2019 - Ouriken Blogs

If you have been following us, you will know that we discussed the methods which can be used in the cloud migration process itself. But most of the tines it may happen that the process of execution according to us happened correctly and efficiently, whereas, unless we test it thoroughly we cannot just assume that its concrete and it needs constant attention and maintenance to run smoothly. That is why just as we do software testing, we have to do the cloud migration testing. And in this blog, we’re going to address the testing considerations for cloud migration.

A comprehensive testing plan is crucial for the migration’s success, once you have decided to move your business to the cloud. The cloud migration process will help you to ensure that you do not face server breakdown issues, database glitches and other errors that can impede a successful cloud migration.

Focus for Cloud Migration Success

The main focus of cloud migration testing is on the various validations required to ensure its success.

Functional Testing

The production-readiness of the migrated applications is tested in functional validation. For ts various aspects a detailed analysis is performed and checked for SLA compliance. Perform end-to-end validation of the applications’ functions to ensure the success of your migration

Checking if the desired output is generating for a valid and required input.
Checking if the service integrations with other applications are complete.
Checking if the object references are working as expected.
Checking if the cross-platform compatibility is ensured.

Integration Testing

To ensure your applications are integrated seamlessly with third-party applications and that communication between them is happening without and issues is an integral part of migration testing. Strikeout the dependencies between applications, and various SLAs that each application comes with. The migration process tends to become more complicated if you are migrating one or more applications. Just consider these following validations to simplify the process.

For integration testing, what interfaces and systems should be covered?
For validation and integration testing, what are the resources needed?
To develop and execute tests with third-party applications, what plan is in place?
How will the identification of coordination problems in the cloud environment?

Many Cloud consulting service providers also provide integration validation as an add-on to their services, which help ensure error-free integration testing.

Security Testing

In the beginning, the biggest discouragement for organizations to move their operations to the cloud was concern over security. Backed up by several advancements in the field, cloud security now has features that can prevent even sophisticated attacks from gaining access to your data and applications. Consider the following while y perform security validation:

Make sure that your cloud network can be accessed only by authorized users.
Take preventive measures against common attacks, and ensure that the measures are working properly.
Validation of data security is important In rest, in use and during transit.

A few other aspects of security testing include data security, privacy testing, business process security, and application security.

Performance Testing

Determining the performance and response time of the applications moved to the cloud is important for determining migration success. This step will also help you in optimizing the workload across resources. These are the things you should consider while performing performance validation.

Checking if the application architecture is supported by the cloud.
As per SLAs, we have to validate response times.
Load testing must be performed in parallel to understand how your services perform under various load types.

Conclusion

Cloud migration is often tricky to execute despite having all that help organization can get on paper, cloud migration is often tricky to execute and can result in more problems than benefits if used misleadingly. Hence, it is important and advisable to understand why to bring a team of testing professionals on-board for a successful migration.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations. Our cloud consulting services identify and prioritize cloud applications, optimization, cloud migration which helps your business.

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Digital Solutions, Website Development Company

3 Digital Marketing Strategies to Reach Local Consumers

Local Consumers need to be attracted by Local Businesses. Reaching the right consumer at the right time seems like an easy job to do, but it can have many challenges, especially when consumer searching behavior shifts towards journeys. It means consumers may search the same phrase over and over for a month or so, but the expectation of search results varies as they progress in their buying journey. This concretizes the fact that consumer wants personalized results, and if the results are located near to them, then the consumer will be happier. As a matter of fact, reports of Google states that “near me” mobile searches have increased over 500% in the last few years.

What’s in it for local businesses? We need to reach the consumers where they spend a lot of their time, which is mobile devices. And it will be even better than your competitors at doing so.

There will be a need for the right tools and technology in order to make this happen. Thankfully, companies are adapting technological advancements and it makes it easier for local businesses to get their hands on these digital marketing tools and use them to reach nearby consumers. Let’s look at the three ways

Location Extensions for PPC Ads

We are able to show ads with more information about your business location with the help of Location Extensions. It allows searches to see click-to-call and direction links with the proximity to our businesses.

We can take advantage of location extensions to drive searchers to take action directly from your ad, driving calls, foot traffic, and leads to your businesses. Most of the Digital Marketing Solution Providers focus on the PPC Ads with location targetting to achieve most out of the campaign.

In-App Ads and Deliver Real-Time offers

Many digital marketers confuse themselves when they see the report that consumers are not using mobile phones they think they’re on desktop, but in reality, most of the consumers spend time on mobile apps. Research shows that 90% of smartphone time is spent on apps. So the question arises, how to reach that local consumer base, well the answer is in-app advertisements, like geofencing, display relevant advertisements to consumers when they are using their favorite applications near your business. In realtime consumers see these ads who are in near proximity to our business, display the ad with a compelling message, like an offer or a coupon, which will eventually drive traffic and sales the business would have not gotten otherwise.

Optimized Google My Business Listing

To local consumers, advertising is not the only way to promote our business. One of the most downloaded and used the app from Google is – Google Maps, so it’s important to make sure your business is visible in it, with a requirement of all your information being correct and the link you have provided in the listing, links back to your website. Not only having a claimed Google My Business Listing that’s consistent with your website is an important factor in the site’s SEO, but it will also help your listing get found in local map searches on both web and mobile.

Make Nearby Consumers happy and drive Conversions and Conclusion

All these mobile marketing techniques emphasize the need to have a mobile-optimized website also responsive website for your business that is appealing to nearby consumers who find you on a mobile device. Ensure that your website is built to capture leads from all your digital marketing and advertising strategies but also looks great and works well on mobile. Featuring a call-to-action button and an email submission form on your website or landing page which means you can get more than just clicks from your marketing.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations. Our digital solution services not only help the client create integrated digital ecosystems but also to strengthen brands, increase ROI, new business value.

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Digital Solutions, Website Designing, Website Development Company

4 Link Building Strategies That Will Enhance Your SEO

Introduction

What you do with them is what matters whether you love them or hate them, such is the characteristics of links. To get attention from Google, it’s no secret but to get a high-quality backlink from popular websites. There are two ways to get a link for Google, one is ethical and the second is not so ethical or wrong way to do it. The wrong way will undoubtedly get you blacklisted but the right way will get you a precious firm hold on Google search results.

No matter you’re an expert in SEO or a complete beginner, everyone will agree that natural link building will give you a stronghold in Google search ranking.

Natural Link Building

The attraction of links without investing in time or energy is called a natural link building. They are generated naturally due to guest posting, outreach or link buying.

The content on your website is so valuable that people can’t resist linking your website within their content that is the core idea behind generating natural links. And with no surprise the more you can accumulate the more your ranking on Google will be firm. And to double the impact we would suggest combining both the natural link building with current link building strategies.

Benefits of Natural Link Building

With natural link building, you can impact on the improvement of the traffic on your website, rank, and hence there will be an increase in brand visibility.

Industry Recognition: If your link gets mentioned in the famous publication, your brand visibility will increase.

Social Shares: The number of shares of content is directly proportional to the attraction of natural shares.

Relationship building: With industry experts, the relationship could be built with the help of natural links.

Confidence: If you get traffic from natural links, it eventually refers to the people are genuine and willing to read and invest time furthermore taking interest in your brand.

But how can these natural links be built? Let’s dive deep into the six strategies.

Related Post: 8 Free Ways To Promote Your Business.

Content Marketing

You just have to create a sharing worth content which will be the foundation of strong link building. Natural link building doesn’t need attention and demand from guest posting and blog comments. A sure-shot way to attract links from high-quality websites is building evergreen content. The people and high-quality websites will take note if your content is regularly providing value.

Social Media Platforms

Without even spending a dime, social media platforms allow you to share links on the platform to be seen by more and more people.

Twitter provides two fields to add the link (in bio and website section). And in profile, there is an option to give a link on Instagram. Whereas, LinkedIn provides three fields to add the link.

Besides all these options, social media will help you to get your content to be seen by a high number of people. Engaging and relevant content is always loved and the audience will share that content. That will result in attracting tons of natural links.

Taking Aid from Resource Pages

Resource pages are always known for providing high-value to the customers. These pages contain PDFs, downloadable content, tools and tips, third-party links and interviews that offer valuable content. The traffic on these pages is consistent that is why it becomes very helpful from them to provide that natural link which we need. Sometimes it happens that the pages limit their resources for themselves. But, there is an option to convince the website owner to post your link on the resource page. It would boost your ranking on Google exponentially.

People with modern and digital problems come on these pages looking for digital solutions. And if they liked the content and think it is useful, then they will share it further giving directing more relevant traffic and link juice to the website of yours.

EBooks

If you have got an excellent writer in your team, then ask them to write an industry-leading eBook to get some natural links. An eBook is considered as personal, so if done the right way, then people will consider you as an expert in your domain giving you authority over other websites.

You can intelligently place links of articles, once you’ve crafted a highly valuable EBook or a landing page of your products and services via hyperlinks and CTAs (Call to Action).

Conclusion

Honorable mentions in this list would be websites like Quora and Reddit which are very good and helpful for building strong natural backlinks. Every link building activity doesn’t involve guest posting, cold emails, and reaching out to websites. The fact is, the more value you provide the more natural links you will achieve. Efforts must be made for this to happen though.

And that is why it is a strong recommendation for the combination of natural link building strategy with your current link building strategy. That’s how you will attract links from multiple sources and increase your chances of getting your content circulated online.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations. Our digital solution services not only help the client create integrated digital ecosystems but also to strengthen brands, increase ROI, new business value.

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Artificial Intelligence, Website Design and Development, Website Designing, Website Development Company

What is Web 1.0, 2.0, & 3.0?

Web 1.0

In the evolution of the World Wide Web, Web 1.0 refers to the first stage. With a huge majority of users who are content consumers, there were only a few content creators in Web 1.0. Personal web pages were normal, hosted on ISP-run web servers consisting mainly of static pages, or on web hosting services.

Advertisements on Web 1.0 were banned while surfing the internet. Web 1.0 enables to showcase of the piece of information on the websites which is known as Content Delivery Network (CDN) also can be used as personal websites. Cost formula is per page view and it has directories that enable users to retrieve a particular piece of information.

Design Essentials of web 1.0

Pages are static.
From the file-system of the server, the content is served.
Using Common Gateway Interface (CGI) or Server Side the page sare built.
To position and align the Elements, frames and tables are used on a page.

Web 2.0

User-generated content, usability, and interoperability for end-users are some of the highlights of Web 2.0 which is also known as a worldwide website and another name for it is a participative social web. It doesn’t refer to any modification to technical specification, but to recreate in a good way web pages are designed and used. When the changes have occurred the transitions are beneficial, but it doesn’t seem that way. Collaboration is allowed with each other by Web 2.0 in a social media dialogue as the creator of a user-generated cant in a virtual community. Web 1 is an enhanced version of 2.0. In web 2.0 development the browser technologies are used, and it includes ajax and JavaScript Frameworks.

Features of Web 2.0

It permits users to retrieve and classify the information collectively, and it also provides free sorting of information.
It provides dynamic content that is responsive to user input.
By means of evaluation and online commenting, information flows between site owners and site users.
APIs are developed to allow self-usage, such as by a software application.
Web access leads to an issue different from the traditional user base to a wider variety of users.

Use of Web 2.0

To share the perspectives, thoughts, opinions, and experiences the social web contains a number of online tools. Web 2.0 applications tend to have a conversation much more with the end-user. The end-user is also a participant of the 8 tools mentioned below:

Podcasting
Blogging
Tagging
Curating with RSS
Social Bookmarking
Social Networking
Social media
Web content voting

Web 3.0

The evolution and utilization of web interaction with the inclusion of alteration of the web into the database. After a long time of focus on the front-end, it enables the upgradation of the back-end of the web. To describe the evolutions of web usage and interaction among several paths web 3.0 is used. Instead of owning data, it is shared, where services show different views for the same data / same web. All the development process is done in Web 3.0, and all the Website Development Companies uses Web 3.0 for the website designing services.

Establishments of “the world’s information” is promised by the semantic web (3.0) in a responsible way than Google can ever attain with their existing engine schema. From the perspective of machine conception, this is particularly true as opposed to human understanding. It is necessary for the semantic web for the use of a declarative ontological language like OWL to produce domain-specific ontologies that machines can use to reason about information and use it make new conclusions, and not simply match keywords.

Features of Web 3.0

Semantic Web

There is an involvement of the semantic web in succeeding in the evolution of the Web. In order to create, share and connect through search and analysis based on the capability to comprehend the meaning of words, instead of keywords or numbers, al this is used in the development of and improvement of the semantic web.

Artificial Intelligence

Mixing this capability with natural language processing, computers can distinguish information like humans in order to provide faster and more relevant results in web 3.0. to fulfill the requirements of the user it becomes more and more intelligent.

3D Graphics

In Web 3.0 the three-dimensional design is being used widely in websites and services. Computer games, museum guides, eCommerce, geospatial contexts, etc. are some of the examples that use 3D graphics.

Connectivity

Thanks to semantic metadata, the information is more connected to web 3.0. As a result, the UI evolves to another level of connectivity that leverages all the available information.

Ubiquity

The services can be used everywhere, content is accessible by multiple applications. Every device is connected to the web.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations. Our standard web designing services include many features that contain home, blog, images, faq, contact us and many more. It is the best website designing firm.

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Cyber Safety Services, Website Development Company

Types of Hackers & current scenario among the types of hackers

The word Hacker is not fully understood by everyone and inherently misused. A stereotypical 1980’s movie character where a hacker is an evil criminal who is conspiring against the people and government, is the visualization of people when they hear the word hacker. But in reality, a hacker is just a normal person whose computer skills are high and can manipulate and bypass computer systems to make them do the intended. Hacking is not illegal unless a hacker has malicious intent and is trying the trespass the defenses and exploit weaknesses of a system without authorized permission.

As in the 80s movies the good guys used to wear white hats and the villain used to wear the black hat, the hackers are also classified on the basis of their hats.

Unethical type of hackers – Black Hat

A computer expert who finds vulnerabilities in online security and willfully damages them for their own personal gain is a black hat hacker. They are motivated by the feelings of petty revenge by targeting the companies they don’t like and exploit their vulnerabilities to shut them down only for their frivolous reasons and also by feelings of power by infecting a computer by ransomware and then demanding money to unlock the device.

Black hats may look for any type of private information that might give them some money such as credit card numbers, passwords, Emails, and Bank Accounts data. Thus, they are called criminals with no ethics, and might even break into a computer network with an intention to destroy it rather than just stealing it.

Confused Type of hackers – Grey Hat

When compared to black hats, grey hats are less skilled or white hats are a blend of both types of hackers. Grey hats are often technology hobbyists who enjoy dabbling in minor white-collar crimes such as P2P file sharing and cracking software. They report the organization about their findings and if the organization or company does not respond or refuses to pay them, they perhaps post about the system’s weakness on online forums for the internet and the world to see.

Grey hat doesn’t usually work with malicious intent, they just search for bugs and vulnerabilities in order to get a small fee for discovering the issue. Whereas the hacker type attempt to compromise a security system without permission and that is not legal.

Ethical Hackers – White Hat

Using skills and capabilities for good and legal purposes is known as White Hat hackers. They are also known as contrasting personalities of black hat hackers. White hats are employees or freelancers or contractors who are hired to test the weak spots in security systems. This is the job which an individual get after studying cybersecurity if he is good at what he does he can also start his own company giving cyber safety services. They determine how they can improve the security measures by simulating the attacks by imitating the malicious user or black hat and help identify the vulnerabilities.

White Hat performs tests on the security systems like penetration testing and many more, they exploit a completely authorized and legal form of hacking. All this happens by taking permission from the owner first and report all the findings to the security team.

Current Scenario for the hackers and Conclusion

As per the experts, black hat types of hackers are the most skilled hackers and are more experienced when compared to that of most of the white type of hackers. To ensure their safety from data breaches and other security threats many former black hats have turned their life around and now work as white hats.

The requirement of ethical hacking is increasing to ensure malicious hackers do not get success in their efforts to access computer systems. Red-team, blue-team exercises and continuous penetration exercises are performed by companies to analyze and identify the weak spots, and to refine the security of their systems before the black hat types of hackers exploit them.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations. Ouriken provides cybersecurity services and operations to effectively and efficiently detect and respond to the evolving threat landscape.

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Cloud Consulting, CRM Software, Web Push Notifications

3 Best Cloud Migration Strategies You Must Know About

For Business purposes companies nowadays have adopted cloud computing platform. There are hardly any companies we’ll find wh does not use cloud today, such as the popularity of cloud. For the successful run of business, there might be many reasons but it is essential to migrate to the cloud platforms in cloud consulting services.

Why Should We Migrate?

As the introduction and updation of newer technologies take place, it is highly recommended to use and adopt these technologies n order to stay in the competition. IT does have many advantages in terms of speed, storage, processing of data, cost and much more it’s the go-to platform every company is adopting right now. Migration isn’t something which can be done overnight, significant planning is required wit required resources. Inclusion of planning should be why you want to shift, what you’re keeping with you, and where is the destination where you will keep all the data again. Let’s dive deep into the strategies.

Strategies

With the necessary resources, the planning of migration is concrete, for achieving the desired result, we can follow a strategy. Though there are many strategies we can use to complete the job, today we will look at the three R’s of the cloud migration strategy. It is very essential to determine the current environment, its dependencies, licenses, types of applications and servers. Organizations that opt for the migration of data and applications to the cloud use these strategies. They are as follows:

Rehost
Revise
Refractor

Rehost

It’s also known as “lift and shift strategy”. This is the most commonly followed strategy when the applications are needed to migrate to the cloud. Involvement of lifting a part of the application or whole application from one on-premise or existing cloud environment and shifting it to another cloud environment, that is why the name. in the process of shifting of an application to the new cloud platform, sometimes there is a need for change in the host configuration. Is your business concerned about operational cost and quick migration without any need of disturbing the existing application workflow?

Revise

Unlike the rehosting strategy, in this strategy, a part or whole application is optimized before migrating to the cloud. This strategy is also known as “re-platforming”. Preoptimization of application really helps in better performance of application rather than improving the entire code architecture. Organizations can leverage more cloud benefits by optimizing the applications rather than just moving them, but rehosting is way cheaper as compared to revising strategy.

Refractor

Not at all similar to the other two strategies. It is too complex as compared to rehosting and revising. It is also known as “re-architecting” because even though this strategy is the most expensive one amongst all three, but it offers the best possible benefits when it comes to cloud migration of data and application in an organization and the refractor approach makes changes to architecture structure of the application. The requirement of time, as well as knowledge about the cloud platform itself, is necessary for the refractor approach and services offered.

There are two types in this strategy namely, partial and complete. In Partial refractor, only a part of the application is modified, since it happens in sequence it results in faster migration whereas, in complete refractor approach, the entire modification of application takes place, which is pocket-friendly and high in performance.

Conclusion

It is not easy to choose an appropriate migration strategy for an organization. Many factors must be considered before taking a decision which includes the right cloud service provider, optimization of necessary application processes, migration strategy, overhead, costs, and more.

Ouriken’s cloud consulting services identify and prioritize cloud applications, optimization, cloud migration which helps your business. Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Business Process Management, Digital Solutions

What is Business Process Management?

Introduction

Set of activities required to accomplish a common goal is Business Process. These activities are completed either sequentially or parallel and may be performed by people or systems. The acronym for ‘Business Process Management’ is BPM.

In every business, we hear the term business process management or BPM. BPM can be defined as a discipline of design, execution, modeling, optimization, and monitoring business processes to increase profitability.

That is the reason why BPM is considered more of a discipline rather than a tool or technology. It’s a very important concept. It is not just a software you can purchase and install to repair business issues, there are people involved who play a significant role in the business processes management. BPM software goes merely beyond the automation work to helping others with continuous process improvement, this is the key difference between workflow and BPM.

What is Business Process Management?

Business Process Management Services is a management approach concentrated on aligning all aspects of the organization with the needs of clients. Business Process Management tries to enhance processes constantly so that, it could be described as the “Process optimization process.” It is said that BPM allows an organization to be more efficient, effective and more capable than a functionally focused =, traditional hierarchical management approach.

Related Post: What is Agile Methodology?

Types of Business Process

It is very important to realize that processes differ greatly when starting our BPM. You can categorize your business in many different ways, which includes:

Complexity
Duration
Volume
Industry
Department

Some businesses are not very well suited to being managed within the BPM software that is why it is important. Let us take an example, where highly repetitive or regulated processes tend to be excellent candidates, unpredictable and unstructured processes are not.

The Process Lifecycle

There are 5 main phases of business process management: design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization. Lets further dig into it

Design

Both the identification of existing processes and the design “to-be” processes get encircled within the Design Process. Representation of the process flow, the actors within it, alters and notifications, escalations, standard operating procedures, service level agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms are some areas to focus.

Good designs reduce the number of problems over the lifetimes of a process. A correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared is the only aim of this step. The improvement which is proposed could be in human-to-human, human-to-system, system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market or challenges which are capable of competing faced by the businesses.

Modeling

By taking the theoretical designs and introduction of combinations of variables takes place.

Execution

If you want to automate the process, one of the ways to do it is to develop or purchase an application that executes that required steps of the process. But on the contrary, these applications rarely process all the steps properly to get the optimum result. Another great way to do it is to operate it with multiple software and human intervention, but then again this process is tedious and complex, the documentation part becomes very difficult.

To overcome these problems, the software has been developed that enables the full business process to be defined in a language that will be directly executed by the computer itself. To perform business operations, the system will either use services in connected applications or when a step is too tough to automate, will ask for human input. Directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easy to improve compared to either of the previous approaches. For process execution and resolution, a business rule engine can be used.

Monitoring

In this phase, process performance is measured. Monitoring is completely included in the tracking of individual processes, so the information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided. Apart from this, to improve their connected processes, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers. The generation of measures are examples of statistics on quickly an order of the customer is processed or how many orders were processed last month. They fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate, and productivity.

What information the business wants to evaluate is totally dependant on the degree of monitoring, and analyze and how a business wants it to be monitored, in real-time, near real-time, or ad-hoc. However, BAM (business activity monitoring) extends the monitoring into generally provided by the BPM system (BPMS).

A collection of methods and tools related to process mining is known as Process mining. To analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with a priori process model is the aim of process mining.

Optimization

Retrieving process performance info from modeling or monitoring phase. Look for potential or actual issues and the potential opportunities for cost savings or other improvements then applying those enhancements in the design phase of the process hence, the creation of greater business values.

Conclusion

The most important aspect of BPM is one of the most often overlooked perhaps, is continuous improvement. Because, as time changes with technology, processes change too. The cycle begins again once the potential process change is identified and the best suggestions are implemented.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations. Ouriken works with you to optimize productivity, improve performance and reduce time-to-market. To accelerate your business growth with our Business Process Management services.

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Digital Solutions, Website Designing, Website Development Company

Common Problems in Web Designing and how to Avoid it

While developing a website you can face a lot of problems which can ruin your whole development process, the precious time you had invested in developing the project and the resources as well. In this blog, I will be sharing a few common issues, time-suckers, and other things that arise that can deviate a project.

Each Website project is different, but according to my experience, there are a lot of common problems that arise in the phase of website designing. And we do our best to acting in advance to deal with the expected change guide course of designing very clear of any issues so we can save our client’s time as well as budget in Website Designing services.

Here is a compilation of 4 common problems/issues we have observed in web design projects over the years and how to avoid them effectively. In order to keep your website production smooth and at a budget.

Wrong people in Charge

Many clients think that we are vendors they pay us to do the designing the websites, so all the responsibility is our own.

It’s very important to know that it’s a collaborative effect whenever we are beginning a web design project. To help you achieve your goals, we take our knowledge of the web, best practices and your option to create a website. To get there we need to have a point-of-contact that will be engaged, communicative, well-organized, and understand the large goals of the project.

We have run into issues where this does not go as expected, so once there was this client running the project without seeking approvals or feedback from anyone else on the team. Without the knowledge to us, we received approvals on things and then we got to the final stage. But when the CEO saw what we made, she hated it and we had to start over.

Assigning a wrong person in charge can be very destructive for the project’s budget and timeline – according to what we have seen. We should manage our time in terms of communication because the person in charge was not doing what they’re supposed to do, the less time we need to create a beautiful website.

Ignoring the budget

The trickiest subject to deal with when it comes to a project is its budget. We arrange our projects based on the number of hours we think it will take. Based on historical data from previous websites, we come up with our estimates. We estimate our deadlines accordingly.

We give updates on where we are with a budget, as we move throughout our web design project. Just address the concern and try to be mindful of the hours if you find out that the design phase is already wasting the development time.

Some clients have requested that we keep updating the design and hope that we will have enough for the rest upon knowing this information. It does become an issue sometimes and clients end up getting very close to their budget or exceeding it.

You should hear those concerns and make any important adjustments to preserve the budget for the remainder of the project if your web designer is bringing up a budget in the design phase of the project.

Radio Silence on Feedback

There are many website projects which are based on approvals. We typically start with a sitemap/wireframe whenever we begin with a new project. And once that is approved, we go ahead with the design.

It’s important to really review the drafts you are given and make sure its what you want, it’s typically a red flag that they didn’t really review it and will probably change down the road if clients are too swift to approve a design. Make sure your review is thoughtful and specific.

Assumption of the Template is a Right Method

We will sometimes recommend using a template to keep the budget low. Website templates help us put out a product quickly. But many clients opt for the template for the wrong reasons and don’t consider the long term consequences.

It doesn’t work in the long run, while the templates help us keep the budget less. A template has its own limitations. It could be further edited beyond its capabilities which will force the designer to use the custom website design, which will make the cost to custom website design so there is no use of using the cheap template for the use.

Conclusion

It doesn’t mean that every website project is doomed from the beginning, but if you are aware of the common problems, you can work with your company to avoid it effectively. We work hard to make our clients happy and to make a successful product that produces amazing results. And by collaborating to work on issues.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Application Development, Digital Solutions

9 Tips to Reduce Mobile App Development Cost

Since the past five years, there has been a major growth seen in the migration of consumers from desktop to mobile because smartphones allow users the accessibility at any time from anywhere. That is the reason why the businesses are shifting a major part of their development from desktop to mobile, with a goal of developing mobile apps will give exposure to the business, improve the loyalty of customers, and therefore building a stronger brand altogether. It will happen because mobile apps enable customers to interact with a brand personal space. However, extravagant app development cost acts as a discouragement to the company when developing a mobile app for their brand.

Costs for developing mobile apps shouldn’t be expensive. So we will discuss some of the points to reduce unnecessary costs without compromising on the quality.

Efficiently Planned Mobile App Development Process

Mobile App Development is a complex process that requires several iterations and modifications before achieving the final product. The basic requirement of the mobile app is that it provides the user experience which customer likes, for making it possible there are many changes in the process and each change ascends the app development costs. To lower costs from the initial stage is to have many ideas of how the customer can get the best version to enhance the user experience. By weighing the pros and cons of various ideas and brainstorming with the team at the initial stages will be very effective in cutting down some costs. You can choose to implement only the feature in which users want reducing a sufficient amount of costs in the development process itself by reducing too many alterations.

Preparing a Sketch of Final Product

Coding is just a base of the development process, it is very important that the developer has the vision of a clear goal of expectations from the app or the kind of the interface that needs to be provided by the customer. You can easily communicate the expectations of the customer to the developer by sketching the app and its interface so he can use it at his initial point for designing the interface and workflow to match the expectations of the customer. It will prevent unnecessary reworking of the app design that adds to mobile development costs.

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The decision of Platform for the App

There is a various platform where you can develop your app – iOS, Android, Windows, always ensures that the app reaches more users when the company is trying to keep the costs low, it might make more sense to target a single platform. The best way to choose a platform to work on is to analyze what major consumers like and to work on it. By choosing one platform out of three, you automatically reduce the cost of app development to almost two-thirds. And chosen by many of the clients, cross-platform development is an economical way to make the app ready to be deployed on multiple platforms.

Outsourcing the Project

Many companies think to outsource as a loss for their development project, but on the contrary, it comes with a host of benefits. First, since you hire the development team only for a short time, paying them hourly, the app development costs cut down significantly than if were to hire an in-house development team as you would continue to pay them a fixed salary. Without knowing it, the number of hours they worked on the task. Secondly, you get access to not only to the skills of the expert developers who have experience in app development but also to much more design of the app.

Use Existing Technologies and Resources

Like we discussed in the above point, outsourcing the mobile app development to a developer with a skill set is that you can make optimal use of existing templates and frameworks he has developed for previous builds. By opting for pre-existing frameworks that meet your requirements you can significantly cut down development time, reducing app development costs in the process.

Framework Testing

Many companies make the mistake of not testing their app thoroughly in a rush on making it live in the market which results in not only a loss of reputation of the brand but also an increase in the app development cost for correcting the flaws. Testing the framework before launch will give us the idea of what is not working properly and fix them as soon as possible cutting downtime as well as costs.

Look for an Expert Mobile App Development Company

The mobile app development process requires skilled experts in various areas working together to build the app. That’s the reason you should look forward to hiring a mobile app development company who provides app development services who has good experience in app development for the various platform, besides offering end-to-end services, app development, design, and marketing. By doing this the cost of app development will be lower than if you have to outsource each service to a different agency.

Don’t Rush for the Launch

Reduction of development times will lower the costs, its no brainer to not rush in the process without following a systematic approach that includes, testing. Otherwise, any imperfections or bugs will be noticed only once the app is used by the customers, which will diminish the user experience, and affecting the brand value.

Keep it simple

It doesn’t mean that more features mean good experience. The Excitement factor in the initial stage of the app development process is understandable but it not only increases cost but also makes the app too heavy and also lengthen the development process. Highlighting the best features of an app that are essential for rand or business will keep your costs down.

Ouriken application development & support services help you maintain your business-critical mainframe applications & replace legacy applications. Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Website Design and Development, Website Designing

Maintaining a Website’s SEO After a Redesign

Planning to redesign your website but afraid of the SEO rankings? There need is some need to considering the maintenance of SEO rankings and your website’s DA before, after and during the redesign process. The aesthetics of the site is not the only thing you need to worry about when you think of redesigning your website, but we also need to take some time to look into the maintenance of SEO for your website and ways to improve it as well.

Many companies, since maintaining SEO for a website is a big deal nowadays, fail to understand the importance of attention to SEO while the redesigning of their website, but it affects them a big-time after in time. You could wipe out all your previous SEO efforts if maintenance of SEO is not done carefully. With major Web Design and Development activities, there are both technical and non-technical areas to consider for. Specific steps must be taken care of to ensure that you don’t demolish your SEO quality when transitioning from old site to new one.

Core Areas to Consider

There are three main areas to look upon in order to maintain the SEO rankings when redesigning your website:

What is acceptable with your current SEO efforts
During a redesign, what might be the possible common challenges
Changes that will come with a new website

You will be able to find out your weakness in SEO by focusing on these areas so you can improve it later.

Monitoring your SEO

If you have campaigns in place and currently monitoring your SEO rankings regarding those keywords then you have a good amount of data to analyze. In that case, one must be really aware of the keywords they rank for, the mapping for each keyword, the exact placement in rankings and the pages that deliver the highest organic traffic.

Common Challenges to Face with SEO in Redesigning Process

There are a lot of issues that may pop up when you work on a site redesign, focus on rebranding, improving User Experience, and updating of backend. There is a list where one could face challenges:

Removed Content
Changed Content
Movable content based on the new site’s navigation or site map
URLs might change
Changes in Page-level optimization
Addition of new content, sections, technology, new features
New Technical difficulties
Internal Link structure edits
Changes in Domain or Sub-Domain
Changes in Protocol

These are the areas which may impact SEO in a redesign. It may be very hard to identify exactly what needs to be addressed with so many possible changes. Out of the above-mentioned challenges, changes in a domain are one of the biggest challenges as compared to other challenges, but each and every challenge must be overcome and the more challenges you have the more difficult it will be to maintain your SEO rankings.

How to not lose your SEO rankings checklist and redesign at the same time

Before starting the redesigning process it’s very important to undertint the best practices to preserve your SEO rankings. Some of the parameters are as follows:

An SEO audit must be run on your current website

Understanding all the keywords you are attempting to rank for and with what the pages are associated with. You should be concerned about pages and specific on-page optimization beyond redirects, which go from the Dev. to the live line state.

Setting up 301 and 302 redirects

First and foremost, you must redirect the old URLs to new ones. You’ll need to have a spreadsheet of all needed redirects if you’re making changes to permalink structure. Crawl the old list of URLs to ensure that everything redirects as it should once you have the new site live.

A permanent redirect from one link to another is called a 301 redirect. This redirection is used for website visitors and search engines, a 301 redirect is better for SEO over a temporary one because it transfers the internal link as well, approximately 90-99% of the time. This redirection method is the preferred method for new sites.

And a temporary redirection is called 302 redirects, redirecting users and search engines to the desired page for a short period of time until it’s removed. In order to give your users a seamless experience, you should use it during the update of a web page. What they say is right, excess 302 redirects will affect your SEO, so be careful when using it.

Multiple Tests

Assuming the live site will perform the same as a dev. site is kind of stupidity. A lot of time and resources are probably invested in testing, but in the real world, things can change. Usage of technical tools for site audits like Moz, Ahrefs, or DeepCrawl, these tools provide insights on technical issues. Also, running your domain through the mobile-friendly testing tool and the loading speed of the new website must be checked too. Last but not least, schema markup on the new website should be done and must not be forgotten.

How to Avoid Mistakes

We’ve covered almost everything that you should do, but how can we avoid mistakes that can cost you your SEO rankings.

Don’t start over on the content: If the content on your website is ranking, then you must not abandon it. If you do it will affect the rankings.
Redirects are your friends: when a 404 Page Not Found error is displayed to the user, which means the pages have dropped off Google’s index.
Internal linking is the key: Always remember to push this to the new website.
Outbound links must be added on need.
You can use Ahrefs to find these pages that have high rankings and multiple backlinks, try to preserve or transfer them.

Conclusion

As the brand evolves, redesigning a website is a move that most companies should make. In order to maintain the SEO rankings, you must follow these best practices from a website redesign. Never start over on the content like your old website never existed, it will affect the rankings so bad. Feel free to add your tips, tricks, and suggestions in the comments below.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.