Thursday, January 25, 2007

Creating An Environment For Innovation In The Office

The environment of the office coupled with other crucial factors acts as a determining factor in the overall thinking process and eventual reactions of your workforce at any specified time. The overall environment plays a fundamental role in shaping the outcomes of events and can result in desirable circumstances or deviations from the goals if not paid appropriate attention.

A normal working individual spends at least eight to ten hours a day in the office, not including the travel time. They pass the rest of the time engaged in the other daily chores of life. If you add onto this the travel time, accounting for the increasing traffic in cities, and the time spent in dressing for the office or preparing for the next day, the time dedicated toward the office could increase to twelve to fifteen hours a day. Now consider a situation wherein you are spending the chunk of your day at a place you don't enjoy. The environment is stuffed and managing office politics is more crucial than any other part of the day's work. Such occurrences only have a negative impact and do not leave a place for a positive attitude towards the regular day to day work.

All organizations irrespective of size or nature of work performed face this problem in different forms. The environment tends to demoralize even the most creative workers. High performers subside without any impelling force to gear up and strive towards new avenues. The only option that remains is looking for a new job.

This challenge has been continually haunting Human Resource managers, who, considering the stiff competition, are always facing enormous problems in hiring the right candidate. Complemented to this are the huge training costs. What is the right solution?

The solution is to create an environment inducing work and prompting rapid innovations. An environment that allows people to experiment and effectively utilizess the requisite space and resources is the perfect remedy.

Employees must be internally motivated to research and perform the required extra duties in addition to their daily work requirements. Some methods to achieve such an open environment are listed below.

Create an effective communication channel. Make sure that you as a boss are accessible. The channel should be two ways.

Create an effective reward system. The worthy must be honored.

Do not be afraid of experiments. They are the road to innovations.

Promote a horizontal structure to the greatest extent possible instead of various layers.

Impart individuality. Recognition is an effective motivation tool.

Organize cultural activities.

Eliminate unhealthy competition among the team members or employees in the same department.

Various organizations are taking extreme steps like promoting relationships in the work place and creating small team open office configuration. However, the exact requirements can be decided only upon understanding the work environment and existing culture.

Broadband Satellite Internet

Broadband satellite Internet has provided hope for rural subscribers who are outside the coverage areas of most Internet service providers. Most home subscribers opt for cable and DSL Internet connections. But in areas which are not under the range of the high-speed broadband connection, or where dial-up access is extremely slow, satellite broadband Internet is a boon. The technology has been there for a long time, but it has evolved in more recent times.

The connection does not use wire, but requires an intermediary satellite. Requests are logged through a home computer and a special satellite modem to a satellite dish, which is installed on the roof of the subscriber’s office or house. These signals are sent or received from the dish satellite to an orbiting satellite, which in turn sends or transmits information to the dish satellite at the service provider’s office. The connection speed is a little less in comparison to DSL and cable Internet connections. This can be a drawback while using certain applications, such as real-time interactive games.

However, does not affect web surfing and sighting. A lot of these shortcomings can be overcome by using a signal amplifier, to cater to external or climatic disturbance and signal locators, to catch signals faster. Some other problems associated with satellite broadband Internet connections are that the installation charge for the dish satellite and the monthly subscription charges are a bit expensive, in comparison to DSL and cable connections.

The satellite dish being installed outside on the roof is liable to damage due to climatic conditions like rain and high-intensity wind. The expenses required for setting up the right kind of infrastructure for the rural subscribers has been one more reason for the technological lag in this area. Despite all of these shortcomings it is the best option for those who are placed at a geographically disadvantaged condition, and the promise of a better future lies ahead.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Importance of CSS in Web Sites

1. The content is separated from the design

Because you are able to create a separate Style sheet and link it to all your web documents, you have great control over how your website looks. So if you want to change a certain aspect of your page, you only need to alter one file: your Style sheet! This Of course, generates some great flexibility. This flexibility is not available when your website is using tables for layout, inline font tags or inline defined colors.

A single CSS file can contain positioning, layout, font, colors and style information for an entire web site.

2. You site uses less bandwidth and loads faster

Because style sheets are so lightweight, your website will load much faster. The main reason is because you do not need table layouts anymore for the positioning of elements. Since text loads really really fast your website will be visible in a flash. This means that visitors will be happier when surfing your website. They only have to download the Style sheet once, and it's automatically reused for every page. So the only thing that needs to be loaded is the actual content. On average a website will load five to ten times faster if it makes use of cascading style sheets.

3. Your website will automatically gain better search engine results

With CSS, you can position any element, anywhere you want. So if your menu is at the bottom of your HTML document, you can bring it up using absolute positioning. The reason this is useful is to make sure the search engine spiders pick up the main content first. Another advantage you automatically gain is that your HTML code is much cleaner. So the search engine spider will not have to separate the junk code from the real content. So make sure you put your logo text and your menu at the bottom of your HTML document at put it at the top using CSS!

4. CSS is compatible with newer browsers

Because more and more browsers are used other than Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, you need to be sure that your website is accessible by all major and newer browsers. By using web standards, defined by the w3c, you are making sure your content is viewable in the future. Because there are so many browsers these days, it is impossible to test your website in all these browsers on different configurations. Coding to standards is then the only practical solution.

5. CSS can be used to display the same content on different media.

Because you are able to define different style sheets for different media you have great flexibility in presenting your content.

The printer for example, is a medium on itself. If someone prints out your website, you will be able to modify the look of it. Add an extra black and white logo, remove the advertisements and change the colors to black and white values. It's all done easily by using cascading style sheets. And the best thing is, visitors do not even have to know you created a new Style sheet especially for the printer. Style sheets can also be created specifically for PDA's and such. As you will understand, this adds some great flexibility to the presentation of your web document.

Importance of submitting your articles to an Article Directory

Articles are the most effective way by which you can generate traffic for your website. You must have heard the phrase that “Content is the king of any website”. Writing and submitting articles to article directories is a potent way of promoting your website, newsletter, or ezine. Today more and more people are using this technique to generate massive amounts of back links to their website, boost link popularity, get topmost positions in the search engines and flood their sites with an unstoppable flow of fresh visitors on a daily basis.

Importance of submitting articles to article directories

Article sites on the web provide free content for their website visitors. Webmasters who visit the article directories have permission to grab any article for use on their website, as long as the article is left in the original state and credit is given to the article author. For instance if you have submitted an Article to an Article directory and if a visitor of the article directory finds it useful and interesting he will publish it on his site in the same way as you posted your article in the article directory with a link pointing back at your site. In this way just one Article can result in thousands and thousands of back links to the Author’s website, resulting in tons of free and targeted traffic.

Tips while submitting Articles to Article Directories

Writing and submitting Articles to article directories are an effective way of promoting your website and generating more back links. There are certain points you need to keep in mind while submitting articles to article directories.

· Make sure to leave a link pointing back at your website in the resource box provided by the Article directory. · Always submit your article to an appropriate category related to your website. · Make sure to provide useful information through your article. Do not just promote your website in the article. This might result in declination of your article from the article directory.

Search engines love content and by writing more and more Articles and submitting them to Article directories you can only help your site grow. Every single day, more and more people are discovering how powerful Article writing can be for traffic generation and website promotion. As a result of this boom, article directory submissions are at record levels.

Writing and submitting Articles to article directories can not help you achieve the top most rankings in the search engines but also boost your site traffic in the major search engines.