Maximizing Productivity with Remote Teams

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Working remotely is now becoming a necessity. The global health emergency we have all experienced over the past few months has expedited the transition to virtual teams across all types of organisations who have until now been reluctant to commit to such a radical change. It has now become a critical factor for business continuity in addition to the already known benefits of accessing the best talent wherever they might live and increasing flexibility and productivity for colleagues.

That said, managing projects using remote teams brings its own set of challenges on top of an already difficult task. There is an extra dimension to the standard procedures for making assignments, managing resources, tracking progress and updating stakeholders when they may be in different countries and time zones.

Virtual project management is the process of managing projects via remote or virtual teams. When teams are distributed across different time zones, they still need to get assigned tasks and that work must be monitored and tracked to make sure it stays on schedule. As more teams work from home, virtual project management has become more defined.

Not having physical contact with your team creates new obstacles that project managers must overcome.  The good news is that project management tools have for some time been moving from analog to digital, and with that transition increasing efficiencies and productivity. So, the move to virtual project management is not the great leap it might at first appear.

As organisations become more accustomed to working with teams who are not co-located, they’ve also warmed to the idea of virtual project managers. This has been facilitated by technology advances that have made it easier to manage remote workers. The development of a virtual office has made the transition to virtual project management that much smoother.

The generational change of workers is also at play in the rise of virtual project management. New workers are entering the workforce, but older workers who are able to adapt are staying in with the help of virtual teams. This creates an even more productive team, one that is energized by youthful enthusiasm and new ideas, but anchored by the experience and skills of older team members.

The acceptance of virtual teams has now reached a tipping point but that’s not to say that we are in unchartered territory. Many organisations globally have been early adopters of the virtual cool-aid and there is a wealth of expertise and experience available to organisations now making the journey. iEngageIT’s project managers have been managing virtual teams and delivering virtual projects successfully for over 25 years and offer the benefits of that experience to any organisation whether  just making the transition now, or planning to extend their existing capability.

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Web scrapping – Is your business benefiting?

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What is Web Scraping?

If you’ve ever copied the data off a website and used it then you’ve scrapped the data manually. When you automate it to get data intelligently and efficiently you use a software tool called as Web Scrapper.  Once the data is scraped, web scrapper will usually then export it in a more convenient format such as an Excel spreadsheet or JSON. Depending upon suitability, content of a page may be parsed, reformatted, searched its data copied into a database etc.

Web scraping or web harvesting solutions range from the ad-hoc, requiring human interactions, to totally automated systems that are eligible to transform entire web sites into structured data.

Web scrapping typically involves two stages

  • fetching pages (by crawler)
  • and extracting data from it (by scrapper)

web  crawling is an important component of web scraping, to fetch pages and data for later processing. Once fetched, then extraction can take place.

Why Web Scraping?

It’s a common knowledge that Data is ‘King’. The true power of web scraping lies in its ability to build and power some of the world’s most revolutionary business applications. ‘Transformative’ doesn’t even begin to describe the way some companies use web scraped data to enhance their operations, informing executive decisions all the way down to individual customer service experiences.

Some obvious examples of their frequent use are:

  • Real Estate listings scraping (in the real estate industry)
  • Scraping product data to build price comparison tools
  • Scraping website for new lead information
  • Using web scraping to assist with website transitions
  • Social Media scraping for sentiment analysis
  • Scraping stock prices for market analysis

 

Conclusion:

  • Web scraping is legal in general and won’t get you into trouble.
  • follow some basic rules like
  • Don’t overwhelm an online server
  • Don’t steal content
  • Give due credit to source of information
  • Do not download copies of documents that are clearly not in public domain.
  • If the information you scraped is not within the property right please take due permission to share it. Then share it out there for others to reuse it.
  • If you wrote an online scraper to access it, share its code (e.g. on GitHub) so others can have the benefit of it.
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Best practices for responsive web design

 

Every new trend comes up in each field and web technology is a very emerging trend of this decade. Website is the mirror of every business so it’s more important to follow the best practices at the time of development.

In today’s vast and saturated online world, with stunning user experience, creative web design aren’t just sufficient things to have, they are a necessity for the website. Therefore today we spotlight on the best practices which should be followed at the time of web designing.

Responsive website

Responsiveness as the name suggests, responds to user’s viewport, device or platform.  The diversity in the device which is used to browse the website is growing larger. It’s too important to follow best practices that can adjust to any screen size.

When we are thinking about different devices the features and capacity are also different so we need to focus on the following points:

 

Speed of website  – Different devices have different processing power therefore the speed of a website is most important. The website always needs to be faster which will make the website compatible with every device.

Speed of the website depends on the website content and file which loads in the browser. To optimize website there are following best practices which are needed to be considered at the time of designing.

  • Minimize CSS and JS files – Website code should be reusable which made the file size smaller.
  • Gzip – Add gzip to the website which reduces the size of the file sent from the server.
  • Caching – Enable caching of the website so it will reduce the response time and make website fast.
  • CDN (content delivery network) – CDN boosts the speed of the website by caching content in multiple locations around the world. CDN servers are typically located closer to end-user than the host server or original server.

Responsive images –Images are a major factor and can make or break a website. There are so many ways to make the image responsive.

  • Using CSS property – We can make the image responsive by setting max-width using percentage.Responsive Image But this feature has a downside too. If image size is 3780px and our image container size is 700px then it takes more time to load image and website contain more images which make the site very slow. We can overcome this issue in the next point.
  • Different image sizes using the srcset attribute –We can add different size images in one single HTML tag using srcset attribute. We will use this attribute to tell the browser about different image sizes.Responsive image

Call to action button – CTA should be easy to find on the website. Call to action buttons are used to guide users for your goal conversions. It’s a part of the website where the user needs to click in order to take the action you want them to take. To create an effective call to action button that grabs user attention, follow the best practices which are as follows:

  • Stop designing the page, start designing user flows – as per the conversion sciences team, mobile CTA organized according to their priority. For example on the eCommerce site, you should order these call to action button like: “Continue shopping “, “View cart” and finally “checkout “. The order should be followed by eye movement from top to bottom. This Design flow allows us to create a positive user experience and profitable for the business.
  • Styling – Whatever the purpose of the button, but it needs to be more attractive. The designer has many reasons to style button but the end-user perspective is more valuable. The standard buttons are easier to locate on every device.

Above are the best practices to make the website more responsive & Interactive. We at iEngageIT, believe & follow the same practices and that’s the reason we have a large number of happy & satisfied clients who trust us & in return we favour them back with customized software services. We at iEngageIT listen to the client & understand the business, its need & its goal. Accordingly, we provide customised services & make sure we bring value to our client & their business. We have friendly & professional staff who always comes up with new & innovative ideas so as to help the business grow & not just this we believe in strong communication between client to iEngageIT & vice versa & in return you get responsive & timely services. Now that’s why we propose businesses to join hands with us & let us assist you with your business to achieve global heights.

 

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