What to do to differentiate your Ecommerce Business?

Just imagine that you could be able to sell your products or services online at very good prices, and also have your customers be excited to pay the amount whatever you charge for your products or services. This sounds good! Yes, it is utterly possible if you use proper methods and strategies in your e-commerce business.

To make your e-commerce business different from your competitors and steer miles ahead of them, then these are the ways that help you to achieve your goal:

• One of the best ways to separate yourself from your competitors is through absolutely exceptional customer service. Offering an outstanding and unique customer service is easier said than done. As an e-commerce business owner, you have to analyze and decide on what would appeal to your customer base. It could be quick delivery, packaging, and may be shipping options. Find out the unique ways of serving your customers in a better manner, and stand out from your competitors.
  
• Personalization and customization are the most popular aspects in e-commerce business. Personalization involves modifying your e-commerce website to suit your customer’s preferences by using cookies. For example, if a customer is buying a product from your website, you need to list out the similar products of interest on your homepage when the next time the customer login. On the other hand, customization helps you to empower the users by providing them tailor-made solutions based on their requirements.
  
• Enrich the user experience when the users come to your e-commerce website for buying your products or services. Creating a memorable and exciting experience for the users not only brings satisfaction to them, but also guarantees repeat business. Even for first-time visitors of your website, the novelty of the user experience immediately sparks their interest, draws them into your online store, and keeps them do more online purchases from your website.
  
• Harnessing technology and social media into your e-commerce business is very important to beat your competitors. If you are innovative, you can always harness the latest available technologies and integrate them into your e-commerce website to grow your online business. On the other hand, given that social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn and so on, has turned out to be a tidal wave, hence it is mandatory to accord it a special place in your e-commerce strategy.
  
• Offering attractive or competitive price is obviously one of the best ways to attract more customers. You can sell your products or services at lower prices as compared to your competitors by following various options such as managing to source your products or services at affordable prices, or being able to cut down or reduce the shipping expenses, etc. Indeed, lower price can be a formidable competitive advantage. So, price is undeniably considered as a strong way of differentiating your e-commerce website.
  
• Offering a guarantee on your products or services shows your customers that you are assuming the risk, because your customer satisfaction is your primary concern. Apart from providing best customer service and amazing user experience, you can put your customers at ease with a splendid guarantee. Offering guarantee speaks volumes about your e-commerce business, and how firmly your business stands behind your products or services.

Ecommerce is obviously a promising realm of opportunities for ambitious business owners, and the only way to outdo the competition is by daring to be absolutely different. Apart from the above mentioned strategies, there are also some other strategies available to differentiate your e-commerce business, and also it all depends on your ground-breaking and passionate approach.

Comparison between web 2.0 and web 3.0 standards

World Wide Web or WWW was first introduced in the year 1991. But, later, as the technology advanced, new versions of web standards in the form of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 came into existence. However, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are obviously considered more advanced and easy to use when compared with Web 1.0. But, most of the people are confusing with the changes and the evolution that have taken place. This article aims to be clear out the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

S.No	Web 2.0	Web 3.0
1	“The document Web”	“The metadata Web”
2	“The social Web”	“The intelligent Web”
3	Static	Highly mobile, three-dimensional or 3D
4	Controversial	Even more controversial
5	Writable phrase of the WWW	Executable phrase of the WWW with interactive services, dynamic applications and “machine-to-machine” interaction
6	Uses the read-write web	Uses semantic web
7	Google as catalyst	Semantic Web companies as catalyst
8	Google keyword search is used to find information	Databases with metadata are used to find information
9	Uses blogs, web applications, rich media and viral media	Uses drag and drop mashups and widgets
10	Focuses on Communities	Focuses on Individuals
11	Uses online knowledge community that entails people tagging of content and its categorization	Uses content management systems along with artificial intelligence
12	Facilitates interaction between web users and sites	Interprets information like humans and wisely produce and distribute useful content customized to the requirements of users
13	Abundance of information	Control of information
14	Sharing Content	Consolidating Dynamic Content
15	The key technologies developed during this stage of the Web include are Blogs (Blogger); Wikis (Wikipedia); Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us); Social Networks (Facebook, MySpace); Instant Messaging (Yahoo!, Google Talk, AIM); Mash-ups; Auction Web sites (eBay); and Professional Networking (Linked-in, Plaxo).	The key technologies developed during this stage of the Web include are Ontologies (YAGO, DBPedia); Semantic Searching; Thesauri and Taxonomies; Personal Intelligent Digital Assistants; and ·         Knowledge Bases.

Create a Facebook Page for a business now!!

Have you decided to create a Facebook Page for your business? Wondering how to get your Facebook Page started? This article helps you to set up a new Facebook Page for your business.

If you have a Facebook account, then you can able to create a Facebook Page within few minutes easily and quickly. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a web developer, web designer, marketing expert or tech savvy to create an enticing Facebook Page.

To set up a Facebook Page for your business, just follow the below mentioned steps:

• Log into Facebook: Don’t you have a personal profile set up on Facebook? First, create your personal profile rather than just creating a “business-only” Facebook Page. Your Business Page will be tied to your personal profile; however both the Pages are completely separate. No one can view your personal information, not even your name, from your Page.
  
• Select a Category: Open the link www.facebook.com/pages/create.php, and select any one main category that suits your business very well. Don’t select Local Business or Place if you don’t have any physical storefront. This is because Facebook will automatically turn your Facebook Page into a Place as well.
  
• Name your Page: Think well and provide your Facebook Page name carefully. If you have a clear brand name, then naming your Page is easy. Have keywords in your Facebook Page title, because this helps your Page to come up in Facebook search. Once you have provided the name, select the check box next to “I agree to Facebook Pages Terms” and click Get Started.
  
• Add your profile picture: Your profile picture will be appearing next to each and every post that goes into the news feed from your Facebook Page. So, add an image relevant to your business, for example: brand logo, as your profile picture. Once you have added your profile picture in your Page, then click Next.
  
• Add your basic “About” information: The About Page is the main page where you can briefly provide the information about your business. As this page is indexed in Google, make sure that you provide descriptive and keyword-rich content in this page. Also, ensure that you link your business website in this field, so that the visitors can able to easily find out your website. Here you can also add other websites that you want to direct the visitors to. Once done, click the Yes radio button and click Save Info.
  
• Like your own Facebook Page: Facebook allows you to give “like” to your own Facebook Page. You can give “like” to your own page if you want, else you can skip it.
  
• Don’t invite your email contacts: Facebook displays a page where you can invite your email contacts. However, until or unless your Facebook Page is updated a bit more, it is better to avoid inviting your email contacts. Instead, create your own email message and send it directly from the email service you use.
  
• Start sharing: Facebook allows you to share your first status update. You can either share your update now or you can skip this step. But, before you start inviting people to like your Facebook Page, you can have many status updates on your timelines, which makes people to see the types of things you are going to be sharing.
  
• Add a cover photo: Read the Facebook’s Cover Photo terms properly, and then add a cover photo to your Facebook Page accordingly. Before adding your cover photo, make sure that it meets all the guidelines. Then, click the Add a Cover button and select Upload Photo. Choose your photo, place it properly on your Page, and click Save Changes.
  
• Review your permissions:  Go to Edit Page, manage permissions from the admin panel and then review how your permissions are set up. Here, you may want to change the Profanity Blocklist to Medium, and also your Message button. Ensure that you monitor all the messages there, and also that you are making it easy for the people to send you messages in a different way.

Your Facebook Page is almost ready! It’s now time for you to get some likes on your Page!

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