Create an Online Store using CS-Cart

Technology improvisation makes people smarter and showers heaps and heaps of benefits to the users. To top as a victorious online store, it should be capable of managing an infinite number of categories and unlimited products to gain quality response from the end users. These user-friendly websites can be utilized by the users even without any technical knowledge. The virtual interface and the exclusive features of these stores dig out the shopping needs of the people and enchant them completely.

Ecommerce, a booming industry in today’s market has lot of scope and this is mostly preferred by most of the marketers to promote their sales to a higher level. Creating an eCommerce site to attain a great reach in the bazaar without the help of the developers is possible nowadays. If you’re in search of a classy and stylish shopping cart for your startups to meet up all your needs, then CS-Cart will be the right choice for you!!!

What is CS-Cart?
Cs Cart is one of the most excellent shopping cart solutions to design an online store despite of the size of the business. This amazing tool helps to administer your online store wherever you’re. Sustain your customized online eCommerce website on your own server to manage your business with maximum comfort.

Why CS-Cart?
CS Cart is available in three standalone editions:

• Professional
• Ultimate
• Multi-vendor

This is the reason why, this tool suits all the businesses of any size. This can be used for a new standalone project or it can affix more functionality features to the existing one.

Create an Online Store using CS-Cart

If you wanna start up a business and develop a website on your own? Don’t be worried that you’re not aware of the HTML and CSS codes which are the basics for creating a websites. Your creativity is quite enough to create an online store using CS-Cart.

Follow the below instructions to craft your own desired website to augment your business:

Installation & Setup

• Create an account in CS-Cart Customer Help Desk system. Place an order for CS-Cart license. Then download the software in your system. 
• Register a domain name with the affordable CS-Cart hosting packages. 
• To offer a safer environment to all the customers, get an SSL certificate installed on the server. 
• Then install CS-Cart software on your server. 
• Give your entire company address which is given to calculate shipping costs.
• Then, list out all the languages in which the site will be available.
• Quote the prices to be displayed and the payment methods to be accepted.
• Give the mode of shipping methods.
• Create and set up taxes applicable and the necessary terms and conditions.
• Set up all general settings like minimum order amount, weight symbol, one-page checkout, extended search, etc. 
• Once the installation and setup was over, you can add the products manually or import the whole product database in CSV format.

Home Design

• Pick the captivating design from a list of design themes available. 
• Provide the essential information like title of the page, welcome message and meta-information in the home page.
• Pop in your own logo. Then in CS-Cart admin panel, change the default language to date and time format. 
• CS-Cart default functionality has to be changed, if your company has some special features. This can be done easily if a person is well-versed in Smarty Templates, MYSQL, and PHP. 

Endorsement

• This part is only to attract the customers towards your business. You can do so by adding additional and striking features like reward points, gift coupons, promotions, etc. 
• Use a resourceful and innovative content management system (CMS). This helps to store large number of products classified under various categories and this in turn, promotes your business by attracting many customers to your store.
• Different information pages like featured products, related products, bestsellers, listing as per price, listing as per category can be used to group the products in a structured way.  
• Then focus on the target audience by advertising your site on the social media. 

Kick start your own dream business and bring all your imaginations into existence in the form of an online store with all your creativity!!!

How an attractive Real Estate Company Website Design Assists in Business?

Have a virtual and visual experience of the property, which you’re gonna buy. Wherever you’re in this world, you can get a piece of land or a constructed property anywhere across the globe through the real estate websites.

Not only buying and selling, renting a property can also be quite easy through these sites. The visualization of these websites will present you the real-time feel of gawking at the property in person. If the appearance of the websites astonishes the users with its design and the necessary features, this will in turn get innumerable user responses to them thereby boosting up the real estate business of the company.

Let us take a quick glance of what are all the attractive features that are behind the successful real estate websites and how they assist in bringing up the business to the pinnacle…

Why Real Estate Business to be systematized?

No one will get satisfied easily by viewing fewer numbers of properties as it is a life-time investment. Hence, presenting a large number of properties and comparing them with one another will gives the supreme striking gold to all the buyers. With the rapid and continuous improvement in technology, real estate business also got systematized and gained sufficient response from the end users.

The evolving internet and its great features like presentation upshots with photos, videos; database of storing aplenty of data; its mode of reaching people at their place made each and every business pushed towards it to arrive at the grand success of it.

Features of attractive Real Estate Websites

To meet up the needs of every business and to handle them at ease, the websites are designed and created with most prominent features to fulfill the needs and requirements of the end users and the business firms. The features that make a real estate website a most powerful and attractive one is as follows:

• Fully automated - completely programmed and systematized
• Custom Template Web-Design - eye-catching layout to navigate easily and to present look and feel environment
• Modular & multi-tiered - goes well with real estate business of any size
• Responsive Design– one design, one website to view on all devices like mobiles, desktop, laptops, iPad, etc. 
• Multiple Listing Service – includes MLS databases to store, sort and represent to have the curb appeal
• Google Map – using Google Geo-Mapping Service to show the property locations with the exact co-ordinates of latitude and longitude
• On-page SEO – Search Engine Optimization techniques are used to make the content rich and search-engine friendly.
• Detailed Mortgage Calculator – to know the monthly finance, refinancing, interests, tax deduction and other information
• Additional modules like rental database module to display the photos of the property; real estate agents module to display the contact info of them; rental availability calendar to show the accessibility of the property and rental pricing grid to provide the pricing of rentals. 

How the above-mentioned features assist in business?

Each and every feature that are used to design a real estate website helps in their own way to broach the business to satisfy the real estate company proprietors in yielding a superior views from the customers.

Let us see in detail how each and every feature promotes the business to a higher level…

Fully automated website makes the real estate business to be highly systematized, so that it can be administered at any place across the world. Custom template web design will grab the attention of many users to engage in using the site for more information.

Modular and multi-tiered will fit any size of the real state companies. Responsive websites will offer the universal access despite of the screen resolutions of the devices. This helps the users to view the properties at any place with the device of their choice.

Multiple Listing Service gives wider access to the database and the modules present in it. This sort the properties by house type, city, town, state; and by brokers, realtors; displays the properties of similar requirements like price, sq. ft. of it.

Google Maps will give the accurate location with the correct coordinates on the map. On-page SEO will bounce the website to have high traffic as they use keywords to boast high responses and also make the content search engine friendly.

Get a piece of an own land or a rented one easily through these attractive websites which is at your reach!!!

Map your travel info with this City Mapper App! – City Spot

Never mess up with your direction and never drive for miles down the wrong road. Get to your important engagement or a gathering faster and on time by never losing your way. Navigate your world and explore your favorite hangouts around you. As rapid increase in time, we must update our self with latest tools to keep up with our rate of knots.

City Spot – a world map application for mobiles will make you explore new things in the place where you live and wherever you progress across the globe.

Now, are you sitting at the edge of your seat to know more about the interesting facts of this fantastic app? Let us spot out all the most amazing features of this map application in this below section…

City Spot
K2B Solutions, a company into and web and mobile app development feels great to launch the mobile app ‘City Spot’ which goes well with Android and iPhones.
 
If you go crazy in exploring the renowned and famed amenities in a particular place, then get a friendly companion – City Spot to be installed in your handy device. This great app lends a hand to you in finding out most famous restaurants, theaters, banks, ATM's, stations, educational institutes, parks, hotels, bars, malls, home appliance stores, travels, health and fitness centers, holy and devotional shrines, buildings near the place where you’re.

System-based specifications 
This city map application for mobile entails iOS 5.1 and it effectively runs in most recent versions of it. At the same time, City Spot for Android runs successfully in Android operating system with versions 2.3 to 4.3. This IOS app or an Android app is also compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. This mobile app helps you to spot the approximate network-based location and precise GPS location.
This striking app works effectively on all network connections like Wi-Fi, 2G and 3G networks.

Features

1. Location based augmented reality
The most striking and grand feature of City Spot is the ‘Location based augmented reality option’ in that app. This option will redirect to the camera in your friendly and handy device. Viewing the camera on a particular side will gives you a list of amenities you’re looking for. It may be a restaurant, hotel, ATM, devotional shrine, and so on.

2. GPS tracking
This location-based Android app comes with GPS tracking – a satellite based navigation system which gives the information on all the amenities like tourist spots, fuel stations, restaurants, hotels, lodges, etc. This trait gives the shortest path between two places.

3. Google Maps
If a user searches for a particular destination to travel through, City Spot will redirect to Google Maps to offer the utmost accuracy of places across the globe. This gives the speed map access and all the categories or the amenities that are in or nearby a particular place can be viewed easily and rapidly.

4. Social media
The trip details from a particular source to searched destination can be saved for future purpose and it can be shared through email, Facebook, and Twitter with your beloved buddies.

5. Trip Duration
The ‘speed of travel’, ‘distance covered’, and the ‘time duration’ taken for reaching a particular target can be measured. With this, the user can measure the time duration while on the go. By tapping the ‘Refresh Icon’ in this app will fetch the accurate current location and proceeds with your further searches.

Once an amenity is clicked, it will point out the intact list of services in that location. By clicking on the place-marker, the user can get the precise route to the marked target. Then the user can navigate in the route map by clicking the place-marker (Car icon) again to watch the current route activity.

Other Features

• You can listen to music while using City Spot 
• While using this app, the mobile users can place or pick a call. 
• All the search locations and the trip details are saved for your future purpose. 
• Covers all the countries across the globe
• This app is upgrade to its newest versions. 

Ease your voyage as much as you can and ensure that you travel in a correct pathway while on the move. Spot your preferred spot across the globe at ease with City Spot!!!

Why X Cart is preferred over Magento for eCommerce solutions?

Got drained with your unprofitable business in some other field? Come out from that and kick-start your eCommerce online business.

Develop a site using X Cart. The visualization of these site gives the paramount viewing experience to all their valuable clients by presenting a number of product catalogues in their devices wherever they’re. This helps you to deal with thousands of customers, picking many preferred products of their choice by simply adding them to the shopping cart. Placing orders at ease using this method earned a good retorts from the users of these eCommerce sites.

After selecting the web layout for your eCommerce website, next choice should be of shopping cart as they hold a vital role in them. Let us see in detail how X Cart is effective and widely used more than Magento in most of the eCommerce websites.

Magento and X Cart 
Magento – Magento Inc is the developer of this open source eCommerce web application which uses EAV model for the data storage.

X Cart - open source software developed using PHP as a base

Why X Cart not Magento for Ecommerce?
Organization Features

• X Cart is a robust open source app, and it can multiply the prospective of shopping carts persistently through consistent resources and services.
• This app always comes with substantiate user manuals and technical support. 
• Step-by-step runs the system instantaneously once the installation gets completed
• Easy to modify and competitively priced, hence it goes well with any kind of business despite of its size
• More insightful and user-friendly solution when compared with Magento 
• Cost-effective solution to meet up the budget 
• Online Store Manager can keep track of the inventory to know the remaining stock at any time.
• To facilitate the sales, it gives the detailed reports, statistics, catalog manager and much more.
• Administrator can limit the access of a user to certain goods or products.

End user benefits

• It is a search engine friendly app. 
• Before buying a product, the customers are open to the options like ‘compare’ and ‘review’. This assists the buyers in getting the best from a number of choices.
• Customers can rate a particular product. This in turn results in knowing the additional features of that product and results in high productivity.
• Integrates with the famous social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Once the product is added to the shopping cart before checkout, it leads to the payment gateways that are more secure. The most famous payment gateways that act as a mediator between the banks and the online stores are also integrated with this app. 
• Responsive interfaces provide mobile compatibility despite of the sizes of the devices. (Either desktop or mobile)
• Customers are given 24/7 assistance via Live Chat or through phone calls. 

System-based features

• It can be easily set up at shared server, because of its less resource consumption 
• As PHP Smarty Template System is used by it, programmers love to design the layout of the website. 
• Huge amount of data can be stored in MYSQL database. The database can be extended or customized as the complete source code and SQL are given.
• To make use of the static HTML and dynamic content, it has incorporated HTML Catalog functionality. 
• Increases performance and customizes uniquely to gratify the needs of the diverse online stores 
• Highly reliable and rapidly fast without any extra optimization
• A robust online store management system to store thousands of products
• Being an open source app, it can be downloaded for free of cost. At the same time, the products at the online store can be added, edited and deleted as per the convenience of the vendor of the online store. 
• Provides maximum flexibility, hence it is preferred by most of the developers. 

App’s added features

• Inventory is controlled directly and informs the purchasing sector regarding the time of restocking goods. 
• Provides hosted and self-hosted services
• Being a search-engine friendly app with rating features, the company websites are rated in the renowned search engines. 
• The online stores can be customized to be more attractive as per the choice of the online store manager to present a gorgeous site to grab the attention of more visitors or buyers.

Have the best feasible shopping experiences with X cart!!!

Is Xamarin a better choice for cross platform Mobile App Development?

iOS and Android are the most used platforms in Smartphones until the preface of Windows platform in them. Objective-C is used for iOS and Java is used for Android phones. As there are most exclusive features in each platform, the users of respective smartphone cannot avail the added feature in another platform. The mobile app developers felt hard to write code for multiple platforms. They found code replication in all the platforms. So they wanted to develop a toolset or an app which supports all the three mobile platforms and to reduce the repetition of code. As a result, Xamarin has invented to work successfully with the cross-platforms in the mobile devices.

Let us see how Xamarin supports all the three Smartphone mobile platforms with all its attractive features…

Types of Mobile Apps

Before getting started to know what is Xamarin and why it is the best option for the cross-platform mobile app development, let us take a short of different types of mobile apps.

There are three types of mobile apps that can be written by mobile application developers. They are:

1. Native apps – runs reliably and solidly on the mobile device. These apps are highly interactive. The language codes are not portable and it is difficult to retain different codes for multiple platforms and it costs much. 
2. Web-apps – run within the confines of the Web browser. There are some restrictions in accessing the parts of the hardware. As their codes are written once, they can be accessed anywhere. They are less expensive and the codes are written using CSS, HTML, and Jscript.
3. Combination Apps – A blend of both native and web apps is called as ‘combination apps’. For hardware access of the mobile, native codes are used and for web access, web codes such as CSS, HTML, and Jscript are used. Due to performance issues and poor scalability, these apps are used rarely. 

What is Xamarin?

It is a product or an app that selects the unique features of the mobile platforms and persuades the mobile apps developers to take benefit of those features offered by each platform. They can share the code across any mobile operating system without affecting the systems’ quality or performance.
It is used for designing mobile apps, testing them and categorizing them to iOS App Store and Google Play. As most of the .NET developers prefer C# for its simple mode of learning and it reaches the skilled mobile apps developers, it was chosen by Xamarin.

How it works?

The mobile app developer writes user interface code on Android and iOS separately. Then they can write reusable business logic, database codes, web services codes only once on both platforms.

Platforms supported

It powerfully integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio. The developer can choose their preferred development environment to construct mobile apps. The platforms that are supported are:

• Visual Studio on Windows
• Xamarin Studio on Windows
• Xamarin Studio on Mac

Why Xamarin for cross-platform Mobile apps development?

• If a developer is well-versed in (.NET/C#) or (JAVA/Objective-C), they can easily work with Xamarin. The reason is code of .NET and C# is compatible. 
• Developers are given complete access to all the user controls and native application programming interfaces that are available in the existing OS. 
• Less code - less errors – less bugs 
• Creates reusable components that can be reprocessed by any of the mobile platform
• Code for accessing any services can be used again smoothly on iOS, Android and Windows platforms.
• Integrated Development Environment Xamarin Studio is a top-notch IDE. This IDE develops tests, debugs, and much more operations in the cross-platforms. 
• iOS with UI and Android with SDK features creates distinct platform for each other. It take hold of the distinctive features of each platform making the apps native to their platforms. 
• Xamarin core .NET classes = Platform specific .NET classes (iOS-specific .NET classes + Android-specific .NET classes). This helps the applications to share the core logic across the different platforms
• Writes user interface code for Android and iOS, then share the business logic that can be reprocessed in both platforms
• Highly transferable database code
• Reduces development time – writing few code that are unique to each platform 
• Xamarin apps are assembled to native binary and always execute without any performance degradation.
• Application portability gives amazing user experiences
• Writing single set of code reduces the amount of testing and validates them for both platforms. 
• Working with .NET/C#, helps the developers to focus completely and develop efficiently with the best support. 
• As the shared logic created for both Android and iOS will be applicable to Windows phone and it supports them. 

Benefits of using CiviCRM for Drupal based websites

Having a huge list of appointments, meetings, and conferences is always hard to handle. Do you want to put an end to this issue by scheduling your valuable appointments, meetings, and get-togethers in a hassle-free way?  Here is the effective tool called CiviCRM helps to record and organize your important conferences, events, group activities in a structured way. Above all, you can access them wherever you’re, if they are integrated with the Drupal websites. Let us have a detailed information of Drupal based websites and the benefits of using CiviCRM in them.

Before going deeply into CiviCRM, first let us know what CMS and CRM are?

CRM and CMS

• CMS – Content Management System 

CMS is an efficient system helps in creating, organizing and managing the website contents effectively in a structured way.

There are three most popular open source CMS. They are:

1. Drupal
2. Joomla
3. Wordpress

• CRM - Contact Relationship Management System

CRM is same as your personal contacts book with some enhanced features associated with it.

What is CiviCRM?

Do you want to keep track of all the important official or personal conversations and interactions??? You can simply carry out this vital task through your websites to manage your engagements and memberships.
CiviCRM is web-based open or free source software. As its name implies, this software can be used, shared, downloaded or installed at free of cost. This software grants complete freedom to share out the original source code to all any of the employee or a person in an organization. The source code can be viewed and modified.

CiviCRM is a modular system and always works with CMS tool, as both the software tools are open source.  CiviCRM's core keeps track of contacts and groups; activities, relationships, tags and permissions. There are 9 components of CiviCRM. They are:

1. CiviContribute - keep track of contributors
2. CiviEvent - keep track of events
3. CiviMember - keep track of member lists
4. CiviCase - keep track of cases
5. CiviGrant - keep track of grants
6. CiviCampaign - keep track of campaigns
7. CiviPetition - keep track of petitions
8. CiviMail - keep track of bulk mailings
9. CiviReport - keep track of reports

What is Drupal???

Drupal is one among the three most popular open source content management systems. Drupal is back-end framework with pre-built manuscripts. Presently, millions of internet sites are using pre-built manuscripts to grab the attention of new users to have quality traffic for their sites. These pre-built scripts will give you the entire configuration you need for your website. Then, you can customize your website by simply embracing your quality content, personalized pictures, and styles in it.

Why Drupal, not Wordpress or Joomla???

Highly customized websites always entails complex content organization and scalability.This results in producing the advanced sites. Drupal is the most friendly and powerful tool capable of categorizing and organizing complex content with its robust and potent taxonomy. Most of the online stores and community platforms nowadays encompass multiple users. Those sites require complex content organization. Hence, developer-friendly tool Drupal is used.

Wordpress is user-friendly and it is ideal for creating simple web-sites with partial design options. As it lacks content management capability, this is often targeted by hackers.
Joomla allows you to develop a site with complex content and structure flexibility. It lacks SEO capability and at the same time it is not easy and intuitive.

CiviCRM Integration with CMS or Drupal

Being a free or open source software integrates with CMS (Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal) to bring in a set of useful possibilities to the websites in which they’re being used. This helps the users of the websites to carry out many activities on their own. The users can request for email updates, renew their memberships, sign up new events, share the data, edit and modify the data and so on.

Benefits of using CiviCRM in Drupal-based Websites

Drupal being a developer community contains a lot of modules which goes in hands with CiviCRM. CiviCRM and its components keep track of the contacts, member lists, relationships, activities, groups, events, tags and permissions, petitions, grants, contributors, cases, campaigns, reports, and bulk mailings in the Drupal-based websites.

Benefits of using CiviCRM in Drupal-based websites are listed below:

• Expands your website’s operating capabilities.
• Scalability and Security
• Views: display website content. 

CiviCRM integrates with Drupal Views and allows CiviCRM data to be shown on your website. One can create CRMData using views in structure section which is located in Drupal Administrative menu

• Calendar Module: displays calendars on your website
• Webform Module: offers extensive options in form submission. 
• Organic Groups CiviCRM module: after integration of Drupal Users with CiviCRM, the Drupal group can be used for mailings, tracking address information, tracking activities or anything else normally done with CiviCRM contacts.
• CiviGroup Roles Sync module: allows Drupal Websites’ administrators to update their user experience for donors and staff. 
• CiviMember Roles Sync module: allows Drupal Websites’ administrators to update their user experience for organization members.

Stop worrying in handling the bulk of contacts and records!!! Create an effective and powerful planner cum organizer and pre-built website to efficiently handle your private conversations safely using Drupal integrated with CiviCRM!!!