Flat design in web designing

Flat design is a minimalistic design approach that emphasizes usability. This is a snappy designing trend to make your website look fresh, attractive and clean. Symbols, logos, shapes, shades are used to increases your website quality. Main features of flat design are:

·        Simple

·         Clean 

·        Colorful

·        Modern

·        Trendy

·        Efficient responsive design

With photographic pictures you can catch user’s attention quickly and motivate them to stay on the site longer. Your site will truly gleam if you are able to properly play with colors as well as layouts.

There are several reasons behind the success of flat design in the last few years. Flat websites are light in size. It means flat websites load faster than complex graphic & 3D websites. Second main reason is that flat design can be easily adjusted to various screen sizes which makes your website responsive allowing you can target both desktop and mobile users. Another main reason to use flat design is its simple and user friendly layouts.

How to use flat design in your website?

Clean Fonts: Using clean fonts can be a great idea. It makes your website design clean and beautiful. The text in your website should be readable, simple and attractive. Headings and sub headings should use all caps. The line height of the text used throughout the website should be consistent because improper line height can irritate readers.

Use Web Font Icons and Symbols: Flat design usually involves using icons. You can make your website effective and intuitive by using web font icons. A message is more easily conveyed when it is represented through symbols.

Bold and Attractive Logo: Try to make a simple yet effective logo and match the logo font with the fonts used in the website. Do same in case of colors; try to use same colors as used throughout the website. Sometimes using a wrong logo can affect overall design of a website.

Use Parallax Effect: Adding elegant movements using parallax is a powerful way to present your products on your website. Your visitors will experience your product in a totally new way.

Choose Simple Background: Use plain and smooth colors in the background. It makes your website look classy. Avoid using loud images or playful brick-wall patterns.

Use Shapes: Shapes are also main part of flat design. Circles, squares and lines are a great way to improve the design and create a clear division of content. You can use shapes to create a viewing hierarchy that helps viewers to understand the page structure.

People like flat design, because of its clear and modern appearance. Flat design has all the key attributes that make a site as functional as it is beautiful.

CMS for Ecommerce Comparison: Wordpress, Magento and Drupal

CMS plays a great role in ecommerce business. Getting your first website up and running is easy. But it is very important that your ecommerce website looks good and professional. CMS stands for content management system. And in ecommerce you can say it as product management system. You can add, edit or organize products easily. There are many cms platforms available at market but here we will discuss about top 3 content management systems:

o   Wordpress

o     Drupal  

o   Magento

Wordpress: Wordpress is most popular CMS in world. It has thousand of plugins which makes it convenient and popular.  The main advantage that Wordpress holds is its simplicity and it’s so user-friendly interface. It provides a large number of open source themes that can be easily customized and integrated into your website.

Advantages of Wordpress

o   Wordpress does not require php and html knowledge

o   Large support community to help its users

o   Thousands of free plugins are available for use

o   Thousands of free and paid graphic templates

o   Fields can be easily added into forms

Drupal: Drupal is content management platform powering millions of websites around world. It was created over ten years ago. It is an open source web development platform. That means that it’s completely free to download, use and modify. No registration or purchase required.

Advantages of  Drupal

o   It includes a rich set of functionalities like advanced menu management, graphic modification tools, user’s management etc.

o   Advanced user management

o   Capabilities of design elements editing

o   Structured page content management through URL addresses or paths

o   Thousands of plugins available

Magento: Magento is one of the most developed platforms for running an online shopping cart. Magento requires a little knowledge of coding. Choosing to start a business with this platform you have to consider that only a programmer will be able to manage it.

Advantages of Magento

o   Wide range of functionality

o   Technical support is very good

o   Additional functionalities can be installed in Magento

o   It is written in SEO friendly scripts

 Conclusion

For a small ecommerce stores a WordPress with Woocommerce or a Drupal installation would be a good choice. For huge stores Magento is more suitable than any other ecommerce platform.

Parallax Scrolling in Web Design

 

With new technologies like HTML5 and CSS3, it's becoming possible to create more advanced effects in websites. One most famous web design trend is parallax scrolling. It includes creating a 3D effect as you scroll down the page, background moving at a slower rate to the foreground. Simply you can say that parallax scrolling is a type of web design where different elements of a website move at different speeds. The web user of today wants to get entertained and engaged. With parallax scrolling you can do great things to engage your visitors within your website.

 

Advantages of parallax websites

·         Best way to present your products: It’s a powerful way to present your products. Your visitors experience your product in a totally new way. Instead of static images, you can present product with a 3D presentation. Designs are made paying attention to the product.

·         Present your products as a story: Parallax scrolling sites can be constructed in a way to provide the user with an interactive story. Parallax scrolling offers the ideal setting to tell your story in an engaging and interactive way. The movement of the design tool allows companies to create visually innovative storylines.

·         Make your website special & unique: Make your design visually special then your entire competitor. With parallax scrolling you can give your site a very unique look. Website unique design increases overall site traffic, and user engagement time. You can give an unexpected experience to your visitors. With parallax design a website can give never ending scrolling engagement to its visitors.

·         Reduced bounce rate: Bounce rate of a website indicates the number of visitors who entered to it and instantly hit the Back button. A high bounce rate negatively impacts your site’s ranking among search engines. A parallax website already has reduced bounce rate. Because it provides a dynamic experience that encourages users to stay on the website longer.

With parallax your website can be most engaging site on the web. Whether you just want a style upgrade or to improve back-end SEO, parallax is best option in market.

 

Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards allow you to add images, videos and product descriptions to your tweets. This can help you to increase the amount of people who check out products on your website. Twitter cards allow you to add attractive media to your tweets making them interesting and much more engaging.

There are nine type of twitter card you can use:

·         Summary Card

·         Large Photo Summary Card

·         Product Card

·         Website Card

·         App Card

·         Lead Generation Card

·         Player Card

·         Photo Card

·         Gallery Card

Summary Cards and Large Photo Summary Cards are same in type. Both allow a user to include a title, description, thumbnail image, Twitter account attribution and a direct link to the content. But large photo summary cards also provide a space for product image. Product Cards are designed for ecommerce website owners. It allows a site owner to add description, thumbnail image and also a small selling detail. Website Cards allows user to check out a landing page of your website. App Cards are helpful in driving traffic directly to an app. Lead Generation Cards allows user to sign up for a special offer. Player cards can provide media for your products. Audience can listen or watch media without leaving twitter. Photo cards works as a photo link to your website. Gallery cards allow you to add more than one image in a single tweet.

With these twitter cards you can ask your audience to do things like sign up for an email list, register at a website, view and use a coupon, visit a landing page and download an app. And they don’t need to leave twitter for doing these tasks.

How to Get Started with Twitter Cards?

First of all you need a product web page with an image of that product.  After that you need to add the appropriate Meta tags for a card onto your product page. If you don’t have website developing knowledge then you can try alternative ways to set up twitter cards. Tweeter recommends these plug-in to integrate your website with twitter cards:

o   Jetpack

o   JM Twitter Cards

o   Wordpress SEO by Yoast.

After adding a plug-in to your website you will need to submit a URL from your blog or website to Twitter Card validator. Twitter can take up to few weeks to approve your card if you implement it correctly. When you are approved you will get a confirmation message for it.

 

Photo Sharing and website promotion

Photo sharing websites are becoming more and more popular now a days. By using a photo sharing site once the photos are uploaded they can be shared around the world in few seconds. Great advantage associated with using photo sharing sites is that you have all of your photos in one place. This is more convenient than storing them on multiple devices like computers, mobiles etc.  If you have used any of your own photos or images on your site, then you can share then on many of the major photo sharing websites. It can benefit your website in search engine ranking. People will be able to see your products photos. These websites allows user to comment on photos and see photo link and details. So there will be chances that interested user can follow a link and can visit your site. If we placed alt tag in image then search engine crawler can easily recognize a photo, otherwise never. Here are some useful tips for photo optimization:

·         Make image size as small as much as possible.

·         Set a descriptive and product related file name before uploading an image.

·         Add image caption name.

 

Some photo sharing site allows their user to upload photos free of cost but many of sites are paid photo sharing sites. Paid photo sharing sites charges a small fee for sign up.

These are some of best photo sharing websites:

1.       Flickr: Flickr.com is most popular photo sharing site. It’s free to use Flickr or upload photos on Flickr. Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website. It allows user to use 100 MB of storage space per month.

2.       SmugMug: SmugMug.com is a paid photo sharing website. It allows its user to upload photo and videos. There is not a limit for members on how many photos are stored or uploaded to the site.

3.       Photobucket: Photobucket.com is an image and video hosting website. Photobucket allows you free photo upload option with the option to upgrade for an annual fee. Free account users receive 2GB storage for photo sharing. If you need to use more space on website then you must upgrade to paid accounts.

4.       Shutterfly: Shutterfly.com provides its user an Internet-based image publishing service. It allows its user to store photos and create unique greetings with them. There is totally free and unlimited space for users.

 

What is responsive web design?

Responsive designs are website designs that adjust to the user’s computer or device screen to give an optimal viewing experience. It aims at making the reading and navigation easy by minimizing scrolling, resizing, panning etc,. The layout is flexible to change as per the viewing environment by using flexible images, media queries etc.,

The reason responsive design is preferred is because it gives an enhanced user experience, simplifies search engine optimization as well as online marketing (as there is no need to have different websites for a desktop and for a mobile device) and also is a cheap alternative to mobile applications. It is better from search engines point of view because a responsive site on a mobile device has limited code and it is easier for the Bots or the Crawlers to read. 

There are two ways in which a web design can be done to make it compatible with any device:

Responsive: This as explained above uses the same site and thus the url is also the same. By using different layout and css it simply adjusts the layout and renders it to fit in the users device. This is economical as it uses the main (desktop site).

Separate Mobile site: This mobile site opens in a separate url which is like m.websiteurl.com This website is coded separately and does not show the desktop version of the website. This is a costlier option as you have to get another website made and also use a different url. This does not any way negatively affect the search engine standing of a website (as it is believed having two sites with same content - for the mobile and for the desktop can be viewed by search engines as 'Duplicate Content").

Both the above techniques work well from usability, coding and search engine optimization point of view.

We are Vantagewebtech make all websites responsive. If you have an existing site that needs to be made responsive, contact our sales team here.

What you need to know about Web Forms

A web form allows a user to enter data that is sent to a server for processing. When data that has been entered into HTML fields and the form is submitted, the names and values in the form elements are encoded and sent to the server. A form is a section of a document containing normal content, check boxes, radio buttons, menus and labels. Some of examples of forms are:

o   Contact Form

o   Order Form

o   Registration Form

o   Survey Form

Spammers are annoyingly everywhere. Most of them are caught by spam filters but every once in a while one or two get through. So how can you protect your website from hacker and create a spam filtered form?

Following are the methods which will helps you in creating quality and spam secure form:

Use CAPTCHAs- A CAPTCHA is a visual image that is written in a strange font and is difficult to read. It will be impossible for a computer to read CAPTCHA text, but a human can read them. You can add three types of CAPTCHA’s to your web form:

·        Standard CAPTCHA: The user has to type a few letters that are displayed on the screen to complete the form submission.

·       Simple math CAPTCHA: A very easy arithmetic test. A very simple mathematical equation is displayed in image user has to type solution for that equation.

·        Google ReCAPTCHA: Google ReCAPTCHA is a very powerful anti-spam device. It displays CAPTCHA’s which are Easy for people and hard for robots.

Validations: The form should have checks/validations so that the user does not submit any incorrect information. Even if forms are clear and labels explain what is required, customers will still make errors, such as using the letter 'o' instead of a zero, or 'I' instead of the number one. So make sure to set these types of validations to your form. It will help you prevent spam.

Data Confirmation Screen- Data confirmation screen will be displayed after form submission. What happened with this option is that it displays a web page after the form has been completed which allows the sender to review and check the data for confirmation. And subscriber should be asked to visit mail box for confirmation of email address. It will prevent you from automated submission robots.

Highlight Required Fields- Clearly mark all the compulsory fields. Notifying site visitors that field is required is a great way to increase user interaction with form. There are several times when a user won’t understand what a form element means. So you can overcome this problem by adding help text for labels. Display hints when a user clicks on a particular field of your form.

Use In-Line Error Check- When user make a mistake when completing a form, don’t make them wait until they click the submit button on the page. Quickly displays an easy to understand error message and ask user to correct mistake. This enables customers to quickly rectify any problems and reassures them that they have completed the form correctly.

Fields Labels- Quality of field labeling means the format in which users are expected to enter information should be made clear.

Choosing a Payment Gateway for your online business

Payment Gateways can be defined as a bridge which allows secure transactions between merchants and consumers. It is a service that authorizes credit or debit card payments and processes them securely. Choosing a payment gateway can be difficult, there’s a lot of competition, a lot of confusion and a lot of data to figure out. Following are the most popular Global Payment Gateways:

·         Worldpay

·         Checkout by Amazon

·         PayPal

·         Intuit

·         PayLane 

Worldpay: Worldpay is a payment processing company. It provides internet payment gateways to e-commerce business. Worldpay charges 2.75% transaction fee for credit cards and 39p for debit cards.

Checkout by Amazon: Amazon is one of the largest shopping sites in world. Amazon creates a payment gateway for others to use and named it Checkout by Amazon. It allows companies to embed Amazon checkout buttons onto their site which allow users to purchase items through their Amazon account. Checkout by Amazon charges 3.4% + 20p per transaction for accounts that receive less than £1,500 per month and 1.4% + 20p per transaction for those receiving over £55,000 per month.

PayPal: PayPal payment gateway allows people to pay via credit and debit cards as well as through their PayPal account. PayPal offers special low rate of 1.4% + 20p.

Intuit: Intuit is an American company and it can provide merchant service- payment gateway to you. Intuit payment gateway charges are as:

o   Setup fee = 0

o   Monthly fee = $19.95

o   Chargeback fee = $20 

PayLane: PayLane offers most popular online payment methods. It provides affordable pricing for their services. PayLane fee plan is as 2.8%+0.25 EUR for debit and credit cards and 0 EUR for Paypal users.

Choosing the right payment gateway solution for your business can often affect your online business. If payments on your online store are not optimally set up, you could lose a lot of sales opportunities and that means loss of money. So figure out best payment gateway and make your customer satisfied with checkout options.

 

Magento for your next ecommerce project

Magento Ecommerce

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source content management system for e-commerce web sites. Choosing an e-commerce platform to set up an online store always becomes the first challenge for any business. The magento e-commerce platform is one of the world’s leading platforms for online business that comes packed with many of user-friendly features. It allows you to update your ecommerce website automatically, which is not available in other e-commerce platforms. Some features of Magento Ecommerce plateforms are:

·         Multiple Site Functionality: It allows controlling multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel.

·         SEO Friendly: If your website does not get traffic visits through search engines then you are not going to achieve a ROI. Magento ecommerce websites are seo friendly websites. Magento generates SEO-friendly URLs. So it’s easy for customers to find your products online.

·         Management & Flexibility: You can control content separately for each individual page. You can view the page layout graphically in admin panel. Fully 100% customizable design using templates. Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and any third-party application.

·         User friendly: When you use Magento, the products of your store can be displayed easily. That gives the people a great buying experience. It displays products in groups that help customers to find out the things they are looking for quickly. Best zoom-in capacity, product reviews and multiple of a product are some of the features that make it more users friendly.

·         Easy and Secure Checkout: Different payment options and one page checkout makes it easy to order your products. User can order products without having an account as a guest. SSL security support for orders on both front-end and back-end makes all payments secure.

If you want to do online business then without any question you should go with Magento Ecommerce websites.

 

Drupal as a CMS

Drupal is a popular Content Management System that has been around for some time now and is used for creating dynamic websites having different scopes including user administration, news aggregation, community features etc., It is flexible, robust, secure, scalable for future enhancements and easy to manage.  

History of Drupal: Drupal was initially created as a message board software in 1999. In less than one year's time it caught the attention of the developer community and started having a lot of features contributions. The Drupal community was formally incepted in 2005 and since then it has evolved into a very well developed, secure and robust system.

As Drupal's popularity soared, big brands like AOL Corporate, Sony Music, MTV UK etc., started using it.

What kinds of projects does Drupal work well with:

• CMS based websites which have content pages, galleries, forms, blogs etc.,
• Sites that can interact with other sites and technologies.
• Work flow based web sites and applications.
• Social networking sites that have members area, wikis, blogs, forums and other such features.
• Classifieds directories that have paid membership for advertisers.

Are sites made on Drupal safe?: Yes Drupal based sites are very safe provided the version is updated on a regular basis and the basic security measures on the server and any code customizations have been followed.

How long does it take to make a site in Drupal? It all depends on the scope of work. If the site is a simple CMS site with a straightforward design then it can be done within days. However if the scope is vast and the design is complex then it can take a few weeks or months.

What are the minimum server requirements to run a Drupal website? In terms of Disk Space, minimum requirement should be of 15 Megabytes. Web server should be Apache. Database should be MY SQL 5.0.15 and PHP version should be 5.4 or higher.

At Vantagewebtech we have been making websites using Drupal in different scopes. Contact Us for your website needs.

New Google Pigeon Update

New Google Pigeon Update

New Pigeon algorithm is now added to google algorithm. It provides you more accurate and relevant search results. Google Pigeon Update displays local search results and maps to user for a specific keyword. This update is also known as local search algorithm update. Pigeon gives more preference to local businesses over local brands. It is good news for small business owners because now they can be listed in Search Engine Results Pages without having a website. Owners only need to get registered on google maps and it’s very easy. Once your business is registered, optimizing it for the new Pigeon update may give you special advantages over your competitors.

Google pigeon update pays attention to a specific graphical area. If you have a physical location you need to pay attention to, then Pigeon Update will help you in this. Google Pigeon Update is for U.S. English queries.

How can you prepare for google Pigeon?

·         Recent and Accurate Listing: The first thing to consider is to ensure that you have made all business related listing on google map. Provide latest listings as fast as possible. And make sure that all the information filled in the listing is accurate or google map pin shows your exact location. Be absolutely true to your physical address.

·         Create new listing: Create new listing for your business to most popular local directories. Your listing must be well optimized and choose accurate category for your business.

·          Up-gradation: Time to time Upgrade your address, telephone number, website address and email address across all websites and directory listings.

·         Quality of website: Google Pigeon algorithm can rank website according to website quality standard. It means it will display well optimized website on top of SERP. Make a high quality and well optimized website for your business. And it should be completely optimized for a variety of local search items.

·         Backlink: Having a high quality backlink to your website can help strength of your website. Backlinks from local business directories will help to pointing location specific pages within your website.

New pigeon update only shows results for businesses which are listed on google local listing. So if your local business doesn’t have a local listing then google will not show you in local search results. Better your ratings in local directories and you will be on top of google local search results. Contact us to help your business benefit from the Pigeon Update.

 

 

Leveraging Google Adwords for your online business.

Google AdWords is an online advertising service that places advertising copy at the top, bottom, or beside, the list of search results Google displays for a particular keyword search. Google AdWords is one of the most effective and popular ways of promoting a product or a website on the internet. It benefits your website with increase in targeted traffic. Google AdWords can help you reach new customers and grow sales of your business. Google AdWords keyword finder can provides best keyword suggestions for you. It will help you to find keywords that are suitable for your website. It is a pay per click based google product that allows advertisers to more easily target their chosen audience. Google AdWords advantages are:

Ø  Immediate Visibility: One of the biggest advantages of Google’s PPC program is that it can increase your website visitors immediately. You have to wait for months if advertise through SEO strategies but Google AdWords can bring your site on the top just by paying a small amount.

Ø   Budget Flexibility: Google AdWords allows you to only pay for the clicks that are received.  It can also allow paying for how many times people see the ad, as well as target individual content websites. With Google AdWords you can decide how much you want to spend on Advertising. There is no minimum spending requirement. You can decide how much you will pay for a click.

Ø  Accurate Customer Targeting: Google AdWords gives you control over your entire campaign so you can select keywords which can provide targeted traffic to your website. It means With Google AdWords you can target your audience using very specific keywords. And you can reach to right customers.

Ø  Guaranteed Placement: There can be guaranteed placement with SEO programs but Google AdWords guarantees your ad will appear at various times throughout the day.

Ø  Keyword Planner: Keyword research is very important in internet marketing. It enables you to know that what people are searching on search engine. Best keyword selection will increase organic traffic to your website.

Ø  Generate lots of immediate traffic to your web site: Instead of waiting for your web site to get indexed by the search engines you can drive traffic to it instantly with Google AdWords. 

Ø  Specific Area Traffic: Google AdWords advertising allows you to select country and state for advertising your business.

Google AdWords helps you to grow your business in an effective way or you can do this within your budget which you want to spend on advertising. It can help you reach new customers and grow sales of your business. Set your daily budget and the amount you're willing to pay for a click. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. There's no minimum term or commitment. Once you use the coupon amount, you're under no obligation to continue. Google AdWords is a way to set your business online and it will make people to know about your business and products immediately. Unlike other advertising methods, Google AdWords is one of the most effective and most popular ways of promoting a product or a website in the internet.