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.

What important technical details should a programmer consider before making the website live?

As a web developer or programmer, you need to concentrate on some vital technical information before making your website live. The foremost thing that you need to concentrate on is using an appropriate platform for your web development.

You need to make sure that the platform you’re going to use for developing the website must be stable, secure, high-performing and scalable. Also, it must meet all kinds of business goals such as less cost, quick development time, high Google ranking, and so on.

Next, you need to be more specific about using web standards for your website development. As a professional web developer, you need to have specific consideration on HTML, JavaScript and CSS over HTTP.

Before using any web standards, ensure that which web standards you are going to use, and also ensure that in what circumstances and why you are going to use those standards.

So, what important technical details you should consider before make your website live?

• Make sure that your website works reasonably well across all major browsers, because sometimes browsers implement standards inconsistently. Also, consider how browsers render your website in various operating systems, and how people might use the website other than from major browsers.
• Ensure that you deploy updates on the websites without affecting the users. Have staging environments(one or more tests) available to implement changes on the websites, such as modifying architecture, adding content, changing code, etc., and ensure that they are deployed carefully without affecting anything else in the website. So, always have an automated way of deploying changes to the live website.
• Never display unfriendly errors straight away to the users of the website. Also, never provide the user’s email ID in plain text as it may get spammed to death. 
• Learn how doing progressive enhancement, which helps you to deliver the best possible experience to the users.
• Always REDIRECT after a POST if it was done successfully. This helps you to prevent a refresh from submitting again.
• Make sure that you take accessibility into account without fail. Because, in certain situation, it is a legal requirement.
• Aware about Injections like SQL injection, and learn how to prevent them. You have to use hash passwords to prevent rainbow attacks.
• Use SSL/HTTPS for pages like login pages or the pages where sensitive data is entered.
• Avoid cross site scripting (XSS) and cross site request forgeries (CSRF). Also, prevent session hijacking and Clickjacking.
• Implement caching if necessary. To do this, you have to use HTTP caching and HTML5 Manifest properly.
• Learn how to deflate content and optimize images in the website.
• To reduce the number of browser connections, try to compress duplications among files by improving gzip ability.
• For performance profiling, use Google page speed with browser extension. This helps to optimize images in the website. You can use CSS Image Sprites for small related images like toolbars.
• Reduce the number of HTTP requests that are required for a browser to render the web page.
• Always remember that SEO or Search Engine Optimization plays a greater role in generating traffic to your website. So, make sure that you use search engine friendly URLs in your website.
• Make sure that you install Google analytics tool or an open source analysis tool right at the start. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools to get a detailed report about the visibility of your web pages on Google and Bing.
• Never forget to have an XML sitemap in the website. This helps you to tell Google about pages on your website.
• Use XHTML/HTML and CSS according to the W3C specifications and also ensure that they authenticate.
• Learn how JavaScript is processed in the browser. If you use iframes, then learn how the JavaScript sandbox works. Also, consider using JavaScript frameworks that hide the browser differences when using JavaScript for DOM manipulation.
• To load frameworks, consider using a service like Google Libraries API. This makes a browser to use a copy of the framework it has already cached instead of downloading a duplicate copy from your website.
• Always set up a better error reporting solution, and document how the application works. Also, make frequent backups and make sure that the backups are functional.
• Use a version control system that helps you to store your files. Also, never forget to do your acceptance testing.
• Ensure that you have enough logging in place using frameworks. When logging, make sure that you capture both handled exceptions as well as unhandled exceptions. And analyze the log output regularly to find out the key issues in your website.

What is a framework? Why using frameworks to build Websites and Web Applications?

What is a framework?

A framework is mainly designed to help developers to build unique websites and web applications. It provides core functionality to almost all web applications such as user session management, template systems and data persistence. By using a proper framework, a developer can able to save a significant amount of time when building a website.

When should a developer use a framework? 

The necessity of using a framework can be measured based two categories. 1) The level of customization you need, and 2) The developers whom you employ.

Suppose, in order to drive innovation in your company, you want to improve social interaction among your employees. However, you don’t want to use the public social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, etc. So, you want to create a custom social network among your employees. Therefore, you will be considered a custom development done for this purpose. As this will be requiring more customization, you will be more likely using a framework.

However, if you are not going to do the website or web application development by yourself, you will be employing a developer to do the work for you. Even thought a huge number of developers use open-source frameworks, some developers prefer to use their own custom-built internal frameworks, and some never uses framework at all.

Like many of the communities that share their opinions, the developer community does so many aspects, such as using the actual language and design pattern, writing the code, and of course, various aspects are also there about using frameworks.

Why using frameworks to build Websites and Web Applications?

• Most popular frameworks in many languages are open-source or available to use for free. Some frameworks come with licensing, but that is not restrictive and, however, allows developers to create commercial products using such frameworks.

• A framework has either good documentation or good support or both at the same time. At times, good support will be a subjective issue. Generally, paid support will be faster and more concise; however, this also depends on the activity level within the framework.

• Efficiency is the main reason why framework exists. If you use a framework to build a website, then you will not be required to write a lot of repetitive code, which you will find being used in various web applications.  Example: Commenting Systems and User-authentication. On average, you can expect to build a website in much less time than would be built writing code without using a framework.

• Generally, a framework is built and tested by a large number of developers. So, it is extremely likely that various different security risks are addressed and tested when building a framework. Moreover, new security risks can also be addressed and fixed easily and swiftly. 

• Suppose, if you are developing any web application and you want to store some data, then you will be using a database. Similar to database, there are various other tools available to link to web development. While Frameworks make it much easier to link to these tools and also to communicate with them.

Comparing Web Browsers: Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox

There was a time when only one browser was vastly superior to another, but now due to the emergence of various web browsers, it has become tough for you to choose the best one amongst so many varieties. Fortunately, you cannot go wrong with any of popular web browsers anymore, but there are a few things here and there that give each of its own competitive edge of the others.

Here is the comparison among the most popular web browsers: Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

	Internet Explorer	Safari	Google Chrome	Mozilla Firefox
Developer	Microsoft	Apple Inc.	Google	Mozilla Foundation
Open Source	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
First Public Release Version	1.0	0.8	0.2.149.27	0.1
First Public Release Year	August 16, 1995	January 7, 2003	September 2, 2008	September 23, 2002
Software License	Proprietary	Proprietary (browser), GNU LGPL (WebKit)	Google Chrome Terms of Service (Google Chrome's closed-source features), BSD (Chromium executable)	MPL, MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license
Accessibility Features	Ad Filtering, Caret Navigation, Full-text History Search, Text-to-Speech, Voice Control	Caret Navigation, Full-text History Search, Mouse Gesture, Spatial Navigation, Text-to-Speech, Voice Control	Full-text History Search, Spatial Navigation, Text-to-Speech, Voice Control	Caret Navigation
Platform and OS	Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris OS, HP-UX	Mac OS X	Windows, Linux, Mac OS X	Windows, Mac, Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, Other/Unix
Current Layout Engine	Trident	WebKit	WebKit	Gecko
Mobile Tech Support	None	WML	None	None
Web Technology Support	·         SMIL          ·         VML	·         XHTML 1.0           ·         XHTML 1.1	·    XHTML 1.0    ·    XHTML 1.1	·         MathML          ·         XForms          ·         XHTML 1.0          ·         XHTML 1.1
Plugins and Syndicated Content Support	·         ActiveX, Atom, Other Web Feed, RSS	·         Atom, NPAPI, RSS	NPAPI	·         Atom, NPAPI, RSS
Protocol Support	·         IPv6, Proxy Possibilities	IPv6	Proxy Possibilities	·         BitTorrent, Gopher, IPv6, Proxy Possibilities
Image Formats Supported	·         None	2D Canvas, JPEG 2000, PDF, SVG, TIFF, XBM	2D Canvas, PDF, SVG, XBM	·         2D Canvas, APNG, SVG
Average Market Share	18%	5.92%	25.7%	25.2%
CPU Usage	18.1%	4.4%	3%	7.6%
Overall Performance Rankings	5/5	2/5	1/5	2/5

Why Social Media Marketing is better than Traditional Marketing?

In today’s ever-changing and fast-paced world, social media marketing has revolutionized the way how companies and business people interact with their clients, partners, dealers, suppliers and others who are important to their businesses.

Even traditional media, such as television, radio, magazines and newspapers, is also partly moved online where they can easily share their information to a huge number of people all around the world.

Today, marketers are questioning the real differences between traditional marketing and social marketing. Is social marketing is really better than traditional marketing? Let us look at the benefits of social media campaigns in comparison to the conventional marketing strategies.

Social Media is cheaper: The major advantage of using social media for marketing or promoting is that it costs nothing for businesses to set up social media accounts. Using social media, businesses can reach a lot of people for a fraction of the cost than they can reach through traditional media. Social media not only makes your business promotion easy, but also allows you to do it with free cost.

Effective One-on-one communication: Social media marketing enables most companies to have a conversation with the people, who are important to their business, in such a way that few promotional tools can make. The conversational nature and the easy accessibility enable businesses to easily connect with their clients one-on-one. Using social media, they can respond to their customers’ or others’ comments, feedbacks and posts everything instantaneously and vice versa the way they do business.

Generate pre-qualified traffic: If you use social media for marketing, then it is easy for you to drive pre-qualified traffic to your website, and thus generate sales and profits. Generally, people who are interested in your company will follow your company social pages regularly. So, in order to attract many people and make them visit your website, you can post updates on social networks regarding your new products, offers, discounts, and run exclusive promotions. Even though, it is possible to generate traffic by using traditional media, the prospects that are gained through social media would be definitely warm leads.

Flexibility and adaptability with campaigns: Suppose, if you have signed off on traditional marketing campaigns such as newspapers, magazines, television or radio advertising, then you will be having some restrictions on the changes that you can make, without acquiring a huge amount of cost. However, if you use social marketing, you will have the adaptability and flexibility to include or remove promotions, and also you can make changes to your campaigns through social networking websites at a moment’s notice with very less set up time needed.

Easily evaluate the results: You can able to easily evaluate social media campaigns by using social network analysis software such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and so on. This software helps you to find the metrics such as how many users clicked on links, how many people shared the links with their community, and which network refers the highest traffic to your website. Whereas, measuring the success of conventional offline campaigns like advertising or public relations is very difficult.

Therefore, social media has become a very important channel for news as well as information distribution and utilization that has taken over the benefits of traditional media. That is, social media has replaced the traditional media significantly by presenting great information consumption and distribution channel. Furthermore, the recent trend shows that the popularity of social media has grown over the past few years, and also the growth remains the same trend.

How to create an attractive Email Newsletter?

In general, businesses try every possible way to attract their customers. In certain scenario, it has become obligatory for businesses to persuade the customers online and thus to undertake additional efforts.

Today, creating a quality website to promote products or services and hence to generate online sales is what every company is doing now. But, another most useful and powerful way of promoting businesses to reach existing as well as prospective customers is Email Newsletter.

By creating an attractive Email Newsletter, readers can become even more engaged and interested to find out new or more information about your products or services, whilst increases your business sales and profits.

If you want to create an attractive email newsletter, then there are some key factors that you should keep in mind:

• Have a clear focus: When planning to design an email newsletter for your business, always bear in mind that what you actually need to achieve it. That is, the actual purpose of the email newsletter should always remain in focus. Whether you may be sending your newsletter to inform the readers about your new product or service, or to make the readers familiar with the offers or discounts you provide for your products, the design should be relevant and direct the readers to take desired action.
• Make simple and clean design: Mostly email newsletters are viewed in a very less time by the readers. So, it is important to keep the design simple and understandable. A complex newsletter design will distract the readers reading your information. So, avoid overfilling your email template with complex design, large number of images and information overload. A simple and clean email newsletter design is always attractive, and it facilitates a great understanding for the readers. Also, use short but descriptive content in your newsletter.
• Use tables in your template design: Using tables for designing an email newsletter is considered as a perfect choice to make your template looks good as well as to gain more benefits. To provide various elements in a favorable way, you need to properly place the elements in your template. To do this, you can use tables in your template, and thus the elements will not appear distorted even if the readers view your email newsletter in a preview pane.
• Use images safely: It is uncertain that the readers will be able to view the images in your template. In fact, if a newsletter is there with a blank appearance, then it is surely going to leave a very bad impression. So, images must be carefully used in your email newsletter, and also make sure that you use the images only if they are really required. Also, do not use too much of images in your newsletter because it gives a clumsy look to your email newsletter.
• Avoid using animation or video: You can use catchy content and images in your newsletter to make it attractive, but it is mandatory to avoid using video or animation to create an attractive newsletter. This is because the email client may not support it, or it may make the email heavy. Hence, the reader will not take pains to view a video in an email newsletter. Instead, you can place them in your website for readers to view when they visit your website after going through your email newsletter.
• Keep “Call to Action” simple and prominent: The main objective of an email newsletter is persuading the readers to take the required action. So, always keep this in mind while designing your email newsletter. Grab the reader’s attention, simplify the message you want to convey, and perfectly display the action button at the right place. The action button must be significantly visible and it must clearly describe the action.
• Provide link to view the Web version: Sometimes your email newsletter cannot be viewed in proper form by the readers, even though you might have paid high attention to every detail in creating email newsletter effective. Therefore, it is very important to include a link that opens a Web version of your newsletter. 
• Adapt your newsletter template for mobile devices: Generally, websites are designed to cater to the mobile users. Likewise, your email newsletters must be created to make them adaptable and user-friendly to mobile devices. This helps you to reach your potential customers easily and efficiently.