4 Fool-Proof Trends for Your Web Application Design

Web application development is ever-changing as we enhance a user-friendliness, beautiful, fastness, and extremely useful for the end user. Driven by trends, here is what one should consider before coding yourself into irrelevance.

1. Data Probability

Internet being the classic walled gardens of the web, since the inception of Web 2.0 development, developers have made a  been a gradual shift toward portability and many of the once guilty parties are taking steps to enable you to take your data with you wherever you choose. When Facebook got hip to data portability, this became a true trend considering a death knell to any web app hoping to make a buck while keeping user data proprietary.

2. Preparing for HTML5

If you're not preparing for HTML5, then you are sure to be obsolescence. With many features like Video playback, geolocation, drag-and-drop media and more make many of the oldest bastions of web plugins redundant- this is the future of web. Even the World Wide Web Consortium ratifies the HTML5 standard makes way for talk of Web 3.0.

3. Flat Web Design

The look of web applications is changing with respect to people wanted text with shadows, the 3D effects and elaborate fonts and design elements. One of the important aspects of using this is because it helps users scan a page and quickly find what they need without the interruption of design elements getting in the way. More the “flat” design used, the looks getting cleaner, lines being bolder and the colours richer.

4. Focus More Mobile Functionality

With time, web apps and mobile apps are becoming indistinguishable from one another with a click to installation on to your Android or iOS device. But some of the best mobile implementations have avoided coding unique apps and focused on the mobile functionality of their web apps.

All the above mentioned trends help keep visitors on a web page longer because they’re curious and it’s a novelty.

10 Best Practices to Design a Better Mobile Checkout

The US market saw an 81% spike in mobile ecommerce sales in 2012, comprising a $25 billion market and the numbers keep growing with years. This rate has influenced retailers to fuel by creating seamless, user-friendly checkout processes that inspire trust and that make full use of all of the advantages the medium has to offer. 

This post compiles 10 best practices for mobile checkout and how it really helps both business as well as the customers.

1. One Cohesive Page with covered Essentials: A responsive mobile checkout process succeeds by reducing the fields to the bare essentials, condensing the entire process into one cohesive page.

2. Provide An Option To Check Out As A Guest: This should be one of the standard practices across media but sadly 24% of ecommerce websites don’t. By removing the “Register” button a user is more likely to complete an order.

3. Mobile UI Elements: Instead of a user being prompted to select quantities using a typical drop-down menu, a responsive design prompts to update quantities using increment selectors- a speedy way.

4. Content Shouldn’t Be a Distraction:  A content-rich checkout page might seem like a good idea but they aren’t. But then, never neglect content part for answering about shipping guidelines, delivery, terms and conditions and more.

5. Watch the Loading Speed: Your mobile website needs to be light weighted and not to take more than five seconds to load.

6. Progress Bars Alleviate Anxiety: Although many implementations leave much to be desired the majority of major e-tailors show a progress bar until they are done.

7. Security Reassurances- A Biggest Reservation: Designers needn’t be subtle when it comes to security. Using iconography, SSL certificates and dedicated callouts in copy resolves this.

8. Checkout via Payment Gateways: Rather than fumbling through checkout forms, use a trusted service such as Google Wallet, PayPal and Amazon to get users two taps away from completing their payment.

9. Use Geolocation and One-Touch Calling: Through these, Google will automatically retrieve the nearest location and provide directions to make an in-store purchase successfully.

10. Don’t Neglect Mobile Testing: Though it is difficult and time-intensive, this would make sense to choose between a native app/website, cross-browser experience, and a native aesthetic.

The promise of mCommerce is assured but only with retailers offering a clear, focused, streamlined and lightweight path to making their purchase.

70% Customers Of Online Shoppers Walk-Off Without Buying- Guess Why?

A recent study say, one of the biggest reasons why shoppers leave an online store without buying isn’t because of price. Perhaps, you don’t get what they really want. It is not one or two but many features that assure a GENUINE seal.

Where Do We Start?

It is said increasing sales and conversions means increasing traffic volumes, which fails in this digital era. Getting visitors to your online store is really only the first step in the conversion process.

The more you evaluate and optimize your entire shopping experience before implementing and optimizing promotions, starting from server performance to site design to product descriptions to checkout can have a tremendous impact on conversion rates.

Help Your Customers Find What They’re Looking For

Two easy ways to help your customers find the right products:

• Search: one of the best ways you can increase your conversion rate is improving your product search. Your search bar should be large enough so that it’s easily visible.

• Faceted Search: This help customer narrow their searches according to various products attributes, including category, size, color, etc

Merchandise and Sell That Product

There are three simply steps to achieve this

• Using quality images featuring zooming, detail views, and even video to give customers numerous ways to view the product

• Canned or pre-written product descriptions.

• Tailor product descriptions to your specific target audience.

Never Underestimate a Fast Loading Site

Shopping experience goes for nothing because of pages that are slow to load. It’s found nearly 25% of online shoppers abandon a page after 2 to 6 seconds of wait time.

• Enable caching (including query and full-page caching)

• Clean up any inactive CMS pages and remove out-of date promotions and products

• Limit the number of concurrent promotions, and disable any functionality if kept unused

Ensure Mobile Friendliness

If your customers are waiting for image-heavy pages to load or struggling to view pages optimized for desktop or laptop screens, count that person is no more your fan. Images should be optimized for mobile so that they load quickly

• One way to optimize your site for mobile is to automatically detect mobile browsers and display a mobile-optimized version of your site.

• Another solution is to create a separate mobile app for your store that helps customers locate products more quickly, without affecting the speedy payment and checkout.

Want to maximise your success? Magento Enterprise Edition gives you the tools you need to take complete control of your online channel.

Why Online Business Owners Say Yes To Open Source

If you decide to build an online store for your business, it's very important to be clear about your objectives from the start and strategize around them.

So, in this post we shall discuss on various reasons that insist retailers to consider Open Source Web Development seriously.

Keeps Costs Down
 
No matter what size the organization is, cost savings is a big part of open source's allure. Be it using Drupal for Website Development or Magento for shopping carts, Enterprises have always customized packaged software such as ERP applications but then, now ”Nail It: open source customization is less expensive”.


Helps In Dynamic Presentation

Using open source products in website development helps the developers at great extent.

• Encourages the dynamic presentation of the content as well as modification and integration of new features to the websites

• Using open source frameworks like Magento for Ecommerce Website Development makes it more interactive, and offers great user interface, strong administrative rights and smooth functionality.

• Its adaptability factor provides innovative products allowing business environment and developers to enjoy more flexibility.

Improves Quality

If code is flawed, the developer community can identify and address the problem quickly. Considering banking sectors, it integrates open-source components into custom-developed applications on a regular basis ensuring that they're appropriate for use within the bank's development environment.

Delivers Business Agility

Business agility is the ability to react to marketplace demands quickly. And, Open source provides this to web developers and businesses alike by speeding up the pace of software development. Say for instance, companies that use open software code aren't tied to vendors' timelines for commercial application upgrades. This is one reason why healthcare providers are increasingly involved in web application development that it's now serving customers who have higher expectations for frequent updates.