Generally, an Outsourcing Partner is a long term commitment. As such, it is important to choose a good partner. It is generally very tiring to keep changing partners for different projects as you have to get used to each others’ working style and expectations all over again.

So generally, what do we need to look for in an outsource partnership? Well, after doing some research around a few sites, we came to the following checklist:

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199Web was started with a vision of helping new start-ups which did not have much capital to invest on a simple website. As the year progresses, it seems that we started to handle more complicated projects like Content Management Systems (CMS), Ecommerce and Database Driven Applications.

Recently, there seems to be a trend for companies to outsource their web design work to us. They may be printers, graphic designers, event mangement companies or even accounting firms…. most of them will have the need to design a web pages for their clients every now and then… do they turn down the clients’ request… alternatively, they chose to look for us…

Honestly, we feel that it is a great WIN-WIN business decision!

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Recently, we just completed a Content Managment System project for R-One Trading Pte Ltd. The company is involved in the retailing of thousands of communication equipment. A lot of their customers are from overseas. As such, they needed a web presence to showcase the multitude of products. More importantly, the system must be dynamic enough to allow the owner to upload new products.

Upon the completion, the owner was so proud of our system that he agreed to our request for a video testimonial!

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It had been a hectic year for us… and it was more so after we started becoming the outsource arm of event companies. One of the main problems of working with event companies is their terribly short timelines. Generally, datelines are almost instantaneous. When we hear from them, we generally need to produce something within a day or two… and for those of you who are not familiar with web design…. it is indeed a very rush job.

Thankfully, our clients are appreciative. After a whole year of rush jobs, we were rewarded with a bottle of desert wine for our efforts! I’m no connosieur, but looking at all the awards on the bottle… must be pretty good stuff. For the wine connosieurs, we were rewarded with a bottle of Sandalford Sandalera, Vincent Veritas, Est 1840. Honestly, all those sounds greek to me… so just copying everything, word for word from the bottle…

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It is generally not my style to do a cut and paste of an entire article that does not belong to me. It is downright plagiarism. However, once in a while, you come across something really good that you want to share. To make it worse, the article is login protected… so here comes some tips about starting an online business.

For those established retailers out there… maybe it is about time to look into ecommerce strategies to bring your sales to the next level.

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Does your web page load up too slowly? As mentioned in an earlier article, one of the main reasons for slowness experienced in web pages is due to the location of the server.

Even with broadband connection, the bottleneck of the bandwidth is more likely to lie in the location of your server.

Recently, a friend alerted me to an article from the straitstimes which gave a good overview of the causes of the speed of your broadband.

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Most of my customers are not familiar with the difference between the concept of maintenance, hosting and change requests. Hosting refers to the storing of the application on a server.

Maintenance refers to the corrective action taken should unexpected events cause the application to fail. It is like insurance in the commercial world. It ensures that some one is there to service your application should it, as the saying goes, kick the bucket.

Change requests on the other hand refers to feature enhancement of the application. In today’s competitive business landscape, it is natural to issue continuous change requests and upgrades to ensure that your web application is effective.

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This article is long overdue…. my clients have been asking me about how they could do simple updating of their website. Due to our hectic schedule, such requests, unfortunately fell on deaf ears.

Finally, enough is enough. Decided to write up something simple (in the wee hours of the night) and hopefully, this will give our customers the necessary information to perform simple updating of their website.

A word of caution! This is for simple textual updates….. If you need to do something complicated, it is definitely better to just use our design services….. no point tearing your hair out for something that you do only once or twice in your life.

Anyway, here it goes:

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Have u seen professional corporate event sites by big multinationals? Well, though these deals might be fronted by big marketing and event companies, some of which are actually designed and developed by us! One of our potential clients just spoke to me today and wanted to see some sample of works that we have outsourced from other event companies. Well, instead of emailing him privately, why not just post this samples up on our blog for everybody’s benefit?

Attached is this article are some samples of websites and electronic direct mailers (EDM) that we have done for one of our clients (our client is an event management firm)….

Just a special note, for the sending of EDMs, it is better to levarage on a professional E-Marketing Software, iike iMessage.to, instead of sending it yourself. One of our customers bought a desktop emarketing program and due to careless sending got his domain name and ip blacklisted from major ISPs!

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Recently, one of our clients complained about receiving a large amounts of unwanted mails (SPAMS). After some preliminary checking, we realised that our client has, against our advise, put his email address back on to his contact us page.

This is one of the things that we should NEVER do unless we are prepared for the onslaught of unregistered mails.

Out in the internet, professional spammers actually run spiders that crawl through each and every webpage to extract out email addresses to run their email campaigns from Viagra to Nigerian Scams to Imitation Watches.

To protect our email addresses from being illegally harvested, we should never leave it on the contact us page. Instead, we should encourage our customers to contact us directly through the contact us form.

Article on Email Harvesting