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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to make a successful e-commerce store?

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

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

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

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