My of my clients are ex-WordPress users who were once sold to this platform for better performance and most importantly for being SEO super friendly. But at the end - users looks for a platform which will be either managed by professionals and very easy manage their contents including publishing. Few of my clients were originally Wix user who later was told that Wix is not business focused and the organic or paid SEO ranking is not possible in that platform - instead moving to WordPress will resolve the issue. Those clients of mine realized a bit later on, that the move was much worse than what was originally intended. Those clients of mine were after a very well designed, colorful website with drag and drop contents creation. The theme in Wordpress needed to be professionally extended to support those required changes and then when a new update came - it broke the site! I am not against WordPress. In fact I used to use WordPress and even worked on customising few of the themes for my clients. You can run WordPress on a $5 per month hosting making it one of the cheapest Content Management System. It needs to be patched regularly as well as upgraded. If someone is tech savvy and will be able to manage those maintenance job then it's up to you. Nowaday our drag and drop CMS is intricately built with SEO options which has site and page covered. If you are struggling with WordPress content management and maintenance of the site then please reach out to me - the content management system and the tools that I incorporate within the site has undergone various changes, making it one of the easiest intuitive content management system for general business users. In last 12 months I ensured my clients had zero downtime making me proudly present to them 100% uptime in the annual report. With WordPress or similar solution it hasn't been possible due to the fact the way the solution needs to be kept updated. You also need to see that WordPress platform is an open source platform and thousands of developers are developers are providing their own solutions. You definitely can enhance the functionality with the help of developers but it will have its own challenges.
If you are a foodie like me then I am sure you have visited Goode Brothers at one of their three outlets. They have amazing Italian food delivered straight from their live kitchen which you can view from your table. But this discussion is not about their amazing food but their management of their Customer Data management service. Like all other customer and member of their loyalty program I received an Email outlining business's one of the worst nightmare - losing Customers details to Hacker!! Breach of personal information is a huge thing and I don't know whether they understand or not. Nowadays keeping customer data is a big responsibility and there's legal implication if the data is compromised. Their Email read - "Mondays aren’t usually our favourite day of the week, and we definitely didn’t have a goode one on Monday 23rd July. If you follow us on Facebook, you will know by now that our email database was breached, and you may have received an invoice from us as a result. Since then, our email service provider has had our account paused while they investigated further. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to contact you, but we’re pleased to say we’re now back and confident our partners have done everything they can to investigate and safeguard our database. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused throughout this period, and if you’d like to chat further please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us." Don't be like Goode Brothers and make sure your Email and CRM are well protected behind well reputed cloud infrastructure. This is why I always reiterate to my prospective clients when they are trying to fit in cheapest solution from some local provider.
It's not that Microsoft always get things right! But it seems like with Windows 10 - they might have finally got it right with their most popular product. When there's still a battle between Mac OSX and Ubuntu Desktop (not to mention Chrome) - Windows still is a major player in the desktop market. With the Surface - it is trying to come up in the tablet arena as well which is dominated by iPad and Android tablets. They took a new approach in rolling out the new OS - surprisingly it is free and will come automatically as an upgrade. We all thought Windows 8.1 will have SP1 - instead SP1 became the new Windows. As a Windows user I have to appreciate Microsoft's vision. Apple always offers their OS to their customer free but you have to remember it is because their users have to buy Mac hardware. Microsoft don't have exclusive hardware other than Surface - so it's not the same as Apple. But definitely Microsoft's new CEO made a big impact and will win back lots of disgruntled customers. In my experience the installation was very straight forward specially since it was an upgrade from an existing 8.1 Professional installation. Instead of waiting for my automatic update - I used the Windows 10 Download Tool from Microsoft's site. Microsoft customers downloaded 14 million copies of the Windows 10 upgrade on the first day of availability - this is 10X more downloads then Windows 8 had. This alone should convince you to upgrade your existing Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 systems. If you have 4GB or more RAM and a 64bit supported processor - you should install 64bit version of Windows 10 else 32bit will obviously will do. None of the application had any issue nor the any hardware. I have to say it was the most clean hassle free upgrade experience for me after Windows XP. In fact better than Windows XP. I typically noticed performance gain. User experience wise I love the layout and the access to applications. Although Cortana is not available for most languages but I hopeful it will arrive for my English New Zealand very soon. The new browser Edge seems to be very responsive and works well with all sites. The new snipping tool-set within browser is a great idea. Don't wait for the automatic roll-out - give it a go now.
Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSD) has been a biggest joke amongst Mac and Linux users for a long time. Little did we know that it's not completely Windows OS's fault rather it's the third party device drivers and tools written to support various hardware and services were the root cause of the problem.