Just like any website, online stores are not spared from errors on pages. E-commerce websites are even more prone to these technical glitches because of the number of pages involved. If you own an e-commerce store, what should you do to keep your site error-free?
Web Design is one of the most important aspects of your online presence. It increases your credibility towards customers. Some of the businesses don’t have any physical location. Their website is their business location. This doesn’t mean that you need to pay an exorbitant amount to top designers, but rather you need a design and plan that works for your business. Designing and building a website requires prudent planning when it comes to estimated cost and delivery.
Here are the 7 proven tips to Budget your Website Development:
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The above mentioned tips can certainly help in cutting down the budget of your website development to a large extent. And yes, it would be done without compromising on the content quality, look and feel of the website. So, here’s your chance to apply these tips and develop a successful website.
As a blogger, photos must always be an important part of your blogging experience. It is very obvious that visual content adds a much-needed appeal to textual content, making it more relatable and easier to grasp. But where do you find the right photos? There is always Google for searching random pictures, but images you clicked yourself are always a better option. They add a personal touch as well as save you from copyright infringement. But for so long, there was no easy way out. Even with cloud-storage options like Google Photos, you would always have to download the images locally and then upload to your WordPress account. Well, not anymore.
WordPress.com now supports Google Photos as an in-built feature. All you need is to click on “Photos from your Google Library”. For the first time, you would have to link your Google account with your WordPress. Make sure that you use the same Google account as the one linked to the Google Photos you want to use. And after that, things become very simple.
Every time you need a photo, you simply have to check your Google Library, find the image, and “Insert”. The image would be added to your WordPress library and inserted into your blog. Just like that. But wait, it gets even better.
Google automatically analyses and categorizes your photos according to the content of the image. So even if you forgot to add labels, no worries. Just type the keyword you are looking for and all related pictures would appear in front of you.
Even if you have hosted WordPress locally, you can use the JetPack plugin to use this feature. And depending on the plan, you can even insert videos in a similar fashion.
It goes without saying; WordPress makes sure that your blogging experience remains awesome.
You might be familiar with the concept of website. It requires a great effort not only for creation but maintenance too. The basic components governing a website good or bad are:
All the components are of equal importance but here we have some tips to focus on the last factor.
It is a network of high speed servers placed across the globe to distribute the static data of your website. Whenever a visitor reaches your website, the content becomes available from the nearest CDN server. This reduces latency and improves the performance report to multiple times. A better user experience and fast load rates reduces the burden from web host.
CDN can be boon for some categories of website. Check out if your category falls here:
Distributing your data on CDN servers improves reliability, scalability, performance of your website in a more pocket friendly way.
Opting for CDN over a high end infrastructure is an economically viable solution, specifically for individual owners and startups. Adjudge the need of your website and fly high its performance.
Web site is not only about build and forget it. You will have to feed it daily to maintain its credibility. Internet is a huge source of data. To let your content reach people, efforts need to be made by updating site with latest happenings and removing the obsolete. This can be a tedious task, so here’s enlisted a broad category of site update & some quintessential tips you need to keep in mind.
Technical updates
Content updates
Design updates – These kind of updates are rare and not to be carried frequently. But they form an important part of updating. The site may look old, boring or monotonous with time. A custom redesign from upper end designer or by use of available modern templates can bring back life to it. Aptly quoted ‘First impression is the last impression’, an appealing visual is as important as a relevant content.
Once you have taken care of all the categories, monitor the bounce rate of web pages and update them accordingly to improve UX. These updates may sound tough but are easy to implement. Keep working and enjoy the popularity of your site.
All of you might have seen them, used them but not familiar with the name. Have you ever done shopping from amazon, or online payment. If yes, you have already experienced and admired the ease of breadcrumbs. It is a type of navigation scheme that locates user amidst large content on the website. It can be considered a web design tool used to define hierarchy.
Where can you use them ?
Breadcrumbs have a wide utility. Navigation in e-commerce sites is a critical issue. It is the only factor attracting customers. Detailed categories and sub categories enhance user engagement and lead them exactly to the desired product. Almost all e-shops flipkart, walmart, alibaba etc are using this schema.
Some of the blog layouts also go perfect with breadcrumbs. It is not necessary to have deep navigation categories, even simple layers can enhance blog design. They are mostly used at header tabs or left navigation panes.
Social platforms like facebook, corporate and government websites like that of United Nations, rich snippets of google are a few examples showing utility of breadcrumbs.
Variety of breadcrumbs
Creativity can never be confined and so applies here as well. Each designer has its own concept of classifying content. Below are some of the examples of breadcrumbs used commonly in web designing
A free design experience
Why work hard, when smart work can get things done. While web designing, you need not customize your own breadcrumb every time. There are many freebies available online that can be downloaded directly. All the above displayed examples and many more are already prepared and free for use. Before starting, just check if any of those fit your needs.
Once you have a design style, the next step is to code it, implement and actually visualize. Here again, the service is ready at your doorstep. A rich treasure of code snippets and plugins is lying in the market for you to pick up. Here’s a list of few:
Breadcrumbs do not directly impact search engine results but affects the content accessibility of the site thus indirectly lead to better performance results. So now whenever you navigate through web, appreciate the style used by designer. In case you are on the other side, analyze the need of your site from reader’s view, indulge your best breadcrumb design and be one amongst the most captivating designer.
For the past year, Microsoft has been trying to prove the worth of its flagship browser, Microsoft Edge. Microsoft’s argument for Edge is that the battery life far surpasses that of other major web browsers. Despite their best efforts, Google’s Chrome has remained the browser of choice for many users.
Google is not in denial about the effect their browser has on your laptop battery. The company has addressed this point and has promised to keep making strides in decreasing the impact their browser has on battery life. Last year, Microsoft publically drove this point home in an effort to draw more attention and users to their browser. The company released a video showing a time lapse experiment comparing the effect a variety of browsers have on a laptop’s battery. They showcased Firefox, Opera, Chrome and of course their browser, Edge. The computer that played a video on Microsoft’s Edge outlasted its competitors. The experiment also verified that Chrome has the largest impact on battery life. The computer running the video on Chrome, died a few hours before all the rest.
Google has taken the experiments personally. Since the video was released by Microsoft last year, Google has released almost identical video experiments. Also Google has routinely released new versions of Chrome, each claiming to improve the effect the browser has on battery life. Now, Google has release their newest version of Chrome. Google is expected to release Chrome 57 this week. This update promises to enhance the batter saving capabilities by reducing the power consumption of background tabs, which Google attributes a third of its browser’s battery consumption to.
While this feud between the two tech companies seems insignificant, this form of inspired competition will hopefully lead to greater changes on the consumer side.
Google has been holding events in the past week to highlight and attract more businesses to its cloud service. As representatives from the tech giant spoke on the growing number of companies their service currently hosts; Google made the announcement of its acquisition of Kaggle. Traditionally, Amazon and Microsoft have dominated the cloud space. Google’s recent acquisition Kaggle is in an effort to differentiate their cloud platform while making strides in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Kaggle was founded in 2010, as what could be colloquially described as an open sourced, series of competitions. In short, Kaggle presents a problem to data scientist, companies and researchers around the globe. The community then competes to present the best solution to that problem. The community, or Kagglers, stand at over 500,000 strong. To date there has been over 200 competitions. These competitions have resulted in contributions to Microsoft and CERN. They are also responsible for advancements in everything from HIV research to traffic predictors.
Google’s acquisition of Kaggle, means Google has essentially teamed up with the 500,000 plus Kagglers. When Google officially announced the acquisition, they too presented new software that immediately created a buzz in the tech world. The company demonstrated Video Intelligence API (application program interface), which is a step forward in machine learning and recognition. This API has the unique ability to automatically identify the content of a video and the type of video. On stage, Google played a short commercial. The API was able to identify the commercial as such and understand the content of the commercial, a task previously accomplished only through manual tagging.
Still, the reality is that Google lags behind the leaders of cloud services, namely Amazon and Microsoft. Though, the numerous keynotes that have been held, in addition to the acquisition of Kaggle proves that Google is trying to make its cloud platform one that is highly competitive all the while continuing to improve artificial intelligence.
With the number of mobile web users increasing, web developers and designers find themselves catering to this demographic more every year. This means that aside from creating a mobile friendly site, SEO has to be adjusted for this platform. SEO is Google’s mysterious search ranking algorithm. What Google prioritizes is always changing and keeps businesses and developers on their toes. Emphasis on mobile friendliness is shaping up to be a major SEO trend for 2017. Here’s how you can help your mobile site stand out in Google’s eyes.
Recently, Google has put a large emphasis on AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages. Just as the speed of your desktop site directly affected the traffic and search ranking you received, the speed of your mobile site has a strong effect of SEO. AMP strives to ensure speed by removing unnecessary code and content through what is essentially HTML-lite. Mobile sites that comply with AMP have a load time of around a half a second.
If you have an app dedicated to your site, you have more to worry about besides SEO. ASO, or App Store Optimization, too follows an algorithm that rewards applications that adhere to its guidelines. There a tools available to help you in getting the most of ASO. Tools such as Mobile Action, App Annie and Gimmicube rank among the top app store optimization tools on the market.
While what makes a site truly SEO friendly has and will remain a secret, these tips will help you stay on top of the trends. Mobile friendliness and ASO may prove themselves to be even larger parts in Google’s SEO eyes than expected. The number of mobile users will continue to rise and developers will have to put more weight on their mobile products as the year goes on.
With a new year just beginning, tech companies are pushing further into making the charging of your devices wireless. Apple has recently joined the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC). The WPC is positioning themselves at the forefront of the wireless movement by boasting over 200 members that includes Nokia, Samsung and HTC in an effort to better the technology and start a “charging revolution”. If finding your charger and plugging it in has proven to be too much of a first world problem for you, then you’re in luck.
Apple reportedly has a number of teams working to make charging your phone wireless. Other manufacturers have experimented with this technology. Samsung implemented wireless charging into their Galaxy S7 and Note 7 phones. This innovation by Samsung is assumed to be the catalyst for the rise of wireless charging by 40 % last year. Now, the upcoming iPhone 8 is expected to be equipped with wireless charging. As with anything Apple adopts, their focus on wireless charging should then create more of an incentive for other companies to do the same. Aside from cell phones, Dell has recently released the first wirelessly charging laptop. The Latitude 7285 is able to be charged by simply placing the laptop on a supported mat.
The applications for the technology are far reaching. Disney, for example, has been experimenting with a room that will wirelessly charge your devices by just walking into them. Also, automobile companies have entertained the idea of implementing wireless charging to electric cars in an effort to increase efficiency.
The prospect of wireless charging being incorporated into all of our smartphones and computers is inevitable. It is not unimaginable that this technology will be the new norm regarding our devices. It is where the technology moves from there, that is exciting.