According to an article published in the Daily Mail, 82% of the Internet users in the UK shop online regularly. The Centre for Retail Search released some statistics stating that online sales in the UK account for 10.7% of the total retail sales. These statistics may talk about the UK market alone but the truth is that the eCommerce story has grown leaps and bounds not just in the United Kingdom, but globally. Many people who use to buy offline have now moved on to online shops. As a web development agency into the trade of developing bespoke eCommerce solutions we have come across many clients who have their concerns about this whole thing of getting an eCommerce solution developed for their business. While there are many small business entrepreneurs who have become successful after setting up an online store, there are many who fall prey to the myths revolving around selling things online. This blog post aims to debunk all those myths that have been stopping you from taking the big step. Myth 1: My product is not suited for selling online Until and unless what you want to sell online is illegal, you can sell it online. Anything from diamonds to vegetables can be sold online as long as it covers all the costs of selling online. Myth 2: My business is not registered. So, I cannot sell online. Thanks to platforms like PayUPiasa, the payment gateway services are now accessible to even businesses that are not registered. So, that shouldn’t stop you now! Myth 3: I need a thousand awesome features to make my online store...
As a business owner who is always aiming to excel, you are constantly working towards making your presence appealing to your customers. A considerable amount of time, effort and money goes into marketing your business, its products and services. Just like your marketing material, your web applications or website must also be designed to appeal to your potential customers. The more professional your web presence is, the more credible your business will appear to your customers. When considering creating a new web application or a website, businesses are faced with a dilemma. Whether to go for simple web development or get a bespoke web application or website developed that meets to your business needs perfectly. But before deciding which approach one should go for, remember that it all depends on the requirements of your business and what you want to accomplish with your website. A good web development agency can help you take the decision. Web Development There are many platforms available for developing websites. There are numerous generic, pre-built website templates and themes available easily for purchase. WordPress themes are the most popular in the market right now with over 60 million people using it. Even most of the web development agencies recommend it. The reason behind such a success of the WordPress platform is that you can use only what is required for your business. It comes with a set of features that suit simple as well as complex requirements of businesses. There are so many plug-ins available that you can even build an eCommerce website on WordPress. Building your website on a web development platform is...
Google Material Design, the latest release by the web giant has become the talk of the town. From industry experts to business enterprises and web designing & web development agencies, everybody is curious about this latest release. This blog is all about what Google Material Design is and what it brings to the web development industry. Google Material Design is the new universal cross platform design language by Google. This new design language is a part of the Google’s forthcoming Android ‘L’ redesign. With this new design language Android is getting a makeover which will be visible not just on the mobile but also on desktops and TVs too. The key new feature of the new Material Design is the updated version of the system font, Roboto. The bold and dramatic colors, more fluid motion, highly polished animations and more tactile surfaces are some features that everybody is looking forward to. We hear that Google has done away with skeuomorphism and will now offer a flat and more colorful design that will comprehend accordingly when the user interacts with it. We all know that Google is more concerned about the functionality than the look. And again, they have put user experience first. Material Design will offer a highly attractive responsive interface to its users. To cut a long story short, here’s what all the web design and web development agencies can expect from the new design language by Google: Designers will now have access to a comprehensive new way of thinking that can lead to finding newer and better ways for software interaction in context to modern devices. Material...
Being in the web development industry, every web development agency wants to build excellent web projects. But there are times when evolving nature of the industry itself makes it very hard for us to accomplish what we aim for. But not anymore! Agile Web Development – the next big thing is here! Agile Web Development has come to the rescue for numerous of our kind and working on development projects is not the same anymore. The approach is so effective that today, more and more Web development agencies like us prefer Agile Web Development and strongly recommend it to the clients as well. Rather than referring to it as a process, it is best to explain Agile Web Development as an attitude with which any project is undertaken. The Agile approach focuses on providing value to the clients and this is done by iterative and frequent delivery of working products. Simply put, in Agile Web Development, the project is broken down into small tasks. These tasks are to be completed in short cycles of 1 to 3 weeks. Each of these cycles involves planning, analysis, designing, documentation, development and testing. The emphasis is laid more on spending more time on actions that will add value to the web project. The key in Agile Web Development process is to take away the precious time and energy from parts of the development process that are non-relevant. Such an approach not just ensures quality deliveries but also makes scope for entertaining change requests and feedbacks. The project can be completed in half the time normally taken or sometimes even quicker than that....
Cloud Computing and SaaS are the latest buzz words in the IT industry these day. Businesses today are migrating their legacy applications to the Cloud, mostly as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The reason being, Cloud Computing offers convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources including networks, applications, services, storage, servers, etc. These computing resources can then be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management efforts. There are many other benefits of cloud computing: Cloud Computing offers a broader network access. This means that you can access anything at anytime from anywhere. It helps you in achieving economies of scale. Your output is more with lesser people. You don’t have to spend huge bucks on technological infrastructure where you have everything that you need on the cloud. It helps in streamlining processes which ultimately lets to get more work in lesser time and people. With a cloud supported set up, it takes fewer people to do more work. So, there is less personal training required. Despite all the benefits, the decision to migrate your legacy application to the cloud should not be taken lightly. Your decision should be based on a deep thought given to your business requirements. Remember, it is more about applying the correct strategy for the right application and least about the benefits offered by cloud computing. A business must consider answering the following questions before deciding to migrate their legacy applications to the cloud: Why should I make the move to cloud? The answers are simple. You should move your application to the cloud when you need to change the architecture of the...
This year at World Wide Developers Conference keynote, Apple spent a significant amount of time focusing on and speaking about the iOS 8. And it got everyone thinking about how the new version would look like. But you will have wait until September for the iOS 8 release. That’s too long, right? Well, being in the iOS app development business has its perks. The new operating system is available for iOS developers and we will tell you what makes iOS 8 more than just a new number. No redesigning has been done to the new operating system. iOS 8 is built on iOS 7, taking its design and has included new features to it. The latest iOS updates are nothing like you have seen before. The new iOS 8 features will let the third parties score more with their apps. Yes, Apple is finally allowing the third-party apps to communicate with its own operating system as well as server through a number of extensions. The extensions that will allow the app developers to make apps are: Today Extensions Like Windows Phone’s Live Tiles and Android’s home screen widget, iOS 8’s Today extension will let you show limited information in the Today view in the Notification Center. Share Extensions Share extensions will let you share information from one app to online service. While one could share links or photos on Facebook and Twitter earlier also, the iOS8 is now open for online services such as Tumblr and Pinterest as well. Action Extensions The most interesting of all extensions, Action extensions will allow apps to manipulate or view content in another...
One of the most popular and widely used open source web content management systems, Drupal is under the process of releasing its newest version, Drupal 8. Backed by a strong community, Drupal 8 CMS is going to be a platform with over 200 features that will change the way content management has been perceived till date. The official release is being awaited by Drupal developers in UK and the by the developers world over. Here are a few features that makes Drupal 8 release, an exciting affair: Mobile First The new Drupal 8 isn’t just mobile friendly. Instead, it has mobile at its core. All you need to do is deploy the content once and it will be displayed the way you want it, on any mobile device. All the built-in themes in Drupal 8 are responsive that will simplify designing and development of websites optimized for various devices and screen sizes. Better Configuration Management Drupal 8 comes with better configuration management that will allow the developers to take a snapshot of the overall Drupal configuration at a specific time. This will also help the Drupal developers to streamline development, deployment or migration. Built-in Web Services Drupal 8 comes with built-in web services that will allow a website to respond with data and not with an HTML page, to a request. It will make machine to machine communication possible. Also, there will be no need to define the context for data. Multilingual Drupal 8’s built-in user interface will allow you to translate anything in the system. You can build pages with Views languages as well as filter and block visibility....
Out of the plethora of services that Amazon offers, the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. These are also popularly known as Amazon EC2. Web-scale computing can be easily redesigned using this web service. The services offered by Amazon follow a simple policy according to which you will only have to pay for the services that you are using. There is no concept of ‘minimum fee’ on Amazon. You can calculate your monthly expenditure using a tool called ‘AWS Simple Monthly Calculator’, which is available on the Amazon website. This blog explains the costing concepts for all the other services available with Amazon. On Demand Instances This billing format allows users to pay their hourly usage of compute capacity. Moreover, there are no long term commitments involved. As a result, the large fixed costs involved are broken down into small variable costs. Besides, you are not required to pay for plan, purchase and maintenance of hardware. The pricing done for a service is billed on a per hour basis for each of the instances used. The pricing is different for different operating systems though. The time is logged from the time the instance was initiated to the time that it was terminated. Besides, a partial hour is also taken as a full hour. But the best part is that there are no long-term commitments required with Amazon. Reserved Instances This payment format allows you to make a small one-time payment, which reserves an instance for your use in the future as well. Against this, you get a discount on the hourly charge for the service. According to...
Released by Microsoft Corporation in 2001, SharePoint was earlier viewed only as a browser-based collaboration and document management platform. But over the years, SharePoint has seen much advancement which has further broadened the scope of this technology. There is so much that an organisation can do with SharePoint. Microsoft itself describes SharePoint as a number of things such as collaboration software, enterprise business process management portal, content management system, business intelligence dashboard etc. With so many capabilities contained in itself, SharePoint has completely changed the way organisations function these days. The platform has gone so popular that over three quarters of Fortune 500 companies now use SharePoint. This blog will talk about the different things for which organisations use SharePoint. With SharePoint you can create an intranet portal for an entire corporate network. This portal can be used to centralise access to enterprise information and applications. All the important news and announcements can be shared on the intranet portal. Even tasks can be assigned to the employees and access to a variety of information can also be given. The intranet dashboard can be customised by department and role and also different levels of access can be granted. Document sharing is one of the most important features of SharePoint. This feature is also the reason behind the initial popularity of the technology. With SharePoint, organisations have a shared space to store documents that can be accessed by anyone (or by those to whom the access is given by the administrator) in the company. This means that the documents can even be shared with employees working in different offices. That too...
With the passage of time, so many trends fade away. Take for example fashion. Once Bell Bottoms used to be so hit amongst everybody, but now they have completely vanished. Similar is the case with web technology. There is some advancement being made every second. Even while you are reading this, there is some innovation taking place somewhere and everybody is benefiting from it. Especially businesses! The World Wide Web has become an effective channel to enhance your business growth. That’s precisely why most organisations have set up websites to have an online presence. But there’s is a catch. The internet is not restricted to your personal computer anymore. The users now have laptops, smartphones, iPads, tablets and so many devices. Just walk into a Starbucks during lunch and you’ll find almost everybody surfing the internet from their phones, laptops and other devices. So, the new trend is to take your website to the modern devices that the users are using. But your already working website which looks great on computer look horrible on mobile phones. Some doesn’t even function on phones at all. It’s time to upgrade because nobody wants to offer a negative experience to their users. Do we? The good thing is you don’t need to create separate multiple versions of your website to be compatible with different devices. We have responsive web design solutions. Responsive web design is a design development technique that reacts according to the screen size of the device in use. In other words, responsive web is designed to respond according to its web browsing environment. As a business, the benefits of...
