So, are you thinking of starting a web design agency? It’s a glorious idea. Covid-19 has shown businesses how successful or disruptive a good online presence can be for businesses. During this pandemic, we have all seen that the demand for web design has increased and will continue to increase.

Today, it’s much more common to start your own business. After learning all the necessary skills about web design such as coding, designing, photoshop, SEO, IT, and more, everything is easier now and only a few steps are left for starting a web design agency.

When you know the steps and have a plan, you can launch your agency successfully. It takes time to rise and succeed in a web design business, so you should manage your expectations and set yourself up for achievement. 

Here are some necessary steps you need to check out to get started to turn your skills successfully into a career, complete the startup process and launch your agency.

Read the case study: How Colgate-Palmolive accelerated Ad Campaign Optimization

With Adverity, the company is now able to optimize ad campaigns much faster and with more confidence, significantly improving campaign efficiency and budget allocation.

Read more insights here

Before starting your web design agency

You should know web designing includes tasks that require programming technical skills and knowledge in site usability. These skills, including being familiar with designing tools and knowing coding languages such as HTML and CSS, are essential for any web designer.

However, by choosing the best platforms such as WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Joomla, and Drupal, you don’t even have to learn every detail about HTML and CSS. These platforms automatically do everything and make your work easier. Learning these platforms that give you speed is as simple as using them. However, expertise in your field brings you more success in the long turn.

The other thing is finding out what you like most to determine in which fields you want to serve. When you have a focus, your agency can stand out in certain industries easier and faster. It creates great work offering services that you are good at and you love to.

Once you are ready to offer your service to your customers, you can start your web design agency.

bugherd-website-feedback-tools-in-page

Define your agency and your business plan in detail

Take the time to define your agency. Your definition is what your agency represents, as well as how your business is perceived by your customers.

The most effective way to define your agency is to ask your own questions and answer them in detail. These questions should be strategic and intentional. Your defining questions should be like

  • What is our agency’s approach?
  • What is our story?
  • What problems do we solve?
  • Why do you trust our team?

After questioning, you should give striking answers. Your answers also should be as creative, defining, and impressive as your questions. These questions and answers will give reliance to your clients about your agency.

Another indispensable thing is your business plan. You can think of your business plan as a road map of your business. When determining a business plan, there are many things to consider. The important one is to point out the key elements of your business in a way that’s clear to you and your clients.

Your business plan should set long-term goals about new products and services, market and competitive analysis, financial partnerships, business contracts, defining your ideal clients, setting financial goals and targets, and estimating your expected expenses and income. A strong business plan will give you confidence and attract your potential clients to work with you.

When choosing a legal entity, you should consider how taxation rules will affect your finances and your liability and plans for partnering and growth. Make sure you are in full legal compliance when setting up your agency.

If you are new to these topics, you can work with an experienced financial advisor to draw a useful guideline for you. There are various types of companies, which affects the tax you will pay and all the processes you will need to manage while serving your customers.

The most common legal entities are sole proprietorship, partnerships, limited liability company (LLC), S corporation, and C corporation. You should check out which one is best for your agency. You can choose to start a sole proprietorship and change it when you need it in the progress of time.

Before starting your business, open a bank account and get a credit card if necessary. You can consider consulting a financial professional to create your spreadsheet and accounting structure. In addition, it will be helpful to establish a long-term relationship with a tax professional who can handle taxes as well as answer financial questions. Also, you can work with new generation companies providing all these services as a pack.

Decide your services and products

Offering only building a website may not be enough for your agency. Other services are a plus for it to continue running smoothly and finding more customers. You should consider ways to bring extra value to your clients with numerous services and products.

straight-north-seo-campaign

For being useful in many fields, your web design agency can also include other in-demand services such as logo and brand design, photography and videography, networking, advertising, growing an online community, development, search engine optimization, managed hosting, and more.

However, you and your team must be experts and professionals in these services. Your agency should only offer services you know you can deliver professionally. Considering the competition in the field, this will bring you forward while starting a web design agency.

Build your team and invest in hardware and software

A successful web design agency should be well-rounded with people who specialize in many skills. In that way, you need to build a team of experts to cover every aspect of your web design business. They don’t have to all in-house team members. You can collaborate

Read the rest
Read More

Being a web designer involves harmoniously combining visuals and content. But non-technical skills, like collaboration and communication, are also important.

20 web designer skills to have

Here’s a medley of 20 skills to help you become a design expert, no matter where you’re at in your career.

1. Know the principles of design

You don’t need to know music theory to write a song, and if you’ve never taken an art class, you can still draw. Some of us might have an innate artistic ability, but knowing the basic fundamentals can make the difference between recreating what you see and being able to build a design that’s calculated and unique.

Essential visual design principles” does a deeper dive into the principles of visual design rooted in Gestalt psychology. These fundamentals are the foundation of web and graphic design and important to know. Whether you’re designing a portfolio or a print ad, these concepts can help guide your work. Let’s do a quick recap.

Emergence

Rather than focusing on individual parts, we tend to process visual stimuli as a whole. Emergence is seeing an arrangement of visuals and immediately understanding what they represent. When something breaks a pattern, we become aware of the pieces that make it up.

Reification

Reification is using only the essential parts of an object to make it identifiable. It lets you exercise restraint in a design, while still conveying meaning.

Invariance

Invariance is being able to use tasteful discordance in your designs, making something stand out from a group of similar objects. The use of invariance allows you to highlight parts of a design.

2. Typography

FontReach top font page.
Websites like Font Reach help you keep on top of typography trends and inform your font choices.

That the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of ‘colour’, gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type.

– From Beatrice Warde’s “The Crystal Goblet

Typography shapes our perception of ideas. A type’s weight and geometry communicates meaning, and as a designer, it’s important to know the best way to deliver messaging with the appropriate typographical choices.

All the font options can make it hard for new designers to know what to choose. Practical fonts like Georgia, Verdana, and Roboto work well for body copy, while more decorative typefaces should be used sparingly as ornamentation. Good designers know the difference between type styles and where to use them.

There are plenty of resources on the web to help broaden your typographic knowledge. FONTS IN USE shows different typefaces applied to a variety of media. Tools like Font combinations for web designers can give you ideas for possible pairings.

3. Composition

Bauhem homepage

The arrangement of text, visuals, and other elements serve both an artistic and utilitarian purpose. There’s the visual harmony of a design and the organization and hierarchy of ideas. Important content should grab our attention and look great.

A well-composed layout involves creating balance with contrast, negative space, and proportioned elements. Pay attention to design around you — websites, paintings, movie scenes, billboards. The more you’re aware of and can recognize good composition, the more it will show up in your own design.

4. Color Theory

color theory

Basic concepts, like combining primary colors to create new colors will help you craft pleasing color palettes.

As a designer, you should be familiar with the color wheel and how complementary, contrasting, and analogous colors work together.

The use of clashing colors is a common mistake that plagues beginner designers. A bit of visual dissonance can make for an interesting design, but conflicting hues can also render a layout ugly and unreadable. Text, calls to action, and headers should use colors that work well together and maintain a strong sense of legibility. Understanding and knowing when to use lights and darks, contrast, and saturation are also important color skills in website design.

An understanding of color theory will take the guesswork out of combining colors — trial and error can be a real time suck. “Web design 101: color theory” is a great place to start.

5. Software for design

Adobe Illustrator, XD, Photoshop, Figma, and Webflow are a few design software programs designers should be familiar with. You should have a grasp of photo-editing basics and the ability to tweak vector-based graphics, like a logo that may come your way.

For those on a budget, free photo-editing software like Gimp or the vector-based Inkscape will give you the power to do what you need to do without spending a ton of money. And, as you develop your web design skills, animation software like Motion or After Effects are handy tools to add motion and pizzazz to your work.

And then there’s the platform you’ll use to create your site. Webflow has an intuitive interface that generates flawless code for you — we think it’s the perfect choice.

6. Content Management Systems (CMS)

webflow cms

Knowing how to use a CMS, like this blog Collection from the Webflow template Fashionlatte, makes taking care of large blocks of content far less burdensome.

For content that needs regular updates like blog posts, recipes, or events, a CMS will streamline the process. Using a CMS to link related data and customize templates will make wrangling content much easier. Webflow has a built-in CMS feature with templates and gives you the power to create the content you need.

7. Responsive design

Responsive design is a key component of the web development process. The guidelines for responsive design ensure that HTML, CSS (cascading style sheets), and JavaScript elements like menus, text, and buttons are clear and usable everywhere.

Responsive design ensures consistent delivery of your content. It works by having a master layout that adjusts to fit the screen it’s loaded on. Making sure your designs translate to different devices helps them reach more people without sacrificing the user experience. And with tools like Webflow,

Read the rest
Read More

On this page, we’ll discuss why design is important and provide you with seven must-have design elements for your website. If you need help creating your dream website, call us today.

As you look into redesigning your website, you may wonder the importance to website design. How does it impact your audience and your business? Let’s look at five reasons web design is important.

1. It sets the first impression

When your audience visits your website, it gives them their first impression of your business. They will judge your business within seconds. In these first few seconds, you want to make a positive impact on your audience.

If your website looks unappealing or outdated, your audience will immediately have a negative impression of your business. They won’t find your website appealing, which deters them from your page. You’ll miss out on leads because they’ll leave your page for a competitor’s page.

Web design is important because it impacts how your audience perceives your brand. The impression you make on them can either get them to remain on your page and learn about your business or leave your page and turn to a competitor. A good web design helps you keep your leads on your page.

Consuming content

2. It aids your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy

Many web design elements and practices influence how you publish content on your website, which in turn affects how search engine spiders crawl and index your website.

This is one thing you cannot afford to mess up. If your on-page SEO fundamentals are not up to snuff, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle for visibility from the start.

Aside from how content is published on your website, certain web design elements can directly affect SEO in and of themselves. Web design can be difficult to understand if you’re not familiar with how it works, but to put it simply, your code needs to be SEO-friendly.

The best way to ensure proper web design practices (and subsequent search engine visibility) is to partner up with a web design agency that knows what they’re doing.

3. It sets the impression for customer service

People can judge how you will treat them by looking at your website. Your design gives them insight as to how you view your audience. If you don’t put any effort into your website’s design, your audience knows that you won’t put effort into helping them.

Your website is like a customer service representative. If your website is bright, modern, and inviting, your audience will feel more welcome on your page. You’ll give the impression that you are open and welcoming to new people who visit your website.

On the other hand, an outdated and unappealing site makes your business appear cold and aloof. People don’t want to check out a business that doesn’t value them enough to make a good first impression.

Think of your web design as the digital face of your business. If someone walked into your physical location, wouldn’t you want a friendly face to greet them and make them feel welcome? An updated and modern web design is the equivalent to a friendly face greeting your new visitors.

4. It builds trust with your audience

People don’t trust poorly designed websites. If they see your poor design or the information looks outdated, they won’t trust your site. They may view your site as seedy or shady because you don’t have an updated web design.

Think about a person looking to place a bulk order with a manufacturing company. They’re spending a tremendous amount of money, which means if your manufacturing website design doesn’t convey trust, they’ll find another business to fulfill their order.

On the other hand, a professional site signals trust with your audience. They will trust your business and feel comfortable checking it out further.

It’s important to build trust with your audience so they remain on your site. When visitors remain on your site longer, you create more opportunities for your business to capture those leads.

5. Your competitors are doing it

If you need a reason for why web design is important, here’s a big one: Your competitors are already utilizing web design. If you want to remain in competition with them, you must use web design for your site.

You want your website to stand out from the competition. If you have an old, outdated, and low-quality website, your competitor’s will outrank you. Their well-designed website will perform better than your website.

This means you’ll lose leads to your competitors. They’ll attract more leads to their page because their page is more appealing.

Your website’s design is an opportunity for you to set your business apart from the competition. When you’re competing with other businesses, you generally have the same services and similar pricing. You need that one thing that will make your business stand out from the rest.

Web Design Competition
A well-designed website is an opportunity for your business to showcase your unique features. You can show your audience why they should choose your business over the competition.

6. It creates consistency

When you’re trying to get new leads for your business, you want to build up your brand. You want your audience to get familiar with your brand so they choose you when they’re ready to convert. Online web designs are important because they help create consistency across your page.

You need to have the same fonts, styles, and layouts across every page on your website. If you have a different design on every page, this will make your site look unprofessional. It also makes it more challenging to build brand recognition because your audience won’t know which colors to associate with your brand.

If your website is not consistent, people will bounce from yours to one that looks more professional. By building consistency, you keep leads on your page longer and get them familiar with your business. You’ll earn more leads and conversions down the line when you redesign your site for this key … Read the rest

Read More

Top 6 Basic Elements of Web Design - DreamHost

Most consumers perform in-depth online research on products and services before making purchase decisions. A study by the eCommerce Foundation shows 88 percent of buyers will search for product information before buying it online.

By CHRISTIAN KRUSE

Such a purchase behavior stresses the value of a content-rich, professionally designed website for a business. What’s more, consumers spend more time on beautifully designed sites than they do on plain and basic ones. Here are 10 ways a good web design impacts your business.

1. Serves as Your Business’ First Impression

First impressions: make your first site visit stand out | N-able

Potential customers get their first impression of your company by checking out your website. They form an opinion about your business in a matter of seconds. So you should focus on leaving a lasting positive effect on your audience within these few seconds by ensuring your website is appealing, user-friendly, highly responsive, and has a fast loading speed.

A site that appears unattractive or old-fashioned sets a negative first impression of your brand. It wards off potential customers and drives them to your competitor’s page. But a decent website design helps maintain your audience on your page, which improves leads conversion.

2. Boosts Trust and Brand Consistency

Brand Equity Definition and Importance | Marketing91

As mentioned above, your website design determines how most people judge the integrity of your business. Trendy and professional website designs tend to promote trust. Outdated and unprofessional web designs, on the other hand, make users doubt your credibility. Brand consistency is another notable way that a decent web design encourages trust. Consumers recognize prominent and successful brands by just looking at things like their colours, logos, or styles. So it’s important to ensure things that your customers identify your business with are reflected in your website design.

Ensure the outline, styles, and fonts are the same throughout every page on your site. If every page has a different design, your site will appear unattractive and unprofessional. Building brand recognition will also become a hassle because your target audience won’t easily identify things that represent your brand.

3.  Enhances Usability

A good design allows visitors to effortlessly access what they’re searching for from your website. According to a 2015 web usability report, 86 percent of website visitors are looking for information about your products or services, 65 percent search for contact details, and 52 percent look for your business’ About page. Good web design makes these things extremely easy to find. Otherwise, your visitors will have a bad user experience and will spend less time on your site.

Your website may work well, but a bad design may make visitors feel that it’s difficult to use or locate what they want. Users are likely to enjoy using an aesthetically-pleasing site more than a dull site even if the two websites are identical when it comes to functioning. That means a good website design enhances usability along with the perception of usability.

Due to the complex nature of web design, consider partnering with a professional design agency. In the same breath, hire a reputable agency for translation services, to help you offer insightful and consistent product messaging that resonates with your global customers, in any language.

4. Eases Navigation

A high-quality design makes your site easy to navigate. Many professional designers usually apply Hick’s Law when it comes to website design. This law basically states that the duration taken to make a decision is proportional to the number of choices available. If you’re provided with many choices, you’ll take longer to make a decision, and vice versa.

When professional designers build website navigation with Hick’s Law in mind, they want to simplify and reduce the number of options so that visitors can easily decide what action to take or where to go. Make your site easy to navigate by reducing the number of options to five or less. Take a look at your product menu and merge similar options into a single option.  That way, visitors will find your website easy to navigate and easy to use.

5.  Fosters Your SEO Strategy

Various web design components and techniques have a huge impact on your site’s content publishing capability, which in turn influences how top search engines crawl and rank your page. That aside, some web design components can hurt your SEO strategy. Sydney SEO Agency says that one of the most common mistakes that businesses make is prioritizing design over functionality. In 2021, with more than 58% of users choosing mobile as their primary search device, having a fast, responsive website is imperative to SEO.

To enhance the visibility of your page, make use of SEO-friendly web-design elements and techniques. If you strongly feel that this is not part of your expertise, you can always hire a competent SEO company that will optimize your website for search engines and drive organic traffic to your site, and enhance your online presence.

6. Improves Website Loading Speed

A well-designed site tends to load quickly on all devices, including tablets, smartphones, and desktops. A page loads in a matter of seconds due to the fluid grids and high-quality, responsive visual media. A visitor is more likely to stay longer on websites that load faster than on those that take ages to load. In fact, one study found that 53 percent of mobile users will leave a website if pages are unresponsive or take a significant amount of time to load (more than three seconds). The same study revealed that sites that load quickly keep visitors engaged for a long time and realize an uptick in conversion rates.

7. Reduces Bounce Rates

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who visit a specific website and abandon it after checking out only one page. As stated above, a well-designed site with a fast loading speed means users will interact with your website longer and that will lower your bounce rate. By spending more time on your site, visitors will be more likely to open other pages on your website, learn more about you and … Read the rest

Read More

UI and UX are two distinct facets of web design, yet they work hand-in-hand. While UI focuses on your design interface and how a user interacts with it, UX emphasizes a user’s experience as they use your product or service.

UI design tools give designers what they need to design accurate hi-fi wireframes, mockups, and prototypes and render minimally viable products. They represent the nuts and bolts of a design, communicating its functionality.

UX design tools focus on the user and how they’ll experience the content. These tools can help structure the information architecture, as well as how someone will flow through the experience. Since this is more conceptual, UX tools are about helping a designer paint the broader picture of how content and organization will affect experience.

We’re going to take a look at some UI and UX tools that you may find handy for your design process. Some of these tools have features that work in both UX or UI, but for the sake of your own user experience, we’ve divided the list into two categories

17 useful tools for UI/UX designers

In this list, the first 11 tools mentioned are great for UI design, while 12-17 are great for UX. Let’s dive into each one and learn how you can craft beautiful projects.

1. Sketch

sketch interface

If you have any UI design experience, you’ve heard of Sketch. And there are quite a few reasons why it’s one of the design tools that’s so revered.

Being able to make universal changes — whether it’s through their library of symbols, layer styles, or text styles, or its smooth resizing and alignment features — saves designers time to deliver consistent prototypes. It takes out what’s tedious and lets designers jump in and create. And with a multitude of third-party plugins that integrate without problems, there’s no shortage of tools out there that can be used with Sketch.

Popular readFrom Sketch to Webflow: how to turn mockups into live websites

2. InVision Studio

invision studio

With a full suite of applications, InVision gives designers all of the UI design tools they need to create fully realized and functional prototypes with dynamic elements and animations.

Along with these easy-to-use UI design tools, they also make communication easy — with collaboration features that let developers share their work as they design it, receive feedback, and make documented changes at each step. Another useful aspect of InVision is the digital whiteboard that allows team members to get their ideas out there, interact, and get that all important sign-off before moving forward.

3. Axure

Axure homepage

Axure functions in prototyping and keeping track of the workflow. It features a smooth interface to document as you go. High fidelity drives this app, resulting in prototypes full of details.

Axure offers many of the other features of popular prototyping and UI design tools. It allows for testing of functionality and puts everything together for an easy developer handoff. This, combined with an emphasis on communication, ensures that everyone on a project is kept up-to-date with progress and changes as they happen in real time, making Axure a solid choice for UI design.

4. Craft

invision craft

Craft, a plugin from InVision, works right alongside what you might be doing in Photoshop or Sketch, with a sync function that updates what you’re working on. Along with this time-saving feature, Craft offers everything you need for prototyping and collaboration. Changes in styling, edits, and other tweaks are updated across the board so that everyone is referring to and working from the same version of a project.

Craft sets itself apart from other UI design tools with its placeholder content. You get access to both Getty and iStock photos, letting you fill your layout with better visuals. And if there’s data in your layout, you can use your own or bring it in from other sources. Not many UI design tools let you fill your mockups with more meaningful content. This special feature of Craft gives your mockups a more accurate representation of what a final design might look like.

Related reads: The best Photoshop alternatives (free + paid)

5. Proto.io

proto io

In their own words, Proto.io says using their UI design software results in “Prototypes that feel real.” And Proto.io delivers on this, giving you what you need to create, organize, integrate, and test accurate mockups. It also smooths out the collaboration process, fostering communication between team members through comments and video feedback, as well as integrating with some of the more well-known testing products, like Lookback, Userlytics, and Validately.

6. Adobe XD

adobe xd

It’s hard to knock Adobe off of their status as royalty in design software — their kingdom of design products reigns in the creative cloud. Adobe XD offers vector-based user interface tools for creating prototypes and mockups with an interface that’s familiar to anyone who has used other Adobe products. This, along with real-time collaboration, makes it a go-to for many UI designers.

Adobe XD has many sophisticated tools for UI designers, but it is also stocked with what designers need to whip up interactions and other dynamic elements that can be integrated into prototypes or mockups. It’s one of the rare design platforms that can combine different disciplines together, without anything lacking.

Popular readFrom Adobe XD to Webflow: how to turn your prototypes into live websites

7. Marvel

marvel design platform

Whether you’ve been a UI designer for a while or if you’re just stepping into the role, Marvel’s design platform makes things easy. With the ability to create both low fidelity and hi-fi wireframes, interactive prototypes, and do user testing, it gives a UI designer everything they need — all wrapped into an intuitive interface. Marvel also has a feature called Handoff that gives developers all the HTML code and CSS styles they need to start building.

8. Figma

figma design tool

Figma lets designers build dynamic prototypes and mockups, test them for usability, and sync up all of the progress. Figma allows for a collaborative environment where multiple people can

Read the rest
Read More

As a software engineer, I spend a lot of time reading and writing design documents. After having gone through hundreds of these docs, I’ve seen firsthand a strong correlation between good design docs and the ultimate success of the project.

This article is my attempt at describing what makes a design document great.

The article is split into 4 sections:

  • Why write a design document
  • What to include in a design document
  • How to write it
  • The process around it

Why write a design document?

A design doc — also known as a technical spec — is a description of how you plan to solve a problem.

There are lots of writings already on why it’s important to write a design doc before diving into coding. So all I’ll say here is:

A design doc is the most useful tool for making sure the right work gets done.

The main goal of a design doc is to make you more effective by forcing you to think through the design and gather feedback from others. People often think the point of a design doc is to teach others about some system or serve as documentation later on. While those can be beneficial side effects, they are not the goal in and of themselves.

As a general rule of thumb, if you are working on a project that might take 1 engineer-month or more, you should write a design doc. But don’t stop there — a lot of smaller projects could benefit from a mini design doc too.

Great! If you are still reading, you believe in the importance of design docs. However, different engineering teams, and even engineers within the same team, often write design docs very differently. So let’s talk about the content, style, and process of a good design doc.

Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash

What to include in a design doc?

A design doc describes the solution to a problem. Since the nature of each problem is different, naturally you’d want to structure your design doc differently.

To start, the following is a list of sections that you should at least consider including in your next design doc:

Title and People

The title of your design doc, the author(s) (should be the same as the list of people planning to work on this project), the reviewer(s) of the doc (we’ll talk more about that in the Process section below), and the date this document was last updated.

Overview

A high-level summary that every engineer at the company should understand and use to decide if it’s useful for them to read the rest of the doc. It should be 3 paragraphs max.

Context

A description of the problem at hand, why this project is necessary, what people need to know to assess this project, and how it fits into the technical strategy, product strategy, or the team’s quarterly goals.

Goals and Non-Goals

The Goals section should:

  • describe the user-driven impact of your project — where your user might be another engineering team or even another technical system
  • specify how to measure success using metrics — bonus points if you can link to a dashboard that tracks those metrics

Non-Goals are equally important to describe which problems you won’t be fixing so everyone is on the same page.

Milestones

A list of measurable checkpoints, so your PM and your manager’s manager can skim it and know roughly when different parts of the project will be done. I encourage you to break the project down into major user-facing milestones if the project is more than 1 month long.

Use calendar dates so you take into account unrelated delays, vacations, meetings, and so on. It should look something like this:

Start Date: June 7, 2018
Milestone 1 — New system MVP running in dark-mode: June 28, 2018
Milestone 2 - Retire old system: July 4th, 2018
End Date: Add feature X, Y, Z to new system: July 14th, 2018

Add an [Update] subsection here if the ETA of some of these milestone changes, so the stakeholders can easily see the most up-to-date estimates.

Existing Solution

In addition to describing the current implementation, you should also walk through a high-level example flow to illustrate how users interact with this system and/or how data flow through it.

user story is a great way to frame this. Keep in mind that your system might have different types of users with different use cases.

Proposed Solution

Some people call this the Technical Architecture section. Again, try to walk through a user story to concretize this. Feel free to include many sub-sections and diagrams.

Provide a big picture first, then fill in lots of details. Aim for a world where you can write this, then take a vacation on some deserted island, and another engineer on the team can just read it and implement the solution as you described.

Alternative Solutions

What else did you consider when coming up with the solution above? What are the pros and cons of the alternatives? Have you considered buying a 3rd-party solution — or using an open source one — that solves this problem as opposed to building your own?

Testability, Monitoring, and Alerting

I like including this section because people often treat this as an afterthought or skip it altogether, and it almost always comes back to bite them later when things break and they have no idea how or why.

Cross-Team Impact

How will this increase the on-call and dev-ops burden?
How much money will it cost?
Does it cause any latency regression to the system?
Does it expose any security vulnerabilities?
What are some negative consequences and side effects?
How might the support team communicate this to the customers?

Open Questions

Any open issues that you aren’t sure about, contentious decisions that you’d like readers to weigh in on, suggested future work, and so on. A tongue-in-cheek name for this section is the “known unknowns”.

Detailed Scoping and Timeline

This section is mostly … Read the rest

Read More

If you have staffing agencies, you know a lot of work needs to be done. Hence, having payroll funding for staffing agencies is a great thing to do. Besides, you are going to take a lot of workload off of your shoulders before it is all said and done. Besides, staffing agencies are stressful to manage. You will have people coming in and out of the office and you need to give them everything that they need. You have a few applicants and delivery people who would want to see that you get what is rightfully yours.

Lets You Focus on Other Stuff

When you get payroll out of the way, you can now focus on other important stuff which would make you feel great. Yes, it is a lot easier said than done to run a business and your mind will be focused on so many things at the same time. This is why you must hire managers to handle the different departments. The payroll department is just one aspect that needs to be handled in the right manner. You know you must focus on all the aspects equally for your staffing agency to have a bright future. When everything is handled properly, you know you will be pretty confident in having a bright future ahead of you.

Someone Else Addresses Complaints

There will be a third party who will handle all the complaints about the payroll. When you have a lot of employees, there will be times when the computation for the salaries will be wrong. Yes, there will be people who will go on leaves and some will want to take a maternity leave for their child. It happens and it is pretty rare for everyone to have a perfect attendance. When that happens, you know you would want to give someone some high praise for a job well done. We can’t all be winners as that rarely happens in the real world. We must face the consequences with open arms so that you will avoid it from happening in the future.

Workers get burnt out so they need to take a break every now and then. Some vacations would only last a few days while some would last a month. They would not even mind if some of their days were absent which means it is not paid leave but rather unpaid absences. Of course, they would count the number of days they were not able to come to work. You can expect them to have their own computation as they would want to get paid the right amount. After all, you would want to focus on making everyone as happy as possible so they would not even think about resigning from their work. It is one thing to be paid in a huge amount and it is another step in the right direction.

Less Headache

When you make a mistake on the payroll, you will need to repeat from the start and that is never good news. You will see all that effort you exerted go to waste. You are going to have an anxiety attack and imagine never encountering this thing from the start when you outsource it. Besides, a staffing agency just has too many employees to pay. You would send employees to different companies from lots of industries. You would never want to experience a headache as that would cut into your production. You will be forced to take medicine to get rid of the headache. However, it will only be a matter of time before you get immune to that so better not rely on it too much.

Create More Opportunities

You would give your staffing agency a huge opportunity to expand a bit more. When that happens, you know you would be able to increase the number of branches you currently have. You would have locations in cities that are located in the business district. It is a must to be recognized in the staffing industry as you know you should be on top of the world so a lot of people would have nice things to say about you. A lot of companies would want to do business with you when they see that you have garnered a lot of positive reviews over the years. It takes a lot of hard work and determination to do that and you must also welcome criticism. It is a great opportunity to improve in the future.

Avoid Tardiness

When you let someone else handle your payroll, they will use the latest in technology in order to avoid getting late. You know you promised the employees a certain time and date for the money to arrive so you must abide by your promises. Since the employees have a lot of bills to pay, those things may also get late if their salaries are late. They may already allot their salary to various expenses that would be none of your business. The important thing to do would be to give them their money on time or else you will be encountering a lot of complaints. If there are times when it happens, you should just inform everyone ahead of time.

The last thing to do would be to find the most capable payroll funding for staffing agencies. In this scenario, it would be difficult to make any kind of mistake. Yes, these people must be used to doing the necessary things and they should always be on the dot. Just like they say, everyone’s attitude would change when we are all talking about money. It is what makes the world go round. The employees worked hard to earn their due so they don’t deserve any form of late payment. In fact, there will be evaluations that will be submitted to you so you will know which among the employees would deserve a raise. If they are passionate about what they do in the office, there is no reason not to give them a raise.

Read More

Nowadays, technology is advanced and upgraded. For that packaging system has been changed a lot. Due to advanced packaging technologies, modern methods can decrease the amount of waste. The modern techniques focus on the maximum resources and concentrate on waste management. In this way, modern packaging can also save a lot of money. Awareness of the customer is also playing a valuable role in the emergence of the modern packaging system. The modern method of packaging is very much sustainable. These packagings use eco-friendly materials.

Packaging and its relevance:

The packaging is very much essential to protect products that are distributed in the market for sell. There are so many varieties of packaging such as boxes, cans, bottles, bags, envelopes and wrappers as well. Above all, the packaging is one of the main factors for selling. Many companies choose different types of packaging to sell their products through better packaging and designing. We all know that attractive packaging not only grabs the attention of the customers but also ensure the protection of the item and its longevity as well.

So, the modern methods of packaging are very much valuable and it also allows to prevent wastage. The modern packaging system can prevent foods from spoiling and getting damaged before reaching its final destination. So, increased method of packaging can save a lot of money and time as well. It also protects the products and foods.

Some modern and advanced packaging technologies:

Here are some modern packaging systems that can save a lot of money and also eco-friendly. These advanced systems are such as follows:

Refill system:

It is one of the modern forms of packaging. It reduces waste and follows waste management as well. In this system, the manufacturer reuses the packaging materials. So, it allows for less waste production. The wastage is being dumped into the land after production. This particular form of packaging is very much popular and well-known in Germany and other countries. In these countries, beer, milk and detergent are being refilled into the old packaging system. This type of packaging is environment-friendly and cost-effective as well. It offers so many environmental benefits. Nowadays, many companies produce refilled water bottles instead of small water bottles. Many people argue that refilled items are expensive. But if you are looking at the advantages then, you can notice that refillable items are considered as more favoured and beneficial as well.

Flat packaging:

It is another beneficial packaging systems to cut down the wastage. Apart from this, it also reduces the larger and bigger packaging materials. It is also a new concept of packaging. This packaging system is introduced commercially by IKEA. This packaging uses the form or method of packaging that are fabricated in the flat portions. This packaging system can be designed quickly and assembled easily as well. The main advantage of this packaging system is its flatness. This type of packaging is space-efficient and also needs less material. So, it requires less money to produce this particular type of packaging. The storage and shipping charges are comparatively low in this packaging system. For furniture packaging, this package system works better. It is also useful for packaging wares, gadgets, toys and all.

Bulk packaging:

This particular packaging system is also one of the best packaging systems to reduce waste. In this packaging system, the manufacturers do not use small, fancy and also unnecessary items and materials. Apart from this, the bulk package system offers and allows materials to be used on other occasions. Therefore, it is one fo the reasonable methods of packaging.

In the bulk packaging, there are two different packaging methods such as flexible and rigid packaging. Flexible packaging can offer so many flexibilities and benefits than rigid packaging.

Active packaging:

This type of packaging can enhance the lifetime of the product. It also protects the products from damage. The active packaging helps to keep the food intact and extending the shelf-life of the product. The active packaging systems are such as follows:

  • Oxygen scavenger
  • Carbon dioxide scavenger
  • Ethylene scavenger
  • Preservative releasers
  • Moisture absorbers
  • Odour absorbers

Intelligent packaging:

Intelligent packaging is for protecting the food items. It also controls the quality of packed foods. This type of packaging follows these things:

  • Time and temperature indicator
  • Indicator of freshness
  • Pathogen indicators

These all are different advanced packaging technologies. Apart from this, modern packaging offers a simplified design. The biggest shift is to transform into simplified and minimal design. In the simplified designs, the packaging needs bold colours and clean labelling as well. The using of bold colours are very much popular and common in children’s items. Using the same colour pallets also help to identify different products of the same brand. It also helps to make the brand attractive and noticeable.

Cleaners labelling is one of the necessary and convenient matters of advanced packaging. It makes consumers more aware of what they are buying. Clean labelling is used for brand transparency. The user will appreciate this a lot. The clean labelling elaborates on what the product offers.

The modern packaging follows less packaging as the excess packaging can be quite frustrating and it creates a lot of waste. For example, the box of a toothpaste tube has no purpose. It comes to give a better look at the product.

Many companies now switch over recycled paper packaging. It has much less carbon footprint. Many companies and brands use the refill packages instead of bottles and containers. These types of refill packages or pouches contain less plastic than bottles. These pouches also take less space. The packaging is a part of the product and its marketing. For safe storage, proper packaging is important and needed. The reusable packaging system enhances and ensures the safety of the product. Pharmaceutical and food products use smart and advanced packaging method. The smart and advanced packaging system follows the low cost. It is also a smart way to cut down the material cost and manage wastages. These types of advanced packagings … Read the rest

Read More

The Many Ways Virtual Receptionists Can Improve Your Businesses Efficiency

Running a business on your own for the first time can be overwhelming. You may mistakenly think that once you begin seeing success, things will become a little less hectic.

However, unfortunately, as many business owners have found success with their business over the years, their business is merely the beginning of their headache.

At a certain point, customer service will become the only thing you do if you are reliant on only yourself when you run your business. You endeavor to follow through on your commitment to providing the highest level of customer care to each client.

Most consider constructing a call center or subcontracting with an established call center company to yield all customer service issues. As we all know from personal experience, these are rarely world-class customer service centers.

Benefits Of Hiring A Virtual Receptionist For Your Business

There is another way that businesses without the resources to construct and maintain a world-class customer service center can still compete and provide the same level of customer service large multinational corporations provide.

Virtual reception centers offer your company invaluable guidance and will serve as a loyal ally to your business and your customers.

Unlimited Scalability For Business Growth

As the business you have sweat and blood to build reaches a critical mass, you are no longer capable of keeping an eye on every single moving part and, by necessity, are forced to delegate more and more business administrative functions.

Suppose you rely on hiring in a traditional manner it is simply a stopgap that is only delaying the inevitable as you will continually be pressed to hire and train more staff. Virtual reception centers offer unlimited scalability and provide exactly the amount of support you need.

The ability to quickly fluctuate the amount of customer care representatives you have on-call allows you to eliminate high labor costs while still providing consistently high-quality customer service.

Improve Customer Perception Of Business Reliability

This is something that you are likely intimately familiar with yourself from personal experience. Still, when a computer answers the phone, it’s far less endearing than if a human was answering.

Customer satisfaction scores have been shown to increase by as much as 10% simply by switching from automated answering services to a virtual reception center.

This makes virtual reception center services one of the best investments on your ROI when trying to boost customer satisfaction scores.

Creating Noticeable Enhancements To Both Customer Retention And Growth

When you are looking at the performance of a company, there are two factors you need to consider as being the most significant as an indicator of future performance.

These factors are the rate at which customers are being retained when they try to discontinue their services, the customer retention rate, and the rate at which the company is acquiring new customers and the amount of them that stick with the services 90 days or greater.

These two factors alone will tell you how quickly the company is either growing or shrinking.

Research indicates that virtual reception centers can significantly boost customer growth while also decreasing the rate of customer retention. Effectively, virtual reception centers can provide the fuel your company needs to reach the next level of growth.

Customers are more easily retained by a live person who can answer questions that computers cannot interpret intuitively, when customers have their questions answered, no matter how mundane or trivial they are, satisfaction increases.

It’s a simple fact that humans prefer to interact with other humans and not machines.

Satisfied customers are both less likely to leave a company even if they disagree with pricing changes or subpar service after getting a particular product. Still, they will also be far more likely to recommend the service the company provides to other people.

Word-of-mouth advertising is free for companies, but it is far more powerful and effective at generating new business leads than any media advertising could ever hope to achieve.

Why you should hire a virtual receptionist

If you hire a virtual receptionist, there are innumerable concrete ways for your business to be improved and enhanced.
From the simple fact that a live person gives a human face to your business at all hours of the day and night to the decrease in customer frustration from poorly calibrated automated answering services.
Depending on the company, you choose virtual reception centers that offer even more than simple customer service for companies. More and more, we are beginning to see these reception centers transform into all on virtual assistants.

USAnswer offers Virtual assistant centers are capable of doing anything that a personal office assistant would be handling for you. This includes things such as scheduling your appointments and check your emails for you regularly. You can decide exactly how much you would like to delegate away from yourself and onto your virtual reception center or your virtual assistant.

Final Thoughts On Virtual Reception Centers’ Benefits For Business Owners

When you delegate all of your customer service tasks to a dedicated third-party company, this frees up valuable time and gives you the drive you need to fuel your business’s growth the same way you did when things were first beginning.

Having all of this extra free time available will finally allow you to have the freedom you had when first launching the company and deleting it from the front while managing all of the administrative tasks yourself. Bringing back the golden days of glory that make you reminisce about yesteryear.
Working with a virtual receptionist can be a truly transformative experience for your business and yourself.

This experience gives you insight into how consumers’ perception of your business is more than just an abstract concept but an organic composition created as the amalgamation of its employees.

You can make very few choices that benefit the overall performance of your business and its efficiency as much as working with a virtual reception center, especially not for … Read the rest

Read More

Document shredding is an essential task for those educated on the security risks of the modern world. It is easy and takes very little time to do, but can save your business years of wasted time on court cases and a lot of money. Below are a couple of reasons why shredding documents is a good thing to do, as well as some tips on how to do it most efficiently.

  • The first and most apparent reason to shred documents is to protect from identity theft. Each year, identity theft cases rise in number. Despite many security changes and increased protection, people are still very vulnerable to smart identify thieves who know how to game the system. One of the easiest ways for them to do this is by stealing a person’s mail and using their sensitive information to take out loans, credit cards, make purchases, and other things that can damage a person’s financial reputation.
  • The good news is that even a simple shredding process can virtually eliminate the identity thieves’ ability to make these things happen. If they cannot easily retrieve information, they will move on.
  • This brings up the issue of what exactly people need to shred to keep their identity safe. It is generally recommended to destroy any unwanted mail solicitations, bills, receipts, and bank and credit card statements. These are usually the items that identify thieves look out for, as they contain the exact information they need.

  • Picking the right shredder is a vital part of this process. For simple home applications, a primary shredder will do the trick. It is worth noting that the more complex the shred pattern is, the more effective it will be. The most basic shredders can sometimes put people at risk, as it is easy for identity thieves to piece the documents back together. Business owners have the great option of choosing a commercial document shredding service to do their shredding. These businesses are secure and will transport and dispose of all documents safely. This is an effective option for businesses with a high volume of sensitive documents.
  • Aside from being a positive thing for personal and business security from a possible identify thief, document shredding can also be good for the environment. Shredded paper is easy to get rid of and recycle. Many garbage services will pick this up and take care of everything.

Paper shredding services and the process.

Paper shredding services can be offered on the business premises or away from the business premises. The location of the shredding is all dependent on the resources and preferences of the business client. If the papers being shredded are a lot, they can be conveniently taken out of the business premises. If the business owner is not comfortable with the shredding taking place away, he or she can have someone from the company supervise the shredding and make sure all papers are shredded. If there is enough space on the business premises, then the massive shredding can take place on-site.

Shredding services at Record Storage Systems can include destroying business companies’ hard drives. A lot of information gets stored in these hard drives, and one way to make sure that a genius mind cannot retrieve them from a hard drive even in its ruined status is by doing hard-driving destruction which uses electricity. If the company wants to do the document shredding without external help, they can buy the shredders and get those that can accumulate a lot of shredded paper, thus making the process easier.

Advantages of outsourcing document shredding services

  • Outsourced document shredding guarantees safe document destruction

In-house document destruction procedures require the implementation of intricate document destruction policies. Destruction and disposal of documents and records also need to be logged so that you can avoid employee or company liability should something go wrong. With outsourced document shredding, the risks related to possible poor records destruction are absorbed by the service provider who usually has professional liability insurance cover to protect him from claims of document mishandling or privacy violation. With this in place, you as a business owner and your employee(s) are excluded from liability.

  • Outsourced document shredding helps you to save the planet

Most individuals as well as businesses have joined the quest to go green and save the planet. By outsourcing your document shredding requirements you will also contribute to this cause as most outsourced shredding services recycle the waste material.

  • Outsourced document shredding prevents employment fraud

Companies seldom hire a dedicated shredding employee. Instead the in-house operator is usually someone with a bit of spare time on their hands, and often they are different people, working unsupervised. This can pose serious risk as selling personal or sensitive business information is a great and relatively easy way to make money. Using outsourced document shredding services can significantly reduce the risk of employment fraud as records destruction always happens supervised and everything is documented; from the moment records are collected to when they are shredded and disposed of.

  • Outsourced document shredding is cost effective

You may think that ‘doing it yourself’ will save you and your business money, but the opposite is true. In-house shredding requires the purchasing of the shredders; these machines need to be serviced regularly and will also require repairs from time to time. Then you need to pay a staff member to operate the machine. And that can’t be just any employee. If it is highly sensitive documentation that needs to be destroyed, the person doing it needs to be fully trustworthy. When you outsource this, you don’t need to spend money on the actual machines, equipment upgrades, power usage and staff. The costs associated with outsourcing are generally only half of the cost of in-house shredding. Add to this the increased security, decreased liability and you will have a good idea of the advantages.

It is absolutely not right for a business to discard their paper documents by throwing them in a dumpster.These are just a few of … Read the rest

Read More