Articles

Electrolux and Niteco’s Levande platform wins prestigious SBR award

Fri, 26 May 2023 15:53:56 +0700

Electrolux, the renowned home appliance company, this week received the award for Online Services - Consumer Products (Durables) at the prestigious SBR Technology Excellence Awards in Singapore. The accolade, presented by the Singapore Business Review, was earned for the successful introduction of their all-in-one, comprehensive appliance subscription platform, Levande. This groundbreaking platform, developed by Niteco, revolutionizes the traditional appliance ownership model.

Electrolux’s Gaurav Julka accepted the award.

Levande's subscription service disrupts conventional business models by offering consumers an end-to-end appliance subscription experience that covers setup, delivery, service, and even includes a 48-hour guaranteed like-for-like replacement policy. By providing customers with peace of mind and significantly reducing upfront costs, Levande redefines the way people approach appliance ownership.

The Levande platform integrates seamlessly with various external systems, including MyInfo SingPass, OneMap SG, Stripe, SAP CDC, and Electrolux backend systems. These integrations ensure a smooth and hassle-free experience for consumers who utilize the platform. Additionally, Niteco has included automated recurring billing, secure payments, and a user-friendly interface that allows Levande subscribers to manage their subscriptions effortlessly. Users can easily renew or upgrade their subscriptions without the need to go through the payment process again. Furthermore, the platform prioritizes the security of users' sensitive financial information through a secure payment gateway. Niteco's experts also placed particular emphasis on performance and accessibility, with the site's homepage fully loading in just 2.9 seconds.

Levande revolutionizes the way consumers approach appliance ownership by eliminating the need for substantial upfront costs when purchasing appliances such as washing machines, wine cabinets, refrigerators, and more. With Levande, subscribers select the appliance that suits their needs, subscribe to a plan for a fixed monthly fee (starting from $21.99/month for a washer dryer), and get the appliance delivered and set up within 48 hours. They also have the flexibility to upgrade or cancel their subscription at any time, giving them greater control over their appliance choices.

Moreover, Levande efficiently manages its partner affiliate program, which involves listing Levande subscriptions and services on partner platforms like DBS Marketplace. This integration harnesses Levande's affiliate tracking mechanism to monitor and report conversions resulting from successful subscriptions. Additionally, it enables the monitoring and incentivization of affiliates or partners who refer customers to Electrolux's services.

The SBR Technology Excellence Awards recognize exceptional companies in Singapore that pioneered groundbreaking IT products and solutions and impactful technology initiatives, leading the digital journeys of their respective industries.

Why website performance matters and how to improve website speed

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 10:41:14 +0700

Picture this: You're moments away from securing a product in the final minutes of a flash sale. As you’re ready to make the crucial move, the Commerce site suddenly slows down, thwarting your final step. Poor website performance just prevented you from enjoying a satisfying purchasing experience – unacceptable after you had been eagerly waiting for the sale. This scenario is not rare. It happens all the time and can greatly affect a business’s performance.

To prevent this from happening to your site, in this article, Niteco will help you understand why website performance is so vital and show you how to improve website speed for better business results using Niteco’s free Performance Insight tool. Read on!

Table of contents:

What is website performance?
Why does website performance matter?
Important metrics for website performance
Where can you check your website performance online?
How do you improve your website speed?
Conclusion
FAQs about website performance

What is website performance?

A common term in the digital world, website performance is a comprehensive measurement of how well a website functions and how fast the website speed is. It encompasses various aspects, including the site's responsiveness, loading times, and overall user experience. Savvy businesses track their performance because a high-performance website not only attracts more visitors but also retains them by providing a seamless and efficient browsing experience.

Why does website performance matter?

The significance of website performance cannot be overstated. The speed of your site has a direct impact on critical factors such as bounce rates, conversion rates, overall revenue, user satisfaction, and search engine ranking. Now, let's delve into the major benefits you get from ensuring an optimized website performance.

Better website performance improves user experience

User experience is at the forefront of the digital landscape. A slow and clunky website frustrates users, leading to increased bounce rates and decreased user satisfaction. A study showed that a staggering 88% of internet users claim they would not revisit a website following a negative user experience. Therefore, the better a website’s performance is, the smoother and more enjoyable the experience for visitors is, resulting in positive interactions with your brand.

Good performance enhances user engagement

A site’s user experience usually determines the level of user engagement. Did you know that pages with a loading time of under 2 seconds experience an average bounce rate of 9%, whereas those taking 5 seconds to load witness a significant spike in bounce rates, reaching 38%? Users are more likely to explore a website with quick load times, as they’re aiming for a seamless experience with the shortest time spent finding what they’re looking for.

In essence, a well-optimized website not only keeps visitors engaged but also motivates them to explore more content, ultimately enhancing the likelihood of them making a purchase.

A fast website helps increase conversion rates

On a larger scale, website performance directly influences conversion rates. According to data shared in a recent Aberdeen Group study, a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% decrease in your conversion rate. For instance, if your website generates $50,000 per day in sales, this delay could translate to a potential loss of $1.25 million per year in missed conversions.

A fast and efficient website contributes to a seamless conversion process, reducing the likelihood of potential customers abandoning their carts or leaving the site before completing desired actions. Improved performance can lead to increased conversion rates and, consequently, higher revenue.

Website speed affects search ranking and SEO

As mentioned earlier, slow website speed not only affects user engagement but also has a subsequent impact on bounce rates and conversions. This forms the crucial starting point in the interconnected chain of website speed, user satisfaction, and SEO.

Search engines such as Google diligently monitor user behavior. If visitors quickly leave your site, it tells search engines that your content may not meet user expectations. Such high bounce rates, slow-loading pages and overall poor website performance can detrimentally affect your SEO efforts, pushing your pages further down on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Source: Niteco’s Performance Insight tool.

Important metrics for website performance

To gauge and optimize website performance, it's essential to monitor key metrics. These prominent metrics are:

Core Web Vitals: Introduced by Google, these metrics assess critical aspects of user experience, including loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Paying attention to metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) helps in understanding and improving the overall user experience.
Lighthouse Scores: Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. It provides audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more. Lighthouse scores offer a comprehensive overview of your website's strengths and areas for improvement.

Beyond these, there are vital page speed metrics, including Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Total Page Load Time, which directly impact user experience.

Monitoring and optimizing these metrics contributes to faster loading times, reducing bounce rates and enhancing user satisfaction.

Where can you check your website performance online?

You can assess website performance using your in-house team, but it requires substantial resources and effort. An optimal solution for your business is to leverage performance testing tools. These tools play a crucial role in continuous evaluation, allowing you to make comparisons with your competitors. Niteco's Performance Insight tool is a trustworthy recommendation for assessing and enhancing website performance. And, more importantly, you can access all those pivotal data insights for FREE!

How to use Niteco’s Performance Insight tool

Follow these steps to make the most of Niteco's Performance Insight tool:

Step 1: Go to Niteco’s Performance Insight tool, insert the URL of the website you want to audit and track.
Step 2: Insert URLs of your business’s competitors. You can skip this step.
Step 3: Choose the desired test location. This allows you to see how your site performs in the place from which your users access it.
Step 4: Sign up with a work account. This account will be used to receive daily reports on the websites' performance.
Step 5: Wait a few minutes for the test to finish and voilà, you will be directed to a dashboard with a plethora of results.

How your website performance is reflected in the tool

Navigating to the dashboard, the initial section of the report you will encounter is the benchmark section. It provides a comprehensive evaluation of four key areas: Performance, SEO, Best Practices, and Accessibility.

The next section shows a detailed examination of loading speed presented in the form of filmstrips. Your website will be compared to that of competitors on a screen, illustrating which one loads more quickly. Concurrently, it will emphasize three crucial performance metrics, namely First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, and Time to Interactive.

In the following section, you will get an overview of the Core Web Vitals. As mentioned earlier, the Web Vitals not only act as a reliable measurement of site performance and user experience, but also significantly impact your website's Google search rankings. The tool will display your website's score in each metric, including Largest Contentful Point, Total Blocking Time, and Cumulative Layout Shift (LCP, TBT, and CLS) compared to your competitors. To enhance your organic traffic, it is crucial to ensure that these metrics consistently stay within the recommended ranges. When you see that any metric is displayed in orange or red, you already know where improvement is needed.

The next section is designed to crawl Chrome UX data, assessing the level of user-friendliness based on your website's technical performance.

The last section of the website performance report focuses on site requests. In this segment, you can find the number and size of site requests made when loading a page, encompassing requests like HTML, CSS, JS, Font, Image, Media, and other elements. This shows you what might be slowing down your loading.

How do you improve your website speed?

After obtaining insights from Niteco’s Performance Insight tool, your business will undoubtedly gather ideas on how to enhance your site’s performance. Here are some key areas to focus on if you want to improve your site:

Reduce site requests: Decrease the number and size of requests made to your server by consolidating files, utilizing CSS sprites, and eliminating unnecessary elements.
Optimize images: Resize and compress images to reduce file sizes without compromising quality.
Implement browser caching: Configure your server to enable browser caching, facilitating faster loading for returning visitors.
Employ content delivery networks (CDNs): Distribute your website's content across multiple servers globally through CDNs, ensuring swift load times for users, regardless of their location.
Enable GZIP compression: Activate GZIP compression to minimize file sizes sent to the browser, resulting in quicker loading times.
Streamline code: Enhance your website's performance by cleaning and optimizing its code, eliminating any redundant elements or characters.
Mobile optimization: Cater to the expanding mobile audience by ensuring your website is responsive and optimized for mobile devices.

However, it should be noted that optimizing web page performance involves addressing various factors; those mentioned above are merely some of the common ones. For a thorough investigation and tailored solutions addressing specific issues on your website, reach out to Niteco's experts. We will assess both the strengths and weaknesses of your website and guide you in implementing solutions that ensure your business success.

Meanwhile, if your website is powered by Optimizely, we already have a guide available on how to enhance its performance on the platform for your reference.

Why does website performance matter? - Conclusion

In conclusion, website performance is a multifaceted aspect that significantly impacts user experience, engagement, search rankings, and conversion rates. If you haven’t already, it’s time to prioritize and invest in optimizing website performance to stay competitive in the digital landscape. Utilizing tools like Niteco's Performance Insight tool provides actionable insights and empowers businesses to enhance their online presence. Contact us for more information on how to improve your website performance.

Why is experimentation important in business? Here are top 3 cases

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 09:26:00 +0700

Over the last two years, companies like Optimizely have gone all in on experimentation as the future of the digital business world. Experimentation is by no means a new concept, but it has gotten a lot easier to implement with the growth of digital businesses.

In experimentation, we compare an experimental group (e.g. people who are presented with a newly updated landing page) to a standard control group (e.g. people who saw the standard landing page) and measure the difference in their performance. By doing this, we’re taking impulsiveness and subjectivity out of the equation and basing our business decisions on hard data. The best-known version of this is A/B testing or conversion rate optimization, but the approach isn’t just applicable to marketing purposes – development or business processes can be experimented with as well.

Read on to uncover the power of experimentation and explore why incorporating more business experimentation is crucial.

Table of contents:

What is experimentation in business?
Why is business experimentation important?
The key to successful experimentation
Experimentation – A pathway to business success

What is experimentation in business?

Business experimentation is a strategic and data-driven approach used in a business context. It involves conducting a series of specific tests, known as business experiments, to assess ideas or hypotheses and gather insights before committing significant resources to major projects such as marketing or conversion rate optimization campaigns.

For example, a company might conduct a business experiment to observe user responses to a change in an app or the addition of a new feature. The behavior of these users is then compared to that of a similar group which uses the app without the new feature.

There are popular types of business experimentation including website user testing, usability testing, A/B testing, and accessibility testing. These methods are frequently employed in combination to obtain comprehensive insights, enabling data-backed decisions for enhancing user experience and business outcomes. Therefore, business experimentation serves as a critically important strategic application of tests, allowing informed business decisions and the mitigation of risks associated with significant projects.

An illustration of how business experimentation works

Why is business experimentation important?

Understanding the significance of business experimentation is crucial for any organization aiming to thrive in today’s dynamic business landscape. Let’s delve into why this strategic approach is not just beneficial, but essential for informed decision-making and sustainable growth.

1. Optimizing your online performance

In the past, much of the decision-making process in the digital marketing world was based either on gut feeling or on copying what others had done before. For example, if a company had increased its conversions after changing the font on its website, a rival company might think to do the same thing to improve its own performance. Would rolling out such a change for all users work? It might, but it might also be a disaster. To make sure we don’t put all our eggs in one basket, we need experimentation.

In A/B Testing, we take a hypothesis – such as “changing the font will make this digital experience convert better” – and put it to the test. We create 2 (or more) variants of a digital experience, present each to a part of our audience, and measure the results. Was our hypothesis confirmed? If yes, that’s great, we can roll out the change to all users. If not, we’d better just leave things as they were.

This also allows us to continuously improve performance to keep up with KPIs, growth and conversion goals and any other targets we may have set for ourselves – based on data, not a whim.

2. Improving development processes

Experimentation is by no means only applicable after a solution has gone live. On the contrary, experimentation earlier on in the development journey can actually save you a lot of grief later on. In this context, experimentation means testing the feasibility and potential of features before investing full development resources that you cannot get back.

In this case, we are not talking about the traditional QA (Quality Assurance) testing that occurs to prevent bugs or other technical failures. Rather, this kind of experimentation means taking a closer look at the actual functionality you are building and asking yourself: Is this worth pursuing further? Do users actually respond to this?

However you conduct such an experiment – using your own employees, a focus group, or a different method – you will have a better idea of the direction in which you should take your development to maximize your ROI. In the end, you don’t want to find yourself investing time and money in an idea you’ve lost confidence in.

3. Perfecting your business strategy

Experimentation may be the most useful – but also the toughest to apply – when it’s applied to your business itself. While testing whether one font or another works better on your website doesn’t require much courage, testing your own business processes or strategy may take more. After all, the principle of “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” is still deeply ingrained in the minds of many businesspeople. And it’s dangerous to let that attitude veer into territory that prevents you from embracing change.

Change is where growth comes from, and finding out what changes will actually make your business run more smoothly can have a major effect on your bottom line. Such change can come in many forms. Maybe an innovative approach to customer discounts, or a change in your teams’ distribution. The important thing to keep in mind when you ponder how to implement your ideas is that you don’t need to do so across the board. Experiment with a small portion of your customers and compare the results to your standard approach. For you, the end result will be hard data on what works and what doesn’t. As Stratechi points out, Capital One, a leader in credit cards, created a $40 billion business by executing hundreds of thousands of controlled experiments optimizing credit card designs, offers, and messaging.

The key to successful experimentation

Successful experimentation requires more than just ideas about what to test. To yield fruitful results from your testing efforts, consider these three important tips:

Start using a goal tree and formulate an experimentation methodology: Resist the urge to rush into tests. Align your goals with the overall company objectives, enabling your team to focus resources on the right problems and prioritize workloads more effectively.
Do more than just A/B tests: Explore various testing types for specific hypotheses. Considering each type based on your ultimate goal can yield more significant results.
Communicate your experimentation results to a broader audience within your organization: Taking experimentation to the next level involves sharing testing campaign results with employees. This fosters an 'experimentation culture' and may bring forth more ideas for future successful experiments.

Besides, you can learn more on how to elevate your experimentation approach and the success story of Electrolux’s conversion rate optimization resulted in a 25% increase in 'Add to Cart' actions.

Experimentation – A pathway to business success

In conclusion, experimentation is a pivotal pathway to successful business in today's dynamic landscape. As businesses strive to thrive through innovation, experimentation not only allows you to navigate the complexities of idea evaluation but also offers a strategic gateway to optimizing online performance, refining development processes, and honing business strategies through data-driven approaches.

For more customized and optimized experimentation solutions tailored to the unique needs of your business, we invite you to contact Niteco. With our expertise, we stand ready to assist you on the journey toward business excellence. The path to success begins with exploration, and Niteco is here to guide you every step of the way.

Niteco makes the switch to Zendesk for best-in-class customer service

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 09:26:00 +0700

Niteco’s Helpdesk offerings are receiving an invigorating update this fall as the agency has announced its switch to the industry leading Zendesk platform. The company’s Content Publishing and 24/7 Proactive Response services began using the platform for their work beginning in late September.

The switch to Zendesk brings many additional benefits for Niteco’s customers, among them companies like Electrolux and Avensia:

Customers receive more detailed information on the progress of their support tickets and tasks.
Comments and replies are also automatically emailed to people connected to a ticket for real-time updates.
With the entire support process happening in the Cloud, access will be much quicker and more reliable.
Improved speed and availability means your tickets will be taken care of even more smoothly.
Thanks to Zendesk’s frequent updates, you’ll always have the latest version and the latest improvements.
The built-in reporting capabilities of the Zendesk platform provide deep insights into the handling of tickets.

The decision to use Zendesk was initiated through Niteco’s Continuous Improvement program. Niteco regularly reviews our platforms and services to find new ways to add value to our customers and partners. The selection process assessed several different Helpdesk solutions over a number of months. “We tested the most sophisticated solutions available and came to the conclusion that Zendesk fits our customers’ requirements the best,” said Niteco CEO Pelle Niklasson. “It allows us to provide the best customer service we can while making the experience smooth for our customers as well as our agents.”

“Zendesk’s ticketing system means that our customers don’t need to change any processes in order to receive this streamlined support via Zendesk,” said Tung Nguyen, Niteco Delivery Manager in charge of the switch. “As before, customers send ticket requests to Niteco via email, which automatically creates a ticket for our dedicated team of experienced agents to work on.”

Should you have any questions about this move or if you're interested in Zendesk and Niteco's Helpdesk services, please feel free to contact us.

Why you should use a one-stop shop agency for your website

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 09:26:00 +0700

Designing, building, maintaining, and running a website, be it an Commerce site or not, requires more than the efforts of a website development team. You also need teams to take care of your digital marketing, SEO, conversion rate optimization and A/B Testing, design work, and more. In the past, this meant having to deal with lots of different agencies, each providing one of these services. If you’ve ever had to do it, you know it’s a nightmare of stakeholder management.

Working with a one-stop shop agency like Niteco, however, is different. Communication is greatly simplified, since teams within the partner agency know each other and work closely together. Taking care of your website development as well as your digital marketing needs suddenly becomes a much easier task – and we’ll show you how it works.

What is a one-stop shop agency?

A one-stop shop agency is a company that provides a comprehensive range of services in web development and digital marketing. These services often include web development itself, web design, content creation, search engine optimization (SEO), conversion rate optimization, email marketing, and many others. The goal of a one-stop shop agency is to provide clients with a single point of contact for all their needs, streamlining the process and making it more convenient for clients to access the full range of services they require.

Taking Niteco as an example, the greatest advantage of working with a one-stop shop agency is having to manage fewer stakeholders. For complicated tasks that need the involvement of several different teams, it’s enough to brief one team. They will then put a process in motion that involves all the teams that are relevant for the given task, freeing up time for the client that would otherwise be spent on having numerous meetings with different stakeholders.

The benefits of a one-stop shop solution in web development and digital marketing

Simplicity

Without a doubt, it’s an advantage to have all the services you need under one roof. While, of course, you’re working with different teams on different services, those teams share an office in a one-stop shop agency. That means that issues between teams are resolved much more quickly and processes are less ambiguous. Also, adding more services to your suite becomes simpler than ever if your partner offers those services as well.

Streamlined communication

The existence of a single point of contact and the time savings associated with it may just be one of the greatest advantages of the one-stop shop approach. Zhenbei Li, Digital Manager APAC and MEA at Electrolux, put it best, we think. She said,

“When I have a task that needs the support of many different teams, I only need to brief one project manager. They will then go on to inform the others and put a plan in place. I saves me tremendous time I can then spend on other pressing business.”

The simplified communication is a huge advantage of working with a one-stop shop agency

Cost efficiency

Maintaining relationships and contracts with several different vendors is not only complicated and time-consuming, it can also get quite expensive. Having to buy every single service individually from a different vendor means more time and money spent on researching those different vendors, getting to know new sales departments and project management teams, and reviewing contracts. When you’re working with a one-stop-shop agency, you can often get bundled pricing for multiple services, with further pricing advantages as part of a long-term partnership, led by sales teams that get to know you and your requirements.

Consistency

When you’re working on a project with several different vendors providing different services, making sure that everyone is working toward a common goal becomes your responsibility as the customer. While vendors will probably do their best to complete their tasks and provide their service as best they can, every agency invariably has different ways of doing things. So, to ensure consistency, you as the customer representative have to stay on top of everything, making sure that the work is aligned. Working with a one-stop shop agency, with different teams under common leadership, this alignment is much simpler to ensure, resulting in a more consistent solution.

Avoiding conflicts

Stakeholder management can be very challenging, and even more so when you’re dealing with partners that don’t get along. If you’ve ever been in a position where partner agencies were pushing blame for an issue back and forth endlessly, you know what we’re talking about. When you’re working with a one-stop shop agency, there’s no more need to participate in such blame games. While, of course, miscommunications can still happen, knowing that everyone involved is working under common management makes conflict resolution much quicker and smoother.

Common one-stop shop services in website development and digital marketing

Most one-stop shop agencies cover a wide array of services, though few cover every single offering you might need for the running of a successful Commerce site. Some of the essential services most one-stop shop agencies offer are the following:

Web development

Website development is the core service for the building and maintenance of successful websites and Commerce sites. Whether your site uses Optimizely, Sitecore, Umbraco or other platforms, your chosen agency’s extensive expertise will allow you to get the most out of it.

The web developers not only build your site and make sure it runs smoothly without any downtimes, they also support other teams in providing their services. For example, services like data analytics, SEO, or conversion rate optimization often require technical support in their implementation.

UI/UX Design

Great UI/UX design can make the difference between your site being a success or hemorrhaging users immediately. Good user experience is absolutely essential, and close cooperation between the design team and the development team can ensure that your design gets implemented in the best way.

In a one-stop shop agency, your development team and your design team are already familiar with each other and know each other’s strengths. With their shared experience of designing, building, and implementing great websites, this multi-disciplinary team can make sure that users engage more closely with your site.

SEO and content services

Without good SEO strategy and good content, it’s almost impossible for a site to be successful. Google’s criteria for high search rankings are becoming ever more stringent, and also include technical requirements and minimum thresholds for your site’s performance. These Core Web Vitals mean your SEO team also has to work closely with your web development and maintenance team to ensure that your site’s performance is up to scratch.

Add to this that SEO requires quality content for Google and other search engines to crawl, meaning that you may also require content creation or content governance services – all of which require close cooperation with the SEO team. So, it’s definitely a good thing if all those teams share a common space and can discuss issues within minutes.

Analytics and conversion rate optimization

Knowing how users behave on your site is incredibly important if you want to improve your user experience, guide users through your sales funnel, and maximize your conversions. With advanced tracking tools and A/B Testing, a qualified analytics team and conversion rate optimization team working together can tell you exactly where your users drop off and what kind of content converts.

To analyze and optimize all aspects of your site, your analytics and CRO team need to work closely with all the other teams, including content services or web developers. And with a one-stop shop agency, those teams working together under common leadership will deliver the most cohesive solution to boost your bottom line.

Why you should give a one-stop shop agency a try

Trying whether a one-stop shop agency is right for you is as easy as starting off with having an agency provide just two services. Once you see how effective this way of doing business is and have become comfortable with the way the agency does things, you can decide to add additional services to your suite.

With Niteco, this is the way our customers came to realize that working with our web development and digital marketing teams is the best way forward. If you’re looking for a way out of your stakeholder management troubles, contact Niteco today to find out how your sites and workflows could benefit from working with a one-stop shop agency.

Standardize your Solution Architecture Diagrams

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 11:16:00 +0700

People say that "Drawing great solution architecture diagrams is an art”. Drawing solution architecture diagrams does involve a lot of creativity: Choosing shapes and symbols, colors, and types of arrows, deciding on what to write and where to place all the boxes and so on. But what often happens when people choose their own ways of drawing diagrams is that the architecture is easily misunderstood.

When diagrams fail to present the solution

We have probably all seen diagrams similar to the ones below – all with different design language.

The first one uses colors, lots of symbols, text, logotypes, and dividers - but no connectors/arrows. The described system is in the middle, but its purpose is not clear.

Source: Wikimedia

In the diagram below, we see the described system at the top. This diagram uses no symbols or logos and has a limited number of shapes. Unlike the previous diagram, which used no connectors/arrows, this diagram uses arrows as a main component. It is still unclear what purpose the system serves, except that it is some kind of web application.

Source: Wikimedia

Click here for the full image

The third diagram is the first that involves actors – we see them as the classical faceless icons. There are symbols, multicolored connectors of two sorts (two- and one-directional). The diagram contains a list of functionalities, describing features of the system. What the system does and who it serves is not explained in this diagram either.

Source: Wikimedia

Click here for the full image

The three diagrams are very different in visual appeal, what symbols they use and what information they are trying to convey. Indeed, some creativity has gone into making these diagrams. I think there is even a slight chance that we could get "Solution Diagrams" classified as a new artform among the 28 existing art forms listed by Axis, a platform for artists.

Jokes aside, is diagramming supposed to be an artform? Does it require creative skills just to architecture facts in a visual way?

And how useful are these diagrams? Can they be misinterpreted easily? For example, the middle diagram we looked at earlier has arrows in both directions on all connectors – so is there always two-way communication happening between all systems or was that just the default connector used by the diagram’s drawer?

Standardization using the C4 model

At Niteco we have started to look at how we can standardize our diagrams and not only take the artistic requirements out of the drawing but add a long list of benefits that cannot be achieved using traditional methods.

We are starting the standardization process with our Optimizely solutions, and we are using the C4 model. This model allows the drawer to focus on representing the system completely in a visual form, without ambiguity.

C4 comes in three levels, and this post focuses on the first level. Future posts will cover level 2 and level 3.

The first level will be useful across the organization and is also easy to understand for the client. It tells the overall story about the system, its actors, and its integrations.

The C4 diagram below is of a fictious system for the made-up business Automo that owns several car brands. I will not tell you more than that, since the C4 diagram contains all the contextual information within it. Unlike the three diagrams above, the reader should, within minutes, have a good grasp of what this system does and who it serves.

The diagram is almost like a book, where the title and blurb are seen in the blue box in the middle.

Title: Car Parts

Ok, maybe not a fiction best seller :)

Blurb: Car parts websites for all Automo brands that allow mechanics, distributors, staff, and consumers to purchase car parts and accessories for Automo cars.

Click here for the full image

The rest of the "book" is read in whatever order the reader chooses. Each "mini chapter" starts with a box and continues by following a "shooting arrow" to the receiving box, where the chapter ends.

As an example:

Mechanic Buys Parts from Car Parts

Car Parts Request Payments from Ebay.

Car Parts Authenticates Automo Staff via Azure AD Connect.

The Level 1 diagram only contains 3 different types of boxes:

The blue box represents the described system. This is represented by the Visual Studio solution.
The grey boxes represent all the external systems with which the described system is integrated.
The green boxes represent the actors.

There is only one type of connector, the triggering connector. It goes from the actor/system that triggers a system to the triggered system.

Understandable diagrams for all stakeholders

Level 1 of the C4 model does not assume any prior knowledge by the reader. Everyone in the business should be able to read the diagram, without having any knowledge of what a CRM, CMS or PIM is. Automo has a wide variety of business users that range from content writers to IT administrators to Commerce marketing staff. Automo often employs new people with no knowledge of the company that quickly need to get up to speed. This diagram is helpful for them as well, since there is an emphasis on providing a good explanation of each system and each actor. At Niteco, the diagram is used by developers, architects, testers, PMs, operations, and sales – our solutions are the centerpiece of what we do, and level 1 gives a one-page visual summary of each solution.

Only the direct integrations are described in C4. The PIMS connects to an ERP system, which would often be included in other architecture diagrams. But Car Parts does not contain a single line of code of integration with the ERP, hence the ERP is not included in the diagram. The C4 diagram displays only what interacts with the described system.

However, to roll out a standardized way of drawing Optimizely solutions at Niteco, C4 rules did not supply enough guidelines. We added our own rules and definitions on top of the ones given by C4.

Optimizely CMS and Commerce are tightly coupled with our code, and we did a lot of thinking on how to describe this in the diagrams. We landed on the solution seen in the diagram above, showing them as external systems.

This way, we can quickly see what parts of the Optimizely product suite are included in each solution, and we can also keep track of what version each solution is running by adding them as properties in the model (Component of DXC is an example of such a property).

Using Archimate for diagramming

That leads us to the powerful modelling aspects of Archimate, the tool we are using to draw C4 diagrams.

If I select the PIMS box and open the visualizer (see below), I can see all objects that are connected to the PIMS. In addition to Car Parts, the PIMS API (visible in level 2) is connected to the PIMS. In our fabricated example, Niteco is managing more solutions for Automo which also integrate with the same PIMS. As we draw these solutions in Archimate, the visualizer also includes these solutions, even if they are in independent views.

The diagram itself is represented by a view and it presents any aspect of a model. In level 1, we are not showing the PIMS API, but it is still in the model.

When we have modelled all the diagrams for Automo, it is useful to analyze the model whenever we have questions about the enterprise architecture. Automo might be in the process of investing in a new PIMS solution and would like to know all the dependencies on the existing PIMS. By looking at the model, we can quickly find all the connectors to the PIMS and give the client an understanding of the rough costs for replacing their PIMS solution.

There is also a SQL query language to search the model.

Imagine this scenario: One of Niteco’s sales representatives has a new Commerce opportunity where the potential client asks for our experience in integrating to CRM systems. To quickly find out what CRM systems have been integrated in any of our solutions, he can query the model where all diagrams are stored.

Conclusion

That concludes the blog post of the first-level diagramming of the C4 model in Archi for Optimizely Solutions. Many goodies have been included, but this way of drawing diagrams and modelling solutions has even more aspects that I will not be able to cover in one post.

Some of the many benefits of drawing diagrams using the C4 models are:

Consistency in how solution diagrams are drawn across and within client projects.
Reaches a wider audience due to the high readability.
Strict definitions minimize the risk of misinterpreting (remember the double arrows in the second sample diagram?) the diagram.

Removes the artistic requirements and components in diagramming. No need to think about what colors to apply, what shapes to use, how to connect the shapes, how to position objects, what to represent, what logos to include or what images to decorate with etc. The creative component is eliminated, and all energy can be focused on describing the solution and its integrations.
Ability to query the model using SQL syntax, providing a tool for sales, architects and developers that quickly need to find information across several systems.

What is mobile first design and how do you implement it?

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 11:16:00 +0700

A mobile first approach refers to the practice of having designers start design work for mobile devices first. The goal of taking a mobile first approach is to reverse what has been the established workflow, namely designing for desktop and scaling down the design for mobile afterwards.

With the number of mobile device users growing around the world, a trend that is unlikely to change anytime soon, creating engaging experiences on mobile devices has become crucial for the success of any online solution. In this post, we will give you the answers to the three most important questions around mobile first: what is mobile-first design, why is it important, and how do you implement it effectively?

What is mobile first design and why is it important?

What is mobile first design?

Mobile first design means that designers working on a new digital experience focus their work on smaller, mobile screens first before later adapting the design for desktop computers and other larger screens.

In the past, this process was usually reversed as part of what design professionals call graceful degradation. Desktop solutions with full functionality were adapted to fit the much smaller mobile screen later in the design stage, having to sacrifice part of their functionality in the process. While many solutions performed this adaptation remarkably well, this treatment of mobile design as an “afterthought” often led to less satisfying and comfortable experiences on mobile devices.

Mobile first design follows the logic that it’s more effective to design a product for the smaller screen first because of the space limitations instead of having to cut a design made for larger screens and losing functionality in the process. As part of the approach, designers make sure that all the most crucial UI/UX elements are prominently displayed and used logically on mobile screens, without having to accommodate previous design decisions made for desktop screens. Once the mobile design is done, it can then be scaled up to fit larger screens, with the possibility of adding design elements that aren’t crucial to the experience – and no risk of losing key functionality. This is also called progressive advancement – the design progresses from the most basic key functionalities on smaller screens to more advanced functionality on larger ones.

Why is it important to design for mobile first?

Mobile first design drives you to make your solutions easier to read and use on mobile screens. While creating satisfying and engaging mobile experiences through mobile first design is a design goal for any solution, the rising number of mobile users around the world also makes it a smart business decision. According to Statista, the world has 6.5 billion smartphone users in 2022, so it’s no surprise that many websites – including those of many of our clients – now see more total traffic from mobile devices than from desktop computers. Combine that with the fact that Google’s algorithm ranks mobile-friendly websites higher than others, and it’s easy to see that good mobile design can have a clear effect on a company’s bottom line.

Niteco followed a Mobile First approach in creating the new Commerce site for AEG Australia.

How do you implement a mobile first approach?

Put the user at the center of your design

In the UI/UX design process, nothing has higher priority than the users for whom you are designing. They are the people who will be using your product, so it’s crucial to keep their requirements in mind.

Starting out on a new design process, the most important question you should be asking yourself is, “What do the users expect from this product?”

Take the Tolka project with translation and interpretation agency Transvoice as an example, where Niteco built a completely new user portal with mobile first in mind. To understand the customer’s needs, Niteco’s UI/UX designers held workshops to determine the main pain points of working with the existing platform. The team conducted extensive research on the business field and competitors’ solutions, created user personas to further clarify the needs that needed to be addressed and, finally, presented the customer with wireframes and user flows. This helped them design a product that established a clear workflow for user tasks without distracting secondary functionality.

Step-by-step guide to implementing a mobile first design

Get organized

What is the first step in the mobile first design process? A major part of building a mobile first design is setting the scope and prioritization of the mobile application. In your first design meetings, you will likely come up with or receive requests for a long list of features that should be included in your application or website. Banners, videos, menus, account management, blogs, and more. The next step, however, is to figure out which is the key functionality – the reason your users use your application. And this is where a spreadsheet is your best friend.

List out all the content you have and wish to include in your design, then create a hierarchy that will help guide you in prioritizing and placing the most important features.

Prioritize your features

For a very simplified example, let’s assume that your application’s purpose is to book tables in restaurants. Your application will need to have lots of features to cover everything you may envision – account management, favorite lists, promotions, etc. However, the main features would likely be the following:

Choosing restaurants
Booking tables

While the other features will still be part of the application, the focus will be on these two functionalities. That means that they will take up most of the used screen space, with controls that are large and comfortable to handle even on the go. In essence, users should still have the option to use other functionality but should not be distracted or have their experience impaired by it. This way, you can ensure that using these features works smoothly on mobile devices. When you upscale the application for larger screens later, you still have the option of giving other features more prominent placement as well.

With the added space, you can add blogs, introduce new restaurants or present bios of new chefs, all while keeping the key functionality of choosing and booking intact.

Design the mobile wireframe first

Based on what you decided in the prior step, you can now create your mobile wireframes. Decide exactly which features should be placed where, where CTAs should go, and how users will navigate through your application.

When your mobile wireframe is done, you can use it as a foundation for larger breakpoints in the design of the experience on larger screens. Essentially, in designing the mobile experience, you have pinpointed what the focus of your application should be, and you can use this information for creating a great desktop experience.

Get rid of unnecessary obstacles

Some design features work perfectly on large screens, but are nothing more than a distraction or, at worst, an impediment in mobile design.

Popups: Popups can be annoying on any screen if they’re not used in moderation, but on mobile screens, they can quickly become a deal breaker. Because of the different sizes of mobile devices, if you’re not careful with sizing, a popup can easily hijack a user’s whole screen, keeping them from what they wanted to do in the first place. If you absolutely need to use popups, use them sparingly and only to provide users with information or functionality they absolutely need.
Images: Website banners are great, but refrain from using large landscape-format images, since they won’t look good on a mobile screen held in portrait mode. Even when you use portrait-format banners, don’t take up an entire screen with images – always ensure that users can see the CTA or key functionality at first glance, without having to scroll.

Use responsive design

One thing you need to remember about the world of mobile devices is that one size does not fit all. Smartphones and tablets come in a wide variety of screen sizes, so you need to make sure that your design looks good on all of them. Using a responsive framework allows your design to adjust to the screen on which it is displayed, making sure all essential information is retained. This means that you can focus on the important aspects of your design instead of having to adjust everything manually for every conceivable screen size.

Test on real devices

While you’re likely designing your application on a desktop or laptop computer, you should test it on an actual mobile device. Many design programs offer features that let you emulate a mobile screen on your computer screen for testing purposes, but we recommend using a real mobile screen.

Navigate through the entire application like a normal user would, and ideally involve other designers that were not part of the design process. They will be able to look at the application without preconceptions while being able to give you a professional opinion. However, make sure to also involve non-designers in the tests for an additional perspective.

How to test a mobile first design

Use testing tools

While, as mentioned above, we recommend testing on actual mobile devices, there are also a number of useful tools that can help you to test the performance and functionality of your application.

For a quick test using Google’s criteria for mobile friendliness of a web application, use Google Search Console. Other tools we recommend for use in testing mobile designs are Calabash, Testdroid, Appium, or MonkeyTalk. For cross-browser testing that ensures your application works on any combination of OS, browser, and resolution, a tool like LambdaTest is recommended.

Validate HTML and CSS

To make sure that any errors in how the application is displayed or how it performs aren’t rooted in your own code, it’s a good idea to use a validation tool to validate the HTML and CSS code. These tools can help you fix syntax errors and other mistakes.

Tools for this testing step include Validator.nu and the W3C CSS Validation Service.

Perform A/B Testing

Once your application has gone live, it’s time to embark on a thorough A/B Testing campaign. Even after testing, a lot of the things upon which you have based your design are assumptions of what users may like or demand. Now, once actual users get their hands on the application, it’s time to find out what they actually want.

The A/B Testing process is simple: analyze your application’s data, come up with a hypothesis of what could improve your numbers, then test and evaluate. You can use basic analytics to determine where improvements could be made. Heat maps can also be very useful as foundations for your experimentation.

Don’t forget that A/B Testing is an ongoing process throughout an application’s lifecycle. User preferences may change with time and new hypotheses will arise, so don’t neglect your testing down the road.

Some tips for your mobile first design

Mobile first is content first: Determine which content is the most essential for your mobile experience and focus on it. Then create your design based on the content you need to present to the user.

Keep it simple: Simplicity is your friend when it comes to mobile first design. As mentioned above, the goal is to make the key functionality the centerpiece of your design and try to keep distractions to a minimum.

Keep CTAs bold and consistent: Users should be able to locate and recognize your CTAs with ease even if they’re just glancing at their screen while on the go.

Optimize loading speed: Performance is crucial when it comes to user experience. According to Neil Patel’s blog, 47% of users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less, so make sure to optimize your application’s performance.

If you want to find out more about Mobile First design or need advice on how to create a UI/UX design that converts for your application, contact Niteco today!

Frequently asked questions about mobile-first design

Optimizely on .NET 5: Performance game-changer | Niteco

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 11:16:49 +0700

On September 28th, with the launch of Optimizely’s latest updates to their CMS (Content Cloud version 12 and Commerce Cloud 14), Optimizely launched its first version ever based on .NET 5. Niteco Solution Architect and Optimizely MVP Scott Reed gives a short rundown of why this is a reason to be excited, for developers and website owners alike.

Performance

The main benefit to the upgrade to .NET 5 for Optimizely customers are the improvements to performance and stability. This means faster, more stable websites that handle concurrent loads, better at high volumes. This translates to faster page loads and better Google Core Web Vitals scores, with fewer service interruptions. That equals better search rankings and an improved customer experience; and that means reduced bounce rates and increased conversation. That’s a win, whichever way you look at it!

Optimizely’s benchmarking shows that tests produced 4 times higher response speeds and 5-10 times faster site operation. Overall, this should have a definite effect on your bottom line.

Support

Moving to .NET 5, and more importantly .NET 6 (coming early 2022 as .NET 5 support ends in February 2022), means that the platform will be aligned with a supported version of .NET. This means security patches and updates are guaranteed and can easily be implemented. With Optimizely and Microsoft so aligned in their close partnership, the future looks very good indeed.

Platform features

The .NET 5 version adds a whole load of new features for both CMS/Commerce editors as well as development teams. With Optimizely usually rolling out its changes in a regular release update cycle, these new features are not going to be retroactively ported back to older versions. Basically, if you don’t upgrade, you will not get these features. It also means you will not get any of the features Optimizely rolls out in the future and that will leave you stagnating on an old version of the platform. New features include:

Better and faster redesigned version of the admin area: The admin area is now faster to use for admin users with a snappier response (due to a complete redesign and the .NET 5 update).
Removal of Commerce Manager: In Commerce, a major pain point in the past was having two applications, with some legacy features still kept in Commerce Manager. This part has been removed and the last remaining configuration features were folded into to the main CMS interface. Frankly, this is a massive win for developers and site editors alike.
Faster overall CMS/Commerce editing experience: The .NET 5 performance upgrades also benefit the editor area, making it more efficient. The improvements will be easily felt by editors on both CMS and Commerce, meaning edits will be smoother and quicker.
New versions of core packages: New versions of packages such as marketing connectors, forms and more provide not only better performance, but have been reworked to be more modern and more easily extensible by developers to suit your needs. That means you can customize your Optimizely site even further to meet your needs.

As Optimizely announced, upgrading to .NET 5 will require a new environment for your DXP, but no reason to worry. There will be no additional cost to your license. Your code will also need to be migrated from your existing code base to .NET 5, a process Niteco can take care of for you, getting you on .NET 5 with ease.

Niteco has been at the cutting edge of this work, with OMVP Scott Reed partnering with Optimizely to run masterclasses on the topic and speaking about it at Optimizely’s annual conference Opticon21. There is no better placed partner to help you to upgrade your Optimizely installation than Niteco. Find out how and let Niteco handle your .NET 5 journey.

Find out more about the latest .NET Core upgrade and why it is important for your business.

Get access to the pdf version & recorded presentation from Scott Reed (Niteco Solution Architect) on Optimizely Partner Day:

Get Access

Top 9 web application risks that could harm your business

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 11:16:00 +0700

As our laptops and mobile devices get more and more connective features, we also create additional loopholes for data and attacks to slip through. And as ever, new technologies are being created faster than security practices protecting users from exploitative use of those technologies.

Cybercrime incidents cost the world economy more than US$1 trillion in 2020. However, cybercrime is not all about hackers forcing their way into your network, it is also about how users – legitimate and otherwise – interact with and gain access to your system and your apps. This is why securing web applications is just as critical as securing your back-end systems.

In this article, we will go through a quick definition of what a web application is, detail the risks they can carry and show you what you can do to mitigate them.

What do we define as a “Web Application”?

When browsing a website, there are numerous technologies involved in returning what users see in their web browsers. In the early days, simple websites were made up of just HTML & CSS. However, as websites needed to become more complex to allow users greater levels of interactivity, website development and the tools involved ballooned rapidly.

As the need for more complex user interactivity arose, several technologies came about, among them:

Server-side Programming allows developers to write code and create experiences based upon user interactions running on the servers our websites are hosted on.
Databases – These are where we store and interact with complex data allowing our server-side code to access persistent information which can be used to enhance user experiences.
JavaScript – This is one of the core technologies of the web, allowing us to create rich interactive experiences. Instead of writing code that runs on the server, JavaScript enables developers to write code that’s run directly in the web browser.
Cookies – Cookies let us store data on a user’s device, which allows us to identify the same user between requests to a web server.

The above technologies and many others put together make up our web applications. Without these innovations, we wouldn’t be able to create rich experiences for the users.

However, interconnected technologies inevitably create security issues. If there are errors in the code or the databases or infrastructure were not set up in the correct way, people can exploit them for their own malicious purposes.

So without further ado, let’s dive into the 9 most common web application vulnerabilities we see today:

1. Broken access control

Access control imposes policies, keeping users from acting outside their explicit permissions. That’s why broken access control often leads to unauthorized information exposure and modifications or damage to data.

Almost every web application is reported to be susceptible to some forms of access control vulnerability. Depending on the types of data the attackers can get their hands on, the impact of a successful attack exploiting this kind of vulnerability could be severely detrimental to your business.

Some common access control vulnerabilities include:

Bypassing access control checks by modifying the URL or API requests, HTML page or internal application state.
Violations of the principle of least privilege, where access should only be granted for specific capabilities and roles, but is available to anyone.
Escalation of privilege, which may allow acting as an admin when logged in as a user, or acting as a user without being logged in.

2. Cryptographic failure

We rely on cryptographic algorithms and protocols for secure communication on the Internet. You are safe to make your bank transactions and send that private message online because your data is encrypted before being sent to the recipient for decryption. Thanks to cryptography, your information is protected in cyberspace.

A cryptographic failure might be a weakness in a code, cipher, cryptographic protocol, or key management scheme, which leads to sensitive data being disclosed or systems being compromised. This may result in the exposure of passwords, credit card numbers, health records or business secrets.

3. Injection

An injection attack is a type of attack that injects malicious code into the application to perform an exploit/attack of some sort. Some of the most common types of injections are SQL, NoSQL, OS command, and Cross-site scripting.

For example, a SQL injection attack occurs when an attacker is able to inject custom SQL commands into the application, making it possible to perform actions with the database that were not intended. These SQL commands can give the attackers the ability to view sensitive data, change information, or delete data stored in the SQL database. At worst, this could end up causing a major security leak, comparable to cases where customer usernames and passwords were leaked online, resulting in lots of media coverage.

4.Security misconfigurations

Security misconfiguration vulnerabilities occur when there is a misconfiguration or insecure configuration issue, making a component in the web application susceptible to attacks.

Attacks like buffer overflow, XSS or brute force/credential stuffing may target misconfiguration vulnerabilities.

Some of the risks for security misconfigurations include:

Missing appropriate security hardening across any part of the application stack or using inappropriately configured permissions on cloud services.
For upgraded systems, the latest security features are disabled or not configured securely.
The software is out of date.

5.Vulnerable and outdated components

When was the last time you downloaded something for free on the Internet?

With the increase in third-party components that are available for free online to use in application development, there is an increasing risk of them becoming outdated and filled with security flaws, yet never get updated in the solution.

Some of the causes for vulnerable/outdated components you might encounter:

Software is out of date or vulnerable, including the OS, web server, database management system, APIs, etc.
You don’t scan for vulnerabilities regularly and don’t subscribe to security bulletins related to the components you use in development.
You don’t upgrade the underlying platform, frameworks, and dependencies in a timely, risk-based fashion.

6. Identification and authentication failures

Identification and authentication attacks attempt to exploit the authentication process that a website uses to verify the identity of a user, service or application. Some authentication-related attacks are credential stuffing, password attacks, brute force or other automated attacks.

An application is prone to authentication weaknesses if it:

Permits automated attacks such as credential stuffing, where the attacker has a list of valid usernames and passwords.
Permits weak passwords such as “123456”, “password”, or “abc123”.
Uses ineffective credential recovery/ forgotten-password processes such as “knowledge-based answers”.
Uses plain-text, encrypted, or weakly hashed password data stores.
Has missing or ineffective multi-factor authentication.

7. Software and data integrity failures

Software and data integrity failures are related to code and infrastructure that don’t protect against integrity violations. One example is of application that has auto-update functionality, where updates are downloaded without adequate integrity verification but applied to the formerly trusted application. Ergo, attackers could upload their own updates for the distribution and operation on all installations.

8. Security logging and monitoring failures

Security logging and monitoring is a process that performs electronic audit logs for signs that help detect unauthorized security-related actions on a framework or an application that transmits or stores data. Insufficient logging and monitoring vulnerabilities occur when the security-critical event is not logged or monitored properly, which makes malicious activities harder to detect and escalate.

Without logging and monitoring, breaches can’t be detected. This can affect visibility, accountability, incident alerting and forensics. Insufficient logging, detection and monitoring include:

Auditable events (logins, failed logins, high-value transactions) are not logged.
Warnings and errors generate inadequate, unclear, or no log messages.
The application can’t detect or alert for active attacks in real time or near real time.

9. Server-side request forgery (SSRF)

SSRF refers to an attack that lets an attacker send crafted requests from the back-end server of a vulnerable web application, allowing the attacker to manipulate the information in the realm of that server. It is commonly used by attackers targeting the internal networks that are behind firewalls or VPNs and can’t be reached from the external network. A common example is when an attacker can get control of a third-party service URL to which the web application makes a request.

Mitigating application vulnerability risks

In the modern web landscape, web applications can contain sensitive data such as usernames, passwords, personal data, credit cards and much more. Therefore, it is critical that every level of the applications is audited for and protected against attacks in cyberspace.

As the types of cyberattacks are continually getting more sophisticated, it’s essential that you use well-secured and monitored applications that follow the OWASP Top 10 guidelines.

Optimizely's platform is designed, reviewed, and tested using OWASP application standards. The software developed by the organization is continually monitored and tested using processes that can proactively identify and remediate vulnerabilities.

The company also has technical measures in place to protect Optimizely applications. Among them are access control measures including secure authentication and session management, network and transmission controls, data confidentiality as well as security in engineering.

The Optimizely Digital Experience Platform also has an always-enabled Web Application Firewall (WAF) to constantly monitor website traffic and filter out malicious traffic at the web application layer. The WAF also examines HTTP requests to your website, so malware, SQL injections or any illegitimate traffic can be challenged and either blocked or stopped.

Having been an Optimizely partner for over a decade and boasting the largest number of Optimizely certified developers of any partner in the world, we know the platform like the backs of our hands. And at Niteco, we know that mitigating threats to a web application requires much-needed focus on the end-user. That’s why our 24/7 Proactive Response service actively monitors security and performs incident management around the clock to give you peace of mind.

If you want to know more about our security practices and standards, get in touch so we can talk more about how we can help to protect your user data.

International corporate sites - Optimizely Multiple Languages in action

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 09:29:00 +0700

For Niteco, a software development firm that has a strong track record in building complex, multi-lingual sites, Optimizely continues to be the go-to technology for multinationals. Big continues to be better as far as corporate execs and investors are concerned, but there’s a clear need to satisfy consumers’ preference for localized content.

That’s why Niteco is continually approached to build sites that can maintain a company’s global brand reputation - branding guidelines and content included - while still appearing to be locally influenced. Take for example, our client Bisnode which operates in 16 different European countries. In order to resonate equally and professionally as ‘thought leaders’ it was essential to Bisnode’s company strategy that local sites featured content in the relevant dialects.

How did we do this?

Thanks to Optimizely, Bisnode could create their corporate content in the group content hub, which can be accessed by local editors for translation into their local language.

Below, Hiep To, one of Niteco’s Swedish-based Project Manager reveals how developers can structure the pages, blocks and forms:

In Optimizely, the pages are structured in the shape of a tree. To build up a page, you can create content blocks and use in pages. The blocks will be structured in Optimizely’s asset tree folder as well. For each language, Optimizely supports the ability to translate pages to different languages.

Assess the solutions - to solve the multiple languages scenario, you have two options.

Option 1:

All local sites use the same language with the option of mapping each language site to a different home page root

- Pros:

Easy to copy and clone a new page
Easy to create and maintain different content structures
Setup the access rights which are separated by tree nodes

- Cons:

Each tree node for the main site is separated by other local sites.
You may face a challenge when using the translation flow to translate the master language to other languages
The node for each tree will be duplicated so you will have a very long tree structure in the end

Option 2:

Local sites use a different language with the same root

- Pros:

Can set up a translation process to translate the master content to different languages
Can setup the access right by languages
Can develop a clear page tree structure that can be managed centrally.

- Cons:

This option is more complex with copy, paste or move action.

The option we prefer is Option 2: Different languages using the same root for each language.

Why?

Because it’s the translation process that benefit editors the most. In addition, we don’t want to have a complex page tree with thousands of parent nodes.

But before anything is built, there are some questions that need answering, such as:

How do we limit the access rights for each country? What happens if an editor in one country moves the blocks and content around without any other editor from any other country noticing?
How will you bring the content from one language to other languages in a convenient and easy way?
Will the company’s editors create all content or will translation agencies, for example, also be required to populate pages?
What will happen if one editor deletes the pages so that the whole page node is moved to trash?

As a developer, the other essentials we need to think through, include:

How we will structure the access rights for Pages, Blocks and Forms?
What is the translation workflow from Master languages to different languages?
What actions could be done on Pages?
What level of flexibility does the company want to give to local editors?

How to set the access right for Pages, Blocks and Forms

For pages: All the web editors will have access to the back-end link, but only the web editors working on the English language site will have access to edit English pages, and editors for the Swedish language site will have access to edit Swedish pages.
For blocks: Set up a folder for each language or country:
English: only English editors have the edit access - English WebEditors group
Germany: only German editors have the edit access - German WebEditors group
Poland: only Polish editors have the edit access - Polish WebEditors group.

… and so on and so forth.

And the same structure with the Forms; each country will have their own folders
Editing Rights for each language: only the editors with access to the local group have the chance to translate the content.

Our Recommended Translation Workflow

The content will be created in Master language first (in this case we choose English)
Language Add-ons can be used to help translate the content into different languages
The blocks on pages can be translated to different languages if needed.

Actions on Page Tree

Because Optimizely allows the editors to move or copy the page once they have the edit access, it could create problems if multiple editors from multiple countries try to duplicate the content and move it around
But rules could be set up. For example, the Editors in the Master Language could move or copy the page, while editors working with other languages can be given access for translation purposes only
If local editors have content that they create locally, they can create a page in their local language.

By adopting this approach, we’ve observed improved usability for editors. Certainly, you’ll find that there may be small things that need customizing in order to achieve a good workflow. Optimizely also supports content approval workflows that can be set up differently for each language. While these were not available when Niteco started to implement the solution for our client, it’s something that we recommend developers look into when starting or upgrading to the latest Optimizely version.

To find out more about building complex multi-lingual sites, send me an email.

The Optimizely Platform in 2025 – An Overview

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 11:16:00 +0700

After its rebranding in 2021, the Optimizely platform is more streamlined than ever. With a renewed focus on experimentation and optimization, Optimizely now divides its offerings into three distinct service groups – Content Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Intelligence Cloud. In this overview, we explain which features and services make up these three groups and give Optimizely the all-around capabilities your business needs.

Click here for the full image

Optimizely Content Cloud

For several years now, Optimizely has been a leader in the Web Content Management space with the CMS named Content Cloud, consistently ranking highly in reports by Forrester and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Its powerful content management capabilities empower editors to take full control of the website’s content and support them in their day-to-day marketing activities. This includes on-page editing, scheduling of content publishing, bulk content authoring, approval workflows, multi-step web forms, A/B testing and CRO, SEO, social media integration and personalization, all via a user-friendly, intuitive UI. Optimizely also supports headless CMS options for businesses with multiple touchpoints.

Optimizely Commerce Cloud

Not only does it have a powerful web content management, Optimizely also has very strong Commerce capabilities (check Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce). It has a very easy to use UI to manage markets, products, pricing, inventory, carts and orders, as well as setting up discounts and promotions. It can easily integrate with the usual Commerce support systems such as an ERP, PIM, OMS, DAM, payment gateways, marketing automation and so on. And it blends well with the CMS capabilities, providing marketers on-page editing abilities for product listing and detail pages and letting them easily manage campaigns, banners and landing pages, even across multiple markets and languages.

Commerce Cloud is split into B2B Commerce Cloud and B2C Commerce Cloud, with features that specifically target both of these market approaches. While B2B Commerce Cloud emphasizes flexibility, management of complex business rules and integrations, B2C Commerce Cloud focuses on using artificial intelligence to deliver personalized commerce experiences.

Optimizely Data Platform

Optimizely’s customer data platform (CDP) is at the heart of Optimizely’s delivery of experiences. It works behind the scenes to collect and centralize customer data from different touchpoints and make it available to the website so it can provide a unified and personalized experience to the customer. Based on the Zaius platform, which Optimizely took over in early 2021, the CDP utilizes a personalized data science model based on your specific customer data to provide intelligent segmenting and campaign targeting. And with real-time insights powered by data science, the Optimizely Data Platform gives you a holistic view of your customers and users.

Data Core Service

Optimizely’s Data Core Service is, in essence, an underpinning layer for the storage of all customer and engagement data across all products on the Optimizely platform. It also allows you to report on this data. You can use the additional context you receive from this service to underpin your data-driven decision making. You can even make use of unknown sessions by turning them into individual customers, gaining insights even from interactions that previously gave you little data to work with.

Content Recommendations

Optimizely’s AI-powered recommendation engine allows you to personalize user experiences with minimal manual effort. The Content Intelligence feature can analyze all your content in real-time with big data analysis and AI-enabled tagging using natural language processing, enabling you to make informed decisions on what needs to be created next – without having to tag every piece of content yourself. Easily find out exactly which topics drive conversions and revenue so you can focus on creating content that converts.

The recommendation engine provides you with a deep understanding of the interests of any given user profile in your CDP, allowing you to target users effectively with content that will be engaging to them.

Product Recommendations

Instantly boost conversions, cross-sells, upsells and order value by leveraging personalized product recommendations based on each visitor's current journey and actions of similar visitors. Out-of-the-box dashboards highlight actionable feedback on how to tailor your merchandising and recommendation strategies so you can maximize revenue even further.

There’s no need for you to set up every recommendation rule manually, Product Recommendations takes care of everything using machine learning. Optimizely Product Recommendations can also provide a unified experience, being able to recommend products not just based on website behavior, but also on other touchpoints (i.e. offline or in-store experiences).

Email Product Recommendations

Individualized experiences should extend beyond just the website and into email communications. Optimizely Email Product Recommendations provides just that, personalized product recommendations inserted into your email campaigns. Marketers can construct emails around individualized customer product suggestions to provide that unique 1-to-1 messaging which has been proven to significantly increase click-through rates, driving more traffic to the website via email. Outside of marketing campaigns, this can also be used in transactional emails as well as triggered messages, covering abandoned basket emails, welcome messages, order confirmation and so on.

Web experimentation

With optimization and experimentation being a major focus of the entire Optimizely offering, the Web Experimentation platform takes a central role. It allows you to use A/B or multi-variant testing on any channel or device with an internet connection.

Powerful testing and experimentation capabilities take the guesswork out of deciding what converts and what doesn’t. You can optimize at scale without having to sacrifice performance or speed. And with features like exclusion groups – a first in the industry -, you can even run multiple experiments on the same page at the same time.

Full Stack

Full Stack takes Optimizely’s focus on experimentation and optimization into the development and release process. It enables experimentation for each new feature that product teams add to their applications, so you can measure the impact of every release to customers. You can experiment on everything from content to search results and algorithms. And thanks to real-time experiment results powered by Optimizely’s industry-leading stats engine co-developed with Stanford, your teams can get insights and make decisions at scale.

Use free feature flagging to separate code deployment from feature releases and easily turn features on or off with feature toggles. That means you can choose who gets access to new features and roll out features gradually to mitigate risk.

The goal is to create a culture of experimentation in businesses, not only for content and marketing purposes, but also for feature deployment and coding. Based on the exact effects your feature releases have for your users, you can make the important decisions with confidence.

Optimizely Visitor Intelligence

A lot of businesses have abandoned traditional product-driven and business-driven methodologies for a more customer-centric strategy. We are in the midst of a revolution where the customer is in the driver’s seat, willing to pay for a better customer experience and abandoning businesses with which they’ve had a poor experience. To provide a great experience to the customer, understanding them is key.

Optimizely Visitor Intelligence allows you to track, analyze and identify your customers. It gives you the ability to segment your customers based on several themes, including demographics, Commerce behavior, as well as omnichannel behavior (i.e. customers who purchased online and offline/in-store). Part of Optimizely Visitor Intelligence is the Optimizely Data Platform, as explained above.

Marketing Automation

This can be an addition to your Optimizely platform or be used as a standalone marketing automation tool, integrating easily into most CMS, Commerce and CRM systems. It provides marketers with a powerful editor to create anything from one-shot smart campaigns all the way to complex multi-step campaigns. It allows the use of several channels, including email communications, print, mobile push and SMS. It also seamlessly integrates into Optimizely Visitor Intelligence, allowing you to use and target your already created user segments as recipient lists to your campaigns. In addition, it also provides some performance analysis to your campaigns, with reports including KPIs, post-click tracking and visual link analysis.

Search and Navigation

Optimizely also offers an Enterprise search service that’s hosted in the cloud. It can power the website’s search results and autocomplete, as well as be the engine to your product listing pages and news listing pages. It has built-in tracking abilities to help content marketers analyze the search performance of the website and optimize these with features like Best Bets, Related Queries, Synonyms, and customized weight boosting.

Personalized Search and Navigation

Optimizely Personalized Search and Navigation takes search even further, allowing you to personalize search results for individual users based on their previous behavior and interests. Using guided search options and consistently improving search results powered by machine learning, it takes your user where they want to go more smoothly, reducing the necessary clicks and actions between the start of a user’s visit and conversion.

Tell us what you want the Optimizely Platform to do for you. Contact us today and find out how we can help you reach your business goals.

Boosting Commerce sales with email marketing plans | Niteco

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 15:00:00 +0700

You’ve probably heard this before, not once but repeatedly: “Email is old-fashioned and will soon be replaced by social media”, “Millennials don’t use email”, “Email marketing is dead”, “Spend your money on Facebook advertising instead of running email campaigns”. But is that true?

Well, you may also have heard that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.

In fact, in 2020, approximately 4 billion people around the globe regularly used email. In fact, with an annual growth rate forecast of 3%, the number of email users is expected to grow to nearly 4.5 billion in 2024. Meanwhile, the latest Facebook statistics show that it has over 2.2 billion active users. Even if you add Instagram’s 1 billion users to that tally, both platforms are still outnumbered by email. And in contrast to what many people believe, millennials spend more than 6 hours a day checking their email, with more than a third checking their inbox before even getting out of bed.

With email alive and well, it’s clear that if your Commerce business has yet to adopt email marketing, you’re probably leaving money on the table. So read on to find out which email marketing campaigns can help you increase engagement and boost revenue.

The Welcome Email

This is the email you send out when a prospect decides to become your customer or a website visitor subscribes to your newsletter. Either way, it’s your chance to make a great first impression and inspire people to be engaged with your next emails.

The welcome email is not just a greeting from your brand to the customer or subscriber. Studies have shown that welcome emails are more engaging and able to generate more revenue than many other types of emails – if they are run efficiently. Here are some examples of what welcome emails can accomplish, according to data collected by invespcro.com:

Welcome emails generate 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than regular email marketing campaigns.
Average open rate for welcome emails is a whopping 50%, which makes them 86% more effective than standard newsletters.
Subscribers who receive a welcome email show 33% more engagement with the brand.
Welcome emails have a 14.4% click rate compared to just 2.7% in other types of emails.

That being said, it’s not easy to stand out in a cluttered inbox. So, to make sure you establish a meaningful connection with the recipient, your welcome email should be customer-focused and packed with valuable content or offers.

With an onboarding welcome email for new customers, your audience is someone who has already converted, so the purpose of the email should be to get them up and running with your product as soon as possible. The email content should focus on educational resources like tutorials, tips or manuals that help new product owners get started. Don’t try to upsell or cross-sell anything in this email. It would be a big turn off and you will see them less engaged with your next emails.

On the other hand, the welcome email sent to new subscribers is more challenging, as these users have only shown a bit of interest in your business and you have to do a lot to make sure their attention isn’t going away. Below are a few items you can include in your template:

Show your appreciation with a genuine ‘thank you’.
Remind recipients what they’ve signed up for, what they can expect to receive in the future, and why it will be valuable to them.
Introduce your brand.
Provide something of value to get your new audience engaged straight away.

Here is an example of a well-designed welcome email that Niteco designed and set up:

The Cart Abandonment Email

Before the pandemic, window shopping was a popular pastime. Now it has become such a luxury in many countries that people have begun moving to a virtual experience as a replacement. With many businesses now complementing their traditional brick-and-mortar stores with Commerce platforms, shoppers can easily browse the site and add the items that catch their eye to the wish list or to the shopping cart. However, not all added items are going to make it to the final step of checkout. Many are left in carts for quite a long time due to various reasons, such as customers are waiting for a better price or them not being so sure about their chosen products.

This is where the abandoned cart email comes in. It’s a follow-up email sent to users who have added items to their carts but left them untouched for a certain period of time. This type of email campaign doesn’t always convert, but if you do it right, you should be able to see your revenue tick up.

Below are some ideas for your abandoned cart email campaign strategy:

Pay attention to your email subject line

What’s the point of creating a good-looking email template with appealing content if your subject line is boring? Most likely, it will sit in your customer’s inbox, eternally unopened. So, don’t forget your email subject line needs a lot of care and attention too. Here are some tips for writing an eye-catching subject line:

Personalization is important. For example, you could include the customer’s name or the product name in the subject line. Examples include ‘Joe, did you forget something in your cart?’ or ‘Joe, still interested in your steam oven?’.
Be direct and clear about your message. Remember that not all of your subject line will show in the customer’s inbox, so a long and complicated one might not work. Use simple language instead.
Sometimes, creating urgency or including a product discount (if available) in your subject line can increase your open rates. For example, ‘Joe, your steam oven is selling out fast!’ or ‘Joe, your selected product is on sale!’.

A good subject line will give your email a better chance of being opened while also giving you more room to craft creative content.

Include social proof in your abandoned cart emails

One of the reasons why people abandon their shopping carts is because they aren’t sure about their decisions and need more time to consider. That means gaining their trust must be your top priority – and abandoned cart emails are a good way to build a relationship between you and your potential customers. So, including positive product ratings and reviews in your abandoned cart emails is highly recommended.

Offer discounts to enhance abandoned cart recovery rates

Offering discounts or coupons for abandoned products has always been a successful method to boost your conversion rate. Your users might be more tempted to make a purchase when seeing the discounted prices. Free shipping is also an attractive offer to encourage people to re-visit their abandoned carts.

Back-in-Stock Email

Products can go out of stock due to various reasons, one of which is increasing seasonal demand. Obviously, this is a big turn-off for customers, especially those who eagerly expected to make a purchase. Apart from the direct consequence of a lost sale, there’s also the risk that the shopper might turn to a competitor for their desired product.

But marketers can turn the risk into an opportunity to recover the potential lost revenue or keep the customers engaged with the brand by setting up a back-in-stock email campaign. Below are the main steps of creating a back-in-stock email campaign:

Step 1: Prepare your site

It’s definitely a bad idea to remove the product page of a product that’s out of stock and show your customers a 404 page. Instead, leave it on your Commerce site, place an ‘Out of Stock’ label and add a call-to-action (CTA) button to give customers the option to leave their email address in order to be notified when the item is back in stock (for example, ‘Notify me when this item is back in stock).

Step 2: Create the email

First thing first: Put a lot of effort in writing an appealing subject line. In a sea of emails, you certainly don’t want yours to be lost. Some customers may even have forgotten that they signed up and why they are getting the email, so including your brand or the product name in the subject line can be a good reminder. In addition, emphasize scarcity and urgency throughout the email, from the subject line to the email copy. Phrases that should be used include ‘hurry’, ‘limited time’ and ‘selling fast’. Lastly, don’t forget adding a compelling CTA to encourage customers to act as soon as possible.

Step 3: Send a follow-up email

You shouldn’t expect all your back-in-stock emails to be opened and convert as soon as they’re sent. What if your customers don’t take any action at all? Should you just abandon the campaign if they don’t open your email?

Of course not. That’s why you should schedule a follow-up email to be delivered a few days later if the first email remains unopened. Ideally, send this follow-up one week later and use a different subject line.

These 3 email campaigns are a great start for increasing your conversion rate, but there are countless possibilities when it comes to email marketing for Commerce. Set up your first email campaign now to make sure you don’t miss any potential sales.

Find out more about how Niteco doubled Electrolux’s web conversion rate with marketing automation, personalization and email marketing by reading our case study. If you’re interested in Commerce or want to get started with email marketing, contact Niteco today to find out how we can help you.

Best Practices for Commerce landing pages that convert

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 15:00:00 +0700

The success of a marketing campaign often hinges on the quality of the landing page to which your users are directed. Niteco gives you the basics on building an effective Commerce landing page.

Commerce can be a tricky business. When you build and maintain an Commerce site, success or failure depends on a plethora of details that can influence the behavior of your (potential) customers. Apart from obvious considerations like whether your products and prices are attractive enough or whether your site performs well in terms of speed and user experience, there are other variables you can work on to increase your chances of converting a user.

An incredibly powerful tool to increase Commerce conversion is creating landing pages for your campaigns. Unlike product pages, landing pages are focused on the sole goal of converting its visitors, which are usually sent there as part of a marketing campaign. They offer the most attractive information you have while leaving out any distractions that may take a user away from the page. And they’re a great way to increase your marketing ROI. Hubspot estimates that companies that increase the number of their landing pages from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads.

Diagram: Hubspot

Read on to find out more about the Best Practices we here at Niteco follow in order to create landing pages that convert.

Customize for your target audience

For the sake of this article, let’s assume that your business sells a wide array of coffee makers, from simple moka pots through automatic espresso machines all the way to restaurant-grade appliances. Currently, you’re trying to sell a line of automatic cappuccino machines that use a capsule system – not top of the line, but still quite pricy.

Your ad campaign is focused on professionals over 30, and all your ads lead to this landing page you’re going to build.

Since your ad campaign is personalized for the target audience, of course your landing page should be as well. Copy and imagery should be appealing to the people to whom you’re trying to sell, in this case focusing on ease and convenience, while at the same time emphasizing high quality and great taste.

If you’re selling moka pots targeted at a younger, cosmopolitan, possibly college audience, you might instead want to focus your copy on affordability and coolness.

Use a single CTA

The golden rule of landing pages is to keep distractions to a minimum. That also means that you shouldn’t include more than a single CTA. That CTA could be “Buy now” or “Get your discount code now” or anything else your campaign is focused on (for more on Commerce CTAs, check out BigCommerce). The point is that getting visitors to click that CTA is the sole focus of the page.

Now, this doesn’t mean that there should only be one button on that page. In fact, it can be better to include the same CTA multiple times, as long as you make clear that they will accomplish the same goal. For instance, it’s a great idea to include a CTA above the fold, allowing visitors to see the most relevant information about your products and the button they’re supposed to click at first glance. If you have further information below the fold, it’s best to include the same button below or in tandem with that information as well. You don’t want users to have to go searching for the CTA button.

Perform A/B Testing

Landing pages are great for A/B testing, since it’s easy to see exactly how user behavior changes with your variant versions. Test different CTA wording, different images, different copy or just different content altogether.

Just remember to make only one change per version to ensure that you know exactly why users behaved differently. If, for example, you test against a version that has different CTA copy AND different images, there’s no way for you to know for sure what caused the different behavior.

Use high-quality images

Now more than ever, online users respond more strongly to visuals than to text. According to Hubspot, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. Add to that the fact that high-quality images will give your product presentation a more premium feel, and you have all the reasons you need to splurge on your photography budget.

Avoid distractions

As mentioned above, the be-all and end-all of a good landing page is keeping it focused on the single goal of conversion, leaving out any distractions. That also means that your landing page should appear completely independent of the rest of your site. Leave out the usual site navigation, don’t link to several individual product pages, and don’t add information that isn’t directly connected to what you’re presenting.

What your landing page should contain is:

Great imagery
Clear information on the benefits your products bring
Clear information on the offer you’re presenting
Social proof
A single CTA

No more, no less.

For more information on how Niteco builds and maintains Commerce sites, take a look at our Electrolux Vietnam case study. To find out more about our Commerce services, click here.

Analytics project: 5 tips on tracking key user data

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 09:26:00 +0700

To keep from being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data generated by users on your website, here are some tips for how you can focus on the most relevant data for you.

Everything starts with strategy and planning

Tracking user data can give you incredible amounts of information about how your site or app is used by the people you’re serving. The information can be so extensive, in fact, that it can be hard to draw conclusions from it if you’re not 100% sure what you’re looking for. That’s why it’s important to draw up a tracking plan first.

In this plan, lay out which events and properties should be tracked and why, and set up a hypothesis for what the collected data might signify (e.g., if the number of new users from Facebook goes up, that might mean that your social media acquisition strategy is paying dividends). In short, always put strategy first and derive from that strategy what metrics need to be tracked.

Example:

Here is a part of Niteco’s tracking plan for one of our clients:

Event category	Event action	Event label
Navigation	Click Primary Nav	{{Click Text}}
Navigation	Click Footers	{{Click Text}}
Outbound Link	{{Page Path}}	{{Click URL}}
404 Error	{{Page URL}}	N/A
Events	View Event	{{event name}}
	Click Event	{{event name}}
	Access to Event	{{event name}}
Commerce	Add to Cart	{{event name}}
	Update Product Quantity	{{event name}}
	Check out	Check out page on load
		Confirm attendees
		Payment
	Purchases	Order completed
Videos	{{Status}}	{{Video Title}}
Support	Click Apple Store	{{Page path}}
	Click Google Play	{{Page path}}
	See FAQ question	{{question}}
	Click Social Media Icon	{{Social media type}}
Subscription	Click Subscribe On Form	{{Page path}}
Subscription	Subscribe Successfully	{{Page path}}
Click CTA button	Click {{CTA button}}	{{support section}}

A detailed event tracking definition with a website screenshot in the plan.

Event category	Event action	Event label	Event label	Note
Commerce	Join The Club	{{event name}}	{{event name}}	Event pages

With large Commerce websites, there are usually lots of the same buttons/anchor texts/links that need to be tracked. Google Analytics can’t provide enough dimensions to uniquely identify each of them. That’s why Niteco researches clients’ websites and creates new custom dimensions, which solves this issue.

Below is an example of new custom dimensions that help Niteco identify different buttons on client websites:

No.	Custom Dimension
1	RefPage
2	RefId
3	RefLocator
4	RefPosition
5	Member type
6	Document Title

6 Custom Dimensions for Referral:

Referral page: record the page type such as Home page, Product Page, Category Page
Referral ID: record the unique identity for each page type. For the Event Page, it will be the event name, for Article Page, it will be the article section...
Referral locator: identify where the interacted element locates on the page.
Referral position: identify the position of the interacted element
Member Type: 3 types of member: Not logged in, Guest user, and Member.
Document Title: identify the title of downloaded documents.

Define what you need to know

First, determine some basic information about your site. For instance, what kind of site is it? Is it a regular website or an Commerce site? Or a site where people can find and download information? Is it a multilingual site?

Secondly, what is the main purpose of the site? Are you trying to sell singular products? Or product/service bundles? Are you trying to promote your brand and introduce your services?

And finally, what is the action you want users to take on your website? Should they click on a specific button? Access specific pages? Follow a certain flow or stay on the site for a certain time?

With the answers to these questions, we can easily define what we need to track.

For orientation, Databox writes that the most tracked metrics can be divided into 3 groups:

Is my website growing? (Acquisition)
What are people doing on my website? (Engagement)
Is my website getting people where I need them to go? (Conversion)

Make sure you’re tracking the data you need

Different user data is relevant for different use cases. To make sure that Google Analytics – which, in our opinion, is the most effective tool for user tracking – shows meaningful data to you, you need to give it the correct data to track. Simply put, that means that if you’re running an Commerce site, you’ll likely need to track how well your site drives users to that “Buy” button. Put all those metrics in a structure you can follow in the future to make comparisons even easier.

Don’t forget to leave out traffic from your own company. Chances are that you or your colleagues or superiors will visit your own site a lot, and those visits could water down the information you’re collecting about your actual customers. Also make sure to filter out all traffic from known bots and spiders to make sure your data isn’t diluted.

Involve stakeholders

Include all of your company’s departments in this process and determine which information is needed by each of them. The marketing and sales departments may want to look at some of the same data, but what about your SEO team? If you’re planning continuous development on your site, your development and design teams may also benefit from some specific data, particularly when it comes to user friendliness.

Different data can be relevant for different stakeholders, and will tell you a different story about your site. In addition, you may need your development team’s help in making sure you can actually get the data you need.

It’s all about the journey

While tracking your conversion rate is crucial, it’s not enough to track clicks on that last button click and call it a day. Such data can be misleading, since it doesn’t really tell you why your users made that choice. To gain real insight into what drives your users to or away from that conversion, you need to keep your eyes on the entire user journey. Such a holistic approach will show you what part of the journey may hinder users from getting to that conversion or where the journey could be shortened or optimized.

To get even more information on this process, you might want to set up some custom metrics for a quick overview of how your user journey is working out. For instance, if your site is trying to take users from the homepage to a product page and then to the “Buy” button, you may want to track how many users follow that exact path and how many diverge from it – and why.

To find out how we implemented sophisticated user tracking across more than 20 sites for Electrolux, read our case study. If you want to know more about how you can get the most out of your own user tracking, contact us today.

Optimizely Named a Leader in Digital Experience Platforms by Forrester | Niteco

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 13:36:09 +0700

Optimizely (formerly Optimizely) received its fourth recognition as a leader this year this week, with the company being recognized as such in the Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), Q3 2021.

“Compared with other vendors we evaluated,” the report reads, “Optimizely shows strength in testing and optimization, digital commerce, and platform operations. It also has strength in campaign management, customer journey management, and platform certifications. Reference customers told us that they like Optimizely’s ﬂexibility in their licensing model when expanding the set of sites.”

The report also quoted a reference customer as saying, “Optimizely was very simple to get up and running — more so than other DXPs I’ve implemented.”

You can download the Forrester Wave report right here.

Optimizely had previously this year among other things been recognized as a leader in Agile Content Management Systems by Forrester as well as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.

Here at Niteco, we know all the advantages that Optimizely’s DXP has in store for its users. We’re the world’s largest Optimizely partner and have ample experience with even the most complicated Optimizely projects.

If you’re interested in what Optimizely’s DXP can offer you, contact Niteco today.

Getting to know Core Web Vitals – The new focus of Google search rankings

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 10:37:34 +0700

Google recently announced that page experience would factor more heavily in search rankings from June 2021 and take a leading role from August 2021, with a specific focus on Core Web Vitals. Let's take a look at what this entails.

How Core Web Vitals will determine your Google search rankings

In today’s online world, not only do websites need to provide relevant and meaningful content, but they also need to engage and offer seamless experiences to their visitors. User experience or UX is now the priority concern, especially for businesses that rely heavily on their online presence for lead acquisition and sales. But how can we measure something as ephemeral as a user’s feelings and personal impressions of a website’s performance and turn them into data we can track, measure, and optimize? That’s where Google’s page experience signals come with the aim of codifying how a search engine can evaluate how well a visitor is interacting with a site or a single page. As part of this, the concept of Core Web Vitals is introduced and applied to web optimization in parallel with the previously-known UX-related factors.

Why are Core Web Vitals important?

First, we need to understand what page experience signals are. Page experience signals are factors that Google considers important metrics of how users perceive the experience when interacting with a specific web page. These signals go beyond the page’s information value and content quality and focus on the user experience – and Google plans to make page experience an official ranking factor. We all know that if the first impression doesn’t go smoothly, there is little to no chance that you’ll get to make a second one. As your website is considered your company’s online presence, if page experience is not taken seriously, it could result in lower brand awareness and conversion rates, leading to difficulties in acquiring customers through a promising, authoritative channel.

While there are other factors in page experience (like mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPs, No Intrusive Interstitials), Google denotes the Core Web Vitals as the most important, which is why they will become key factors in evaluating user experience on a web page. While it’s good to be a perfectionist and work on all the signals equally, it’s undeniable that companies and enterprises only have limited resources and time to optimize their sites, so it’s good practice to focus on those factors that will take up a big chunk of your page’s overall UX score. Google announced that the page experience signals as a part of the ranking algorithm would roll out in May 2021, which means there’s still time for you to catch up and adjust. You can check out the announcement here.

What are the Core Web Vitals?

The Core Web Vitals are 3 metrics focused on page speed and user interaction.

Largest Contentful Paint

This measures how long it takes to render the largest element of a page (the time until it’s fully visible), counting from the moment a user calls the URL. A good LCP score is below 2.5 seconds.

Since you can decrease your LCP score by simply improving your page speed, there are a few ways you can optimize in order to get a better evaluation from Google. For example, setting up lazy loading, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), upgrading your web-host or even strategically removing large elements from your page. Whatever you do, make sure your page is decluttered and “lighter”, and focus on what’s most important.

First Input Delay

This measures the time from a user’s first interaction (click on a link or a button) to the time when the browser actually responds to that interaction. It can help quantify the user experience of interacting with an unresponsive page. Basically, FID is used to measure the interactivity of a page – the faster the response, the more seamless the user experience is. A good FID score is below 100ms.

To provide a better interactive experience for your users and optimize your site for a better FID score, it’s a good idea to reduce the amount of JavaScript that is loaded in one page or use a web worker to run JavaScript on a background thread.

Cumulative Layout Shift

This indicator measures how visually stable a page is during the loading phase. The more unexpected layout shifts a page experience during loading, the harder it will be for a user to interact, and the worse their experience will be. The aim for a CLS score would be 0 (meaning there is no shift, only perfect visual stability), but we can usually aim to minimize it to less than 0.1.

Since ads, embeds, and iframes are known to cause layout shifts in web pages, in order to get CLS as close to 0 as possible, we can add new UI elements below the fold, reserve ad slots’ sizes before adding the ad library, or setting fixed size attribute dimensions for media.

Usability testing would be one of the greatest methods that can help you align with these Core Web Vitals metrics.

How can we measure Core Web Vitals?

All 3 pillars of Core Web Vitals contribute to quantifying user experience, creating data that can be used for further analysis and optimization. They help us to understand how our web pages are performing and find out exactly where the problems are, how we can improve, and which goals we need to achieve. Now, you might be curious as to which tools we can use to check and measure these metrics. Basically, all web performance test and analytics tools measure FID and LCP, and most also measure CLS. To name the most widely known, you can use tools by Google like the Chrome User Experience Report, PageSpeed Insights, or Search Console (Core Web Vitals report).

Now that you have all the data, you should be able to see the full picture and know which direction you should head in – enough information to be used as the basis for an effective action plan. If you still have trouble figuring out what you should do next, or what to prioritize with your limited time and resources every time Google adds something to its ranking factors, Niteco is here to help. Niteco’s web development and SEO experts live and breathe site optimization. Not only do they understand your site and your goals, but they also know how to make any search engine (Google, Bing, etc.) work for you, not against you. Contact us today to get your plan up and running.

Discovery Phase: The very first step in the development and design process

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 16:56:00 +0700

What is the starting point of a website or app project? Is it when you receive all the requirements from your client? Or when all hands in a project reach an agreement on what can be done and what not? The first step is always critical and requires a lot of strategic planning with a steady flow of information, which, if not handled properly, could cause delays to the project.

At Niteco, we have been doing website and application development and providing UI/UX design services for a number of clients. Some projects involve upgrading and redesigning based on existing websites, while many require building everything from scratch. Some are as large-scale as doing multiple sites at the same time, some are high-pressure within a tight time frame, with the launch date just weeks away. However big the projects might be or whatever budget they have, every client that comes to us has one thing in common. They all have a lot of amazing ideas on how to do the sites. But often, their long wish list is overshadowed by a limited budget and time restraints. This is often the main cause for delays during the implementation process. Here’s where we come in, with our own Niteco-made workshops that try to bring order to chaos and ensure the projects can move forward with as little hindrance as possible. This is our Discovery Phase.

What is the Discovery Phase and why is it necessary?

Taking place at the start of a website/application development project, the Discovery Phase consists of several meetings or workshops. Each might last 2-3 hours and requires the participation of people from both sides: the client and Niteco. On the client side, the project needs input from a range of different stakeholders from several departments, such as IT, Marketing, etc. to make sure all angles are considered. From Niteco, those who have a hand in the project include project managers, business architects, solution architects, tech leads, UI/UX designers and, sometimes, marketing, depending on the project. A Discovery Phase can last up to 4 months depending on the scale of the project. There is no fixed number for how many workshops we conduct as long as we find out all the information needed to move on to the Implementation Phase.

The Discovery Phase is crucial for many reasons. Here’s why you need it before jumping right into the Implementation Phase:

It helps align user needs around business objectives and technical capabilities.

This initial phase is often the most fun and creative stage because it is a rare occasion for many stakeholders to sit down in one meeting and let their ideas flow out, centered around their understanding of the user personas. Once we have collected their ideas, Niteco’s team will flesh out the technical input, always considering what finances and resources are available from the client side. This is particularly important in the process of feature prioritization: The client will need to decide on the MVP (minimum viable product) while understanding that some features, though they might have potential, will have to be excluded or moved to later phases.

It encourages all stakeholders to thoroughly discuss and finalize as much essential information as possible.

We all appreciate how emails keep everyone involved in the loop, but we also know the pain of waiting for a confirmation email from dozens of recipients, especially when the launch date is just around the corner. Discovery workshops help us avoid this trouble by sitting everyone down in one meeting where the client fully addresses their needs and puts all resources they have on the table while the Niteco team carefully validates them from a technical point of view and shepherds the client’s ideas towards feasibility. This reduces the risk of misunderstandings and work being done based on wrong information, especially with large-scale projects, where data flows from all directions.

It helps save good ideas for future implementation.

There will always be ideas that sound great, but aren’t viable at the moment. During Discovery workshops, the Niteco team employs a method called MoSCoW, a popular prioritization technique used to categorize all ideas into 4 initiatives: must-haves, should-haves, could-haves and will-not-haves at the time. This way, any features that cannot be implemented right now due to financial and time limitations will be noted for future discussion in later implementation stage.

Objectives of the Discovery Phase

As mentioned above, the Discovery Phase can last as long as four months and the number of workshops can sometimes reach as high as 15-20. That’s because we usually have a long agenda full of things we want to agree on by the end of the phase. The list varies based on the scale of a project, but here’s what we normally try to determine and showcase during the workshops:

To understand the business model and technical requirements of the client
To analyze existing systems and data from the client
To provide a solution design
To define the scope and resources for the coming Implementation Phase
To provide UX optimization recommendations and UX designs
To provide UI designs

Only when these bullet points are checked off can we move on to the Implementation Phase. This is a crucial process that lays a solid foundation for all the next steps we are going to take. With Discovery workshops, our clients are able to stay on track with their budget while we are armed with a clear understanding of what the client wants and what features are feasible for Phase 1.

If you want to know more about our development and design services, or if you have a website you need to restructure, contact Niteco today.

Structured Data: What it is and how it helps your SEO

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 03:49:00 +0700

Any digital marketers know how important it is to get higher search engine rankings. If you have ever heard of structured data and are not using it, you’re missing out on a great competitive advantage.

Today, a constantly growing number of purchases are made online and buyers rely strongly on search engines to decide what their best option is. As a result, businesses have been trying to improve their rankings in search results by staying relevant and standing out against other competitors. Structured data, or schema markup, was created to assist marketers in doing so.

What is structured data?

Structured data is a standardized format to mark up information about a web page. It helps search engines like Google or Bing to better understand what images and content are about and to display that information accurately in search results.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@type": "Product",
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingCount": 56,
    "ratingValue": "4.4"
  },
  "offers": {
    "itemOffered": {
      "@type": "Thing",
      "name": "60cm built-in single oven with 53L capacity",
      "@context": https://schema.org
    },
    "@type": "Offer",
    "priceCurrency": "RCP:",
    "price": "8490000",
    "itemCondition": https://schema.org/NewCondition,
    "availability": https://schema.org/InStoreOnly,
    "@id": "EOB2100COX",
    "url": https://www.electrolux.vn/en-vn/appliances/ovens/eob2100cox/
  },
  "brand": {
    "@type": "Brand",
    "name": "Electrolux"
  },
  "category": "Ovens",
  "model": "EOB2100COX",
  "sku": "EOB2100COX",
  "@id": "EOB2100COX",
  "name": "60cm built-in single oven with 53L capacity",
  "description": "A fuss-free built-in oven perfect for any home cook. It has easy-to-use mechanical timer controls, and grill cooking functions to help you whip up your favourite convection oven dinner recipes.",
  "image": https://www.electrolux.vn/globalassets/appliances/oven/eob2100cox/eob2100cox_front_1500x1500.png,
  "@context": https://schema.org
}
</script>

Example of structured data markup

After the implementation of structured data markup, this is what the search result looks like in an example:

As we see, instead of just showing the product listing’s meta title and description, the search engine can also display customer ratings, prices or availability information. There are many types of content on your website that can use structured data, such as articles, reviews, recipes, job postings, company profiles and more. You can find a full list here.

Structured data formats

The three main structured data formats are JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa, but Google’s JSON-LD support has improved so much over the past few years that it is now their recommended approach. While Schema.org is the most common reference vocabulary, some websites use Microformats.org, usually for marking up product reviews or defining a physical location.

Benefits of having structured data

Improving SEO

Search engines and devices (like Google, Yahoo, Bing or Siri) do not read and understand a webpage the way humans do. Adding structured data to the webpage allows search engines and other applications to better understand the context and intent of the page. This results in the content being accurately displayed in a useful and relevant way, which eventually promotes the page’s online ‘findability’.

Moreover, for videos, not only can users play them right from the search results, but they can even see information such as video length and additional details, all of which could influence whether they decide to watch your video or the next one. When it comes to articles or blogs, by adding structured data, you are likely to get featured in the top stories carousel section or be presented in images above thumbnail size. These could entice users to click through and read your content.

Driving more clicks

A standard search result consists of three pieces of information: a title, a URL and a meta description. Using structured data qualifies your content for being listed as rich results, which offer additional information that is more eye-catching and likely to attract more attention when showing up in search results.

This is an example of a search result before adding structured data:

After Niteco’s SEO experts implemented structured data, this is what the search result looks like:

Improving branding

Using structured data increases the chance of being featured in Knowledge Graph, which visualizes information on businesses, topics and people gathered from a variety of sources, presenting it in a box on the right-hand side of the search results. If you get your brand in Knowledge Graph, you’ll be likely to get more visibility, authority and even trust from searchers.

Example of Knowledge Graph

Optimizing your site for voice search

According to Google, nearly 30% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile today. If you’ve optimized your site for organic searches using structured data, you’ve also optimized it for searches by voice assistant, while Google will take care of speech recognition and NLU (or Natural-language understanding).

Google stated at Google IO 2019 that “our motivation for schema markup was so that you could optimize content once and it be optimized for voice and search.” Google Product Manager Aylin Altiok was quoted as saying, “Focus on building great content using an open standard (structured data) and Google will help you reach your users across Search and Assistants without having to build a custom experience.”

At Niteco, we have implemented structured data for our clients and have seen significant improvement in SEO as well as search rankings on Google. Coding is not your forte or you’re not sure how to start implementing this for your site? Reach out to us and let our SEO experts help.

Visual testing with Percy: Use cases and benefits

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:26:41 +0700

We use visual testing to ensure that an application LOOKS correct, making it the final step in our CI/CD, ensuring high quality. A tool like Percy helps you see exactly what changed between edits.

Unit tests, functional tests or automation tests ensure that the application is behaving correctly, but they mostly can't catch visual changes. Sure, we can write a lot of unmaintainable, complex test suites to register visual changes, like test CSS class exist, test color rule inside CSS class, etc., but we still cannot completely ensure that the button we want to be blue is actually blue, whether that text is there or merges into the blue background, and we still can’t spot the visual difference between today's homepage and tomorrow's homepage.

What is visual testing?

When we refactor/update a site, upgrade the underlying dependency libraries or remove wasted unused CSS, a lot of things can go missing in the UI. Some buttons that are supposed to be there in blue might suddenly turn red. The background color might change to be the same color as the text (which makes your text disappear and the CTA button look like a blank box) or the whole main menu may inexplicably move up by 5 pixels.

We use visual testing to ensure that the application LOOKS correct, and this is the last step in your CI/CD, coexisting with conventional automation tools in order to deliver high quality. Visual testing tools spot visual changes and let the reviewer know whether UI changes were intentional or bugs, ensuring that visual bugs do not reach our users. That means you can visualize UI changes more easily and practice CI/CD safely and efficiently.

Why you should use Percy

Percy is a visual testing tool. It lets you observe your website like a customer and notifies you about (weird or good) changes in the UI before they get out of hand. It provides:

Visualized diff, like your code dif
Visual review (it allows us to compare diff in browsers, with responsive screen sizes)
It supports issue/pull request management in Github, Bitbucket and Gitlab (easier to review in development process)
It integrates into CI/CD pipelines (including Azure Pipelines) easily by using percyScript or by integrating into your automation test SDK (cypress, puppeteer, Selenium, ...)

Your manual QA team can use percyScript to execute the tool on their local machine to quickly scan all the visual changes. Under the hood, when we run percySnapshot in our CI step, Percy sends DOM snapshots and assets to Percy infra and renders and generates a screenshot diff there, not on your own infra, which means you’re not wasting your computing resources.

Pages behind logins or firewalls don’t pose a problem either, since our automation script already has access to those (and percySnapshot is part of the automation script).

To learn more about the intricacies of doing QA for your website or application, contact Niteco today.

Ensuring performance, accessibility and healthy SEO with a Definition of Done (DoD)

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 15:11:18 +0700

When is a website project done? It’s a question that seems simple, but is actually quite hard to answer. Criteria will differ between different site owners, development agencies, developers and QA professionals. Some may be satisfied with a function or site that is functional, while others will require a high-performance, accessible site with SEO-optimized content and the latest in security precautions.

But even if you know the priorities, developers and QA professionals need some benchmarks to go by. How quickly does the site have to load to consider it done? What accessibility score does it have to achieve to be considered done? What other checks does it need to pass to reach that level of done?

To get the answers to all these questions, you need a DoD – a Definition of Done.

In essence, the DoD is a list of actions that need to be performed and benchmarks that need to be reached before a project can be considered done. It’s a checklist to be followed to make sure that all aspects of the project are optimal for delivery. While this Definition of Done will, as mentioned, look different in different companies, here are the things we consider and check at Niteco before calling anything done. Of course, these steps would be taken after having assured the site’s overall functionality first – hence, we call it our non-functional DoD.

Performance

As we’ve said many times before, performance can make or break your site. Today’s web users have little patience for sites that take more than a few seconds to load – and they show their displeasure by leaving and never coming back. That’s why making sure your site reaches certain thresholds when it comes to performance is vital.

What tools to use and what numbers to strive for has to be set in the common Definition of Done. Let’s take Niteco’s DoD as an example. We use several different web performance testing tools, including SpeedCurve, Dareboost, and Google Page Speed. The metrics these tools use differ somewhat, so you’ll have to set specific thresholds for each individual tool.

As a reference, we aim to achieve a time under or equal to 0.4 seconds for First Byte and under or equal to 0.8 seconds for Start Render. For Dareboost, Improvements should be fewer than five, while Issues should be zero. In Google Page Speed, the Largest Contentful Paint should be achieved in a time under or equal to 2.5 seconds, while Time To Interactive should not exceed 3.6 seconds.

Accessibility

Ensuring accessibility means ensuring that all users, including those with disabilities or impairments, can access and benefit from your website. This entails, among many other things, full support for the use of assistive technologies and navigation options for those unable to use a standard mouse-based or mobile navigation.

Some of the most essential assistive technologies are screen readers. They allow those with visual impairments or reading/learning disabilities to consume content on a website by having it rendered as speech or braille output. To enable this, you need to make sure that any piece of visual content has a text alternative that can be read by the tool. Other technologies include screen magnifiers — which are used to magnify content on the screen to make it more easily understandable for those with some vision impairment and may also offer functions like color inversion — speech input software, head pointers, motion or eye tracking and single-switch entry devices.

The requirements for making a website accessible are listed in several checklists, most notably the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). As part of our DoD, Niteco makes sure that every website we create meets WCAG 2.1 AA requirements. To do that, a website needs to fulfill, among other requirements, the following:

All image/video content has a text alternative
Video/audio content is meaningfully consumable without image content
Page relationships and sequences are clear and identifiable by assistive programs
Instructions for use and action prompts aren’t based solely on visual cues
Contrast is high and background colors don’t make text or buttons hard to read/discern
Text can be resized without loss of functionality
The site can be navigated solely through a keyboard or a pointer, without need for path-based gestures
It doesn’t use flashes or other effects that may induce seizures

These are just a handful of the requirements of WCAG 2.1 AA, which we test manually as well as with a multitude of different tools, among them the Chrome extension Siteimprove or Dynomapper.

SEO

Last but not least in this non-functional DoD trio is SEO. Having a search engine-optimized site is absolutely vital whatever your business requirements are, so it’s not something that should be left for later.

The SEO requirements of Niteco’s Definition of Done are as high as those for the other categories:

No duplicate, multiple or missing canonical tags
A correct HTML sitemap
A correct XML sitemap
An image sitemap
A correct robots.txt file
Correctly formatted and assembled page titles for display on search result pages

To ensure that nothing is missed, Niteco’s QA professionals use a multitude of different tools to check for the SEO work’s status, including Screaming Frog, Dareboost, Ahrefs and Woorank. All factors have to achieve highest possible results.

Keeping up a Definition of Done

Only when all these factors meet the requirements set out in Niteco’s Definition of Done can a website we developed truly be seen as done. It’s a process that doesn’t just ensure that every website or application created in Niteco’s offices meets our high quality standards, it also firmly implants this quest for quality in everyone involved.

To follow and uphold a Definition of Done, it’s imperative that every aspect has a team or person firmly in charge. Fix a sheet with the respective responsibilities to the office wall or share it digitally — either way, make sure that everyone knows their job and receives their deserved accolades. This way, you can establish a process that will, after a few projects, turn into a central step of the development process.

If you want to know more about ensuring performance, accessibility and healthy SEO scores, or if you have a project you need to get Done, contact Niteco today.