Philippine Web Hosting » Featured Article

22 Essential Tools for Testing Your Website’s Usability

admin — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 01:11:37 +0000

A site’s ease of use, or its usability, is an integral part of its success, especially with websites becoming more and more interactive, complex and packed with features. User-centered design is all about building websites that fulfill the goals and desires of its users, and at the heart of this concept is that a user must be able interact with your website effectively.

Testing usability is an art and a science. There are many times when usability testers rely on qualitative measurements, intuition, opinions and feedback from users and experience. However, there are also factors you can test quantitatively to ensure that a site is usable.

In this post, we’ll discuss six crucial factors that affect usability. For each, you’ll be provided with some tips, tools and ideas on how you can measure these usability factors.

We’ll focus on practical usability testing, so the emphasis is on pragmatic and inexpensive strategies that most site owners can do. These things apply regardless of what type of website (blog, e-store, corporate site, web app, mobile device, etc.) you’re evaluating.

Mr. Chinkee Tan won the 20th Golden Dove Award

admin — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:34:47 +0000

BNS hosting like to express warm congratulations to one of their valued client Mr Chinkee Tan for winning the 20th Golden Dove Awards.

Philippine Data Center

admin — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 02:23:37 +0000

BNSHosting now offers support for hosting on a per rack basis. This is specially suited for large applications developers that need their servers to be hosted in a Philippine Data center on a per rack, half rack or quarter rack basis. Each rack can support 42U (20 2U servers)

Each full rack in our Philippine data center offers :

Dedicated Firewall with VPN server
Up to 64 IP address per full rack mount rentals
Dedicated 24port Gigabit switch
15 amp power supply

Benefits:

1. Great Peering. Faster connections.
BNSHosting is a favored location by applications developers that are looking for Philippine data centers that provide seamless interconnectivity among the Philippines various carriers. BNSHosting boast of connectivity either directly or thru our various peering agreements to all of the Philippines’ premier telephone/carriers- PLDT, Digitel, Globe, Bayantel, Eastern Telecoms to name but a few.

2. Reliable Power Source
BNSHosting is the only Philippine Data Center that is hooked up to a utility line with 3 separate feeder source. In addition, BNShosting facility is backed up with two 50KVA diesel generators for emergencies.

3. Lower Operating Costs.

BNSHosting is the only philippine data center that is located outside of Metro Manila, which means that our lower cost location enables us to pass on the savings in terms of lowest pricing to our clients!

Interested parties are urged to contact us at team[at]bnshosting.net

4. 24×7 Operations
Our philippine data center is monitored by our team on a 24×7 basis using industry standard SNMP protocol and Solar Winds’ Orion Monitoring system. We can be reached by phone (PH, SG, US numbers), email or Live Chat on our website.

Interested Parties are urged to contact us via email (team[at]bnshosting.net) or live chat

Free Queue Management System used in Job Fair

admin — Sun, 29 May 2011 09:31:24 +0000

Queue Management System used in Job Fair for orderly process

BNS Gains ITIL RCV 3.0 Certified Professional

admin — Tue, 24 May 2011 00:27:51 +0000

Mr Wilson L. Chua, president of BNSHosting recently got 100% score on his ITIL RCV 3.0 Exam. With this certification, BNS hopes to improve the process around the implementation of new services and updates in a smooth fashion that is aligned with our clients’ business objectives.

eCommerce Workshop on expanding Online business

admin — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 04:16:14 +0000

Bitstop Inc and Digital Filipino delivers a power-packed workshop aimed at delivering both the theory and the step by step guides on setting up your online webstore that comes complete with payment gateway and shipping solution. This seminar is targetted at micro, small and medium sized businesses that are looking to increase their clients without investing in additional branches or taking up space in malls.

The seminar will be at the BFAR Auditiorium, Bonuan Binloc, Dagupan City, on May 26, 2011 from 9am to 5pm. Interested participants are urged to sign up here.

Agenda Inlcudes:

eCommerce Fundamentals, Law, Strategy
Advantages and business models on the web
Guidelines for Merchants
Mobile Commerce
Internet Branding and Advertising
Internet Payment
Practicum: Setting up your own webstore.

What Websites can do for your Business

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:35:28 +0000

Ideas sourced from http://www.vcbytes.com/setting-goals-for-your-website/

Primary Goal for your website

Primary goals are those that produce direct and tangible results. They are the goals that bring in the money and generate a return on investment. Primary goals that are appropriate for small businesses are:

Generating Leads and referrals
Selling Products Online (and globally)
Lower operational costs (compared to physical storefront)

Secondary Goals for your website
Secondary goals support the primary ones and produce less tangible benefits, but are important just the same. Good examples of secondary goals are:

Building up Credibility
Sustaining Current Customers and increase customer service
Recruiting Affiliates

Primary goals will make up for the majority of the site’s contents and secondary goals will probably be single-page contents. Questions to ask which will help in setting goals -

What actions you want your visitors to perform?
What are the secondary tasks that you want your website to do?
Will existing customers be using your site?

-Marina, vcBytes.com

One recent example of this is http://digitalfilipinocom.ning.com/video/marketing-a-brick-and-mortar If you know of others that benefited from their websites, do post them here.

Get International funding for your Web Projects

admin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 23:48:21 +0000

Lets say you have a great business idea and would like to see it through. You have assembled your team and would like to go out to the world – blazing with your game changing projects. You only have one little problem- funding. You need money. Where do you get it?

After attending the garag3.com sponsored event in Singapore, here are some ideas I was able to learn and share with you here:

Getting Donations:

http://www.kickstarter.com/

Kickstarter lists projects from the creative arts—Art, Dance, Film, Music, Photography, Publishing, and Theater—as well as projects from the diverse and creative fields of Food, Design, Fashion, Technology, Games, comics and jouranlism. People then choose which projects they would like to fund. It could be yours.

One sample success story is from the Moonchild project. Sara Chong and Chen Yanyun, was in dire need of donations in order to finally finish their animated film – “Moonchild” They aimed for only 2000 USD in 60 days, but already got more than 4000 USD in 6 days!

Getting Equity Investors:

http://www.profounder.com/
ProFounder was created to ensure all entrepreneurs have access to the resources they need through the engagement of robust, supportive communities. Traditional funding sources can be expensive, difficult to access, or not a great fit for many small enterprises. Instead, we believe that communities can be the best source for the energy, encouragement, tools and capital small business entrepreneurs need to succeed.

Getting Loans:

http://www.kiva.org/

Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending

I am sure that the Philippine government has counterpart funding scheme of some sort similar to Singapore’s Spring, MDA and IDA programs, but I am not aware of any at this point. If you have information about this, kindly share it with us here.

Website to help in choosing color combinations

admin — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:52:59 +0000

Visit this website: kuler.adobe.com to get to use their color chart suggestions for color combinations. Again this was shared in a session at the garage seminar in Singapore. Browse, search, and modify Kuler color themes directly in your CS4 application. Include them in your workflow by using the Swatches panel.

View their demo on http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-flash-professional-cs4/using-kuler-color-themes

Rapid Website Prototyping using Balsamiq

admin — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:31:05 +0000

Just learned this from attending the Garage seminar in Singapore.

For rapid site development and webpage prototyping, use this software from www.balsamiq.com . It lets you quickly add wireframes using your keyboard, drag and drop interfaces for simplicity, allows you to re-use symbol libraries to create master templates, and is fully cross-platform!

Why dont you try it out?