Servage Magazine

It’s easy for service providers to ask their users to use secure passwords. After all it is the user who is supposed to remember it. Obviously it is better for everyone if secure passwords are being used everywhere, but for many people it represents an annoyance to use a password like “237IMBd!” instead of “pizza”. However, there are plenty of ways making it easier to remember secure passwords – and some of them even add a little bit of fun to the process ;-) I would like to explain my personal way of generating and using secure passwords as an inspiration to figure out a way that works for you, and moreover, ...

E-commerce is quickly turning into a must-have for modern businesses. And why shouldn’t it when it’s relatively cheaper than selling products at a physical location, always having to worry about rent for your shop and a whole lot of others expenses. With an e-commerce business you can basically sell anything, no matter how big or small. And if you have good suppliers, you don’t even have to worry about having too many items in stock or running out of stock. With good managerial skills plus the right marketing and conversion funnel you can actually run a successful business where items sell themselves. Which other crucial element does your e-commerce business depend on, other than ...

There are pros and cons of a brand style guide and controversies over making it public or keeping it internal. It fulfills the purpose of simplifying and generalizing your web design processes to provide the same recognizable look and feel across your products on all devices. Branding in the mobile era has become a more intricate process, and the complexities for designers in branding are likely to increase even further with the technological advancements in media. Therefore the involvement of more than one designer in branding is a common scenario. Expectations of collaborative environments, organization and management of entire branding processes become the need of the moment in many design and marketing companies. If you are a ...

Every business-owner knows how hard it is to get customers to buy something. It counts for retailers as well as online stores. Offline as well as online service providers. No matter the product, you are likely to find yourself in a highly competitive market, where other businesses are looming around like sharks, trying to get their share of the customers. Plenty of marketing methods evolve around spam, where businesses somehow send out information in bulk, to any recipient they believe could somehow remotely be interested. This is valid for email, flyer, posters, magazine or newspaper advertisement. Smart people have learned to optimize this process, using demographics and other user-derived information, so ...

You probably know the hazzles of project management. Always trying to maintain the big picture, understanding the milestones and goals for the project, collecting information aboutproblems, solutions and progress. Some people keep all this stuff in their head, and the edge of explosion, some people use notes, some use Excel, some use apps. Some use great apps that really make your project management easier. There quite a few project management apps out there. Some free, some commercial. I've choosen two that I would like to present, because I think they can help you with your project management in an efficient way. One paid, and one free alternative. Basecamp 37Signals's Basecamp is ...

This is the sixth and last part of a simplified explanation of the “Yahoo best practices for speeding up your web site“. Read the fifth part here. The fourth part is about image related optimization. Reduce cookie size Basically cookies consume resources in terms of data in requests. The article "When the cookie crumbles" by Tenni Theurer and Patty Chi provide the following conclusions: Don't use unnecessary cookies. Think before storing useless data. Reduce cookie size to the minimum required. It helps response times. Restrict cookies to domains appropriately, so they are not affecting other subdomains unnecessarily. Set appropriate expire dates, to remove cookies as early as possible with regards to their relevance. Do ...

This is the fifth part of a simplified explanation of the "Yahoo best practices for speeding up your web site". Read the fourth part here. The fourth part is about image related optimization. Minimize image file size Avoid using GIF files. If you have GIFs, try to convert them to PNG, in order to evaluate if you might save some size. PNG files are more efficient in terms of quality and size. Most browser-issues with PNG are resolved, so there are not many things in favor of the GIF anymore. If you must use it, make sure to include the amount of colors in the color palette, which are necessary. ...

This is the fourth part of a simplified explanation of the "Yahoo best practices for speeding up your web site". Read the third part here. The third part is about CSS related optimization. Preferably place scripts at the bottom Scripts block parallel downloads of multiple items in the browser. Therefore you might want to place the scripts at the bottom of the page, if possible. It is a problem if your scripts alter the content of your document on the initial load, since you might want those scripts at the top. Make JavaScript (and CSS) external Including JavaScript and CSS in the HTML document reduces the amount of requests, but also ...

This is the third part of a simplified explanation of the "Yahoo best practices for speeding up your web site". Read the second part here. The third part is about CSS related optimization. Include stylesheets in the head section Use the <link> tags in the <head> section of your HTML code to include CSS files. This enables your website to load progressively, instead of waiting for style information in the middle, or at the bottom of your page. It means that content can be rendered when it is ready, because the style information has already been loaded in the beginning. This makes the page appear to load faster. Do not ...

This is the second part of a simplified explanation of the "Yahoo best practices for speeding up your web site". Read the first part here. The second part is about server related optimization. I am aware that some settings are not available to all developers, depending on their development and deployment infrastructure. Use Content Delivery Networks Where possible you should take advantage of servers closer to your users than your own. TO get started quickly with some major improvements, try to load JavaScript sources like Google APIs, jQuery or similar code you might use in your project, directly from their servers, or suggested CDN. Add expires header to utilize ...