G'Day Fellas, Sometime back A friend of mine asked me if I could help him to hire a Web Developer, the one who can manage his business sites. I told him that it is quite a job to get a right man or woman to do the job you are offering. Anyway I created content for Job to be published and him being a native English speaker corrected all the grammar mistakes in my write-up. We end up publishing that job on couple of Job Websites Its kinda expensive to publish one, you know :) Nightmare started in couple of minutes, Job agencies offering right candidates tailor made just to do this job. Interesting! Good cooks (I am serious) applying for this Job didn't make any sense. Same person applying with two totally different resumes? whoa! thats a little bit too much just to get a job. Anyway I shortlisted few applicants and in the end shortlisted 3 after phone conversations and stuff. I then gave them an assignment to do so  that I can decide on which one will fit in nicely based on their style of coding, approach they took, creativity, design, execution and used technologies We were successful in finding The One I was glad that in the end it was not just the face value shown in resumes that we counted on, rather it was more rigorous approach. My friend being a part technical brain would like to explain things in plain English and would expect the same in return, rather than a developer explaining in var $myVar = "IDontKnowHowToExplain" language This post is not about how to hire but rather about what 15 signs you look for if you want to avoid hiring a wrong Web Developer. Lets check them out and please add to this list if you would like to add Responsive Design: If your prospective employee knows nothing about Responsiveness, that will put you in a lot a trouble or may lay a death bed for you to be launched website pretty soon. On the other hand those who thinks that responsive design can only be achieved by Twitter Bootstrap, hmm.. You … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, This is my fifth post in my Blogging Tips series that I started few days back. If you haven't already you can read my previous 2 posts from here Blogging Tips: Where to start Blogging Tips: Think out of the Box Blogging Tips: Why Blogs won't work How to draw traffic to your blog site Today I am going to talk about the importance of social media in the age we are living in and how important it is for your websites. We all know likes of Facebook and twitter. I've just started to use my personal account on Facebook and Twitter to highlight some important stuff that I do for my websites and the response is incredible. With Twitter I don't have many followers but I think it will get better where in other social sites like facebook, I am getting pretty good response from my friends etc. Put it this way. You release a post and talk about it on your Facebook page. If you have 2000 accounts who are your subscribers and you get 500 to check your link out you get instant traffic increase. Now it does not end here. As you saw on my blog that I have social buttons installed so that if a visitor likes the content they are more likely to give it a Facebook thumbs up or a Google +1 or Digg it. When someone likes a link on your website it get certain audience from the person's friend list who liked it. So your article visibility is instantly amplified.  In the end its all about publishing valuable content and getting people to visit your site. If you are doing good work and no one sees what you are doing I guess that's not a good Idea. Let's highlight some key points what I do for in Social amplification of my article or post. Posting your Links Select a group that is relevant to your niche and post your article link there. You are nearly guaranteed to get audience from that group. If you keep posting something valuable every time, you will get a loyal audience. You should try to interact with the group, just posting links will isolate you. … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, This is my fourth post in my Blogging Tips series that I started few days back. If you haven't already you can read my previous 2 posts from here Blogging Tips: Where to start Blogging Tips: Think out of the Box Blogging Tips: Why Blogs won't work I will be talking about my experiences. There are so many other ways that I may not cover in my points below. You can contribute too using comments. Ok I believe that I am doing few things right because when I started writing the traffic was really minimal. I understood driving traffic after posting few months. Google and other major search engines are too important to your site that you cannot avoid them. You have to understand that you are writing for prospective visitors that are just search for that information. In other words you are not writing for yourself. Now if you are writing for yourself then only you will understand it and neither your visitors or major search engines will be too entertained with what you wrote. Here is the visual difference when I was running blog for myself and then I starting writing for major population. You have to understand the Content is king Every unique post that you write is guaranteed to bring quality traffic to your site. Now that I am sure you are either using wordpress or something similar for you site. Here are some key points that I assembled over the time. Keep above graph snapshot in your brain just for the time being until you finish reading this post. Post Title Choosing your post title is the most important thing that you can do before you even wrote a single word for you post. You title is your first H1 HTML tag and thus is most important piece of information for search engines too. Putting some research work and checking Keyword competition is a good thing. No matter how good your post is if your title lags that crispiness it is most unlikely to receive a hit. Content Quality If you got your titled sorted then next part is your … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, This is my third post in my Blogging Tips series that I started few days back. If you haven't already you can read my previous 2 posts from here Blogging Tips: Where to start Blogging Tips: Think out of the Box In this post I am going to outline whatever experiences I had when I started blogging. I and few of my friends have a really bad start. In this post I am going to highlight what you should and you shouldn't do. Navigation Do yourself a favour. Treat your Blog as a site that is not yours. Now try browsing it. Ask yourself these questions Can you search something particularly easy on this site. Can you go to a category easily. Is the navigation Clear i.e. Did you get lost somewhere and don't know your way out. Is there something that you can do to improve the Visitor experience. Bottom line is that your site navigation should be friendly so that it cause less confusion when a visitor is browsing your site. Your Site Layout & Look and feel As I said before that you are browsing your site as a third user. Ask yourself If you were a real visitor what will their initial impression. Here are couple of NOTs that you should be aware of I hate blogs where a Ad pops out of nowhere (like a modal dialog) while I am reading an article. While I think it is Ok if they want to highlight if they are running any specials but Ads should in within Article itself. Making money is good but limit your Ads to display in a way that it doesn't hurt user reading experience. You can read my Old posts I think I became greedy when I started :) doesn't work. For me I love writing now and want to give my site visitors a good experience. So I am limiting my in article Ads to maximum 2 depending on length of Article. You website theme should be simple and sleek. If you think funky stuff works think again. In my experience on this Blog my bounce Rate decreased rapidly when I made really basic changes to navigation and look and feel. Here is a … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, So I am starting this series to share my blogging experiences with you. I am naming this series Blogging Tips series and this series will cover many topics like Where to start - this post Creativity Why blogs won't work How to draw traffic Using Social media What you should avoid Making money How affiliate stuff work. Best Affiliate program providers. Blogging Tips Advertising Commenting on your blow and many more to follow Don't forget to +1 this post if you like it. Many Links in this post are affiliate links I never talk myself down so my experiences may be agreed by you or you can criticize my post or you can add you wonderful thoughts to whatever I write. I am in field of blogging from last many many months if not decades. So I have gained may be enough knowledge to share with you. Ok so let me tell you where to start. Its a difficult one but I will try to address it. Its not easy when you ask yourself what you should be writing about or even worse you have no clue what Blogging software to pick or to create one. I should tell you that you shouldn't spend time reinventing the wheel just to prove that you got some skills. Wordpress is an awesome software that I use for Blogging. Not only it is self efficient but extensions like themes and plugins make it really strong platform for yourself. I wrote only 2 plugins up until now just because the requirements were very unique. So now you know what software to pick Next for me was to choose hosting. A cheap and reliable hosting. I am using knownhost (aff link) now but I started with Hostgator Point was that I never wanted to invest too much upfront that it would become liability. So cheap and best was my option. So now your hosting is all set. You should be looking to customize your Wordpress the way you want to run it. You should be looking to create a good navigation menu. Sitemap, Privacy policy (A must), About us page. You have to be sure what … [Read more...]

So so the competition is growing in terms of Cloud storage and that is really good for the consumers looking for awesome deals. In this post I highlight some key comparable features for Google Drive, Dropbox, Box  and SkyDrive Ok so at time of writing here are some comparison by me Service Free storage Web Droid Win Phone Black berry iOS Linux Mac Windows Cost for 25GB Cost for 50GB Google Drive 5GB Yes Yes X X Yes X Yes Yes $2.49 $4.99 (100GB) Dropbox 2GB Upto 18 Gb Free with referrals  Yes Yes X Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes  Only comes 50G+ $9.99 Box 5GB Yes Yes X Yes Yes X Yes Yes $9.99 $19.99 Microsoft SkyDrive 7GB Yes X Yes X Yes X Yes Yes $0.83 (27GB) $2.08 (52GB) Advertisement   Now For me Dropbox is a clear leader. Why? One of the main reason behind me saying that it supports nearly everything except Windows Phone. I am sure guys are working hard on this. Google and Skydrive on the other hand has just started and have long way to go. With big brand name and trust behind them, I guess they will soon catchup with Dropbox. I am not considering to tell you about Apple iCound because it is so tightly integrated with iOS and is not true Drive solution. Box amongst all is really expensive. But I guess its not for guys like myself may be IBM perhaps could be using them. Dropbox is an excellent service and to start with they give you 2GB free but thats not it. Stay with them and refer your friends and they will give upto 18GB for FREE depending how many referrals (500MB/referral) you can give them. Google Drive has reserved Ad display rights in Drive. Google says it reserve rights to display ads with their Drive solution. Fair enough. Nothing is for FREE after all. Best thing though is that you can increase your storage to 16TB. Wow! that's huge. At the moment Google drive is more of an extension to its Google Documents … [Read more...]