Hi, this is Laura Turner and today we are going to talk about how to write a comparative analysis. You might be writing about two different forms of literature, two different novels or two different approaches to politics.

Whatever the case is you are going to want to give equal weight in research to both sides. Then your going to want to, of course, juxtapose the views of both sides. So, you are going to want to take all the notes you possibly can on the first one, all the notes you possibly can on the second one and the divide them into similarities and differences between the two sides so that you’re analysis won’t give too much weight to one side, of course it may be the side you favor and then a little less to the other.

So detail their similarities, detail their differences, compare and contrast them based on these, and really, try to reach a conclusion that is proper for your analysis, you know, what was your initial question in the first place. Is one more effective than the other? And then reach that conclusion based on the comparison that you’ve made in your comparative analysis. So, good luck with that.

I think the biggest general type of mistake I see with web design is that the.., it’s not balanced. So you can look at a side and you can see it’s been overly influenced by one type of person. So, you see, for example, the compliance to fit with accessibility has meant that visually the site does nothing for the brand; it’s not a compelling experience. On the other hand you’ve got the opposite situation where you might have a retail site were it’s been totally designed in flash, doesn’t work in terms of accessibility or usability, although it may look quite good visually. So, its’ about having the right hybrid approach with the visuals, the accessibility, the usability and increasingly with the social networking, getting user content. So, I love the firebox site for example, where people can submit their own videos and their own commentary. And it’s amazing what’s on there and I think it really helps sell the products by having that user involvement.

So, something that I would say its really important is to have an online value proposition, OVP as I call it, which would allow you to really explain your unique points or difference and to get across that you ‘re really a trusted provider. So, things like testimonials can help with that, or the number of users you’ve got. If you look at a salesforce.com site, a business to business example, they are really good at doing those things.

Now, some of the other mistakes that you would often see are really, the goals for each page aren’t clear enough. So, to my mind each page needs to be designed around the course to action and what you are looking to achieve. And you can see this by doing the right tracking, which page is on resonates in with the audience and they’re immediately hitting the back button.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) would be another area. Often web design agencies are very skilled at doing the visual design and the technical design of the coding and the type of the style sheets integrated with databases. But I think that some basic rules of SEO, the web design agencies, if they know, they can make a much better job for their clients.

I think that there’s one final mistake you see with web design, and very few companies get this right. The site isn’t sufficiently flexible… enough. And often you can see why that’s the case because of the content management system that’s used. But web technology changes so often that you do need a flexible design, that you can try new approaches, you can move different content pods, cause to action around the screen and see what’s working, what’s not working. Amazon is one of the few companies I think that does this well. They are continually trilling new approaches and they will tell you that they look at this different, they’ll use multivariate testing to see which message is, which images work best. Lovefilm would be another, the DVD rental company, would be another company that does that. But I have seen some sites from major brands where they’re sending millions of pounds worth of traffic to lending pages, and if you look at the page this year, it would be the same as it was last year or the year before. And you can’t tell me that they are getting the most from that when some of their competitors are updating the pages daily, almost.

This program is brought to you by Stanford University. Please visit us at stanford.edu.

The first thing I figured out that learns sometimes the hard way about entrepreneurship is that the core, the essence of entrepreneurship is about making meaning. Many, many people start companies to make money, the quick flip, the dot com phenomena. And I have noticed that both companies that I started and funded and been associated with, that those companies that are fundamentally founded to change the world, to make the world a better place, that make meaning are the companies that make a difference, they are the companies to succeed.

My naive and romantic belief is that if you make meaning, you will probably make money but if you set out to make money, you will probably not make meaning and you will not make money. So my first thought is you need to make meaning. That should be the core of why you start a company. There are three ways to make meaning:

First is to increase the quality of life. My background is the Macintosh division of Apple Computer. That I can tell you, with total certainty, that we were not motivated by making money; we were motivated by changing the world to make people more creative and more productive. We were trying to increase the quality of life for the Macintosh user. And that was a great motivation that kept us going through many, many difficult periods; we were waking up in the morning thinking how we could change people’s lives.

A second way to make meaning is to right a wrong. You know, this fish is going to die after jumping out. But to right a wrong means that you find something that’s wrong in the world, or you notice something is wrong and you want to fix that. This might be particularly applicable to not-for-profits where, you know, there’s pollution and there’s crime or there’s abuse and they just, their very core is to end that wrong.

And the third way to make meaning is to prevent the end of something good. That you see something beautiful, something wonderful and you just can’t stand the fact that it’s being eroded, it’s being changed, it’s being ruined.

So I ask you as you start your companies, your not-for-profits, your churches, your schools, whatever you are starting, please have one of those three motivations, one or more of those motivations. If you don’t have one of those motivations I suggest that you rethink what you are doing. I think these three things are the key to starting a great organization.

The preceding program is copywrited by Stanford University. Please visit us at stanford.edu.

Hey you all. In this video I’m going to be sharing with you some tips and tricks to really help make the most out of your site and to try make it professional and stylish.

Tip number one. Try to make your site colorful but at the same time don’t over color it. What I mean by this is try and keep the background plain and simple. If you go and look on sites such as YouTube, Google, yahoo and Wikipedia, for example, you’ll see that they’ve all got white background. You’ll see this with most of the sites, now this is because we don’t want to distract the user when you’re making the site, you don’t want to distract the user from the main content. In the case of YouTube the videos, you don’t want them looking at the background which is a weird background image for example, so you really want to try and make it as simple to use as possible for the users. By all means maybe a light grey could be a good background color, but a bright red, for example, would really not help the users.

Tip number two: define your content, for example menu bars and sections of the site by using a black or a colored border. Try to make it bold and try make it stand out so they really know which part of the site is which part. And also, another tip with this, try to make your content parallel or horizontal to one and other.

Tip number three: keep your site layout the same throughout. If you’ve got loads and loads of pages, try to keep them all the same. If you go trough YouTube you’ll see all the pages look roughly the same. You can, by all means, customize certain pages, but try to make the layout the same. By all means change the colors though; otherwise the user may think they’ve been led on to a different site which they didn’t want to access in the first place.

So that’s all the tips for today. Thanks for watching guys, more videos coming up soon.

Do you like to explain how things work? That’s often what a technical writer does. It is very important to be able to write clearly and simply. This is a job that usually requires a college degree in the liberal arts, especially majors in Communications, Journalism and English. It also helps if you have training in the field for which you will be writing. For example, technical writers who describe how to operate equipment can benefit from a background in engineering.

 When you read operating or maintenance manuals, catalogues, assembly instructions product descriptions and other materials meant to inform and educate, you’re reading the work of a technical writer. A technical writer is in a way a translator. He or she translates scientific, medical or other complex information into easily understandable language.

Technical writing is a skill you can take anywhere. They are employed throughout the country, with the most jobs being available in the Northeast, Texas and California. With rapid growth in technology and electronics, demand for the services of technical writers should continue to rise, especially for people who are comfortable with changing technology.

Management of informotion tehnology in today’s organizations is about three things. First is understanding how to lever information tehnology as a valued process in the organization. As an example: adopting new informational tehnology to transform, or to change internal processes. And also how to impact the environement creating new market rules for example.

The second thing is to think information tehnology as a business model. For example to search, understanding internet for new business models or mobile applications. And the third is understanding information tehnology as a lever for building new organizations, network organizations. Emphasising the idea of interactivity and inovation.

These three things are the key components of what information technology management is about.

The great majority of us don’t go out looking for trouble; we don’t go out trying to cause conflict. But sometimes conflict can occur in departments, in teams and even in entire organizations. Our one day Dealing with conflict and difficult people program will show anyone who attends how to understand and better manage and reduce conflicts, either in a team environment or in a workplace. How to deal with difficult customers, or colleagues, or managers, or simply people we come in contact with day to day whose behavior is not as good as we would like it.

You see, we know from research and we know from our own life experiences that there’s three ways of trying to cope with conflict and difficult people in behavior. One is to fight it. In other words to use aggression to try and manage it, fight fire with fire. But you know what?!That rarely works. The second way is to run away, to flee, to flight. And you know what?! At times, that can be the appropriate response, but in reality that doesn’t solve the problem. The third way of managing conflict, difficult behavior or people is what we call Flow. Its being assertive, its understanding that it’s ok to stand up for your own needs while at the same time allowing the person who is creating the conflict, the tensional behavior to not feel defensive.

If you’d like to know more about how this cause can make an enormous difference and open up the eyes of everyone within your team or department take a moment and look below this video for more information. If you would like to know how we can customize this program specifically for your people, your business, your team than we can do that. Take a moment and look at the information and if conflict or challenging behaviors is something that you would like to see resolved we do have a customized solution that we can apply to your people as soon as you’re ready.

Hello and welcome to This Month in Real Estate, I’m Jay Papasan. Our top story: An increase in existing home sales for the month of May. Let’s look at the numbers. The National Association of Realtors reports an increase in existing home sales. With transactions in South and West helping most to drive existing home sales to more than $ 5,600,000.00 units. While that’s down 2.2% from April, the May closings are up 19.2% from the same time last year. If you are looking to buy a home and worry that your dreams may have expired along with the Home Buyer Tax Credit Bryon Ellington shows us how an FHA loan could help. Bryon.

Thanks Jay. The Federal Housing Administration or FHA was created by Congress in 1934 and help folks buy homes by insuring the loans the banks make to home buyers. This means banks can offer lower rates because there’s less risk of them losing money. We call them FHA loans but really they’re loans made by your bank and backed by the US government. There are lots of ways an FHA loan can help you. For instance your down payment can be as low as 3.5% of the purchase price and most of your closing costs and fees can be included in the loan. In addition there are FHA loans to help make your home energy efficient, loans to help you buy a home in a rural area, loans to include the cost of repairer and fixer-upper in the mortgage, even loans to help you rebuild your home if you have been hit by a disaster.

These are just a few of the programs available to help you buy your home. To find out which one might be best for you contact your local real estate agent. Back to you Jay.

Thanks Bryon. Well that’s it for This Month in Real Estate, thank you for joining us.

Hi, my name is Mark and I’m just going to briefly cover international business as a subject, with you. International business is a collective term used to describe the operation objectives of organizations that have business interests in other countries, in other words multinationals. Some of these companies you might be aware, you might know Disney, Shell, Sony, McDonalds, Tesco, Ford, just to name a few. These are organizations that have business interest on a global bases and they have key objective is to standardize what they are offering. So that wherever you go in the world, whatever you buy, whatever product or service you buy of there’s, it is of a standard level of a generally acceptable level on a world-wide basis. It’s a measure of quality. Now, of course these organizations have the money but they don’t necessarily have the know-how in these local markets. And they have to partner-up with, sometimes, local organizations of similar size in order to operate in these markets. Sometimes are barriers to entry, primarily, because they are taking on the local operatory net field, so it makes sense to them to work in a collective manner.

There are many factors that affect an organization’s entry into a new market: politically, economically, socially and of course technologically. One of these issues can affect how a business operates and it must do an incredible amount of research before, of course, it goes ahead and spends considerable amounts of money investing overseas.

Hi, I’m Miranda Chuck, a CPA. I’m going to talk a little about tax preparation centers. Now, there are both centers for profit and not for profit. Now, the purpose of both would be to help you take all the information from your W-2, 1099 forms or any other forms that you’ve received from payers and any information you have on the deduction side and expenses and put all that information on the right lines of the right forms and help you calculate the taxes that are either due to the IRS from you, or the refund that is due to you.

And what they’ll do for you is take the information from your W-2es, 1099 forms and any other forms that you receive from payers, as well as information you have on the deductive side, like charitable contributions you have made over the year, and help you put all that information on the right lines of the right forms and help you calculate either the tax that’s due to the IRS or the refund that’s due to you. Now, most of these centers also offer electronic filing so you may get your refund faster. Now, some of the nonprofit centers typically are targeted to specific areas of the tax paying population, such as AARP for the elderly, or the Voluntary Income Tax Assistance program VITA, that’s for low to moderate income tax payers, and there is a VITA specifically for the military as well. So if you want a list of these tax preparation centers you can either go to the IRS’s own website at irs.gov, or you can check with your local Chamber of Commerce.