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  admin 3:27 pm on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Tips for Effective Web Writing 

  

  When you are writing content for online publication and reading, you should know that it is altogether a different ball game than writing for traditional print mediums like newspapers, magazines or a book. Most of the readers online would prefer go through the content quickly before deciding to read the whole content properly. Only if they find the online content or article compelling enough in that quick scan, they would like to read the article properly or they might just skip to other website. However there are a few tips for effective web writing one could use. A few of them are mentioned here –

  1. Organize your content – Organizing your content for online publication so that you have a headings, sub-headings etc. will help not only help the reader to quickly overview the content but, also help him or her to read on a particular topic or heading he or she might be more interested in. Moreover, an organized content looks cleaner and thus, more professional.

  2. Keep it short and simple – Long texts or paragraphs can bully most of the online readers away. They would rather like to see the content broken up into small pieces of paragraphs than long ones, which when they start reading could seem longer and requires more patience to read. With readers having a lot more options on the Internet, even a single break while reading a long paragraph, could make them click away from your content to another one.

  3. Emphasize on important lines – Even though you would highlight your headings, sub-headings using bold option, you should still consider emphasizing on other important lines within your paragraph, which you think ought to be read even while scanning through the content. Strong and important statements should be highlighted either by using colored text or using bold option. It could attract the attention and awake a curiosity in the mind of the reader while he or she would be taking a quick glance at the content.

  4. Keep your audience in mind – You could know in and out through a particular topic you are writing on and would want to use terms and jargons that would strike a connection with relevant reader online. It does work if your target audience has always been and would always be the people who are from the inside world of the topic you write on. However, if your article is open to people from all walks of life, you should consider avoiding jargons that would only confuse the people who have just come to gain some extra knowledge through your content.

  5. Consider having RSS feeds for your articles – If you want your articles or content to spread across a wide spectrum of online readers, you might want to make use of RSS feeds so that your writings can reach a large number of online readers as other websites can pick up your article to share it with more readers online. WordPress users by default, have RSS feeds enabled on their posts.

  
   

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  admin 3:20 pm on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Copyrights on Web 

  The concept of copyright on websites seems like a difficult thing to understand for a few sections of people. How difficult is it to understand that a thing that one has not created, which could be a simple content built on a beautiful mesh of words or an intricate piece of art, he or she does not have a right to use it for their personal purpose? One ought to remember that using someone else’s graphics or text without seeking permission to use it, is an infringement of copyright and legal action could be taken against the person who plagiarises.

  But, let’s try to understand the concept of copyright clearly in all its senses. Copyright refers to the right, which the owner of a piece of art or any other creative work has, so as to reproduce it or permit anyone else to use or reproduce his work. The works that can be included under copyrights are –

  - Work of photography and art like pictures, paintings, drawings etc.

  - Work of literature like stories, articles, journals or modern electronic work like computer programs or applications or games.

  - Architecture blueprints

  - Music composition or songs

  - Written plays, screenplays, lyrics etc.

  - Moving images like movies, videos, music videos, audio visuals

  One may argue that he was not aware of a particular work being copyrighted. However, almost all of the creative or literary work that involves the imaginary skills of the owner of the work would most likely be copyrighted.

  Reproducing any copyrighted work could be –

  - Printing web page

  - Copying the JavaScript, HTML or other code from a website

  - Downloading content like pictures, movies, videos, music etc.

  - Printing of a picture.

  A large section of people having copyrights over a web page do not mind people using their webpage for personal purposes. However, when it comes to printing their webpage, they might take it as an infringement to the copyrights they hold.

  It is very common these days to see copyrights being infringed upon since it becomes difficult to track people who do it unless the copyright owner comes to know of it either by themselves or by the people. You might see copyright notices on Web pages very often. However, you should know that sometimes, even when the website does not give any notices or information about copyright on their page, it is very much protected under the copyright laws. However, for web page owners, it is always best to put up copyright notice in their websites. In case, the website owner puts up his professional work including pictures, videos music etc. he should put across a watermark or a bug on the image that could not be edited out so as to discourage plagiarism from people who might be tempted to make some money out of the owner’s efforts and works. There are applications that help owners of content to put up watermarks on their printed work, which could either be their name or their logo.
   
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  admin 3:18 pm on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Content and E-Commerce 

  Content on a site plays a very important role, especially on a website that focuses mainly on e-commerce. A website that wants to generate its primary income through E-commerce can go highly wrong if it only focuses on the description of the products or services it offers. A site set up for E-commerce should not be only about selling products or services online. It should go out all the way and have a catalog for its audience, store and company information etc. In the highly competitive times, smart copywriting or content writing could help a lot in selling your products more effectively.

  1. Keep your audience in mind – First of all, what you should know is what kind of audience would you primarily serving or would it serve all kind of consumers. It helps to know your audience so as to what kind of writing would attract them more and make them like your website. Set your tone and style of your website according to your audience so they like browsing through your site whenever they need to buy anything online.

  2. Keep your information sorted – Information about the product and the company should be well organized so that it is easy for the online users to get quick information on whatever they want. Having cluttered text all over the page can look bad and gives bad impression about your site

  3. Marketing Copy – It is written for the product or the company description. As common as it could be found, but can be really difficult to pen down. There are a few E-commerce sites that have got confused between positive adjectives and selling products.

  4. Optimization Copy – You should know what keywords to be given more prominence in your content with the help of search engine optimization. It entails about finding out the keywords that online users would use to reach the website like yours or what keywords could actually get them to your website. However, once you have your keywords and you are set to write your content accordingly, you should not forget about your target audience.

  5. Talk about your business – The content you put up on your E-commerce website should talk about your services or products using easy words for the online readers. Do not take your paragraphs too long as it might make it boring for the reader. Better keep it short and straight to the point with information organized in points and sorted according to their relevance.

  6. Keep your website good looking – First impression is the last impression! As they say, online users too, consciously or sub-consciously believe in this adage. A neat and clean and beautiful website not only gives good vibes to your online audience but, also lets them know that you are a thorough professional!

  7. Connect with your audience/ customers – It is always beneficial for your online business to keep in touch with your customers or your audience through regular interactions. You could call for suggestions or get feedbacks from them so as to keep your website active.
   
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  admin 3:17 pm on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Open Source Content Management 

  Who would not like a CMS that is light i.e. simple to manage for oneself or the other people who would use it and more importantly, your clients! And, if the CMS is an open-source, it becomes an even more desirable to have it! Here are some of the options you could consider for getting an open source CMS, as per your needs, preferences and convenience –

  Get simple – It comes loaded with features that almost all the websites would need. It boasts of having the best UI in its class and it uses the convenience and speed of that of XML. It is also known to be very simple to learn.

  Frog – This CMS offers a simplified content management with its neat user interface, flexibility in applying templates across pages and simplicity in user permissions and management as also in file management tools. It is unique owing to the simplicity it offers in templating code and since it directly uses PHIP, you do not need to know any other scripting language.

  Requirements – PHP5, SQLite 3 with PDO or a MySQL database, a web server.

  Symphony – It is known to leverage open standards such as XML, XSLT and also the old XHTML, CSS. The interface for the admin makes use of the largely in use, iQuery library, which makes it unnecessary for the extension developers to learn new framework while trying to extend back end.

  Stacey – Known to be extremely light CMS, It does not need any database setup, not even installation files! You simply have to drop this application on the server to make it function. You can manage the content by simply creating folders, editing the text files. There are no screens for a login or even admin interface. It keeps all the content with the help of text files, which are flat and folders, unlike the traditional database. Thus, installation becomes so simple that you just have to copy application files to the server. So, no installation files, no setting up of a database and it works on a standard PHP server.

  Radiant – Again an open source, it is designed especially for smaller teams and has been kept very simple. The admin interface is very elegant with its focus around 3 important components – layouts, snippets and pages. It has its own macro language, which is known as Radius, enabling the ease of including other pages’ content.

  Pixie – It is not meant to compete out with the other open source CMSs out there. The goal of Pixie is to be so simple so as to enable even a layman to use and benefit from it, which is what sets it apart from the other options listed above. It makes use of the latest standards in the web world and so; the site you build through this tool can be accessed by all of your visitors and is also friendly with the search engine. You would also be happy to know that you just need to know CSS for customizing your site.
   
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  admin 2:55 pm on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  PHP Content Management 

  CMS projects are meant for the owners of web sites to manage their content by facilitating them with an interface, which helps them in adding, editing or deleting content very easily. Take a look at some of these PHP CMS that you could use for your web site –

  TangoCMS – it is a free, open source, simple but yet powerful and secure PHP CMS. It is built using strict standards of coding like W3C HTML. It helps you in creating as well as managing a site easily and quickly. Features like RSS feeds, blogs, powerful module for media come along with TangoCMS.

  Advantages –

  - Powerful and flexible, enabling ease of use for almost everyone

  - Built keeping in mind about the security, right from the beginning

  - Complies with the standards of W3C HTML

  Requirements –

  - PHP 5.2.0 or versions later than that

  - MySOL 4.1 or version later than that

  - Apache 2+ (Note that 1.3 is unsupported)

  - Support for Lighttpd, IIS 6+ and nginx

  - Other recommendations include installation of mod_rewrite

  Joomla! – Another open source powerful PHP CMS allowing you to build web sites, which look professional and that too, with very much ease! It is a popular choice among the owners of small business and even users from home who wish to maintain a site that looks professional and is simple to manage. You could be surprised to know that it is also capable of delivering a robust web site even at an enterprise-level, which is empowered with unbelievable extensibility that can take care of your customize publishing requirements.

  Advantages –

  - What sets it apart from other CMSs is that it is devoid of any complication

  - As with Mozilla Firefox browser, its core system could be extended with the help of add-ons that are authored by developer community.

  - With the internaionalization of Joomla! 1.5x is capable of supporting languages that read from right towards left like Arabic or Hebrew and also extended set of characters. In addition, a dozen more pack of languages can also be downloaded separately.

  Requirements –

  - PHP 5.2 or versions later than that

  - MySOL 4.1.0 or versions later than that

  - Apache 2.0 or versions later than that (with mod_xml, mod_mysql, mod_zlib)

  - Microsoft IIS 7

  Drupal – It is another open source and PHP CMS platform that comes equipped with powerful features. It supports a wide range of websites that range from blog pages to a big community based website.

  Advantages –

  - One of Drupal’s unique feature, the Collaborative Book, helps you in setting up a book, after which you can authorize content contribution by other individuals

  - It makes use of mod_rewrite by Apache for customizing URLs, which are both search engine and user-friendly.

  - Drupal’s source code can be had freely governed by the GNU General Public Licencse 2 terms. Unlike with most other CMSs, the feature set of Drupal is available fully for extending and customizing it as needed.

  More details can be had from – http://drupal.org/
   
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  admin 2:51 pm on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Website Management refers to a person’s or a company’s efforts in maintaining and managing their website. Managing a website can be a complicated task with planning like online strategy, budget, software and system administration, hosting, marketing for online and communication etc. An individual’s website management might be relatively easy for the owner of the website to handle but, with the scale of the website going up and with a big amount of money at stake, complications increase and thus, planning out many things become very essential.

  The different planning, roles and responsibilities involved in managing a website for an organization include the following

  - Online strategy

  - Content strategy

  - Development of web content and workflows

  - Software and systems administration

  - Business development

  - Online communication and marketing

  - Graphic design for the website

  - Data/ information architecture

  - Analytics for the website

  - Security

  - Archiving

  - E-commerce

  - Accessibility

  - Legal

  - Training and information ethics

  Depending on the infrastructure and the resources available, the goals and requirements of the company or organization, the scale of the website and the way the content would be managed to deliver, the above-mentioned areas could be handled by either single or several staff within the organization. Once could define Website Management Team or WMT as the authorizing body for the website so as to achieve higher goals.

  The authorities and responsibilities of the staff managing a website can be grouped based on their roles, which could be strategic or tactical or operational, which can be organized like a cross-functional team handling the website. The staff handling the strategic part of the website articulates a long-vision plan for the website and determines if those goals are being fulfilled. The tactical team’s responsibility include translating the vision of the strategic team into reality as they prioritize projects, specify the designs for the site and look after the placement for the content.

  Coming to the content, it is no doubt of high importance for a website to have interesting and fresher content constantly so as to keep the traffic coming in to the website, which is very essential for any business to grow. New and interesting content coming in to the website ensures that it is picked up by search engines as they prefer fresh content, which helps in ensuring that an active website gets as much as traffic possible. However, to upload, modify and manage content online, which could be lot, depending on the scale of the website, the company or the website owners need to have a Content Management System, also abbreviated as CMS in place. A CMS is simply, a system that allows the user or the owner of the website to upload and manage his or her content on the website while providing him with an interface to work on. CMS basically offers 2 important functions –

  - Enabling the website owner or the user to create, modify or remove content from his website without having to consult a professional in managing websites or a webmaster

  - Delivery of content in the form of updating the website once the content is added or removed.
   
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  admin 2:49 pm on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Business Process Management, also abbreviated as BPM refers to the management approach, which is holistic with a focus on the alignment of all the aspects of a company or an organization as per the needs and wants of clients. While it does promote efficiency and effectiveness of the business, it also strives to be innovative, flexible and integrate with technology as it continuously tries to improve the processes. Thus, it can be termed as “process optimization” method. It is said that BPM helps an organization in becoming more effective, more efficient and relatively more capable for a change as compared to a the traditional approach of management which is functionally focused and hierarchical. Kohlbacher’s study in 2009, which could be termed as “empirical” says that BPM is helpful for organizations for higher quality of products, speed in delivery and in marketing and greater customer satisfaction. Another “empirical” study from Vera & Kuntz in 2007 across the Hospital sector in Germany, confirms that BPM leaves a positive impact over the efficiency of an organization.

  Business Process encompasses a network or series of activities, which could be value-added and executed by the relevant collaborators or roles with the purpose of achieving the common goal in business. These business processes are of critical importance for any organization as they have the capability to generate revenue. Very often, they also represent a large proportion of expenses. BPM, with the managerial approach, considers processes as an organization’s strategic assets, which should be understood and managed to improve with the aim of delivering value added services and products to the clients. Such a foundation may be very similar with the approaches or methodologies in Continuous Improvement Process or Total Quality Management. However, BPM goes another step ahead suggesting that its approach could be enabled or supported through technology in order to ensure viability of managerial approach during stress and changing times. In fact, it would not be wrong to state that BPM’s approach integrates a company’s or an organization’s capability for change, in both human and technological way. Therefore, many pundits or articles about BPM discuss BPM across 2 viewpoints – technology and/or people. However, across the IT world, the terminology of business process is synonymous with management in middleware processes or in the integration of tasks in application software. Thus, this viewpoint could be very restrictive and thus, this limitation should be kept in mind while reading papers about software engineering, which could refer to terms like business processes or business process modeling.

  BPM could be used for understanding an organization through a wider view, which would not be otherwise seen, like relationship between the processes. Once included in the model of the process, these relationships facilitate advanced analysis and reporting. Some regard BPM as the backbone in Enterprise Content Management, also abbreviated as ECM. Since BPM lets the organizations to extract business processes through the infrastructure of technology, it takes another leap apart from automating the business processes or help in solving problems in business.
   
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  admin 11:17 am on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Digital Asset Management, abbreviated as DAM encompasses the management decisions and tasks around the areas of ingestion, cataloguing, annotation, storage, distribution and retrieval of assets, which are in digital form. Music, videos, animations, digital photographs demonstrate the target-sectors of Media Asset Management, which is the sub-category of Digital Asset Management. It primarily addresses media assets like video, audio, pictures etc. The Enterprise Content Management, abbreviated as ECM, which is a concept that came up recently also has similar functions but the difference is that it deals across a wide range of applications or fields or industries.

  DAM systems include both the hardware systems and computer software that help in Digital Asset Management process. The terminology also includes the protocols to download, rename, back up, group, rate, and archive, optimize, maintain and export files. The digital assets that are managed are usually collected to be stored in digital format. Usually, there is a fixed target version, which is referred as “essence”, which is generally the representation of highest fidelity and highest resolution. The details of the asset could be found in its metadata, which includes the description about the asset, the depth of which could vary as it is dependent on the designer’s, user’s or system’s needs. A metadata can include details like the content of the asset, encoding/-decoding means (tar, MPEG 2 or JPEG etc.), provenance or the asset’s history since its capture, access rights, ownership and a host of other details. There are templates and set standards for metadata like PBCore, DublinCore. For the systems that have asset essences of very large size like JPEG2000 and MPEG 2 for images and videos, they usually have related copies of essence, known as “proxies”. A proxy is a lower-resolution copy that represents the essence, which could be used for referencing, thus bringing down the overall requirement of bandwidth for the infrastructure of DAM system. It could be generated during the ingestion process of the asset, either at the same time or after the essence.

  Various types of systems in Digital Asset Management –

  - Systems for Brand Asset Management focus on facilitating content re-se in big companies or organizations. Mostly, the content could be sales or marketing related. Examples can include imagery of the products, logos, fonts, marketing collaterals etc.

  - Systems in Library Asset Management focus in storing and retrieving a vast amount of media assets that are not changed frequently. Examples in Library Asset Management would include the process of archiving of photos and videos.

  - Systems in Production Asset Management focus on the management of the assets while they are still in creation for production of digital media, which can include 3D feature film, video games, animation, scenes with visual effects etc.). Typically, they will have the features that encompass workflow, project management along with organising, storing and revising the digital assets, which changes frequently.

  - Services like Digital Supply Chain push out digital content (games, music videos etc.), received by Digital Retailers

  Software for Digital Asset Management could be either proprietary or open source.
   
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  admin 11:16 am on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Digital Document Management 

  The process of storing and tracking of electronic documents of any kind, which includes even the paper documents as images with the help of computer programs or a single program is called Digital Document Management, which could be abbreviated as DMS. This term overlaps with content management systems’ concepts and is often seen as a part of Enterprise Content Management, also abbreviated as ECM systems. It can also be related with Digital Asset Management, Records Management, Document Imaging and Workflow systems.

  Digital Document Management systems are commonly known to facilitate storage, metadata, versioning, security and also providing capabilities of retrieval and indexing. Read below, in brief, about these components –

  Metadata – Typically, it is stored for all the documents. It may include details like the date of storing the document along with the user ID who stored it. The DMS could suggest the user to put in metadata or may also extract it automatically through the document. Some systems can also employ optical character recognition or OCR over the scanned images. In case of original electronic documents, some DMS can do text extraction on them. The text that is extracted could be used in assisting the users to locate documents with the help of keywords or facilitating searching with full text.

  Integration – A lot of Digital Document Management Systems try to integrate the management of document directly with other applications which lets the users retrieve their existing documents from the DMS repository, directly, which lets them make changes on the document and save it in the repository without having to leave the application.

  Capture – It is the process in which the documents in paper form are converted to digital form with the use of Multifunction printers or scanners. The digital images are converted into text form, readable by machine with the use of Optical Character Recognition system or OCR, which could either be integrated with the hardware or could be used as software, which is stand-alone. The data from bubbles or check boxes are extracted with the help of Optical Mark Recognition system or OMR. Capture usually involves the process of accepting the electronic documents as also files, which computers understand.

  Indexing – In simple words, it involves tracking the electronic documents. However, it can get complex as it can provide classification from the metadata of the document, indexes of word extracted through the contents of documents. Mainly, it is there for supporting retrieval. Index topology is of critical importance in rapid retrieval of documents.

  Storage – It is the process of storing electronic documents. However, within this process, even the management of documents could be included, which encompasses details like the location of their storage, duration of the storage, migration to another storage media and also the eventual destruction of a document.

  Retrieval – It involve the retrieval of electronic documents, which are in the storage. Retrieval of documents seems to be a simple notion although it could get complex and also powerful when it comes to the electronic medium. The retrieval of single documents could be supported as the user can specify the document identifier, which is unique and letting the system use its basic index for retrieving the document.
   
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  admin 11:13 am on November 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Enterprise Content Management, abbreviated, as ECM is a process in which the documents or other contents, which talk about an organization or an enterprise’s processes is organized and stored. Enterprise Content Management encompasses the strategies, tools and the procedure that is used till all through the content’s lifecycle.

  ECM uses a combination of components, which could be also used individually without having to be incorporated in a system as wide as an enterprise. AIIM was the first to define the 5 components and also the technologies to be used for an ECM. These are namely

  - Capture

  - Manage

  - Store

  - Preserve

  - Deliver

  Capture – The process of capture involves the conversion of information, which could be on papers, into the electronic format with the help of scanning technology. Capture is also helpful in collecting files and information, which could be in electronic form already, so as to have consistency in structure, which becomes easy for management. It also encompasses the process of creating metadata, which describes the attributes about the documents so that it becomes easy to locate with the help of search technology. For instance, in medical charts, a particular patient can be found with the help of a particular data like the name of the patient, his ID, visit date etc. any of which could be used in searching the required data.

  Previously, systems in document automation used to photograph the documents to store on microfiche or microfilm. Today, optical scanners copies the paper documents into the digital format. Digital files can also be copied or can be linked to depending if they are available online. Semi-automatic and automatic capture can use XML documents or EDI, ERP or business applications or current special application systems for use as sources.

  There are various technologies for the recognition process that are used for extracting information from digital faxes and scanned documents, which include –

  Handprint Character Recognition, also abbreviated as HCR, is the process in which the text, written by hands is converted into alphanumeric values. This yields better results in case of short text, which are in fixed places than freeform text.

  Optical Character Recognition, also abbreviated as OCR recognises typeset text and converts them into alphanumeric values.

  Intelligent Character Recognition, also abbreviated as ICR, is helpful in improving recognition from both HCR and OCR as it compares data, attempts logical connections, checks with the current master data and reference lists.

  Barcode Recognition helps in decoding the standard industrial encoding of products, along with other data, which are commercial.

  Optical Mark Recognition also abbreviated as OMR does the reading of special markings like dots, checkmarks across predefined fields.

  Image Clean up does the work of straightening, rotating, adjusting the colours, zooming,

  Page-separation, alignment, de-speckling, transposition and annotations in documents.

  Forms processing refers to the process of capturing of printed forms through scanning. Very often, recognition technologies are used here as forms that are well-designed mostly enable automatic processing, which are useful in capturing electronic forms like the ones submitted through web-pages, provided that the structure, layout, contents and logic are familiar for the system of capture.