Determining When Responsive Web Design Is a Good Idea: A Few Harsh Truths

With increasing web traffic on mobile phones and tablets, most of the firms have come to the point to optimize their online business sites to almost all devices, browsers, and screen resolutions. Well, thanks to the great idea of responsive design but again optimizing for the mobile Web isn't a simple task.

Before you get to step in, understanding RWD's simplicity and convolution will help you decide when to leverage it to meet their customers' mobile needs.

Pros for Using RWD

• RWD website from an adaptive site, using which it is possible to build one website with different implementations for different devices.

• Includes a single code base thus makes it developer’s desire.

• Reduced maintenance time and

• A single device-agnostic URL structure which doesn’t requires two or more domain names as used for mobile website.

Here, The Question Of The Hour Is When Should You Pull The Trigger On Going RWD?

Here Are 5 Strategies To Help You Make That Decision.

1. Greater the number of different presentation venues, more chances for RWD arguments.

2. The cost factor may be an issue if it eliminates the need for a company to build different sites for desktop, tablet portrait, mobile portrait and mobile landscape, etc.

3. How many unique page formats are there? If to reuse templates and other components- RWD certainly aggravate.

4. Top notch skill sets for HTML, CSS and JavaScript are required.

5. In case your project’s life span is short, it might not be worth the time and cost.

The sum of your answers shall determine where your project falls on the scale between standalone mobile site and responsive site. Responsive web design is a good step not only to the device of the visitor but a call-to-action for all designers out there. Aside from responding to the device or the browser of the end-user, a true design means responding to the end-users.

How to Regulate the Rising Security Risks for Online Shopping

Some of the most successful elements of an ecommerce website in general are: displaying clear product information with pictures, to offer multiple payment options, to include postage & GST in purchase price, proper customer support, and most importantly a secure platform.

People look for trust and integrity, besides the first impression. And, for this very reason website development companies have surpassed mainstream security measures set in place to properly regulate online commerce and prevent consumer identity fraud. 


Fundamental Security Tips in the E-Commerce World

1. Share Only That Is Required

• Sellers need to create online checkout forms but including highly sensitive personal information such as social security or driver's license numbers are irrelevant.

• If you have a digital wallet app, sharing without taking basic precautions is just asking for a problem down the road.

• No all shared Wi-Fi networks are safe for your sensitive data.

2. Verify Urls For Secure Connections

Many fail to check URLs for "https" security when making transactions online, especially when making purchases on the mobile Web. Though it can thrive off ease-of-use and convenience, ensure to take time to check the URL.

3. Ensure You Transact With Legitimate Sites

Aside from checking the URL for validity, there is a simple two-step process to ensure authenticity.

• Firstly, check the shopping cart site has a valid "About us" or "Contact us" page with contact information listed.

• Secondly, confirm the company has some type of social media presence. Fraudulent sites are likely to show up in Google results with consumer complaints, BBB warnings, or other scam indications.

4. Protect Your One Online Identity

No matter how cautious you are in the ecommerce sphere, having a Facebook account for instance can be the best way to protect yourself to monitor your online identity actively. With 50 % of Web sales projected to occur via social media by 2015 your social media presence defines your digital footprint to the point to combat online payment fraud in the near future.

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.

How Bold Enough Are You When Branding Your Website?

This question sometimes shakes everybody. Website design is daunting as it requires a lot of efforts to stand apart from others. How much ever hard you try, there is one thing that could possibly be missing from a website crafted by a developer? - Your brand.

When it comes to your branding, only you will be evident throughout the pages on your site? Compiled here are some undeniable truths about branding your website:

LOGO + WEBDESIGN = IDENTIFYING MARK

While it is obvious that your logo is the face of your company, it should never be the sole identifying factor. Even before an audience has been properly conditioned a logo will do its job immediately. Your audience need to catch hold of your brand the moment they arrive on your home page, starting from the colors used to the content you share. Plan your website design around that brand strategy.

The Question Of The Hour Is: will your visitors know what you selling, how you selling it, more importantly, why you sell it?

Static Websites Never Grow

When designing a website, make sure it turns out to be a dynamic one with a great content that tells your brand story. Stories need to be posted occasionally in the form of frequent blog posts, landing pages for lead generation, and even videos and images that share your products and company culture.

Aside from content gearing up the interest of your buyers and solidify your brand message it also helps you with search engine rankings.

First Impression Happens Only Once and You Need to Win That

Potential customers will determine the worth of you website in their first impressions itself. Believe it or not, 80% of US consumers have admitted to leave the shopping cart if doesn’t load in 5 seconds. Elegant design can get these standards across to your buyers to see if your company’s purpose and value fulfilled immediately.

If you’re not sure of your brand standards, take website design and development slowly and be meticulous. “Your Each Word Can Spell The Magic Of Your Brand Story”

What Type of PHP Application Is Good For Your Enterprise

Mostly, businesses and developers of the most successful applications and services use a rigorous performance testing and optimization process to choose the right instance type(s) for their application.

It’s nowhere a surprise if you have already heard PHP is one of the hotly pursued platforms out there. Those software development enterprises who haven’t adopted it yet are grappling with the temptation of introducing this technology.

Different Types of PHP Applications and What Suits you the Best

PHP facilitates creating a myriad of software applications perched in an ideal zone of top-notch quality and complete control.

The Desktop Applications

Having been in the loop from times immemorial now, these windows-based applications help in more user-friendly operation of the computers and enable the users to perform certain tasks on their systems with more ease and speed. These applications are mostly free of cost, and it’s not hard to locate them on the Internet.

Web Based Applications

Creating web applications that do not let the issues of compatibility crop up and render your efforts fruitless is a speculative. PHP development is supported by several browsers and operating systems and for the record the various libraries and scripts let the applications personified by quality and responsiveness. Hire a reliable PHP Developers to help you achieve this.
 

Java Applets in PHP Scripts

So far in the popularity of applets, it has enhanced by PHP scripts ensuring to add a lot of dimension to the interactive-levels of a web page. There are a few applets so immaculately developed that nothing enters their frame that is not designed to be there. There are even the small program bits rather known as Java byte code can be deployed to the end user without any fuss at all.
 

PHP-Based Mobile Application

Zend recommends using HTML5 and JavaScript as your primary mobile technology. People expect mobile apps to be updated all the time and agile development aids to be very scalable. As a matter of fact, organizations need to take that trend into consideration as they develop mobile apps.

Running business-critical PHP applications in the cloud is trending but need to efficiently deploy and manage them.

What Brings Responsive Design to a Great Investment Factor?

There has been an explosion in the use of responsive web design when developing any website that use one base of code and one base of content that are optimized for the devices they are displayed on. In this age of burgeoning smartphones and tablets, the value of this technique is increasing in proportion adapting to changing user behavior. Let’s have a few reasons compiled here to why a online business lead should invest in responsive design?

Google Recommends

Google owns more than 70 percent of the search engine market share and they are telling us that responsive Web design is the industry’s best practice. Not only that it allows search engines to crawl faster and easier but also to indexes multiple versions of the same website.

The Most Cost Effective Option

Regardless of the device you can contact your designer/developer to fix any issue across all platforms. Can you ever imagine another method to ensure a website that works beautifully across multiple device platforms with less maintenance costs?

Good for SEO Efforts And Social Sharing

Not only that it is cost effective but the combination of all traffic into one domain results in one site with larger traffic. This increases search engine appeal which theoretically improves its ranking to be applied across all versions of your site in one unified process.

Easy To Focus Target Audience
As a matter of fact, every website is developed for some targeted group. Adopting to responsive website design and UX remains paramount which means a visitor surfing from their laptop, tablet, and mobile will have the same great feeling every time. Incompetent user experience!

CMS Platforms Support

Millions of websites are hosted on Content Management System like Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress which you might be already aware of. And, these CMSs have extended their support to responsive factor as mobile computing is going to be the integral part of Consumer level UX.

In a nutshell, Responsive is the future…and present of Web Design.

The 3 Newest Drupal Modules That Every Business Should Give a Try

Drupal- one of the best content management systems has a lot of really cool modules to develop stellar sites for clients, worldwide. It has been a core competency among popular web development companies, USA and remains a cornerstone of development, design and consulting efforts to this day. Guaranteed for security, scalability, modularity and, most notably, rich features, it helps you built high-performance site far beyond your expectation.

In this post, we've compiled this list of three newest modules that we have found particularly helpful, and to help ensure that they don't fall through the cracks.

3 New Drupal Modules That You Must Use

Vimeo Video Uploader:

This is the best module in case you website requires to host videos. Known for its stand-alone capability, this module integrates with your site so easily. While it lets you upload videos from your site to Vimeo, it makes your video publish the workflow a little bit smoother.

 
Slick Carousel:

A simple, lightweight module yet very powerful- this is what we say when talking about carousel. Known for it’s fully responsive and swipe enabled features it lets you save some development work. Slick Carousel works with or without Views integration!

 
Role Export:

This module has been around for a few of years now. In a nutshell, Role Export allows roles to have a machine name which can be used to generate a unique role id. When working with different developers in a project, this is handy during development. Plus, it let you have a unique id different from other developers to ensure effectiveness. With it, there is no way for conflicts when multiple developers export role configuration.
  
If you need experts at anything Drupal, hire only those who can work with you to shape the right engagement model, delivery method and custom solution to meet your unique needs besides providing an open communication line, anytime.