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10 Minimalist but Spicy Web Design Ideas for Beginners in 2017

10 Minimalist but Spicy Web Design Ideas for Beginners ...

Some trends are popular for many reasons. They just work, easy to build, users are accustomed to them, flexible across many platforms and present the whole information in a more appealing and meaningful way.

The term minimalism can be defined as cutting down all the unnecessary elements and just focus on what is more important to display on the screen. Basically, minimalism showcases the real purpose of your website.

Though minimalism seems simple on the screen but requires a lot of time in the production and development practices to create a minimalistic piece.

Let’s go through a list of some nice, clean and minimal web designs that really shines in 2017 and hoping that they will be around for many years to come.

1: Stay Consistent

When it comes to creating a brand identity, a minimal brand mark can be incredibly useful. Keep your business logo super simple and the color palette very minimal, make it flexible enough to be used throughout the rest of the branding seamlessly, and helps in creating a consistent and a memorable brand.

This bar branding sign above by Simon McWhinnie is an example of being consistent in your web design.

2: Discover Hidden Relationship

Following minimalism in no way means that your design has to be any less creative. If you’re not trapped down in complex visuals, you often get a chance to explore and play with clever relationships hidden within your design.

Take a look at the branding done by Interband for Opera Australia, a minimalist design to discover a clever relationship between the words.

3: Play with Native Relationship

Minimalism allows considering the spatial relationship of the design in a way you might not have before. Do consider how your design interacts with other elements on the web page to create a wider design.

Check out these above business cards designed by Trevor Finnegan as how their design interacts with other elements to create a wider design.

5: Stay Clever

Minimalism isn’t about the lack of the illustrative elements, but instead of the careful choice of when and where to use them in your website design. Working on an illustrative element that directly relates to your brand name into a logo can help creating a very visual, and yet very minimal design.

The above example by Frame Creative created a very visual yet minimal design by following the technique of being clever.

6: Embrace the Efficiency

Minimalism is about skipping all the unnecessary things and only focusing on the website communication. Display the information neatly and efficiently, no crazy visuals required.

See how Jake Frey displayed the information on his business card (above) neatly and efficiently with no crazy visuals required.

7: Be Functional

Minimalism is just brilliant for functionality. A clean, clear and uncluttered design can make the navigation like a walk in the park. The minimal design and the clear typographical hierarchy makes the navigation of the contents page quick, easy and functional.

The minimal design and typography done by JamesKape have made the navigation of the contents page quick, easy and functional.

8: Find Some Balance

The relationship between visual elements like photographs and typography is important to get just right. A good design is the one in which no element overpowers another with no good reason.

One key trick to follow, the simple photographs should be paired with large, attention-grabbing pull quotes, while the more textured and complicated images should be paired with a small piece of body copy creating a balanced harmony between each page.

9: White Space is Alright Space

White space, aka as ‘negative space’, can sometimes look empty or blank space, but this is not entirely true! If use well, white space can help balance out your design, and help it breathe. The idea of white space results in a classy and minimal design.

10: Be Direct

When there are less visual elements fighting to be seen, designers will able to be a lot more direct with the message conveyed and the overall communication. This can be useful when doing web designing, with a direct and plain message, helps give the viewer an idea of who you are straight away.

Final Words

Minimalism is the vital component to your web design as it has the potential to be timeless. The fewer elements your design possess, the less chance it may get to go out of style or trend.

Old-Google-Vs-New-Google

Let’s take a look on Google. The screenshots above are of 10 years ago and today’s homepage of Google.

Despite the small change, the white space, the focus on the content, and the minimalism of the website keep the design relatively timeless.

Minimalism is about the way of thinking about your design. Typographically, limit the use of fonts to create a more connected and less confusing design. In colors term, embrace monochromatic schemes but don’t be limited to them only.

Overall, consider what can be removed, whether color from the palette or image from the composition. See what can be replaced with something more concise. Reduce them and just keep what is necessary.

Saima Naz

Apr 19, 2017

How to Hire the Right PHP Developers

How to Hire the Right PHP Developers

If you asked to describe PHP in one word, it would be ubiquitous. Means it’s everywhere. And so are the PHP people, who develop with it. So how can you find an expert PHP developer among all those who claim to “know” the language? This blog here will give you the answer.
PHP is used in more than 80 percent of the websites and applications as a server side language. It is used in more than 80 percent of all the web projects, and with PHP 7 just around the corner, it is only going to rule the web world.

Finding an average PHP developer is not that much difficult. However, mastering this language requires a lot of time and effort, and if it’s the professional few you’re looking for, you will definitely need to design a flawless interview process.

Writing down interview questions, it’s difficult to maintain a balance: you want to test your candidates’ problem-solving and error-resolving ability, but not torture them with a long list of boring, irrelevant questions and potentially drive them away.

Here are some ways to follow while hiring the right PHP Developers.

1: Ask Basics Questions:

While you don’t want to irritate your candidates with a standard interview routine, asking one or two basic questions form them won’t hurt anyone. You need to ensure that the candidate must have a good understanding of PHP and how it’s used in the development process.

Get free quote from professional PHP Development Company about your project.

2: Ask Specific Questions:

Some of those specific questions will largely depend on the kind of knowledge and skills your project requires. Write down the list of sample PHP interview questions which will help to evaluate the candidate’s expertise. The list should contain server-side, database, and client-side related topics.

3: Ask About their Past Projects:

It’s important to know what they did on their past projects. However, the project may seem very impressive, but the part they played in them might not be. Ask them their contributions in the project.
Keep in mind that they could have worked under NDA, so if their answers sound little fuzzy, it doesn’t mean you should drop them from the list of your potential hires immediately.

4: Ask them some Non-Technical Queries:

Developers sometimes need to explain things to other developers and non-developers the same, and making them talk about something they find interesting can tell you a whole lot about how they communicate, which is no less important than their PHP skills.

5: Check the Candidate Code:

There are few ways to check their coding style. You can use coding tests available online, but ensure that they are real world coding challenges and not some standard “textbook” problems. And in the alternate, you can take their small trial.
Do remember, it’s not the final code that matters here. You just want to check how your candidate does the task and get the opportunity to review their work before handing them your precious project.

Wrapping Up

You’ll come across many who claim to be the “experts” of PHP, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good fit for your project.
So make sure you know very clearly what skill set you would like your PHP programmer to possess, what frameworks you are planning to use, and what exactly the ultimate goal of your project is. Use these as guidelines, and, hopefully, hiring the right PHP developers to build your web application will become a little easier.

Saima Naz

Apr 17, 2017

Some Main Things to Know About the Drupal Website Security

Some Main Things to Know About the Drupal Website Secur...

Drupal, among all the website building platform,  gives the best security to your website. Big brands and business websites like the White House, French Government, New Zealand Government, British Council, and the Embassy of the UAE in Washington are all built with Drupal.

The owners of these big websites trust Drupal and feel safe. There must be good reasons for that! Let’s dive into the details and read out some prominent features that make Drupal secure.

If you are planning to create a Drupal website, or already have one, then you are welcome to read about these Drupal website Security benefits and some tips as how to utilize them in the proper way.

Drupal Website Security

The Drupal Security Team is always available

The Drupal own security team includes a team of expert professionals from across the globe. They continuously analyze Drupal core and modules, view security reports, respond to the security issues arises, cooperate with the module maintainers, prepare and release fixes. Anyone can contact them to report for errors or get assistance.

Get Free Quote and Avail Drupal Development Services.

Continuous core and module updates

Drupal core and contributed modules are constantly updated to provide the high level of functionality and security for your website. Make sure to run the recommended core and module updates for your Drupal website. Old modules should be removed instantly.

In terms of security for custom code, ensures it is written well and accordingly to the Drupal coding standards.

If your site is running on Drupal 6 or on any previous version, do upgrade them to Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 which are now the only two latest versions supported by the Drupal community and, get regular security updates for better performance.

A convenient user role and permission system

Drupal offers flexible and convenient options for granting permissions to the website’s users or groups of users. Be very sure who you are granting the access to your website. Pay special attention to the roles that are allowed to run PHP code on your Drupal site. It is a safe idea to remove PHP input filter from your Drupal site.

Good news, in Drupal 8, it is no longer even available.

Data encryption

In Drupal, passwords are encrypted with multiple parameters (length, expiration, complexity etc.). Also, a strong database encryption can be configured, with a variety of options to protect the specific information. Make use of it to get advanced security for your website.

Limited login attempts

Drupal helps prevent from intrusions by limiting the number of login attempts from the same IP address for a particular period of time. You can also keep track of all these login attempts through the administrative interface.

Form API

The purpose of Form API is to clean and validate the data before submitting into the database. It tests the data entered by users to match the specific formats and parameters.

The End

Drupal is the most secure, open CMS platform.  Follow these Drupal security guidelines and prevent your Drupal site from cyber attacks.

Saima Naz

Apr 14, 2017

Build ASP.NET Web Pages using Razor Syntax

Build ASP.NET Web Pages using Razor Syntax

Microsoft Asp.Net framework is used to develop web applications, dynamic websites, and web services. There are basically 6 frameworks introduced by Asp, which is 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5, 4.0 and among them, 4.5 is the current and latest version of Asp. Every framework comes with advanced classes, methods, and types so the programmers can produce unique things using the features of these frameworks. Let me guide you through all the basics of Asp.Net before we dive into building an application using Asp.Net

About MVC

MVC, a software architecture pattern, separates the development of application into three components namely Model, View & Controller. Let me tell you what they are about and what they actually do

Model: Manages the entity definition, data access and business logic of the application

View: Represents the UI, and where the user can see information provided by the model.

Controller: Controls the interaction and communication between Model & View

About C#

C#, an object-oriented programming language, developed by Microsoft as a part of the .Net framework.

About Razor

Released by Microsoft for VS 2010 in January 2011, Razor Asp.Net programming syntax enables the programmers to write C# or Visual Basic code embedded in HTML page and used to create dynamic web pages.

Get free quote from professional Asp.Net Developer about your project.

About Visual Studio

Visual Studio is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) used to create windows form applications, websites, web applications and web services. It supports a variety of programming languages including C#, C++, Python and Ruby.

Let’s start building Web Application Using Asp.Net

So we now know about these software development technologies, let’s create your first web application.

1- Open Visual Studio 2012, go to “File/New” menu and click on “Project”. A window like below will open

2- In this window, select within the Visual C# options, ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application.

3- Then in the next window, select the template “Empty”, and “Razor” as View engine, and then click Ok.

You can now see web application project created with the required folders Models, Views & Controllers also the reference, app data, scripts and other files.

4- Right-click on the folder “Controllers” and “Add/Controller” and you’ll see a window, enter the name of your controller. For e.g. “Index”, and for the template option, leave Empty Controller. Don’t remove the suffix “Controller” in the controller name because it’s showing that this one is a controller class.

5- Now, right-click on the folder “Models” and select Add/Class. Name this class as you like because this will be the Entity to show in the View. We name it “IndexModel” (the name doesn’t have to include the word “index”). Then, add some properties to the class. For example add ID, Description and Comments properties.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;

namespace MyMvcApplication.Models
{
public class IndexModel
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Description { get; set; }
public string Comments { get; set; }

}
}

6– Right-click on the folder “Views” and create a new folder named “Index” (as the controller). Then right-click on that folder and select Add/View. Name the view as “Index” also and as a result, we’ll have a new “Index. cshtml”.

7- Now we have added Model, View, and Controller. Let’s add some code to the controller which will be like this.

8-Now add some code to the view which will look like this.

9- Run the Project on any internet browser, and make sure you add to the URL the action “Index”.

That’s it! You have built the first MVC Application with ASP.NET, using C# and Razor. It’s is the most basic and simple way in order to learn and create your very first web application using Asp.Net with Razor syntax. Hope it helps you in understanding the easiest way to develop Asp.Net Web Application.

Saima Naz

Apr 12, 2017

Top 10 Features in ASP.NET 4.5

Top 10 Features in ASP.NET 4.5

ASP.Net, an open source, server-side web application framework, introduced by Microsoft to create dynamic web pages. The framework is designed to help programmers in developing dynamic websites, web applications, and web services.

History

ASP.Net first version i-e ASP.Net 1.0, was released in January 2002. ASP.Net is built on CLR (Common Language Runtime), let programmers write ASP.Net code with any .net supported languages such as C#, J#, JScript and Visual Basic .net. With ASP.Net you can create more interactive and data-driven web applications. ASP consists a variety of control like text boxes, buttons, and labels for assembling, configuring, and manipulating the code to create HTML pages.

Microsoft ASP.Net 4.5

Microsoft ASP.Net is one of the most successful application development frameworks. The latest and the newest version of this framework is 4.5. ASP.Net is quick to develop and deploy highly scalable and fast performance web applications in a managed environment. Here in this article, I am to going to discuss the top 10 features of ASP.Net 4.5 for the developers.

Get free quote from professional Asp.Net Development Company about your project.

1: Bundling & Minification Feature

The bundling and minification feature in ASP.Net 4.5 will bundle and minimize the size of the scripts and style sheets used in your application. The feature is a great addition in the performance of any web application. The namespace System.Web.Optimization provides the support for bundling and minification of files. When you create a new project in ASP.Net 4.5, these below lines will appear in your Global.aspx file.

protected void Application_Start()

{

//Some code

BundleTable.Bundles.RegisterTemplateBundles();

}

2: Strongly Typed Data Controls

ASP.Net 4.5 have strongly typed data controls. It gives intellisense, just assign the ItemType property to a model which is going to be associated with the data controls used in the aspx pages. Below mentioned code will illustrate how to use Strongly Typed Data Control feature:

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText=”Name” >

<ItemTemplate>

<%# Item.Name.ToString() %>

</ItemTemplate>

</asp:TemplateField>

 The below code is a complete markup code of the Grid view control which uses Strong typing:

<asp:GridView ID=”GridView1″ runat=”server” AutoGenerateColumns=”false”

ModelType=”Payroll”>

<Columns>

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText=”FirstName”>

<ItemTemplate>

<asp:Label ID=”lblFirstName” runat=”server” Text='<%# Item.FirstName %>’></asp:Label>

</ItemTemplate>

</asp:TemplateField>

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText=”LastName”>

<ItemTemplate>

<asp:Label ID=”lblLastName” runat=”server” Text='<%# Item.LastName %>’></asp:Label>

</ItemTemplate>

</asp:TemplateField>

</Columns>

</asp:GridView>

 3: Model Binding

ASP.Net 4.5 Model Binding feature allows to develop Web forms which are independent of the model that populates the view. The biggest advantage of ASP.Net 4.5 Model Binding is you can easily unit test the methods. Model Binding in ASP.Net 4.5 is supported through the namespace “System.Web.ModelBinding”. The namespace has value provider classes like ControlAttribute, QueryStringAttribute etc. All these mentioned classes are inherited from the ValueProviderSourceAttribute class.

4: Value Providers

ASP.Net 4.5 offers many Value Providers which can be used to filter the data. Here are some:

  • Querystring
  • Session
  • Cookie
  • Control Value

5: Support for OpenID in OAuth Logins

ASP.Net 4.5 gives the support for OpenID for OAuth logins. One can easily use external services to login into the application. Like ASP.Net MVC 4, ASP.Net 4.5 also allows you to register OAuth provider in the App_Start/AuthConfig.cs file. This data dictionary is also can be used to pass additional data.

6: Support for improved paging in ASP.NET 4.5 GridView control

Paging support in ASP.Net 4.5 GridView control is improved a lot in this version. ASP.Net 4.5 GridView.AllowCustomPaging property gives great support for paging and sorting through the large amounts of data more efficiently.

7: Advanced Support for Asynchronous Programming

ASP.Net 4.5 gives excellent support in asynchronous programming. Now you can read and write HTTP requests and responses without the requirement of OS threads. Also, now you have the support of two new keywords await and async.

8: Support for Web Sockets

HTML5 web sockets allows to perform duplex communication between the client browser and the web server. ASP.Net 4.5 offers the support for the web socket protocols. Now you can leverage WebSockets in the ASP.Net web applications.

The namespace which supports the WebSocket is System.Net.WebSocket.

9: Support for HTML5 Form Types

ASP.Net gives excellent support for HTML5 form types. The below following list are the new controls available in HTML5.

  • Email
  • URL
  • Number
  • Range
  • Date pickers like date, month, week, time
  • Search
  • Color

10: ASP.Net Web API

ASP.Net Web API is included in ASP.Net MVC 4 and ASP.Net Web Forms. This new feature will help you to build and consume HTTP services easily.

Summary

Microsoft ASP.Net is the most successful web technologies till date. It has matured over the past few years and its latest version is ASP.Net 4.5 with amazing new features and advancements.

Saima Naz

Apr 5, 2017

Questions to ask from the PHP Development Company

Questions to ask from the PHP Development Company

In this digital world, no business can survive without websites or applications. Every business owner is well aware of the importance of moving their businesses to the online world. With the rapid increase in the online businesses, many programming languages and platforms are emerging to help to build a website or applications. Among them all, PHP is the widely-used platforms because of its great benefits and advantages.

PHP is open source, free, flexible, easy to integrate, scalable, object-oriented, simple and easy to learn. PHP operates more quickly than any other languages. PHP has a variety of frameworks to work on with great features.

Developing your PHP website or building PHP applications on your own can be a risky task to attempt. Instead, it would be wise to let professionals develop your PHP websites or apps.

With the increasing demand for PHP development services, more PHP web development companies are emerging. However, before hiring development firm to create your PHP web or app you first must do some research to choose the best web development and design firm.

After all, the success of your business resides on your virtual appearance. So, it is necessary to select your PHP development company carefully. I will tell you here some questions to ask before hiring any professional PHP Development Company if they are good enough for your company or not. Let’s take a look on some of the most important questions.

  1. Ask about their experience. How old their company is? What projects have they done? Their staff capacity and which industry they cater?
  1. Ask about their expertise. Their PHP developers’ skills, experience, and qualification?
  1. What tools and technology they use and will they upgrade the PHP software according to the latest version?
  1. Which framework they use and what will be their delivery models?
  1. What is their communication mode? Will their developer or project manager be available for any assistance?
  1. Ask for them to show their brief portfolio and previous work was done?
  1. Provide them with the details for the targeted audience like age group, region, qualification, interests, industry etc.
  1. Tell them the nature of your business and what is your plan to achieve through your web development project.
  1. Who are your industry competitors and how will they help you stand out among them?
  1. Do you have any theme, style, functionalities in your mind or want the web development company to come up with some outstanding ideas?
  1. Are you revamping your existing site? If yes then how will they re-create it? Or do you want to develop it from scratch?
  1. Where your website will be hosted and will you have the full access to the c-panel and FTP logins?
  1. Will they outsource any other developer for your PHP website?
  1. How much is your budget and what are their packages?
  1. Do they have the right server with enough space, bandwidth, databases etc. capable enough to provide the necessary infrastructure to the website you intend to build?
  1. Will you provide them the content for your PHP site or would like to get their content services?
  1. What will be the expected timeline for your PHP web project?
  1. Do you need a fluid-width website or fixed-width website front end development?
  1. Which CMS you need and which e-commerce shopping cart and with what kind of payment mode?
  1. Is blogging necessarily for my website?
  1. Will they make responsive PHP website which is optimized for mobile devices?
  1. Do they give on-going SEO services? Do you want to use any of your keywords to high rank your website in search engines?

There’s more

Apart from all these necessary questions, there are some other important details to ask like payment, post-development support, and security. These questions will surely help you in the filtering process for selecting any offshore PHP Development Company.

 

Read Here: Why You Should Migrate From PHP 5 to PHP 7

Saima Naz

Apr 3, 2017

Why You Should Choose Drupal Over Joomla

Why You Should Choose Drupal Over Joomla

Planning to mark your presence in the virtual industry? Well deciding where to start from may seem an overwhelming task. Most online business owners prefer websites to update the content on their own. Keeping this advantage in mind, the CMS is a logical and the perfect choice.

When we talk about CMS, there are 3 major key players: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. In this blog here, where are going to tell you how and why you should choose Drupal over Joomla. We’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both the CMS to simplify your choice for the right CMS for your website.

The Overview

Technology, Community, and philosophy are the 3 common things in both these CMS. This two software are open source which means they are free to use. Both of them contains great features, built on PHP and have MYSQL as their database management system. Drupal and Joomla both uses themes or templates to give the visual appearance of your website and poses a variety of plugins and modules to give some extra functionalities to your website.

With all these similarities, there are some differences as well. These both CMS differ in terms of how they handle system plugins or themes, how they deal with security and some more differences which can have a huge impact on users and how they will build your website.

Let us compare these top two CMS platforms and why you should opt for Drupal instead of Joomla.

Ease of Use v/s Complexity

Joomla is a bit complex to use. Though its interface might seems attractive for new users. But it requires a lot of time to become familiar with the platform and the terminology.

Drupal, the most complex of all. Requires the much-needed technical expertise. Well, its interface is easy when talking about updating the content but not so simple when you try to change the appearance.

Features

Joomla more geared as a community platform with strong, powerful social networking features.

Whereas Drupal has powerful taxonomy features which help you in categorizing and organizing complex content.

Installation, Themes & Plugins

Good news, Both these platforms gives you the one-click installation services with 1000+ themes in Joomla and 1800+ themes in Drupal along with 32000+ modules in Joomla and 7000+ extensions in Drupal.

E-commerce

Both these platforms are available to make e-commerce websites except Drupal 8, the latest version of Drupal because it doesn’t support the stable e-commerce module yet.

Developing e-commerce site with Joomla will provide extensions for managing products and content.

Seo Optimized & Responsive

Joomla gives you basic SEO and requires additional tweaks whereas, on the other hand, Drupal offers the best SEO services.

Another good news for both the CMS developers, Drupal and Joomla both are mobile friendly and responsive in nature.

Performance

If Joomla is not tweaked properly, it can consume speed more quickly. While a Drupal site loads more quickly and gives faster response time than those WordPress and Joomla websites.

Why Prefer Drupal Over Joomla

Well, no doubt both these CMS offers a great advantage and if you are looking for the definite answer as which one to choose, you will find fans for both of these CMS claiming their CMS the best one.

Since there is no universal answer and clearly not easy decision to make, you should keep in mind that every business and website is unique and every situation requires different solutions.

Joomla is the perfect choice for mid-sized websites, social networking or community oriented sites. Whereas Drupal is the logical solution for large, complex websites which needs extensive features and scalability.

Decision Time

Making a choice is definitely not an easy task. Well bear in mind the definition and purpose of your website, what is your complete budget and what is your own level of expertise or your Joomla / Drupal Web developer.

We hope this guide will clear your head and make your decision be an easier one.

Read here: Advantages Of Drupal Development

Saima Naz

Mar 31, 2017

Top Killer SEO Tips to Best Optimize Your Magento Store

Top Killer SEO Tips to Best Optimize Your Magento Store

As you know, the virtual marketplace is growing so fast, and most of the physical stores are also running their e-businesses and many new business owners are focusing on their online marketplace. Through this, they are increasing their sales and revenue each and every day. As more or more people are attracted towards shopping online and seeing this new mode of shopping portals, more and more online businesses are starting up their online presence accordingly.

If you are the one who is running or thinking to starting up an online store, so your first top priority should be on increasing the customers on your online store as much as possible. Search Engine Optimization is the one of the keys to get the tracking of the visitors’ data through webmaster that tells the exact figure of the presence online customers on your website. You can find the precise data of your needs that how many audiences visited your website from which location available through webmaster. But I’m going to share here some killer tips to best optimize your Magento store that I’ve discovered over the years.

Web Configuration:

Make a start with optimizing your Magento website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Option in the website configuration:

  • Step 1: Go to System
  • Step 2: Configuration
  • Step 3: Admin Panel of the website

Now, Under the URL option; change the setting “Add Store Code to URLs” to “no”. This will help you to prevent unnecessary keywords from the URL. In the same section, under SEO Option set “Server URL Rewrite” to “yes”. It will remove “index.php” from all URL for the same purpose.

Metadata:

Don’t forget to add Meta title and Meta Description under the Search Engine Optimization option. Do add keywords in Meta title and make sure Meta title should not more than 66 characters also do add Meta description and it should not be more than 156 characters. Meta description helps you to increase your CTR.

Content:

Your website content should be really unique and avoid using the duplicate content. Suppose, if you are adding two different types of t-shirts so keep in mind, do not add same content because both the products should have their own unique content with their specification or features.

Images:

Images are the most important element of any e-commerce site. For image optimization, you must have to focus on these points. Always try to use meaningful image names that describes the image the best. Also remember to use Alt Tag and Title for images. These points help to create visibility of your images on Search Engine.

Robots.txt:

Make sure that robots.txt file allows the robots to crawl the website which is the simplest and easiest point. If search engine cannot crawl your website then all of the above works will not going to work for you.

SiteMap:

To make Google index your website, create an automated Google sitemap following below steps:

  • System => Configuration => Google Sitemap
  • In the “Generation Settings” box, enable sitemap generation
  • Change your sitemap settings when adding a new category or a product, or a page, so that your sitemap comprises of all your new items.

Google WebMaster:

Google WebMaster is a free SEO tool introduced by Google to help your website rank in the Google. One can easily add “Google WebMaster Tool Verification Tag” in Magento by following these steps:

  • System => Configuration => Design => HTML Heads
  • Put your “Google Webmaster Tools verification tag” in the “Miscellaneous Scripts”.

Google Analytics:

Google Analytics will help you keep a track of your website and its performance. To enable Google Analytics on your Magento website requires just following two steps:

  • Enable “” by going to this path: System => Configuration => Google API
  • Set “Enable option” to “Yes” and type your Account Number in the box.

Magento SEO Plugins:

Plugins are also available to make a Magento developer’s life easy and to give you the best results. Here are some Magento SEO plugins to optimize your Magento SEO:

  1. Magento SEOSpace Extension
  2. Yoast_MetaRobots
  3. Canonical URL for Magento:
  4. SEO Suite Pro
  5. MSemantic Basic
  6. SEO Suite Enterprise
  7. SEO Layered Navigation
  8. Ultimate SEO Suite
  9. SEOgento

Conclusion

Cover these aspects of Magento SEO and execute them in your Magento website and get your desired traffic results.

Did we miss out any other SEO trick for Magento? Do let us know in the comment below!

Saima Naz

Mar 29, 2017

20 Questions to Ask Before Hiring Any Web Designing Company

20 Questions to Ask Before Hiring Any Web Designing Com...

Planning to hire the best Web design and development company? Well, you need to read this article first before taking any step.

Understand that the website acts as a window to provide an insight of your business to the customers. The website the web development company is going to design will play an important part in your company to achieve the desired marketing goals. Whether you are designing your website for the first time or revamping it, your hiring decision for the world’s best Web Design and Development Company will dictate your website success.

With multiple options of the web design companies and each claiming to be the best, makes the choice difficult as which one is the right fit for your business. The perfect and the best approach is to adopt a thorough hiring process. Just like hiring a new employee, interview your web design firm to, ask questions, review performance, request for portfolio and check references.

To help you, we brought here 20 interview questions to ask before hiring any web design company. This questionnaire session will help you and the company to get to know each other’s business well, your targeted audience and the objective for your websites. This will help the company to utilize their skills and develop the plan in a way to achieve your online business goals.

So here we go:

1: What services do they offer?

Commonly it assumes that a web design company offers web development, hosting, copywriting, e-commerce solutions, digital marketing services like SEO, social media or PPC management are related to each other whereas, in fact, these are different services from each other which require the different skillset.

Never assume that a company is good at one thing just because they are offering another. Almost every web design and development company are now offering digital marketing services too but don’t rely on them and let them handle all the digital work unless you get a solid, the desired result.

2: Do you make Custom Web Design or use Themes?

Web design and development companies offer both the options to satisfy their client needs. Some go for unique look and functionality built from scratch whiles others goes for the template to customize and save money. Discuss what you need for your website and compare the prices of both options before making any move.

3: Can you provide the Portfolio?

Looking at the examples of the previously created websites by the web design company will help you evaluate the design diversity. Also check for the performance of their developed website while looking their portfolio, like site navigation, is the website well-crafted, are the designs modern, see if the design matches with the business.

4: Do you provide case studies to showcase the results of your web designs?

Your website is not about only the online presence of your business but it should also get a return on investment and have the website deliver business results.

For that, ask for case studies. The case studies will provide you specific results like increased online sales, increased the lead and boosted conversion rate in certain time period.

5: What strategies will be used to revenue for your site?

The Web Design and Development Company you choose to design your website should be concerned about generating revenue for your website too. They should provide a genuine list of strategies that can be incorporate into a site design.

These result-oriented strategies must be matched with your goals like proper placement of your business contact information, an eye-catching slideshow on the homepage features products and sales properly placed on every page of the website and prominent of CTAs to catch the visitor’s attention.

6: Will they Review your Current Website to analyze the performance before designing the New One?

Firstly find out if your website design company plans to analyze the current site’s metrics to evaluate the strength and weaknesses before making any design changes.

7: What is their policy for building websites in comparison with your competitors?

It is the most important question to ask and to use in the evaluation process. This can either be a good or bad thing, if the company has designed the website in the past similar to yours, they might have some better knowledge of what works the best and what doesn’t.

8: How will they handle your project?

A website design and development process includes research, design, site development, and launch and evaluate. While asking the questions, do remember to ask who will be the specific person you will be in touch with, what will be the timelines for the different phases in the development process, in which way you will get progress reports and is there any project management system going to manage the tasks.

9: How much time required to analyze the business, market and the competitors?

Planning out the website is the key to ensure its success. It requires researching in the industry, do a basic market analysis, before planning the functionality, content structure, element, and other things.

10: Who will be working on your website and what is their qualification?

Make sure you know every individual of the team who is working on your website project to understand how your project will be managed.

Also, it is important to know the experience level of your web project team along with the updated portfolio and references of their latest work.

11: How long will it take to complete the Website?

Typically the website project timeline depends on the work required and how fast you can provide them with the required information. It will be worthy to discuss what they will do if they don’t meet their deadline.

12: How many pages will the Website Contains?

Search engines love the websites which contain various pages and rich content. Normally a website has About Us, Contact Us, FAQs, and Terms & Conditions and other pages like blogs, services, testimonials, products will be decided according to your business type.

13: What will you require from me and will you create the logo for my site?

Obviously, you are going to provide the Web Design and Development team the text, images, content and other required things for your site and if you want the content to be done by the web design company’s copywriters then you need to give them a brief detail about the nature of your work.

Ask you Web Design Company how appealing they can make the logo for your website, seek for their experience in this area and look for their other logos created by them.

14: Will they help you get the Images for your Website? & will they outsource any of the work?

Providing real pictures for your business is the best to get that unique factor in your website but in case if you don’t have any then ask the web design firm if they access to the public domain images or you need to pay royalty fees for it.

Often web design companies outsource for the certain phases of your web project. If they do so, then ask for all the necessary details of them and how project coordination will be handled in-house.

15: What will be their price and what is included in their price?

The pricing structure is of two types, flat project price, and second hourly rate. But do understand that prices depend on experience, expertise, and scope of the project.

The second most important thing to ask is that what are the items included in the prices and what is not.

Read here How you can set budget for your website

16: Will your website be compatible with every screen?

Find out the most important factor and that is whether your website is responsive and compatible enough with smartphones, tablets and mobile devices or not.

17: Do they build search engine optimization into the websites?

Nowadays every websites are coded with SEO in mind. So if you are designing a new website, it’s better to get a third party SEO firm do an SEO audit prior to launch to ensures that there are no technical issues.

18: How do they determine keywords for the site? & do they perform other SEO services?

To have the right keywords on every page of your website is the necessary SEO marketing component. It would be great for the third party SEO firm to not only do a site audit but also the keyword study.

Ask your web design company about the experience as who will be providing SEO and SEM services and the strategies applied.

19: What kind of CMS do they use?

Ask them about the type of CMS used either third-party system of the custom built one. Also find out if it’s web based interface supports WordPress and other e-commerce platforms, compatible with all browsers.

If you do not know how to use the live CMS then ask if they offer training for it.

20: What web standards and practices do they follow?

A web design and development company should follow latest design trends and web development standards so that your website functions in all web browsers and operating systems.

Wrapping it up

Well here are some major questions you should ask before hiring any web design company and ensures you get a result-oriented partner to help you get the desired results which can give a measurable return on your website investment.

Read Here: Is It the Right Time to Revamp Your Website

Saima Naz

Mar 27, 2017