Congratulations, you’ve recently graduated high school. That’s a great achievement. You completed twelve years of education and now the time has come to search for a good paying full time job. you begin your search.
Are you finding that job search to be more difficult than you believed?
Would you like a better job than working at that fast food restaurant?
Have you been told by many employers that they would like to hire you if you only had those important job skills?
Have employers emailed you that you don’t have the right experience?
Would you like a profitable solution to this problem that will not take a lot of time and cost a lot of money?
Would you want that solution to have career advancement and give you excellent raises?
An outstanding solution to your problem is to enroll in a career or vocational school, which teaches information technology. According to the United States Department of Labor, information technology is leading the job hiring fields today, because the education is performance based, which is what employers are looking for in their new hires. Information technology training is based upon training, performance and certification. This training does not require a college degree. Many students who get a job in this field wind up working for a company that will pay all or part of your college tuition after working for that company for more than one year. If you have heard or read about attending a vocational school will stop you from ever attending college in the future, this statement is truly a myth. Many students use vocational training as a steppingstone to finance future debt free college degrees. Many employers, especially colleges and universities offer tuition free classes to university employees who have been employed for a certain length of time. This is one way to graduate from college with no student loans. A great example of one university offering free tuition to college employees is: Loyola Marymount University located about three miles from our ABCO Technology campus. UCLA and all community colleges offer education to their employees at a substantial discount or totally free!
What certifications will get that great job?
If you are a person who enjoys repairing and solving problems with a computer, the CompTia A+ certification is just for you. The A+ is completed in six weeks. After completing this training you can look for that better paying job as a computer repair specialist or as a desktop support technician.
After repairing computers, you can advance to higher paying fields of networking, which include the MCSE or Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert and the Cisco Certified Network Associate. With a little experience and a few certifications your job title will be network administrator.
High school graduates can also train and certify in other fields of information technology including Web Development, database administration, and computer programming.
Students certifying in web development build websites, which all businesses need to advertise their services. The database field has the job title of database administrator, which involves handling large amounts of corporate information. Computer programmers write games, design smart phone applications and write programs for Windows and other operating systems.
Some of the certifications listed in this article will take six months to complete.
Get Hired and Get To Work
Vocational training is in high demand by countless employers because the training is performance based. Employers substitute your performance for countless years of experience when you fill out that important job application, which lists your performance based skills. Employers in 2018 want to view at a glance what you can do for them. Businesses are spending less money on training. A certification in information technology saves companies countless training dollars spent in time and money.
ABCO Technology is an ACCSC accredited institution. When an institution is accredited students may apply for financial aid and receive help with their education if they qualify.
Students enrolling at ABCO Technology receive a diploma instead of a certificate. The diploma is highly valued when placed next to that important certification.
If you would like to receive more information about how a vocational education will jump-start your job career, contact ABCO Technology.
You can reach our campus by phone at: (310) 216-3067 Monday through Friday from 9 Am to 6 PM.
Email us for information at: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Get those important information technology job skills today!
One of the biggest challenges parents face in 2018 is the fact that jobs for millennials or teenagers are very hard to find.
The reasons are simple.
First of all the #US is moving toward a #skills oriented economy and teenagers or millennials haven’t had the opportunity to train for a skilled job.
Second the skills based economy with political pressure is artificially forcing wages higher than the market will bear. The higher wages forces teenagers out of the conventional restaurant jobs, which they have held for the past 100 years.
The solution to this challenge is to train your son or daughter to ensure they have an employable skill early in life.
One skill, which has high demand and job growth is computer repair. When we talk about computers, we are talking about laptops, iPhones and iPads. All of the mentioned devices will breakdown. The device itself could malfunction or simply be dropped.
A training course and certification, which trains millennials to compete in the computer repair field is the #CompTia A+. Training for the CompTia A+ or a course in computer repair can be accomplished in approximately 78 hours.
After the training is completed, the candidate passes two exams to obtain the CompTia A+ certification. These exams are: 901 for hardware, which covers the building of a computer and 902, which covers all of the operating systems, which can be installed on that computer. The CompTia A+ also covers setting up a small network, installation of printers and installation of online faxes.
Employers are looking for young people who can fix computers. Jobs come in many forms. Websites including Indeed and Glass door have many listings for young candidates with the A+ computer repair certification.
#ABCO #Technology teaches courses in networking and cyber security. Our school is ideal for the teenager who wants an employable skill. The CompTia A+ is a major part of this training. Call our campus between 9 Am and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email all questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE # 588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
The design of a company’s website plays an important function in attracting prospects and customers, generating leads, and potentially creating satisfaction.
Generally speaking, a website has between 15 to 30 seconds to convey a favorable impression about a company, as well as the products and services offered, to online visitors; therefore, paying attention to the site’s design is a key factor in how well it performs.
Design Basics
To some extent, a website’s design will be influenced by a company’s industry and culture. As an example, a website for a law or accounting firm will likely have a more serious design approach than a party planner or an ice cream parlor.
An effective website blends design, text, images, and video to provide a good overview of a company and what it offers. A website’s images can highlight both team members and the workplace, as well as provide a personal touch that helps differentiate a company from its competitors.
To avoid increasing a website’s startup or “load time,” it’s a good idea to optimize images for online display. Because the screen resolution is lower than print, using a “save for web” command in a photo-editing program reduces the “density” of the image so it will load more rapidly. There are also many plugins available for WordPress-designed sites that will aid in optimizing load time for pages and images.
It’s also helpful to consider readability as a site’s design is prepared. Dark text on a light background, for instance, is easier to read. It’s also an excellent idea to consider the target market’s age — if your target market skews over 40, making text easy for on-screen reading will help improve your site’s usability for visitors. Font type is also a key factor in the design of a website. Fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, or Georgia are all easy-to-read fonts that can be read clearly through a variety of browser types.
Improving Search Results
A website’s content is a critical factor in how the site is indexed by search engines. Thus, it is important to make sure that headlines and content relate to products and services offered.
Consider what keywords or phrases customers are likely to use, as they search for offerings that a company specializes in, and include those phrases in page titles and headlines. Avoid repeating keywords over and over, since search engines may penalize for “keyword stuffing;” yet make sure that the site describes the company and what it does, utilizing the terms necessary to find the website online.
Prepare for Scanners
Since most visitors scan a site quickly (think 15 seconds), instead of reading it carefully, it’s helpful to break up text with headlines, bulleted lists, and images. Keeping sentences and paragraphs short is another helpful way to improve the appearance and readability of a website. Important elements and the company’s contact information should appear “above the fold,” which is the portion of the screen visitors can see without scrolling down. Most people won’t bother to look for information that’s not directly in front of them.
Navigation Drives Results
While most people think of how a site looks, good design also includes navigation menus that are straightforward and easy to understand. Therefore, a web designer should make it as easy as possible for visitors to find their way around the site, since confused visitors will likely hit the back button instead of exploring a website further.
Some navigation tips:
•Place a company brand/logo in the upper left corner of every page, and make that logo a clickable link to the home page.
•Keep navigation menu items to a minimum. Professional web designers suggest using seven items or less on a navigation menu.
•The navigation menu should use descriptive titles. Summarize what a user will find on the specific page. Rather than have a menu item called “Team,” consider expanding it to “Meet Our Team.”
•Keep design usability in mind. A user should never have to go more than three levels deep (or three clicks away) from the homepage to find information.
Enlisting the Help of a Professional
Depending on goals for the website, enlisting help from a professional web designer could be a profitable investment in making the website as appealing and functional as possible. If you’re technically inclined, or wish to tackle the site’s appearance yourself, most web hosting companies offer a wide range of website templates designed for small businesses. Additionally many website building companies offer templates for little to no cost. WordPress and Wix are just two of the well-known companies that offer simple solutions for web design that don’t cost a fortune or require a programmer to code.
When working with a professional, it’s important to ask if you’ll have the ability to update or add content yourself (and how easy those updates will be to perform). If you have to rely on the web designer for future changes, additional costs will be incurred and possibly delays in having the website updated. Instead, ask the designer to include content management features so you or your colleagues will be able to update the site yourselves.
If you prefer to do it yourself with a design template, customize the images or graphics to give the site a more personal look and feel that better matches your company and its personality.
Either way, remember that creating a website is not a one-time project. You’ll have to plan for frequent updates as you develop more content and change your design periodically to prevent the site from appearing out of date.
#ABCO #Technology teaches a comprehensive program for web design. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
good web design = success. Become a successful web design professional today! #Website
There is an old saying, which dominates the marketing and search engine industries. This saying states “content is king.”
Content comes from information. If content is king, then information is power.
The question of how to use this information begins with its storage and access. Information is stored in columns, rows and tables, which makes up what information technology experts call a relational database. The term relational means one piece of information relates to another. This information must be easily accessible, have the flexibility to be manipulated into a report and the presentation should be in such a way that other relationships can be drawn from that information.
One occupation, which has the job of making all of this activity take place is that of an Oracle database administrator. Oracle, handles the nation’s largest databases including those from the US government, major educational institutions and Fortune 1,000 companies. Google uses a customized version of Oracle for its search engine.
#Oracle #Database administrators are responsible for the accessibility, security and safety for a company’s information.
This includes client records, financial data, product information and all other documents needed for an organization’s successful operation. Oracle database administrators do not have to possess a four-year college degree. The person entering into this occupation must be well organized, enjoy categorizing information and have a passion for making that information accessible to those persons who need to use it. Security is also a major concern. The database administrator will become proficient with Oracle’s database security protocols and procedures.
The Oracle database administrator is accomplished when students train and pass two Oracle certification exams. The first exam a student must successfully complete is that of Oracle Certified Associate. The #OCA is usually completed after eight weeks of training in an accredited Oracle class.
The final exam, which is the Oracle Certified Professional, which carries the title of database administrator is usually passed after three additional months of training.
Oracle database administrators are experiencing a wide variety of job openings throughout the country. The job sites of Indeed and Glass door show the average salary for Oracle database administrators at approximately $93,000 per year. As you gain experience in this occupation, your salary will increase. Oracle has specialized databases, which include Oracle financials, Oracle medical and Oracle biological. Students can specialize in one of these databases after passing the Oracle certified Professional exam. Naturally specializing in a specific field will mean an increase in salary.
If you are interested in training for this exciting career, contact #ABCO #Technology. You can reach our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all qualified students.
#ABCO #Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Database administrators are in demand, train and certify for a job today!
Google has withdrawn ratings from Adwords extensions. So you will no longer be able to add these to your ads. Why are they taking this action and does it signify a wider problem with ratings? More importantly, does this mean local results or seller ratings
#Google #AdWords allows you to add something called extensions to your ads. Extensions are additional pieces of information that are free to add and can boost your click through rate. Some examples are:
•Sitelinks •Call outs •Structured snippets
If you’re not already using extensions, then you should be! It’s a great way of increasing CTR (by around 10%) and at a point where more advertisers are using them than not, you’re going to be hit increasingly hard if you’re not using them.
Unfortunately, like many things with Google, you can suggest what you want them to show but they decide whether or not they want to show it.
Reviews Extensions
Google didn’t source these reviews themselves. You added them, linking to the source, and the Adwords team just reviewed them before they were allowed live.
Although Google have given little reasoning behind why they have removed them, it seems it might just have been a badly designed system.
For a start on Google’s part it has got to be resource intensive, with team members having to click through, find reviews with matching text and approve. Although it’s likely this was partially automated, if even only a tiny percentage required manual review then it would be a large drain on resources.
This brings us to the next issue: legitimacy. Could you just make the reviews up? Well yes, you could. If you wanted to add a fake review to your site, then include it in the site link there is little Google could do to tell. This is the problem with pretty much all reviews and leads me on nicely to the final point.
Was the review representative? The reason why we trust a review from an unknown source is that it correlates with many other reviews. With this system you could just cherrypick whichever review you wanted, so even if the product is terrible someone, somewhere, is bound to like it and leave a good review. Which you can then legitimately use in your adwords extension.
Finally, you might be clicking on an ad for a product but for the sitelinks reviews, Google encouraged you to utilise those which reflected the site as a whole:
Reviews should focus on your business as a whole, as opposed to a review about a specific product or service. This makes the reviews relevant to just about all of your ads.
So you the user could well think that a general review such as “Absolutely excellent, will be purchasing again” is about the specific link they see in the ad. But it’s not, it’s about the site as whole and may be validating an otherwise awful product.
Does this mean there is a wider problem with reviews?
Reviews themselves have come increasingly under attack. If like myself you use shopping sites such as Amazon and have been doing so for a while, you’ll have seen what I mean. There are so many fake reviews, paid-for reviews, and reviews created by third-party companies paid to create them.
This problem has been created by the effectiveness of reviews, if customer is purchasing a third party product through your site you’ll want to make sure that the best products are shown first. This means using reviews to help weight products in how you rank them. Which in turn means vendors are more and more incentivized to have the best reviews possible. Which is fine, except that not all vendors have great products, but they still want great reviews.
So what’s the solution? What about other ratings-based extensions?
Reviews as part of AdWords extensions are in principle a great idea, but there some real fundamental issues with these which need to be resolved. AdWords needs to strike a balance between what the advertisers – who are after all paying for that advert – want to display and what is a fair representation for the consumer.
These means really they should be looking at a more independent source of reviews or way of gathering these. This is what they do with both seller ratings and consumer ratings.
Seller ratings are an automated (opt out) extension which look like this:
These are shown on search network text ads, or as an abridged version in Google shopping results. Seller ratings show a star rating and text snippet which they gather from a long list of third party review sites and they only show in certain circumstances;
In most cases, seller ratings only appear when a business has 150 unique reviews and a composite rating of 3.5 stars or more.
Consumer ratings are another automated extension and are taken directly from Google customer surveys which they ran for specific industries. So, these will only appear on certain results where they have data:
Google also use a star rating in reviews within local results and although having these linked to a Google account negates some of the problems, they are still pretty open to abuse. Many businesses only have a small number of reviews, meaning just one or two added from friends or family accounts might be all that’s needed to influence a consumer’s decision.
AdWords needs to use a service which is more long standing with a large number of reviews already present and which have their own controls in place to ensure these are legitimate, much like they do with their seller reviews extension. However, even dedicated review sites have massive problems with this. Like the guy who made his shed the top rated restaurant on trip advisor. In short you can’t trust reviews.
Adverts fall under advertising guidelines in both the UK and US where if ads are misleading they have to be removed. Publishers who regularly break these rules or are deemed to be not doing enough to prevent misleading ads can be fined. So AdWords must adhere to a higher standard than the sites it would be taking the source content from, hence the potential problem.
So was Google right to remove them and will we be seeing them again?
In my opinion reviews are becoming less of a trustworthy metric. The ability of bad actors to place them has far outstripped that of companies to ensure they are legitimate. This might be down to the cost / benefit being vastly different from both sides. For an individual company a set of good reviews could be the difference in zero revenue for a product, or $1000’s. So spending several hundreds or even thousands just on ensuring they have good reviews is well worth it. For a review site though, they simply cannot afford to spend anywhere near an equivalent amount on checking the reviews for an individual product. In short there is a lot more total effort going into making fake reviews than there is in removing them. Google tries to negate this with automated extensions by using a wide variety of sources, or their own survey results which they have more control over.
The way the Reviews extension was implemented in AdWords was pretty much asking for trouble. Then again, while there are better ways, I still don’t think there are any that are ‘good enough’. We’ll have to wait and see what Google does in the longer term and if it decides to make any changes in the organic results or to the other automation tools on their site.
#ABCO #Technology teaches courses for E-commerce and web design. Contact our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE # 588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Google has been testing the new version of search console in beta for a few months and will now start making it available to all verified users. Users will receive a message once their site is available in the new Search Console.
Functionality will include redesigned Search Performance and Index Coverage, as well as AMP status and Job Posting reports. Users will welcome the expansion of data in Search Performance to 16 months, making it easier to analyze long term trends. Google has also added the ability to share reports internally within an organization, to simplify internal knowledge sharing and collaboration.
While #Google continues work on adding features the two versions will exist side by side, and users will be able to move easily between the old and new Search Console via links in the navigation bar.
Search Performance
Search performance is similar to the current Search Analytics. It has 16 months of data, which is something users have been requesting. The data will also be made available via the Search Console API in the near future.
Search Performance
Search Console gives full details about the Search Performance feature.
Index Coverage
The updated Index Coverage report gives a comprehensive insight into how your site is being indexed by Google and makes it easy to find tools to test and resubmit URLs. Google says:
“It shows correctly indexed URLs, warnings about potential issues, and reasons why Google isn’t indexing some URLs. The report is built on our new Issue tracking functionality that alerts you when new issues are detected and helps you monitor their fix.”
Index Coverage
Google’s screenshot outlines the process in these numbered steps:
1.Clicking any error URL brings up page details and links to diagnostic tools to help understand the source of the problem.
2.The new Share button in Search Console lets you share the report within your team to facilitate a fix.
3.Select a flagged issue and click on Validate Fix to confirm you’ve resolved the problem. Google will recrawl and reprocess the URL with higher priority.
4.Google says the Index Coverage report works best for sites that have submitted a sitemap. You can use the sitemap filter to focus on an exact list of URLs.
Search Console’s report on Index Coverage gives more details.
The AMP status and Job Posting reports also focus on providing error data. You’ll be able to see which AMP urls have errors, get diagnostic help, and resubmit once fixed. For those with job listings on their site, the Job Posting report will show indexing stats and any errors.
For full details on the new Search Console rollout, see Google’s blog post.
#ABCO #Technology teaches a comprehensive program for web design. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, ca. 90304
The State of Mobile User Experience By Charles Pascal
Summary: Ten years from the original iPhone, the field of mobile UX has finally reached maturity.
The original iPhone was released in June 2007. In late 2009, when ABCO Technology wrote the research for the first article of our mobile report, most people still had primitive mobile devices with horrible user experience. At the time, anything that was half-way decent was a pleasant experience compared with the misery caused by most mobile devices and most mobile sites.
Three years ago, when the second article of the mobile report came out, we did a thorough evaluation of the state of mobile usability. At the time, we were happy to report that mobile usability was no longer an oxymoron— and we finally saw many sites and apps with decent usability. With the new third 2018 article of our mobile-UX research report, we continue to see progress.
Today, most mobile sites and applications offer a good user experience. There are still the occasional glitches and sacrifices of usability in favor of aesthetics, but we can confidently say that the field has progressed in the past two years since the last article. Most of the egregious errors are not there anymore. When we tried to update the examples for many of our mobile guidelines, we discovered that the companies had fixed their problems and some of the issues that we discussed were no longer common. Yet we also encountered revivals of problems we thought almost extinct two years ago. In the business of usability, mistakes (like trends) tend to be cyclic: one generation identifies them and creates design patterns that avoid them, but later generations, no longer having witnessed the UX problem, make the same error again in their quest for refreshed designs. It’s always two steps forward and one step backward.
Content vs. Chrome
The importance of prioritizing content over UI elements (that is, chrome) was one of the lessons learned from responsive design. The hamburger-menutrend was a consequence of that lesson: designers were trying to minimize the number of UI elements visible on the screen because these took away precious content space. Two years later, designers continue to value the screen real estate on mobile devices — but they’ve reached measure in hiding the chrome. A break has been put on the hamburger trend. It’s still very widespread (as we argue elsewhere, hidden navigation is the only option for some sites), but many have understood that it should not be used if a better pattern (such as a visible navigation bar) is available.
Prioritizing content over chrome has trickled in other design areas: for instance, we no longer see results pages headed by fat filters that occupy half the page. Or, the nested-doll pattern, which involved having users make a sequence of selections through multiple pages before encountering content, is no longer as popular as it used to be. At least some companies have started to understand that it’s better to flatten the navigation structure on mobile: show people a variety of content right away and allow them to later narrow it down to a specific category of interest.
Walgreens.com used the nested-doll navigation pattern, which used to be popular in the past but is becoming less widespread. It required users to make 4 category selections before they could see any products. However, Walgreens tried to create the illusion of content by adding product images to the some of the category-selection pages, which suggests that designers were likely aware of the tedium of this category-based design.
#Google Express for iPhone: Instead of listing all the subcategories under Grocery, a few items were displayed under each. Instead of using a category-based design where users had to decide among different categories, the app rightly used a content-based design.
Use of Gestures
Gestures solve the problem of too much chrome on a too small screen, but they are notoriously hard to discover and learn. Some of the original gesture enthusiasm (embodied by gesture-only apps such as Clear Todos) has dampened down, but gesture use is still one of the more promising directions in mobile design.
Clear Todos for iPhone, whose first version appeared around 2012, used a variety of gestures to compensate for the lack of visual interface elements. These gestures were hard to remember.
Unfortunately, gestures are a chicken-and-egg problem: they won’t become easy to learn and use until a standard vocabulary of gestures used across apps and websites is built, and all applications and websites use these gestures consistently. But, on the other hand, designers are forced to stay away from gestures because they have so little familiarity among their user base.
Apple has had multiple attempts to expand the standard vocabulary of gestures (with the introduction of 3D Touch for iPhone 6S) and to delegate some of the visible chrome to gestures. Their attempts have culminated with the iPhone X — which got rid of the iPhone’s only physical button to replace it with a series of swipe gestures. The result has been a more effective use of the screen at the expense of some initial learning hurdles for people used with the old Home button.
#3D Touch was a promising direction, but it is still relatively rarely used by applications. However, two other (old) gestures are increasing in popularity to the point of being added to that basic gesture vocabulary: the swipe-to-delete for exposing some contextual actions including delete, and the two-finger scroll for moving around a map embedded on a webpage. While the swipe-to-delete simply adds a convenient way to perform contextual actions on a list element, the two-finger scroll solves the problem of swipe ambiguity, often encountered when maps are embedded in web pages. These gestures are becoming more and more familiar to users, although we still recommend that designs which use them add other redundant ways to perform the same actions or at least have good contextual tips to guide users.
The two-finger scroll gesture is becoming a standard for map scrolling and solves the problem of swipe ambiguity (where users attempt to scroll the page and accidentally scroll the map or viceversa).
Better Integration Between the Mobile Web and the App Web
Transitioning from the web to an app used to require a specific user action: on iOS, people had to explicitly choose to open an app and then perform a search inside it. From iOS 9 on, it’s become possible to easily transition between the mobile web and the app web— if I search for a movie in a search engine, some of the search results will seamlessly open corresponding application pages (when users have these applications installed).
When a link to a movie on the search-results page was selected, the control moved from Safari to the iMDb app. The Back-to-appbutton was displayed in the top left corner of the status bar and was labeled with the name of the previously used app (Safari).
This seamless transition from browser to app, or, more generally, from one app to the next ensures that the experience of consuming content is optimal — because, most often, applications will have a better user experience than sites(simply because they are closer to the mobile platform for which they were designed).
Unfortunately, with this design we also see a new burden placed on users: that of keeping track of where they are and knowing how to navigate back. Applications still have to accommodate that need — for example, we still notice that many apps (like iMDb above) do not include logos on their deep pages, which makes it more difficult for users to orient themselves in this new expanded app-plus-web universe.
A notable improvement, possibly related to the increased ease of switching from browser to app, has been a lower number of interstitial app ads. (Almost) gone are the days when navigating to a new site was preceded by an interstitial inviting the user to download the app. Most of the time, the app is simply advertised in a banner at the top of a web page.
Better Use of Phone Features
Although not perfect, more and more sites and apps take advantage of basic phone functionality. Checking out on many ecommerce sites has become a breeze due to integrated systems like Apple Pay and Android Pay. And most sites and apps take into account the user’s current location. Biometric authentication promises to get us closer from the problem of remembering passwords, and can even make desktop login easier by allowing users to easily transfer information (and thus automatically log in) across devices.
When setting up a new iPhone, there was no need to type in credentials to authenticate: they were automatically transferred from a nearby device.
Fewer Tutorials: Stagnation
A few years ago, any respectable app started with a lengthy tutorial that catalogued all the different features available in the app. These tutorials were at worst annoying and at best ineffective — no user could remember the plethora of commands listed in a lengthy tutorial. Nor were they motivated to remember any of them — after all, who could say in advance what features would be actually useful?
Today, those tutorials have been largely replaced with general overviews of the apps, meant to convince the user to go beyond the login walland create an account. Ideally, these login walls should disappear completely and users should be able to experience the app without having to register at all. The initial app overviews play the function of an ad — and most people hate to have to sit through an ad, especially if they’ve already spent the effort to download the app.
Steps Backward
Although overall the responsive-design trend has been a positive influence, the quest for building across multiple interaction modalities has pushed some towards strange solutions like using a split-button for menus or accordions. The intent behind the split-buttonmenu is to replicate desktop’s hover-plus-click interaction for categories in the main navigation — that is, to allow access both to a category landing page and to a submenu. Yet it is a highly unusable solution — not only because it crams two targets in a small space and makes the job of acquiring each of them more difficult for human fingers, but also because it violates users’ expectations and the mobile patterns that they have learned so far.
Another somewhat surprising development has been the disappearance of guest checkout. Sites and apps that used to offer this functionality in the past have eliminated it — some rely on Check out with Apple Payor Check out with PayPalto compensate for the lack of guest checkout. But many still force users to create an account although they may be one-time purchasers. On the plus side, registration has been simplified in many designs — it is fairly common nowadays to be asked only for an email and a password in order to create an account.
The popularity of the overlay has increased, with many sites implementing menus as overlays. Two years ago, many mobile overlays were buggy and created funny effects (such as content behind the overlay suddenly appearing on top of it). Today’s overlays are much better. But they often look like full pages, and people treat them as such — expecting to be able to use the Backbutton to close them and navigate back to the previous view. Often, they get disoriented when that does not happen and instead they are spit out of the site. When an entire flow is moved in overlays (as it is the case with the increasingly popular sequential menus), the opportunity for errors increases even more, with people forgetting to use the menu’s Back button to ensure correct navigation in the overlay and instead using the browser or the phone’s Backbutton.
LATimes.com: The menu was displayed in an overlay that looked like a new page (left). In spite of the Closebutton in the top left corner, people will still be tempted to tap the browser’s Backbutton to close the overlay. If they did so, they would be taken to the previously visited page (the search-engine page — right) instead of to the LA Times homepage.
Conclusion
Ten years from the first iPhone, the field of mobile user experience has finally reached a reasonable level of maturity. It was about time — according to a recent report by comScore, in many parts of the world, more than half of the online time is spent on mobile. So it’s only right that mobile usability catches up with desktop usability. It doesn’t mean that mobile sites and apps have reached a state of usability perfection: there’s no such thing as a perfect design. It simply means that a lot of them offer a decent user experience, and that many flagrant errors of the past have been fixed.
ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive course for E-commerce. Call our technical college campus today. You can reach us between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE # 588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Amazon Echo and its voice assistant, Alexa, might be the current market leaders in voice-activated smart technology, but recent announcements from the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show have shown that Google fully intends to challenge Amazon for that crown.
The past few days have seen some big developments – and a couple of even bigger teasers – for the future of Google’s smart assistant, the imaginatively-named Assistant.
On Tuesday, the first day of CES 2018, Google published a post to its official blog announcing partnerships with more than a dozen electronics companies to produce Google Assistant smart speakers – some with a very significant upgrade.
The blog post also highlighted the breadth and depth of “Actions”, the name given to built-in apps and integrations for the Google Assistant. At the same time, Search Console users began receiving notifications that their podcast, recipe and news content was eligible to be included in a new “Actions directory”, which is being rolled out over the next few days.
This appears to be part of an increased focus on what can be accomplished with Assistant, shifting its emphasis from finding information (Google’s long-time speciality) to carrying out tasks.
There’s a lot of news to unpack, so let’s look at what exactly these developments involve, and what they mean for SEOs and the wider industry.
SEOs using structured data are first to the Google Assistant party
While a comparatively smaller development than the flashy revelations of major electronics partnerships and smart displays, Google’s introduction of native support for podcasts, recipes and news to the Assistant is nevertheless big news for SEOs.
I owe a hat tip to Aaron Bradley of SEO Skeptic, whose post to the Semantic Search Marketing Google+ group first tipped me off to this development. In turn, he was tipped off by SEO consultant Dan Shure, who tweeted about a Google Search Console alert he’d received inviting him to “improve discovery” of his podcast in the Google Assistant
Google is gradually rolling out a browsable directory of Actions for the Google Assistant, allowing users to more easily discover what the Assistant is capable of.
Podcasts, recipes and news will be the first wave of content added to this directory – though only content published with AMP, or marked up with structured data such as Schema.org, will be getting the nod.
This means that webmasters and SEOs who have been marking up their content with structured data are already ahead of the curve in making that content available via voice – while those who haven’t must hop on the structured data (or AMP) bandwagon if they want to be eligible.
Structured data has long been touted by its fans as a great way to get search engines to better surface content from your site, particularly in the form of things like rich snippets or Quick Answers. But it can be time-consuming to add and maintain, and the immediate benefit isn’t always so obvious.
This new use case, however, shows that there is a huge potential advantage to “future-proofing” your website by adding structured data markup. If Google continues to make Assistant a primary focus going forward, then this could be the key to content optimization and discovery in a voice-driven world.
Hey, Google – look what I can do!
As discussed, Google is clearly keen to shift the focus of its voice capabilities away from information discovery towards actions.
To this end, it’s heavily promoting “Hey, Google” as the slogan for the Google Assistant, placing it in huge letters on top of its CES installation, and creating a #HeyGoogle Twitter hashtag (complete with a unique Assistant emoji) to accompany their Assistant-related updates.
But wait, you might be thinking – isn’t “OK Google” the wake phrase for the Assistant?
Yes, Google has been a bit unclear on this point, but it seems that “Hey, Google” has been an alternative wake phrase for the Assistant for a while now. In late 2016, the website Android Police reported that the Google Home responds to both “OK Google” and “Hey, Google”, but Google voice search (e.g. on mobile) responds only to “OK Google” – making it possible to differentiate if you have multiple devices within earshot.
Now, as Google moves its focus away from search and towards actions, “OK Google” is out and “Hey, Google” is in.
#ABCO #Technology teaches E-commerce courses in its web design program. Voice search is powerful and you need to get onboard with it now! Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach us at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Get started marking your pages for voice search today!
#Amazon Echo and its voice assistant, Alexa, might be the current market leaders in voice-activated smart technology, but recent announcements from the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show have shown that Google fully intends to challenge Amazon for that crown.
The past few days have seen some big developments – and a couple of even bigger teasers – for the future of Google’s smart assistant, the imaginatively-named Assistant.
On Tuesday, the first day of #CES 2018, Google published a post to its official blog announcing partnerships with more than a dozen electronics companies to produce Google Assistant smart speakers – some with a very significant upgrade.
The blog post also highlighted the breadth and depth of “Actions”, the name given to built-in apps and integrations for the Google Assistant. At the same time, Search Console users began receiving notifications that their podcast, recipe and news content was eligible to be included in a new “Actions directory”, which is being rolled out over the next few days.
This appears to be part of an increased focus on what can be accomplished with Assistant, shifting its emphasis from finding information (Google’s long-time speciality) to carrying out tasks.
There’s a lot of news to unpack, so let’s look at what exactly these developments involve, and what they mean for SEOs and the wider industry.
#SEOs using structured data are first to the Google Assistant party
While a comparatively smaller development than the flashy revelations of major electronics partnerships and smart displays, Google’s introduction of native support for podcasts, recipes and news to the Assistant is nevertheless big news for SEOs.
I owe a hat tip to Aaron Bradley of SEO Skeptic, whose post to the Semantic Search Marketing Google+ group first tipped me off to this development. In turn, he was tipped off by SEO consultant Dan Shure, who tweeted about a Google Search Console alert he’d received inviting him to “improve discovery” of his podcast in the Google Assistant
Google is gradually rolling out a browsable directory of Actions for the Google Assistant, allowing users to more easily discover what the Assistant is capable of.
Podcasts, recipes and news will be the first wave of content added to this directory – though only content published with AMP, or marked up with structured data such as Schema.org, will be getting the nod.
This means that webmasters and SEOs who have been marking up their content with structured data are already ahead of the curve in making that content available via voice – while those who haven’t must hop on the structured data (or AMP) bandwagon if they want to be eligible.
Structured data has long been touted by its fans as a great way to get search engines to better surface content from your site, particularly in the form of things like rich snippets or Quick Answers. But it can be time-consuming to add and maintain, and the immediate benefit isn’t always so obvious.
This new use case, however, shows that there is a huge potential advantage to “future-proofing” your website by adding structured data markup. If Google continues to make Assistant a primary focus going forward, then this could be the key to content optimization and discovery in a voice-driven world.
Hey, Google – look what I can do!
As discussed, Google is clearly keen to shift the focus of its voice capabilities away from information discovery towards actions.
To this end, it’s heavily promoting “Hey, Google” as the slogan for the Google Assistant, placing it in huge letters on top of its CES installation, and creating a #HeyGoogle Twitter hashtag (complete with a unique Assistant emoji) to accompany their Assistant-related updates.
But wait, you might be thinking – isn’t “OK Google” the wake phrase for the Assistant?
Yes, Google has been a bit unclear on this point, but it seems that “Hey, Google” has been an alternative wake phrase for the Assistant for a while now. In late 2016, the website Android Police reported that the Google Home responds to both “OK Google” and “Hey, Google”, but Google voice search (e.g. on mobile) responds only to “OK Google” – making it possible to differentiate if you have multiple devices within earshot.
Now, as Google moves its focus away from search and towards actions, “OK Google” is out and “Hey, Google” is in.
ABCO Technology teaches E-commerce courses in its web design program. Voice search is powerful and you need to get onboard with it now! Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach us at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Get started marking your pages for voice search today!
The “WannaCry” virus, which took down, among others, the National Health Services’ computer network in the United Kingdom last May, was formally labeled a North Korean plot by the U.S. last month. Lost in the foreign intrigue were some basic questions. Why had computer administrators in the U.K. and elsewhere not applied the software fix issued by Microsoft months earlier to protect the vulnerable Windows software? Or was the U.S.’s National Security Agency partly to blame for stockpiling malicious code?
Perhaps most important, why hadn’t billions of dollars worth of computer security gear from leading cyber protection companies such as Cisco Systems (ticker: CSCO), FireEye (FEYE), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), and Symantec (SYMC) foiled the attacks?
Not too surprisingly, the founders of a three-year-old cyber security start-up called Polyverse are convinced their new system “would have completely prevented WannaCry,” says Alex Gounares, the company’s CEO.
The chief technologist of Microsoft’s (MSFT) online unit back in the 2000s, Gounares—who was Bill Gates’ personal technology advisor—says the hackers’ success relied on a simple asymmetry: It costs far less to attack a computer system than it does to protect one. Existing systems build the equivalent of walls and moats around a castle, the so-called firewall that sniffs out intruders and tries to block access. The defenders must guess where they might be attacked and try to anticipate every possibility. It’s a costly and never-ending process.
The problem is that attackers can spend all the time they want studying the situation, looking for holes or ways to get around the protections. If anything, new discoveries have made it easier for hackers far less sophisticated than WannaCry’s creators to take control of a computer.
Polyverse, which has gotten good reviews for its fledgling system, tries to shift the balance of economic power back to the defenders. By replacing the basic instructions inside a computer program with alternate instructions, Polyverse keeps scrambling the code. Doors and windows familiar to hackers disappear quickly, raising the stakes—both on speed and spending—for attackers.
“Dollar for dollar, offense has been winning,” despite billions spent on computer defense, says Bryan Smith, who worked for six years at the National Security Agency and now runs a tech incubator called Bantam Technologies. “Polyverse actually does switch the advantage back to the defender.”
If #Polyverse or a rival does succeed, it will mark the latest shift in the decades-long war for control of computer networks. A computer operates via a series of instructions written by a programmer telling the microprocessor, the brains, to carry out one basic function over and over. That function is to take some values stored in its memory circuits, to perform an operation on them, such as addition, and stick the result back in memory. A hacker tries to gain control of a computer by replacing the programmer’s series of instructions with his own, either changing the operations specified or sometimes changing where in memory the chip fetches and stores values.
One of the last big strategic shifts in the war came in 2007, when a computer scientist named Hovav Shacham showed it was possible to use a computer’s own code against it without injecting new code. Code is a long string of ones and zeros, and the computer chip only knows the instructions by knowing how to divide the ones and zeros into the right sequence of bits that make up each successive instruction. But Shacham realized he could direct the chip to divide the ones and zeros differently, thus changing the instructions.
To complicate hackers’ task, Gounares, 46, conjured ways for them to find not the traditional string of instructions, but a completely different set. Polyverse’s technology is what’s called a binary scrambler. It mixes up the ones and zeros of a program but lets the users’ tasks be completed undisturbed. The exercise turns the attackers’ own game against them, employing different instructions before the attacker can.
AT MICROSOFT, Gounares was well aware of the common complaint that Windows was a “monoculture,” a uniform system that attracted a mass following of developers but also armies of attackers aware of the software’s vulnerabilities. At Gates’ famous retreats to contemplate high-level software issues, the two would occasionally discuss using epidemiology, or the study of the spread of disease, as a guide.
Gounares, who is fond of nerdy references, poses the question, “Why hasn’t the earth been taken over by the zombie apocalypse?” The answer is because human DNA varies enough that no diseases can spread so far they devastate the entire population. But software is like DNA that’s uniform: It can be compromised because it’s reliably the same.
The solution was to create “entropy,” as he puts it—a divergence in the code so that every computer has unique sequences of instructions running through it. Polyverse’s product to date has been for scrambling the Linux operating system. Later this year, it will offer a version that can scramble the entire Windows operating system and programs that run on Windows, says Gounares. Some customers have been given the Windows version to test.
POLYVERSE IS A VERY small company with a promising idea. Funded with just $6 million in private capital, the Seattle-area entity has less than $10 million in annual sales, though Gounares pledges that will rise into the tens of millions over the course of the next 12 months. That’s compared with roughly $2 billion annually in security-related revenue for Cisco, the biggest publicly traded cyber security vendor.
To be sure, Polyverse is not the only company to have thought of what’s known as “moving target defense.” The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Labs has a rich literature on the subject. But researchers there found problems cropping up: Either the scrambling is limited, leaving avenues of attack, or the scrambled programs degrade in performance.
“We have taken this from an academic approach to an industrial-strength system,” insists Gounares. Polyverse scrambles all the parts of a program, not just some, he says, and without affecting the performance a user experiences.
Steven Potter, a former Navy SEAL who heads sales, sees the military as a key market for Polyverse. There are U.S. weapons systems running on versions of Windows no longer supported by Microsoft. To rip and replace, as they say, those computer systems to make them safer can run into billions of dollars. Hence, a Polyverse sale can be an economical option for government, notes Potter, who served as a contractor in Afghanistan ensuring cargo was safe for the war effort. The firm has already won several military contracts.
Potter, however, becomes most animated when discussing the possibilities offered by the weakness of existing cyber companies. “Where the disruption comes from,” says Potter, “is that with the Palo Alto’s, and the FireEyes, and Symantecs, you can literally take a class and for $1,000, you can hack through any known firewall on the planet.”
Cisco, FireEye, and Symantec declined to comment, while Palo Alto did not return my calls last week.
With the publicity and questions that accompany each new WannaCry-like cyber disruption, Polyverse’s opportunity grows. The system of walls and moats just might be giving this company a great opening.
ABCO Technology offers a complete program for cyber security. Cyber security jobs in Los Angeles are exploding. If you are interested in a career in this exciting field, contact ABCO Technology.
You can reach us by telephone from 9 AM to 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Cyber security jobs will expand through 2030 says the US Department of Labor. Start your new career today!
Poor website performance is one of the most widespread problems for business websites, yet it’s the most essential one hurting your company on many levels, from lost customers to a bad online reputation.
These easy-to-use tools will help you solve the problem.
Despite what some people may think, site speed is not a purely technical issue. Marketers have been talking about the necessity to speed up your page load for ages. Not only does poor page load time hurt your site usability, but it also hinders your rankings (by devistating your page engagement metrics), conversions, social media marketing campaign performance and so on.
Fixing the page load time issue is not that simple. It does take a strong development budget and good diagnostics tools. Luckily, I can help you with the latter:
Page Speed Insights
Google’s Page Speed Insights measures your page speed and provides Page Speed suggestions to make your web site faster.
page speed
The Page Speed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A score of 85 or above means your page speed is optimal. The tool distinguishes two main criteria: How fast your page above-the-fold loads and how fast the whole page loads. Each page is tested for mobile and desktop experience separately.
Each Page Speed suggestion is rated based on how important it is.
Pingdom
Pingdom monitors your site and reports if your site seems slow or down. It operates a network of over 60 servers to test your website from all over the world, which is very important for a global business website because your server location effects in which parts of the world your site reports well.
Pingdom also has a free tool you can test here. While Pingdom is mostly known as Uptime monitoring solution (you can read about Uptime here), it also does performance monitoring.
Because I monitor a lot of metrics for many websites, I use Cyfe to integrate Pingdom stats into my website monitoring dashboard:
cyfe
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache turns your dynamic WordPress blog pages into static HTML files for the majority of your users. This way your web server serves static files instead of processing the heavier WordPress PHP scripts.
This plugin will help your server cope with traffic spikes. It makes the pages faster to load, and stops those traffic overloads from happening in the case of a viral hit.
If you operate a huge database-driven website, a better solution for you would be setting up a content delivery network.
Incapsula
Speaking of your website being slow in remote parts of the world, Incapsula is a set of premium tools helping you to solve that problem. The platform offers a reliable Content Delivery Network, i.e. a network of servers all over the world allowing your site visitors to load files from the server located closer to them.
This means your site is fast wherever your future customers choose to load it from.
If you want to know more about how CDN works, here’s a very good resource to read and bookmark.
cdn-for-your-wordpress-blog-infographic
Compressor.io
Compressor.io is a handy tool to optimize your image size to allow for faster page load. As most web pages have images these days, this is a must-bookmark and use tool.
Compressor.io reduces the size of your images while maintaining a high quality. You’ll be surprised to find no difference in your images before and after compression.
The tool supports the following image formats: .jpg, .png, .gif, .svg. I have found it invaluable to animated GIF compression because all the tools I use produce really huge images.
compress
The tool is absolutely free and there’s no need to register to use it. Your files will be stored on the servers for 6 hours and then deleted, so don’t forget to download your optimized images!
If you want to learn how to optimize your website for search engines, call ABCO Technology. We can be reached from 9 AM to 6 PM Monday through Friday. Call us today at: (310) 216-3067.
Email all questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Start building search engine optimized websites today!
