Monday 17 November 2014

5 Prominent SEO Tactics to Ignite Your New Website

While launching a website for an existing business, many tend to simply ignore or consider it to be the last thing to do. You have guessed it right? SEO or Search Engine Optimization! While it is a long term investment and also considered to be a difficult proposition, not to forget SEO can help put your business on the right path from as soon as a new site goes live.

Here are some SEO tactics one can do to help get new website off the ground.

Make Sure You Are Visible To Google

If only Google can see your website crawl and indexed, other too can see through their naked eyes. Many times people forget to set their pages as indexable and followable which results in more complexity for any business' new website.

Having Appropriate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions

Whilst all these days, each title recommended having appropriate character length Google has made changes to the format of their search results recently. As per the result, the Meta titles and Meta descriptions are at about 60 and 120 characters limits respectively.

Optimize Around Video Keywords

There is a lot of information to process but leveraging video keywords tend to get more traffic to your videos ultimately enhances your website.

Sticking To a Dynamic and Unique Content

New websites/ webpages that contain generic content obviously don’t stand out from the competition. This is why it is vital to find ways that you can differentiate from and improve upon the content in that webpage.

Doing Appropriate Internal Linking

The best SEO is a combination of user experience and technical SEO. Your business will flourish if the pages that perform best from a sales perspective are internally linked together correctly. Before which, you need to identify what pages are the most important to your website and then doing appropriate internal linking.

That's all. If  you have any questions feel free to leave under the comments section below.





Friday 7 November 2014

How Drupal Commerce Serves As the Best Extension for a Shopping Site?

There are myriads of CMS for an ecommerce website these days, say Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Pretashop but what could be the best options for an online store with the most usage over the Internet?


Let’s take a little survey:

* Wordpress constitutes 61.1% of the CMS market share but known for blogging sites and not ecommerce. And that’s why developers don’t find it flexible to do than other CMS.

* Magento is an ecommerce platform built to serve the purpose of an online store. But not for those with a tight budget

* Drupal is a powerful and flexible platform, an open source CMS that is more extendable than Wordpress.

Whether a small & medium online business, here are a few reasons why the integrated platform Drupal Ecommerce - Drupal with Drupal Commerce or Ubercart is the best solution.

1. Every features of Drupal content management explains why your online store needs a CMS functions, elaborating marketing aspects as well.

2. Ecommerce platform like Magento requires installing another decent CMS to work with content whereas Drupal is so flexible to work with for both your shopping features and the content.

3. Drupal’s structure and extendability lets developers to embed any fields such as image, text, videos, link, and no limitation.

4. Known for its security terms, even the White House is built on Drupal.

5. If you need the extensions for your Drupal shopping site, free modules are there to support.

6. Drupal Commerce and Ubercart are integrated in the highest level with Drupal which brings in a magnificent experience for your shopping site.

7. Since Drupal 7 has been much easier to learn compared to earlier versions, the average hiring cost for developers is much cheaper than hiring a Magento developer.

8. If you consider your ecommerce website is more than an online store, there should be a content marketing plan with frequently updated contents, and a sophisticated SEO.

Summing up, if you treasure for any of the above mentioned reasons, then Drupal can’t be missed. 


http://www.openwavecomp.com/request-proposal.php

Wednesday 5 November 2014

Why Mobile Optimization Testing Is Vital For Your Ecommerce Store?

Who actually shops on a cell phone? Well, if this question was jotted before a few years, many
retailers would have turned their back, not willing to even answer such funny question. But now, if
you’re not mobile friendly, then you’re not customer friendly.

This is digital era and mobile commerce is more welcomed among 90% of the USA population.
Means, optimization strategy needs to include mobile and your website has to address the
different needs and expectations of mobile users.

Responsive Web Design- One-Size-Fits-All Solution

With RWD or Responsive Web Design each page has a single, universal URL instead of having multiple pages and sub-domains with the same content (like m.domain.com). Here, based on the browser’s dimensions, you can prioritize content and calls-to-action and customize those experiences for varying visitor scenarios.Howbeit, to find the best layout, design, content, and calls-to-action for your device segments- conversion optimization testing for your mobile shopping cart development is vital.

Mobile Test Opportunities

Focus your mobile optimization testing on these two areas.

Copy: In order to keep on the mobile version, copy was important enough which could be dropped
down. Unlike in desktop where it’s easy for visitors to scan through blocks of copy looking for what
they want, on mobile, full screen is not available worth of copy to extol the virtues of your company and products.

Conversion optimization testing for mobile should explore the most effective use of limited copy to convey your value proposition or crucial directions in website development.

Calls-To-Action:  Despite the desktop version of your site shows several CTAs, the mobile site should prioritize them. Stand out with a new colour treatment and a finger-friendly size and shape. Before testing which of those your mobile users respond to best, deciding on which CTAs are most aligned with your business and website goals, and then

If you’re serious about ecommerce with mobile devices, give your first hands to user-shopping
experience.





How Ecommerce Is Compared to an American Football Game

What to sell? How to sell? Which tax laws apply? All these daunting questions let entrepreneurs to think about ecommerce like a game of football. The United States celebrates football as the single most popular professional sport for 30 consecutive years. With that in mind, this article portrays how to successfully start and run an online business.


4 Familiarities and Popularity That Makes Ecommerce, an American Football


Many of the Innovations Makes the Modern Game So Popular


Every aspect of the game concentrates not just reactively respond to weaknesses in the other team, but also to proactively take an advantage. Similarly, Ecommerce should also be taken seriously with a plan that
Take the time to seriously and thoughtfully create a business plan.

The Offense, the Defence, And Special Teams


Within these groups there are many position players with a particular responsibility. Similarly, an ecommerce operation needs a person in charge of setting goals for the business; one to devise marketing plans; another to order products and monitor margins; a team to develop the shopping cart site; and so on.
These are distinct jobs that should be specialized as the business grows.

Statistics on Each National Football League Team


The service ranks teams collect data of Team Rankings, sports statistics, etc to figure out average number of plays per game. Success in ecommerce is also about many incremental interactions or plays. Sometimes, one particular sale/ one particular blog post/ one particular management decision is enough to make or break the business.Think about a business as a series of plays.

The Source of All Wealth And Money- The Fans


The NFL has stated that it expects to reach more than $25 billion in annual revenue by 2027. And how is that possible? Well, well, well- The Fans! Likewise, in ecommerce web development it is more important to make fans than it is to make individual sales.A loyal customer worth much more than a new customer over time includes specific business goals, and a description of the steps required to achieve those stated goals.

Besides, bear in mind every business decision will put you in that championship game.










Monday 3 November 2014

Why Planning a Website Content Model Is Itself a Valuable Exercise

When building a complex Drupal site, be it mid to large-sized site, to have as many as a dozen content types, there's a lot that goes into keeping track of all of them.

Planning out how the entire site's content model and build will look is itself a valuable exercise. This not only reduces errors but also improves overall consistency and quality that we now use for all sites to aid in planning. When it comes to Drupal, it is extremely configurable step one of a new site is to start pushing buttons- so what we actually want to do? How does it work?


There are a number of ancillary benefits in planning to automate an entire Drupal website development.
  • Allows easier identification of all possible custom modules required, starting from Field types, formatters, Views plugins, etc.
  • Identifying hidden custom code early and factor into the budget or into design changes, as appropriate
  • Allow the entire team to review the content model at-a-glance to see how all of the moving parts fit together besides checking the potential pitfalls
  • Developers, those who are joining a project in the mid can get a clearer picture of the site they're inheriting, its development phase, and more importantly why.
  • It’s harder to forget about the important UX details such as help text, field settings, and other little details in-your-face
  • With proper planning strategy, the design and development greatly reducing "oh, we haven't built that part yet" problems avoiding too many context switches from "build headspace" to "code headspace" 
  • Can be completed at once, showing the client early progress.
  • Image style settings help to ensure that information is figured out early and in a consistent manner.
Summing up, this is actually the biggest benefit of this approach and therefore gives it a whirl on your next Drupal site making your life easier.

How Do You Know Magento Delivers Futuristic Ecommerce Solutions

Benefiting millions of online business of varied types, Magento is undoubtedly the widely used and preferred ecommerce platform or rather the best hosted solutions for running online businesses. This platform is clearly managing to outsmart its competitors with some of its unique aspects: complex coding styles, need for performance optimization and complexity in customizations.

Why should one go for Magento? Here are a few reasons jotted down to state why will Magento be considered as the best ecommerce solution henceforth.


Web Store Owners to Optimize Their Stores for Mobile

Being the medium for accessing the internet, mobile data connection speeds have improved a lot more in the recent past most of the internet dependant users. But that doesn’t conclude that creating a mobile version of a Magento site will have a toll on your budget. So, web store owners should necessarily optimize their stores for mobile.

Scalable To Handling Data of Huge Volumes

What makes Magento ecommerce solution highly preferred one for online businesses is its scalability to handling data of huge volumes. With global ecommerce market enhancing, Magento obviously becomes the frontrunner for developing such marketplaces as any number of products can be uploaded and marketed through this platform easily.
To Earn a Better Visibility in the Search Engines

A majority of users wish to shop online and essentially an online business must earn a better visibility in the search engines and brand popularity by driving in more traffic. Using Magento as the best choice, it can be easily incorporated with SEO-friendly features that would help a web store get indexed by a search engine in a better way.

Focussed On Evolving Methodologies

With the modern-day requirements of the business owners, Magento keeps on invoking methodologies for better experience and end-users experience to a whole new level. A few named improvements include: tax calculations, security and functional improvements on shopping cart, API components, and one step checkouts.

Been dealing with this remarkable ecommerce solution, recommended to build a shopping portal using Magento to drive in more customers and sales.

Thursday 30 October 2014

Pros and Cons of Web Design Approaches: Responsive vs. Adaptive

As we knew it already, we’re living in a post-PC world making way for more of smart phones where responsive and adaptive design techniques rule the day. How do we deal with this tectonic shift in user behaviour?

Currently, there are three popular approaches to developing a website:

> Responsive Web Design
> Client-Side Adaptive Designs And
> Server-Side Adaptive Designs

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and considering both ends will help your developers to pick the one that works for next project.

Responsive Web Design

The most common One Web approach, Responsive Web Design uses CSS media queries to modify the presentation of a website based on the size of the device display.

Advantages Of responsive Web Design

> Designers can use a single template for all devices, and just use CSS to determine how content is rendered on different screen sizes.

> Designers can work in HTML and CSS technologies they’re already familiar with.

> With the growing number of responsive-friendly, open-source toolkits like Bootstrap or Foundation- the entire process become simplified.

Weakness To A Sound Responsive Design

> Testing phase can be quite fussy as it can be difficult to customize the user experience for every possible device or context.

Adaptive design

Based on the principles of responsive design, an Adaptive design uses JavaScript to enrich websites with advanced functionality and customization. There are two varied approaches in this:

> Client-Side Adaptive Approach- Let’s you rebuild your site on existing content while still delivering a mobile-responsive layout.

> Server-Side Adaptive Approach- Offers distinct templates for each devices for extended customization, thus enabling smaller mobile pages that load faster

Strengths of the Adaptive Templating Approach


> Ability to reuse one set of HTML and JavaScript across devices thus simplifying change management and testing.

> Numerous server-side plugins available for common CMSs and eCommerce systems such as Magento

Weakness of Adaptive Templating Approach

> Requires significant changes to your back-end systems that might result in a lengthy (and costly) implementation

Summing up, the increasing competition and mobile traffic are still wrestling with the basics of responsive. It is fast becoming super nova, yet optimizing to mobile performance creates new challenges for shopping carts development.

http://www.openwavecomp.com/request-proposal.php

5 Prominent Tips to Mitigate Web Application Security Risks


Regardless to the framework used, web application development requires a proper Web application and server maintenance to avoid security breaches. Despite many companies hosting their web applications in the cloud and select a private cloud for the web applications, hackers and web spiders perceive everywhere.
What’s important is to specifically focus on proper Web application security and maintenance. In fact, it starts with a developer who writes secure code and to properly maintain your app:


* To check vendor notifications about updates and patches or withdraws
* To buy insurance to protect yourself against risks.

Here, in this post, let’s look upon 5 simple tips to mitigate security risks and ensure Web application security.

Educating the Employees:

Security experts need to ensure that an application is secure in code and design and certainly this has to be shared with other employees. Web application Devops are needed to implement monitoring and patch management, and support of your server and software.

Don’t Store All Of Your Eggs In One Basket:

Why take risk? Do not store all Web applications on a single server. Not only that it is architecturally incorrect but could negatively affect Web application performance. Hosting it rightly is an effective way to significantly decrease costs and create truly flexible and reliable solutions in the Cloud.
Patch your web apps and web server. Regardless of what framework is used, it’s important to remember that none are a safe haven for your Web application but has got some vulnerability that needs to be addressed.


Access Keys and Passwords Protection

This is one of the many aspects to be taken care of as there have been far too many cases of hackers attacking developers or cloud access keys to take it lightly. Besides, your web application needs regular check-ups for the code and server security reviews & assessments. If your organization does not have internal experts ask a security vendor to help establish a comprehensive security strategy for regular check-ups.


Do Not Skimp Or Cut Corners On Security When Outsourcing

If you`re outsourcing Web application development, ensure security is covered in the agreement. Make a list of the security maintenance and check-up possibilities with your vendor and incase, having a long-term strategic partnership, don’t adjourn to share responsibility model.

Tuesday 14 October 2014

4 Best Practices To Speed Up Your Joomla Website

The rank has dropped down...and how do I get back there? Is this the mind set you are in? If so, the very first thing you need to understand is that a slow site can impede your ability to rank well in search engines besides intruding user-experience. In other words, only faster websites are ranked higher because they provide visitors with a better experience. Make them wait for 30 seconds or more and see losing them.

Here is the step-by-step guide to discover the current speed of your Joomla 3.x site and learn how to speed up your CMS today.

1. Measuring the size and speed of the Joomla 3.x website 

When was the last time you checked the speed of your website?  No clue! Well, using a tool such as Pingdom or the Page Speed add-on for Firebug, or the YSlow Chrome plugin will give you a score in comparison with other tested sites, and then a breakdown of performance highlighting areas where you can improve your CMS site.

2. Optimization Settings (Images, CSS, Java Scripts)


To speed up your website:

• Upload big scale pictures post resizing

• Use a lighter and simpler website template to play it simple

• Compress the size of CSS files and Javascript files

• Clean up occasionally and remove the unwanted components, modules, plugins, “Not Found” queries as part of Joomla website maintenance.

3. Gzip Compression Feature Setting

As the name implies, The Gzip Compression feature lets you compress your website pages before sending them to the user. It only takes less time than transferring uncompressed pages. In Joomla 3.x, this feature is disabled and therefore need to enable it manually.

4. Choose the Right Hosting Partner

Is your website server put among as hundreds or thousands of other sites? If so, this might be the reason why the loading speed is slow and not to blame many clients try to access this server at the same time.

Therefore, ensure that you choose the right hosting from a reputable provider who offers a limited number of sites per server, server hardware and cache support, and Joomla expert support.

Optimising your Joomla website is a continuous process of finding the right balance between the quantity and quality of the content, and its size and speed of loading.

http://www.openwavecomp.com/

Sunday 12 October 2014

How Shipping Strategies Influence Your Online Business Activity


Offering free shipping is something not dedicated because everyone loves free stuff or paying for shipping is extra painful...honestly it is a trick to increase your sales volume. But when does it make sense for you to offer it?

The Pros and Cons of Various Shipping Options

Figuring out your shipping strategy is determining a solution that cuts into your margins as little as possible yet remains attractive to your customers. This post outlines a few factors you’ll need to consider when deciding whether or not to offer Free Shipping and, which one. Let’s go in detail.

1.       Offer a Flat Rate for Every Package

Despite the fact that this is one of the most prominent methods to charging for shipping, it requires a bit of preparation as you need to figure out your average cost of shipping a package. Also, you need to make sure that you don't drastically undercharge or overcharge your customers but delivering the product in a reasonable amount of time.

An important highlight in flat rate shipping is to figure out what flat rate works for you, and if you need to do it by order totals or weight ranges- will require some testing.

2.       Setup Real-Time Shipping Quotes

Take for instance, the very popular shopping cart solution like Magento ecommerce where it's possible to setup real-time shipping quotes. Means, customers will pay more or less the same price what you would pay to ship your products.

However, the small discrepancy here is you might end up breaking even between the shipping charges you collect and what you ultimately have to pay to ship the package.

3.       Offering Free Shipping Depending On Your Margins

This is a sure-fire way to get your customer's attention. Displaying 'Free Shipping' on your website will require you to either absorb the cost or slightly increase your prices to cover it.

In order to follow this practise requires a lot of research time to understand your numbers and make the right decision. It includes

·         How much each of your products actually costs to ship,

·         What’s your competitors handle shipping, and

·         Your allowable profit margin


 The best ways to ship your products or services is enabling the most strategic decision possible and taking the advice of an expertise even while developing your ecommerce website can be prudent.


Friday 26 September 2014

4 Smart Ways to Keep Your Brand’s Design Consistent


Branding is essential in ecommerce website, and consistency in it brings instant recognition. In precise, consistent branding means higher click-through rates across channels.

Well having said so, to have a recognizable brand is actually a big challenge. Successful branding is achieved over time, not overnight, and consistency is the key.

1. Narrow Your Niche- A Clear Design With A Message

Working off your brand’s vision, it is imperative to establish a design scheme that complements it. This comprise what type of images will you use which includes high-quality photography or illustrations but limiting to colors and font palette. Not to forget, don’t complicate your brand with indecisive design. And this usually happens when you start to go overboard.

2. A Design Partner Is Vital
Building a consistent, cohesive brand is a full-time job besides simply developing a ecommerce shopping cart. Those designers who are trained to know branding will help you stay consistent which will save you both, time and money.

3. Train Your Team
Whether it is an in-house team or outsourcing, consider those who are in charge of the project: web designers, developers, marketing coordinator, and others because all of them have a powerful impact on your brand. Again, the sales people and, project managers have the power to change how others would view your organization. Creating a unique design is not just the concern of the creative team but that matters to user-engagement with the right information and tools.

4. Everything Needs A Design Review

As is obvious, your website is your backbone and everything else should reflect back to the site. Say for instance, that includes your twitter background, website design, and eBooks, the way you present your proposal, or even videos?

Small projects are sent off to different departments or to a designer without proper branding guidelines. But not to forget, the marketing materials you use shows your brand goes beyond just a first impression.

Brand consistency is consistently matching to customers perceptions, essential to building brand equity and ensuring your brand’s success.

Tuesday 23 September 2014

Want to Empower in Online Retailing? 3 W’s to Create Stunning Websites


Online retailers has some serious problem of high dropout rates across their websites which results in many serious issues such as loss in sales, low customer loyalty, loss in brand identity and many more.

However, the reason behind majority of retailers fail to have a planned approach to rectify this problem. They generally take an ad hoc approach of providing random advertisements all over their websites without realizing that this action might have detrimental effects on their website traffic.  Being an e-commerce enthusiast, what do you think about a planned approach?  Here’s it.

Web Design- Creative And User-Friendliness

If you want to keep a user on your website? You have only 5 seconds left with you. And, within that short time how do you increase their interest in your company? Well, the answer is a good web interface that will increase user experience, delivering a clear and strong message. A lot of changes are being observed in the trends of modern web design whether to design a responsive website or a standalone mobile website to offer their customers with an enhanced user experience.

 Web Development- Open Source Software

Secondly, if you want to take full control on your own website, then using an opensource content management system (CMS) like Magento or Drupal is the wise decision. It lets you add additional website pages, images, files and enabling features on the website is just a few clicks away. Beside these, It is even possible to build a CMS from scratch using the PHP programming language.

How can a CMS help you? Its typical features include: Text and Image Editing, Search Engine Optimization, User Management Forms, Subpage Creation, Third Party Integration, Banner management and many more.


Web Hosting for A Thorough Monitoring

Running an online store or a company website wants to spend time, money and effort on is server management and that's when fully managed hosting services comes to play. Monitoring  the server on a daily basis prevents any disruptions due to resource hungry websites. 

A few web hosting features include: Control panel software (cPanel), 24 / 7 down-time support, Periodic backups, Offsite backups to a different city, Industry standard configuration (LAMP), Unlimited sub-domains and parked domains, Scripting support – PHP 5.2.4, SSL, PERL, CGI

I hope this article has given you a better understanding of what web development services can offer and how they can be beneficial to you.

Friday 19 September 2014

Why Retailers Should Waste Money on Apple’s New Mobile Payment System

No. You shouldn’t waste money if it doesn’t worth for it. But the ongoing hot talk is, “if Apple Pay is a hit, ‘BYOD is dead.’”

Apple CEO Tim Cook was proud to reveal a frictionless reality that makes paying completely seamless unveiling the first step with Apple Pay. Building a payments business is HUGE RISK but then, why payments incumbents and innovators should take chance in installing this new terminals?

Summary: Technology Embarking the New Payment System


The prevailing opinion among analysts and experts in the payments industry is that Apple is turning a Smartphone into an in-store payment device. A crucial enabling wireless technology named Near Field Communication is used that will enable the chip in an iPhone to pass payment card data to a store terminal without needing for a shopper to swipe her card.

Close news from the provider of proximity marketing, loyalty and contactless payment technologies says, “This will ignite the mobile payments market globally, especially in the U.S. where adoption has lagged”.



How Apple Pay Works

Apple Pay can accept transactions through their iTunes credit card details or take a photograph of their card in order to add a credit card. The good news is that the payment information is not stored on the phone but only a 16-digit device identification number is combined with a one-time payment number with a dynamic security code for each payment whilst the consumer’s identity is verified using the Touch ID biometric fingerprint scanner.

The end result is that, Apple Sustains To Be The Secured Way To Pay With A Smartphone In Stores.

Other Benefits Include:

Backed by American Express, Visa and MasterCard and card-issuing banks Apple Pay is incorporated into the Apple Passbook mobile wallet for or 83% of credit card transactions.

NFC- that which mentioned earlier uses the iPhone’s Touch ID biometric fingerprint scanner and encryption to enable in-store payments by holding the iPhone close to a payment terminal.

Also, its finger print scanner let the owners to make purchases inside applications on the iPhone.

Howbeit, winding up, the consumer adoption of Apple Pay will depend on how easy it is to use and with insouciance- the merchants can sure start to commit!!!

Thursday 18 September 2014

Enhancing Estore Capabilities Using Magento Development

Millions of retailers all over the world have showed their interest to create highly functional and feature-rich eCommerce websites. Not only that they believe it’s their future but also considering worth the investment.

Known for its various rich- features, Magento module development stands out to be the most effective way to extend your business capabilities. Its extensive flexibility and scalability help merchants add dynamic features and functionalities to the front-end as well as back-end interface of the e-commerce sites. 

Here is how Magento Module Development helps to boost the functionality of your eCommerce store.
 

Magento Module development and integration is a way to boost the functionality of an ecommerce website as and when required by the business. Hence, it is highly essential for the owners to develop and integrate custom modules which enhance the functionality of an estore without compromising on the core functionalities.

Only professional Magento extension developers can deal with customization, development and integration services. Be it for back-end or front-end, the modules enhance the over-all functionality of an estore, right from admin, shipping, online payment gateways, marketing and promotional activities, order management, multi-store management etc.

While enabling pioneer features and designs to reflect the multi-store functionality, reliability and efficiency, it also helps to create a better shopping experience for the customers as it has the ability and capability to enhance your online store and make it more user-friendly.

Aside from all these, its incredible features like search engine optimization, intuitive admin interface and catalog management tools, potent marketing give retailers the power to create a customized online store that suit their unique business requirements.

It doesn’t matter if you want to develop social media modules or solid administration modules, it is wise to get the assistance of Magento experts and attain stunning modules that help boost your online presence.

Wednesday 17 September 2014

Here’s Why A Lot of Enterprises Making Waves to Joomla CMS

Joomla- as you all know, is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing websites of any type. With 2.7 percent of the Web is claiming to be Joomla-based sites, Joomla on a straight line would fall somewhere between WordPress and Drupal. 

Joomla Makes Strides in the Enterprise

Joomla can go beyond being the best CMS without the added pressure of being the most popular one. Small businesses like having access to thousands of add-ons that make it easy to extend basic website functionality which is why the enterprise is the big picture evolution for Joomla.

In this post we have outlined the reasons why Joomla reigns supreme and rightly sits atop for enterprises.

1. Joomla Has More Than 6000 Extensions

Joomla developers refer to as “extensions” which WordPress folk refer to as plugins. The latter one comprises 12,000+ plugins which is way too much and perhaps could overkill at times. There’s no need to add even more clutter to Joomla’s already beautiful templates making it easier to use.

2. It Doesn’t Cost You Much
Be it a small startup company or large industry, online business is a great way to success. And, choosing an open source platform rather than developing own proprietary web platform is not only idealistic but also cost effective. Using Joomla or any other CMS like Drupal or magento is simply purchased upon some commercial pancakes, subscription and add ons which reduces your cost by 200%.
 
3. You Don’t Need Technical Wizards To Deal With


What is the most important advantage of using Joomla CMS is that it doesn’t require any technical expertise to maintain the content delivery through your website. All it needs is a developer who is an expertise in customization and adds any complex web application. To make it ease, this solid CMS offer over 9000 ads and over 6000 built in themes from which you can choose one for your website.

4. You are Not Alone But With Large Community and Users

Joomla has been downloaded over 3 million and 2.7 % most popular websites brands like Pizza Hut and Kellogg’s have been developed through Joomla. Running small businesses who don’t want to invest their large sum on the web design and development can make an interactive web platform always require expertise.

Joomla is not just a CMS which is used to deliver article on blog or some images in your website but promise to create an impressive stuff.

Tuesday 16 September 2014

Wordpress 4.0 New Features and Benefits to Maximize Your Website Effectiveness


WordPress, over the years, has shown its willingness to constantly adapt to emerging trends to dominate the CMS market, and combat its alternatives by a wide margin. Recently, a large-scale update known as WordPress 4.0 includes over 250 improvements to the platform.

This article portrays why they’ll help you maximize the effectiveness of your websites.

Revamped Plugin Installation

As a matter of fact, the old plugin installation process was much more convoluted process neither functional. However, the developers have improvised the way that users find and install plugins in WordPress 4.0. Consider the importance of plugins when it comes to search engine optimization and branding so as to improvise the experiences of many users.

Embedded Media


WordPress 4 has got this new feature- an ability to easily embed content by copying a URL into a post through which the leading forms of embedded video ranging from YouTube to Hulu, and from TED Talks to College Humor.com thus streamlining it for our convenience.

User-Friendly Post Editor

Editing posts is now a more pleasant experience. Compose posts without scrolling that WordPress will reshape itself as per your browser specifications making the entire editing process more efficient. This feature is meant to be a subtle improvement that will have a positive impact on millions of WordPress users.

No Geographical Barrier

English is a language with millions of users all around the world and that’s why WordPress makes it a new installation languages. Besides, translations will be handled more effectively than ever before so that its growing user base will start appealing to an ever wider audience. Since the soaring WordPress user base means that improvements will continue to be rolled out for the foreseeable future.

Updating is not about getting new features that you don’t want but about protecting your site, your users, and the wider web from online criminals. WordPress 4.0 is a solid, if not spectacular release to improve the experience of hundreds and thousands of people and companies who use WordPress every day.

Monday 15 September 2014

Why Would Your Customers Backslide When it Comes To Mobile Shopping

Very recently, a global survey for etailoring happened which showed 40.3% of ecommerce site traffic in the UK is from Smartphone’s- yes, a phenomenal growth. And 60% of shoppers have clearly showed their interest to BUY it via their phones. However, they aren’t sure if they can- why is this repulsive still happening in the digital world has become a serious problem of the hour.

Growth of e-commerce - via iTunes, iBooks and the app stores via Apple's products were up 19% to $4.4 billion in Q1 2014. Some say, perhaps the tiny keyboards might cause difficulty to enter Credit Card, Billing and Shipping information which, as per Google, comments Smartphone shopping cart abandonment is at 97%. Some others say it’s because of the significant gap arising between what the market wants and what is provided by the eTailers.                 
                                                                       
Let’s see how to make mobile shopping experience a pleasant one:

One prominent solution is using trust-able payment gateways like PayPal, Authorize.net, Cyber Source, and Google Checkout which store your credit card number and process your payment after an authentication process.

Instead of over typing 150 characters on a tiny keyboard, letting customers to enter email address on the average 22 characters.

Usage of password of minimum 8 or 9 characters containing numbers, upper and lower case characters and a symbol- perhaps a safer and longer password.

Since Smartphone’s can become our digital identity, automatically authenticate us and make payments for us on our command.

Our phones know who we are and it always requires a feature to authenticate us. If they have such capability to remember our credit cards and shipping addresses in our hands, why are we being asked to type 150 characters on tiny keyboards every time we buy something? Apple is simultaneously building a mobile retail marketing infrastructure across the U.S. Like I said, mobile shopping carts are to become a lot bigger business than wristwatches ever will be.

Thursday 11 September 2014

How Important To Count on SEO When Developing an E-Commerce Site


A great deal of importance should be put into considering search engine optimization for a business site, especially in an ecommerce shopping cart where competitors are pretty a million. As is obvious, it determines the overall ranking of an ecommerce site on various search engines.

Compared to the ordinary content sites, SEO keywords will lead customers to their site with ease. Those who develop the sites should make a point of having the objectives well defined to get your website ranked highly.

How SEO Impacts Ecommerce

Designing an ecommerce website should be in such a way that they are easily perusable and well organized. Only then it supports SEO practices to enhance clarity for everyone who comes into contact with the pages. If you wanted to obtain maximum functionality, it is vital to consider things such as Classic ASP Ecommerce and SEO Friendly ASP.Net Ecommerce during the development stage itself.

Aside from the pages being designed with usability in mind, the shopping carts are to be added to the site. This provides the pages a well organized and designed look that suits the purpose- right SEO-friendly ecommerce site. 

 SEO To Drive Major Traffic for The Ecommerce Website

Ecommerce is gaining popularity worldwide as businesses willing to make sales easily over the internet. Always make a point of getting the right site developers who will provide the necessary services if the business cannot manage to develop the site itself. Only those with the skill and knowledge of how to develop the site will give the business what it needs the most in terms of improving search engine traffic.

This is the takeaway: Google reports that 97% of consumers search for local businesses online. Make sure you’re taking advantage of tools they offer like local listings and G+ for business for a great SEO.

Tuesday 9 September 2014

5 Fatal Mistakes to Avoid in Drupal Website


Using any Content Management System (CMS) software, in first place, there is no silver bullet for creating a site that can fully survive an upgrade with no developer assistance needed. It’s the same for Drupal website as well.

This is why certain things to be taken care of when planning a Drupal website development project that can save maintenance time down the road.
  

Mistake#5: Keeping Extraneous File In The VSC Repository.

Image asset files, holiday pictures, or database dumps are generally pushed to the repository which is very unhealthy practice. Try to keep the VCS as clean and small as
possible

Mistake#4: Missing Out Of Date Development And Staging Environments.

Say for instance, developers conduct testing only in production because the other environments have old data or no connection to an external service. Ensure to maintain testing environments as similar to production as possible. This way you can easily copy from production and execute tests to assure that changes will work when moved to production.

Mistake#3: Out-Of-Date Code For Core And Contributed Modules.
At times, businesses prefer out of date code thinking to save some money. But keeping all modules and core as current as possible saves you in a long run.

Mistake#2: The Thought- Repair Better Than Maintenance

As a matter of fact, Drupal is a well-architected CMS that will continue to perform for a long time. However, keeping things up to date ensures a good experience for your visitors. If unnoticed, chances are there for site to get hacked which is much more costly

Mistake#1: Less Security During Deployment

Any developer can take a snapshot of production to install on their laptop which means anybody can misuse it. Allow developers to take snapshots and have other access to development and staging environments without giving access to the production environment only for the most trusted users.

Summing up, Keep your code under version control and review all logs periodically, including Apache, Drupal, and MySQL.

Friday 5 September 2014

5 Shortcuts to Better Fraud Protection for Online Store



It is been evident that small businesses do not use enough fraud-prevention measures for the cause of cost-prohibitive. Yes, developing a risk management infrastructure is complicated and nuanced to meet today’s savvy and, technologically advanced fraudster.

Here are a few key practices merchants of all sizes can put in place to better identify fraud and prevent charge-back. 

 
Address Verification Service (AVS)

One of the best strategies to evaluate the validity of an order is using AVS data in conjunction with IP address, or other data points. How does this work? An IP address that is geographically close to the AVS address could be a sign that the order is valid. Not to deny, AVS matches can sometimes be misleading but essentially a full AVS match with a different shipping address is essentially meaningless.

Data Linking

A recent study confirms that “Big Data” is the best way to combat online fraud. This is why linking data is vital to protect a shopping cart. To brief it, it’s a simple method that can provide valuable insights about a customer’s order pattern and help you notice negative indicators: changing credit cards, order velocity, machine ID, and IP addresses that may have been used with other customer IDs.

Proxy Detection

Proxy detection is a very important first step in evaluating an order for fraud and such services are the most accurate way to detect a proxy. If you don’t plan to use such a service, simply doing a web search for IP address alongside keywords, such as “proxy,” will allow you to see if it is a current proxy on any public warning lists.

Geo Location

Geo location is a second data point that helps identify fraud. The endpoint of an IP address can tell you the location of the customer placing the order. Amidst the many free online services that can identify IP location, using it in conjunction with other data points like shipping or billing addresses and AVS results is preferable.

Hire an Expert

Hiring a third party expert can save you a lot of time and money. There are even a number of tools in the Magento app store, doesn’t matter whatever the size of your business or budget be.

As a whole, implementing these tips will help you protect your store against chargebacks and fraud.

Thursday 4 September 2014

Why Opt For Open-Source CMS than Something Proprietary

Launching a new website is an intensive process, starting from choosing a design scheme and layout to crafting the content that fills the site’s pages. With little experience in creating and maintaining an online destination, the idea of content management system often appears overwhelming and complex. But then these innovative resources are actually one of the most valuable tools available to would-be site managers.

To justify an open-source CMS to be a seamless fit for most webmasters, here we represent the 3 unique advantages of the same for content creation and designing.

Assures Intuitive User Experience

One of the BIG responsibilities for professional web designers and developers is to creating an appealing website. At times, what happen is that small business owners who keep a site updated with new information find it hard to change the various elements that compose them.

An open-source CMS like WordPress and Joomla, on the other hand, don’t present the same challenge but are utilized by innumerable groups across the globe.

Plays Cost-Efficiency Game Well

Unlike closed platforms, an open-source product is created and maintained by an independent group of developers. They don’t carry an exorbitant price tag but have deployed and customized for a fraction of the cost of a proprietary system. Also, the grassroots development teams behind these open-source products continually release new updates to the bones of the CMS infrastructure. This ensures complete security.
No Worries about Flexibility and Compatibility

Within the realm of digital content creation, the continual advancement is an undeniable boon for web developers. Web designers have a vast arsenal of solutions from coding languages to dynamic plug-ins, available to them.

Whereas proprietary management platform supports a limited number of these resources which resulting as a massive headache.

Let’s say this way. An open-source CMS can be customized to fit nearly any website need because of which much number of sites is taking advantage of it.

6 Ethical Ideas to Improve Your Online Business Productivity

If you're running an e-commerce operation, it’s obvious you need to get customers on your website in the first place. And how much does it cost you- A LOT.
Owing to which, successful entrepreneurs are here sharing a few advice for generating high-quality, organic search traffic to their business websites.

Producing Quality Online Content

The more experience you are in creating quality content, the higher chances you have to pop up in search results. Starting a blog or churning out a bunch of articles and keeping those activities going for years as opposed to months makes a huge difference.

Link Building

Ask vendors, partners, and clients that you interact with to embed hyperlinked keywords back to your site. If the referring source has a high page rank, then it won’t be any difficulties in reaching the desired ranks.

Add Amazing Value to Your Readers

Content marketing through blogging or guest posts is the fastest way to build great traffic. Therefore, when it comes to content don’t ever compensate on quality. If you haven’t, then you really need to look at your content strategy again.

SEO as an Opportunity to Create Value

You want Google to deem your content search-worthy? Make it valuable. Visitors are more likely to share content and will stay on your site longer while bloggers and the media might use your site as a reference. This enhances more organic links.



Create a Company Blog

Instead of overwriting on your homepage and various other landing pages, initiate a separate blog for additional SEO work. The popular more search terms within your niche, the more organic leads will be generated. The blog will increase your visibility.




Don’t Underestimate Google

To increase organic search traffic it is not a good strategy for the long haul. Check the Google Keyword Tool to make sure you're using the correct terminology that the general public is using when they're searching.

The 3 Myths Stories of .Net Application Development


With the advancement in technology, no surprises there are n number of web development platforms coming up. Howbeit, .net application development is on the go offering a whole host of benefits to businesses as well as the developers.

ASP.Net is a server side web application framework marvellously designed to build dynamic web applications that run on the World Wide Web. Commonly known as Active Server Pages, it provides a well-structured model for the developers to build enterprise-class web applications.

However, there are many rumours and ignorance’s. Let’s see.

Misconception#1 Untrustworthy and Complicated

Microsoft- the world’s software leader is very particular about its products source code. So, naturally one might consider ASP.Net is a closed source and very complicated.

Did you know? The source code of .net framework is available for free and you can easily access the resource for developing your own application. Most importantly, it is absolutely possible to even create your own version. This isn’t. Microsoft offers ample access to the source code of the ASP.Net releases such as MVC, Web Forms and more through CodePlex.

Misconception#2 You Can’t Afford It

Many developers consider this is not preferable because it’s quite expensive as compared to the other platforms. I’m sorry.

When talking about the cost, it is important to know that the cost of development depends on numerous factors such as hosting as Window-based hosting is not so cheap. Hosting asp.net web applications is based on the popularity of the hosting services available and not the platform itself.

Misconception#3 .Net Is Meant For BIG SHOTS

There is this rumour prevailing that Asp.net is not suitable for building small business websites but is feasible for creating only huge websites.

Microsoft offers a class library in the .Net framework to create different business solutions. It has also released Web Matrix to help developers to create any kind of website in an easier and user-friendly way. Means, this framework is highly flexible to create small websites to fit according to your business needs.

Now, you get why more enterprises prefer dot net application development over others.

Monday 1 September 2014

5 Crucial Mobile Web Design Mistakes That Will Dump Your Sales



Mobile websites are a very useful place to connect with your audience but with a great deal of responsibility. When we say so, it eventually means that it is the easiest place for marketers to make massive mistakes that will turn off a customer, too.

Here’s what you should be looking out for and what you can learn from those who have come before you:


Keeping Mobile Separate

Designing a “mobile site” is a trend, yes. But the problem is now that you have a separate site to maintain, content duplication is highly visible for the search engines to see. This is why your web design platform should be able to determine the type of device that your site is being viewed on and deliver the appropriate version.

Mobile Site vs. Responsive Design

Most often, a 'mobile site' is confused with a 'responsive site'. While the former one is actually a spate version of your actual website, the latter one adapts to the screen size of your website providing the same look regardless of how it's accessed.

Clickable Links are Too Close To Each Other

Touch screens are for control and navigation. Bearing this in mind, users’ fingers being a typical tool for navigation, consider clickable objects or targets in 30-40 pixels in size for ease of touch.

Third Party Management

Instead of creating a “mobile site” with a third-party who provides you mobile site on a separate domain and put your content in an easy-to-use mobile format but it’s still useless without buying the site. Having a mobile site managed by a third party is just a terrible idea.

Poor Forms

To fill out a form on a mobile device can be incredibly frustrating. Majority of us are turned-off by long, over-complicated, poorly labelled or generally badly designed forms. Make sure you only ask for details that triggers a call to action.

Create a simple and cost effective mobile website. See what percent of your visits are coming from mobile web browsers? Was your web site designed with mobile compatibility in mind?


When Can You Choose Joomla Over WordPress



The world of Content Management Systems is in serious competition which is why, a lot of businesses brain storm to end up choosing Joomla rather than other leading open-source CMS systems like Drupal and WordPress. 

This article shall give you a few reasons to why?

Deciding Between The Two Great Choices

A competition that was performed between these CMS’s teams competed to build a community website with the same requirements.  Here are the results


·    Total Hours Worked: Joomla takes almost 57 hours based on your requirements while Wordpress takes 90 hours.

·    HTML Validation: With proper joomla training, all you need is HTML / CSS to turn any psd to Joomla. But Wordpress doesn’t.

·    Page Weight: Joomla CMs shows 140K whereas Wordpress shows 154K

These are the basics and there are a few more reasons to let you choose Joomla for website development.

·         Depending on the size, most designers will handle your WordPress site design for less than $500. However, this doesn’t fulfil all your business needs. Rather, if you choose a designer capable of using Joomla, yes he might charge $1,000 but get your work done with no errors.

·         Even in first look, Joomla looks much different and from the first glance its organizational superiority can be seen. Its articles are categorized supporting a new menu easily from the backend and whatever content you have on your Joomla website you can easily choose the certain page where you want it to appear.

·         Joomla comes with a steep learning curve than WordPress. And, if you’re trying to manage thousands of articles on your blog or website, Joomla does provide some options to make it easier.

As a bottom line, Joomla will be the better choice as it fits in most of the areas.