Drupal Vs. Joomla- Which One Is The Best For Online Business

Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are the 3 most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) online. Though WordPress is basically the best suit for blogs all these three are open source and built on PHP + MySQL.

Comparing Joomla and Drupal, they vary significantly in terms of features, capability, flexibility and ease of use. This post will showcase some of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these CMS solutions to help you make a better decision.

Drupal: Pros And Cons

Drupal is considered the developer-friendly CMS and therefore data-intensive websites like Whitehouse.gov and Data.gov.uk makes it a popular choice.

Advantages

Extreme Flexibility: From simple blog site to a powerful backend that can support hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of users every month- well, Drupal can handle that. The software is all powerful and flexible.

Strong SEO Capabilities: Designed from the ground-up to be search engine friendly.

Enterprise Friendly: no wonder, as it can handle hundreds of thousands of pages of content with ease make Drupal the choice for enterprise customers.

Disadvantages

Lack of Free Plugins: In Drupal, we name them ‘modules ‘because of its enterprise-first roots and most of them are not free.

Joomla: Pros And Cons

Joomla is one of the most popular CMS solutions in the world and boasts over 30m downloads to date.

Advantages

User-Friendly: Joomla isn’t WordPress but relatively easy to use- UI polished, flexible and powerful.

Strong Developer Community: With a ton of free to use, open source plug-in library called ‘extensions’ Joomla has a strong developer community.

Content Management Capabilities: Originally designed as an enterprise-grade CMS, it’s far more capable at handling a large volume of articles.

Disadvantages Of Joomla

Learning Involved: Hoping in and installing Joomla doesn’t work if you’re not familiar with the software. It requires a steep learning curve.

Drupal is recommended for large projects where stability, scalability and power are prioritized over aesthetics. Joomla lets you to build a website with more structural stability and fairly intuitive interface. The latter one is a good option for small to mid-tier e-commerce stores but if you require more powerful for enterprise use, consider Drupal.

How Can You Extend Your Ecommerce Development Services, Globally

One of the benefits of running an ecommerce business is the ability to reach new customer bases but unfortunately most of us don’t reach a large number of clients with limited resources alone.

However, ecommerce business owners must first assess their product or service to ensure it's a good fit for global customers. Besides, their product or service must be something that translates well to other cultures. If you are one who are looking to expand internationally, six ways to achieve a successful launch.

Steps To Take Your E-Commerce Business In Various Regions

G-Localizing: Adapting your global marketing strategy to target each local market isn’t as simple as applying an existing strategy to new regions. This requires on re-thinking on shopping experience strategy for each local market and adapts their approach to accommodate regional expectations. This help you build the credibility and brand trust needed to succeed on a global scale.

Designing A Scalable E-Commerce Infrastructure
This generally involves a step-by-step e-commerce rollout which will be much easier to accomplish at every stage. One way is to find a cloud-based infrastructure and secured methodologies that are designed to make expansion quick and easy. The more flexible it is more easier is to develop your ecommerce website.

Creating A Regional Rollout Plan

A replicable approach is required to adapt to each market, starting from a comprehensive plan that can be used to create a local sales presence makes it broad enough to to each region targeted for expansion. The plan should also identify the market characteristics and customer preferences that will be included in the "globalization" plan.

Developing A Pricing And Tax-Compliance Strategy

Local tax-collection regulations must be followed to have an accounting infrastructure in place. Besides attending to the tax issue, the prices need to reflect local market realities that should need to be displayed in the local currency.

There is no doubt that innumerable businessmen have reaped its benefits. And if you want to stand out among competitors, hire a web development company that serves with quality CMS development service. It simply means that this tool is simple and consumes less time than any traditional ways.

3 Terrible Blockages When Creating A Responsive Web Design

Gone are the days when mobile website was an optional for growing in online business but now- it is a compulsion. Well, as many designers are turning to responsive web design, the fact that it is much more complex than a standard site or a dedicated mobile site is undeniable.

In order to ensure that the site is properly optimized regardless of the device, listed below are the 3 major obstacles that designers face and some tips on how to overcome them.

Website Loading Time

The main objective behind responsive websites is to provide convenience for mobile users. Yet many of which fails. A recent study tested over 300 sites and found that regardless of the site being tested, the page size and load time results were nearly the same. All you need to do is:

• Avoid using larger Image Files and Videos

• Avoid using JavaScript as it is usually the largest asset on a web page.

• Use of unnecessary Links and personal comment icons

• Ads and Social Media Pop-Ups

• Including too many Widgets

Over-Resourcing

Responsive web designs rely on multiple image sizes and CSS scripts in order to get a customized layout matching varied screen sizes. At times, this might leverage a user to download all the images which is not required.

This is when you should use conditional loading. If you want your web design to run on desktops as well as a dedicated mobile website, double and triple check the coding to ensure that it’s fully optimized and running smoothly.

Poor User Interface

Even though your eCommerce website functions well on desktops, it needn’t be mobile friendly. Don’t only think about aesthetics when creating a mobile web design but rather consider the differences between user needs when visiting your site from different places.

Above all these, get to know your customer’s feedback on what they want to do on a mobile device vs. their desktop, and make sure your responsive design meet those needs.

With Magento GO Shutting Down – What’s Up For Small Businesses

Aimed at offering support to small enterprises Magento Go is a cloud-based e-commerce initiative that focuses on the use of built-in modules and additional extensions. However, the sad news is that the Magento Go is going to shut down for good and only full customer support will be provided to all businesses till Feb 1st 2015.

So, what’s next? This is a sceptical situation for most of us who are being affected. For clients looking to stay on the Magento platform but upon more power and flexibility, then you might be tempted two powerful ecommerce platforms:

• Magento Community and

• Magento Enterprise

Community Edition: An open source ecommerce platform that supports outstanding mobility, functions and outcomes, suitably for small to medium businesses.

Enterprise Edition: This is a vibrant annually paid eCommerce solution mainly favorable for large enterprises

Migrating To Magento

Migrating to these platforms entirely depend on your store size with an existing database and site usage. Both editions comprise a few dominant benefits with a variety of features and adaptable solutions such as modules, themes and customer support in an advanced manner. Another important aspect of migrating between Magento versions is that you won’t lose any content due to the data being re-mapped. All of the fields available can be set up within Community. There are a number of things to remember when you’re looking to move your site from Go to Community. Thanks to ‘Magento Community’ equipped with sufficient flexibility, customizability and scalability making way for us to migrate to better, improved and feature-rich platform for ecommerce website.

Be it any versions, both of these require to deal with some technical aspects and that’s why working closely with an ecommerce development company means that we can take the headache out of the transition.

How Does A Website Portal Differ From An Ordinary Website?

When it comes to running an Internet business, the term portal and website, at times are used interchangeably. However there is a difference between the two.

What’s A Website?

Hosted on at least one web server, a website is a collection of related web pages that consists of images, videos or other digital assets conveying products and services.

Typically a web page is a document written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML) incorporating elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors. The information is usually general and intended for a wider audience.

What’s A Website Portal?

A portal describes a well-defined website that acts as an entry point or gateway to an array of services. It has a wide range of resources including search facility, directory of other sites, news, e-mail and lot more. One of the most popular examples is Yahoo. In general,   it is referred to a form of content management system such as PHPNuke for Ecommerce Portal Development.


A Sneak-Through Of A Website Portal
• Built in user functions and a fantastic ability for users to customize their own experience

• Builds heavily upon the dynamic nature of a normal website

• Displays all the content in one place while information is usually dispersed across a website

• Uses a consistent framework for presenting the information in a standard way

Well, the conclusion is simple. If you really need many of Portal features then go for web portal development product available at affordable cost. Thus a portal is a complete environment for managing and integrating a large number of diverse applications and user repositories across an enterprise wide system. Openwave has exert web portal developers qualified in different programming languages like ASP, ASP.Net, ColdFusion, Python, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Flex, SharePoint, Silverlight and CGI.

Planning Your Mobile E-Commerce Website? Watch For Design Factors

In USA average consumer spends about 15 hours a week looking for products on Smartphone or tablet of which 40% of them do shopping. So no wonder, mobile ecommerce has taken an important role gradually becoming one of the major sales tools for multichannel stores.

Ecommerce website design with mobile capabilities greatly affects shopping cart functionality. Before you decide which technology to adopt for your mobile ecommerce shopping cart, here are the basic insightful feeds for high conversion rates.

Design Factors In Mobile Ecommerce For High Conversion Rates

Responsive Layout

Whilst gaining popularity among iPhone, iPad, and Android OS, this ecommerce web development technology can change the attitude of your consumer towards online shopping.

Creating a responsive site means defiled to three characteristics:

1. A single URL to browse all website content.

2. A responsive web design template is user friendly

3. Responsive website layout suffers slow loading due to additional css codes

Responsive Themes And Plug-In

If you have an ecommerce website already running on Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, PrestaShop and wanted to establish yourself but on a limited budget, better opt with open source Wordpress responsive theme. This technology has some characteristics:

1. Activating responsive CMS plug-in is easy and fast.

2. CMS version should be tested with the WordPress responsive plug-in.

3. The theme or plug-in must follow web 2.0 standard to avoid loading issue.

Mobile Ecommerce Website Builder

Powered by Mobile CMS, a mobile website includes features like mobile shopping cart payment gateway system, content and buttons. The obvious characteristics include:

1. Creativity and the sense of uniqueness

2. Additional mobile sales features to enhance user experience.

3. Acceptable mobile website speed

4. Requires a sub-domain that re-directs desktop users to mobile phones.

To conclude, mobile presence always helps you generate more sales and leads. For all those planning to revamp your web 2.0 website, Give a thought to it soon.

What Should You Look For In A Payment Gateway Solution?

What’s payment gateway and how do they work for online business? This is a great question we get to hear from eCommerce businesses. Well...the answer is here. Read On

Image Source: webilop.com

In Ecommerce Shopping Carts, a merchant account collects the actual funds from customer’s credit cards while the payment gateway service uses the merchant account to actually collect the funds in the best secured way. It will transmit your customers’ billing information to your merchant bank so that payments can be deposited into your internet merchant account each month.

And the next question would be, “What Should I Look for in a Payment Gateway?”

Checklist to Buy a Complete Secured Payment Gateway Solution

PCI Compliance: Ensure the payment gateway has a good reputation and having PCI compliance is also a must.

Fraud Prevention: Undeniably, there are many frauds going around online, and if you don’t have the protection in space you could get cheated easily.

Integration with Existing Software: If your existing software is not built-in-house then check if the payment gateway supports it so as to save time.

Banks/Merchant Accounts Supported: Most payment gateways support a decent number of banks but still double check the bank you plan on using.

Token Payments: Incase of recurring payments, either you need to get PCI compliance yourself or you can use the payment gateway to handle the credit cards through a token payments service.

Multi Currency: This feature works great for ecommerce shopping carts these days as it lets you process payments in other currencies (say USD).

Price: Generally, per transaction fees is inversely proportional to your transaction volumes.

There is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ especially very finicky when it comes to talking custom development. Also finding a reliable open source payment gateway solution can be hectic if it’s not NOW. Does that mean you should build your own one? Well- give a thought to it and before you go forward consult a professional Ecommerce Portals Development company.

Openwave Payment Portal Solutions:
           Openwave, a leading web development company in NYC, offers reliable payment system development. Know More..