Investing into Mobile Application Development for your business: What’s the Gain?

Due to the proliferation of smartphones, the ways that people communicate, spend their leisure time, perform shopping, and do their work have drastically changed. As everybody was starting moving towards smartphones, both mobile applications and wireless gaming have been growing in the recent past days.

According to the statistics taken on smartphone users, around 63% of the users are playing games, and almost everybody is downloading and using mobile applications. However, around 62% of smartphone shoppers do mobile online shopping at least once in a month. In the near future, around 31% of the smartphone users are expected to do more mobile shopping.

Generally, B2C businesses are aware that mobile applications are mandatory to gain a competitive advantage, while the B2B businesses neglect some important opportunities. Let us look at a glance on the B2B marketing to find some real arguments in favor of mobile applications.

As per the research done by the “Small Business and Entrepreneur Council”, generally small businesses use mobile applications for managing their operations that conserve 725,000,000+ employee hours and around 370,000,000+ million business hours per annum. This shows that a huge amount of time saved in using mobile applications.

Now, Let us have a look at the average business owner. The use of mobile applications that can spare companies’ time spent on monotonous jobs, such as document sharing, book-keeping and travelling, can save small-sized business owners on an average of $377/month, i.e., up to $4,000/year.

As there are many mobile applications available and they can be customized based on specific requirements, businesses can use the applications and improve their business processes as well as their business efficiency globally.

So, how do you build a winning and reliable mobile application? Before investing your money, you need to make sure that you can limit the risks of failure. The very first step that you need to take is nothing but checking out which trend is up at present and coming, and finding which one will be suitable for your business model. Also, let your clients easily download your customized mobile application, and hence make the application available to them anytime and anywhere.

Also, establish a mobile application that provides great support to the users and their processes. For example, instead of making the users fill a request through email, you can provide a customer service application where it is easy for them to deal with the problems concerning your products.

You have so many mobile applications available to accelerate your business. Indeed, the applications are not only there to provide support for B2C enterprises, they do support all kinds of businesses. You need to just imagine out-of-the box and get assistance from a best mobile application development company who can understand your requirements, the needs of your potential customer, and very importantly, have a proven track record in mobile application development.

Another key to get success in your business is finding a right partner. Nowadays, companies can able to select from different mobile application development options. You have so many mobile application development companies that have a comprehensive knowledge in programming, localization, and also porting from old projects. They provide fully customized mobile solutions, and hence you can get whatever you need for your business.

As mobile applications have the capability to empower your employees, customers and partners, it greatly improves your productivity multiple times and brings profitable growth in your business.

On the other hand, ROI or Return on Investment will compensate the mobile application development costs by a significant number of times as the development is usually a one-time development with very less or no enhancement or maintenance cost.

Hence, due to the lucrative benefits of mobile applications on the market, there are many ways for mobile application developers as well as the business owners, who are in need of a mobile application for their business, to cash in during this boom of mobile application growth.

Comparing CMS Applications: DotNetNuke vs. Joomla vs. Kentico vs. WordPress

DotNetNuke, Joomla, Kentico and WordPress are the most popular Content Management Systems or CMS Applications used all over the world to power websites. However, even though each CMS has its advantages and shortcomings, you can build your own website of any kind. Let us now compare the features and other information about all the four Content Management Systems.

	DotNetNuke	Joomla	Kentico	WordPress
CMS Release Date	February 2009	August 2005	September 2004	May 2003
Started by	Walker's company	Forked  from Mambo	Petr Palas	Matt Mullenwegg and Mike Little
Company	DotNetNuke Corp.	The Joomla Project	Kentico Software	WordPress
Framework	.NET	PHP	.NET	PHP
Application Server	Windows	Windows, Linux	Windows	Windows, Linux
Licensing Model	Open Source	Open Source	Pay Per Domain	Open Source
Base Cost	N/A	Free	Affordable Cost	Free
Implementation Cost	N/A	Costly	Free	Costly
Usability	Less	Comparatively Less	High	High
No. of websites powered	>7,50,000	>500,000,000	>10 million	>10 million
Downloads	>8 million	>30 million	>1 million	>140 million
Top sites using the platform	EricksonTribune, Magenic, SkyeTek	Harvard University, The Hill	BendixKing, RAC, Brantano	Forbes, CNN, Sony
Free Themes	1,315+	900+	1000+	2000+
Free Plug-ins	12,780+	7000+	10000+	27000+
Best used for	Commercial websites, corporate intranets and extranets, online publishing portals, and custom vertical applications	e-commerce, social networking sites	e-commerce, intranet, social networking, online marketing	Blogs, corporate websites, small-medium sized websites

How to make a successful e-commerce store?

Today, the competition is huge! Literally, more than thousands of online businesses are started every day, and hence the competition seems to be getting tougher day by day. So, you need to have an outstanding online store design and a strong marketing strategy that helps you to stand out from the crowd.

The main challenge here is not just having your online shop up and running, instead it is very important to attract visitors and convert them to paying customers.

The following tips guide you to make your online shop really standout:

• Make your website simple: The most common mistake that is done when designing an e-commerce website is adding too much of content like flash animation, large graphics, videos and audios. These features may seem appealing to visitors, but will seriously affect the performance and the speed of your website. Instead, ensure that your web design is well-organized and your online store is easily navigable.
• Analyze your website: To run a successful e-commerce business, you need to analyze your website thoroughly. Your web design might be having a great look, but if there are no customers, then there is no use in having such a website for your business. Hence, you need to analyze the reason for this and find out the best solutions. Some free powerful tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster, provide you important information on your customer’s preferences and how they use your website.
• Track your competitors: Always check what your competitors doing and what customers like to do shopping around the best deals. And if your competitors provide a cheaper shipping rate than what you provide or if they have a monthly sale, then it clearly shows that the customers are shopping at your competitor’s website instead! So, always stay competitive and pertinent without losing your brand image, and also set up monthly sales, free delivery offers and competitions frequently.
• Have strong social presence: By having a strong social presence, you can increase your brand loyalty and sales right away. One of the easiest ways to make your customers engage in your business is opening a blog with frequent updates of your brand. Also, having social reviews of your products or services will definitely increase loyalty and conversion of your online shop. The social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many more, are all free to sign up and they are all the most powerful online marketing tools for your online business.
• Provide good customer service: Always keep in mind that every visitor of your website is a potential customer. Suppose if you get customers’ query, then it is important that you have to get back to them as soon as possible. If you do not deal with your customers’ queries promptly and effectively, then there is a great chance to slip your potential customers, as there is a heavy competition in the online business. Also, make sure that you always have someone to deal with the customer service for you, in case if you are away or not available to deal with it.
• Encourage returning customers: It is apparent that returning customers will greatly benefit your online business. If you provide your customers with good products and services, then there is a high chance of coming back. So, set up exclusive offers or deals for returning customers or monthly sales on your social platforms. Also, ensure that you never over-sell your products or services, which will drive your customers away.
• Have a clear marketing strategy: Every good online business must have a clear marketing strategy. So, make sure that you have a perfect marketing strategy for your e-commerce business. Ensure that what customers you are targeting and what region is your market. If you are really serious about your online business, then have your website ranked well in all search engines with a good SEO campaign.

Creating your online store using Shopify

Here is your choice to attract customers like never before. With Shopify, an online store builder, you can build an attractive online store based on all your specific requirements. You can organize your products, customize your storefront, track and response orders, accept credit card payments, and do many more with no hassles at all. Shopify is absolutely an easiest way to sell online!

Shopify has become the platform of choice for businesses ranging from small to mid-size organizations those who are looking for an effective e-commerce solution. With its proficient and easy-to-use templates, you can build an online store in a matter of minutes, and also have your website up and running in no time. 

How to create your online store with Shopify?

• Sign Up: When you are planning to sell your products online, then don’t try out something big right away. Shopify consists of three main plans, and especially a starter or a beginner plan for less cost. The cheaper the plan, the fewer the features it provides. Initially, you can choose the basic plan, and later on, you can easily upgrade your plan based on your requirements. Moreover, Shopify provides a large number of options to meet all your needs no matter what your budget is.
  
• Customize Your Online Store: As you are setting up your own online store, you have the facility to customize any of a Shopify theme of your own choice, by using a wide range of customization settings. Also, by using Shopify’s new Theme Settings Editor, you can preview your website in real-time to view the changes that you make. Also, Shopify’s Liquid templating language makes everything simple for you to change any aspect of your website.
  
• Add Products: Shopify allows you to add your product by simply clicking on the button “Add a product”. If you add a product, then you will be asked to provide the information about your product such as product description, product title, product type, product’s Barcode or SKU, etc. After filling the basic details about your product, there will also be some options like “tags” and search engine options. No issues if you don’t have much knowledge in SEO, because Shopify automatically fills the SEO related information.
  
• Other Settings: Shopify gives you with their own sub-domain, however, if you purchased your own domain, then you can set it up now. Next, you need to set up your shipping rates and tax rates. As Shopify was already configured with the tax rules of almost all countries, the shipping rate will be automatically configured for you by default. So, you will not be required to make any changes here.
  
• Setup a Payment Gateway: In earlier days, accepting credit card payment was very difficult for any e-commerce website, as the process required the customers to fill so many forms and bank related information. This drawback is completely eliminated in Shopify, as it provides a large variety of payment options to choose from. If you want, you can choose to use a different credit card processor or simply accept “cash on delivery” option.  Other option that you can provide your customers is allowing them to create their accounts on your store or just do guest checkout.

If you already have a website for your business, then you can integrate the Shopify storefront into your current website to provide a seamless experience for your existing customers. You can also customize a standard theme to capture the look and feel of any of your particular product.

So, start selling your products online with Shopify. Just choose a website design, add products, customize your store, add a secure shopping cart, and now you are ready to sell online. 

Benefits of ASP.NET websites for your company

In the early days of the web, the contents of web pages were largely static. And these web pages must be permanent, but changed manually. Hence, there was an urgent need for the enterprises to build websites that are dynamic and are updated automatically. During that time, Microsoft’s Active Server Pages or ASP was delivered to the market to meet this requirement.

Basically, ASP runs on the server-side, and sends its output to the user’s web browser. This enables the server to generate dynamic web pages based on the actions of the users.

Thus, ASP.NET has greatly captured the web development industry, and it is now among the most favored technologies to build dynamic websites, feature-rich web pages and web-centric applications.

Following are the benefits of using ASP.NET websites for your company:

Fast Web Applications: 

The two main things that make ASP.NET fast is caching and compiled code. In previous days, whenever a visitor views your web page, the code was interpreted into “machine language”. But with ASP.NET, the code gets complied into “machine language” before a visitor views your web page. On the other hand, caching stores all the data or information that can be used again in future for faster access. Also, ASP.NET allows the caching of the data from a database, therefore, your website is always faster even after frequent visits to the database.

Fixing Crash and Memory Leaks: 

 ASP.NET automatically recovers from errors and memory leaks. This helps you to ensure that your website never gives an error message to your website visitors, and also ensure that your website is available to them whenever they require.

Stability and Reliability: 

It is important for every business to have no downtime, no matter it is just for few minutes or several hours a day. Because even a simple issue may leads to serious losses, and this may impact the reputation of the business. This is the main reason why a huge role in the website plays its reliability and stability. ASP.NET technology increases the degree of resistance to various types of malicious attacks and hacking websites built on it. Therefore, if you use ASP.NET to build your website, then your website will always be secured.

Integration with Other Apps and Information Systems: 

Microsoft .NET platform consists of several embedded technologies for the integration of information systems and other applications, such as XML, JSON, WCF, remoting, service web, and so on, with the ASP.NET exists as a part of it. Because of the availability of these multiple solutions, this optimum technology is probably selected for each individual case. This will make sure flawless performance, scalability, and mostly security.

Supporting many languages: 

Using ASP.Net, developers can able to write their code on more than twenty-five .NET languages such as C#, VB.NET and Jscript.NET, and this provides the developers ease of use of language that they are expert in. This way the developers can able to build or customize your website based on all your business requirements.

Thus, ASP.NET web development has emerged as the de-facto standard in developing dynamic websites and feature-rich web-based applications on a global basis. This is mainly due to the robust framework of ASP.NET, and also the strong support base that this technology has been able to build over the years.

You may be developing a small enterprise website or a huge corporate web application distributed across various networks, ASP.NET will provide you all the features that you could require for your business, possibly at reasonable costs.

Developing Hybrid Mobile Application for Your Business

It is evident that the mobile world has been growing rapidly these past few years. With the boom of internet, the usage of the handheld devices, such as smart phones, iPhones and tablets, is also growing day by day.

Due to the increasing demand and sales of smartphones and tablets, modern businesses cannot ignore the benefits of mobile apps for their customers. It is a difficult task to create an app with the perfect mix of features and platform support at reasonable cost.

In general, these are the three technologies that are used for mobile application development: native, web and hybrid mobile app development. A hybrid application leverages both native and mobile web technologies. The development process of hybrid apps includes the qualities of both the web and native application development processes.

The hybrid app development is basically built with the native programming languages such as Java, Objective C, and web technology such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. It is developed based on the concept WORA or Write-Once-Run-Anywhere, which is nothing but it supports all mobile devices of different operating systems.

Using this hybrid app development approach, developers write important portions of their app in cross-platform web technologies, whereas, they maintain direct access to native APIs when needed.

The native portion of the hybrid app uses the operating system APIs to build an embedded HTML rendering engine, which acts as a bridge between the device APIs and the browser. This makes the hybrid app to take the advantages of all the features that the latest devices have to provide.

A hybrid application mostly uses native features of any device such as geo-location, calendar, notification, contacts, camera, and offline storage. It also supports various features that are supported by touch screen display devices.  For graphics, a hybrid app can use HTML, Canvas and SVC. Also, a number of hybrid apps support offline work such as an online game has an offline game practice features.

The hybrid mobile app development is accessed effortlessly through the internet without using any web browser, as it uses web view control to display HTML and JavaScript files on a screen. The web view control covers WebView on Android, UIWebView on iOS, and so on.

Advantages of hybrid mobile app development:

• Uses of open source technologies such as PhoneGap, Sencha and SproutCore
• Flexible for both multi-platform and cross-platform development
• High-performance and cost-effective
• Easy to download and install features
• Highly interactive and impressive user interface
• Great access to device features
• Re-usable code base for various mobile platforms

Why a hybrid app is important for your business?

From a business viewpoint, developing a hybrid mobile app is the best idea, because this app development doesn’t require you to develop a full app for every mobile platform.

A hybrid app is cross-platform by design, and also it resolves some of the problems that some experience with web applications. From iOS to Windows Phone to Android to Blackberry OS, hybrid apps provide across-the-board functionality.

Some of the benefits of hybrid mobile apps are as follows:

• Standardized branding: Developing a hybrid app helps you to have an app that is basically standard on all mobile devices. This gives a great user experience for your customers who use your app on their mobile devices. However, if you want to update your app, then a single update will fix the app on all platforms. So, if your customers change from one mobile platform to another, the user interface of the app will remains the same.
• Better Integration: Similar to native mobile apps, hybrid mobile apps use the own code of mobile device to keep it in sync with other mobile applications. Hence, it works well with GPS, messaging, cameras and other device information to offer best service to your customers.
• Better Speed: Hybrid apps are not faster than native apps; however, they are comparatively faster than mobile web apps as they support various best features. Unlike mobile web apps, the hybrid apps will not require network communication which can be the main reason for slowdown.
• Accessibility: To ensure that your customers can able to easily access your products or services whenever they require, you need to have your app available for download in various mobile stores. Hybrid apps ensure that your app will be accessible across almost all app download platforms such as Android Google Play store, Apple App store, Windows Phone App store, and so on.
• Offline use: Similar to native apps, hybrid mobile apps use the device’s API, and hence they store some data offline. So, your customers can able to use your hybrid apps even though they have the problem with network connectivity.

So, it is important for every business to enrich or improve their mobile applications by adding the native device capabilities. To do this, it is time for you to race ahead and develop a hybrid app for your business.

Create Facebook apps for your company and increase the brand image

Facebook marketing is a great, easy and affordable way marketing opportunity that helps you to promote your business. It is a huge business and recently there have been enormous changes occurring in the way Facebook pages for businesses are handled.

You can increase your brand image by having a Facebook page specially created for your business, and enhance it by adding few good Facebook apps. These Facebook apps will engage your customers and generate traffic to help you achieve your social media marketing objectives effortlessly.

So, are you having a Facebook page that works for your business? Have you ever considered using Facebook apps to enhance your business?

In this article, let’s have look at the most popular Facebook apps, the different ways to use the Facebook apps, and how the Facebook apps generally work on your Facebook page.Using apps is a best way for a business to create a Facebook page that makes the best impression on new page visitors. They enable you to do all sorts of things on your Facebook Page without scripting your own code.

Some most famous Facebook apps that enhance your brand’s Facebook page are Heyo, North Social, Pagemodo, ShortStack, Static HTML – Thunderpenny, TabFoundry, TabSite, Woobox, Aweber Web form Tool, YouTube for Pages, Networked Blogs, Sweepstakes, etc.

Before you get started, let’s analyzed create Facebook apps and use them on your Facebook page.
You have so many easy ways to get off the fence on app creation and move towards the direction where the social web has already headed. If you don’t have a Facebook app, then definitely you will be disappearing in the competitive online marketplace.

Facebook apps or custom tabs on Facebook are manually installed on your Facebook page. You can show up all those apps underneath the cover photo. Suppose, if your Facebook page has more than four custom tabs, then your user must click the down arrow on the right side of the tab cover photos to reveal all the apps.

Generally, every Facebook page consists of four standard Facebook apps. They are Photos, Events, Videos and Likes. Other apps are basically created by a third-party developer, not by Facebook. Most apps are designed on the app website and later installed on the Facebook page.

At a time, you can install up to eleven Facebook apps on your Facebook page. But, only four apps are visible in the thumbnail images directly under the cover photo. While Photos always appears as the first app, you can choose which apps must be displayed in the remaining three spots.

Some users may not have any idea about how to reveal all the apps. Hence, make sure that you include your most important Facebook apps in the top row of visibility. This is very important to be remembered when creating and adding the Facebook apps on your business Facebook page.

Here are some of the ways to use the Facebook apps to increase your brand image:

• Integrate other social media channels: 

Besides using Facebook, some people think of their various social networking websites too. So, to cross-promote content from various other social media such as Twitter, Instagram and PInterest, you need to use a free app like Statigram on your Facebook page.  However, Tabfusion and Woobox are the other two Facebook apps that enable you to integrate various social media channels on your Facebook page.

• Publish your blog to Facebook:

If you have a blog, then you need to repost blog entries to your Facebook timeline. On your Facebook page, share new posts in the news feed and house an archive of your blog posts. RSS Graffiti and NetworkedBlogs are the two most popular tools used for blogs to integrate with your Facebook page.

• Run contests and promotions:

In addition to hosting the promotion on your Facebook timeline, you can also manage your contest by using a Facebook app. There are some Facebook apps that help you to get your contest out to your fans and start increasing traffic to your Facebook page. Offer-pop is an app that provides a huge variety of contest app types to choose from.

• Add email subscribers:

Do you want to directly communicate with the people who like your page, through email? Constant Contact and Mail-chimp are the online marketing service providers who offer best sign-up apps for your Facebook page. However, Tab-site is a third-party app that offers an email sign-up app as part of their free package.

• Enable e-commerce:

Besides selling your products on your website, you can also offer your products through your Facebook page. Heyo is an app platform that provides good templates to build out commerce-oriented tabs and add product links to increase sales.

• Provide customer support:

Nowadays, most people are using social media to post feedback about the products they use. You can use apps like Get Satisfaction and Parature to get feedback and help support users right from your Facebook page. Using Facebook apps, you can collect the information you need and respond to people appropriately.

On the other hand, when running contests, promotions or more distinct marketing campaigns, it can be consoling to know that you are working with a preferred marketing developer. They ensure that you are complying with all the guidelines of Facebook, and get the most out of the platform.

If you want to get more out of your Facebook page, you must provide more convenience to your fans. Suppose if you want to have multiple tabs or apps on your Facebook page, it is recommended for you to look at the professional companies, which provide a suite of apps to determine what meets your requirements and fits your budget.

How to enhance your business using social media?

As there is an increased competition in the market and spread of Internet facilities, it becomes mandatory for business people seek different kinds of media that help them to increase traffic on their websites and grow their business sales.

One of the most effective ways to promote your business online is to harness the power of social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. If you want social media to have a positive impact on your bottom line, then you must have a planned approach that is resourceful and consistent.

So, do you know how to use social media to enhance your business? The following tips for using some of the most popular social networking websites help you drive interest and customers to your business.

• Create a business page on Facebook, and post the offers and special discounts to all the people who like your page.
• On your Facebook page, post polls to your customers asking them hilarious or quirky questions related to your products or services.
• Request your customers to share pictures of the products that they bought from your website, on your Facebook page.
• Expand your marketing efforts on Facebook by allowing subscribers on your personal Facebook page. Subscriptions enable you to send public updates to your subscribers such as vendors, customers or others who view your public posts.
• Use Twitter to tweet some interesting facts about your products or services, and give a link to that particular page on your website.
• Provide short tips on how to use your products or services via Twitter.
• On Twitter, tweet pictures or images related to your products or services to your Twitter followers.
• Create a YouTube channel, especially for your online business and frequently add interesting and useful videos. Also, encourage your customers to view and share your YouTube videos with others.
• Encourage your customers to create videos that show how they are using your products or services, and have people vote on their favorite videos.
• On your YouTube channel, frequently post short videos that demonstrate how to use your products or services.
• Request your customers to submit video testimonials and post those videos on your YouTube channel.
• Create a LinkedIn profile and add links on your website. Also, update that LinkedIn profile with the information about your products or services, so that this information appears to all the people connected to your network.
• Join the LinkedIn groups, which are popular among your customers, and regularly add comments or questions about your products or services.
• Request your customers, vendors and other business associates connected to your network to give a recommendation for your products or services in LinkedIn.
• In the Answers section of LinkedIn, look for the questions that are related to your business and provide answers for them on a regular basis. If your answers are rated highly by other LinkedIn users, you will get the title of Expert for that specific topic.
• Launch a Google+ profile to make it easy and simple for your customers to find and follow your products or services.
• Create circles in your Google+ profile, which are set up particularly for your customers, vendors and others who are interested in your brand.
• Start a Hangout in Google+ to request and get feedback from your customers.