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.

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.

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.

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!!!