What happens when era changes? Come variety, newness, and more competent systems replacing the old ones. So here we get web-based advertising as a change to provide increasingly voluminous competition a bigger, better, and more sustainable platform to publicize and promote upon. It is a step further to traditional promotion methods, and there’s more brilliance, sophistication, and technology for use. What is so with online promotion and advertising that traditional approach can’t offer? Well, this is what is impressive about it:

Broader spectrum and wider scope: It breaks time and location boundaries. Online global market encompasses every region of the land and your product or service gets famous digitally and virtually all over.

Cost-effectiveness: The newer, the more explorable. Online publishing and broadcasting tools allow advertising agencies to comprehensively explore creativity of writing and designing techniques involving graphics and animation with lower budgets.

Easy, real-time accessibility and ready availability: As internet access is not scheduled like TV or radio commercials, web visitors can visualize it anytime and with a lot of convenience. There is firmness and sustainability to internet ads for as long as the owner pays for it.

Less labor: There is easygoingness with online commercials as their production can be managed with less manpower and financial resources.

Non-aggressiveness: Online advertising is a rather on-invasive promotion technique. Online visitors are not hammered untimely. In fact, a short, condensed message comes first and then possibly the entire content if a user wants to see it. Majority websites take visitors’ permission to deploy ads or to broadcast commercials.

Online advertising might be connected to online shopping. Products or services advertised so as by a website have greater chances to be bought. So finally a question in the end:  What was there to get so tired of traditional advertising? I would just react by saying there’s always a need to go beyond in time, distance, technology, and systems as nothing has a full point next to it. There is this run-on pattern for everything and something new and advanced is always impending.

Software development industry never sleeps and its effervescence flashes up as new methods and strategies come out of the minds of its ingenious professionals. Lately, an approach known as “agile software development” has evolved that has given software development project cycle a new expression. It refers to using a group of software development methodologies with adopting cross functional collaborative teamwork for the solutions to emerge out. The term “agile software development” was coined in the year 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was formulated.

Agile development would involve planning, analyzing, designing, unit testing, coding, and final testing to be done before displaying the software to the esteemed client. The process development cycle in such a case incorporates teamwork as a crucial element throughout its length to minimize overall risk. Principally, this method focuses on delivering working software frequently and welcoming any changes in requirements later on.

The team requires a great deal of cooperation among the professionals themselves and close, frequent communication with its clients. Face-to-face communication is preferable here if the client exists in the same location. Tele-calling and video conferencing periodically are better in case the software application is to be outsourced. Whatever the case may be, there is always a need to monitor the project updates and implement changes, if any, on time.

Much focus is laid on individual interactions about the design, tools, techniques, and processes. A comprehensive documentation covering all the stages of the project is also of value so that at a later point it is easy to trace back and react for a change. Contract negotiation with the client spreads across the length of the development as any late changes are welcomed.

Businesses looking for software solutions may get impressed with this model as it would normally provide a quick software solution with short-term planning. However, recommended is to check the suitability of the agile methods for any requirement and then only proceed.

Any online merchant wants business from his website visitors. What’s essential here is to have a way to process transactions, for which online payment processing methods are to be deployed. There are many options for an ecommerce web site owner to consider; however, only looking at the key determining factors, he will be able to weigh up the choices and decide the best available to him. Whatever online payment processing methods you get to choose from, the primary aspects for selection should lead you to think about affordability, accessibility, currency and conversions, and security.

Out of the popular payment processing methods, here I present a few that are commonly explored and deployed.

Credit cards: Credit cards are a popular payment way these days. If you want credit card processing on your site, a merchant's account is what you need first with the credit card company and/or with your bank and next a secure third-party gateway to accept payments online. It’s quite time-consuming and costly and lays a significant responsibility on the online business for conducting safe online order processing.

PayPal: Among small businesses, it is one of the most favorite ways for online processing of payments. It allows quick merchant account setup eliminating many of your safety concerns and can still be applied directly to your site. The best thing about it is that it allows currencies to easily pass and convert. Free setup of accounts and cheap maintenance are also the strong points of PayPal. You need to give away some percentage of the money that you make through the account as a charge.

Other similar services are available, such as StrataPay and PayMate, but it’s important that you check the fine print before landing up on any decision (things like some would charge a fee to the customers would be somewhat business deterring).

Direct transfer to bank account: Usually fast and cheap, this process uses existing accounts and processes transfers between them. But what’s an important consideration here is whether you want to release your account information for processing. Often problems crop up with involving cross-border transactions and different currencies.

While choosing a service, irrespective of anything, don’t lose the objective of protecting yourself and your clients. Wisdom is in choosing a service that does not make accepting payment an unprofitable event. Your research and wise choice would allow you to make the most of convenience, profitability, and safety.

Yahoo Store, a buzz word among the web community, is fascinating the Ecommerce operators as a brilliant online business opportunity that’s just right for those seeking a cost-efficient, quick online marketing and selling platform. Ecommerce solution with a Yahoo Store is being seen as a brilliant alternative to other web merchant solutions.

Developing a Yahoo Store would require tapping into a vast range of features that Yahoo offers to its Ecommerce store owners. Your internet business can turn into a success story only when these features, namely menus, paging, graphics, content, add-ons, customization, programming wizard etc…etc., are packaged through a bundle of activities for designing, enhancing, and marketing of the store with the sole aim of revenue building.

A profit-generating Yahoo Store would take efforts of a professional development team that exactly knows what to pick up from the available resources and how to handle the development work for building a high-performance online earning asset. The result you can see as an attractive, user-friendly store with a unique layout consisting of great navigational and product features. This is something done to set you apart from your competitors and best done by these professionals only.

The need is that you seek a competent Yahoo Store developer who can make your Yahoo Store go live with all its potential capabilities taken care of. Pick up an experienced one for this task, which you can do by checking their credentials, and keep the ball rolling. Your Ecommerce success dream can come true with a Yahoo Store, provided it’s in the right online environment.

Ajax is a concept that combines Asynchronous JavaScript and XML for developing highly interactive web applications. Microsoft Silverlight creates rich internet applications using XAML with the .NET framework. It can be used with the JavaScript and also work within Ajax-enabled web pages.

Let’s quickly get on to the comparison.

The Ajax side

To get the feel of Ajax, one can check its presence on Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter etc. Its implementation there has raised the bar of user satisfaction due to a rich client-end interactive experience.

With implementation of Ajax, reloading of pages is much faster without the hassle of refreshing pages and waits. Its compatibility with any browser and operating system makes it a better choice over Silverlight. The latter one still has a narrow user base.

Ajax uses JavaScript libraries like jQuery and MootTools that were one of the first technologies to help deploy sleek and interactive rich web apps. It’s good to use if you don’t want to pay for an integrated development environment (IDE) but still want an attractive and professional RIA functionality.

Ajax, no doubt, provides a good enough UI for the vast majority of cases. But, the reality is that now “pure” Ajax, i.e. just HTML and script-based, has given up to the scope of mergers for extra richness. Silverlight can be put to use to spiff it up more. Ajax applications can be made more interesting with capabilities using local storage, accessing user’s files, integrating rich media and vectors graphics, background processing etc. of plug-ins such as Silverlight and Flash. Contrastingly, the ASP.NET server controls extended to incorporate Ajax functionality can also simplify Silverlight to compensate for its shortcomings.

The Silverlight side

The first benefits with Silverlight are to the developers in coding and designing. With Silverlight development, one greatest benefit is true separation of writing business logic and designing user interface (UI). This “separation” improves a developer’s ability to decouple and isolate the visualization of elements from any necessary business logic. The improved designer/developer workflow allows the designer to work on the front-end UI while at the same time a developer can work on the backend (business logic). With Silverlight, you are most likely to benefit through decreased development time and decreased maintenance costs. For more complex scenarios such as that involving interfacing with web services, running complex logic etc., Silverlight can save tremendous development cycles.

On browser and platform reach, Silverlight can cause graceful elimination of certain nuisances with Ajax, things like XML-driven dynamic pages with validations.

If your team has primary expertise in .NET, Silverlight is a good option for custom web application development requiring complex graphics. On this note, Netflix is a credible example for Silverlight.

There is still a very significant percentage of web users who don't have Silverlight installed and who would just get away if they came to a website that relied on it. Where you're dealing with a more specialized audience or need apps for a well-known user group, say an internal app for a company like intranet, Silverlight can be reasonably trusted as a good choice as you don’t have to bother about its installation among the users.

The negative points for Silverlight at the present date are associated with its worrisome compatibility, user acceptance, and SEO. This is somewhat keeping it away from its application for Ecommerce sites or for open, public-facing applications. There, it can well be a plug-in to Ajax to be used where it makes sense or simplifies the development significantly.

Conclusion

1. Both have benefits and drawbacks as mentioned above.
2. Silverlight is easier to write, but Ajax is less frustrating. You can extend the latter with using Silverlight and add richness for the end-user.
3. There are things that can easily be done in Silverlight but not with Ajax and vice versa. One can complement the other to produce many rich apps.
4. Silverlight was released in 2008 and Ajax in 2005. With Silverlight being newer, many developers would not be at the peak of its learning curve.