Smart marketing from Starbucks that cuts straight to the psychology of consumerism.
Starbucks knows a thing or two about loyalty. Gold Card members enjoy free refills as well as a periodic free drink. (Green Card members get the refill benefit, but not the free beverage after every 15 purchases. In addition, Gold Card members get a personalized card in that color and, theoretically, are addressed by name by the baristas.
Many other coffee shops offer complimentary in-store refills to all customers, but Starbucks has converted refills into a loyalty benefit. The Gold Card is a symbol of prestige, privilege and when in the presence of friends and colleagues the card is dropped like it’s hot. It’s a smart strategy because in a unique way it encourages people to buy more coffee.
Enterprises and organizations are always looking for solutions to better manage their various business activities and processes. Usually they find solutions from the IT industry that is evolving on a regular basis and has something for everyone. There are various softwares that can be bought “off the shelf” and applied directly to the various aspects of a business. However, these solutions are not always completely satisfying as they are built for a common business base. Usually, organizations have requirements that are unique to them and are not shared by any other organization. These specific requirements can only be fulfilled by custom web application development. Organizations can take help of any web application development company and get their custom solutions and enhance their business processes.Custom web application development is highly regarded as it offers a unique solution that is built around the specific requirements of the client and can be applied to those needs that are most critical and unique for a business.
There are many reasons for the popularity of custom web application development but the most prominent ones are mentioned below:
The Solution is Built After Much Research: Any reputed web application development company would first conduct extensive research and analysis of any project before actually getting started with it. The business analysts and project managers conduct an extensive fact finding expedition in which all the requirements of the client, their business, requirements of the personal using the software etc are found and clearly documented for future reference while developing application.
These findings are then applied to create a well formulated solution that actualizes client’s requirements into an applicable solution.
Flexible Solutions: The whole development procedure is required to be flexible in order to create a solution according to clients needs. Custom development offers a highly flexible development platform where developers can work and create the solution as envisioned by the client. The flexible development strategy allows the developers to apply their creativity and knowledge without much restrains and come up with innovative solutions for clients.
User Friendly Applications: The most critical thing to remember while developing custom web applications for organizations is that they should be user friendly. The qualifications and computer knowledge of those who would be finally using the application on a regular basis is essential to remember while developing applications. The regular users of the application would most probably be non IT enthusiasts who are more concerned with business activities rather than the technological aspects of how applications work. This requires the web application development company to come up with solutions that are highly user friendly and can be easily operated by general users. Not much technical knowledge must be required for operating the software. Custom applications can be easily formulated in such a manner.
Custom web application development is highly favorable for organizations requiring specific solutions for unique requirements, but care must be taken while choosing the development partner for a project. Clients should do thorough research and enquiries before offering their project to any web application development company.
Although there is no easy way to style input elements in a graceful and manageable way, with a little use of a JavaScript function we can ease this process. We’ll build it keeping in mind users who don’t have JavaScript – they will experience fall backs that work.
The problem when styling input’s
Addressing the problem is fairly obvious. In HTML, there are several tag names that differentiate from each other and are easy to style uniquely from each other. However input elements can vary from a text box, radio button, and checkbox…which doesn’t make for easily styling. If we wanted to style input, we’d have to style all three types!
Styling with Attribute Selectors
If all browsers supported attribute selectors, we could easily do the following:
Since not all browsers support attribute selectors, we can simply use className’s instead. Although clever and smart, it can get tedious real fast. Thus, the CSS would then become this:
And then we would have to manually add all those className’s to our html documents.
Use JavaScript to automate the process
In a situation of Thanks but no thanks, we can opt out of manually adding a className to every input element and do it with JavaScript. This function is fairly straight-forward and simple.
Function appendInputTypeClasses
function appendInputTypeClasses() { if ( !document.getElementsByTagName ) return; var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName('input'); var inputLen = inputs.length; for ( i=0;i<inputLen;i++ ) { if ( inputs[i].getAttribute('type') ) inputs[i].className += ' '+inputs[i].getAttribute('type'); } }
What this function does is basically adds a className of whatever type of input it is. So if it’s type is ‘text’, then it’s className will also have ‘text’! Neat eh?
And just to be safe…
We can keep our attribute selectors as a “progressive enhancement” and our final CSS will look like this:
There a multiple ways to setup WordPress, from instant install to uploading files via an FTP client. We’ve found installing WordPress via SSH to be the most efficient.
Setup Domain or Subdomain on your hosting system using Plesk or CPanel. – For plesk browse to https://domain.com:8443
If you’re setting up a new client in plesk go to clients
If you’re adding adding a subdomain go to Domains and navigate to the control panel for the specific domain.
Use Terminal or sshXgui to access shell. enter hostname, username, and password
Within Terminal or sshxgui navigate to the location of where you want to install WordPress using this command
cd /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs
Get and Uncompress the Latest Version of WordPress
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xfz latest.tar.gz
Move All Files from WordPress Back a Directory
cd wordpress/
cp -rpf * ../
cd ..
Remove the /wordpressdirectory and the compressed file since we no longer need them.
rm -rf ./wordpress/
rm -f latest.tar.gz
For permission issues you need to make sure the User and Group is set to match what you have in plesk. USER:GROUP
chown domainuser:psacln pathtofiles/* -R
Then add your database via plesk
Final step browse to your domain or subdomain and walk through the wordpress setup.
Google has finally unveiled their latest answer to Facebook… Google+, the company’s top secret social layer that turns all of the search engine into one giant social network.
At its core, Google+ is a social network. The Stream is the first thing users are introduced to. It’s much like the Facebook News Feed, allowing users to share photos, videos, links or their location with friends. Google+ categories/sections, are as follows:
Home: The search giant’s new social project will be omnipresent on its products, thanks to a complete redesign of the navigation bar. The familiar gray strip at the top of every Google page will turn black, and come with several new options for accessing your Google+ profile, viewing notifications and instantly sharing content. The notification system is similar to how Facebook handles notifications, complete with a red number that increases with each additional notice.
Circles: Most social media services (Facebook, Twitter) haven’t been successful with friend lists because they’ve been designed as a “tack-on” product rather than being integrated at every level. Circles is an attempt to address that challenge. The HTML5 system allows users to drag-and-drop their friends into different social circles for friends, family, classmates, co-workers and other custom groups. Users can drag groups of friends in and out of these circles.
Hangouts: Google’s new group chat feature. Instead of directly asking a friend to join a group chat, users instead click “start a hangout” and they’re instantly in a video chatroom alone. At the same time, a message goes out to their social circles, letting them know that their friend is “hanging out.” The result, Google has found in internal testing, is that friends quickly join. Unlike Facebook, Hangouts lets you chat with a group of friends simultaneously instead of just one.
Sparks: To spur sharing, Google has added a recommendation engine for finding interesting content. The feature, Google+ Sparks, is a collection of articles, videos, photos and other content grouped by interest. For example, the “Movies” spark will have a listing of recent and relevant content for that topic.
Photos: The photo tab takes a user to all of the photos he or she has shared, as well as the ones he or she is tagged in. It’s not just photo tagging, though: Google+ includes an image editor (complete with Instagram-like photo effects), privacy options and sharing features.
In the end, I will not be surprised if Google+ fades away faster then Google Buzz, or if it surpasses Facebook as the ultimate social network forum. Either way, I’m still waiting for my invite to Google+ to decide for myself.
