Do you run a small business? Try Wordpress

Do you run a small business? And do you plan to develop a website for your small business? Developing a small business website can be a time-consuming and if not done the right way, a downright frustrating experience. People usually start looking for recommendations from their friends, business partners, and their immediate circle. But nothing can substitute first-person analysis. You need to do the search yourself, and find out the antecedents and track record of the web development companies on the list. Or you can take the risky route: designing the site by yourself.

To avoid this, many small business owners take matters into their own hands.

Designing a website yourself can be challenging. But with the right solutions and tools, it can be a fun. So, where do you begin? The first step is to choose the CMS you want to work with. The CMS will be the shelf and shell that holds and presents your website content, including pages, blog posts and the like. The most effective (and free) Content Management System on the market today is WordPress. WordPress is not only easy to learn and use; it also very search engine friendly and displays nicely on a mobile device. Using WordPress to develop a website will require a few hours of learning and tinkering but the end result will be complete control of your website and that is empowering.

WordPress comes with several design options. WordPress uses themes to create the look and feel for your website. It helps frame and layout the content you enter. There are two kinds of themes. The first comes free when you install WordPress and the second that comes with a premium anywhere between $25-$100. Most small businesses will fork out the extra money for a premium theme simply because it eliminates the "cookie-cutter" format and allows for increased customization to help make your small business website look clean, professional and trustworthy. The money invested in a premium theme will be far less than paying a freelance designer or website design firm.

Even if you decide to hire a agency or website design shop to develop your WordPress website, the costs associated will be much less than if they develop the website from scratch. In fact, most Web design companies will prefer to use WordPress anyway and will be able to quickly customize your website; shaving weeks of the timing to launch the new site.  

3 Do's and Don'ts of Designing an effective web page

Creating an effective web page requires planning, skill, attention to detail and some creativity. But far removed from the flashy logos and picturesque backgrounds are certain things that every developer must be aware of before he/she ventures into creating a web page. In this article we look at 10 do’s and don'ts that you should know to create the web page that you’re looking for.

THE DO’S

1. Structure your page

It’s essential to keep your page structured. Use a lightweight grid system and layout the information in a structured and easy-to-follow format. 

2. Keep it simple

One of the first maxims of designing attractive web pages is that it pays to keep it simple. People hate doing things that take a lot of time. Your website should be as easy to view for a for year old as it is for a technology junkie.

3. Make it easy to navigate

Take this: People are not going to spend more than 5 minutes to figure out what your website is and what it has to offer. The best way to do this is to make your webpage easy to scan. This means using proper heading tags, streamlining content, and focussing on the important items.

THE DON'TS

1. Don't place boxes everywhere

We’ve seen it everywhere. Boxes of all sizes, flooding the place, not lined up properly, and worse not grabbing our attention too! We invariably end up closing the whole window in disgust. If you’re a web designer, you must know how to place things in a structured environment.

2. Don't place irrelevant ads across your page

We all want to make money and we need ads for it. But wait, they shouldn’t eat up your entire page space. Many web pages have 70% ads and 30% content. That should not be the case. Don't make ads your No.1 priority. That must be reserved for your visitors, always.

3. Don’t overdo images and colours

Colours and images are important, but you must be careful not to overdo them. Use them judiciously and with an innate aesthetic sense. Your colour scheme must have not more than 5 colours and go to sites that have user generated colour schemes posted.

The freedom platform-Magento ecommerce

If you’re one of those planning to open an online store, the biggest decision you will have to make is choose which ecommerce platform to use. A variety of factors weigh into this decision including ease of use, pricing, and integrations. In this article, we look at the factors you need to keep in mind when choosing an ecommerce platform, along with the leading players you can choose from

Customisations

• Magento is fully customisable but you will need to be either technical or have a developer to make the customizations for you.
• Bigcommerce and shopify lets you customise its templates by giving you access to CSS and HTML but not change features or edit the platform code.       

Open source

• Magento is open source which means that you get more flexibility and full ownership of your site, you will not be locked into somebody else’s development cycle.
• However, the responsibility is on you to maintain and support and there is little recourse if there are bugs with the system etc. There is a large community around Magento that can help you.
• BigCommerce and Shopify are SaaS apps. They develop, maintain and support the software for you. It will continue to improve without you needing to lift a finger. However, you have little control over what gets developed and when.

Add-ons, features, transaction fees

• Magento being fully customisable has as many features and add ons as you are prepared to integrate but it is less ‘out-of-the-box’ than the other two.
• BigCommerce comes with a lot of features built in with the initial pay plan so you are ready to go straight away.
• Shopify is missing a number of standard features so you will need to but some add-ons and on lower tariffs a 2% transactional fee may apply.

Your choice of ecommerce engine

Remember that this is rough ride to get you started. All of these solutions have their fans and detractors and it is really worth trailing each of them.

• Magento gives more freedom in how you build it at the cost of requiring or hiring more technical talent.
• BigCommerce and Shopify take a more template approach, building beautiful options but at the risk of looking like another company using the same template.

Managing many channels

Each of these ecommerce choices come with plugins and add-ons and a variety of tools to help you list and manage each one. The problem for a business though is that when they grow and add channels or volume how do they manage all of them as opposed to each of them? That is the stage where it makes sense to technology at the backend to act as a central hub.

Wordpress plugins that lessen your burden

According to Wordpress, a plugin is a program or a set of one or more functions written in the PHP scripting language that adds a specific set of features or services to the Wordpress weblog. Plugins can extend the functionality of your blog in almost every imaginable way. Read on to find out more about the most essential plugins for your Wordpress site.

Cache plugins

These plugins increase site speed and prevent server overload. W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are some examples of good Cache plugins.

Social bookmarking plugins

Social bookmarking plugins allow your visitors to spread your content on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Sharebar is a powerful toolbar that adds a floating set of social buttons to your site.

SEO plugins

SEO plugins allow you to optimize your tags, site structure, and much more to make your website more search engine friendly and improve your site rankings. Wordpress SEO by Yoast handles your SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, and import functionality for the Headspace2 and All in One SEO plugins.

Login protection

Brute force hacks can be nasty if your website is not properly protected. These plugins stop hackers dead in their tracks. Limited login attempts limit the number of times people can try to login before being locked out and notifies webmasters of suspicious activities. You may want to try WP Login Security.

URL management plugins

URL management plugins redirect the old URLs to the new ones and keep track of the outgoing links. Redirection keeps track of URL changes and automatically adds a 301 direction when the URL of a post is changed.

Security analysis

These plugins can identify and notify you of security threats. Better WP Security applies common security techniques to your website and can patch many holes in one shot. You may also want to try WP Malwatch and Ultimate security checker.

Maintenance plugin

All webmasters need to take time to maintain their web properties. Vaultpress is a service that maintains Wordpress sites for webmasters. It covers disaster recovery, theme and plugin scanning, migration assistance and other services.

5 Mistakes to avoid in Drupal

Among the current crop of Content Management Systems (CMS), Drupal is certainly a leading player in developing impressive content that is well tailored to the web. Drupal does require in first place, some knowledge on web design and development (for novices, there’s Wordpress). Therefore, certain things need to be taken care of when you build a Drupal website. Let us look at what you should avoid when you build a Drupal site.

Mistake 1: Overlooking security during deployment

It doesn't take much time for a developer to take possession of production code and install it on their systems. Which essentially means it is free for use by anybody who wishes to use it. While you can let developers take a few snapshots and have other access to the development environments otherwise, do not allow access to the production environment except to those who are involved.

Mistake 2: Repair (is not) better than maintenance?

By all means, Drupal has gained the reputation of a well-built CMS that is expected to stay for a long while. However, keeping things updated ensures an optimum experience for your visitors. If gone unnoticed, chances are that the site may be hacked which of course, would cost you much more.

Mistake 3: Outdated code for Core as well as contributed Modules.

Some times, businesses do prefer outdated code thinking it will save them some money. But ask developers, they will tell you that keeping all modules and core as current as possible holds you in the long run.

Mistake 4: Outdated development and staging environments.

Let’s say for instance, that developers test only during production since the other environments have old data or no possible connection to an external service. Make sure that you maintain the testing environments as close to production as possible. By doing this you can migrate to production with ease and execute tests thereby assuring that code changes work when moved to production.

Mistake 5: Saving extraneous files in the VSC repository.

Image files, pictures, and database dumps are usually relegated to the repository which is an extremely unhealthy practice. You need to keep the VCS as clean as possible.

How should you test web applications

Security is of prime important in today’s digital world and new bugs and threats that arrive everyday are only making people more paranoid about it. That is the reason why you must evolve a sound process to test your web applications before they go live. For this, you should know how testing practices have to be adhered to and also why we need to stick to them. This article gives you a synopsis of the steps involved in testing web applications.

1. Develop test objectives

What are test objectives? These are ends developed with the end-user requirements in mind. But you must first classify your priorities. For this, you must first be clear about your project goals. If you find defects in your application, which ones are going to get priority? And which ones should be flagged as least important? The answer to these question must be decided beforehand.

2. Develop a reporting process

Keep reporting simple. Establish the necessary steps for defects or bugs to be reported and categorized. This is the key to efficiency. The reporting has to be in line with the project’s objectives.

3. Establish the test environment

Separate the test environment from development and production. That means keeping the web server, application server and the database server separate. This helps you simplify process and makes it easier to pin point such as to where issues exactly lie.

4. Have a professional tracking system

Testing web applications involves endlessly tracking issues and to track issues and resolve them to their end, you need to have the right systems in place. By this, we mean a tracking system that identifies where the mistake lies and how to resolve it. To prioritize the issue has already been dealt with. You need to set up a timeframe to resolve issues too.

5. Perform unit and usability testing

Well, you must be knowing this, but anyways, unit testing is where you test the individual portions of the application to see if they are functioning properly. In usability testing, the testing is performed with the end-user perspective in mind. In other words, usability determines testing evaluation.

5 key elements of a good website design

If you are a business owner, you must be knowing the importance of websites in reaching out to customers. A website is crucial to sales, brand building and familiarity with customers. But what should you keep in mind when you create websites? What are the critical elements that go into the making of a good, efficient website? That’s the subject of our article as we delve deeper into the question of the key elements in a good websitedesign

Good Visual design: First of all, the website must be visually attractive. It should make the visitor want more and entice him into browsing the website. The website must have enough photos and videos to make it look attractive while being informative. Also, encompassing all the necessary information such as logo, space, theme, font(s), layout, colours etc. must be taken care of.

Content: The content must be well written without any form of grammatical errors as it tends to put away a lot of people. A good content is bound to help you put across the information in a logical and coherent manner and easy enough to understand. The sentences should be adequately framed and readable. Also, the font size and pattern along with the quality of the content play an equally important role too. In simple terms, it should helps users understand what it has in store to offer them.

Navigation: Navigation, otherwise known as the GPS of the website are usually Nav Bards that help new visitors of the website reach the piece of information they are actually looking for. These bars guide the users reach their destination and are easy to use and simple to understand. It is important as it helps in sorting out data and streamlining the navigation for visitors and hence make the entire process simple for them.

Call to action: It is a smaller set of words that basically urge the website visitors to take an action immediately on your website. It is basically done to address your customers to own a set of the product/service you have to offer them. The usage of words in this call of action must be attractive and catchy enough to encourage the users to want more of you and your services.

Credibility: The website must be credible enough for the user to trust you and your services to wish to invest in it at a later stage. The resources must be legitimate and the links mentioned in the website must be active and verified and clearly mention who you are, your identity and you contact information.