Tuesday, 6 October 2015

Boost Your Online Presence by eCommerce Web Development


In the age of technology and internet, having an online business for your company’s online presence in mandatory. There are plenty of people who are going to tell you how important an online presence is, which is why it is important for you to understand the concept of eCommerce website development and the need for such a presence. Once you understand the concept behind eCommerce website development, you can understand why its presence is such an important deal. There are plenty of people who are looking out for a good company to hire eCommerce web developers and get all their needs fulfilled.



Advantages of eCommerce Website Development



There are certain characteristics that a good website needs to have. With the latest technological strategies, you can now hire the best web developers who are going to construct a website that will market your product and service online. This is perhaps the best type of eCommerce website development till date. Since there many things to keep in mind it is good to know that a website developed by the best E-Commerce Web Developers in the market is going to help you to get a website that will be friendly to the audience and easy for you to manage. It is also important that you get a website design developer who is going to keep your best interests in mind. Since there are many companies who offer eCommerce website development solutions, make sure you take your time and only hire a company or hire eCommerce Web Developers who are fully qualified and professional. They should keep your return on investment and your ideas in mind, before they implement a project.



Characteristics of a Good Online Website



1. The website should be search engine friendly, and should be constructed in such a way where your website is caught by the important search engines.



2. A big part of eCommerce website development is to make sure that you have a website that is appealing and informative to the audience. This includes several things such as being user friendly, having good content, quick to load, and many more.



3. The eCommerce web developers should also make sure that the website they design are easy to maintain and update by you and your staff.



4. Gives you the required reports that are going to help you to explore other opportunities, measure your performance, and optimize your business needs.






Tuesday, 1 September 2015

Bloggers Vs WordPress: What you need to know?


Most of us have heard of both these blogging platforms: Wordpress and Blogger. But how much do we know about each of these? In this article, we take a look at the positives and obstacles in each platform these platforms and compare them on the parameters of flexibility, customization and ease of use.

If you want to customize your blog, you get added freedom with Wordpress (something Wordpress doesn't offer) as Wordpress is Open Source. When you choose Wordpress, you gain full access 2 the database and all the image files in the Wordpress platform including the PHP and CSS files. Now what happens when you can access the entire Wordpress system?

When you have access to the whole of the Wordpress CMS, you can be as creative as you like with the effect that your blog will have functionalities that normally won’t be a part of websites built on other platforms. A small caveat here: you don't get this functionality if your website is hosted on Wordpress.com. But you will still be able to host files other than images like PDFs, Office and Word files. 
 
Where Wordpress Scores

One of the difficult things to do when it comes to Blogger is manipulating your XML schema. Here, most users choose customized templates. But the problem with Blogger is that their documentation is sparse though some of Blogger’s tags are indeed documented. 
 
Wordpress scores here with the advantage of greater flexibility when you categorize posts. Users do not have sub-categories with labels on Blogger. On the other hand, substitute-categories are an integral part of the Wordpress environment.

Usability

Wordpress gives you free hosting for up to 3GB of space in comparison to Blogger which gives you only 1. But apart from that, it is Blogger that scores on the usability front. It is very easy to start if you are a lay user. On a Wordpress self-hosted blog, you need to download the software, upload it to a server, configure the database settings and run the installation program included in the software. 
 
So, Wordpress does emerge stronger though Blogger is easier to start with. We’ll look at more on these platforms in our upcoming articles!

Tuesday, 18 August 2015

The Two Principal Approaches to Redesigning Your Website


The question that occupies everyone that wants to redesign his or her website is will entail a complete overhaul of the website’s design, layout, content and user experience? Most companies go for the jugular when redesigning their website, ending up with budgets overshooting but conversions plummeting. So what is the right website redesign strategy? Will a mere redesign lift your sales and revenue? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this article. 
 
Traditional Website Redesign

The first step in website redesign is to analyse risk. Risk analysis involves enumerating the number of changes that you make in redesigning the website and also the scale and impact of those changes. Let us say that you propose to change your home page title and layout as also the navigation bar. Now the first two fall under the category of sweeping changes as their reach and impact on the customer’s mind is more pronounced. 
 
Some of the most common changes that people do in a website redesign is:
  • Changing the home page title(s)
  • Changing the images and icons
  • New graphic designs with headlines
  • Changed call-to-action buttons
  • New navigation and forms

The Right Approach

The right web design approach would have a mechanism in place to measure the changes in web design against user traffic on the website. The key is to undertake a redesign that improves user experience while conforming to the same objectives that your business is built on.

This can be done only with the help of a correct conversion optimization strategy. Formulate proper test cases with timely executions and separate them from one another to make informed inferences about user preferences. This would mean getting the right alpha and beta tests to mitigate risk.

Evolutionary Site Design

A much better way to redesign your website would be to undertake what is called Evolutionary Site design (ESR). This approach posits continuous improvement in place of a complete overhaul in website design.

In ESR, you need to separately list out all components of your website in order of customer preference. From home page titles to product page templates to service value proposition statements, you need to measure and test every component step by step against customer traffic.
This way, you not only bring about a more gradual and well thought out design change that can be fully measured and also rolled back in parts. So, which way are you going to go?

Thursday, 13 August 2015

5 Steps to Success in eCommerce

If you are planning to build an ecommerce website for your business, then you must have a clear idea of what you’re going to do at the start. What is ecommerce? It is simply the process of transacting business, namely the buying and selling of goods over the internet. But with maddening competition and rising customer expectation you need to ensure you have the right strategy in place to take you to the top. So, what do you need to get right?

1. Unclutter The Sales Process 
 
When you design your website, look at how many clicks a customer has to make before he eventually makes the purchase. Study after study has found that the primary reason why people abandon a shopping cart before making a purchase is due to the number of stages that they need to pass before finally making a payment.

2. Are Your Customers Aware of Product Availability?

The customer needs to know beforehand whether the product he wants to buy is available or not. Customers get annoyed when they make the effort to order the product, add it to the catalog, and get until the ‘purchase’ button only to find that the product itself is unavailable. The customer will go, in this case never to return.

3. Make Your Site Compatible Across Browsers

Cross-browser compatibility is essential if your business is to reach customers across boundaries. Browser preferences vary across the world, and though Chrome has become the numero uno in that category, other browsers still hold sway over large populations and you need to ensure that your ecommerce website is perfectly viewable in them.

4. Use Graphics, But Make Them Simple

Images are better than words and Graphics do play a positive role in enriching the overall customer experience. But make sure you don't have too much of them so they take a toll on your website performance. Optimize your graphics for the web or otherwise your website may take too long to load and kill the very purpose of attracting more customers.

5. Move Towards a One-Step Checkout Process 
 
However responsive and well-designed your website may be, the customer will not make a purchase on your website without your payment system being secure and efficient. Host your website on a secure server and make sure your payment system is PCI-DSS compliant, has email and multi-payment options and is customized for your website.