’ll no doubt have seen some packages described as ‘managed hosting’. If you are unsure what managed hosting is, how it differs from unmanaged hosting and whether it’s the right choice for you, this post will hopefully provide the answers you need.

The difference between managed and unmanaged hosting

Web hosting is the act of installing your website software and content on a web server so that it can be found and accessed over the internet. The web servers belong to your web host and are housed in a datacentre. Keeping your website or applications online is, therefore, a joint venture between the host and the website owner. The host takes care of the physical hardware and infrastructure and the website owner looks after the website software and content.

There is, however, a middle ground that can either be undertaken by the host or the site owner. This includes actions such as making backups, monitoring and optimising the performance of the server, installing and updating the server’s operating system and setting up and maintaining server security software, such as firewalls and malware and intrusion detection.

Managed hosting is when these things are carried out by the web host. Unmanaged hosting is when they are carried out by the customer.

It needs to be understood, however, that not all managed services are the same. Web hosts can offer different managed hosting solutions to each other and provide different managed services for different types of hosting. At the same time, some of these managed services are included in the basic price of a package while others can be purchased as an add-on service. Some enterprises even choose to work with their hosts to create bespoke managed services that are tailored around their specific needs.

When to choose unmanaged hosting

Choosing unmanaged hosting can be less expensive than managed hosting, but its biggest attraction for businesses is that it gives them far more control over their hosting. Apart from keeping the machines running, they take responsibility for everything else. Companies that have very complex IT infrastructures and which often rely on legacy software can find it easier to manage their applications when they have this level of oversight and control.

Of course, to do this, these companies need to have the extensive IT expertise to undertake all these management tasks themselves. This is usually achieved through a combination of employing experts and buying in third-party technical support.

When to choose managed hosting

The vast majority of companies choose managed hosting because it is more convenient and because they lack specific server management skills. While running a website has got easier, thanks to the development of user-friendly admin panels in platforms like WordPress and through the wide range of functions offered in control panels like cPanel and Plesk, the workings of a web server have, for many companies, remained an area over which they have little knowledge. If you have never had an in-house server and employed someone who can run it, unmanaged hosting can cause real problems.

With managed hosting, you can forget all about the more complex issues, such as installing PHP modules, load balancing, database optimisation or troubleshooting a server issue when something goes awry.

Indeed, today, even companies that have the in-house expertise in place to manage their own hosting choose to opt for a managed hosting solution. With a shortage of IT expertise available in the recruitment market and those that work in the sector demanding high salaries, it is far more cost-effective, productive and convenient to hand server management to the web host so that IT staff are freed up to work on more business-focused projects.

What to look for in a managed hosting plan

What you need to look for depends upon the type of hosting you choose. If you have shared hosting, for example, the simple fact that multiple customers share space on a single server means no individual customer could be responsible for server management – it’s always carried out by the web host. However, even with shared hosting, you should look for other server management solutions being included in a managed package – these include website backups and 24/7 technical support.

For more advanced forms of hosting where users have their own operating system, you’ll need to look for automated backup solutions, real-time performance monitoring, updating of OS, control panel and other server software and security software management.

Conclusion

Today, the advantages and convenience of managed hosting make it the number one choice for businesses. It removes all the burdens of managing your server and the calamities that can happen when a lack of know-how causes issues. At the same time, it allows smaller companies to get on with running their websites and larger organisations to put their IT expertise to more productive use.

What Are App Containers, and Do You Really need Them?

Posted on 20/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

App containers have helped transform the way companies run their software, but despite being around for almost a decade, for many people, the term ‘app container’ remains one of those obscure pieces of IT jargon. Here, we aim to give you a clear understanding of what app containers are, what they’re used for and whether they might be a solution that’s useful for your business.

What are app containers?

An app container is like any other form of container, it’s what you put something in to keep it separate from what’s around it and to move it from place to place. In IT, what you put in a container is software. The idea is that putting an application in a container prevents it from conflicting with other applications or not working properly when move to a different environment.

How are containers useful?

One of the biggest benefits of a container is that they enable the software within it to work independently from the environment in which they are located and this prevents issues from arriving when they are moved from one environment to another.

A typical example is an app developed using one version of an operating system (OS) and then moved to an environment with a different version. Without a container, the app might work flawlessly in development but when moved might hit problems that prevent it from working as expected. It’s not just operating systems that can have this effect, so too can programming languages, PHP versions, SSL libraries, network structure and various other differences.

A container prevents this from happening by placing the software in a self-contained environment of its own where it can be moved without issue. In other words, a container is a complete runtime environment for the software and contains all the other things it is dependent on to run. In a sense, it works like a submarine or a spacecraft, supporting the life inside regardless of what alien environments they travel to.

Additional benefits of containers

Virtualisation can be used as an alternative to containers as applications and their operating systems running on virtual machines can also be easily moved across different hardware. The key difference is that containerised applications usually require smaller storage, enabling a company to host more containers than virtual machines on a server. This can help reduce the costs of running applications in a cloud environment. Another advantage containers have over virtual machines is that they can be booted almost instantaneously, whereas a virtual machine takes several minutes.

From a development and management point of view, another benefit is that applications can be separated into their individual parts (microservices) and each of these placed in their own container, for example, the front-end in one container and the database in another. This approach is useful as it enables each microservice to be modified independently without the developer having to rewrite the entire software. It also means companies can save money as they don’t need to run the full application at all times. By providing instant availability, containers can be used to turn different microservices on and off as and when the application needs them.

A well-established technology

After almost a decade, containers have become an established part of the IT landscape and some prominent organisations are helping to develop them. The Open Container Project (OCP), run by the Linux Foundation, is the key initiative in the field, with the aim of standardising container formats and runtime software across different platforms so that they can benefit everyone. In addition, this open-source approach has led to improvements in container security and management systems and the development of freely available container management systems, such as the well-known Kubernetes that was kickstarted by Google. The OCP is supported by industry giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, VMware and many others.

Would app containers be useful for my company?

The fact that containerised applications tend to use less storage and because individual microservices can be turned on and off as needed so they use fewer resources means their adoption could help companies reduce the cost of their cloud services – especially because cloud services are charged for on a pay per use basis. Whether this could be a significant saving depends, of course, on the size of the overall application and the extent of the resources it uses.

Another value is that containers help prevent vendor lock-in. In the past, companies have felt tied to a vendor because they have been concerned that moving their application to a new provider with a different environment might cause their applications to falter. Containers prevent this from happening. They also make it far less problematic to move applications across environments for any other reason and make it easier to modify microservices in isolation from the rest of the application.

Conclusion

Today, many companies use containers to house their applications in the cloud and, with most platforms being free to use and their formats standardised, they look certain to remain part of the cloud landscape for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, from reading this article you’ll now be aware of what app containers are, what they are used for and how they could benefit your business.

Cloud Computing Technology : Advantages for Schools

Posted on 19/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Cloud adoption is not just something for big business. Today, schools across the globe are adopting it for the numerous benefits it brings, including for staff, students and parents. Here, we’ll look at the ways cloud technology is transforming education and bringing schools into the 21^st Century.

1. Cut costs

With staff costs swallowing around 80% of school budgets and changes to school funding having an impact, business managers are hard pushed to make ends meet. Over recent years, school savings that have taken decades to accrue have dwindled. At the same time, schools are increasingly having to modernise their IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with technological developments and keep their curricula up to date. This often requires the purchase of expensive servers, as well as paying for the additional IT expertise to manage them and the ongoing energy costs to keep them running and cool.

Moving to the cloud technology eliminates the need to buy on-site servers completely, replacing them with a vendor-hosted infrastructure that is paid for with a more manageable monthly cost. And with no hardware to manage and maintain at school the burden on IT staff is reduced, freeing them up to work on more important, school-related tasks. In addition, with no 24/7 air-conditioning and power to pay for, further cost reductions can be made.

The hardware savings and reduction in other costs is even bigger for multi-academy trusts, as they will only need a single cloud package to cover all of their schools. This trust-wide system can then be controlled by a single team at the trust’s HQ, rather than needing staff in each school.

2. Everywhere accessibility

One of the biggest practical advantages of moving to the cloud technology is that it enables data and information to be accessed anywhere with an internet connection. This means teachers and pupils can access files, documents and other learning resources anywhere – something that has been absolutely critical during the pandemic. They can also collaborate and communicate far easier using a wide range of devices, communication channels and specially developed education platforms.

With highly secure logical access control in place, schools can restrict access to information so that only those given permission can have access. This can be done on an individual basis so that each person is given the right access to the information they need. With logical access in place and school data and files stored centrally online, the possibilities for extending learning beyond the classroom and enabling staff to collaborate are endless.

3. Better parents’ evenings

The cloud opens the door to a new way to hold parents’ evenings. Over the last year, we have seen many schools using the cloud to replace face to face parents’ evenings with video calls – something that both parents and staff have found favourable. Parents are happy because they can book appointments to suit online and don’t need to travel to the school, struggle for a parking space or wait endlessly in a queue while appointments drag on over the allocated times. Online, they last exactly as long as the school sets them, usually five minutes.

Online parents’ evenings are also good for the school. They reduce the burden on staff as no one has to timetable the appointments and send hundreds of print outs, the school doesn’t need a super-clean and furniture rearrangement, and there’s no need to provide refreshments or pay someone to serve them. Teachers, meanwhile, can hold their appointments from home instead of having to stay late and wait for hours before the event actually begins. Online, they’ll also have access to the data they need for the meetings and can even share it on screen. Additionally, the school doesn’t need to be heated or lit and the caretaker doesn’t need to be paid overtime. There are also benefits to the wider community as local roads won’t be blocked by traffic, residents won’t find their parking spots filled and there’ll be less pollution.

4. Real-time data – on tap

The use of data has become vital for schools in helping them drive everything from whole-school initiatives to improving the progress of individual students. Increasingly, school leaders, classroom teachers, pupils and parents need to access that data and want it up to date. This is incredibly difficult to achieve when that data is not held centrally. If individual teachers or departments store their most recent data on local machines or even portable drives, what’s available to everyone might be out of date and won’t give the current picture.

The cloud can transform the way data is stored, managed and accessed. Held centrally, everyone can access the data they are permitted to access and be assured that it’s the most up-to-date version available. What’s more, data held centrally doesn’t get lost when people accidentally delete it from a machine or lose their portable drive. It also means data can be backed up online quickly and securely, instead of IT staff having to make daily backups to other drives or disks in school.

5. Cut the costs of print and paper (financially and environmentally)

Schools spend a fortune on paper and printing, much of which, today, is unnecessary. Instead of handing out numerous worksheets for students to complete classwork and homework with pen and pencils, they can be completed and marked online. This also ensures there’s a permanent copy of them which doesn’t go missing and reduces the amount of old schoolwork taking up valuable storage space in stockrooms across the building.

The same goes for the copious amount of literature that schools send home: letters to parents, newsletters, consent forms, pupil guides, uniform regulations and so forth. All of these can be made available online and parents can be sent text messages or emails with a link to download them. What’s more, making them available online means parents can go back and relook at them at a later date which is hard to do if paper and email versions have been put in the trash.

Of course, the financial benefits are boosted by the environmental ones. The CO2 generated by manufacturing and transporting paper and printing out messages are vastly reduced. That’s not to say that sending electronic communications is carbon-free, it isn’t, but the environmental impact is significantly less.

6. Personalised environments

Personalisation is one of the major benefits of cloud technology and has been seized upon by businesses to improve the customer experience. Just think of how your Amazon homepage is personalised for you when you log in. This is something that the cloud also enables you to achieve as a school.

Its main benefit is for students. Here children can have personalised learning environments created for them, helping schools address accessibility issues for individual students and providing all pupils with schoolwork that is customised for their individual needs. It’s a highly effective way to provide all students with individual learning plans that can be easily managed and implemented. This, indeed, is a far more beneficial project for your IT team to work on than managing an on-site server.

It’s not just pupils that benefit either. Teachers can have personalised areas of their school portal making it easier to access the data, files and information they need, helping them do their jobs more effectively, instead of having to sift through a portal designed for everyone’s use. The same applies to parents. Overall, it improves everyone’s experience of accessing the school online.

Conclusion

Schools can no longer ignore the digital transformation that is taking the world by storm. Digital products and services are benefitting users in all aspects of life and staff, students and parents expect to be able to make use of these technologies in the school environment. From a school’s perspective, adopting cloud technology is essential to make use of these digital services and benefit from the advantages they bring.

Is Your Online Store Meeting Customers’ Expectations?

Posted on 18/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Today, winning new customers and keeping them loyal is all down to customer experience (CX). It’s the major area of competition in the online retail market and one that businesses have heavily invested in. The result is that CX has improved rapidly over the last few years and this has raised the bar in customer expectations. To stay competitive, websites need to deliver what their customers want, not simply in terms of the products they sell but in the quality of the experience that customers have when they shop with you. With over 80% of consumers saying they’ll abandon a brand if their online experience is poor, it’s something you can no longer ignore. With that in mind, here are some of the most important things today’s experience-led consumers want from a retail website.

1. Instant loading and response

Patience isn’t a virtue shared by many of today’s internet users, so if your website is slow, they’re not going to hang around waiting for it. What they expect – and what successful eCommerce sites are achieving – is super-fast loading and response times. Fail in this and you’ll see a decline of 7% in your conversion rates for every second your site takes to load or react to a click, search or input. And that doesn’t matter whether a visitor is sat at home with mega speed broadband or out in the wild with an old phone and 3G connection.

While you can optimise your website to the Nth degree to speed things up, at the end of the day, what puts a jet engine in your loading times is the performance of your hosting. For growing eCommerce sites serious about getting up to speed and making sure you have enough oomph to stay fast when times are busy, you should consider upgrading from shared hosting to VPS. This way, you’ll have enough storage, CPU, RAM and bandwidth to deliver those expected speeds.

2. A slick design

Your website doesn’t have to win design awards or be outlandishly quirky in how it looks; however, it needs to be slick in how it works for your customer. Yes, it has to be designed around the brand and easy on the eye, but most importantly, it needs to be well organised and simple to navigate so that customers can quickly and easily find their way around, add products to the shopping cart and check out. Essentially, you aren’t just designing a website, you are designing a shopping experience, so take advantage of all those plugins and tools that help make that experience great.

3. Reduce the clicks

The more clicks your visitors need to take to find the right products, the fewer of them that will make it to the check-out. It’s a speed thing again – and the more products you have, the longer it can take to find them.

What customers expect is what they see on websites like Amazon and eBay: well-organised product categories, search bars, detailed menus and product filters that make it easy to find the product they want by brand, colour, size, weight, price and so forth.

4. Product pages that are actually useful

Buying online isn’t easy because you can’t examine the product. This leaves potential customers with plenty of questions that a useful product page would answer. A great shopping experience makes it easy for a customer to make a purchasing decision and websites need to put the time and effort into supplying all the information a customer might want to know. If you sell the product, even at a good price, but don’t answer visitors’ questions, they’ll go elsewhere.

What should you include on a product page? Looking at the world’s most popular retail site, Amazon, is a good starting point. Here, you’ll find zoomable images, detailed descriptions and specifications, buying options, customer questions and answers, delivery information and a plethora of related products and upsells.

5. Product reviews

If you want to sell something, you obviously make it sound and look as good as possible – that’s what marketing is all about. The online shopper, however, isn’t going to take your word for it. Scepticism is a built-in shopping behaviour and the modern consumer expects you to provide independent, genuine feedback about the products you sell. This makes product reviews a necessity on the modern website.

6. Personalisation

Personalisation is the biggest driver of customer loyalty and provides the customer experience most valued by today’s consumers. Online shoppers love it when a website provides personalised offers and product recommendations and they spend more as a result. This, of course, has made personalisation a key area of competition for online stores.

Doing it right, however, can be challenging. You’ll need to collect personal data, analyse browsing and shopping histories, deploy a product recommendation engine and set up customer accounts in order to create personalised homepages and send personalised marketing messages. The amount of data and computing resources needed might also require you to upgrade your hosting solution.

Conclusion

As customer experience evolves, consumers will expect the stores they shop with to continually improve their website and offer new, enhanced experiences. As a result, customer expectations never stay the same. To ensure your website stays successful in today’s highly competitive market, it is vital to meet those ever-changing expectations. Hopefully, the points discussed here will help you move forward.

The five Key eCommerce shopping Trends

Posted on 18/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

The last twelve months have seen significant change in the online retail market. The number of people buying online has risen sharply, as has online spending as a percentage of all retail spending. While this growing market provides greater opportunity for online stores, they are having to adapt rapidly to shifts in consumer behaviour and emerging technologies. Here, we’ll look at what the most important trends are for online stores.

1. Personalised shopping

Beyond its speedy delivery and vast range of products, one of the reasons Amazon dominates the eCommerce market is because it delivers highly personalised shopping experiences. With data gathered from browsing histories, wish lists and previous purchases, together with freely given information, such as date of birth, gender and location, they use AI-powered product recommendation engines to create individualised homepages that display highly relevant products. Customers love this experience and reward Amazon for it with increased spending and long-term loyalty.

2. Omnichannel shopping

It is such a popular model with consumers that it has become one of the major trends for eCommerce stores everywhere over the last few years. The difference today, however, is that signed-up shoppers expect every homepage to be personalised when they log in.

To stay competitive and build stronger relationships with customers, online stores need to embrace personalisation, not just in the shopping experiences they offer, but with their communications and marketing too.

With so many different ways to shop available today, customers are expecting stores to make it easy for them to switch seamlessly between one and the other. They may, for example, put a product in the shopping cart on your website, want to check out using your mobile app and then pick it up from a physical store or collection site. Similarly, they may want to communicate via your social media page and then pick up the same conversation later on telephone or online chat.

This is one of the most sought-after customer experiences and companies that offer it benefit enormously from customer loyalty. However, doing it means unifying your inventory, sales and communications systems so that there is a single overview – without this, omnichannel experiences are impossible.

3. Mobile shopping

Smartphones have become the most popular device for browsing the internet and they are being increasingly used to buy online. They account for over 60% of all traffic to online stores and over half of sales. As a result, online retailers are increasingly putting efforts into improving the mobile versions of their websites, helping them to load faster, make finding and viewing products easier and making it simpler to checkout.

Rather than rely on responsive themes, many are developing independent mobile sites that have streamlined content and specially designed layouts that improve the mobile shopping experience.

4. Sustainable shopping

The green revolution is having a major effect on consumers’ choice of who to shop with and which products to buy. According to KMPG, 56% of customers will take a company’s social and environmental credentials into account when choosing a brand, while other research showed that last year, 28% of UK shoppers abandoned a brand because they had concerns about its sustainability.

With climate change and the environment becoming increasingly important subjects that are constantly in the news, expect sustainability to be of growing importance in the marketplace. While regulation pushes companies to make progress, consumer expectancy will pull them, with equal weight, in the same direction. Of course, taking advantage of this in the market means more than just becoming greener – you’ll also need to promote your eco-friendliness to consumers.

5. Trustable shopping

Trust is a critical element of the brand-customer relationship. With the ball firmly in the court of the shopper, brands who want to acquire and retain customers are having to work harder than ever to improve trust.

Trust operates across all strands of an online store’s operations. It begins with delivering on your promises and being upfront, honest and fair when you are unable to keep them – whether that’s delivery times, product quality, customer service or guarantees. Beyond that, it means having transparent (no-hidden extras) pricing, clearly worded and easy to understand terms and conditions, product images and descriptions that are accurate, and genuine product ratings and reviews.

In addition, a trusted company is one that is secure. It uses SSL to encrypt transactions, secures data to protect against data theft, prevents customers’ accounts from being hacked and keeps its website clean so that customers’ devices don’t become infected.

How your web host can help

Meeting the needs and expectations of today’s experience-led shoppers can be challenging. However, underpinning much of it is a reliance on the technology provided by your web host. For example, cloud hosting makes it easier to analyse the data needed for personalisation, while providing the infrastructure required to unify separate systems and deliver omnichannel shopping. Similarly, your host can ensure you have all the resources to improve the loading times of your mobile website and provide a whole range of security tools to protect your systems, data and website. What’s more, at Anteelo, we use the latest power-efficient CPUs and SSDs which provide a far more carbon-friendly way to host your website, making your store more sustainable.

Why Every Builder Should Have A Website

Posted on 17/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Look down any road, these days, and you’ll see some form of building work going on. It’s a busy industry, but one where competition is fierce. Having a website doesn’t only improve your chances of landing more work, it can also lead to customers being willing to pay more for your services. And if the only thing stopping you from getting a website is because you think it’s too difficult or too expensive, read on and we’ll bust that myth once and for all. Here are six reasons every builder needs a website.

1. Stop being so hard to find

Not getting enough enquiries or the right kind of jobs? Most people looking for a builder today will begin their search online. More specifically, they’ll type ‘builder’ and the name of their town in Google and look at the companies that appear in the results. If you’re not on the list, you won’t get the enquiry. The good news, of course, is that if you have a website, you’re likely to get many more enquiries than you currently do.

2. Give customers information immediately

The internet has made the world a faster place. Not only do customers expect things to be done quickly and conveniently; they are no longer prepared to wait for things that are slow or which are a hassle. Why does this matter? Well, if detailed information about your services isn’t available on a website, they’ll see it as a long-winded hassle to ring you up, especially when your competitors’ websites put that information on their screens in a matter of seconds.

This is why simply putting a few details on a listings website is never enough. Even people who find you on there are still expecting a link to your website where they can find out more.

3. Provide information that sells

As an experienced builder, you’ll know better than anyone the type of questions your customers want to know before they decide to choose your business. For example, they’ll want to know the different types of building work you offer and your qualifications, accreditations, skills and experience. A website enables you to answer all these questions in detail and in writing so that customers can be better persuaded to contact you for a quote.

What’s more, put once in writing on your website, it will save you hours having to explain it again and again over the phone or in emails.

4. Show customers how good you are

There’s nothing like a great photo for showing how fantastic a building looks after you’ve finished working on it – and this can be the clincher when it comes to landing a new contract. On a website, you can create a portfolio page with pictures of your best work and can keep adding to it as the years go by. This will let potential customers not just see the quality of your work but help them visualise how the final project will look.

5. Up your prices

While pricing is important, how much you cost isn’t the most important factor in landing a job. Today, 82% of customers are willing to pay more for services that deliver better customer experiences. As a builder, you’ll know what those important customer experiences are, for example, starting projects as agreed, meeting deadlines, arriving on-site on time, staying within budget, leaving premises clean and tidy, finishing the project to specification, etc.

While delivering those experiences is essential, letting customers know about them on your website changes perceptions of the kind of company you are and this can stop relying purely on price to get contracts. You can quote what you are worth because of the quality of the experiences you deliver and customers will be willing to pay for it.

6. Look more professional

Most people expect every business to have a website. When there isn’t one, potential customers will ask why – and this can lead to concerns about whether you are a professional builder or a legitimate company. While you certainly don’t need a website to be professional or legitimate, having one can reassure people that you are, especially when it contains information that establishes trustworthiness.

Simple information, such as a physical address, telephone number and professional website and email addresses, give your business legitimacy. As does a company registration number and VAT number if you have them. A website that contains terms and conditions, testimonials from past customers, photos of previous work, an about us page, etc., all help to convince customers that you are a business they can trust.

With customers spending significant sums of money on a building project, it is important to let them know that you are a professional company and doing this on your website is key to building that trust.

How easy is it to build a website?

It has never been easier or more affordable to build and run a website. Website building software, like WordPress, is free, easy to use, requires no coding skills and comes with thousands of themes and add-ons to give your site the look and functionality you need. Used on 41% of all websites, this professional tool can be installed with a single click here at Anteelo, enabling you to start working on your site in minutes. What’s more, you can host your website with us for less than £1 a week and take advantage of the wide range of services included in the plan, such as 24/7 technical support, daily website backups, professional email, robust security, guaranteed 99.9% uptime and more.

Promote your uniqueness

Think carefully about website design

The benefits of a blog

Simple interaction and communication

A reliable and trustworthy website

Conclusion

1. Largest Contentful Paint

2. First Input Delay

3. Cumulative Layout Shift

4. The mobile experience

5. SSL, safe browsing and intrusive interstitials

Conclusion

The impact of a data breach

1. Use tech and training to prevent phishing

2. Two-factor authentication

3. Virtual Private Networks

4. Automated software updates

5. Encryption

6. Remote backups

7. Secure hosting

Conclusion

1. Cost savings

2. Access information from anywhere at anytime

3. More competitive bidding

4. Manage growth better

5. Building Information Modelling (BIM)

6. Improve employee safety

7. More effective communications

Conclusion

The difference between managed and unmanaged hosting

When to choose unmanaged hosting

When to choose managed hosting

What to look for in a managed hosting plan

Conclusion

What are app containers?

How are containers useful?

Additional benefits of containers

A well-established technology

Would app containers be useful for my company?

Conclusion

1. Cut costs

2. Everywhere accessibility

3. Better parents’ evenings

4. Real-time data – on tap

5. Cut the costs of print and paper (financially and environmentally)

6. Personalised environments

Conclusion

1. Instant loading and response

2. A slick design

3. Reduce the clicks

4. Product pages that are actually useful

5. Product reviews

6. Personalisation

Conclusion

1. Personalised shopping

2. Omnichannel shopping

3. Mobile shopping

4. Sustainable shopping

5. Trustable shopping

How your web host can help

1. Stop being so hard to find

2. Give customers information immediately

3. Provide information that sells

4. Show customers how good you are

5. Up your prices

6. Look more professional

How easy is it to build a website?

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