Malawi's Joyce Banda, the other "Iron Lady"

"How can a woman who sells doughnuts become president?" This demeaning phrase, coined by the former Malawian First Lady, bears witness of the many tribulations that Joyce Banda had to face on her bumpy road to the summit. And, strong as they were, those words did not prevent her from becoming the country's Head of State on 7 April.

Unlike her Liberian counterpart, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Joyce Banda, who became vice-president in 2009, has most certainly not had to do any campaigning. Taking over the helm of affairs after Bingu wa Mutharika's death on 6 April has been far from easy.



Once divorced and then remarried, and minister several times between 2004 and 2009, Banda was ousted from the ruling party after having opposed a power succession project involving the president's brother. And her stance in the matter boosted the popularity of Joyce, also known as a staunch feminist.
Mutharika's last term in office saw the government facing several severe economic crises, as he started drifting towards dictatorial rule - a dictatorial drift that reached its highest point in July 2011, after a violently suppressed demonstration caused the deaths of 19 people.

Having become the figurehead of the opposition, Joyce Banda has been the main target of a myriad of provocative jokes as well as a fierce resistance from the ruling party's rank and file, even after the demise of their leader. And a plan to kick out the vice president put together by the late president's party failed to work.


Joyce went straight to work, uprooting those who had been behind the failed plot. On her very first day in office, she dismissed the Minister of Information, who had previously tried to obstruct her from reaching office, and the Head of the Police, who was presumed responsible for the violence, which the opposition had fallen victim.

Nonetheless, Joyce Banda now has to tackle the arduous task of putting the country back on its feet in order to get the support of Malawians, before the next presidential elections in 2014.

Cloud vs. Traditional Accounting Software: Which Should You Use?

At least 50 percent of all businesses set part of their budget for cloud computing in 2013. Likewise with half of software developers. As the world’s data goes to remote hosting, it’s hard to imagine that very recently, all business accounting software was purchased on a disk or a download and confined to a single computer or small group of computers in a physical office, with that office responsible for the data’s storage and security.

There are many reasons to go to the cloud, although some businesses choose to host accounting data the old-fashioned way. Follow this guide to see if the cloud is right for you.

With every passing month, more and more data is trusted to the cloud.

Pro: Clouds Are Cheap

When you pay to have your accounting data hosted in the cloud, that hosting subscription is essentially your only expenditure. Locally hosted accounting software can be expensive by itself. When you consider that most require licensing fees to add it to other computers, costs really start to rise.

Pro: Accessibility

Locally hosted accounting software spends its life on one or two computers. Those computers becomes the office’s accounting station. With cloud accounting, your data can be accessed from absolutely anywhere, even your phone or tablet, with nothing more than a password.

Pro: They Do it for You

When you keep your accounting in-house, not only do you have to buy the software, but you have to store the data on a hard drive, in a databank, or on a server. That hardware must be purchased and maintained. With the cloud, there is no hardware or IT investment.

Security: Pros

When you move your accounting to the cloud, you move with it the security risks that come with locally hosted data. Fires, floods, burglaries, hacking, digital theft – or the still-common hard-drive crash – are all real potential disasters that can and do wipe out data and leave businesses devastated. Remotely hosted accounting data is stored far away on secure servers that are overseen by companies that keep them safe, at the right temperature, and (relatively) secure from online attacks.

Security: Cons

“Relatively” is the key word. As cloud storage becomes more and more popular, the data they hold becomes more and more of a target. When you turn your data over to the cloud, you’re entrusting it to a group of people you’ll never meet in a facility you’ll never see. Some companies – usually large firms with lots of sensitive data such as banks and healthcare institutions – would benefit from keeping their data close to home.

For most businesses, the cloud is cost effective and sensible.

There is a reason that cloud-based computing is taking off. It works. The cloud usually improves accessibility; reduces cost; takes the security bonus off of your business; frees up local databank, hard drive or server space; and requires essentially no commitment to IT or infrastructure. There are a handful of businesses that may benefit from on-site accounting. Most of them are large, well-monied firms that have major investments in IT and security. For the rest of us, the cloud makes sense.

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How to Optimize a Landing Page

A landing page serves as a bridge between the marketing message that brings visitors to your website and the site functionality that enables those visitors to take action, such as filling out a lead form or making a purchase. In essence, it’s your organization’s first impression to the online community. In today’s market, first impressions are tough to overcome, especially when the competition is just one click away. The old saying holds true, you only get one chance to make a good first impression – so don’t blow it. Here are quick and easy steps to ensure your landing page meets customer expectations.

Edit Steps

    1  Determine if there are any obstacles to scanning the page. Today’s rule of thumb is that a Pentium I-586 user connecting via dial-up should to be able to quickly see your landing page and complete its call to action. Can they? Double-check the page appearance in different browsers, paying special attention to video and flash, as they not only create distraction, but also build additional barriers for the user to overcome.
   
2  Consider how hard it is to leave the page or get sidetracked. Check your headline. There’s not always a perfect headline, but there are a lot of bad ones. Most users will make the decision to stay or go within seconds of visiting your landing page. Your headline must catch the user’s attention immediately and compel them to keep reading. Unlike traditional website navigation, landing page navigation should make it difficult for a user to easily leave the page. Allowing website navigation on the landing page offers more exit options and may hurt the conversion rate. Another reason to remove the standard website navigation is to gain better control over what the visitor sees and interacts with on the page.
   
3   Determine if the page has a fold. It’s recommended that any folds on your landing page be eliminated. However, if a fold is unavoidable, make sure it does not take away from the call to action – keep all important components above the fold. In addition, it’s okay to have multiple CTAs (calls-to-action) on one page, as long as the primary CTA is in the top position above the fold.

4   Consider if you are gathering unnecessary data. Poorly constructed and unreasonably lengthy forms are still surprisingly common in today’s landing pages. Remember to keep the user in mind and optimize your forms to provide the best experience. Evaluate each form field to determine if the information requested is really necessary. To make the form better, allow:
   

        The input cursor to hop to the next field after the current field is completed;
        the user to tab around fields,
        fields to be auto-populated where possible.
 
  5  Decide the amount of white space needed on the page. Studies show that white space improves the user experience and allows key messages to stand out. Your landing page should do the same. Evaluate every element on the page for its contribution to user conversion rate. If you don’t need it to get your message across, remove it. It may seem like more is always better. But if you take a step back and really give it some thought, is more really better? Don’t overload your users.
   
 6  Consider adding testimonials and a link to Privacy Policy on the page. Testimonials and privacy policies help create the necessary levels of trust required for today’s online businesses. Would you purchase an item from a site that did not have this information? In addition, if you have any awards or other forms of recognition, a landing page is a great place to highlight them and boost your corporate validation.
   
 7  Make it easy for the user. All buttons on the page need to be big, use full color, and be located above the page fold. Test to learn what colors and sizes work best but take baby steps and test one thing at a time, or you risk not understanding what exactly worked the magic.
   
 8  Analyze the time required to load the page. Pages that take too long to load produce “barely there” conversion rates, a poor user experience, and Google quality score issues. Use tools to check your page load times and make sure it takes less than 7.5 seconds to load.
   
 9 Examine the impact of using photography on the page. Images are probably the most controversial element of any page, but even more so for landing pages. Try testing stock imagery versus amateur photography. An image should compliment your messages, making the entire page look more professional.
   
 10 Ensure your landing page is avoided by search engine spiders. If you are creating multiple landing pages with only slight variations in text, it’s wise to ensure that these pages are kept away from search engine spiders. To prevent duplicate content penalties from search engines, make your general purpose landing page available for indexing, but use robots.txt or a robots meta tag to exclude other pages.
   

Edit Tips

    Employing these techniques can greatly improve the success of your company’s landing page and in return, increase sales conversion. Taking simple steps to increase the usability and appeal of your page can give your company the edge over competitors – and in these tough economic times, can make the difference for your business and its future.
    Invest some time in testing and optimizing your company’s landing page. If done properly, it can offer a gateway to your business, giving customers the information they need to make purchasing decisions and delivering the essential sales information you need internally to run a successful business.

Edit Warnings

    If you make an obstacle to users getting to your information, they will leave. A good rule of thumb is that if more than 90% of users will click a single link, you should send all users there without forcing them to click on it. (The other 10% can click on a link from that page to go where they want).

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