We hosted our first Hackathon and we are so excited to share our experience with you!

We developed two big challenges with our friends from Qrvey, a fronted one and a backend one, it was a joint effort that took us two weeks and a half and the hard work of six developers, three for each challenge.

In order to put you in context, we are going to explain each challenge:

Frontend Challenge: Sound House
To develop an application that consists in a music player which gets the available resources from YouTube, by scoping lyrics or audio-only videos.

Backend Challenge: Scrum Bot
To developers a Telegram Bot which will allow to execute commands to create Scrum as Trello Board, based on the Issues from a GitHub’s public repository.

The Hackathon started Saturday morning and it ended Sunday night, it took place in one of our offices in Barranquilla and we had over 20 participants. Throughout the weekend we had a lot of food, candy, beer, music, video games, and last but not the least, we had amazing prizes for the winners. There were 3 winner for each challenge, the first place got a Nintendo Switch, the second place got a drone with WiFi and the third place got a gift card.

The invitation was for high profiled developers that were located in Barranquilla or cities nearby and who considered themselves Ruby js, Node js, Angular js or React js awesome devs, each competitor had the chance to pick only one of these technologies and show what they were made of. For the frontend challenge the winner was the Angular js technology and for the backend challenge the winner was the Node js technology.

Our idea was to consolidate and empower the tech culture in Barranquilla and it was a success; We were all winners, we made friends and worked together in a positive learning environment, we can’t wait for the next Hackathon.

Thanks to all our participants and our team for making this event possible.

As you know we love coding, new technologies, engaging with communities and leaders. Our idea is to consolidate and empower the tech culture in Barranquilla. We know there are amazing developers with enormous talent in the city and we want to summon them to participate in this quest. Are you ready for the adventure?

Throughout the years we have organize a lot of cool stuff, but this is definitely one of the most exciting things we have organized so far! Hackathon 20.18 was constructed so high profiled developers have the opportunity to engage in a challenge that could prove his/her abilities in software development. In this event we will test backend & frontend devs and we’ll have a special challenges for each one.

Do you love Javascript? Are you a Node, Ruby, React, or Angular developer?

This time you’ll have the chance to pick only ONE technology so you can show what you are really made off. There are a total of six prizes for the Hackathon, three for each challenge. If you ever wanted to spend your weekend just coding, eating pizza and going home with an Nintendo Switch this is for you.

Prizes for the Backend challenge:

1st place: Nintendo Switch.
2nd place: Quadcopter Drone with WiFi .
3rd place: $150.000 Falabella Gift Card.

Prizes for the Frontend challenge:

1st place: Nintendo Switch.
2nd place: Quadcopter Drone with WiFi .
3rd place: $150.000 Falabella Gift Card.

What you need to know:

Hackathon 20.18. One frontend challenge & one backend challenge. This is not a team quest. This is a one player game. Winner takes it all. Starts on Saturday morning and ends Sunday afternoon (sleep over not required).

Who can participate:

Any Ruby, Node, React or Angular developer who is willing to show off their amazing abilities. Limited seats.

When:

September 29th & 30th are the dates you must mark in your calendar!

Where:

Calle 77B#57-103. Green Towers. Of. 1604. Ideaware’s meeting rooms

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Does your business have a website? Is it working? Are you sure? They’re five benefits you should definitely be getting from having your own website, otherwise, maybe you’re doing it wrong, MacGyver.

In 2014, more than 52% of small business in the US didn’t have a website because their owners thought they didn’t need to have one. Many spirits have been exorcised since then all around the world and today we know that having a website is very important, the thing is maybe we are forgetting to keep in mind the key reasons for having one, and that makes difficult to estimate the success of our website in a measurable way.

Even if you have the most creative domain, the coolest responsive design and the most descriptive “Products & Services” section, that’s not enough if your website is working like a virtual branch office instead of a magnet for attracting new clients, a window to build solid relationships with your current clients and an effective way of promote your business by a relative low cost.

So how can you know if your website is being truly profitable? Keep reading and find out the advantages you should be enjoying body and soul.

—

I bet there’s something your grandma cooks extraordinarily well. Maybe, every time you eat at your grandma’s house you find yourself thinking that if people out there could know how wonderful does your grandma cooks, then she might build her own food empire. Perhaps, the only thing your grandma needs to effectively promote herself is a website… but only if it’s a good website.

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, said a great man, so let’s start by the past.”

A few years ago, businesses’ websites were not doing what they should have been doing. According to a 2012 research, by example, 50% of online sales were lost because visitors couldn’t find relevant content and websites (specially from small businesses) were incompatible with mobile devices. Those are some reasons why businesses owners were not experiencing the best results four years ago, but curiously (and sadly) many companies keep wasting a lot of money and time every year because they still ignore (as they did in the past) what a website is supposed to be for.

They’re five functions your site should be fulfilling right now for the good of your business:

1. Let you be found easier than a pair of keys
2. Attract new clients
3. Effective and less expensive advertising
4. Improve your brand image
5. Improve your products or services and develop new ones

Let’s see what’s this all about.

1. Be found easier than a pair of keys

Nobody’s going to taste your grandma’s food unless someone decides to promote it. They’re a lot of good businesses which capital sin is that you can’t easily find them on Google (and something you can’t find on Google is suspect).

If you have a website, well, it’s supposed to help you reach thousands, millions of people worldwide (that’s the www for). One of the key benefits of having a site is that it makes easy for businesses to connect with potential clients and enforce their presence on the market, actually, a 2012 research says that businesses that have a website are expected to grow 40% faster than those who don’t, so guess what? Your business should be growing because of your website!

Of course, you need a good SEO strategy in order to accomplish that, and that’s why keeping a website online without investing in a good SEO strategy is like buying a nice pair of socks for a pair of tennis you don’t have.

2. Attract new clients

If people can easily find your website on search engines, then we can start to talk about attracting new clients, creating long-term relationships and improve the engagement with your current clients. Certainly, that’s something you can’t reach by just having a well positioned website, you need to provide valuable content (articles, tips, videos, graphics and, for God’s sake: contact information) or people will forget they once visited your site.

If you have a website, it should definitely be working like a customer magnet. Indeed, a 2015 research says that 91% of people that do have a positive experience on a business’ website end up visiting their branch office because of the impact that online experiences has these days.

Obviously, if you have done your homework on SEO then you should be attracting only the clients you want to attract (we don’t need vegetarians checking out your grandma’s homemade quarter pounder online menu).

3. Effective and less expensive advertising

Investing lots of money on traditional advertising should be kind of unnecessary if your website is doing its job. Even some experts predict that printed advertising is going to be a completely waste of money very soonbecause businesses that have a website and know how to promote themselves through online marketing can create more successful campaigns with a low-medium budget by just emphasizing on things such as:

• A responsive design (for all devices)
• A call to action layout
• Social media integration
• An online store
• Feedback options

4. Improving your brand image

Your website should be helping you improve your brand image by offering credible information about the benefits of buying your products or services (as well as qualified online customer support). Why? Because more than 80% of consumers do online research before buying, more than 85% read reviews to determine the quality of a business and more than 70% say that positive reviews make them trust a business more.

So, if your business is doing it just fine and you have a website, then your online reputation should be boosting your offline reputation.

5. Improve your products or services and develop new ones

Your website should be functioning as a window to consumers’ opinion. People want to feel that you care about their expectations and goals, and you need to get close to their level of satisfaction in order to take right decisions and improve customer retention and loyalty (that’s why adding feedback options to your interface is so important).

Actually, feedback can also work as a marketing strategy if we consider that 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they would trust a personal recommendation, so if you have some happy clients disposed to publically share their happiness, you should put a ring on it through a Testimonials section.

Conclusions

Having a website that doesn’t contribute in a significant way to the growth of your business is as useless as having an empty money box. Online marketing has become essential nowadays and even when business owners may have realized about the importance of having a website, that doesn’t make a great difference from not having one if benefits are not tangible and consistent.

Website engagement has more to do with the reason you still love or hate your ex than what you think. Emotions, data and feedback play a significant role on what do users prefer to see (and therefore, share) online. If you already know what you need to care about to improve loyalty towards your website, good for you, but if you don’t, maybe you should prepare because a breakup is coming (and they’re always painful).

Introduction

The term “rapport” may sound like a roaring dinosaur, but it’s actually an extremely important factor when we talk about emotional marketing and, thus, when we pretend to measure and improve our website engagement. Coca-Cola and Nike are very good examples of how big companies use marketing to create emotional bonds with their clients, but web engagement requires a different strategy (a little bit of Coca-Cola-Nike “feeling” is needed, though, just to be sure that we are doing things right).

Of course, we need to start by making a statement of what does “rapport” implies in the context of website engagement.
According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, rapport is defined as “a friendly relationship”. That’s all. We all have a good friend who saved us from death on a difficult afterparty. The difference between that friend of us and users visiting our website is that being able to establish rapport with users will define (for good) the future of our business, basically because:

When you build an emotional bond with consumers or prospects, you’re making them feel like if you were talking directly to them, and that increases engagement.

When users or visitors are truly engaged with your website, they will come back over and over again, and they will be more likely to share your content and make Word of Mouth marketing for free (which is, by the way, the most effective type of marketing).

So, how can you improve your visitors’ engagement and eventually forge one website to rule them all?

Let’s find out.

First things first

Let’s start by an obvious and often missed fact: you must know your visitor.

Remember this as you’d remember your girlfriend’s/boyfriend’s birthday: the philosopher’s stone of engagement resides on emotions, because emotions lead to psychological arousal and arousal makes the difference between: “Get seduced by my call to action” — “Yey”, and “Get seduced by my call to action” — “No, thank you”.

Engagement only grows decently when your clients feel that you care about their expectations and lifestyles besides taking away their money. But let’s suppose you don’t know what your visitors prefer just to talk about why you should. So, our ten ways to increase your website engagement are:

1. Use metrics and analytics

Information is power, and web metrics give you a good amount of it. Using metrics and analytics allow you to measure the effectiveness of your website principally because:

• You can identify subscriptions or form submissions rate.
• You can compare audience participation between different kind of content.
• You can know the number of visitors you receive and how many of them actually stay on your website and consume your content.

If you have one thousand visits on a dog’s photo and just five on a caiman’s, people definitely prefer dogs, and they’re a lot of things you can do by just knowing that. On the other hand, analytics help you track and collect data about users profiles and that makes more easy to create a successful engagement strategy.

2. Allow users to collaborate

We all like our needs, life stories and hardships to be listened by someone, but why?
According to a Harvard University study, “humans devote 30–40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences”, which means that we love to talk about ourselves. That’s probably the reason why your last relationship didn’t work out, you didn’t let that poor guy/girl to express him/her feelings entirely, so be sure to do the right thing with your website.
Let users to collaborate by sending messages, photos, videos, advices, guest blogging… They will be delighted by your goodness and ready to return.

3. Share relevant content

Quality is always better than quantity. Of course, quality is something you can only offer when you know who are you talking to. Relevant or related content is defined by your audience beliefs and affinities, analytics and metrics can help you with that.

A key point you must consider about relevant content is, again, emotions, emotions emotions. According to researchers at the University of California (San Diego, School of Medicine), emotions shared online are somehow contagious, which means that: “What people feel and say in one place may spread to many parts of the globe on the very same day”.

In other words, if you want people to be engaged with your website, make them feel good. In order to make them feel good, make them smile. To make them smile, share positive content.

4. Avoid “whatever” content

This would be quantity instead of quality.

Some people commit a mistake: they think that a website will be “well positioned” as long as they put someone in front of a screen exclusively in charge of massive publishing, lots and lots of content every day, with the intensity of a military weapon. They believe that a high volume of “updated” content will make them have more visitors, which is true, but how many of those visitors stay to keep reading some low quality paragraphs when they can just go back to Wikipedia, where articles even have a table of content?

One more time: engagement depends on how skillful you are to share content people feel connected with. They don’t care if your website produces fifty articles per day, they just need a single one to love you (or to hate you).

5. Use social media

But not to collect followers, that’s useless. Eight hundred followers doesn’t mean anything if seven hundred doesn’t care about you. The purpose of social media is to get in touch with people, to know what they like and take advantage by creating effective content. Virality will do the rest and you will know things are going right if:

• You see Likes.
• You see Shares.
• You see Comments.
• You see Subscriptions.
• You see Direct Visits and Google feels overcame.

Remember: one hundred engaged followers are better than one thousand strangers that clicked on the Like button just to see if they’d win a flight to Bahamas. Those one hundred loyal followers will help you connect with their friends and family (prospects), and that’s when magic happens, because — conveniently — 92% of people believe recommendations from friends and family over any kind of advertising.

6. Include video

An Invodo research says that 51.9% of marketing professionals around the world mention video as the type of content with the best return on investment, which makes complete sense if we also consider that using video increases web traffic from search at 41% and social video (videos posted on social networks) generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.

7. Build a “place to stay”

Your website design matters. The same way you would like to stay a little more in a place that feels comfortable and looks nice and clean, visitors engagement will be influenced by how they perceive your interface.

Make sure people can find whatever they are looking for without any effort. Clear navigation should be your credo, if users experience is positive, people will stay on your website and do long scrolling, which gives you more opportunities to create rapport. If your content is smart, engagement will increase.

8. Improve your SEO

Bad salsa ruins good pasta, bad SEO ruins good content. You may have some great posts on your website, but people will still look for on Yahoo Answers if they don’t find it attractive.

Engagement flourishes when you recognize the supernatural effects of headlines, subtitles, bold, italic, metadescription… In the first case, for example, and according to Merlin R. Mann, associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, headlines are even “more important than any paragraph in a normal story (because) more (people) see the headlines (…) than read the first graph of even the lead story”.

9. Share original content with your website name all over it

Visitors will increase their engagement because of an old marketing trick: repetition. Just remember that if you produce your own content (graphics, videos, articles), your website name must be all over it, explicitly or implicitly. Maybe your logo, maybe your brand colours… Nobody needs a full picture to know that a glass bottle’s silhouette on a red and white background is Coca-Cola because repetition and association do the work. The strategy consists on saying the same thing over and over again.

Think about it.

Think about it.

Think about it.

10. Always ask for feedback

When some famous airline was on red numbers a few years ago, they stopped giving snacks at their flights to cut costs. It was useless and impolite, never do that.

If users are happy, ask them why. If they are unhappy, ask them why too. Feedback options are not a “feature” but an obligation, even an advantage if you know how to use data later. Make your visitors feel important by asking them to leave a short message or a review of your website interface, every single piece of information you collect will help you improve your website structure and eventually increase engagement.

Wrapping it up

High user engagement is the result of knowing how to manage some technical resources such as web metrics and social media, but you also need to remember that emotions are always behind everything. We only come back to places we like, finding out why visitors like (or not) your website rather than invest your money and time on irrelevant content and useless features is your best option.