You’re ready to launch your startup: you’ve got the unique solution to a problem your highly-targeted niche never knew they had. You’re ready to put down your roots and open up office, and while you can picture every detail of your booming new business in your mind’s eye, one piece remains blank: the background. Think Beyond […]

If you run a website (or if you’re thinking of starting one) there’s a good chance you need a privacy policy. This page discloses to users how you obtain and protect visitor information, what to do with it, and why you collected it. Do I Really Need a Privacy Policy? You may think that if […]

Dreaming of a way to automate interactions with your website visitors and customers? Say hello to chatbots. And don’t be surprised when they talk back. A chatbot is a computer program or service that sends automatic replies to people’s messages or inquiries. Chatbots can be powered by a set of predetermined rules for delivering responses […]

Running an e-commerce website can be hard. It’s necessary to be aware of all the ways you can make it easy for your customers to find what they’re looking for and make purchases. Although there are various e-commerce providers out there, building a store on WordPress gives you access to its countless themes and plugins, […]

Update for Monday, Nov 27 — Cyber Monday deals are now live. The holiday shopping season is just around the corner and that means that Black Friday is almost here to kick it all off. Traditionally, Black Friday marks the biggest sales of the year both in the traditional and online retail world. It’s also […]

Even if you don’t plan to become a developer, you will benefit from being able to code. With basic knowledge, and a little practice, you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve. From web development to creating applications, knowing how to code can save you time and money. You can fix your own site, automate tasks, […]

It’s really amazing to see how many science fiction stories from the past have become our reality in the present. In The Machine Stops, E M Forster presented a world that looks very similar to that lived by Facebook users. Or take the seashells (earbuds) from Fahrenheit 451, or video chat from 2001: A Space […]

Inbound marketing brings visitors to your website and lets you market to people without hard sell techniques. This is a huge advantage for new businesses, because consumers increasingly view outbound marketing as a nuisance that should be avoided. By using inbound marketing, you can avoid having to cold call, and you don’t have to pester people to buy. Instead, […]

Writing isn’t necessarily the easiest of tasks — as a professional or as a student. There are a number of competing priorities to constantly contend with, clients that come through with vague details about assignments, unexpected revision requests, and too many new (and fun) ways to distract yourself from getting your work done. With so […]

Do you want to be a hacker? “No!” you answer. “I’m an honest person! I don’t break into computers and steal private information!” Calm down. The word “hacker” once had an honorable meaning — at least mostly honorable — before the media turned it into “computer criminal.” It still does for many people. Origins of […]

Britain voted to leave the European Union on June 23, 2016. Before the vote, various experts warned of unintended consequences. Professor Michael Dougan warned of legal complexity. Bertie Aherne, former Irish Taoiseach, warned that Brexit may result in new borders. And unintended consequences will also affect both the UK and the EU’s IT industry, and the way UK […]

About a year back, the Boston Globe wrote a piece on the history of word processing machines with the assistance of Matthew Kirschenbaum, a professor who currently teaches English at the University of Maryland. The focus of their discussion was on how a computer, generally seen as something cold and impersonal, could actually improve the […]

Despite his use of Twitter, Donald Trump is not a big internet user. He “very rarely” emails anyone, according to a 2013 testimony, and dictates his tweets to his aides. He’s referred to the internet as “the cyber” during the 2016 presidential debates, suggesting that he isn’t completely au fait with the modern web and related […]

Setting up an online store is expensive. As a result, you have an extra incentive to make it a success. And that means converting visitors into customers. But it isn’t always clear how to do that. Remember that customers aren’t just looking for the right products at the right price. They are looking for a […]

With the rise of terrorism and other law-breaking (eg, human trafficking), there has been a great increase in border checks — and the power that governments exercise at their borders. This has resulted in law-abiding citizens seeing their privacy rights erode. What was once a simple validation of a passport and quick look at the […]