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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:

ogy-interview.jpgAmong 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
Last Updated ( Sunday, 21 June 2009 )
 

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

Last Updated ( Saturday, 20 June 2009 )
 

Website Outage Report (Jun 16 & 17)

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Friday, 19 June 2009

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:dr-timeline.png

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 .

 

Last Updated ( Friday, 19 June 2009 )
 

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.
Last Updated ( Friday, 24 April 2009 )
 

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. 
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 29 April 2009 )
 
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