Servage Magazine


Archive for June, 2016

Use a customer persona to understand your users better

Tuesday, June 28th, 2016 by Servage
customer-personaCustomer persona, also called buyer persona or marketing persona, refers to creating a fictional character that bring together all the characteristics of your ideal customer. Creating a customer persona is an important step in determining your target audience, not only because it provides a lot of insights on your audiences' demographics and interests, but also because it can hold the key to how you can promote your brand and product online in the most effective way, using the right channel and approach for your website, social media ads etc. Set your customer persona apart from the competition Creating an effective customer persona doesn’t refer to simply writing down in a persona template information ...

Pros and cons of implementing autoplay videos in your design

Thursday, June 23rd, 2016 by Servage
videoplayerIf you are one of the people who like to stay up to date with current web design trends and popular features, you have probably noticed that more and more businesses tend to choose autoplay videos for their homepage or other pages. Even though they seemed kind of cool at first, you are still not sure if an autoplay video would be the right way to go for your business and you have a lot of questions about them. So what are the advantages of auto play videos and do they bring any real value to a business? What are the disadvantages of adding one to your website? Motion pictures are worth ...

How to define your target audience

Sunday, June 12th, 2016 by Servage

Secure authentication and password-hashing in PHP

Tuesday, June 7th, 2016 by Servage
securityMany PHP frameworks come with built-in helper functions for dealing with passwords in a secure fashion. However, sometimes you may have to manually hash and verify passwords. In either case, it is a good idea to know how everything works behind the scenes and what are the latest and greatest ways of storing passwords securely in PHP 5.6 and 7. Hashing a password PHP 5.5 introduced a new password hashing API that uses a secure bcrypt key function. The bcrypt method is deemed safe and often considered among the best ways to hash passwords in 2016. PHP 5.5 and newer versions include a built-in function called password_hash() that you can use to hash passwords. To ...

Why every small business should have a website

Thursday, June 2nd, 2016 by Servage
small-businessThose days searching in the enormous Yellow Pages book for a business or a service you needed are long gone. Thanks to the rapid technology advancements, our mentality as consumers has also changed. Being surrounded by smartphones, tablets and state-of-the art laptops, we’ve gotten used to focusing all of our attention towards the internet to solve any problem or need we might have. We’ve given up buying newspapers when we can have direct access to every kind of information in real-time and we’re slowly turning into full-time online shoppers because it is so much more convenient. So what does all of this have to do with the reasons why every small business ...