Running Business Across Two Continents |
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Sunday, 21 June 2009 |
About 2-3 months ago, I was interviewed for local business newspapers about our business. The following is the English translation:
 Among
clients that put their trust in OGO Sense are banks, hospitals,
marketing and real estate agencies. It's interesting that this firm
from Banja Luka does not have even one domestic client and that the
recession that brings down many companies in their case actually
improves their business. OGO Sense is actually planning to expand their
operation and their director Ognjen Nikolic will tell us more about it.
At the same time you lead an IT company on two continents
with the headquarters in Banja Luka. How does it work and how did you
come up with an idea to start such a business?
The entire
idea started when I, after finishing college in the States, with one
friend accidentally started a business of building web pages for
certain business clients. Soon, I realized this was really needed in
the States and that it could turn into a serious business. Three years
ago, we established the company in the States. When I returned to Banja
Luka, I established a company with the same name here where I found a fair number of
people who where interested in this type of work. Now we complete most
work from our location here. In the States we have one representative
who takes care of the company business there , mostly related to
company administration while everything else pretty much happens here.
We have about 75 clients, mostly in the US on the East coast but we
also have a few within European Union.
How did you succeed
to attract clients from the US market, considering that your base is
here and this is so far from there? How did you earn your clients'
confidence?
We had some 20-30 clients before me coming here because we first established the company in the US. Starting the
business here would be almost impossible without assistance from
abroad. After we built our credibility , when I transferred to Banja
Luka, it was not a problem just to continue doing the same good work.
Clients typically check references and our references were good. We do
serious work for banks, hospitals, e-commerce sites and other mission
critical businesses. Most clients know me personally because I
periodically go to the states and without it it would be hard to make
all this work.
You said it's almost impossible to start this business from here. Why?
I
don't say it would be impossible but it would be much harder. It's not
enough to only know English language or technical stuff. To succeed in
some market, you need to understand people. After 10 years of living in
the States, I learned how to live with people, to feel them and to
understand their needs. This is one thing that people here don't have
and don't understand which is extremely important. The second thing,
which I noticed here is that people are ready to take any job, to earn
money and even take jobs that they are not qualified for. You take a
job and then you try to figure out how to make it happen and then the
results are not of the highest quality because people are not
specialized in those areas. On the US market, things are different
because the market is so much bigger there and then we can specialize
in a particular area and try to be the best in that area but at the
same time find enough work for us.
You don't have any clients from Bosnia or this region. Why is that and do you plan to offer your services here as well? First
of all, it is because our services are adjusted to Western clients and
everything we do is in English language. For us to offer services here
as well we would have to to turn all processes around and adjust to our
domestic clients who have a different business sense from those small
and medium size clients in the US. In the West, expectations are much
higher from a website, starting from design, service and there are many
differences in which you do business from here. One of the problems
here is getting paid for the work and the second one is the service
tax. Because we export our service, by law we don't have to pay service
tax, and in our case , we export our "brain power" and don't pay the
service tax. On the other hand, we would have to add service tax for our
local clients. The buying power of businesses here is much less than
our clients in the US. This would be a big difference because we would
probably find here that one comes and says "we have 500KM (about $380),
please make me a site". Certainly, you could make a site, but we don't
build such type of sites nor for that kind of price. Websites that we
build are not just Internet presentations and they have a much higher
level of complexity. One important difference is that that many local
business here don't have a need for a site, nor they do have a high
ROI such as business in the States. We built a site for a business in
Alaska with a small shop selling fishing gear and with their website
they can cover the entire US market and the world. When visitors come
to the site, they can order products and instead of small local market,
the owner can cover the market of an entire continent. Here many people
don't even use Internet, live locally and pretty much know where
everything is and don't feel a need to look elsewhere. This market is
small. Working for local clients would be harder and that's why we
don't market ourselves here.
How much did the financial crisis affect your business levels?
Actually,
not much. This crisis actually did well to us. It's true that you can
feel people are sceptical to spend money on certain things and instead
they save that money, but our business clients have in mind that we can
complete quality work more economically ( for our local
standards, we aren't cheap because our websites typically range from
$1,000 to $10,000), therefore many clients come to us, wanting to save
money. The business without a web page in the US is not a serious
business and the website creates a certain level of creditability so
businesses really need it. In the US, the cost of building a quality
website is much more expensive, therefore people turn to us because we
are less expensive compared to similar firms there. Of course, the
cheaper price without quality does not mean much. At the same time
clients understand that they will save using our technical solutions
and/or earn money so that their website is not only a technology
expense. Our websites are very functional. Many website jobs that we do
actually automate processes which our clients would do manually. There
is a big opportunity to save, especially in the times of the economic
crisis, when it's important to do more work with less people.
Considering that everything that we do is on the Internet, it's also
much easier/economical to provide support to our clients later because
everything that they see on their computer, we see on our computers as
well.
An advantage of your business is also different time zones here and in the States?
Here
we start work day at 7AM when on the East Coast, it's 1AM. This means
that if our client sends a request at the end of their business day, we
practically have an entire business day to complete the job. We have
first and second shift here, so the first shift can do a great deal of
development work while the second shift does the technical support.
Basically, we are accessible to our clients at all times. And that is
the beauty and usefulness of working in different time zones, of course
assuming that you finish all your tasks on time!
Credits: Reporter Valentina Dzodzo for www.privrednastampa.biz
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 21 June 2009 )
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Increase your website exposure with a dynamically driven website sitemap for joomla |
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Saturday, 20 June 2009 |
Search engines can't rank pages that they can't crawl and I will
introduce you to creating an index of your site and submitting it to major search
engines such as google, yahoo and bing.
After setting up xmap component on your website, you may need to
install additional xmap plugins for 3rd party Joomla components. For
example, if you have a Virtuemart website, you would want to install
Virtuemart plugin to be able to include links to all website products
on your sitemap. If an xmap plugin does not exist for what you need and
is important for you, it is possible to have it custom built.
With xmap, you'll end up with two
links:
1) The xml file link which is submitted to search engines google, yahoo and bing.
2) The front end link that is good for finding content by "live visitors" on a small site.
OGO Sense recommends first submitting your sitemap to Google which provides
important statistics on your site index status and any issues Google Spiders may find.
If you have any questions about creating or submitting a sitemap for your website, please contact us or leave a comment below.
Ogy Nikolic
Joomla CMS Expert
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 20 June 2009 )
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Website Outage Report (Jun 16 & 17) |
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Friday, 19 June 2009 |
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The goal of this blog post is to provide background information to those clients who experienced website outages on Monday and Tuesday this week. The following illustration demonstrates certain characteristics of any disaster timeline:
Figure 1. Typical disaster timeline
In our case, Time of Disaster happened on Monday (6/17/2009) around 11AM EST when two out of five OGO Sense servers suffered a DOS Attack . You might have heard that in the past Yahoo, Amazon and some popular services have suffered from these type of malicious attacks.
Related to our Last Restore Point, OGO Sense makes daily backups of website databases and weekly backup of all files. However, in this case, we did not need to use any of our site backups as official website data has been preserved. So Lost Data has been very minimal to none.
Service Downtime is the amount of the time from the Time of Disaster to the Service Restored point of time. In some cases, this downtime lasted as long as 24 to 28 hours for websites while email service continued to work correctly for most clients at all times.
Many clients have asked us why Service Downtime has taken so long and here are 3 primary reasons:
1. Many websites had their disaster recovery location on another server
that also got attacked a couple of hours later. This alternative
(disaster recovery) location is a place where sites are recreated if
their primary location fails.
2. OGO Sense did not have access or login information for many domain registrars or DNS Zones so it had to contact clients related to switching of nameservers or IP addresses.
3. The number of websites affected has been considerable which resulted in slow creation of 3rd party hosting accounts. Additionally, with limited access to those hosting accounts and different server configuration, additional issues have appeared and slowed down our team.
The Service Restored point of time took place as we moved some sites to different hosting accounts and set up new firewall rules to defend from the outside attacks on our servers.
While OGO Sense did not initiate these issues, we are truly sorry for the inconvenience caused and we'll credit all affected clients with one free month of maintenance. Additionally, we are looking to put additional measures in place to prevent similar attacks from hackers and your or our own competitors.
If you have any questions or comments about this network outage, please do not hesitate to contact us .
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Last Updated ( Friday, 19 June 2009 )
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A very simplified look at SEO |
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Friday, 24 April 2009 |
For a simplified approach to SEO, check out the video from Shama below or check out our premium SEO checklist for many more items that impact your SEO.
Additionally, I could add that Joomla Content Management System also allows for a really good website structure where you can easily add and modify website content.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 24 April 2009 )
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Three Months Free Joomla Support and Hosting for Business* |
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Sunday, 19 April 2009 |
Get 3 Months of Free Joomla Support and Hosting if you choose OGO Sense to
- design your new Joomla 1.5 website
- redesign your current Joomla 1.0 or 1.5 website
- convert your existing non-Joomla website to Joomla 1.5
- migrate your Joomla website from 1.0 to 1.5
A new Joomla 1.5 website from OGO Sense allows you to:
- improve search engine optimization and visitor conversions.
- refresh the look and feel of your current website.
- reevaluate your current web strategy and internet marketing plan.
- add new functionalities to increase your business automation and efficiency.
- manage critical business processes, update and add new content yourself.
- automatically migrate data from your existing website.
- and receive 3 Months of Free Joomla 1.5 Support and Hosting!
Over the past 2 years, OGO Sense has designed websites for Online Shops,
Paid Subscription Sites, Clubs and Organizations, Schools and
Colleges, Campgrounds, Hospitals, Small Banks, Churches and Many Small
Businesses.
* Offer valid only for upcoming estimates. Limited Time Offer.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 29 April 2009 )
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