Team effort can either make or break the success of any type of project. Members’ engagement is directly proportional to the chances of leading the project to its fruition. It’s universal that engaged teammates generate more productivity and higher quality of work. 

Setting aside this important element of collaborative work can do the opposite, on the other hand. As the saying goes, when you pick up an end of the stick, you pick up the other end. 

Companies today make the effort to remain intact with their workforce via virtual methods. However, coping with working remotely is a new challenge for employees to face. 

Survey says over two-thirds of employees experienced burnout while working from home last year. They struggle more with separating work from other personal responsibilities. This results in taking less time off work to recharge. Although not apparent, this symptom may affect the overall cohesive project creation. 

Below are some of the many tips in elevating team engagement in your business or project:

Encourage Open Communication

There is a certain misconception in implementing the so-called “open communication” in the workplace. Many organizations can conduct a meeting and assembly in relaying vital information but avoid getting insights from the other end. 

LinkedIn believes that building engagement in the workplace should involve two-way communication, both to and from the employees. 

Poor communication is one of the topmost signs of a toxic work environment. Moreover, it would invite economic toll as there are higher chances of unclear details affecting the employees’ performance and quality of work. 

As the manager, it is your sole responsibility to value team belongingness. Silencing them by not letting them be heard even the slightest concerns might impair collaborative effectiveness which can hurt the organization as a whole.

Of course, it shouldn’t only be confined to promising your team of being open to them. Members highly appreciate extra effort to be in touch with them even if they don’t ask for it. The results will be surprising once employees adapt the sincerity and reciprocate.

Get Insights from the Team Members Themselves

In line with team communication, leaders can also evaluate project features by getting insights from the members. Since most are in remote settings nowadays, this can be done easily by interactive surveys. Free survey makers can be found online to instantly collect responses from employees at the comfort of their homes. 

Organizations can also use this method in weekly updates to employee concerns. This way, they can put their trust in the right people, because managers practice extending empathy to the members. 

Getting feedback can also be accomplished through online surveys for the team. Besides, this invites another form of engagement as the company shows value to what the team members also have to say. 

Acknowledge Their Strengths and Efforts

A factor why employees often shy away from putting their extra on their jobs is the lack of acknowledgment from their superiors. Although creative skills are the main tools managers look forward to in employees, soft skills are equally important. 

A former professor once advised his graduating students to balance passion and presence of mind. Sometimes, the corporate world would give a pile of work with little to no regard for consideration, as long as results are delivered. 

In turn, employees accept more and more wishing they will be acknowledged for being noble. However, leaders sometimes fail to realize this. 

A simple tap on the back or a brief encouraging message reassures a member that he was appreciated. This boosts them to achieve more than what is expected next time until it becomes a habit. 

Why? Because now they know their leader trusts what they can do even when they commit setbacks. The more the members are recognized, the more chances they’ll be engaged and be excited about going to work. 

Creative collaboration among the team can also reflect a great customer experience. Make it the common goal to provide this rewarding outcome to the team. 

Delegate Purposeful Tasks

In her book 30 Days to Taming Your Stress, Deborah Smith Pegues suggests that the real role of management is in developing their employees and directing their efforts to where they best cater to. 

Delegating tasks to team members should not be seen as giving up control and authority. It is actually a good practice since employees will feel involved in the group. Tasks are dreaded by many because they don’t see the purpose in them. 

To keep them engaged, they must feel they are making an impact on the organization. 

Make Room for Growth Opportunities

As much as the work environment can sometimes be a place of politics, leaders can de-escalate this and encourage healthy competition, instead. A lot of companies integrate gamified team huddles to build rapport. 

Virtually, leaders can create interesting mind twisters via online quiz makers like JotForm Quiz Maker or Menti and Kahoot to break off from the usual. Moderators are rotational, so everybody can have their turn to be exposed. This way, the whole team has the opportunity to grow not only as professionals but as well as social individuals.

In a deeper sense, the management can also offer career development programs among the members. If requested, they must pay attention to the initiative of employees to advance their skills more. 

In the long run, it will also be the business or the company to benefit from producing excellent employees, after all.

Conclusion

Engaging your members from one another is another level of reward they could get. It is a dream for many to find a job they cannot leave because of good relationships in the workplace. Of course, it’s not always rainbows and flowers in the business world. 

But as a manager, you cannot take away the FUN in FUNDAMENTAL. Your people will be the greatest asset among the resources you have. 

They are a part of behind-the-scenes in building your creative brand. It is just right to remind them of their purpose from time to time. You’ve seen potential in them in the first place. Their success will also be yours.

Whether you are planning to start a new business or looking to expand its presence, tools are your best friend. Business software helps to optimize your business presence, acquire more customers, nurture prospects, and persuade them towards the sale. 

When you automate tasks to reach your customers at different stages of the customer journey, you are able to increase your conversions and improve your brand value. There are several useful tools available in the market and all claim to be the best. To make your research easier, I have listed the top five tools every business needs in 2021. All these tools are easy to use, trustworthy, and used by some of the reputed businesses of this world.

Without any further wait, here is the list of the top five essential tools your business needs in 2021 and ahead: 

1. Finteza

Finteza is an exceptionally advanced analytics software. It is the best alternative to Google Analytics. It recently introduced the Lighthouse report to improve the performance of your website in the search results. 

Top Features

• It recognizes bot traffic and also identifies the traffic source. Therefore, you are able to identify scammers in your project.
• The Lighthouse report lets you optimize your website for the Core Web Vitals. 
• You can generate complex funnels in just two clicks and analyze the data without sampling. 
• It offers a comprehensive set of webmaster tools to access real-time visitor statistics. Moreover, the software offers easy integration with 50 top CMSs. 
• The advertising engine lets you manage paid ads across an array of channels. You can identify the campaigns that are generating the highest revenue.
• Distributed site architecture offers no additional site load on your site. Hence, your site loads faster. 

2. Zendesk Help Desk

Zendesk offers one of the best helpdesk software for businesses to create better customer experiences. Whether it’s an enterprise, SMBs, HR teams, IT teams, educators, or retailers, Zendesk is available for all. It is also trusted by over 160k companies worldwide including Mailchimp, Uber, Siemens, and Khan Academy.

Top Features

• You can pick any channel for communication with customers like live chat, phone, email, and texting.
• Zendesk offers over 500 apps to integrate like Shopify, e-bot7, BotXO AI Chatbot, and Cohere.
• You can also add unique and beautiful designs to your help desk using Zendesk’s paid themes.
• To get more detailed information from the customers, you can create “Dynamic request forms” (get any detail you want to better conversation).

3. Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is one of the best SEO tools available on the web for small businesses. All you need to do is to integrate Google Analytics to your website and you will be good to go. It might take some time for you to be able to use Google Analytics thoroughly, but once you start, there won’t be looking back. The best part is that it offers so many fantastic features absolutely free. 

Top Features

• Google Analytics helps you in knowing important facts like the demographics of your visitors, most frequently viewed pages, bounce rate, source of traffic, and a lot more other important elements. 
• It helps you in calculating your conversion rates from the sponsored ad campaigns. 
• It also provides insight about the devices used to drive traffic to your website, clear bifurcation of locations from where the most traffic comes from, websites that helped you gain traffic, and many other things that can help you to frame competitive marketing strategies. 
• It lets you track your goals and know how users interact with your website. 

4. HubSpot

HubSpot is a trusted name in the software space. It is one of the most popular tools for marketing automation and is trusted by over 1,00,000 customers in more than 120 countries. It offers specialized software for marketing, sales, services, and CMS. The software is used by major companies such as Trello, Suzuki, SurveyMonkey, Soundcloud, and G2. 

Top Features

• You can set up email workflows and automate email tasks to send emails to specific buyer persona groups based on different user actions. 
• The Marketing Dashboard helps you identify the channels that are contributing to revenue streams. When you have access to data, you can make informed decisions leading to increased profits. 
• You can easily set up service requests and tickets to offer exceptional support to the customer. 
• It offers sales tools to reach the customer at different stages of the buyer journey. You can easily create web pages optimized for every visitor and for every device. 

5. Trello 

Trello is outstanding software for team collaboration. As more and more people are moving towards a work-from-home culture, the need for remote working software has increased. You can organize your projects into colorful visual boards. You can see who is working on which project and also track its progress. All the boards are contained in a Workspace. 

Top Features

• Within a Trello board, you can create a number of lists that you can fill with cards and tasks. 
• You can add team members to lists and boards. The team members can send notifications about the progress of the project. 
• With power-ups, you can add a calendar view to your board. This makes it easier for you to see when your cards are due so that you don’t miss project deadlines. 
• You can add colorful labels to cards to identify the type of task on the basis of the color. 
• Trello offers a list of useful shortcuts to increase your team productivity. 

Final Thoughts

Technology has made the life of a business owner easy. The software has made it easier for small to medium businesses to compete with the biggest players in the industry. For any business to succeed, you need an intelligent business plan, skilled team players, and tools to automate and assist your team for business success. 

Today, customers want their issues to be resolved within minutes. Whether it’s maintaining an engaging social profile or fixing customer complaints promptly, tools are a must for every business owner. Moreover, customer analytics is a crucial part of marketing campaign management. Make use of the above listed five tools to take your business to new heights.

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Photo by Tyler Franta on Unsplash

It sure would be nice to be able to animate the transition between pages if we want to on the web, at least without resorting to hacks or full-blown architecture choices just to achieve it. Some kind of API that would run stuff (it could integrate with WAAPI?) before the page is unloaded, and then some buddy API that would do the same on the way in.

We do have an onbeforeunload API, but I’m not sure what kind of baggage that has. That, or otherwise, is all possible now, but what I want are purpose-built APIs that help us do it cleanly (understandable functions) and with both performance (working as quickly as clicking links normally does) and accessibility (like focus handling) in mind.

If you’re building a single-page app anyway, you get the freedom to animate between views because the page never reloads. The danger here is that you might pick a single-page app just for this ability, which is what I mean by having to buy into a site architecture just to achieve this. That feels like an unfortunate trade-off, as single-page apps bring a ton of overhead, like tooling and accessibility concerns, that you wouldn’t have otherwise needed.

Without a single page app, you could use something like Turbo and animate.css like this. Or, Adam’s new transition.style, a clip-path() based homage to Daniel Edan’s masterpiece. Maybe if that approach was paired with instant.page it would be as fast as any other internal link click.

There are other players trying to figure this out, like smoothState.js and Swup. The trick being: intercept the action to move to the next page, run the animation first, then load the next page, and animate the new page in. Technically, it slows things down a bit, but you can do it pretty efficiently and the movement adds enough distraction that the perceived performance might even be better.

Ideally, we wouldn’t have to animate the entire page but we could have total control to make more interesting transitions. Heck, I was doing that a decade ago with a page for a musician where clicking around the site just moved things around so that the audio would keep playing (and it was fun).

This would be a great place for the web platform to step in. I remember Jake pushed for this years ago, but I’m not sure if that went anywhere. Then we got portals which are… ok? Those are like if you load an iframe on the page and then animate it to take over the whole page (and update the URL). Not much animation nuance possible there, but you could certainly swipe some pages around or fade them in and out (hey here’s another one: Highway), like jQuery Mobile did back in ancient times.

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The post Still Hoping for Better Native Page Transitions appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Page Laubheimer says that if you’re going to do a sticky header…

1. Keep it small.
2. Visually contrast it with the rest of the page.
3. If it’s going to move, keep it minimal. (I’d say, respect prefers-reduced-motion.)
4. Consider “partially persistent headers.” (Jemima Abu calls it a Smart Navbar.)
5. Actually, maybe don’t even do it.

I generally like the term “sticky” header, because it implies you should use position: sticky for them, which I think you should. It used to be done with position: fixed, but that was trickier to pull off since the header would move in-and-out of flow of the document. Using sticky positioning helps reserve that space automatically without JavaScript or magic numbers.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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The post Sticky Headers: 5 Ways to Make Them Better appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Ten years ago, people began talking about the “Independent Web.” Although we don’t commonly use the term anymore, that doesn’t mean that it’s not still as vital a topic of discussion today as it was a decade ago.

Today, I want to look at where the term came from, what it refers to today, and why it’s something that all of us in business, marketing, and web design should be thinking about.

What Is The Independent Web?

The Independent Web is a term that was coined back in 2010 by John Battelle.

In “Identity and The Independent Web,” Battelle broaches the subject of internet users losing control of their data, privacy, and decision-making to the likes of social media and search engines.

“When we’re ‘on’ Facebook, Google, or Twitter, we’re plugged into an infrastructure that locks onto us, serving us content and commerce in an automated but increasingly sophisticated fashion. Sure, we navigate around, in control of our experience, but the fact is, the choices provided to us as we navigate are increasingly driven by algorithms modeled on the service’s understanding of our identity.”

That’s the Dependent Web.

This is how Battelle explains the Independent Web:

“There is another part of the web, one where I can stroll a bit more at my own pace, and discover new territory, rather than have territory matched to a presumed identity. And that is the land of the Independent Web.”

In 2010, this referred to websites, search engines, and apps where users and their activity were not tracked. But a lot has changed since then, and many websites that were once safe to peruse without interference or manipulation are no longer.

What Happens When the Dependent Web Takes Over?

Nothing good.

I take that back. It’s not fair to make a blanket statement about Dependent Web platforms and sites. Users can certainly benefit from sharing some of their data with them.

Take Facebook, for instance. Since its creation, it’s enabled people to connect with long-lost friends, stay in touch with distant relatives, enable freelance professionals like ourselves to find like-minded communities, etc.

The same goes for websites and apps that track and use visitor data. Consumers are more than willing to share relevant data with companies so long as they benefit from the resulting personalized experiences.

But the Dependent Web also has a darker side. There are many ways that the Dependent Web costs consumers and businesses control over important things like:

Behavior

If you’ve seen The Social Dilemma, then you know that platforms like Facebook and Google profit from selling their users to advertisers.

That’s right. They’re not just selling user data. They’re selling users themselves. If the algorithms can change the way users behave, these platforms and their advertisers get to cash in big time.

Many websites and apps are also guilty of using manipulation to force users to behave how they want them to.

Personal Data

This one is well-known thanks to the GDPR in the EU and the CCPA in California. Despite these initiatives to protect user data and privacy, the exploitation of personal data on the web remains a huge public concern in recent years.

Content and Branding

This isn’t relevant to websites so much as it is to social media platforms and Google.

Dependent Web platforms ultimately dictate who sees your content and when. And while they’re more than happy to benefit from the traffic and engagement this content brings to their platforms, they’re just as happy to censor or pull down content as they please, just as Skillshare did in 2019 when it deleted half of its courses without telling its course creators.

What’s more, while social media and search engines have become the place to market our businesses, some of our branding gets lost when entering such oversaturated environments.

Income

When algorithms get updated, many businesses often feel the negative effects almost immediately.

For example, Facebook updated its algorithm in 2018 to prioritize “meaningful content.” This pushed out organic business content and pulled regular user content to the top of the heap.

This, in turn, forced businesses to have to pay-to-play if they wanted to use Facebook as a viable marketing platform.

Access

The Dependent Web doesn’t just impact individuals’ experiences. It can have far-reaching effects when one company provides a critical service to a large portion of the population.

We saw this happen in November when AWS went down.

When Amazon Web Services burps and half the Internet goes down maybe just maybe it’s not a great idea to have a single company with so much control over what has essentially become our society’s critical infrastructure?

— Evan Greer (@evan_greer) November 25, 2020

It wasn’t just Amazon’s servers that went down, though. It took out apps and sites like:

• 1Password
• Adobe Spark
• Capital Gazette
• Coinbase
• Glassdoor
• Roku
• The Washington Post

And there’s absolutely nothing that these businesses or their users could do but sit around and wait… because Amazon hosts a substantial portion of the web.

Innovation

When consumers and businesses become dependent on platforms that predominantly control the way we live and work, it’s difficult for us to stand up for the little guys trying to carve out innovative pathways.

And that’s exactly what we see happen time and time again with Big Tech’s buy-and-kill tactics.

As a result, we really lose the option to choose what we use to improve our lives and our businesses. And innovative thinkers lose the ability to bring much-needed changes to the world because Big Tech wants to own the vast majority of data and users.

How Can We Take Back Control From The Dependent Web?

Many things are happening right now that are trying to push consumers and businesses towards a more Independent Web:

Consumer Privacy Protection: GDPR and CCPA empower consumers to control where their data goes and what it’s used for.

Big Tech Regulations: The Senate held tech regulation hearings with Facebook’s and Twitters’s CEOs.

Public Awareness Initiatives: Films like The Social Dilemma bring greater awareness to what’s happening on social media.

Ad Blocker Adoption: Adblocker usage is at an all-time high.

Private Search Engine Usage: Although Google dominates search engine market share, people are starting to use private search engines like Duck Duck Go.

Private Browsing Growth: Over 60% of the global population is aware of what private browsing is (i.e., incognito mode), and roughly 35% use it when surfing the web.

Self-hosted and Open Source CMS Popularity: The IndieWeb community encourages people to move away from Dependent platforms and build their own websites and communities. This is something that Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, talked about back in 2012.

“The Internet needs a strong, independent platform for those of us who don’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s domain. I like to think that if we didn’t create WordPress something else that looks a lot like it would exist. I think Open Source is kind of like our Bill of Rights. It’s our Constitution. If we’re not true to that, nothing else matters.”

As web designers, this is something that should really speak to you, especially if you’ve ever met a lead or client who didn’t understand why they needed a website when they could just advertise on Facebook or Instagram.

A Decentralized Web: Perhaps the most promising of all these initiatives are Solid and Inrupt, which were launched in 2018 by the creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee.

As Berners-Lee explained on the Inrupt blog in 2020:

”The Web was always meant to be a platform for creativity, collaboration, and free invention — but that’s not what we are seeing today. Today, business transformation is hampered by different parts of one’s life being managed by different silos, each of which looks after one vertical slice of life, but where the users and teams can’t get the insight from connecting that data. Meanwhile, that data is exploited by the silo in question, leading to increasing, very reasonable, public skepticism about how personal data is being misused. That in turn has led to increasingly complex data regulations.”

This is something we should all keep a close eye on. Consumers and businesses alike are becoming wary of the Dependent Web.

Who better than the creator of the web to lead us towards the Independent Web where we can protect our data and better control our experience?

 

Featured Image via Pexels.

Source

The post What Is The Independent Web And Does It Matter In 2021? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Startups live online. The flexible, customer-first, and tech-focused nature of a startup requires a fast Wi-Fi connection that’s always up and running. If your Wi-Fi is lagging or constantly crashing, it’ll hold your business back.

Unfortunately, even the best Wi-Fi setup may need some troubleshooting every now and then. If your Wi-Fi’s performance isn’t up to par, there are a few easy steps you can take to fix it.

1. Restart the Network

Let’s get the obvious solution out of the way first. As everyone knows, sometimes a device just needs to be restarted to be good as new.

If your Wi-Fi is slowing down or crashing at unexpected times, try restarting or resetting the network. Do this during a weekend or overnight so you won’t disrupt business. If this works, hopefully that’s the end of it. If it doesn’t work, you can now start investigating other potential causes.

2. Switch to a Less Crowded Channel

If your office is in a building with a lot of other businesses, there’s a chance other Wi-Fi networks are interfering with your network. Free software like inSSIDer or Vistumbler can identify all the nearby Wi-Fi networks and determine whether any may be clashing with yours. Be sure to check for interference at different locations throughout the office.

The number of nearby networks may lead you to suspect that interference is the root of the problem. In that case, you can switch your Wi-Fi to a less crowded channel. This will likely remove most of the interference and allow your Wi-Fi to travel more freely throughout the office.

3. Use AI to Optimize Usage

This is a more involved approach, but it can deliver major benefits to a startup that adopts it. Some innovative companies now provide Wi-Fi equipped with AI capabilities. This AI monitors who is using Wi-Fi where and for what, and it adjusts Wi-Fi output accordingly. For example, Plume WorkPass uses AI not only to provide their customers with top-notch Wi-Fi, but also security and guest insights to optimize for growth. 

AI-based Wi-Fi may be the future of Wi-Fi connectivity. It produces a Wi-Fi network that can help troubleshoot its own issues, making your network more reliable without taking up more of your IT team’s time.

4. Add Access Points

A single router can only reach so far. The more access points your office has, the better Wi-Fi connectivity you’ll enjoy.

Access points aren’t to be confused with range extenders. Range extenders, as their name suggests, catch the waves of your Wi-Fi signal and extend them farther then they would normally go. These definitely have their uses, and you may want to install a few of them throughout your office. However, range extenders slow the bandwidth of the extended signal by a significant amount.

Access points, by contrast, are devices that are connected via ethernet to the main network. They send out their own Wi-Fi signal instead of extending an existing one. Access points are usually just as efficient as the network’s primary router and can deliver reliable Wi-Fi farther.

5. Create More High-Frequency Cells

Another network tweak you can try is adding more narrow-range, high-frequency cells instead of sticking with one or two wide-range, low-frequency cells.

Low-frequency networks (2.4 GHz) travel farther, but they’re also slower. They’re good for physically larger offices with fewer devices — in other words, the opposite of what startup offices are usually like. On the other hand, high-frequency networks (5 GHz) don’t travel as far, but they can handle far more bandwidth.

If your users are complaining about a slow network, consider creating more cells that use 5 GHz to replace some of your 2.4 GHz.

6. Look at the Layout of Your Office

If you’ve carefully troubleshot exactly how your Wi-Fi network is constructed but are still experiencing connectivity problems, look at how your office is laid out.

Wi-Fi travels on radio waves, and those waves can be impeded by other objects. Walls will slow down or block Wi-Fi signals, especially if they’re particularly thick or made of concrete. Metal can reflect signals, so users may have issues if there’s metal furniture, like filing cabinets, nearby. Water is an issue, too, so think twice before installing an aquarium in your office.

Moving your routers, access points, and other pieces of hardware can make a big difference in the signal strength your users enjoy. You can use these pointers to try out various arrangements or bring in a consultant to help you lay out your hardware.

7. Try Some Diagnostic Software

You can purchase software that lets you see how devices, users, and applications are behaving across your network. If your Wi-Fi issues are unpredictable or you can’t find anything wrong with your network, this type of software might be useful.

Wi-Fi diagnostics can help determine which devices are affected, where they are in the office, and what applications are being used when slowdowns occur. Armed with this information, you and your IT team will be better positioned to figure out the source of the problem and how to fix it.

8. Replace Your Hardware

The most low-tech solution does sometimes end up being the right one. It’s possible that your hardware is simply reaching the end of its life. If you’ve had the same routers and access points for several years, they may be wearing down. If you can’t see any issues with your network configuration or usage, try updating your hardware. It’s likely that a more modern device can handle your business’s demands.

Wi-Fi connectivity issues can feel like an inescapable part of modern life, but they don’t have to be. Whether you move devices around or update your overall network, there are plenty of solutions you can adopt to improve Wi-Fi connectivity issues.

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Photo by Praveen kumar Mathivanan on Unsplash

Startups live online. The flexible, customer-first, and tech-focused nature of a startup requires a fast Wi-Fi connection that’s always up and running. If your Wi-Fi is lagging or constantly crashing, it’ll hold your business back.

Unfortunately, even the best Wi-Fi setup may need some troubleshooting every now and then. If your Wi-Fi’s performance isn’t up to par, there are a few easy steps you can take to fix it.

1. Restart the Network

Let’s get the obvious solution out of the way first. As everyone knows, sometimes a device just needs to be restarted to be good as new.

If your Wi-Fi is slowing down or crashing at unexpected times, try restarting or resetting the network. Do this during a weekend or overnight so you won’t disrupt business. If this works, hopefully that’s the end of it. If it doesn’t work, you can now start investigating other potential causes.

2. Switch to a Less Crowded Channel

If your office is in a building with a lot of other businesses, there’s a chance other Wi-Fi networks are interfering with your network. Free software like inSSIDer or Vistumbler can identify all the nearby Wi-Fi networks and determine whether any may be clashing with yours. Be sure to check for interference at different locations throughout the office.

The number of nearby networks may lead you to suspect that interference is the root of the problem. In that case, you can switch your Wi-Fi to a less crowded channel. This will likely remove most of the interference and allow your Wi-Fi to travel more freely throughout the office.

3. Use AI to Optimize Usage

This is a more involved approach, but it can deliver major benefits to a startup that adopts it. Some innovative companies now provide Wi-Fi equipped with AI capabilities. This AI monitors who is using Wi-Fi where and for what, and it adjusts Wi-Fi output accordingly. For example, Plume WorkPass uses AI not only to provide their customers with top-notch Wi-Fi, but also security and guest insights to optimize for growth. 

AI-based Wi-Fi may be the future of Wi-Fi connectivity. It produces a Wi-Fi network that can help troubleshoot its own issues, making your network more reliable without taking up more of your IT team’s time.

4. Add Access Points

A single router can only reach so far. The more access points your office has, the better Wi-Fi connectivity you’ll enjoy.

Access points aren’t to be confused with range extenders. Range extenders, as their name suggests, catch the waves of your Wi-Fi signal and extend them farther then they would normally go. These definitely have their uses, and you may want to install a few of them throughout your office. However, range extenders slow the bandwidth of the extended signal by a significant amount.

Access points, by contrast, are devices that are connected via ethernet to the main network. They send out their own Wi-Fi signal instead of extending an existing one. Access points are usually just as efficient as the network’s primary router and can deliver reliable Wi-Fi farther.

5. Create More High-Frequency Cells

Another network tweak you can try is adding more narrow-range, high-frequency cells instead of sticking with one or two wide-range, low-frequency cells.

Low-frequency networks (2.4 GHz) travel farther, but they’re also slower. They’re good for physically larger offices with fewer devices — in other words, the opposite of what startup offices are usually like. On the other hand, high-frequency networks (5 GHz) don’t travel as far, but they can handle far more bandwidth.

If your users are complaining about a slow network, consider creating more cells that use 5 GHz to replace some of your 2.4 GHz.

6. Look at the Layout of Your Office

If you’ve carefully troubleshot exactly how your Wi-Fi network is constructed but are still experiencing connectivity problems, look at how your office is laid out.

Wi-Fi travels on radio waves, and those waves can be impeded by other objects. Walls will slow down or block Wi-Fi signals, especially if they’re particularly thick or made of concrete. Metal can reflect signals, so users may have issues if there’s metal furniture, like filing cabinets, nearby. Water is an issue, too, so think twice before installing an aquarium in your office.

Moving your routers, access points, and other pieces of hardware can make a big difference in the signal strength your users enjoy. You can use these pointers to try out various arrangements or bring in a consultant to help you lay out your hardware.

7. Try Some Diagnostic Software

You can purchase software that lets you see how devices, users, and applications are behaving across your network. If your Wi-Fi issues are unpredictable or you can’t find anything wrong with your network, this type of software might be useful.

Wi-Fi diagnostics can help determine which devices are affected, where they are in the office, and what applications are being used when slowdowns occur. Armed with this information, you and your IT team will be better positioned to figure out the source of the problem and how to fix it.

8. Replace Your Hardware

The most low-tech solution does sometimes end up being the right one. It’s possible that your hardware is simply reaching the end of its life. If you’ve had the same routers and access points for several years, they may be wearing down. If you can’t see any issues with your network configuration or usage, try updating your hardware. It’s likely that a more modern device can handle your business’s demands.

Wi-Fi connectivity issues can feel like an inescapable part of modern life, but they don’t have to be. Whether you move devices around or update your overall network, there are plenty of solutions you can adopt to improve Wi-Fi connectivity issues.

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Photo by Praveen kumar Mathivanan on Unsplash

Undoubtedly, lifestyle and fashion bloggers require a blog that is visually appealing and stands out. Features, such as elegant galleries, beautiful typography, a lot of white space, and more, help share the blog posts. 

If paired with a responsive design, you can easily impress your readers, regardless of the device they are using to navigate your website. Fortunately, with WordPress, you can find plenty of alluring free lifestyle themes, adequate enough to be used. 

Thus, in this post, we have come up with the best free lifestyle WordPress theme to create your site. But before that, let’s acquire some valuable knowledge regarding lifestyle and personal brand websites. 

What is a Lifestyle Blog?

A lifestyle blog can be best defined as a digital representation of everyday life and interests. Such kind of a blog is used by a person, known as the lifestyle blogger, who creates content that is curated and inspired by their daily activities and personal interests. 

Generally, such blogs are extremely personalized according to the blogger’s experience, life stage, and location. For instance, a 30-year-old, married, and a mom blogger would post content entirely different than a 25-year-old, single blogger. 

While both of them will be regarded as lifestyle bloggers, there will be some overlap in their content. Furthermore, lifestyle bloggers put forward a wide variety of content with the help of the best free WordPress theme for blogging that is inspired by and centered around their personal lives, such as décor, design, makeup, fashion, recipes, food, beauty, travel, home, family, and more. 

Because of the audience reach, lifestyle bloggers are social influencers as well who have an outreach among social media channels, such as Instagram, Twitter, and others. 

How Does a Personal Brand Appeal to Customers?

Personal branding has to offer an array of advantages. When you take control of a narrative surrounding the online persona, you can make essential decisions regarding how you share the content and how people see you. Here are some ways, useful enough for personal brands, to appear to their customers. 

By Being More Visible Online

When engaging in personal branding, you automatically turn accessible and visible to the online audience. People can find you through various ways and can interact with you on different channels. However, if you are just starting out, take it slow. Figure out what you can share online and always respect yours and their boundaries. 

Leveraging the Network

As you grow the brand, you will develop a network of people and customers. This network could be a huge asset when it is about growing the business. Having a network can become valuable whenever you want to take the business to a new tangent or launch a new product. The more people will know about you; the more visible your brand will become. 

By Building Partnerships

Partnerships are an amazing way to appeal to a wider range of potential leads and customers. When you create something with another professional, you can easily access each other’s audiences. Moreover, you can also cut down the work in half, allowing you to put more content out there and attract new audiences. 

How to Create a Lifestyle Blog with WordPress?

Now that you are ready to create a personal blogging website of your own, follow the below-mentioned steps for an easy way out.

Choose a Blog Name

First thing first, to establish your lifestyle blog online, you must choose a domain name. With millions of websites functional currently, you need to ensure that your chosen name stands out from the rest. The selected name should be concise, descriptive and match the content type you will be posting.

Get Your Blog Registered

If you wish to create an attractive, eye-pleasing blog, signup for WordPress. Being one of the considerable platforms, it allows you to use plenty of modernized, responsive free WordPress personal blog themes and plugins. Not just that, you can also customize your blog according to the preference and requirements. 

Choose a Theme and Download Essential Plugins

Once you have signed up for WordPress and set your account, the next step would be to choose a theme. However, upon beginning the research, you will find an array of themes that may seem perfect for your blog, increasing the confusion even more. If you don’t wish to spend enough time researching a theme, one of the best WordPress themes for lifestyle blogs you can use is Lifestyle WordPress Theme by CyberChimps. Easy-to-customize and responsive, this theme is perfect for every blogger. Once done, you can also install the required plugins. 

Start Posting and Sharing

After customizing your lifestyle blog, now is the time to create content and share it on your site. However, to stand out and please the audience, make sure you are creating qualitative, unique and relevant content. 

CyberChimps Lifestyle Theme: Features

• Pre-designed Pages

  The theme offers you pre-designed and ready pages, including about, home, blog, and contact. All you would have to do is edit these pages and add content according to your blog.

• Contact Form:

  Offering a beautifully designed contact form, you can use this feature to increase your email inquiries. 

• 1-click Import:

  The theme offers 1-click import demos, perfect enough for a lifestyle WordPress blog. 

• Responsive Design

  While developing the theme, CyberChimps has taken care of the responsiveness. Hence, it can easily adapt to any device or screen size.

• SEO-Friendly

  Built with semantic best practices and search engines’ requirements in mind, this one is an SEO-friendly theme.

• High-Speed Performance

  Although packed with CSS animations, the theme is light and comes with exceptional loading timing. 

• Plugin-Ready

  The theme is compatible with various plugins, such as WP Legal Pages Pro, Total Cache, MailChimp, Yoast SEO, Contact Form 7 and much more. 

• Multilingual WPML Ready

  The theme can seamlessly be translated into any language as per your choice. This way, you get to target a global audience. 

• Google Fonts

  You get to choose from more than 700 Google fonts that fit your site. Not just that, but you can also change the font size, letter spacing, line height and other elements of fonts. 

• Cross-Browser Compatibility

  The theme is compatible with various popular browsers, such as Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and more. 

Conclusion

When it is about developing a blog, there are plenty of free WordPress themes you can choose from. While some are simple, mobile-friendly; others are customizable. Regardless of your requirements, it is definitely going to take a lot of time to find one theme that matches your requirements. Thus, to avoid time consumption, use Lifestyle Theme from CyberChimps and get your blog up and running in no time.

There is no doubt that CSS plays a huge role in web performance. Milica Mihajlija puts a point on exactly why:

When there is CSS available for a page, whether it’s inline or an external stylesheet, the browser delays rendering until the CSS is parsed. This is because pages without CSS are often unusable.

The browser has to wait until the CSS is both downloaded and parsed to show us that first rendering of the page, otherwise browsing the web would be a terribly visually jerky to browse. We’d probably write JavaScript to delay page rendering on purpose if that’s how the native web worked.

So how do you improve it? The classics like caching, minification, and compression help. But also, shipping less of it, and only loading the bit you need and the rest after the first render.

It’s entirely about how and how much CSS you load, and has very little to do with the contents of the the CSS.

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Rather than spring cleaning, do some spring “shopping” for tools that will make your design life easier. Packed with free options this month, this list is crammed full of tools and elements that you can use in your work every day.

Here’s what new for designers this month:

April’s Top Picks

Charts.css

Charts.css makes creating beautiful online charts that much easier. It’s a modern CSS framework that uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts. It’s accessible, customizable, responsive, and open source. There’s a quick start option and available source code to work with.

Haikei SVG Generator

Haikei is a web app that helps you generate SVG shapes, backgrounds, and patterns in all types of shapes to use in projects. Everything can be exported into the tools you are already using for easy integration, and every element is customizable. The tool is free right now – no credit card needed – and you get access to 15 generators and can export in SVG and PNG format. A premium option is on the way, and you can sign up to get notified for access.

Fluid Space Calculator

Fluid Space Calculator helps you create a related space system and export the CSS to implement it. The calculator allows you to add space value pairs and multipliers and see the impact on the screen before snagging the related code. It’s great for determining how things will look in different viewports and for creating custom space pairs.

Night Eye WordPress Plugin

Night Eye WordPress Plugin helps you create a dark mode option for your WordPress website with ease. It’s completely customizable, schedulable, and one of those things that users are starting to expect. The plugin has free and paid versions – the only difference is a link to credit the developer.

3 Productivity Boosters

Macro

Macro is a supercharged checklist app for recurring processes. It’s designed to help teams document, assign, track, and automate for maximum efficiency. Now is the time to test this tool because it is free in public beta.

Writex.io

Writex.io is a free writing app that uses AI and smart features to help you write more efficiently. It can check readability as you write, make suggestions, check spelling, and allows you to work with versioning. All the settings are customizable, so you can get help and suggestions when you want them and avoid things you don’t want.

Taloflow

Taloflow, which is in beta, is a tool that helps you find the top cloud and dev tools for your use case. This is designed to be a time-saving solution to finding the right infrastructure and API products for your work.

8 Kits with Illustrations and User Interface Elements

Skribbl

Skribbl is a collection of free, hand-drawn illustrations in a light and fun style. The black and white sketches are friendly, and the collection keeps growing. Plus, the illustrators are allowing them to be used free for any use.

Mobile Chat Kit

Mobile Chat Kit is a free starter kit for building apps in Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. It includes more than 50 screen options with mapped-out flows for a quick-start project.

Flowchart.fun

Flowchart.fun is exactly what the name implies. The app allows you to type, create nodes, and link elements to develop simple flow charts quickly. Then you can alter shape and size with drag and drop. Export it for use as an SVG, JPG, or PNG.

Shuffle

Shuffle is a marketplace packed with UI libraries to help you with a variety of digital projects. There are more than 1,500 pre-built components to choose from with professional designs. This premium tool comes with a monthly subscription or lifetime license.

Cryptocurrency 3D Pack

Cryptocurrency 3D Pack is a set of icons with fun colors in three-dimensional shapes that you can use to represent different crypto elements. The pack includes 55 #D icons in PNG and BLEND formats.

Stratum UI Kit for Figma

Stratum UI Kit for Figma includes nine free screens that are ready to use. Options include API documentation, Kanban, document, data dashboard, ecommerce product list, ecommerce product options, payments spreadsheet, cloud storage, and newsfeed.

Conic.css

Conic.css is a collection of simple gradients that you can browse and then click to copy the code into your CSS to use them in projects. It’s quick and easy while using trendy color options.

Artify Illustrations

Artify Illustrations is a Figma plugin that allows you to access more than 5,000 SVG and PNG illustrations within the app. It’s got a built-in search feature, everything is high-resolution, and the huge library includes various styles.

2 Tutorials

A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components

A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components is an amazingly comprehensive guide from Smashing Magazine with everything you need to know about accessible components. From tabs to tables to toggles to tooltips, you’ll find it all here and learn how to use it the right way.

Grid CheatSheet in 2021

Grid CheatSheet in 2021 is a useful guide of everything you can do with CSS Grid. Plus, it has plenty of fun illustrations and an accompanying video.

8 Fresh and Fun Fonts

Athina

Athina is a modern display serif with beautiful connector strokes. The free version is a demo, and there’s a full family that you can buy.

Brique

Brique is a free (personal and commercial) display font with a wide stance and uppercase character set. The letters have a lot of personality and a readable configuration.

Code Next

Code Next is a great geometric sans serif with a full family of styles. Including two variable fonts. It’s highly readable and would work for almost any application.

Inter

Inter is a simple and functional sense serif family with everything from extra light to heavy weights. The extra character personality makes this a fun and functional font option.

Nothing Clean

Nothing Clean is a fun grunge-type option. It’s an all uppercase character set with alternates.

Playout

Playout is a fun, hand-drawn style typeface with interesting glyphs and alternate characters. The most fun feature might be the pawprint characters in the demo set.

Rockford Sans

Rockford Sans is a geometric typeface with subtly rounded edges. It has eight weights and italics. With its large x-height and round features, it’s legible and friendly. It’s suited to cover a wide variety of tasks from editorial to brand design and advertising.

SpaceType

SpaceType is a fun and funky typeface in regular and expanded styles. The stretched letterforms make interesting alternates for display purposes.

Source

The post 25 Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.