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.

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.

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.

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.