Why We All Must Have a Website

by

Varesh Sachdev

Whether you are a small to medium size business OR a business or technology professional who is planning his or her future career, you definitely need a website to be effective and stay ahead of your competition, no matter which industry you are in and whether you have just one employee or one hundred. To be successful in your line of expertise, you must have a place on the internet to showcase your experience, services, portfolio, and expertise to your prospective clients or future employers.

Problems facing Small & Medium Businesses and Professionals:

A very large number of small & medium businesses and professionals who want to design, launch, and host their website find it very difficult to decide who to turn to for designing and hosting their website. They start by searching a web designing company on google but when the search displays hundreds of companies; it becomes very difficult for them to decide which one of these hundreds of listed companies would be the right for designing and hosting their website. Some of the companies displayed in the search are too big to care for small businesses and are unlikely to devote personal attention as they would for their big corporate clients. Before making a decision on choosing their website designing and hosting company, small businesses or professionals need a comfort level which can only come after speaking with a live person who can understand their specific requirements and can offer economical services. Also, as most small business owners and professionals are not technology specialists, they need an assurance that someone would be available to help them if they need to modify their website at a later date for small things like making changes on some website pages, creating email addresses for new employees, removing email addresses for employees who leave their jobs, etc.

Why you must have a Website:

You can be extremely effective if you have a professional and sophisticated website, whether you are:

• A small or medium size business in any industry which could be as simple as a cosmetics business; buying and selling items like books or flowers in retail; a home repair or remodeling business, or a small scale manufacturing unit. The reality of today's world is that as soon as you speak with a prospective client for some possible business, the very first question your prospect asks is, "What is your website address?"
• A professional who is looking for a job in this difficult job market where hundreds of unemployed professionals are competing for the same job that you apply for.
• Having a personal website is not just for technology professionals. If you are a professional in any domain which could be Accounting, Banking, Engineering, Graphic Designing, Financial, Project Management, Software Programming, Database Administration, Network & System Engineering, Management Professionals such as CEO,COO, CIO, CTO; or Technology or Functional Consultant in domains like SAP, Hyperion, BizTalk, Siebel, Peoplesoft, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, and many other domains; a personal website with a sophisticated professional look will enhance your marketability and dramatically increase your probability of getting a job as it will help you stand out in a crowd of hundreds of candidates who are just emailing their resumes to prospective employers.
• Are you may be an Artist - a singer, a painter, an actor, or a musician and want to showcase your portfolio of professional talents and hobbies to enhance your marketability.
• With a professional website in place, while other candidates are just sending a resume in a word or pdf format, you can go a step further and add a link to website in your cover letter which will be a very attractive and time-saving option for busy hiring managers who have to open, read, and save hundreds of resumes for every advertised job to short list few candidates to be called for interview. In your case, they will just click the website link and look at your site to learn about you. If your website has a professional and sophisticated look that can be the first positive step towards putting your foot in the door for the position you have applied for.

What We Offer:

Our team of Website Designers is based in many cities across United States. We provide a wide range of Technology Support and our Services in the arena of Website designing and hosting include:

• Design a Brand New Website and a Corporate Logo.
• Enhance your existing website if you already have one to incorporate new features if required such as e-commerce functionality to enable your customers make payments to you online through your website.
• If your current website works fine but has an ordinary look; we can redesign your website to give it a sophisticated look so that your website stands out among the best in your specific industry.
• Host your Website on our State-of-the-Art Data Center with 24x7x365 technical support.

Why DBA Web Technologies:

DBA Web Technologies is an I.T. Services Company with its corporate office in Connecticut and hundreds of clients based in various cities across United States. When our clients or prospects Email us, we reply back immediately to ask how we can help. If our clients or prospects prefer to call us, they do not get pre-recorded instructions on what to do next. We pick up the phone or call back if they leave name and phone number. We firmly believe that clients and prospects must get personal attention, no matter how small the customer is. That is why we are a very successful company.

Please contact us for your current and proposed requirements to design, launch and host your website. For immediate response with any specific details and personal attention, please Talk to us and we will immediately get back to you to tell you how we can help.

A SMALL BUSINESS HELPS SMALL BUSINESSES IN A DOWN ECONOMY

[Print and On-Line Media Reports in various East Coast Publications]

Southbury, Connecticut based IT Services Company "DBA Web Technologies" was launched in March 2007 with an objective to provide a wide range of Information Technology Services to small and medium size business with reasonably good success. Towards the end of 2008, it started watching a large number of small and medium businesses collapsing, one after another. Each one of these small and medium company that went bankrupt, started with one common sequence of laying-off some employees, and then some more, and then a larger chunk of lay-offs in an attempt to survive the down economy and save the company from total collapse. But the vicious circle never stopped, forcing many of these companies to eventually close their doors.

To read the full article, printed in various East Coast Publications, please click the following link:

A Small Business Helps Small Businesses in a Down Economy

CMP TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE INTERVIEWS VARESH SACHDEV

CMP TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE INTERVIEWS VARESH SACHDEV

[CMP Technology Magazine, a leading global provider of news distribution and specialist information services for the professional markets interviewed Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO of DBA Web Technologies.]

Links to this TWO-PART Interview are given below:

INTERVIEW PART 1:

Career Profile: Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO, DBA Web Technologies by CMP Technology Magazine

INTERVIEW PART 2:

CMP Technology Magazine interviews Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO, DBA Web Technologies on hiring projections and guidance to job seekers. This interview includes some suggestions from Varesh on what to do and also what not to do while looking for a job in this dwindling economy.

Audio Interview - Varesh Sachdev interviewed by Belray Asset Management

AUDIO INTERVIEW

[Greg Skidmore of Belray Asset Management Interviews Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO of DBA Web Technologies]

Listen to the audio interview by Greg Skidmore where Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO of DBA Web Technologies talks about how he is saving many companies from total collapse; and at the same time saving the jobs of many employees who are about to be laid-off with his unique On-Demand IT Support Model

What Is Wrong With Your Resume?

You lost your job many months back. Since then you have been aggressively looking for a job. You are responding to hundreds of opens jobs every week and sending out your resumes to every possible company, recruiter, and even to your personal contacts but nothing seems to be working. You are more concerned because you are not even getting interview calls. Yes, job market is tuff. Very few jobs are opening up and so, you have to compete with hundreds of candidates for very open position you are applying for. But still, in spite of this dwindling economy, “one person” is getting every specific job that you too applied for.

• Why not you?
• Why resume is not among the top few who are called for interview?
• Why your resume is always discarded by the hiring manager?
• Why no one takes a second look at your resume?

After all you are well qualified with many years of experience and expertise in certain domains. Still no job is coming your way, why? Don’t blame anyone else for your woes. It is your resume and your presentation style that is killing your job prospects. A very large number of candidates while applying for jobs do not even realize the countless obstacles they create for themselves during the process of applying for jobs.

These are some of the most common pitfalls.

When you force hiring managers to toss out your own resume

I cannot even imagine that some well educated and highly experienced professionals can commit this common mistake across the board. I see this happening in more than half of the resumes I receive in response to all our open positions on a daily basis. Most of the prospective candidates name their resumes as “resume.doc” while sending resumes as attachments. Look at the problem we hiring managers have to face now:

Very first thing we do is right-click your attachment and click “Save”, to save your resume, so that we can read it later. If you named your resume as “resume.doc”, that is what appears as file name when we click “Save”. So, now your resume is saved as “resume.doc” in our records. An hour later, we open another candidate’s resume which is also named as “resume.doc”. Now see what happens. When we click Save, we see this message flashed on screen: The file resume.doc already exists. Do you want to replace the existing file? Now, look what have you done to your resume? If we click Yes, then resume of the first candidate (imagine if you were this first candidate) has gone forever. If we click No, then we have to provide a name for your resume. Ideally, we would like to save your resume as your_name.doc for future references but at this point, we do not even know your name.

To find out your name, we now have to open your resume, copy your name, close your resume, then right-click your attachment and click Save As, paste your name which we copied in above step as file name and then click save.

Are you realizing that you just wasted about one minute of hiring manager’s time? Now imagine how irritating it is for us when we receive hundreds of resumes every day and majority of these all named as “resume.doc”. For us, the only way to not allow people like you waste our time is that we just skip all such emails with resumes named as “resume.doc” because most hiring managers, who are at the CIO, CTO, HR Director level cannot afford to waste one minute for every single resume to just save the file for future reference.

You can see how this little carelessness is costing you a job at the prospective company even though you could have been the ideal fit for the position you applied for.

When you make it difficult for hiring managers to contact you

This is another very common example of the problem I face a lot when I try to reach a candidate. You apply for a job and email your resume. We find your skills and experience a reasonably good match for the position. In your contact information is your cell phone number and I decide to call you and plan to leave a voice mail with my phone number so that you can contact me later. But on many occasions, instead of an option to leave a voice mail, I hear a recorded message, saying, “This Voice mail box is full. You cannot leave voice mail at this time”. What do you think, I should do now. Call you every few hours hoping that either you will pick up the phone or you might have deleted some old voice mails and I will be able to leave a voice mail for you next time I call. No, I will not do that. I will just move on to the next candidate. In couple of cases, I actually sent an email to the candidates, with the flash news “Your voice mail box is full. Please delete your old voice mails, so that I can leave a message for you and schedule a possible interview for the job you applied in our company”. Do you think we will do that for every candidate who has his "voice mail box full"? No, we won't.

If you are in the job market, please make it a point to regularly delete your old voice mails and make it easy for hiring managers to contact you.

Realistically, you should be doing this anyway even if you are not looking for a job. What if your family is in a medical emergency and someone is trying to reach you but is getting the recorded message “Voice mail box is full. You cannot leave voice mail at this time”. That can be tragic in some situations.

When you ask hiring managers to do what should be your responsibility

This is not too common a mistake but still happens many times. We understand that you apply for many open positions and it is not possible to remember the position description of every job you applied for. But when we call you OR send an email to you in response to your resume you sent to us while applying for our advertised job, it is inappropriate to ask us by return email to send you the job description.

It will help you to be a bit more organized and save a copy of the job description in a company specific folder on your computer. That way, even if hiring manager contacts you one or two months after you applied, you can always go to that specific company folder and look at the position description instead of asking your possible future employer to send you the job description. Such a request will create a negative impression long before you are called for the interview. And let me add that most hiring managers will put your resume on the side a minute after you make such a request.

In my next blog, I will talk about how we can help you in writing a professional and sophisticated resume that can put you ahead of your competition in the job market.

For any career help during your job search, please feel to Talk to us directly.

Job Search or Self Employment: What is right for you?

Job Search or Self Employment: What is right for you?

by

Varesh Sachdev

Have you been a victim of corporate downsizing?

With half-million people losing jobs every month in United States, an unusually large percentage of people and families have become victims due to this downward spiral of economy not witnessed by our generation ever before. Each one of us knows at least one person among our close families and friends who has been directly impacted by this. While, most of us have been through some recessions where people lost jobs but were able to find new jobs in a short span of time; this is the first time when a large number of people have not been able to find a new job after losing their previous job even after many months of extensive job search. This is the first time when we know with certainty that a large percentage of jobs being wiped out by Corporate America are not coming back for different reasons.

I experience this every day because for every new open position that we advertise on Dice, I receive over one hundred resumes from well qualified candidates but I can offer the job only to one person. You are competing with hundreds (sometimes even over 200) of equally qualified candidates for every open position you apply for. This is the reason you do not even get interview calls even though you are applying for so many jobs every day.

But for how long you can let that happen to you? You have to feed your families and you have to find a way to do something about it. No one will bail you out.

So, what should you do? You will have to change your strategy! Do not let the corporate world shape your destiny and your professional future. Take control in your own hands.

If job search is taking you nowhere, ask yourself if being self employed is an option for you?

HOLD ON!

Some of you just thought that it is not for you and are about to close this article. Don’t just close this article without reading even if you think being self-employed is not an option for you due to your specific circumstances. Because it certainly is an option for you and I know that for sure!

• Whether you have just couple of years experience or you are a former CTO or CIO or had a similar management level position in the corporate world and were downsized;
• Whether you are a very strong technical specialist with mastery in certain domain(s) or you are more of a functional expert than technical expert;
• Whether you cannot afford to invest even one hundred dollars or you have a million dollars to invest;
• Or maybe you have spent all your professional life working in other companies and even the thought of being self-employed seems too unrealistic or too risky;

Whatever may be the case, if the pain of job search has become unbearable, Talk to us because we understand that when you are without a job for many months, investing just one hundred dollars may seem an uphill task.

If you are fighting for your survival as a Professional:

If you are fighting for your survival as a professional, start as a one-person consulting company. When job market is not in your favor, you have to change your approach to make it work for you. Being self-employed does not mean you have to make major investments to setup your company but still you have to market yourself.

Finding a new full time job with all benefits has become extremely difficult and will continue to get from bad to worse for at least the next couple of years. Most companies – small, medium, as well as big corporations are thinking of ways to cut down their expenses. So, the preference for hiring consultants for short term periods for specific critical assignments will be the norm instead of hiring fulltime staff with all benefits; at least for the near future.

Also, if you have noticed that having extensive experience in your field of specialization (which also means age factor) is becoming an obstacle for you in your job search for fulltime permanent positions, it is important to know the “having extensive experience in your field of specialization” becomes a big plus in the consulting word. When a company hires you for a specific project as a consultant, they actually want someone who has mastery in his or her field. So, your experience and even age becomes a huge plus for you when you enter the consulting world.

Due to frustration, one big mistake people make is that they apply for every consulting job that is advertised anywhere and most of the time these consulting jobs are advertised by consulting companies for their clients. And if you notice carefully, every single consulting position is advertised by multiple consulting companies because all these consulting companies are talking with “same client for the same consulting position”. If multiple copies of your resume reach same client through multiple consulting companies, it results in your resume being discarded by the client before any one even looks at your profile only because of multiple submissions even though you may be an ideal candidate.

The right approach in the consulting world is to get associated with just one or two consulting companies because if you are a one-person company, you cannot market yourself aggressively which becomes more difficult when economy is collapsing and no company wants to hire anyone unless it is necessary for their survival and that too for mission critical projects for their clients.

So, the strategic solution is to get associated with just one or two consulting companies and let these companies do the marketing for you. Pick the companies that you can trust. And pick the one that gives you personal attention. Never associate yourself with a consulting company if you get a feeling that you are being treated just “as one of thousands looking for a consulting job”.

DBA Web Technologies can help you in more than one way.Talk to us about your situation. Not only, we will help you get your first project, we will also push your candidacy for other incoming projects with other clients before your current projects ends.

If you are a one-person company with plans to expand but facing obstacles:

If you already have been successful as a small-time one-person consulting company, you face a different problem. You can only take one project at a time because you do everything yourself. At times, while you are still working on a project, you come across multiple projects within your domain expertise but you are forced to refuse the new projects because you don’t have time to work on more than one project; mainly because your current project needs your 100% commitment. Don’t you wish sometimes that if you had one more consultant in your small-consulting-company, you could have accepted “that new project”? While the second consultant would have worked on the new project, you could have enhanced the reputation of your small company and at the same time could have made some financial gain. And then maybe few months later, you may be in a position to add additional consultants in your small consulting company and in few years grow from one-person company to a small scale business depending on how much you want to expand in the future.

Only thing that stops you from adding a second consultant is that you do not have any infrastructure in place to manage the additional consultant that you would like to hire. When you are a one-person company, just one laptop is enough for you to successfully accomplish and deliver the ongoing projects and meet all client commitments. But with one more person on your small company payroll, now you need to worry about some additional commitments and responsibilities. Investing in setting up a new infrastructure for your very small company may seem unrealistic because you never know how things will turn out six months later. You cannot afford to invest thousands of dollars in setting up initial minimum IT infrastructure due to so many uncertainties.

You cannot afford but you still need a minimum set-up if you choose to add some additional consultants in your small company. To begin with, you definitely need a website to be effective and stay ahead of your competition in the business world, no matter which industry you are in even if you are a one-person company and now adding your first consultant on your staff. To market yourself effectively, you need a place to showcase your credentials and what your small team of consultants can do and accomplish. Every new prospect would like to know more about you, your consultants, your skill-sets, your previous as well as current clients, some evidence of the quality of your work and the depth of your knowledge & capabilities. And let’s face it; your resume is no longer enough to market yourself and your small company with two or three consultants. Every new prospect in the consulting world wants to see your online portfolio. You also need a small server so that you can manage your small staff. Also, keep in mind, now that you are slowly expanding, you want to avoid having your small staff to use their personal gmail or yahoo email addresses while communicating with your clients. You want to provide them with a corporate email addresses because you want to start building a brand-name for yourself and enhance your small company’s reputation as you look forward to what you can accomplish within the next one to two years.

This is where; we lend a helping hand to small and medium businesses with our On-Demand IT Support Model.
DBA Web Technologies offers the following IT Services:

* Website designing, Logo designing, and Website Hosting and maintenance Services for small and medium companies.
* Support to small and medium companies on our Infrastructure without you having invest in setting up IT Infrastructure.
* Cost effective alternatives to set up, host, maintain and support IT infrastructures.
* IT Consultants on hourly basis for short-term and long projects in all IT domains in every state across United States.

If job search is leading you nowhere and last few months of unemployment are resulting in frustration and desperation, don’t give up. Start thinking like an entrepreneur and DBA Web Technologies will help you with initial support to move forward. Accept the realities of the new job market and take control of your professional future in your own hands. Talk to us because we understand and know what you are going through. Listen how we can help.