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The rise of remote work and rapid advancements in internet technology have made cybersecurity vital, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

According to a recent study by BlackFrog, 61% of SMBs suffered at least one cyberattack in 2022. Even more alarming is that 87% of these respondents reported suffering multiple cyberattacks within a year.

The problem is that even though SMB owners and decision-makers are fully aware of the importance of cybersecurity measures, they don’t have the human or financial resources to make this happen.

That’s why, in this article, we’ll provide you with actionable cybersecurity tips and strategies to keep your business safe from cybercriminals without breaking the bank.

The SEO Implications of Website Security Breaches

What makes a cyber attack devastating for SMBs is that the consequences are as significant as they are far-reaching.

For starters, an average data breach resulting from a cyberattack costs a company $4.45 million. 

And that’s only the beginning!

Search engines will blocklist domains they consider suspicious, malicious, or dangerous to keep their users safe and prevent them from appearing in their search result pages (SERPs). 

Browsers will also prevent people from visiting a website by displaying a message like this.

Not only will this cause a significant dip in SEO traffic, but it’ll also damage a brand’s reputation and credibility, so much so that new and existing customers will be discouraged from doing business with them.

The good news is that there are cybersecurity measures you can immediately implement to significantly minimize – if not eliminate – your chances of becoming a cyber attack victim. 

Let’s take a look at these right now.

HTTPS: Enhancing Website Security and SEO Simultaneously

Website security is one of the SEO principles Google considers when evaluating your website’s page experience, which, in turn, impacts your search rankings.

One of the easiest ways to keep your website secure from cyber threats is by ensuring your website URL begins with HTTPS.

Unlike HTTP, HTTPS uses a specific protocol called an SSL/TLS certificate that encrypts all requests and responses happening on your website’s front and back end. 

This ensures the information your website visitors and customers provide can’t easily be read and deciphered by cyber criminals, making it more difficult for them to hack your website and steal your customers’ data.

Optimizing SSL/TLS Certificates for Improved SERP Rankings

SSL/TLS certificates ensure that websites adhere to data confidentiality and privacy required in specific industries like finance and healthcare.

More importantly, SSL/TLS certificates assure your visitors and customers that your website—and their information—are secure. 

In addition to checking your website’s URL, a website with an SSL/TLS certificate will show up with a padlock on Apple’s Safari.

Cyptnox’s website’s SSL/TLS certificate on Safari browser (left) and Google Chrome (right) 

There are three SSL/TLS certificate types:

Domain Validation (DV) Certificate

This is the lowest SSL/TLS certificate and provides only basic security for your website. 

As such, it’s also the easiest to get because all you’ll need to do is confirm that you own your website’s domain through a phone call or via email.

Organization Validation (OV) Certificate

Compared to DV certificates, OV SSL/TLS certificates provide websites with a higher level of security, including the ability to encrypt sensitive information like credit card details and purchase history. 

If you’re planning to apply for an OV certificate, be prepared to go through a screening process that involves providing proof of your business’s physical address and ownership. 

Extended Validation (EV) Certificate

As you may have guessed, this SSL/TLS certificate has the highest security level. Financial institutions, hospitals, insurance companies, and healthcare providers commonly use it. 

It’s also the most expensive and requires applicants to undergo an extremely stringent verification process.

On top of the security features available in the first two, EV certificates also protect your website and its users from unauthorized access from third parties. 

This protects users when performing various online transactions requiring them to provide sensitive information like filing an insurance claim or requesting medical records.

Having the correct SSL/TLS certificate ensures that you’re providing your website visitors the level of protection and security they expect from businesses within your industry. 

In turn, visitors will be more confident doing business with you, and search engines will reward you with higher SERP rankings and more SEO traffic.

Preventing Negative SEO Through Cybersecurity Measures

Negative SEO (aka “black hat SEO”) uses sneaky tactics to boost a website’s search rankings by damaging its competitors’ online reputation and rankings.

One of the most common tactics is link farming. 

This negative SEO tactic creates backlinks from sites tagged as dangerous or malicious by Google and other search engines. 

Tools like Ahrefs can help you identify and remove these potentially dangerous backlinks from your website.

Although you won’t find any specific tags specifying that backlinks from a particular domain are toxic, there are a couple of red flags to watch out for.

One is the referring domain’s site traffic. 

If the website’s traffic is 0, it may be a sign that search engines and browsers are blocking users from visiting it.

Another red flag to check is the URL anchor text pointing to your website.

A properly executed link-building strategy uses descriptive anchor texts with targeted keywords. 

Link farming tactics don’t. 

So, if you see random letters and “Empty Anchor” anchor texts listed, these could potentially be toxic backlinks.  

You can further check this by clicking on the dropdown menu next to the anchor text in the “Ref Domains” column.

This will display a list of all the domains with backlinks to your site using that specific anchor text.

Again, check the Traffic column to see if any domains are not receiving traffic. If so, these may potentially be toxic backlinks.

You can then use Ahrefs’ Disavow Tool to submit these to Google so that search bots will ignore these backlinks so that they won’t be factored into your overall search rankings.

Secured Structured Data: Boosting Trust and SERPs

Schema markups help structure the different pages on your website in a way that search bots can easily access and understand its content. 

Google uses this information to provide users with links to specific pages on your website under your homepage URL.

Take Novaalabs, for example.

Notice how its structured data allows Google to display multiple product pages underneath its homepage URL on its SERP.  

This makes the checkout process quicker and easier for Novaalabs’ new and existing customers. 

And since Google would often list sites with sitelink schema markups at the top of their SERPs, Novaalabs increases its chances of its target customers visiting them instead of their customers.

If your business has a brick-and-mortar establishment, schema markups allow you to display detailed information about your business and appear on local search results.

The French Laundry, for example, uses schema markups that allow them to display both sitelink markups and local business profile information that includes customer reviews.

This allows them to transform the entire above-the-fold of Google’s SERP into one giant digital billboard promoting the restaurant, significantly reducing their target customers to dine elsewhere.

More importantly, displaying customer reviews and ratings helps the restaurant build a level of trust that will convince them to dine at this restaurant. It also increases the chances that diners will spend more once they get there.

However, schema markups are still code your SEO specialist creates for your website or generated by a plugin. This makes them prone to errors and vulnerabilities that cybercriminals are eager to exploit.

That’s why, before using it, make it a point to test it using Google’s Rich Results Test Tool to check your schema markup for errors, warnings, and vulnerabilities.

You can then fix the flagged areas directly on the tool. That way, you can be sure that your schema markup will help boost your search rankings and keep you protected at the same time. 

Balancing Mobile Security with Google Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile security in the post-pandemic workplace should no longer be limited to cell phones and tablets.

With businesses adopting remote work and Bring-Your-Devices (BYOD) policies to help boost job satisfaction and reduce overhead costs, ensuring that your cybersecurity policies align with these changes is critical.

Here are some tips to help you update your mobile cybersecurity policies to keep your business protected:

Employ Multifactor Authentication

At first, multifactor authentication can be a nuisance because it’ll require you and everyone else in your business to undergo several verification steps before accessing the tools you use at work.

However, these additional steps mean that different layers of security are put in place on your devices, making them more secure for you and your employees to use at home, in a co-working space, or at your favorite coffee shop.

Secure Your Online Forms

Mobile device users make up 56.2% of the traffic visiting websites, including yours!

Unfortunately, mobile devices also account for 73% of significant cybersecurity breaches experienced by businesses.

That said, it’s vital to ensure your website is user-friendly for mobile device users and secure to prevent malware from getting into your website through your contact forms.

One way to secure your online forms is by adding data encryption and security tokens like reCaptcha.

This helps prevent your business from getting flooded with spammy responses, including malware cybercriminals can use to steal sensitive information and hostage your website for ransom.

Be Diligent When Granting Internet Access

This is particularly important if you’re implementing a hybrid work model and BYOD policy in your business.

Since cybercriminals know that personal devices are less secure than those furnished by companies, they would use these as an entry point to hack your system. 

Restricting the number of devices that can access your internet can help significantly reduce the chances of this happening. 

Ensuring Cybersecurity During SEO-Focused Site Migration

Migrating your website to a new web hosting provider is risky and should never be taken lightly. 

For starters, you must take down your site to begin the process. 

When that happens, your target audience and search bots won’t be able to access you’re website, causing your search and domain rankings to drop.

Part of the site migration process involves temporarily disconnecting any security measures you have in place, leaving your website and business vulnerable to data breaches and other cyber attacks.

On top of that, you run the risk of potentially losing content and valuable data about your customers.

Before starting the site migration process, back up your entire website onto an external drive. That way, you eliminate any chance that cybercriminals can get access to it.

Also, conduct a comprehensive website and SEO audit once the site migration is finished and before you bring your website back up. This allows you to thoroughly check your website to ensure there are no errors and vulnerabilities that’ll serve as a backdoor for cybercriminals to enter and wreak havoc.

Finally, submit your sitemap and robots.txt to Google through your website’s Search Console account. This will prompt Google bots to start crawling and indexing your newly migrating site and display it on its SERPs again.

The Interplay of AI in Future Cybersecurity and SEO Strategies

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology advancements are both a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, AI has made it easier for businesses to adapt their SEO strategies to ever-changing industry trends and customer behaviors. It’s also helped streamline workflow processes, increasing employee productivity and job satisfaction.

These same advancements, however, equipped cybercriminals to become more sophisticated in their infiltration techniques.

AI writing tools like ChatGPT are a perfect example of this.

ChatGPT can help businesses and cybercriminals write personalized and compelling email copy to convince readers to act. 

Not surprisingly, the number of people and businesses victimized by email phishing spiked by a whopping 1,265% since ChatGPT launched.

That’s why cybersecurity professionals are deploying and enhancing AI-powered cybersecurity solutions that recognize patterns in malware code and scripts used by cyber criminals, allowing them to block these before they can do any damage.

AI-powered cybersecurity solutions can also help identify and address negative SEO tactics like link farming, artificial traffic, and bots filling out forms on your website.

Conclusion

As long as the internet exists, cybercriminals will always be out there, ready to attack your website when the opportunity presents itself.

The tips and strategies shared in this article won’t eliminate the threat of a cyber-attack. But they can significantly reduce the chance of your business becoming a victim if you diligently put them into practice.

The war against cybercrime can’t be won’t a few people within your business. Everyone has a role to play. Creating a cybersecurity policy and having open communication with your employees ensures that everyone will do their part in protecting your website and themselves from cyber criminals. 

Featured image by Dan Nelson on Unsplash

The post Cybersecurity and SEO: Balancing Protection and Accessibility appeared first on noupe.

In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, the ability to communicate effectively with AI tools has become an indispensable skill. Whether you’re generating content, solving complex data problems, or creating stunning digital art, the quality of the outcomes you receive is directly influenced by the prompts you provide.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems offer businesses a powerful tool for creating lasting customer relationships in today’s highly competitive environment, helping to manage contacts efficiently while streamlining operations and driving growth. By 2025, CRM industry revenue is expected to exceed the $80 billion mark, reflecting its growing ubiquity as an integral element in modern business strategies.

In this blog post, we’ll examine the top CRM features tailored for small businesses, while discussing their transformative benefits. From contact management to sales automation and insightful analytics, CRM systems are more than simple technological solutions. 

A quality CRM system is a strategic asset that increases efficiency, enhances customer satisfaction, and allows sustainable expansion, which are invaluable tools for small businesses looking to thrive in today’s increasingly competitive business world. Join us as we uncover how these tools can act as catalysts in propelling success forward.

Contact Management

Contact management serves as the core of any quality CRM system, actively centralizing and organizing a plethora of contacts for small businesses. This includes customers, leads, suppliers, and partners. Integrating a CRM system enables businesses to effectively organize and manage this information.

Active management ensures quick and easy access to all relevant details about each contact, providing a holistic view that enables personalized communication and strategic decision-making. The streamlined contact management process in a CRM system optimizes efficiency and enhances overall business operations.

Lead and Opportunity Management

In the realm of small businesses, each lead holds the promise of potential growth. CRM systems play an essential role in actively tracking and managing leads throughout the sales pipeline. By prioritizing leads efficiently, businesses can channel their efforts toward high-value opportunities with higher conversion rates that may generate substantial revenues.

The comprehensive lead and opportunity management facilitated by CRM systems ensures a dynamic approach to business development, contributing significantly to sustained success and expansion.

Sales Automation

CRMs allow small businesses to automate repetitive tasks, including data entry, follow-up emails, and appointment scheduling. Sales automation enables these features to be used more efficiently, by optimizing time spent by sales teams while simultaneously decreasing manual errors and keeping consistent communication channels with prospects and customers. Not only does this increase efficiency but it also frees up valuable sales representatives’ time so they can focus on cultivating relationships and closing deals successfully. Coupled with small business marketing automation tools, CRMs can become one of the best assets in a team’s sales and marketing toolbox.

Customer Communication Tracking

Understanding customer interactions is critical to providing exceptional service. CRM systems enable small businesses to easily consolidate all communication channels such as emails, calls, and meetings in one central place for easy tracking of interactions. This provides teams with a complete picture that allows them to respond promptly to inquiries, anticipate needs, and create tailored experiences that create customer loyalty among their client base.

Task and Calendar Management

Pexels

Tracking tasks and deadlines is essential to any business, especially small enterprises that have limited resources. CRM systems offer task and calendar management features that assist teams in staying organized and on top of activities. This helps them stay on schedule with key activities and ensure nothing falls through the cracks while taking a proactive approach to managing operations.

Integration Capabilities

Small businesses rely on various tools to manage different aspects of their operations. A CRM system with strong integration capabilities enables seamless communication with essential applications like email, marketing automation, and accounting software. This helps small businesses eliminate silos while improving collaboration. It also guarantees that data flows smoothly throughout their organizations.

Mobile Accessibility

At a time when remote working and on-the-go business activities are the norm, having a CRM system with mobile accessibility is a necessity for small business teams. This feature enables accessing important information, updating records, and communicating with clients whenever, wherever they may be located, as well as increasing flexibility so no opportunities are missed due to geographical restraints.

Benefits for Small Businesses

Enhanced Efficiency

CRM systems play a pivotal role in substantially enhancing the efficiency of small businesses. Through task automation, streamlined communications, and centralized information management, these systems empower teams to navigate core activities more seamlessly. 

This results in heightened productivity and a notable reduction in time wastage, allowing small businesses to allocate resources strategically and thrive in a competitive landscape. The comprehensive capabilities of CRM systems actively contribute to operational excellence, facilitating sustained growth and success.

Improved Customer Relationships

Small businesses utilize CRM systems to actively cultivate strong connections with their customers. These systems facilitate personalized communication, timely responses, and a comprehensive overview of interactions, aiding businesses in fostering long-term customer loyalty and elevating overall customer satisfaction.

Increased Sales and Revenue

Effective lead and opportunity management combined with sales automation is the cornerstone of higher conversion rates and revenue growth for small businesses. CRM systems enable these organizations to prioritize the most promising opportunities and pursue them aggressively for increased profit potential in their sales pipeline.

Scalability

As small businesses expand, so do their needs. A scalable CRM system can adapt to meet these evolving demands of a growing enterprise, making sure that its tools continue to support and enhance operations.

Final Thoughts

Small businesses seeking success in an increasingly competitive marketplace should see CRM as a strategic imperative. Small businesses can increase efficiency, customer satisfaction, and business expansion by harnessing its features and benefits. Through its capabilities, they can position themselves for long-term success in an ever-evolving landscape.

Featured Image by Canva Studio

The post Top CRM Features and Benefits for Small Businesses appeared first on noupe.

Most product teams think in terms of features. Features are easy to brainstorm and write requirement docs for, and they fit nicely into our backlogs and ticketing systems. In short, thinking in terms of features makes it easy to manage the complex task of product delivery.

However, we know that the best products are more than the sum of their parts, and sometimes, the space between the features is as important as the features themselves. So, what can we do to improve the process?

The vast majority of product teams are organized around delivering features — new pieces of functionality that extend the capabilities of the product. These features will often arise from conversations the company is having with prospective buyers:

• “What features are important to you?”
• “What features are missing from your current solution?”
• “What features would we need to add in order to make you consider switching from your existing provider to us?” and so on.

The company will then compile a list of the most popular feature requests and will ask the product team to deliver them.

For most companies, this is what customer centricity looks like; asking customers to tell them what they want — and then building those features into the product in the hope they’ll buy — becomes of key importance. This is based on the fundamental belief that people buy products primarily for the features so we assemble our roadmaps accordingly.

We see this sort of thinking with physical products all the time. For instance, take a look at the following Amazon listing for one of the top-rated TV sets from last year. It’s like they hurled up the entire product roadmap directly onto the listing!

Now, of course, if you’re a hardcore gamer with very specific requirements, you might absolutely be looking for a TV with “VRR, ALLM, and eARC as specified in HDMI2.1, plus G-Sync, FreeSync, Game Optimizer, and HGiG.” But for me? I don’t have a clue what any of those things mean, and I don’t really care. Instead, I’ll go to a review site where they explain what the product actually feels like to use in everyday life. The reviewers will explain how good the unboxing experience is. How sturdy the build is. How easy it is to set up. They’ll explain that the OS is really well put together and easy to navigate, the picture quality is probably the best on the market, and the sound, while benefiting from the addition of a quality sound bar, is very clear and understandable. In short, they’ll be describing the user experience.

The ironic thing is that when I talk to most founders, product managers, and engineers about how they choose a TV, they’ll say exactly the same thing. And yet, for some reason, we struggle to take that personal experience and apply it to our own users!

Tip: As a fun little trick, next time you find yourself arguing about features over experience, ask people to get out their phones. I bet that the vast majority of folks in the room will have an iPhone, despite Samsung and Google phones generally having better cameras, more storage, better screens, and so on. The reason why iPhones have risen in dominance (if we ignore the obvious platform lock-in) is because, despite perhaps not having the best feature set on the market, they feel so nice to use.

Seeing Things From The Users’ Perspective

While feature-centric thinking is completely understandable, it misses a whole class of problems. The features in and of themselves might look good on paper and work great in practice, but do they mesh together to form a convincing whole? Or is the full experience a bit of a mess?

All the annoying bumps, barriers, and inconsistencies that start accruing around each new feature, if left unsolved, can limit the amount of value users can extract from the product. And if you don’t effectively identify and remove these barriers in a deliberate and structured way, any additional functionality will simply add to the problem.

If users are already struggling to extract value from existing features, how do you expect them to extract any additional value you might be adding to the product?

“As a product manager, it’s natural to want to offer as many features as possible to your customers. After all, you want to provide value, right? But what happens when you offer too many features? Your product becomes bloated, convoluted, and difficult to use.”
— “Are Too Many Features Hurting Your Product?”

These barriers and inconsistencies are usually the result of people not thinking through the user experience. And I don’t mean user experience in some abstract way. I mean literally walking through the product step-by-step as though you’d never seen it before — sometimes described as having a “beginner’s mind” mdash; and considering the following questions:

• Is it clear what value this product delivers and how I can get that value?
• If I were a new user, would the way the product is named and structured make sense to me?
• Can I easily build up a mental model of where everything is and how the product works?
• Do I know what to do next?
• How is this going to fit into my existing workflow?
• What’s getting in my way and slowing me down?

While approaching things with a beginner’s mind sounds easy, it’s actually a surprisingly hard mindset for people to adopt — letting go of everything they know (or think they know) about their product, market, and users. Instead, their position as a superuser tends to cloud their judgment: believing that because something is obvious to them (something that they have created and have been working on for the past two years), it will be obvious to a new user who has spent less than five minutes with the product. This is where usability testing (a UX research method that evaluates whether users are able to use a digital product efficiently and effectively) should normally “enter the stage.”

The issue with trying to approach things with a beginner’s mind is also often exacerbated by “motivated reasoning,” the idea that we view things through the lens of what we want to be true, rather than what is true. To this end, you’re much more likely to discount feedback from other people if that feedback is going to result in some negative outcome, like having to spend extra time and money redesigning a user flow when you’d rather be shipping that cool new feature you came up with last week.

I see this play out in usability testing sessions all the time. The first subject comes in and struggles to grasp a core concept, and the team rolls their eyes at the incompetence of the user. The next person comes in and has the same experience, causing the team to ask where you found all these stupid users. However, as the third, fourth, and fifth person comes through and experiences the same challenge, “lightbulbs” slowly start forming over the team members’ heads:

“Maybe this isn’t the users’ fault after all? Maybe we’ve assumed a level of knowledge or motivation that isn’t there; maybe it’s the language we’ve used to describe the feature, or maybe there’s something in the way the interface has been designed that is causing this confusion?”

These kinds of insights can cause teams to fundamentally pivot their thinking. But this can also create a huge amount of discomfort and cognitive dissonance — realizing that your view of the world might not be entirely accurate. As such, there’s a strong motivation for people to avoid these sorts of realizations, which is why we often put so little effort (unfortunately) into understanding how our users perceive and use the things we create.

Developing a beginner’s mind takes time and practice. It’s something that most people can cultivate, and it’s actually something I find designers are especially good at — stepping into other people’s shoes, unclouded by their own beliefs and biases. This is what designers mean when they talk about using empathy.

Towards A Two-Tier Process (Conclusion)

We obviously still need to have “feature teams.” Folks who can understand and deliver the new capabilities our users request (and our business partners demand). While I’d like to see more thought and validation when it comes to feature selection and creation, it’s often quicker to add new features to see if they get used than to try and use research to give a definitive answer.

As an example, I’m working with one founder at the moment who has been going around houses with their product team for months about whether a feature would work. He eventually convinced them to give it a try — it took four days to push out the change, and they got the feedback they needed almost instantly.

However, as well as having teams focused on delivering new user value, we also need teams who are focused on helping unlock and maximize existing user value. These teams need to concentrate on outcomes over outputs; so, less deliver X capability in Y sprints than deliver X improvement by Y date. To do this, these teams need to have a high level of agency. This means taking them out of the typical feature factory mindset.

The teams focusing on helping unlock and maximize existing user value need to be a little more cross-disciplinary than your traditional feature team. They’re essentially developing interventions rather than new capabilities — coming up with a hypothesis and running experiments rather than adding bells and whistles. “How can we improve the onboarding experience to increase activation and reduce churn?” Or, “How can we improve messaging throughout the product so people have a better understanding of how it works and increase our North Star metric as a result?”

There’s nothing radical about focusing on outcomes over outputs. In fact, this way of thinking is at the heart of both the Lean Startup movement and the Product Led Growth. The problem is that while this is seen as received wisdom, very few companies actually put it into practice (although if you ask them, most founders believe that this is exactly what they do).

Put simply, you can’t expect teams to work independently to deliver “outcomes” if you fill their their calendar with output work.

So this two-tier system is really a hack, allowing you to keep sales, marketing, and your CEO (and your CEO’s partner) happy by delivering a constant stream of new features while spinning up a separate team who can remove themselves from the drum-beat of feature delivery and focus on the outcomes instead.

Further Reading

• “Why Too Many Features Can Ruin a Digital Product Before It Begins” (Komodo Digital)
  Digital products are living, ever-evolving things. So, why do so many companies force feature after feature into projects without any real justification? Let’s talk about feature addiction and how to avoid it.
• “Are Too Many Features Hurting Your Product?” (FAQPrime)
  As a product manager, it’s natural to want to offer as many features as possible to your customers. After all, you want to provide value, right? But what happens when you offer too many features? Your product becomes bloated, convoluted, and difficult to use. Let’s take a closer look at what feature bloat is, why it’s a problem, and how you can avoid it.
• “Twelve Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory,” John Cutler
  The author started using the term Feature Factory when a software developer friend complained that he was “just sitting in the factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line.” This article was written in 2016 and still holds its ground today. In 2019 there appeared a newer version of it (“Twelve signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory — Three Years Later”).
• “What Is The Agile Methodology?,” (Atlassian)
  The Agile methodology is a project management approach that involves breaking the project into phases and emphasizes continuous collaboration and improvement. Teams follow a cycle of planning, executing, and evaluating.
• “Problem Statement vs Hypothesis — Which ­­Is More Important?,” Sadie Neve
  When it comes to experimentation and conversion rate optimization (CRO), we often see people relying too much on their instincts. But in reality, nothing in experimentation is certain until tested. This means experimentation should be approached like a scientific experiment that follows three core steps: identify a problem, form a hypothesis, and test that hypothesis.
• “The Build Trap,” Melissa Perri (Produx Labs)
  The “move fast and break things” mantra seems to have taken the startup world by storm since Facebook made it their motto a few years ago. But there is a serious flaw with this phrase, and it’s that most companies see this as an excuse to stop analyzing what they intend to build and why they should build it — those companies get stuck in what I call “The Build Trap.”
• “What Is Product-led Growth?” (PLG Collective)
  We are in the middle of a massive shift in the way people use and buy software. It’s been well over a decade since Salesforce brought software to the cloud. Apple put digital experiences in people’s pockets back in 2009 with the first iPhone. And in the years since the market has been flooded with consumer and B2B products that promise to meet just about every need under the sun.
• The Lean Startup
  The Lean Startup isn’t just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business. It’s about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do.
• “Usability Testing — The Complete Guide,” Daria Krasovskaya and Marek Strba
  Usability testing is the ultimate method of uncovering any type of issue related to a system’s ease of use, and it truly is a must for any modern website or app owner.
• “The Value of Great UX,” Jared Spool
  How can we show that a great user experience produces immense value for the organization? We can think of experience as a spectrum, from extreme frustration to delight. In his article, Jared will walk you through how our work as designers is able to transform our users’ experiences from being frustrated to being delighted.
• “Improving The Double Diamond Design Process,” Andy Budd (Smashing Magazine)
  The so-called “Double Diamond” is a great way of visualizing an ideal design process, but it’s just not the way most companies deliver new projects or services. The article proposes a new “Double Diamond” idea that better aligns with the way work actually gets done and highlights the place where design has the most leverage.
• “Are We Moving Towards a Post-Agile Age?,” Andy Budd
  Agile has been the dominant development methodology in our industry for a while now. While some teams are just getting to grips with Agile, others have extended it to the point that it’s no longer recognizable as Agile; in fact, many of the most progressive design and development teams are Agile only in name. What they are actually practicing is something new, different, and innately more interesting — something I’ve been calling Post-Agile thinking.

It’s January, and what better time to revisit our typography and freshen up our designs for 2024.

Suppose you ask some AI-based chat app a reasonably simple, straightforward question. Let’s say that app is ChatGPT, and the question you ask is right in its wheelhouse, like, “What is Langchain?” That’s really a softball question, isn’t it? ChatGPT is powered by the same sort of underlying technology, so it ought to ace this answer.

So, you type and eagerly watch the app spit out conversational strings of characters in real-time. But the answer is less than satisfying.

In fact, ask ChatGPT — or any other app powered by language models — any question about anything recent, and you’re bound to get some sort of response along the lines of, “As of my last knowledge update…” It’s like ChatGPT fell asleep Rumplestiltskin-style back in January 2022 and still hasn’t woken up. You know how people say, “You’d have to be living under a rock not to know that”? Well, ChatGPT took up residence beneath a giant chunk of granite two years ago.

While many language models are trained on massive datasets, data is still data, and data becomes stale. You might think of it like Googling “CSS animation,” and the top result is a Smashing Magazine article from 2011. It might still be relevant, but it also might not. The only difference is that we can skim right past those instances in search results while ChatGPT gives us some meandering, unconfident answers we’re stuck with.

There’s also the fact that language models are only as “smart” as the data used to train them. There are many techniques to improve language model’s performance, but what if language models could access real-world facts and data outside their training sets without extensive retraining? In other words, what if we could supplement the model’s existing training with accurate, timely data?

This is exactly what Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) does, and the concept is straightforward: let language models fetch relevant knowledge. This could include recent news, research, new statistics, or any new data, really. With RAG, a large language model (LLM) is able to retrieve “fresh” information for more high-quality responses and fewer hallucinations.

But what exactly does RAG make available, and where does it fit in a language chain? We’re going to learn about that and more in this article.

Understanding Semantic Search

Unlike keyword search, which relies on exact word-for-word matching, semantic search interprets a query’s “true meaning” and intent — it goes beyond merely matching keywords to produce more results that bear a relationship to the original query.

For example, a semantic search querying “best budget laptops” would understand that the user is looking for “affordable” laptops without querying for that exact term. The search recognizes the contextual relationships between words.

This works because of text embeddings or mathematical representations of meaning that capture nuances. It’s an interesting process of feeding a query through an embedded model that, in turn, converts the query into a set of numeric vectors that can be used for matching and making associations.

The vectors represent meanings, and there are benefits that come with it, allowing semantic search to perform a number of useful functions, like scrubbing irrelevant words from a query, indexing information for efficiency, and ranking results based on a variety of factors such as relevance.

Special databases optimized for speed and scale are a strict necessity when working with language models because you could be searching through billions of documents. With a semantic search implementation that includes test embedding, storing and querying high-dimensional embedding data is much more efficient, producing quick and efficient evaluations on queries against document vectors across large datasets.

That’s the context we need to start discussing and digging into RAG.

Retrieval Augmented Generation

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is based on research produced by the Meta team to advance the natural language processing capabilities of large language models. Meta’s research proposed combining retriever and generator components to make language models more intelligent and accurate for generating text in a human voice and tone, which is also commonly referred to as natural language processing (NLP).

At its core, RAG seamlessly integrates retrieval-based models that fetch external information and generative model skills in producing natural language. RAG models outperform standard language models on knowledge-intensive tasks like answering questions by augmenting them with retrieved information; this also enables more well-informed responses.

You may notice in the figure above that there are two core RAG components: a retriever and a generator. Let’s zoom in and look at how each one contributes to a RAG architecture.

Retriever

We already covered it briefly, but a retriever module is responsible for finding the most relevant information from a dataset in response to queries and makes that possible with the vectors produced by text embedding. In short, it receives the query and retrieves what it evaluates to be the most accurate information based on a store of semantic search vectors.

Retrievers are models in and of themselves. But unlike language models, retrievers are not in the business of “training” or machine learning. They are more of an enhancement or an add-on that provides additional context for understanding and features for fetching that information efficiently.

That means there are available options out there for different retrievers. You may not be surprised that OpenAI offers one, given their ubiquity. There’s another one provided by Cohere as well as a slew of smaller options you can find in the Hugging Face community.

Generator

After the retriever finds relevant information, it needs to be passed back to the application and displayed to the user. Or what’s needed is a generator capable of converting the retrieved data into human-readable content.

What’s happening behind the scenes is the generator accepts the embeddings it receives from the retriever, mashes them together with the original query, and passes through the trained language model for an NLP pass on the way to becoming generated text.

The entire tail end of that process involving the language model and NLP is a process in its own right and is something I have explained in greater detail in another Smashing Magazine article if you are curious about what happens between the generator and final text output.

RAG Full View

Pulling everything together, a complete RAG flow goes like this:

1. A query is made.
2. The query is passed to the RAG model.
3. The RAG model encodes the query into text embeddings that are compared to a dataset of information.
4. The RAG’s retriever decides the most relevant information with its semantic search abilities and converts it into vector embeddings.
5. The RAG’s retriever sends the parsed embeddings to the generator.
6. The generator accepts the embeddings and combines them with the original query.
7. The generator passes its work off to the language model to produce natural-sounding content presented to the user.

LLM Hallucinations And Knowledge Limitations

We opened this article up by describing “hallucinations” in LLMs’ incorrect responses or something along the lines of “I don’t know, but here’s what I do know.” The LLM will “make stuff up” because it simply doesn’t have updated information to respond with.

Let’s revisit the first query we used to kick off this article — “What is LangChain?” — and compare responses from the Vicuna and GPT-4 language models:

Here’s the transcription for the second query using OpenAI’s GPT-4 for posterity:

“LangChain is a blockchain-based decentralized translation platform. It’s designed to connect translators and those seeking translation services directly without the need for intermediaries. This system uses artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies to provide high-quality, efficient translation services. LangChain also has a token-based economy, where users can earn and spend tokens within the LangChain ecosystem.”

Both Vicuna and GPT-4 refer to LangChain as a blockchain platform. Blockchain is a technology that stores data in a decentralized manner using chained blocks, so the models’ responses sound plausible given the “chain” in the name. However, LangChain is not actually a blockchain-based technology.

This is a prime example demonstrating how LLMs will fabricate responses that may seem believable at first glance but are incorrect. LLMs are designed to predict the next “plausible” tokens in a sequence, whether those are words, subwords, or characters. They don’t inherently understand the full meaning of the text. Even the most advanced models struggle to avoid made-up responses, especially for niche topics they lack knowledge about.

Let’s look at another example by querying: “What is the most preferred framework used by developers for building applications leveraging large language models?”

While Vicuna offers a couple of reasonable starting points for answering the question, the frameworks it refers to have limitations for efficiency and scalability in production-level applications that use LLMs. That could quite possibly send a developer down a bad path. And as bad as that is, look at the GPT-4 response that changes topics completely by focusing on LLVM, which has nothing to do with LLMs.

What if we refine the question, but this time querying different language models? This time, we’re asking: “What is the go-to framework developed for developers to seamlessly integrate large language models into their applications, focusing on ease of use and enhanced capabilities?”

Honestly, I was expecting the responses to refer to some current framework, like LangChain. However, the GPT-4 Turbo model suggests the “Hugging Face” transformer library, which I believe is a great place to experiment with AI development but is not a framework. If anything, it’s a place where you could conceivably find tiny frameworks to play with.

Meanwhile, the GPT-3.5 Turbo model produces a much more confusing response, talking about OpenAI Codex as a framework, then as a language model. Which one is it?

We could continue producing examples of LLM hallucinations and inaccurate responses and have fun with the results all day. We could also spend a lot of time identifying and diagnosing what causes hallucinations. But we’re here to talk about RAG and how to use it to prevent hallucinations from happening in the first place. The Master of Code Global blog has an excellent primer on the causes and types of LLM hallucinations with lots of useful context if you are interested in diving deeper into the diagnoses.

Integrating RAG With Language Models

OK, so we know that LLMs sometimes “hallucinate” answers. We know that hallucinations are often the result of outdated information. We also know that there is this thing called Retrieval Augmented Generation that supplements LLMs with updated information.

But how do we connect RAG and LLMs together?

Now that you have a good understanding of RAG and its benefits, we can dive into how to implement it yourself. This section will provide hands-on examples to show you how to code RAG systems and feed new data into your LLM.

But before jumping right into the code, you’ll need to get a few key things set up:

• Hugging Face
  We’ll use this library in two ways. First, to choose an embedding model from the model hub that we can use to encode our texts, and second, to get an access token so we can download the Llama-2 model. Sign up for a free Hugging Face in preparation for the work we’ll cover in this article.
• Llama-2
  Meta’s powerful LLM will be our generator model. Request access via Meta’s website so we can integrate Llama-2 into our RAG implementation.
• LlamaIndex
  We’ll use this framework to load our data and feed it into Llama-2.
• Chroma
  We’ll use this embedding database for fast vector similarity search and retrieval. This is actually where we can store our index.

With the key tools in place, we can walk through examples for each phase: ingesting data, encoding text, indexing vectors, and so on.

Install The Libraries

We need to install the RAG libraries we identified, which we can do by running the following commands in a new project folder:

# Install essential libraries for our project
!pip install llama-index transformers accelerate bitsandbytes --quiet
!pip install chromadb sentence-transformers pydantic==1.10.11 --quiet

Next, we need to import specific modules from those libraries. There are quite a few that we want, like ChromaVectorStore and HuggingFaceEmbedding for vector indexing and embeddings capabilities, storageContext and chromadb to provide database and storage functionalities, and even more for computations, displaying outputs, loading language models, and so on. This can go in a file named app.py at the root level of your project.

## app.py

## Import necessary libraries
from llama_index import VectorStoreIndex, download_loader, ServiceContext
from llama_index.vector_stores import ChromaVectorStore
from llama_index.storage.storage_context import StorageContext
from llama_index.embeddings import HuggingFaceEmbedding
from llama_index.response.notebook_utils import display_response
import torch
from transformers import BitsAndBytesConfig
from llama_index.prompts import PromptTemplate
from llama_index.llms import HuggingFaceLLM
from IPython.display import Markdown, display
import chromadb
from pathlib import Path
import logging
import sys

Provide Additional Context To The Model

The data we will leverage for our language model is a research paper titled “Enhancing LLM Intelligence with ARM-RAG: Auxiliary Rationale Memory for Retrieval Augmented Generation” (PDF) that covers an advanced retrieval augmentation generation approach to improve problem-solving performance.

We will use the download_loader() module we imported earlier from llama_index to download the PDF file:

PDFReader = download_loader("PDFReader")
loader = PDFReader()
documents = loader.load_data(file=Path('/content/ARM-RAG.pdf'))

Even though this demonstration uses a PDF file as a data source for the model, that is just one way to supply the model with data. For example, there is Arxiv Papers Loader as well as other loaders available in the LlamaIndex Hub. But for this tutorial, we’ll stick with loading from a PDF. That said, I encourage you to try other ingestion methods for practice!

Now, we need to download Llama-2, our open-source text generation model from Meta. If you haven’t already, please set up an account with Meta and have your access token available with read permissions, as this will allow us to download Llama-2 from Hugging Face.

# huggingface api token for downloading llama2
hf_token = "YOUR Access Token"

To fit Llama-2 into constrained memory, like in Google Colab, we’ll configure 4-bit quantization to load the model at a lower precision.

quantization_config = BitsAndBytesConfig(
  load_in_4bit=True,
  bnb_4bit_compute_dtype=torch.float16,
  bnb_4bit_quant_type="nf4",
  bnb_4bit_use_double_quant=True,
)

Google Colab is where I typically do most of my language model experiments. We’re shrinking the language model down with that last snippet so it’s not too large for Colab to support.

Next, we need to initialize HuggingFaceLLM to set up our model for generating text on the fly:

llm = HuggingFaceLLM(
    model_name="meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-chat-hf", 
    tokenizer_name="meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-chat-hf",
    query_wrapper_prompt=PromptTemplate("<s> [INST] {query_str} [/INST] "),
    context_window=3900,
    model_kwargs={"token": hf_token, "quantization_config": quantization_config},
    tokenizer_kwargs={"token": hf_token},
    device_map="auto",
)

Note that what’s happening here is that we’ve defined our model (Llama-2), but a specific subset of it is designed for a chat UI (Llama-2-Chat). Even though this is what we are using for this article, you can also pick from other text generation models in the Hugging Face hub, such as Neural-chat from Intel.

Compare Outputs

OK, so we have the model loaded and configured. Let’s try it out by asking it questions that it could reasonably answer using the content we provided via the ARM-RAG PDF file to see how the model responds without any context. The following code is for displaying the text output without the PDF providing data to the model for comparison sake:

from IPython.display import HTML, display

# Assuming resp contains the response
resp = llm.complete("What is ARM-RAG?")

# Using HTML with inline CSS for styling (gray color, smaller font size)
html_text = f'<p style="color: #1f77b4; font-size: 14px;"><b>{resp}</b></p>'

Let’s see the response:

display(HTML(html_text))

ARM-RAG (ARM Register-Allocating Generator) is a register allocation algorithm used in compiler design. nobody knows who invented it, but it was first described in a 1995 paper by Mark H. T. Kim and Andrew Y. Chen. The ARM-RAG algorithm is a register-allocating generator, meaning it is a heuristic algorithm that takes a program as input and generates a register allocation plan for it. The goal of the algorithm is to assign registers to variables in a way that minimizes the number of spills (i.e., loads or stores to/from memory) while satisfying all the memory access constraints of the program. The ARM-RAG algorithm works by first partitioning the program into a set of basic blocks, and then iteratively allocating registers to variables within each basic block. The algorithm uses a cost function to evaluate the quality of each allocation, and it selects the allocation with the lowest cost. The cost function takes into account factors such as the distance between the variable and the current register, the distance between the variable and the next allocation, and the number of spills that would be required to allocate the variable. ARM-RAG

Obviously, without any context from the PDF file, the model generates a hallucinated response that describes some unrelated algorithm. To fix this, we need to provide relevant passages from the paper to ground Llama-2’s responses. We’ll encode the document into embeddings and index them for retrieval; then, when we query, we can feed LLama-2 relevant retrieved passages to steer it toward accurate, on-topic responses based on the contents of the PDF file.

First, we need to create a client to interact with our ChromaDB database and a new collection that will hold our vector index.

# create client and a new collection
chroma_client = chromadb.EphemeralClient()
chroma_collection = chroma_client.create_collection("firstcollection")

Then we need to set up the HuggingFaceEmbedding class with the specified model name for embedding the text into vectors:

# Load the embedding model
embed_model = HuggingFaceEmbedding(model_name="BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5")

This initializes HuggingFaceEmbedding, passing the name of the pre-trained model we want to use, BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5. There are other options, of course.

Now, we can set up the vector store and use it to index the embedded document vectors:

# set up ChromaVectorStore and load in data
vector_store = ChromaVectorStore(chroma_collection=chroma_collection)
storage_context = StorageContext.from_defaults(vector_store=vector_store)
service_context = ServiceContext.from_defaults(llm=llm, embed_model=embed_model)
index = VectorStoreIndex.from_documents(
  documents, storage_context=storage_context, service_context=service_context
)

This creates a ChromaVectorStore connected to our collection, defines the storage and service contexts, and generates a VectorStoreIndex from the loaded documents using the embedding model. The index is what allows us to quickly find relevant passages for a given query to augment the quality of the model’s response.

We should also establish a way for the model to summarize the data rather than spitting everything out at once. A SummaryIndex offers efficient summarization and retrieval of information:

summary_index = SummaryIndex.from_documents(documents, service_context=service_context)

Earlier, the model hallucinated when we queried it without the added context from the PDF file. Now, let’s ask the same question, this time querying our indexed data:

#Define your query
query="what is ARM-RAG?"

from llama_index.embeddings.base import similarity
query_engine =index.as_query_engine(response_mode="compact")
response = query_engine.query(query)
from IPython.display import HTML, display

# Using HTML with inline CSS for styling (blue color)
html_text = f'<p style="color: #1f77b4; font-size: 14px;"><b>{response}</b></p>'
display(HTML(html_text))

Here’s the output:

Final Response: Based on the context information provided, ARM-RAG is a system that utilizes Neural Information Retrieval to archive reasoning chains derived from solving grade-school math problems. It is an Auxiliary Rationale Memory for Retrieval Augmented Generation, which aims to enhance the problem-solving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The system surpasses the performance of a baseline system that relies solely on LLMs, demonstrating the potential of ARM-RAG to improve problem-solving capabilities.

Correct! This response is way better than the one we saw earlier — no hallucinations here.

Since we’re using the chat subset of the Llama-2 model, we could have a back-and-forth conversation with the model about the content of the PDF file with follow-up questions. That’s because the indexed data supports NLP.

chat_engine = index.as_chat_engine(chat_mode="condense_question", verbose=True)
response = chat_engine.chat("give me real world examples of apps/system i can build leveraging ARM-RAG?")
print(response)

This is the resulting output:

Querying with: What are some real-world examples of apps or systems that can be built leveraging the ARM-RAG framework, which was discussed in our previous conversation?
Based on the context information provided, the ARM-RAG framework can be applied to various real-world examples, including but not limited to:

1. Education: ARM-RAG can be used to develop educational apps that can help students learn and understand complex concepts by generating explanations and examples that can aid in their understanding.

2. Tutoring: ARM-RAG can be applied to tutoring systems that can provide personalized explanations and examples to students, helping them grasp difficult concepts more quickly and effectively.

3. Customer Service: ARM-RAG can be utilized in chatbots or virtual assistants to provide customers with detailed explanations and examples of products or services, enabling them to make informed decisions.

4. Research: ARM-RAG can be used in research environments to generate explanations and examples of complex scientific concepts, enabling researchers to communicate their findings more effectively to a broader audience.

5. Content Creation: ARM-RAG can be applied to content creation systems that can generate explanations and examples of complex topics, such as news articles, blog posts, or social media content, making them more engaging and easier

Try asking more questions! Now that the model has additional context to augment its existing dataset, we can have a more productive — and natural — interaction.

Additional RAG Tooling Options

The whole point of this article is to explain the concept of RAG and demonstrate how it can be used to enhance a language model with accurate and updated data.

Chroma and LlamaIndex were the main components of the demonstrated RAG approach, but there are other tools for integrating RAG with language models. I’ve prepared a table that outlines some popular options you might consider trying with your own experiments and projects.

Conclusion

In this article, we examined examples of language models producing “hallucinated” responses to queries as well as possible causes of those hallucinations. At the end of the day, a language model’s responses are only as good as the data it provided, and as we’ve seen, even the most widely used models consist of outdated information. And rather than admit defeat, the language model spits out confident guesses that could be misconstrued as accurate information.

Retrieval Augmented Generation is one possible cure for hallucinations.

By embedding text vectors pulled from additional sources of data, a language model’s existing dataset is augmented with not only new information but the ability to query it more effectively with a semantic search that helps the model more broadly interpret the meaning of a query.

We did this by registering a PDF file with the model that contains content the model could use when it receives a query on a particular subject, in this case, “Enhancing LLM Intelligence with ARM-RAG: Auxiliary Rationale Memory for Retrieval Augmented Generation.”

This, of course, was a rather simple and contrived example. I wanted to focus on the concept of RAG more than its capabilities and stuck with a single source of new context around a single, specific subject so that we could easily compare the model’s responses before and after implementing RAG.

That said, there are some good next steps you could take to level up your understanding:

• Consider using high-quality data and embedding models for better RAG performance.
• Evaluate the model you use by checking Vectara’s hallucination leaderboard and consider using their model instead. The quality of the model is essential, and referencing the leaderboard can help you avoid models known to hallucinate more often than others.
• Try refining your retriever and generator to improve results.

My previous articles on LLM concepts and summarizing chat conversations are also available to help provide even more context about the components we worked with in this article and how they are used to produce high-quality responses.

References

• LlamaIndex documentation
• ChromaDB documentation
• Metas Llama-2 access
• ARM-RAG research paper

Welcome to 2024, where web design is as fast-paced as ever. You know how crucial a killer website is nowadays — your online handshake, 24/7 billboard, and usually the first hello to your customers. But with all these rapid changes, it’s tough to keep up, right?

Imagine box-shadow but for a blur effect, where the backdrop of an element is blurred around that element, gradually decreasing the blur’s strength. I came up with the idea while trying to improve the contrast of a popup over a dark area where a box-shadow for the popup won’t make much sense, design-wise. I then thought, well, what other ways might create a good contrast effect? And so suddenly, the idea of a gradual blur effect around the object came to me.

See the Pen Faded Outer Box Backdrop Blur [forked] by Yair Even Or.

It would be awesome if we had a box-blur property or perhaps some sort of blur keyword we could set on box-shadow the way we do for inset shadows. Unfortunately, CSS has no such property. But because CSS is awesome and flexible, we can still get the effect by combining a few CSS features and hack it through.

What I’m going to show you from here on out is the thought process I took to create the effect. Sometimes, I find it easier to know what’s coming up rather than meandering through a narrative of twists and turns. So, for those of you who are like me and want to jump straight into the process, this was my approach.

Start With The Markup

The effect is approached in a way that it is applied to the ::before pseudo-element of some element, say some popup/dialog/popover/tooltip. Those are the common “targets” for this sort of effect. I think using a pseudo-element is a good approach here because it means we could technically scope the styles to the pseudo-element and re-purpose the effect on other elements without any HTML changes.

<!-- This is literally it for this demo -->
<div></div>

You can give the element a class, whatever dimensions you like, insert content and other child elements within it, or use a completely different element. The HTML isn’t the main ingredient for the secret sauce we’re making.

Position The Pseudo-Element

We want the ::before pseudo-element to occupy the entire area of the

::before {
  content: '';

  /* Make sure the parent element is at least relatively positioned to contain the pseudo-element. */
  position: absolute;

  /* The blur size should be anything below 0 so it will extend to the outside. */
  inset: -100px;

  /* This layer is positioned between the parent element and page background. */
  /* Make sure this value is one below the z-index of the parent element. */
  z-index: -1;
}

mask:
  linear-gradient(to top, transparent 0%, black 25% 75%, transparent 100%),
  linear-gradient(to left, transparent 0%, black 25% 75%, transparent 100%);

-webkit-mask:
  linear-gradient(to top, transparent 0%, black 25% 75%, transparent 100%),
  linear-gradient(to left, transparent 0%, black 25% 75%, transparent 100%);
mask:
  linear-gradient(to top, transparent 0%, black 25% 75%, transparent 100%),
  linear-gradient(to left, transparent 0%, black 25% 75%, transparent 100%);

::before {
  /* etc. */

  backdrop-filter: blur(10px);
}

::before {
  /* etc. */

  -webkit-backdrop-filter: blur(10px); /* Required for Safari */
  backdrop-filter: blur(10px);
}

div {
  box-shadow: 0 0 40px #00000099;
}

/* This can be set on the ::before pseudo of the element it is applied to. */
::before {
  content: '';

  /* This layer is positioned between some element and its background. */
  position: absolute;

  /* This should not affect the contents of the container. */
  z-index: -1;

  /* The blur size should be anything below 0 so it will extend to the outside. */
  inset: -100px;

  /* The blur effect */
  -webkit-backdrop-filter: blur(10px); /* Required for safari */
  backdrop-filter: blur(10px);

  /* A mask fades the blur effect, so it gets weaker. */
  /* towards the edges, further from the container box. */
  /* (The fill color is irrelevant, so "red" is used as it's the shortest color name.) */
  mask: 
    linear-gradient(
      to top, 
      transparent 0%,
      red 100px calc(100% - 100px),
      transparent 100%), 
    linear-gradient(
      to left,
      transparent 0%,
      red 100px calc(100% - 100px),
      transparent 100%);

  /* This merges the masks above so only the overlapping pixels are rendered. */
  /* This creates the illusion of a fade-out mask. */
  mask-composite: intersect;
  -webkit-mask-composite: source-in; /* Required for Safari */
}