Shift Planner Software Reduces Hassle of Creating Schedules

 Personnel scheduling software is commonly used these days to dramatically reduce the time spent allocating shifts to employees. Before using this software it was not uncommon for the person responsible for creating the schedules to spend hours per week arranging shifts. Another advantage is that the possibility of error when the schedule is arranged manually is removed. 

Most shift scheduling software is web based these days which in itself has massive benefits. The software doesn’t need to be installed, and actually it can be accessed from any modern web browser. The system is really easy to access since the schedule can be viewed and managed from any internet connected computer. If employees had to contact the workplace directly or even go into the workplace this can save a lot of time since it is a simple matter of logging onto their computer.
The shift manager firstly enters what shifts should be given to employees when the next schedule is produced. The manager must enter the amount of employees required for each shift as well as the start and end time and the type of employee (for example, kitchen staff or waiter) So employees are only allocated shifts at times they can work during the week. After this is done for all shifts the system can go ahead and create a successful shift schedule for every employee. The administrator may want to make small adjustments to the automatic shift allocation before the schedule is publically released.
Using a computerised system allows for much a much more flexible shift schedule than was ever previously possible. For example, it is easy for users to transfer shifts amongst themselves (although the shift manager can control this). In addition the manager can find a replacement employee who is available to work if an employee fails to turn up for their shift.

If the shift schedule changes frequently it can be difficult for employees to remember when they are next working. Some of the more advanced shift scheduling software can send a text message to employees before they are due to begin work. The amount of missed or late shifts is far reduced after this has been implemented.

 Personnel scheduling software can be used in any workplace where the shift schedule has changes each week or a large number of part time staff. For example the business may be putting on a big event where they need extra staff. Therefore it using personnel scheduling software that drastically simplifies the task.

There are also some more advanced features that could be useful in your company. Most employees are given a minimum amount of working hours per week – most shift scheduling software automatically caters for this. If the shift manager is partially cost conscience they can create a shift schedule with the lowest possible cost. Another feature that is especially popular is the ability of employees to request what shifts they want. If an employee is given even some of the shifts they requested they are likely to be happier and work more effectively.

Apple iPod touch 16 GBis spreading like wildfire!

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Apple iPod touch 16 GB ” All in one Multimedia Player slick type gadget”

This player is the iPod touch, not the Apple iPhone. 16 GB capacity for 3,500 songs, 10,000 photos, or 20 hours of video. Up to 36 hours of music playback or 6 hours of video playback when fully charged.

3.5-inch widescreen multi-touch display with 480-by-320-pixel resolution. Supported audio formats: AAC, Protected AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV; supported video formats: H.264, MPEG-4; supported image file types: JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PSD (Mac only), and PNG.

The iPod touch has always been an amazing iPod. And with its groundbreaking technologies–including a Multi-Touch screen, the accelerometer, and 3D graphics–and access to hundreds of games, iPod touch puts an amazing gaming experience in the palm of your hand. It comes in 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB models with new volume controls and a built-in speaker. Play hours of music. Create a Genius Playlist of songs that go great together. Watch a movie. Surf the web. View rich HTML email. Find your location and get directions with Google Maps. Browse YouTube videos. And shop the App Store for games and applications.

This 16GB iPod touch lets you listen to music, watch video, surf the web, get email, and shop for games and applications on the App Store. A new contoured design and revolutionary Multi-Touch touchscreen interface combine with a brilliant 3.5″ widescreen display to make the iPod touch the funnest iPod ever.

Play music, watch video and surf the Internet with the touch of a finger. The revolutionary multitouch interface is easy to use and the built-in wi-fi comes with a Safari Web browser. Music, movies, games and the Internet — with a built-in speaker and groundbreaking technologies such as accelerometer, and 3D graphics, iPod touch puts an amazing entertainment experience in the palm of your hand.

Brush Blush

My New Website

Introduction

When I decided I needed a website for my business I had no idea of the planning involved. Like most people, I thought web design meant deciding on the graphics and the look of the pages and then by some magic it would all happen.I simply hadn’t had any exposure to the planning and build process which I now know to be extensive!

I have a friend who is in the business of SEO web design and web content management systems so I approached him for a quote. As a complete novice who is computer literate up to a point, I was amazed at the depth of initial questioning required to find out exactly what I wanted to achieve.

I had no idea about the various elements and the structure of the site and I found it mind blowing when I learnt about the amount of work involved. So I thought other people would be interested to know more about this complicated process particularly if you consider yourself a non computer person and have to get a website built. I have asked my SEO friend to supply the technical information for this article.

Stages in the Process 

Target Audience

Before building a website there are important questions to consider. I was asked who would be my target audience. Who are my customers likely to be? Would they be children, businesses, home owners, sales people, parents or teenagers and so on? If you are not clear on your target audience then you are not going to be able to set the tone of the site correctly so this is a very important consideration.

The Objective of the Website

Then I was asked, what was the purpose of my website? Did I want to sell products on line or use it to market my business and get more leads for potential customers? Maybe I would want to use the site as an online brochure to showcase my services. Another possibility was to use the website to foster a community so that I was in contact with other like-minded people, with chat rooms, online discussions and being supported by advertising on the site.

I hadn’t quite realised the scope of a website but as I was asked these questions it became clear that a lot of careful planning went into the preparation before building a website. I realised it is like any project, the majority of the work is in the preparation, a bit like decorating really!

Creating a Site Map

The importance of creating a site map is to get it clear in your mind of all the pages you will have on your website so you can prepare the content for each page and begin to design the flow through the website, such as when a user adds a product to their basket, then enters their delivery and billing address and makes the credit card payment in the correct order.

My friend who specialises in SEO UK services, says that all the best websites they have built have been where the client has planned the site out with a sitemap even before they have contacted him.

The aim is to make the site as simple to use as possible so that there are no barriers to getting into the website or making a purchase. For that reason often user name and passwords are set for the customer so that they are not put off making a purchase by having to register. How many times have you gone to buy something online and then been faced with having to choose a user name and password to create an account, and fill out all of your address details and decided not to bother in the end? Well they just lost a sale!

For a non e-commerce site things are simpler with a contact form which allows you to receive enquiries by email without publishing your email address on the website, thus avoiding spam.Web forms can also validate the information before you receive it, so ensuring that the phone number provided does not contain words, and that the email address is in the correct format, for example. These things may sound very technical to us lay-folk but I assure you everything has to be decided on before starting on the construction of the site.

Your Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is often quite a challenge because every name you initially come up with will almost certainly have been taken. Domain names ending in .com are by far the most popular and internationally recognised; the snag is that it’s very popularity means that the majority of the shorter names have probably already been registered. However, you can usually think of some domain name that is available, which is much less time consuming than trying to purchase a previously registered domain name from its existing owner, most of the time just contacting them, and getting a reply is a challenge.

So looking at names with endings such as .net; .org .co.uk or .info may be able to provide you with the domain name you want. When choosing your domain name it is very important to include one or more of your keywords if possible as this can apparently help with search engine rankings. So although the name of your business is the obvious choice for a domain name, it is not necessarily the only option. You will no doubt have heard the Hoover/vacuum cleaner story, where Hoover is actually a brand name of a certain type of vacuum cleaner, but these days most people still say they are doing the ‘hoovering’ ! This is an important concept to bear in mind when choosing your domain name as hoovers4u.com might be a much better domain name than discountvaccuumcleaners.com, also vacuum is a tricky word to spell so think about things like that too. Also how easy is it to give out your domain name over the telephone for example? Classic examples of this are paydotcom.com and Slashdot.org confusing or what?

Copy

The next stage is preparing the copy. This is not the design of your website – just the words and visuals you want to have one each of the pages. A good idea before writing the copy is to have created your site map and decided on your SEO keywords, see below sections.

Having gathered all the above information you will need to decide what imagery you want to use within the website content. As we all know, a picture speaks a thousand words and remains in people’s memory far longer than just words. It is a popular concept that people don’t read, and is even more true on the web today, so use as many images, diagrams, cartoons and illustrations as possible.

For each image you could also have a caption, as the caption of an image is the next ‘most read’ words on the page after the page title. Images and their captions need to be clickable. When you click on a picture it should take you to the next stage of the process such as the sale page or placing an enquiry if your website is for lead generation. All images should also have alternative text or alt tags. Alt tags will display the hover text when you position your mouse over the picture, but also they are used by screen readers to assist visually impaired users know what the image is about.

Website Design

Finally we come to the design of your website.

Creative web design can be one of the most difficult stages in the site build because unlike something technical, it is not a simple case of black and white, it is determined by how the person, or people, viewing the designs feel about it.

There are a number of ways to approach website design but ultimately you need to create a design brief for the designer(s) to work from. Look at other websites and your competitor’s websites to find out what you like or dislike. The design brief should give reference to the logo, any existing brand guidelines or schemes and fonts and colour schemes, and should also detail which pages of the website that the designer is being tasked with creating visuals for. See the Sitemap section below.

The very best results will be achieved by using a graphic designer, and beware – not all graphic designers are the same. A graphic designer who designs specifically for print is working in a different discipline than a graphic designer who designs for screen and specifically the web. So choose your designer carefully, look at other work that person has done and determine whether or not you like their style. It is also worth remembering that design is a personal thing, just because you have used a company before and liked their work, do you know the same person will be doing the work if you use that company again?

If you are working in the big time and budget allows, use multiple graphic designers who have all been given the same design brief and request three concept designs from each designer. If the client themselves also do a graphic design, even if it’s a back of the envelope scribble, you will then have 10 concept designs. The next step is to get them all together and select the preferred elements from each design. Then give the work to the preferred graphic designer to work up as the final artwork. Once you have reviewed the final visuals the artwork files will then be provided to the developer, usually in layered Photoshop files.

The artwork should be finalised and agreed on by everybody before construction of the site begins. Otherwise it can lead to costly and time consuming changes and frustration for both the developer and the client.

Navigation

Another important consideration when building a website is how you want your navigation to work. You can have links within the content of your website, in the text, so there are not just links from the menu. You will need to decide whether the links will open into a new window, retaining your original page open or just change the page to the one clicked on. Next time you go online, you will realise how much thought has gone into the way in which a website works.

Production

Finally the preparation has been done and the site is ready to be built. Now for the more technical stuff! You will need to have decided which programming language to use to build the website. There are two main types for developing a website, one is Unix based, and the other is Windows based. Each one has advantages and disadvantages. If you are starting from scratch then it probably won’t matter, so you can go with the preference of your professional doing the work. My website is built on the Unix platform (apparently!) which is the same as many of the more well known websites such as Ebay, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Also your website hosting must be compatible with the development language with which your website is built in.

Work In Progress

The best way to build a website and be able to monitor work in progress is on the web server where the site is ultimately going to live. This way, those involved in reviewing the work can see work in progress and provide feedback throughout the development.

Going live

The moment of excitement comes when your site finally goes live and you see the results of all the thought that has gone into the whole process.

When the demolition company website for my firm eventually went live I was really pleased, but also relieved that it was eventually done!

As soon as the site has gone live there is no substitute for real world testing though, so ask as many of your friends and colleagues to view the website from their own offices and give you their thoughts.

Accessibility and Compliance

The website has to meet the current standards for website coding and doing so insures that disabled users, such as the visually impaired, can still access the entire website if they are using a Braille web browser. It is also a good idea to also discuss conformance moving forward, particularly if you have a web content management system, because and accessible of compliant site may become un-accessible after six months of being edited by you if you do not add or edit the website content in an accessible manner.

Unforeseen Items

There are always things that arise in any project which you suddenly realise you have forgotten, so no matter how well the website designer prepares and asks the right questions, there is bound to be a last minute change of mind or addition to the site. The main aim is to minimise the number of glitches that might arise because they aren’t calculated in at the start and they could cause extra costs and delays on the date of the website going live.As a general rule it is always a good idea to get he site live to the original plans and then look at an update after it has gone live, unless it is a very small deviation from the initial plans.

Reporting and Monitoring

Once your website is up and running, you might like to know how many people visit your website and from that number how many actually buy the products or place an enquiry. From these statistics you can work out the ratio of hits to sales and gradually make changes to improve the ratios. There are some reliable statistics packages such as Google Analytics or Web-Stat.com which allow you to collect and review website visitor data in near real time. All you need to do this is to have a small block of code inserted into each web page on your site.

Another useful service that Web-stat.com provides is to monitor the website and warn you by email or text message if the site goes down.

Marketing

Once the website is live there are lots of things you can do to market your product or service. The first step is to submit it to the search engines and at the same time write articles, and press releases. Getting links to the site from forums, blogs and other social networking spaces are other options. For more on this subject ask your designer about SEO, remember that’s search engine optimisation.

How to be Found on the Web

One of the first questions I was asked was, ‘Do you want it to be found by Google the main search engine?’ If I did then there was a whole process of establishing Keywords. So finding the best keywords are vital if you want to be found in Google. He says there are two main types of keywords. The first is the trophy, or generic, keyword for the industry which in my industry is simply ‘demolition’. The second kind of keyword is the long tail keyword. These are not searched for as frequently but if you can get a match then they are much more likely to convert into customers. A good example of this in my industry is ‘factory demolition company Derby’. So it is very important to do a lot of research on keywords to find both those that are the most popular and the most specific. Generally most users only look at the top ten results so you will want to get your website promoted so as to get on this page for your chosen keywords. By using a keyword research tool such as the keyword lookup in the Google Web Master Tools kit you can find the single most popular keyword for your industry.

Conclusion

Wheww. What an amazing amount of work! I hadn’t realised when I started the process of getting a website up and running, how complicated it all is and how many factors you have to consider before even designing the website. The word web design is really a misnomer, as people often think it’s just about the graphic design on the home page, and the branding of the product. Unless you are a computer whizz, most people have no idea how much goes into designing and building a website and the systems that support the work you want it to do. I hope that this article gives you an understanding and insight into the whole process of website development from start to finish.Next time you type in a web address or click on a link to a website, remember all the above work that has probably gone into it!

 

Information about SSL certificates for business.

SSL Certs were created to validate the genuineness of a web site because it is so easy to counterfeit a business on the web. In 1995, when they were invented, a standard SSL certs provided adequate protection for consumers. SSL certs secure your website and protect transactional data. Need a secure logon for your site or online store? SSL certificates must be signed by a trusted authority or more commonly known as Certificate Authorities (CA). CA’s confirm your identity by adding their signature to your SSL certs.SSL Certificates bind an identity to a pair of electronic keys that are used to encrypt and decipher digital information. A public key encrypts the information, whereas a private key decrypts the information.

Security remains a moving target, however, as researchers have also started to find weaknesses in SHA1. Although there are no attacks as advanced as those against MD5, it is likely that SHA1 will also be increasingly threatened by collision attacks as research in this area continues. Secure Sockets Layer, SSL, is the standard security technology for creating an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between our web server and your browser remains private and secure. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology protects your Web site and makes it easy for customers to trust you. SSL creates an encrypted link between a web server and a web browser to ensure that all data transmitted remains private and secure.

Certs can be reissued as needed in development situations. Certs may need to be reissued when upgrading or changing server software or operating platform; if migrating your site from one server to another, or if an existing private key has been lost, destroyed or otherwise inadvertently overwritten. After re-validating cert information online, the new cert is issued immediately and is valid from the date of reissue until the original expiration date. Certs are issued by certificate authorities (CAs), which are either trusted because they are a top-level, or root, authority or because they have been granted the ability to issue certificates by a root CA. All Web browsers maintain a list of trusted root certificate authorities as a way to verify certificates issued by those CAs.

Web servers have been built to support it and web browsers have been built to use it. SSL provides the ability to secure customers transactions transparently without the customer having to do a thing! Web server certificates (also known as secure server certificates or SSL certificates) are required to initialize an SSL session.

Google Search Web Site

Google, Google, Google that is all you ever seem to see on the Internet these days and there is a reason why. It has the largest directory of just about any and every site that can be found. Try it, go to a Google search engine and see if there is something you cannot find! That is a tongue twister, sorry. (wink)

Google homepage is the search engine I use for everything. Forget about Yahoo! You have to pay for stuff with them while Google offers nearly everything for free. Want to build your own web site and don’t have any money? Google will give it to you for free. You may not have noticed it yet, but if you look in the upper right corner of your Google homepage depending on your computer settings, it will say “iGoogle” and “sign in”. It won’t give one way links though, but that’s pretty much the only limitation.

If you do not have an account, after clicking sign in you can register for a new account and then up where you signed in, click the “my account” button. From there you can set your profile up and at the bottom you should see a list of stuff to try. Want your own blogger account, get it there. Get webmaster tool, analytics, Gmail, sites, Picasa web photo album etc…

It basically has everything you could possibly need to either build your own web site, get in touch with other people with Talk (Google instant messenger) and even have online meetings with Google Docs… again it is all for free. I am a full on Googleholic! I get my news updates from CNN, weather alerts, Einstein quote of the day, Bible verse of the day, Things to ponder, current moon phases, a clock (lol) and Google translator. C’mon, I even get to customize the theme on my homepage. Right now I am using the “rainforest theme”.

Besides Google being the top search engine on any web browser, it also makes making money on the internet easy. Sign up for Google Adsense. From everything thing that I have tried Adsense actually pays and then they give you suggestions on how to make your web site better and get more traffic which translates to more money. They offer so much that it is hard to turn away.

Now personally, Google if you are reading this sorry, I am loyal but there are some things I think could be better. Like Gmail. I don’t really like Gmail and the instant messenger is weak because you can’t use a webcam. Other than that it is definitely the best search engine in the world and I don’t think I am exaggerating.

Before I switched to using iGoogle my internet use pretty much consisted of checking my mail and I don’t remember what I use to use as my search engine but I do know that my internet use has increased and I have even become my own webmaster and I did it all for free, well… accept for the stuff I would bump into that I found on the web that I couldn’t resist. Let’s face it… I think Google even put a tracker in my head because I think they know me better than I know myself. This is why Google is so successful.