How to build your website across multiple devices and different browsers?

Regardless to the type of device our customers use when browsing through our website, they expect to have a great browsing experience. And the responsibility to give them that is ours. An easy to use website, that’s also compatible with the different browsers available, is a mandatory field that needs to be fulfilled in order to experience your website’s full online potential.

Few years ago optimizing the website to a standard screen resolution and running them on few browsers to test their credibility, was enough to be confidently publish the site and expect all the visitors to experience a roughly similar web experience. Some of the users may notice minor issues such as greater display resolution or different fonts, etc. However, mostly the appearance of the website was constant overall, in spite of OS difference or browser difference.

But, in today’s world people are not confined to just few different browsers and even fewer OSs on their desktop or laptop computers, they are now free to access the web for anywhere through any of the mobiledevices available with hundreds of different display capabilities – smart phones, tablets, of course PCs and even TVs. Also, people have become accustomed to accessing these different devices simultaneously and syncing them between each other.

So, how do we ensure that the browsing experience is uniform and best for all our website visitors? Here are few steps that you can take in order to ensure that.

Analyzing your traffic and customer interactions

It is of primary importance to immediately understand the visitors to your website. What type of device they are using? What type of content they are accessing? Etc. When, with your analysis you realize that the visitors using mobile devices to access your website averages above 10% of the total, then it is time for you to make the necessary changes to your website to make it mobile optimized. And optimizing the contents of your site to be more customers centric (i.e. contents for which visitors access your website) will grant you better traffic flow.

• Responsive Web Designing

As we have seen, to improve the user experience of visitors using mobile devices to access your website, it is important we make our websites mobile optimized. And one such way of optimizing our website is using ResponsiveWeb Designing (RWD.) RWD ensures that the contents of the existing web pages are uniformly displayed on various screen sizes and across different platforms. This is all done without having to create a separate website for mobile viewing alone. This is a much simpler option which can be used when you do not require advanced features on your web pages. RWD resizes your web pages to perfectly fit within all the different screen without the need of zooming or side scrolling.

• Dedicate Website for the Mobiles

Certain websites require more complex functionality such as user interactions, etc in such a case we recommend the development of mobile specific websites. A website with pages that are specifically designed to be used on mobile devices – higher visibility, faster load time, seamless design, easy form interactions are some of the features this option allows. Websites selling products on the web or websites with requires constant interactions with other visitors can make use of this type of mobile optimization optimally.

• Making Browser Specific Changes

Apart for optimizing the websites to be compatible for mobile device viewing, it is also necessary to optimize them to be compatible with the browsers available to the users without any issues.

There were days when you had to have all the different browsers open individually, and check for issues or incompatibility between your website updates and the browsers. When found, you had to again individually make the necessary changes to the coding based on the issue, on a completely setup. This was a time consuming process as multiple changes to multiple page layouts meant, work on them forever.

However, with the advent of newer technologies - HTML 5 and CSS 3 - and better means to make the changes, this process has become much easier. Now, coding the contents based on the browser market you want to engage or conquer will allow you to successfully optimize you web contents to be compatible with the different web browsers.

It is a known fact that with regards web technology, it is possible for the websites to work as good as it can even when something is quite not right. Which when compared with other programming environment is above notches, as even the mistake there will completely cripple it.

Hence, make sure you make necessary change whenever any issue is found on the websites, to provide your customers with the best user experience; to keep your business or service going to greater heights.

What you need to do to make your e-commerce website mobile-friendly?

You have an e-commerce website for your online business. Well done. But, is it mobile-friendly? If no, then that may be the main reason why your website is not preferred by most users for shopping.

Because, in the recent past days, more and more people are turning to their handheld devices like mobile phones and tablets to access the web. So, it is important that your e-commerce website must not only be user-friendly but also be mobile-friendly.

Furthermore, the web design must be conductive in order to make the e-commerce portion of the website navigation-friendly, i.e., easily accessible for users. Always keep in mind that the users may not have enough patience and also may easily get frustrated. So, make sure that the users must stay on your e-commerce website, and they can able to complete the purchase or transaction in a timely manner.

So, are you ready to make your e-commerce website mobile-friendly? If yes, here are the three ways to go about achieving your goal.

• Keep everything simple: Never make the navigational system overly confusing; always make it simple and easy. Ensure that the users can able to view a clear and concise navigational path towards buying your products or services. Once your e-commerce mobile website is developed, imagine that you have never used the website and look out the website at your customer’s perspective. Then customize your website to meet all your customer’s requirements. Always make your website simple, fast and easy, and also make your navigational links obvious. If everything in your e-commerce website is concise, quick and smooth, then the number of purchasers using your site will be increased, which in turn increases your retention rate and profits.
• Make your e-commerce website responsive: A responsive web design is an approach in which the information from a website is converted to fit different types of devices such as mobile phones and tablets. To provide an optimal viewing experience to your users, make your e-commerce website responsive. When your website is responsive, it makes it much simpler for the users to access what they need from your website. The most important things, such as products, services and the e-commerce portion, have to pop right out at the customer, allowing them to have a quick and on the go access to the mobile commerce portion, and hence successfully complete their purchases.
• Use WordPress to build your website: WordPress is an open source blogging tool that provides a huge variety of plug-ins and enables you to build an effective mobile-friendly websites easily. For example, WP touch is one of the plug-ins that will make your e-commerce website mobile-friendly and accessible. That is, this plug-in allows the users to see a mobile version of your e-commerce website on their mobile phones. In case, if you don’t have WordPress, then you can still use other ways to make your e-commerce website mobile-friendly. So many methods and approaches are available to make an e-commerce website mobile-friendly. So, choose a best one for your e-commerce site to achieve what you need.

At K2B Solutions, our expert web design and development team can help to make your e-commerce website more mobile-friendly for your users. We set up WordPress through your e-commerce website to make the entire process simple.  Also, we make the navigational links simpler and concise, and thus make your e-commerce website responsive, which can help retain your customers and maximize profits for your online business.

Responsive Design Adds 40% More Revenue for Your Business

What will happen if your website is not soothing and intuitive for your customers? The customers will automatically switch away from your business to other business and hence you’ll slowly lose all your potential customers.

It is obvious that the success of any company greatly depends on how decisively and frequently they hold their potential customers. This could be easily and promptly done by simply hiring a web development company or a mobile development company to develop a mobile website for your business.

Due to the popularity and proliferation of different sizes of mobile phones and most people have now started using their mobile phones to browse websites, a mobile strategy for websites has become more significant than ever.

A mobile website is the one that fits all latest gadget screen and provides users the readable and understandable format of your website’s content. It provides users with an amusing browsing experience by crafting your website based on the size of the gadget screen.

Hence, this is the right time to make decisions about your business mobile presence to compete with other businesses in your same niche. If you don’t have your website with mobile presence, then you may suffer loss of revenue and profit.

The mobile website allows users to easily navigate between different web pages. The fluid grid layout of mobile websites helps you to hold your customers from moving towards your competitor’s website.

As per the survey taken on internet users, around 40% of the users have switched to competitors’ websites as they felt very difficult to navigate pages in top listed domains. So, have you decided to enter into the world of mobile web browsing?

Before placing an order for a responsive web design, you need to figure out the important information on your website that needs to provide a complete focus to customers.

Based on the survival strategy, recognize the highest flying pages of your website that enhance your business and display those pages to the customers on your mobile website.

By doing this, you can able to create awareness about your selling products as well as your current offers and discounts prizes to your customers. This begets a huge number of customers towards your business and brings more revenue for your business.

If you built your website in a mobile format, then it shows the letter “m” associated with the website and hence the URL will automatically guided the primary website and this will be indicated in the browser’s address bar.

Moreover, this mobile web design is extremely uncomplicated to use and simple to grasp the users who visit your mobile website. Your mobile website may hold the huge bright-colored icons and buttons, thus the users can able to effectively and easily navigate the web pages of your website on their portable screen of mobile phones.

Suppose, if your website is not compatible for mobile devices, you can easily find out that the website is not optimized for features handsets. Because, if the users use their mobile phones and browse your website, then they can’t even able to view and know about your products or services.

So, all business owners must realize the reasons why they are losing their annual sale. They should recognize that they are losing their customers mainly because of their old-fashioned web appearance.

Then, the business owners should build their websites compatible with all hand-held devices or seek help from mobile website development companies and get effective mobile websites. This helps them to give their customers an enjoyable experience while browsing the websites and thus to uphold the customers for long period of time.

All You Should Know About Modern Day Web Development Methodologies

In this ever-changing online world, the modern websites incredibly reflect the trends of web development industry. The internet technology has also changed due to the rapid changes in all the domains across the globe. In these days, people are expecting something novel and inventive web designs for their websites.

The following are some of the latest trends in web development: 

•          Responsive Web Design
•          Flat UI design
•          Parallax web design
•          Full screen photo launch page
•          Advanced navigation and page scrolling 

Responsive Web Design:

Nowadays, websites are designed in such a way that users can able to access the websites from any of their devices, no matter the size of the screens, orientation and the platform they use. If websites are designed to be responsive, then this web design is generally called as Responsive Web Designs or RWD.

Due to the arrival of modern mobile phones and smart phones, responsive web design has become more prominent and imperative in the web development field. Generally, a responsive web design automatically rescales a website based on the dimension of the screen being used by the users to view the website and provides a great viewing experience for them.

Flat UI design:

In previous days, web designers were engaged only on doing animations, flash designs and so on. But now, the trend has changed and the web designers have started concentrating on flat user interface design. The flat user interface design is a two-dimensional web design, which is flat and contains no three-dimensional realism.

Actually, this technology was implemented by Microsoft to its interface. And it is the first one that is against the skeuomorphic design. Unlike three-dimensional design, the flat user interface design doesn’t contain any bevel effects, shadows and other gradients. But, it has some distinguishing characteristics like flat illustrations, open spaces, sharp boundaries, vivid colors and many more.

Parallax web design:

Parallax web design is a renowned technique and it is now the most modern trend in web development because this technique provides an incident of interactive screens. Parallax web design is similar to interactive storytelling. This scrolling technology enables various figures migrating at various speed and the dimensions of the pictures are assorted based on the screen size or on the situation.

Parallax web design technology also enables pictures or characters at different velocity, hence it augments the intensity of the images and furthermore it provides experiences like animations. Moreover, this technology allows users view more than one web page by using a single window.

Full screen photo launch page:

The screen photo launch page technology is mainly used to convey a message in a website effectively. Web designers generally use this technology to convey the message in a poignant way as well as in a promotional approach to grab the attention of users instantaneously. Thus, this helps you to transform your website users into another world of creative activity.

Advanced navigation and page scrolling:

By using the advanced navigation and page scrolling web design, you can able to integrate navigation panels in your website. These navigational panels are very interactive and thus provide an effectual means of navigation to the website users.

There are some extraordinary web development technologies accessible for the web developers to attain the aforementioned web design methodologies. The technologies that can be utilized to create cutting-edge websites are CSS3, Html 5, JQuery, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, etc. 

K2B Solutions is a leading web design and development company in India, which offers ingenious and inventive web development solutions to clients all around the world. We have technically strong web developers who use the best 2.0 applications such as HTML5, CSS3, RSS, XHTML, Active X controls, applets, web services, web protocols, client or server-side software and many more.

Hence, we use modern day web development methodologies and provide efficient web development solutions that satisfy all the business requirements of our clients.

Website Security – Why it is so Freaking Important?

It is undeniably known that the Internet has become the greatest place of opportunity, providing individuals and businesses a platform to communicate with the world. Because of this, websites and web applications are rapidly growing and they have been widely used by both individuals and business owners for their various activities such as publishing, sales and marketing.

Moreover, the websites that are used by consumers are considered to be the weakest point of security, since most websites are prone to security risks. Suppose, you are a web hosting provider with more than thousands of hosted websites, then it is necessary for you to eradicate the possibility of attacks that would gain access to user accounts or your network.

The various types of attacks against websites and web applications are as follows:

• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): XSS is one of the major problems on websites. Around 80% of websites being vulnerable because of XSS. This attack occurs when an application takes user supplied input strings, typed in forms or search boxes, without validating or encoding. It allows attackers to run a script on server or client, which can usurp user session, mutilate websites, introduce worms, etc.

• Malicious File Execution: This attack is susceptible to RFI or Remote File Inclusion. It allows attackers to execute ghastly attacks by including hostile code and data. RFI attacks affect any framework that accepts files or filenames from users and also affects XML and PHP.

Website Security - K2B Solutions Web Design Company

• Failure to Restrict URL Access: Web applications generally protect web pages by preventing the display of URLs or links to unauthorized users. Sometimes, the applications may fail to do this process. In this situation, attackers access web pages directly and perform unauthorized operations.

•  Insecure Direct Object Reference: Attackers can manipulate the references to access internal implementation objects, such as files, directories and database records in forms or URLs, which are usually exposed by application developers.

•   Information Leakage and Improper Error Handling: Sometimes applications unexpectedly leak information about their internal workings, configuration or infringe privacy through different types of application problems. Attackers make use of this and steal secure data and demeanor serious attacks.

• Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF): This attack forces an authenticated user to send pre-authenticated request to a web application that led the user to initiate hostile action that benefits the attacker.

• Injection Flaws: This attack is very common in web applications. It occurs when the input given by a user is interpreted as a part of query or command and sent to an interpreter. The attacker inserts data that is interpreted as a command that may expose or change data.

• Broken Authentication and Session Management: Due to unsecured login and logout processes, attackers compromise keys, passwords and authentication tokens, to presume other user’s identity information.

• Insecure Communications: Web applications may sometimes fail to encrypt network traffic when it is obligatory to secure sensitive communications. This led attackers to conduct attacks such as interception of text HTTP requests and SSL certificate spoofing.

• Insecure Cryptographic Storage: Web applications infrequently use cryptographic functions that protect credentials and data. Thus, attackers make use of the weakly protected information and conduct other user’s identity theft and other criminal activities such as credit card fraud.

Website security is one of the greatest concerns of most website owners. It is really intricate to completely protect your website. Nevertheless, there are many steps that you can take to make your website as secure as possible and also help you take necessary actions suppose your website has been hacked.

Fundamentally, it is important to have a secure website for your online success as your visitors, readers and customers feel safe to use your website.

Before hackers attack your website, you just need to find out the security threads and take necessary actions:

•           Always keep your website safe from malware, hackers and other threads.

•          Use strong passwords and keep the passwords secret.

Website Security - Why it so Freaking Important

•          Do not let your website get expelled by the leading search engines – Google, Yahoo, etc.

•         Increase the confidence level of visitors with website seal.

•    Use daily scans to check for web-based vulnerabilities.

•    Exploit online dashboard that displays the detailed report of issues that occur.

• Regularly backup your website.

• Constantly keep your virus-software updated.

• Do not download anything or open email attachments if you are not confident in.

Nowadays, several techniques have been used by hackers to compromise a website. However, they use the techniques successfully because of the vulnerabilities in the software that run on your hosting account or your local computer.

Hence, a lot of things are there to keep in mind when you think for a website security:

•  Security: Simply blocking malware and malicious software is not enough to have a secured website. Also, you need to be careful in protecting your website from attacks such as Injection Flaws and Cross-Site Scripting, which can easily attack your website.

•  Performance: The performance features give you the guarantee that your website doesn’t take long loading time.

•  Management: If you have a surge or a dip in your website visitor, then you need to check out whether anything has pretentious your website to cause this.

•  Help: Some companies are there to provide community help, which gives you the support structure that you need to keep your website running fast.

How to prevent the security risks of your website?

To prevent your website from security risks, you need to use automated scanning and detection tools. Also, make sure that the detection software that you use for this purpose is infallible. Some automated detectors will not find out all the injection vulnerabilities. So, it is necessary for you to perform a complete review on code.

Similarly, manual penetration testing and manual code review have to be done even though you use automated detection. Because, the automated detection tools infrequently fail to detect some XSS vulnerabilities and also some insecure direct object references.

Eventually, there are a number of safeguard practices that you need to be followed to prevent the security risks of your website. Lack of awareness and alertness of software users and website owners is the main reason for the continuing success of hackers. If you commit yourselves to protect your own data and website, then the website attackers would definitely have a much harder time.

Using website security helps you to keep your website as safe as possible and hence make your customers feel comfortable using your website.

Responsive Websites Vs Mobile Websites Vs Mobile Apps.

Mobile Technology has changed our lives in the past few years. The incessant evolution of mobile phones, regular release of latest mobile OS versions, availability of different varieties of mobile apps and high-speed internet connections have entirely transformed our lives to completely depend on mobile devices for all our online activities.

Apart from mobile devices, people have now started using smartphones, tablets and other hand-held devices for connecting to the internet, from anywhere and anytime they need. This revolution has made many companies to shift from Desktop to Mobile strategy for their online businesses.

Moreover, the shift from desktop to mobile devices also necessitates web designers and developers to refocus their web designing process, to create websites that support all hand-held devices.

Responsive Websites Vs Mobile Websites Vs Mobile Apps.

The web designers and developers follow various approaches to make mobile web presence. They build a separate mobile website or mobile application for users to view websites on their mobile phones. The latest approach followed for this purpose is the Responsive Web Design.

 To make a mobile presence, every business needs to decide on which route to go down - Mobile Website or Mobile Application? Mobile website or Responsive Website?  Mobile application or Responsive Website?

Mobile Website:

A mobile website is a website created significantly for small-screen devices. Similar to a regular website, mobile websites can also be accessed through various browsers. A mobile website generally consists of limited content and hence it is light-weighted and faster when compared to regular websites. If a browser is using mobile phone to view a website, then the website automatically detects that the website has accessed on a mobile phone and then it redirects the browser to a separate URL to view the mobile specific website.

Why do you need a separate mobile website?

Even though the invention of smartphones has changed the importance of mobile websites, certain cases still exists where mobile websites make sense. Limiting the view’s options to only what they require to perform on their mobile phone is achieved effectively through a separate mobile website.

Mobile Applications:

Mobile applications are the applications developed mainly for mobile device platforms such as iPhone, Android, Google, etc. Usually, mobile applications have been downloaded from app stores. There are a large number of mobile applications available for various platforms. As there are many mobile phones available with various operating systems, mobile applications are incredibly expensive to develop and maintain.

When do you need to develop a mobile application?

In recent days, the things what you are able to accomplish using a standalone mobile application can now be able to easily done with a website. But still the necessity of using mobile applications for businesses is there around. Mobile applications are great for storing a large amount of information such as video, audio and catalogues. Even though the applications have a huge amount of information, the users are not required to wait on loading information over a slow 3G Internet connection. This is how the mobile applications greatly enhance user’s experience.

Responsive Web Design:

Responsive Web Design is a latest approach to web design that allows you to create responsive websites. A responsive website is a website that can adapt itself on various screen-sizes regardless of the devices that you use it. Responsive websites are usually optimized for viewing on mobile phones, tablets and desktops.  Hence, the Responsive Web Design approach eliminates the need for developing separate website for every mobile device platform. This approach is currently preferred by web designers and developers as it covers a large number of users’ devices.

Mobile websites vs. Mobile applications

Suppose, your website is relating to marketing and it requires a wider customer reach, then a mobile website is apt for your business. A mobile website provides greater compatibility with different browsers and allows constant updating. However, if your website needs interaction with users such as accessing personal data or sharing user information, then a mobile application works better for your business.

If you want your website that has been easily shared and accessed, then mobile application is the right option. People can easily find out your mobile website by using any of their browsers. In case, your company involves in services like reporting and calculations or game creation and promotion, then using mobile application is the best solution.

Mobile applications have the ability to work without the internet connection. Conversely, mobile websites cannot work in such situation. Moreover, mobile applications require very high development cost when compared to mobile websites.

Mobile websites vs. Responsive Web Design

If you want to provide users a mobile experience that engrosses speedy decisions and also selling and buying, then you need to have a separate mobile website. However, if you want to constantly add something or update your website based on new trends, then having a single responsive web design is the best option.

As a responsive website is entirely composed of complicated codes and technicalities, it requires a huge development cost. However, a mobile website requires a very low development charges. When considering the optimization process and SEO, responsive website takes up the priority than the mobile websites.

Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Applications

When thinking about the advantages of using responsive websites, first thing that comes to our mind is the download activities that are not required for responsive websites whereas the mobile applications require you to download them from app stores. Also, a responsive website doesn’t require you to update any information again and again. You just need to update the information on your main website that makes your work done.

Responsive websites provides you the compatibility across various platforms. It enables the content updates in the websites driven by Content Management Systems. The main disadvantage of using a responsive website is that the responsive website cannot be used without an internet connection while the mobile applications support this situation. Comparing the development cost, both responsive websites and mobile applications entail a strong budget.

Conclusion:

The above three comparisons clearly showed that all the three approaches, to make mobile presence, have both pros and cons. Based on the nature of your business, you need to select the best approach that fits for your situation. Before selecting any one of the three approaches, it is better to research well about your business, audience and the technologies that you need for best results.

Growth of the Internet Transactions in today’s trend.

In this high-tech world, the Internet plays a significant role in boosting economic activities ranging from millions of online transactions and communications. The online transactions and communications are generally handled electronically by adopting Information Technology in the workplace or at home. For example: e-commerce, e-mail and e-government.

Witnessing the unprecedented adoption of Information technology, around millions of people have started using electronic devices like mobile phones, laptops and desktop computers, for their transaction activities. Because of this, the online transactions are no longer restricted to real world today and its impact on worldwide growth is also rising rapidly.

Most people enjoy online transactions for their various activities such as online shopping, online bill paying and online banking. Nowadays, people spend much more in online per transaction than in stores. The entire e-commerce market has increased over 400% in the last five years.

Most companies have setup their own e-commerce sites with numerous payment options for secure online shopping and transaction. Their e-commerce sites facilitate shoppers with easy shopping and also allow them to compare prices and products online. This attracts most of the shoppers to prefer online shopping.

According to the survey, there are around 137 million Internet users currently available in India, among which 25 million involved in online transactions. Is it also estimated that around 10 million people buy flight tickets online and seven million people buy e-commerce products. Hence, the e-commerce market has expected to reach 30 billion by the year 2015.

On the other side, the world of online banking is growing incredibly among the Internet users as they get freedom to bank at their own convenience. Online banking enables users to manage their financial life much easier and facilitate them to access banking information from anywhere that they have access to the Internet.

Moreover, the online bill payment has extremely grown to become the eminent method of bill payment for paying bills such as electricity bills, telephone bills, Internet bills, Gas bills, credit card bills and Insurance premiums. It has become very popular especially among the Internet-connected households as it provides great comfort to them in paying these bills.

As online bill payment provides a secure payments environment, the adoption of Internet transactions is increasing swiftly day by day. People have started managing their bills and assets online to gain control of safety, time and finances.

Even banks are witnessing a tremendous growth in online transactions as there is an increasing number of users log on to the Internet to pay their utility bills. Online bill payments and transfer of funds from one bank to another contributes a 100 percent growth in online transactions every year.  Every month, online transactions are growing up by 10 to 12 percent according to the report given by Billdesk, which facilitates online payments.