Scrum belongs to the family of Agile methodologies. I am not going to talk about how scrum starts and who started it, but I will talk more about what is Scrum and where to go to learn more about it. Scrum is a PM methodology that is being widely used by many major companies such as Google, yahoo, Nokia, and most of the major Japanese gaming companies.

Scrum is a completely different way from waterfall in terms of managing your project. In scrum every thing is a time box.

Here is how it works.

1) Backlog

The Back log is a complete list of all the functionalities needed for the project.

It starts with a meeting with the product owner and the rest of your team to identify the functionalities that needs to be executed (backlog) for the project.

As you’ve already noticed, there is no functional spec or any kind of paper work that does not add value to the project owner. The team members are all there because they are going to be self managed from the start. They will create the backlog with the product owner.

After the backlog is created , the Scrum master (aka the project manager) needs to ask the product owner about the most important functionalities that he/she would like to see implemented first. These functionalities will be taken to the top of the backlog. The team members will then identify the amount of functionalities that can be completed in three months. Yes, the team members are the ones who are going to decide that, because no one can measure the work load and the amount it takes better than the people that are going to do the actual work.

2) Sprints

The first three months the work load will be divided into sprints. Each sprint is like a two week to a one month time box. At the end of each sprint, there needs to be some completed functionalities. Completed means documented, tested , checked in CVS or SVN, and it is on the server and could even be shippable. After completing all the sprints for the first 3 month Phase, there will be a meeting with the product owner to show him/her the progress and present a demo of what the functionalities look like.

3 ) Daily Scrum meeting

After getting your first sprint in place, the team members will sit together to divide the work into very small tasks. Each task will be between 4 to 16 hours. The team will decide on the length of time needed, and the due date for each task.

There will be a daily meeting for all the team members involved in the project. This meeting will take about 10 to 15 min depending on the size of the team. There will be 3 questions in that meeting.

1) what did each team member accomplish the previous day

2) what each team member will accomplish today

3) what are the red flags.

If one of the team members is not completed with his/her tasks, the Scrum master should stop the meeting and ask to meet again in an hour when every one is done with their tasks. Done means documented, tested , checked in.

The product owner or the client can be in that meeting every day if he or she chooses to. They can be there in person or on the phone.

This is a complete transparency between the different individuals on the project.

4 ) Retrospective

At the end of each phase, there is the retrospective meeting. In that meeting, the team members will discuss what went right and what went wrong. How can they improve the next sprint and how can they learn from their mistakes in the first phase.

Whatever could not be completed or whatever needs to change from the first phase can be added to the first sprint in the second phase.

5) Management

There are three managers in Scrum

a) the product Owner

b) the scrum master aka the project manager

c) the team members

6) Burn down chart

the burn down chart is a chart between the workload or the tasks of each phase in the y-axes and the time that needs to complete on the x-axes. this will show the team members the velocity and the speed of the work flow, it will also give a clear presentation of weather or not the project can be completed on time.

7) Iteration

Scrum is an iterative methodology. Unlike water fall, you do not have to wait for the design to start the development. All aspects of the project will be worked on at the same time and the team members will be working on it for the whole life cycle of the project.

Here is a graphical representation of the iteration

A great book to read on Scrum is Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber.

Ken is one of the founders of Scrum.

In my next blog I will talk about other Agile methodologies that go hand in hand with Scrum Such as TDD and XP.

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Many People like to optimize their websites but they don’t know where to start nor do they understand what SEO is and what it entails. SEO is optimizing your website to enable it to rank higher on the major search engines such as Google and yahoo. Ranking your website higher will help in driving more traffic to it and increasing your ROI (return on investment). There are many ways to rank your website on the major search engines. In this post I will go over some of the small yet important changes that you can do to optimize your website and drive more people to it.

1) Header redirect

If your website starts with www, try to redirect all your pages that do not start with www to the www URL. For example, if your website is www.example.com and users type example.com without www then you need to redirect them to the www.example.com. The reason for that is that Google and yahoo regard these pages as duplicates and might consider them as spam and will not index them.

2) Title - Meta description and Meta keywords

Try to have a different title, Meta description and Meta keyword to each page. When it comes to title, do not exceed 75 characters. Anything over 75 characters will be considered as spam by Google.

3) CSS and DHTML

When building your website; have it built in CSS and DHTML. Building your website according to the W3C standards makes your content stand alone instead of having it impeded in the code. This allows Google to reach your content a lot faster and have it rank higher than other websites.

4) Content is king

Your content is the most important piece in search engine optimization. Make your content short and straight to the point. Have your keyword near the top of the page and as close to the beginning of the line as possible. Your keyword density should be around 5% of your content. Each page on your website should focus on a different keyword.

5) Deep Link

Deep link is linking from a page on your website to another inner page on the same site. This will create lots of inner links and will provide a higher ranking for your website.

6) Back links

Create hundreds of back links to your site. This means that there are many websites that will have links to your website. Google considers Back links as a good thing. It considers your website as an important site and it tends to rank it way higher than other sites. Keep in mind that if you tried to find out how many backlinks are out their via Gooole, you will find out that Google does not recognize all of the back links to pointed to your site. Try to use yahoo to find out how many back links are pointing to your website. if you add a back link to your site, It might take up to six month to show up on yahoo. the way you find out how many back links pointing back to your website is by going to yahoo.com and type link:example.com in the search box.

7) Blogs

Get your own blog on your website and contribute back to the community. This will also create a Buzz around your website, generate more links on Google and drive more engaged users to your site. Write on other similar blogs and leave comments with your signature. Your signature will be a back link to your site.

8 ) Social media

Create a Myspace and a Facebook page. Create a Facebook widget that users can put on their pages and can link back to your website.

9) Do not design your entire website in flash

Designing your website in flash will make it invisible to the major search engines. Google and yahoo will consider flash sites as all coding and programming and will not recognize any content. These search engines will not even crawl or index your website.

10) Create sitemap

Create a site map to your website and submit it to both Google and yahoo. This will insure that they will crawl all the pages on your website and index them.

11) Dynamic landing pages

Make your landing page Dynamic using an IF statement but not DB driven . Contents on the landing page will differ every time someone visits your site via the search engine. The content on the landing page will depend on the keyword that the user is looking for on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

There are many other ways to drive traffic to your website but these are just a few of them. This is our way to give back to the community. Do not forget, you can also use webstigma.com for all your online marketing needs. We value quality and embrace affordability. We grow our business by growing your business. Webstigma is a web design, development, strategy and online marketing agency.

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Webstigma is a web Design company that follow certain process when it design a web page. These process allows an interactive design approach between our designers and our clients.

Webstigma starts the web design process As follows.

1) Blue Print - Wire Frame

Blue Print aka wire frame is a stating point towards the completion of the full look and feel design of your web page. The wire frame is a way to layout the navigation and the content using every and each part of the real estate of your web site in the most efficient way possible. Wire frame does not include any images or colors but it only shows where things are going to be on the web page.

when clients sees wire frame, they have the change to verify it in advance. clients do not have to wait to the last minute to see a design that they do not like. Providing wireframe for clients in the beginning allows a collaborative approach between the web designer ideas and the client vision and assure that the new design is approved and verified by the client.

2) web Design

web design comes right after the blueprint or the wireframe of the web site. the design is integrating a full colorful interactive web site the way the web site is going to look when it goes live. web design must allow the branding or the logo of the business to be presented in the site design. the web design must stand for your brand and your branding must mean something that is reflected all over your site design.

3) UI - User interface design

UX or user experience is how users get to ineract with your site. the ease of use, the availability of the informations, the flow and the smoothness of the site, colors and color blind users and most importantly is making your users feel right at home when they visit your site.

4) Load time

Web stigma checks your load time for each page on your site to verify that it does not take more than 10 seconds to view your site on a dial up connection.

5) W3c Standers

Check validity to verify that it passes the W3C standers.

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Website design is one of the most important aspects in building your business online. your website design is the image of your company for users who have never heard of you and they have to trust you through the way you represent yourself on your website. Lots of young start ups do not have the money to pay for their website design. One of the cheap solutions that you can look for is open source solutions such as oswd.org and other open source solution. start up can use some of these website design to launch their website and get started. the problem with these sites is that some of them are not according W3C standers. some other open source solution that you can use are zend card for Ecommerce, Openx for add platforms and other open source software and design solution. At webstigma.com we help you start to build , design and market your website in the most efficient and cheapest way possible. our goal is to grow our business by growing yours. contact webstigma.com.quote.php for all your website design, SEO and online marketing needs

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Most web site design companies tries to give their client with a great looking design. Clients are very happy when they see a good web design because it means that anyone who will visit the site will like it , but what is really important about web site design. I will mentions some rules you should look for when you design your own site because not all web design are created equal.

1) your site should have a smooth and simple look and feel that is welcoming and friendly to new users.

2) your website design must stand for your brand. when you create a brand or a logo for you site you should have your design integrate your logo and your brand all over your site. your brand must mean something and your web site design should represent that.

3) when you choose colors for your web design try to account for color blind and older people so you should allow different font on your site. you should also allow to increase the size of the font automatically because older people tend to stair for a while when they can not read the sentence.

4) your top navigation should be an odd number. navigation design should be 5 or 7 or 9. human can only focus on the first, last and the middle navigation. The content on your page will be too long if you use less than 5 navigations and it will be too short if you use more than 9 navigation.

5) try to use .gif or .jpg files instead of .png or flash files. PNG file takes too long to load and it will minimize your chances with the search engine optimization where flash will make your web page invisible to google and other search engines.

6) make it easy for users to find what they are looking for with minimum number of clicks. users should be able to navigate back and forth without loosing track of where are they on the site.

7) use a search box that is about 251 characters. Users like a search box and the average size of a search sentence is about 250 character.

avoid using metaphors. I you are a care dealer, do not make you web site design look like a wheel for example. Design metaphors tend to get boring for users after a while.

9) make the users feel at home when they visit your web site by making your design similar to what they users are used to.

10) if users are filling out a form on your site, try to make it easy for them to save it instead of retyping their info if they stop and start over a while later by using cookies. avoid having the users type unnecessary info. a good example is hotmail account that forces you to type you whole email when you login where gmail only ask you to enter the first part of you email.

At webstigma.com we implement all these standers and more. webstigma is a San Diego and Orange county web design and online marketing company who strives to provide an excellent web solutions yet very affordable. Look out for my next post for more tip and tricks on web design and website UI.

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many asks how can I make my web site appear or show up on Google or Yahoo’s first page. the process to appear or show up on the first page of Google or yahoo is called SEO - search engine optimization.

SEO - Search engine optimization is the tool that allow your web site to rank higher on major search engines.
the higher you rank is, the better chance you have to show up or appear on Google’s first page which allow you to drive more traffic to your web site and maximize your ROI - return on investment.

if you have not read my post about seo tips then you should start out by reading it. Seo tips provide the basics to get your site off the ground and allow the search engine to recognize it and rank it higher.

In this post i will include few more tips to increase traffic to your web site.

1)Domain and sub domain name

Choose a domain name that is relevant to what you do. for example, if your web site is about cars then you should choose a domain name with the word car in it. if your web site is about design, then you should have sub domain called design or web-design. the point is to have friendly URL’s that has your keywords in it.

2) H1 to H3

Google gives priority to your title then your H1 header. When choosing an H1 you should try to include your most important keyword in it. do the same with H2 and H3.

3) Bold characters and links

have your keywords in bold. you can also make it linkable. Google considers bold and linkable words more important than other keywords.

4) <abbr>

Use <abbr> tag to include some of the most important keywords . abbr will not automatically show the keyword on your site but will imped these keywords in your web site.

5) Page weight

Check your page weight . Find out how long does it take to load your page with high speed internet, DSL and dial up connection. your dial up connection should not take more than 10 sec. If it takes more than 10 seconds to load your site, most users will navigate away from your web site.

6) W3C web standers

Check your web site and find out if it passes the W3C web standers.

7) Check your web design .

My post on web design will give you a good idea on what to look for when you design your web site.

Webstigma provides all these services and more. Webstigma is a web strategy , web design and development and online marketing company that provide services to the San Diego and Orange County. Contact Webstigma at anytime for all your web site and online needs. No project is too small or too big for us. we are an affordable web design company that always gives back to the community.

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