Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
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Forming an LLC is an exciting accomplishment for any entrepreneur or business owner. But the work doesn’t end after the …
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Do you want to get more online reviews for your product or services? Podium has got you covered. By helping businesses send automated invites to customers at every critical touchpoint, Podium can give you a competitive advantage. It harnesses the power of online reviews for companies built on word of mouth. And with its powerful interface, you can also request feedback, convert web chat to text messages, and manage customer messages across different platforms all from the same place.
From starting as a simple tool to procure quality reviews, Podium has grown into an all-in-one app that consolidates all customer interactions. With the help of Podium’s support team, you can cherry-pick only the features your business needs, at a price that is well within your budget.
The most disgruntled customers are often the most driven to post their negative experiences. So even if you hold your business to a high standard, the negative reviews of a select few can warp people’s perception of your business. To stop these bad reviews from outnumbering the good, you need a reputation management tool like Podium’s.
Podium is integrated with over 20 online review sites like Facebook, Google My Business, TripAdvisor, and a host of other industry-specific platforms. With Podium Reviews, you can view and manage all customer reviews from these platforms under one roof. No more jumping back and forth between these review sites as you can keep track of all new customer reviews straight from an easy-to-use interface.
Are you ready to beef up your online reviews? It all starts with a request, and you can convince your customers to provide their reviews using your own message or one of Podium’s preset templates.
Sending these review invites is a whole new ball game, but this where Podium outshines its competitors. Through its platform, you can set up automations so your customers can receive review invites soon after completing a purchase. With its switchboard feature, you can also determine how many customers will be sent to which review sites, ensuring no platform is overlooked.
From the same dashboard, you can also set up alerts so you get notified each time a customer leaves a review. By doing so, you can promptly respond to each review and address customer complaints within the Podium app.
Podium Reviews comes with in-depth reporting to help you gauge how well your business performs based on the reviews. By looking at star rating, recency, and review count, you can determine how well you stack up against competitors and whether your strategies need fine-tuning.
Podium Campaigns is a potent alternative to old-fashioned email campaigns. Instead of sending emails that are often relegated to either the SPAM or a separate “Promotions” folder, you send marketing promotions to where customers can see them right away: SMS inbox.
We’re not talking about sending out spam texts en masse. Customers won’t receive marketing campaigns via SMS unless they opt in to your list. And with opt-in opportunities available in every customer touchpoint, you can passively grow the list of people who are more likely to respond to your promos.
With a targeted list at your disposal, it’s easier to craft personalized campaigns that resonate well with your customers. You can send these campaigns to your entire list or to specific segments of your list.
By using a conversational tone in your messages, you can take the first step towards building a long-term relationship with your audience. The text thread is also two-way so your customers can reply to your messages, giving you more opportunities to earn their trust.
Whether you’re sending out coupon codes or announcing a special sale, Podium Campaigns allow you to take advantage of the 98% open rate of a text message. Moreover, it comes with built-in analytics so you can measure your total revenue, unsubscribe rate, click-through rate, and response rate straight from your dashboard. Using these valuable data, you can fine-tune your campaigns and get better results in the long run.
By integrating Podium with Facebook, Google, Instagram, Zendesk, and other platforms, all customer conversations can be funneled into one location. This enables you to quickly reply to messages without having to juggle multiple platforms at the same time.
Podium’s inbox also streamlines how you deal with all these messages. Using artificial intelligence, it can automatically group incoming messages so you know which one should be prioritized. Each customer profile also has an interaction history which includes all payments and transactions completed. At one glance, you can get insights about the customer you’re dealing with, allowing you to personalize your messages accordingly.
For the busy marketers who don’t have time to respond to all messages, Podium’s inbox also provides smart solutions.
You can assign the messages to other employees or another business location. Access restrictions are also available to ensure only the authorized people can answer specific messages.
Meanwhile, you can set up autoresponders so you won’t lose potential leads even outside business hours or whenever you can’t reply in person. By also automating feedback requests, review invites, and reminders, Podium ensures you won’t waste your precious time on cumbersome tasks.
Getting feedback from your customers doesn’t have to involve long, boring surveys that barely get attention. Podium’s feedback feature turns the traditional survey on its head by sending two automated text messages proven to elicit quicker responses.
Humans are notorious for having short attention spans. By sending short and simplified questions via SMS, you don’t have to wait for weeks or months for answers. Your customers can send their honest feedback almost instantly, which means you can also address customer complaints at lightning speed.
With regular use of Podium’s feedback feature, you’ll be able to understand your market, explore opportunities to improve your service, and gain more loyal customers. The best part is you can also automate it so you can gather insights about your customers at any touchpoint, not just after they make a purchase.
You can schedule when your customers will receive the feedback request and also set up automated responses based on the customers’ answers. By doing so, Podium can gather a wealth of valuable information even while you’re not around.
Podium’s feedback feature also comes with analytics so you can dissect the impact that customer feedback has on your business. Through this tool, you can track your Net Promoter Score which gives you an idea of how satisfied your customers are with your products or services. It also enables you to measure how many customers who received feedback invites actually responded. By understanding how effective your campaign is, you can revise your questions accordingly to elicit more responses.
Through Podium’s webchat widget, you can turn random website visitors into customers.
Unlike live chat where transactions begin and end in the same chatbox, the webchat follows your visitors even after leaving your website. All the visitor has to do is enter his name, mobile number, and message to the webchat and the conversation will be transferred to his phone. By giving you access to the SMS inbox where people are the most engaged, you can answer queries and nurture leads without being glued to your computer screen.
The only downside is not everyone will agree to volunteer their contact details, especially those who are only making casual inquiries. But for those who agree to invite you to their personal inbox, the possibility is endless.
To ensure the webchat can capture leads every single time, you can also set up autoresponders. This guarantees your visitors can get an automated reply even when no one from your team is available, usually during holidays or after business hours.
Through Google Analytics integration, Podium webchat can give you insights on how your visitors interact with your website, and which web pages perform the best. There’s also an option to receive daily digest emails so you can keep track of every inbound lead.
Finally, a leaderboard allows you to compare each employee’s response times and other metrics. It ensures nobody in your team is slacking off when it comes to capturing valuable leads.
Every business is unique so Podium offers custom pricing tailored to your needs. To get a personalized quote, go to Podium’s pricing page, fill out the form with your contact information, and submit it. A Podium representative will then contact you to get a better picture of your business, its industry, and its locations.
A customized plan that includes only the features that will best optimize your business will be recommended. Price varies depending on how many features you need and the number of your business locations. A single-location business, for instance, can cost anywhere between $350 and $450. It may be too expensive for businesses that only need Podium’s review feature but remember that Podium is much more than a simple text messaging solution.
What most users may find off-putting is the 12-month contract that they have to commit to initially. Payments can be made upfront (annually) or in monthly installments.
For those who can’t afford to get into a 12-month contract yet, Podium also has the free Starter plan. Users from the US and Canada can sign up to take advantage of a free textable number and up to 30 communications per month.
The free starter plan also includes a webchat widget, a centralized inbox where you can manage all customer communications, and the ability to send a limited number of automated review invites via SMS.
Podium has been known as a reputation management tool so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most users rave about its review feature. In fact, it’s the leading reason why most users gravitate toward Podium. By letting them send review invites via text not only after purchase but at every possible customer touchpoint, Podium can help businesses triple the number of online reviews they get.
The clean user interface makes it easier to navigate the dashboard and find what they’re looking for at a glance. Podium’s capability to consolidate all messaging apps in one place is also worth highlighting. By eliminating the need to move from one platform to another, Podium effectively streamlines how businesses communicate with their customers.
On the flipside, Podium may turn off businesses that value transparency. Pricing plans are not available publicly so any business interested to get a personalized quote must contact Podium directly. According to those who have already used Podium’s service, the steep cost of the customized plan may pose a problem to businesses that only need basic features.
The platform has also grown cumbersome for small businesses that only signed up to beef up the number of their customer reviews. The problem is you can’t purchase a plan with only one feature. So even if your team only needs the review feature, they still have to contend with other moving parts they rarely use but make navigating the user interface a tad complicated.
Podium stands head and shoulders above the competition for helping businesses use every possible customer touchpoint as an opportunity to get reviews. And because online reviews are now the word of mouth of the digital world, multiplying the reviews you get tenfold can drive great returns for your business in the long run.
However, Podium comes at a steep price, not to mention you have to commit to a 12-month contract before you can get your team on board. If your company has multiple locations and deals with a steady stream of inbound leads, it most likely has the revenue to justify the cost of using Podium’s services.
On the other hand, small businesses that don’t have the means to enter into a long-term commitment with Podium can use its free starter plan instead. Alternatively, you can use Textedly and other similar services that let you message your customers via text but come with a more flexible monthly payment schedule.
Microservices have crafted highly flexible and adaptable IT infrastructures. Microservices is a unique software development approach that concentrates on creating single-function modules that work jointly to execute the same tasks. It enables you to alter only one service, without modifying the rest of the infrastructure. In simple words, one can easily deploy and change every service without affecting the functional facets of other applications or services. Instead of following an old monolithic architecture (sole app with manifold functions), testers and developers use this microservice approach to build independent modules for every function.
However, the microservice architecture can also make an app extra complicated, particularly when we add several functionalities. Likewise, testing the combined functionality of numerous services is a lot more complicated due to the distributed nature of the app. As microservices follow a dissimilar architecture, we also require an exceptional strategy for testing microservices. In this article, we will explore different tools for testing microservice applications. Testing microservices can assist us in eradicating several issues by avoiding a domino effect.
Technical debt is the single largest obstacle to innovate according to research done in Norway. Today we know how to avoid technical debt, at least in greenfield projects. This doesn't imply we don't accumulate it on new projects though, due to humanity's nature being to gravitate towards repeating the same mistakes over and over again. But at least in theory, we know how to avoid it, and the recipe is quite easy actually.
If you follow the four above simple guidelines, technical debt cannot occur, not even in theory. This is because what you're doing is to basically "outsource" your technical debt - Either to "the machine" (automation), open source libraries (components), or 3rd party vendors (components and outsourcing). I happen to run one such company, who's sole purpose is arguably to "take unto ourselves your company's technical debt" for a fee. The idea is that this holds value for others, freeing up internal resources, such that they can innovate more freely, without being hindered by their internalised technical debt.
I am a real-time programmer, currently working for Proprio - a small medical device start-up.
I work with C++, C# and Python on Windows.
WordPress 5.8 introduced an opt-in system for themes to configure block settings, styles, templates, and more. It is done through a new theme.json file that authors can put at the root of their theme folders. Anne McCarthy, the lead of the FSE Outreach Program, announced a survey earlier today to get feedback from developers on this feature.
“Since this new mechanism is an early step towards a comprehensive style system for the future of WordPress, it’s important to hear from everyone who is currently using theme.json to learn more about how folks are using this tool and what might make sense to include in Core going forward,” she wrote in the announcement.
The survey is open to all theme authors who have used theme.json, giving them a chance to put in some early feedback and help steer the ship going forward.
Because I have worked extensively with this system over the past few months, I had a few things to say. Plus, I just like participating in WordPress-related surveys. I also decided it would be an opportunity to share some of my unfiltered thoughts from a development perspective on the current state of theme.json.
What follows are my responses to the survey’s questions — well, the tidied-up version.
Note: This is a developer-centric post that might not universally appeal to all of our readers. I have attempted to explain some things in user-friendly terminology, but some prerequisite knowledge of theme development may be necessary.
The first question of the survey is pretty cut-and-dry. It asks what your experience is with building block themes or using theme.json. It provides four choices (and an “other” option):
theme.json with a classic theme.I chose the first option because I have already built two block themes for family and friends. These were simple personal sites that I already maintain for free — honestly, I need to start charging. I am also working on a theme that I hope to release publicly.
The second question asks how one got started with block themes and theme.json. The choices are between forking an existing theme, using the Empty Theme, or starting from scratch.
Again, this is one of those things where I have experimented with each direction, but I cannot remember the exact starting point. The bulk of my work has come from forking a theme that I last worked on in 2019.
I plan to release this as a new theme for free at some point. I am mostly waiting on the following:
I think I could realistically release a use-at-your-own-risk beta version of my theme today if those items were addressed.
The survey asked which templates and template parts themers always include in their block-based themes. There was a freeform comment field — steps upon soapbox…
I have a love/hate relationship with block templates at the moment. The static nature of HTML templates reminds me of simpler times when theme development was less complicated. However, this also presents a problem in a dynamic system.
I cannot remember the last time I have built a traditional, PHP-based theme with more than one top-level template: index.php. The dynamic pieces have always been the guts of the thing, which are template parts. With PHP, it is easy to set some variable or use a function call to contextually load the templates parts necessary for whichever page a visitor is currently viewing on a site.
The block template system does not work like that. It essentially forces developers into breaking the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle.
For example, if a designer wanted to display a different header template part for pages and posts, they would only need to create a header-page.php or header-post.php template in traditional themes. However, because the block template system is different, they must now create two top-level templates, single.html (post) and page.html, to accomplish the same thing.
This is a “bad thing” because theme authors must duplicate all the other code in each of the top-level templates. There is no way to contextually load different template parts.
To answer the question: I am using almost all of the possible top-level templates out of necessity.
I also answered the second part of the question and listed my most commonly used template parts (broken down by hierarchy):
The content-*.html and loop-*.html template parts are those with the most variations.
The next section of the survey asks how theme authors define their color palette slugs in theme.json. Believe it or not, naming colors may be the most controversial topic in the theming world in years. The only two things generally agreed upon are “background” and “foreground” colors.
Morten Rand-Hendriksen opened a ticket in 2018 for standardizing a theme color naming scheme. It was not the first discussion and has not been the last. The problem it was meant to address was the slugs for colors in the system, which is how themes define their palettes. Once a user makes use of a preset color, the slug is hardcoded into their content. Switch to another theme with different slugs, and the old colors disappear and do not automatically change to the new theme’s colors.
I use semantic names that follow something that closely resembles the Tailwind CSS framework’s shading system. Instead of red-medium (descriptive), I would use primary-500 (semantic), for example. A semantic approach would allow theme authors to define a set of colors that are updated each time a user switches themes.
Of course, there are other schools of thought, and even everyone who prefers semantic naming does not agree on the same system. I have described my approach in more detail in a more recent GitHub ticket and have a theme.json Gist for others who might want to try it.
Outside of colors and typography, the survey asks what other settings theme authors have used. This is another scenario where I typically use everything — if there is an option for it, I am defining it.
One use case that WordPress does not currently have a preset for is global spacing. Most theme authors use a single value for most vertical margins (whitespace between blocks and elements). It is also often used for default vertical and horizontal padding.
I am unsure if I want a preset because I do not know how WordPress will use it. It is something that others have asked for, and it is nearly ubiquitous in use. Defining an entire system around it could cause headaches down the road, but I would still like to see some discussion around implementing at least a standard global spacing preset.
This survey section was a yes/no question, simply asking if theme authors included per-block settings or styles in their theme.json files. Of course, I left some additional comments later in the optional comment section.
I am happy with the system when it comes to settings, which allows themers to define which features are enabled globally or on a per-block basis. However, I am not sold on adding styles via theme.json.
Writing CSS in JSON, essentially what we are talking about, feels wrong on so many levels. Currently, it is limited to merely a few configurable styles, so anything beyond that requires diving into an actual CSS file anyway. That is problematic because half of the theme’s CSS code is divided between theme.json and a separate CSS file. From a development standpoint, it makes the codebase harder to maintain.
Initially, I started down the path of configuring per-block and element styles from theme.json. However, I have since moved my styling back to CSS files. It feels more natural, and I have the added benefit of all the tooling I am accustomed to. Right now, I cannot imagine a scenario where I would move back.
Besides saving a few bytes of code, I have not seen many benefits to adding styles for most things via JSON. Maybe that will change in the future, and I will be a convert. For now, I am sticking primarily with CSS.
I have said it before, but it bears repeating. We need a PHP layer for this theme.json configuration system. There is currently an open ticket for addressing this.
There are two main benefits to such a system. Having a PHP API for piecing together configuration will feel far more natural to traditional theme developers. I look at it as a bit of an olive branch, a show of good faith that the core/Gutenberg developers recognize that many theme authors will have an easier time easing into FSE features via a familiar programming language.
The second advantage is that there is an untold number of plugin ideas to extend global styles, site editing, and more if there is an easy way to hook into the theme JSON system and overwrite things. A simple filter hook would make this painless.
What is going on? Why it is not working like that? This is not expected behavior :(
Sounds familiar?
Over the last year, our team has interviewed more than 200 companies about their data integration use cases. What we discovered is that data integration in 2021 is still a mess.
At least 80 of the 200 interviews were with users of existing ETL technology, such as Fivetran, StitchData, and Matillion. We found that every one of them was also building and maintaining their own connectors even though they were using an ETL solution (or an ELT one — for simplicity, I will just use the term ETL). Why?
Developers dealing with web applications see a lot of things threatening to harm the things they build. Some of these things include attacks targeted at people (for example, social engineering), some of these attacks (DoS or DDoS attacks, Cross-Site Scripting, Cross-Site Request Forgery, Broken Authentication, Sensitive Data Exposure, Broken Access Control, Insecure Deserialization, etc.) target parts of web applications. However, some attacks primarily target your database and data stored there — one of such attacks is SQL injection (SQLi for short). In this blog post, we will look at the impacts such an attack might have.
SQL injection is an attack frequently targeted at web applications. The purpose of such an attack frequently is to exfiltrate sensitive data from the database and use it for the personal gain of the attacker. Such an attack is so prevalent and dangerous precisely because many developers overlook the importance of security when creating public, web-facing solutions. When security gaps are overlooked, malicious parties often find and exploit them. These nefarious actors exploit such vulnerabilities because they can profit from selling data stolen during the breach.
In the following, I will share my thoughts about how to set up a PostgreSQL Database in Kubernetes with some level of high availability. For that, I will introduce 3 different architectural styles. I do not make a recommendation here because, as always every solution has its pros and cons.
In the first scenario, you run PostgreSQL outside form Kubernetes. This means Kubernetes does not know anything about the database. This situation is often a result of a historical architecture where PostgreSQL was long before Kubernetes in an evolving architecture.
Oculus, a virtual reality hardware and software company that is owned by Facebook, has announced a new experimental “Passthrough API.” This new API, which will be available as part of the upcoming v31 SDK, adds new mixed reality functionality to the company’s VR platform.
PublishPress, makers of the PublishPress and PublishPress Blocks plugins, have adopted the Organize Series plugin from Darren Ethier. Organize Series is a 15-year-old plugin for organizing and displaying posts in a series, useful for novel writers, educators, magazine sites, and anyone breaking their longer content up into a series.
PublishPress is also adopting seven extensions for the plugin that add features like custom post type support, shortcodes, the ability to add a post to multiple series, bulk publishing, and more.
Ethier, who works as an engineer at Automattic, said he began losing interest in maintaining the plugin and knew it was time to search for a new owner.
“Most of you have noticed that I haven’t been actively contributing to Organize Series or it’s extensions for some time now and it’s been bugging me,” he said. “I’ve been gradually losing interest in maintaining the plugin as I’ve expanded my developer horizons and as a result, I’ve struggled with making the time to work on it.”
Ethier connected with PublishPress by describing his situation in a post on the Post Status community and agreed to transfer his plugin and extensions in exchange for a donation to a charity.
“Darren asked us to make a charitable donation as part of the handover,” PublishPress founder Steve Burge said. “We chose the American Journalism Project. Over 2,100 communities in the U.S. have lost their local newspaper since 2004. The AJP is trying to reverse that trend. It is a non-profit that is investing in local news. Their goal is to help grow newsrooms that hold the powerful accountable, combat disinformation, and deepen civic participation.”
Burge assured current users that the free version of Organize Series will remain free on WordPress.org with all of its current features and some improvements. The company will also keep the extensions freely available on GitHub but Burge said they plan to release a commercial version with updated versions of the extensions.
With the adoption of Organize Series, PublishPress now has nine plugins available in its niche collection of publishing extensions as part of its mission to “help WordPress publishers succeed.” In the near future, Organize Series’ website content will be transferred over and the company will be changing the plugin’s name to “PublishPress Series.”
In theory, identity governance refers to the policy-based centralized orchestration of user identity management and access control. In layman’s terms, this refers to managing different aspects of user accounts and how they access the resources offered. It’s believed that the concept of identity governance grew out of the Identity Governance Framework, a now-defunct project by the Liberty Group that aimed to standardize enterprise identity information usage.
That been said, there are some user stories that are identified and catered for in the WSO2 Identity Server, categorized under identity governance. I’m trying to talk about these stories one by one, hoping to have in-depth articles on each of them later.
Looks like it was almost 9 years ago when Airbnb first published their JavaScript Style Guide. 112k stars on GitHub later, it seems like the de facto preset for Babel / ES Lint. But it’s not the only company out there with public ES Lint setups. Katy recently shared Mapbox’s setup.
ESLint plugins will help keep your code consistent and improve the quality, but they are also excellent teaching tools. When I come across a plugin, I take joy in reading each rule to learn the benefits of enabling or disabling it.
Katy DeCorah, “A shared ESLint configuration”
Sophisticated linting as-you-author is one of those things that has really upped the game of development over the years.
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