Promoting your Company.

After setting up your company or even before doing it, promoting it becomes the main concern. People are needed to be made aware of the Company, so that they can refer it to potential business partners or bring business to you directly. The various methods which can be adopted to promote and advertise your company are as follows:

1. Verbal advertising. There is no substitute to verbally propagating the existence of your company. Is its easy and it is free. Companies like Google and Barista have adopted this method. You can never see an ad for Google and Barista in Media. The better the Friend Circle you have and the better the friend circle your friends have, the better is the promotion cycle. In this method, allow the work to speak for you.

2. Make Profiles in the following websites:
a} Orkut
b) Facebook
c) Myspace
d) Hi5
e) Twitter
f) LinkedIn
g) Apnacircle

Invite friends and tell them about the company. Make the profile public, so that they can be accessed by everyone interested.

3. Send mails to interested friends so that they can follow your progress and may communicate the same to their friends. You can never know from which direction the help might come.

4. Blog about the progress of your company, the beliefs, the strategy adopted and post the link in Twitter, Social Networking websites, Tag line of Chats etc.

5. Maintain a website of the company and keep your contact information up to date. Give a professional look to the website.

6. In the above website, use Google Analytics, Cluster Maps, Hit Counter, to keep a track of the number of users and their locations.

7. Maintain a forum, in which maintain the codes. So that it may interest other inquisitive minds to appreciate your approach and efforts, so that they main consider bringing you business.

Advertising and Promotion requires dynamic approach and innovative ideas. Along with the present methods, there can be numerous others which can contribute to the progress of the company. Please feel free to contribute your ideas.

Quality Process in the Company.

Quality seems to be a Trivial matter as far as startups are concerned, but in the long run, they really do matter. I am listing down a series of practices, which if followed can improve the productivity of the company and help keep track of the processes.

1. An Excel sheet needs to be shared amongst the employees in LAN, with the setting that multiple people can work on that at the same time.

2. Use Excel sheet as the time sheet for the employees to enter their daily actual hours.

3. The time sheet should have the details of the work on each day and the version of the files checked in the VSS after every day against each work.

4. Supporting documents for each work done can be attached as a future reference.

5. There should be a Sheet in the last page, which will contain the links in an formatted manner, which can give insights to problems encountered in work.

6. Code repository should be maintained in the Server with the links in an Excel sheet with a small description of how the code can be used.

7. All financial Transactions and Appointments should be maintained by the HR/Finance guy/girl of the Company (For a startup, single person has to do multiple jobs, moreover transactions would nut be huge).

Maintaining the Quality is taken seriously in many companies which are certified as CMM5, CMMI5 level companies. They have their own benefits which can be witnessed in the long run.

Anyone who want to add something to the above existing link is always welcome.

Software Usage for Maximum Productivity.

Now with all the hardware and software in place, the next main component for starting a company is the effectiveness with which the resources can be utilized. The main practices to be followed are as follows:

1. Have a VSS (Visual source safe) or SourceOffSite to manage your files. Every day before doing any code changes, the latest files need to be checked out, the changes are to be made and the files needs to be checked with correct comments for better maintainance of code history.

2. Every PC in the company should have a particular folder structure. Files should not be stored haphazardly and should be well maintained.

3. A dedicated folder needs to be maintained for Cheat Sheets for referring them when required.

4. All the required folders should be present in form of shortcut icons in the quick launch bar, so that the browsing becomes easier and time saving.

5. Maintain a template for website. e.g. maintain a folder path like

d:\Projects\Website\

in d:\Projects\Templates the following folders needs to be present.

a)CSS - for having any css files or css frameworks e.g. 960 degree.
b)JAVASCRIPT - for having any js files or javascript frameworks e.g Jquery.
c)BUSINESSLAYER - For having all the class files for logic of code.
d)DBLAYER - For code to connect to the database and manipulate them.

and Code files e.g index.aspx

These files and folders need to be copied into the folder d:\Projects\Website\SiteName every time a new website is created.

6. Last but not the least, use file comparison tools like SourceGear DiffMerge, for comparing files and merging them before taking or uploading any file from VSS.

Following these practices can increase the productivity of the project. Any suggestions are welcome whole heartedly.