IJHANA

How to use LinkedIN – It is a platfrom

Thomas — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:46:15 +0000

We don’t know how to use LinkedIN according to it’s founder, Reid Hoffman.

In the article “Reid Hoffman: The Network Philosopher” in the April 2012 Wired Magazine issue , Reid Hoffman recently said: “is the vast majority of people don’t understand what it’s a platform for. Ask the average person, they think it’s a place they keep their CV online, and maybe have some connections with people they know professionally. They don’t think of it as a place they can get business intelligence, establish an online presence where other people in the network can find them, research problems. We’re a screwdriver when people don’t really realize what screws are. If the light bulb went off in their head on how to use LinkedIn, it would raise the country’s GDP. The vast majority of people don’t really have all the synapses connected about what it is to operate in a networked world.”

He is right of course, we don’t know how to use LinkedIN properly. We are conservative and constricted when it comes to work related social networking. The rules are still so new.

Admittedly, I only use LinkedIN to accept invitations, have a company profile, a personal CV and read the now excellent article stream. So, I am going to take up his challenge. Here is the experiment/new habit I am going to adopt. The only thing that really matters in business is new business i.e. sales which is the same thing as saying growth and whether we want to admit it or not, new business/sales/growth is about who you know – relationships, I am likable guy, I have a decent enough network, but really I am still a bit reserved, I don’t like bugging people, I don’t like sounding like “I want X from you.” It is easy and passive to send out LN invitations to past colleagues and to those whom you have some tenuous third level connection. But none of that really develops enough of a relationship to hear peoples problems and their issues that you can solve with your particular skill set or product/service.

Much, much has been written on how to network, where to network about strong and weak social ties, about hub connectors, about the social graph and word of mouth. But the key, is getting in the mix, getting it wrong and trying it again till a pattern emerges that can be repeated with success creating a sustainable business. So, I am going to try to use LinkedIN for new business, maybe a bit risky, but would seem like a natural and native solution for LinkedIN. This also may sound a bit daft, like you don’t use LN for this already. And of course I do, but not in a committed sense, it feels quite random, done in passing, a more systematic approach could be developed.

What am I going to do is, ask:

1. Who needs help?
2. What kind of help do you need?
3. What are you most pressing issues?
4. How would you like to work?

There are some good resources on LinkedIN but they do feel a bit hidden.
So let’s see what happens, let’s see if LinkedIN really is the platform that it can be.
I’ll post some resulting stories as they come in.

Designing for Humans: Good Content is Good SEO

Thomas — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:58:27 +0000

Oh SEO, how you like to scare people and make them write robot friendly content and not people friendly content. As a user experience practitioner, I champion the user, the user often get’s lost in unfounded fears about SEO best practices.

In my work most where I often encounter the greatest friction between human design and computer design demands is with search engine optimization. SEO is not some demi-god that should be allowed to strike fear into website owners, the refrain is all to common, “we can’t design that way we will loose some SEO traffic/Google Page Rank.”

Good SEO standards should free you to design as you need. Want AJAX menus? Find a way. Want readable product descriptions and not keyword strings? Find a way. Want a Flash hero image, write content to support it.

People read your website. People are your customers. People are interacting with your site. Yes, they need to find you, but not at the cost of publishing nonsensical gibberish. We should not live in fear of the SEO boggy man will hate on us if we focus on delivering a useful experience and meaningful content. Quite the opposite.

It reminds me a bit of the early 2000 reverence for information architecture, where the IA (me) was treated like Wizard of OZ (which I did enjoy), and now good user interface principles are a core practice for all web workers. Good SEO is about strong, core practices and above all: good content – Google strongly support this. Write good, helpful, unique, meaningful content for humans to read, not robots, and, yes, respect the necessary syntax, with good clean code standards. And your site will be fine, your content will be found, and it will be liked, shared and re-tweeted, and Google +.

Our SEO team focuses on core SEO practices, on mitigating risk and tending to your SEO with a careful, constant focus not an overwhelming demand that locks site owners into a cycle of fear of SEO and prevents them from publishing good content.

For the authority on all matters SEO visit SEOMOZ. What is important here is to glean the top 20% of the tips and guidance and reverently implement those. Review the findings of SEOMOZ annual, 2011 Search Engine Ranking: Future of Search.

At the top of the list, and is what this post is addressing, “Analysis of a site/page’s perceived value to Users” – create content that is good for the user above all else. This should come as a relief to publishers. Rather than being stuck in the arcane of robot.txt, just write good stuff.

Like all good communities of experts, follow the top 20% of what they are telling you at SEOMOZ, the rest is for insiders about insiders. And as for Matt Cutts, Matt is awesome, but please stop sifting the tea leaves on his blog as some game to beat Google. You can’t beat Google, play nice with Google and serve up some strong content to the beast and all will be well.

SEO will recede into the background as a given. SEO is something that does require care, respect and attention, but human content for humans by humans will trump all. The web is for people, not computers. Content is still king, even of SEO.

Selecting New Interactive Clients: A Homage to David Ogilvy

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 03:22:55 +0000

Just finished “Confessions Of An Advertising Man” by David Ogilvy, again. Since we started IJHANA six years ago I find myself reading this book about every year and every time I find a new piece of wisdom that seems a little more relevant than before. This time it was the chapter Rules for Selecting New Clients.

The chapter sparked the thought: “What should we, IJHANA, look for when selecting new interactive clients” and vice versa, “What should new clients look for?”.

From the beginning IJHANA has set itself apart from most interactive agencies by being very selective about the clients we select to work with. We agreed as a company to never take on a client just for the money, never take on a project where client expectations can not be met or exceed and never to take on project that is under funded.

There are many reasons why agencies and clients should not work together. The relationship is usually a long hard road, where you will love each other, hate each other, want to kill each other, and would die for each other. But it is important as an agency to find clients you can help and as a client to find an agency that is going to take the time to understanding your business and your goals.

IJHANA’s Rules for Selecting New Interactive Clients

Only work with clients which you are proud to be associated with, never work with a client that you don’t respect and don’t like.

Never take on a client that you feel can get a better solution from someone else.

Never take on other agencies as client. Let them fail. By doing their work you are cheating the client and making your enemy stronger.

Make sure that the client understands that the interactive agency has to make money as well; don’t make the client money while losing money from your own company.

Question any account that would not be very profitable. Exception: If it gives you a chance to show off your skills to other potential clients, then take the account.

Always find the motive for the client switching agencies, if they were let go from the previous agency, find out why.

Do not take clients that put little importance in technology.

Never do an equity project for a client that is not yet in the market.

Never take on small projects. They are as costly and time consuming as larger, more complex projects.

Go beyond expectations, blow the clients mind. DO NOT take on projects that you are NOT Capable of completing.

Never take on a client you are not willing to have a friendly dinner with.

Magento Enterprise Scalibliity

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:11:55 +0000

Want a Magneto Enterprise Edition site with the ability to scale to over 7.5 Million Unique Monthly Visitors and 15,000 orders a day?

So did we! Attention to details during the planning, deploying, and configuration phase of the Magento Enterprise Edition environment was critical if we want to get the best performance out of the eco-system. It required not only optimizing Magneto, but also optimizing the Network, Hardware, Database and Image Serving.

During this process we learned many tricks and tips by constantly looking for optimization improvements and performance testing. Getting into exactly what we did over the 2 year period would take volumes, but below are a few tricks and tips to get you started.

Tricks and Tips

When it comes to the hardware, RAM, RAM and more RAM.

If you are expecting a large number of concurrent users Multi-core CPUs are a must

Optimize the configuration of every component of your LAMP Stack

Fast hard drives (7800 RPM+) are key to page load speed

When possible use a Flat Frontend Catalog

Rebuild Database indexes often

Test the various Caching options available in Magento

Install the Admin component on its own server

Adding a PHP accelerator, eAccelerator shows good results with 40%-600% increase

Most importantly optimize MYSQL, you can get a 55%-70% performance increase

Need more tips? Call us!

Top 5 Information Architecture Standards

admin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 03:10:00 +0000

Twelve years of information architecture best practices have now become proven standards. These Top 5 IA standards still hold true in an A/B split test and rapid iteration world.

1. Test, Test, Test

There is no room for romance in building efficient site navigation and high converting landing pages. You must test your designs and prototypes with seed member online users, focus groups, one on ones and/or paper tests.

2. You are NOT the user

You are not building for yourself. You must know and represent the needs of your user – be that a target customer or an application user.

3. Golden Triangle

Eye heat tracking studies have shown time and time again the areas on website that users eyes first read. If you want a user take an action place the “button” in those areas. Branding and logo are import yes, but consider these highly active areas for conversion functions and trust references.
All site design will be slightly different, but the main eye tracking path remains true to the golden triangle regardless. To move user behavior outside this golden triangle you must change their behavior this is hard to do. Design ques such as arrows and horizontal lines to arrest eye tracking can help, but you are fighting the users natural inclination.

4. Vertical scroll
Users read the left margin vertically first. Make it easy for your readers.

5. Always design for the lowest common denominator.
Old browsers and slow internet connections are still prevalent. Flash and motion graphic sites struggle with these limits. AND with the internet being untethered and mobile – means working with limited browsers, slow connections and tiny screens brings back the design limits of the early years of the internet.

How To Select a Development Framework #howto

admin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:28:44 +0000

What is a web framework?

A web development framework is a collection of libraries and classes based on a design that makes them reusable to support the development of websites, web applications and web services.

Why use a framework?

Advantages of using a framework: code reusability, eliminating repetitive tasks, easier to work with complex technologies, code consistency, easier to debug code, easier for teams to work on the same codebase, programmers and designers can focus more on requirements than coding low level stuff.

How to select a framework?

Framework selection is based on the web project requirements, framework design pattern, hosting requirements, ease of installation, learning curve and documentation, database abstraction, plugins and libraries, scalability and framework support from the creators and community.

Php Frameworks comparison:
http://www.phpframeworks.com/

Most popular php frameworks:

CakePHP: http://cakephp.org/
good: easy to learn, very popular, great community support, php4 compatibility
bad: fairly strict, not very flexible

Zend: http://framework.zend.com/
good: great for enterprise level applications, highly modular, great scalability, multiple configuration options, great documentation and h3 community
bad: very complex, overhead for small projects

CodeIgniter: http://codeigniter.com/
good: very easy to learn, flexible, good support and great documentation
bad: suitable for small to medium web applications, some performance drop for large numbers

Symfony: http://www.symfony-project.org/
good: for enterprise level applications, easy to configure, lots of features, good documentation and support
bad: uses command line generators for project setups and automatic code generation which is not that common for developers

Kohana: http://kohanaframework.org/
good: very easy to use being a CodeIgniter branch off, you can accomplish more with less code
bad: small community, lack of documentation, requires php 5.3, not so good with backward compatibility

Yii: http://www.yiiframework.com/
good: highly modular, great performance, easy to extend for other libraries
bad: lots of command line generators

What is your process for selecting a framework? Please share in the comments below, in reply to us on our Facebook page.

IJHANA becomes a Peer 1 Platinum partner

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:46:09 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that we’re now partnered with Peer 1, as a Platinum partner.

Our complete and current list of partners also includes:

Acquia Drupal

Drupal

EasyAsk

Magento (Silver Partner)

Peer 1 (Platinum Partner)

RackSpace

Contact us now to learn how we can help put both our and are partners services to work for you today!

Press Release: IJHANA aids Integration of EasyAsk Search and Merchandising with Magento

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:27:02 +0000

IJHANA works with our EasyAsk partner to bring natural language search to Magento Enterprise.

EasyAsk Partners with Magento to Bring the Enterprise-Class Natural Language EasyAsk E-Commerce Edition Search to Magento Merchants Worldwide

The Integration of EasyAsk Search and Merchandising with Magento Allows Customers of Any Size to Take Advantage of the Conversion Power of Natural Language

BURLINGTON, MA and LOS ANGELES, CA—November 1, 2011 – EasyAsk, the industry leading provider of natural language e-commerce search and merchandising solutions, today announced a partnership with Magento, the fastest growing e-commerce platform in the world, to integrate EasyAsk’s best-in-class natural language eCommerce search, navigation and merchandising platform with Magento, bringing the solution to Magento merchants around the globe. The integrated solution makes it faster and easier for Magento Enterprise and Community customers to power their sites with EasyAsk’s enterprise-class natural language search and merchandising to increase conversion rates, deliver the best shopping experience and grow their e-commerce revenue.

“Converting visitors into buyers is a significant priority to our customers regardless of size or sector,” said Phil Robinson, Vice President of Business Development at Magento. “The EasyAsk search and merchandising solution uses natural language technology to provide an enterprise-class solution that is affordable and easy to use by any size customer. Now, any of our merchants can take advantage of EasyAsk to increase their conversion rates and grow their eCommerce revenue.”

The EasyAsk eCommerce search and merchandising software – available on-premise or as a service (SaaS) – is a comprehensive, full-featured solution that uses natural language technology to offer superior capabilities, including:

Intuitive natural language search that allows customers to enter highly descriptive search phrases – “men’s blue polo shirts under $50″ – and find the exact products they seek in a single click

Powerful automatic features such as relaxation, spell correction and more, virtually eliminating the “no results” page creating a better shopping experience and drastically reducing lost visitors due to search

Integrated faceted navigation powered by natural language attributes that make it faster and easier for shoppers to navigate to products they like and speeding conversion

Easy to use merchandising tools which allow non-technical users to create powerful promotions with cross-sell and up-sell offers driven by natural language rules

Advanced analytics that identify trends in shopping behavior, brand experience and more, providing pinpoint advice to merchandising teams to better tune the shopping experience

EasyAsk eCommerce Edition has helped customers achieve industry-leading conversion rates that dramatically increase their e-commerce revenues.

The EasyAsk Magento Extension integrates EasyAsk search, navigation and merchandising with the Magento eCommerce platform for fast, easy implementation and delivers a seamless customer experience for site visitors. The Extension and the easy to use EasyAsk tools allow customers to implement EasyAsk natural language search and merchandising in days versus the weeks or months required by other third party search platforms, for faster return on investment.

“We are pleased to partner with Magento to create an innovative eCommerce solution that combines to deliver the best customer conversion rates in the industry,” said Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk. “Blending EasyAsk’s natural language technology with the state of the art eCommerce functionality of Magento allows customers of any size to offer a superior shopping experience that will fuel their eCommerce growth. We are truly delivering the benefits promised by IBM/Watson to all of our EasyAsk eCommerce customers and doing it today.”

IJHANA, a leading e-commerce consulting firm and Magento partner implemented the combined Magento and EasyAsk solution for a large tool retailer with a catalog of over 5,000 items.

“The e-commerce catalog was characterized by complex descriptions and terminology requiring a search product that intuitively knew what the visitor was looking for,” said Kevin Calloway, Managing Partner, IJHANA. “The EasyAsk natural language solution was easy to implement and dramatically expanded the search and navigation capabilities, helping the site convert customers faster.”

About Magento

Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/) is a feature-rich, open-source, enterprise-class eCommerce solution that offers merchants a high degree of flexibility and control over the user experience, catalog, content, and functionality of their online store. In August 2011, Magento was acquired by eBay Inc., and is now part of the X.commerce division (www.x.com). Launched in 2007, the Magento platform now serves tens of thousands of merchants worldwide, and is supported by a global community of solution partners and third-party developers. Magento Go is a hosted, software-as-a-service solution that provides small and growing merchants with the ecommerce tools they need to succeed online. Based in Los Angeles, Magento, Inc. is a fast-paced, entrepreneurial organization dedicated to the mission of enabling the eCommerce ecosystem. www.magentocommerce.com

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is radically changing the speed and ease of how people find information through the company’s ground-breaking natural language search software. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results on demand. The EasyAsk eCommerce Edition uses this unique technology to deliver an industry leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boosts online revenue through increased conversion rates, better customer experience and agile merchandising. EasyAsk Business Edition revolutionizes enterprise decision-making, moving beyond traditional business intelligence solutions with easy, low-cost deployment and a unique natural language interface that extends access to information anywhere in the organization.

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, EasyAsk has long been a leader in natural language information analysis and delivery software. Customers such as Coldwater Creek, Lands End, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, TruValue, Siemens, Hartford Hospital, Ceridian, JoAnn Fabrics and Harbor Freight Tools rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and e-commerce operations daily. For more information, please visit EasyAsk.

CASE STUDY: Integration of EasyAsk Natural Language Search and Magento Enterprise

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:07:59 +0000

How to integrate EasyAsk, a Natural Language Search engine to Magento Enterprise

We implemented a combined Magento Enterprise and EasyAsk solution for a national tool multi-channel retailer with a catalog of over 5,000 items.

“The e-commerce catalog was characterized by complex descriptions and terminology requiring a search product that intuitively knew what the visitor was looking for,” said Kevin Calloway, Managing Partner, IJHANA. “The EasyAsk natural language solution was easy to implement and dramatically expanded the search and navigation capabilities, helping the site convert customers faster.”

CHALLENGE

Turn a clumsy eCommerce platform with outdated technology and limited functionality into a manageable system with a customer friendly interface.

SOLUTION

Due to unique business processes and rules, the project required an open source solution that was highly modular, allowing for flexibility and growth.

METHOD

Developed an open source solution based on Magento Enterprise Shopping Cart.

RESULT

Ability to see inventory in real-time, reduced redundancy across the platform, allowed for data sharing and planning across departments and the ability to successfully service 75x more customers per month. Resulting in revenue growth of 400% in first 6 months.

LINK TO SITE

Harbor Freight Tools

Services Used

ADVISORY SERVICES

Decision Support

Business Unit Development

IT Restructuring

Human Capital

CLIENT SERVICES

Interactive

Branding / Design

Information Architecture

User Experience

Project Management

MARKETING

Online

View all of our case studies here.

NOTE: IJHANA is a Magento Silver Partner and a EasyAsk Development Partner.

Looking for Work? Interviewing & Freelancing Tips For Developers

admin — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:31:03 +0000

Since we recently attended and hosted the LA Drupal Job Fair, a post on our recommendations for finding new development work seemed fitting this week.

What skills are currently in demand?

Companies are now making a gradual recovery from the global recession. The IT industry was severely affected during the economic crisis and had to go through a period of a hiring freeze, and in some cases even cutting down on staff. But now the companies are recovering and people with IT skills are back in demand.

Computerworld polled 353 IT executives about their hiring plans for 2012 in its annual IT Forecast survey. The results indicate that U.S. companies will be investing in their IT workforces to bolster business in the year ahead; Nearly 29% of respondents plan to take on new IT staffers through Summer 2012 – a 45% increase in IT hiring expectations over last year’s results. The survey also reveals that companies will be thinking about innovation, not just “keeping the lights on,” as they plan next year’s IT hiring.

IT Professionals in Demand

Programming and Application Development

Project Management

Help Desk/Technical Support

Networking

Business Intelligence

Data Center

Virtualization and the Cloud

Web 2.0 centered around social media

Security

Telecommunications

Virtually all IT sectors have a huge demand for skilled professionals that have experience with these evolving technologies

Operating systems, cloud computing, virtual environments and mobile application developments

Web development: ASP.NET, C#, PHP along with SQL, Ruby on Rails, and Python

Application development: Java/J2EE, Visual C++, Visual Basic & VB.Net

Mobile development: Java/J2ME and Objective-C

What IT areas are worth looking into?

Current top technical skills in demand include: systems and networking engineers, developers, QA professionals, data warehousing professionals, and security professionals.

Here’s a list of 10 best companies to work for: http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/05/12/10-best-fortune-500-companies-to-work-for/

How do you determine which job offer to accept?

Accepting a job offer, often comes down to a personal preference in what matters most to the individual, but usually a combination of factors like corporate culture, salary, office environment – along with benefits, location, and the commute will determine when to accept or decline a job offer.

Some helpful links:
http://careerplanning.about.com/cs/joboffers/a/evaluate_offer.htm
http://www.kiplinger.com/columns/starting/archive/2007/st0418.htm

What kind of salary requirements and job perks are common for: junior, mid-, senior roles?

http://jobsearch.about.com/cs/salarywages/a/salaryrequire.htm

Here’s a Snapshot

Project manager: $76,250 – $113,000

Systems architect: $65,500 – $93,500

App developer: $85,000 – $117,500

Mobile app developer: $78,800 – $112,250

Database manager: $92,500 – $128,000

Web developer: $80,250 – $110,750

Web designer: $50,750 – $83,000

Job hunting tips for getting a job

The preferred resume structure for a developer job consists of a combination of a chronological and functional resume to showcase your skills and accomplishments, along with an abbreviated work employment history.

This type of resume should emphasize the skills using the job requirements as a guide to match closely what the company is looking for. It should focus on strong skills and acquired certifications, most notable achievements, and should not be over-cluttered with personal information which have no relevance.

Tips

If you have a long career, resume should focus on the most important positions, don’t make the resume longer than necessary to appear more qualified

Resume should contain only information that adds value to it

Incorporate terms that accurately describe your skills and experiences: many times, resumes are evaluated by computer programs and specialized terms become keywords

There is no excuse for submitting a resume with typos or misspellings

Cover letter is not necessary, but usually it is helpful for professionals that seek a career change. In this case, cover letter should be concise, it should target the job offer and it should complement the resume without being repetitive

A few related and helpful links

Best job sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/job-websites
Best job boards: http://www.talenthq.com/2011/03/top-job-boards-for-2011/

A few freelance jobs tips

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/top-5-tips-when-bidding-for-freelance-work/

http://asiaparttime.com/blog/tips/how-to-bid-freelance-jobs-successfully/

If you’re looking for work now, please contact us at jobs@ijhana.com with your resume, portfolio and any related links.

Good luck!