Thanks to changes in the economy, more and more people are working from home. Along the way, they’re discovering that there’s a lot more to home working than sitting at a desk, tapping away on their computer. It requires an entire office infrastructure to make it happen.
But thanks to a bunch of new technologies, working from home has never been easier or cheaper.
Portable Storage
The price of portable storage has dropped to practically zero, thanks to external USB devices and the cloud. Now the average flash memory stick can be bought for less than £10 and offers more than 16GB of space, more than enough for your Word documents or Excel files.
We’re also seeing the rise of hot-swappable SSDs that use USB as well as eSATA interfaces, meaning that it’s possible to take your entire operating system, along with all of your files, out of the house and hook it up to a work computer once you arrive.
Customised Checkouts
Many modern home-based businesses rely on being able to process a lot of people through online checkouts. Ecommerce businesses are popping up all over the place. Until now, they’ve had good support on the front end, thanks to built-in shopping solutions on website builders like Wix, but they struggle when it comes to payment. Solopreneurs operating out of their own homes rarely have the skills to put together a seamless checkout experience themselves, so they rely on generic experiences provided by service providers. As any home-based online retailer will tell you, these off the shelf experience will only get you so far. What’s needed are real Magento enterprise developers who can customise the checkout experience from start to finish. The last thing you want is to spend hours building a beautiful website, all for your customers to abandon their carts just before handing over the money.
VoIP
Running a business from home often means that the phone is constantly ringing. Most of the time you’re not available to answer it. That’s why more and more home based entrepreneurs and freelancers are turning to VoIP. The idea here is to use the power of the Internet to reduce the cost of your calls and make them much more convenient. One of the things that VoIP systems allow you to do is have your voicemails forwarded to your email. They also allow you to avoid some of the costs involved with making long distance calls by transferring data over the internet, rather than traditional phone lines.
VoIP can be a hassle to set up, though, and even once they’re up and running, you can suffer from dropped calls, echoes and glitches. As a result, it’s a good idea to set aside an entire afternoon to set a system up, even if the packaging says it’ll take 15 minutes.
Ultra Wifi Router
Almost everybody who works from home does so with the help of the internet. So the last thing you want is for your internet to cut out and your router reset. Invest in an ultra router, like D-Link’s AC3200, which has six antennas and a vast area of coverage.
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