7 Benefits of Using Joomla CMS for Your Website

Joomla has around 3 million websites running on it currently. It has increasingly become more popular CMS and it has all the features that have contributed to it. Joomla has given the users freedom to create their own website, be it business or personal.

Joomla was launched in 2003 and has not looked back since. After WordPress, it is the world’s most popular and downloaded CMS. The most important reasons for its popularity are RSS feeds, blogs, composer integration and much more. We have listed 7 benefits of using Joomla CMS for your website.

1. Open Source Infrastructure: One of the major reasons for Joomla’s popularity is because of its open source infrastructure. It was created with PHP as it the most common programming language when it comes to open source platform. Developers worldwide have been able to write new extensions for Joomla without any problems. Thus this has been adapted by developers globally and will remain popular in future as well.

2. Flexibility: Joomla is highly functional and interactive. It has over 8000 extensions that help in making it productive and useful for developers. You can add social media widgets and integrate social networking with your website. There are a lot of customizations possible with Joomla. The Joomla extensions are divided into 33 categories including marketing, editing tools, communication. Languages, social media, etc. This makes Joomla one of the best platforms.

3. Blog Posting: It is very easy to start a blog with Joomla. There is no need to possess any coding or programming language knowledge as Joomla has it all made very easy and simple. Once you have all your blog content ready and edited, you can easily publish it. Even maintaining the blog is easy with Joomla CMS.

4. Ecommerce made easy with Joomla: Joomla is one of the best choice for ecommerce businesses. It is ecommerce friendly CMS that offers many components created specifically for ecommerce website. It is easy to manage the products and related content with Joomla CMS. There are also third-party components that run inside the Joomla like Virtuemart. It also provides several options, like, PayPal, shipping and payment gateways. It is very easy to use platform.

5. Strong Joomla community: With the increase in Joomla developers, the community of Joomla users has grown over 200000 users. This means that there are a lot of Joomla CMS users that can help you anytime you need with any problem you are facing. With such a large community the solution can be easily available and experience of other users can be very beneficial. The community can help with any loopholes, updates, security concerns, software bugs, etc. With such a large community, the Joomla CMS security updates are also received quickly.

6. Built-in basic SEO functionality: One of the main benefits of Joomla is that it is SEO friendly. There are search friendly URL’s built in Joomla. You can choose your own meta tags, descriptions and keywords that can help optimize your website for search engine rankings. You have basic SEO under your control in Joomla.

7. Easy to use Design: Joomla CMS was designed to make it easy to use. It is extremely easy to use and convenient to perform any task. As compared to other content management systems, Joomla saves a lot of time. It is easy to manage permission levels and no need to change tabs.

Joomla is the most chosen CMS because of its various benefits. It is flexible, easy to use and has a large support community. You can manage your content better with Joomla and it is easy to start an online store or a blog with Joomla.

5 Steps to a Successful New Website Launch5 Steps to a Successful New Website Launch

In this digital age, a website is important for your business to survive. Being one of the most powerful tools for marketing, you need to hire a website designing company that can give you the most amazing website design and help you with your website development.

Below are the important steps to help you ensure that the launch of your new website will be a success.

Start With the Website Development Project

Prior to starting a site project, see to it that you consider your budget, and the people who will man the whole process. Validate if your existing website developer has the necessary skills for achieving your digital goals or it might be time to search for other options.

Establish the Foundation

In the same way that engineers don’t start a building without blueprints, you should have a set plan that includes all the must-haves and the nice-to-haves. Most of the time, different stakeholders have their own wish list which can lead to scope creep, inflate budgets, and delayed launch without really giving support to your business objectives. Experts recommend that you take a look at your marketing and business plans, value proposition, brand, market/customer augmentation, existing digital assets, and technological needs.

Look for the Right Partner

After documenting all the requirements, there are numerous options for developing the new site. You can opt to purchase an out of the box solution with monthly fee, hire a full service website maintenance company, or use a freelance website developer. It is best that you choose a renowned web development firm that specializes in website design, website optimization, website speed, SEO and everything involved herein.

Manage the Project

Once you chose the right firm, see to it that you sign a contract which includes your milestones and buildup requirements with specific dates. The moment the project takes off, supervise the entire process as there will be some unexpected things which can happen. When you are involved, these will never come out of the blue.

Track the Progress and Celebrate Your Brand New Site

See to it that you understand what you are reviewing in every phase for you to sign off on deliverables with complete confidence. You also have to track for any bugs in your chosen web partner and ensure that an analytics solution has been put in place from the very first day for measuring your performance. If this is an ecommerce site, test all steps of the process of ordering to guarantee a smooth experience for customers and an optimal sale conversion. Aside from the post launch warranty, your chosen web firm must also offer a maintenance and security program to keep your site updated. This is imperative.

Remember that the launch of your site is merely the start of a wonderful journey. You have to be hands on in everything to ensure that your site will not only enjoy a successful launch but also a thriving popularity in the many years to come.

7 Reasons Why You Should Rethink Your Website Content Today

You’ve hired the finest e-Commerce design agency in your area or online to make a professional-looking and easy to navigate website. You’ve also put in a lot of hours to ensure that each aspect of the website wows your targeted audience. However, your website isn’t generating the results you expected. Perhaps, it is the best time to rethink the content of your website today. Below are some of the reasons why

Low Traffic

Your website isn’t generating the traffic you want and this might be a direct result of having poor web content. Have you tried optimizing your web content and your website to get high ranking on your search engine? Have you tried testing your call to action buttons? There are several questions that you have to answer and a professional might help you with this.

Poor Visibility

Once your customers are looking for you over the internet and cannot find your site, it is a clear case of extremely poor online visibility. This is also the reason why you’re not getting enough traffic to your website. Try typing your business name into Google or some search engines. Does it appear on the first page? It must and if it does not, you should rethink the content of your website.

Low Sales

The numbers don’t lie. Although your website isn’t generating traffic, it must be able to convert customers who visit your site. If your web content isn’t engaging enough, your visitors could be bouncing off very quickly. Review the average time your visitors spend on your website and review the analytic for you to know the bounce rates.

Boring Content

Content isn’t just text. It is actually everything that will help you communicate and spread the word about your business. If you think stunning web design is enough, better think twice. Your web design can do so much if you will combine it with good web content.

Your Web Content Fails to Identify Clearly What You Can Do and Who You Are

If your web content fails to convey who you are effectively and the products or services you offer, it’s useless to your readers.

Your Web Content Fails to Give Solutions or Answers

People searching online are typically looking for solutions or answers. Websites that provide such solutions or answers can be attractive while one that does not might be forgotten or passed over.

Web Content is Failing, Pedantic to Connect with the Readers Emotionally

While this may be true that a person is searching for services or products, they do not really like to be told that they do not understand on how to do something on their own. 

 

The Bottom Line

Making web content that attracts your targeted audience is a trial and error procedure. However, it has lots of benefits to your business. When you have made a blog post, you may promote it across your social media channels through a link back to your site. Your attractive content will start moving traffic from various social media channels to your site.

10+ benefits of using Laravel.

Laravel has brought many advancements to the PHP community. With every new version updates, it is disclosing new innovative features to the developers, making their tasks much easier. It also takes care of the security issues. Laravel was made to strengthen security, speed up database migration without data loss, and make the entire process of creating a web application a much easier process. In this article, we will list some of the most common problems, which very often arise during web development, and how Laravel Development enables us to solve all these common problems in a cost effective way.

Benefits of Laravel 

• Building an authentication and authorizing system- Laravel makes implementing authentication very simple. Almost everything is configured out-of-the-box. Laravel also provides a simple way to organize authorization logic and control access to resources.

• Integration with mail services-  Laravel provides a clean, simple API over the popular SwiftMailer library. Laravel also provides drivers for SMTP, Mailgun, Mandrill, SparkPost, Amazon SES, PHP's “mail” function, and “sendmail”, allowing an application  to quickly get started sending mail through a local or cloud based service. In addition to support for sending email, Laravel provides support for sending notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including SMS (via Nexmo) and Slack.

• Integrations with tools to make web development faster-  Laravel supports popular cache backends like Memcached and Redis out-of-the-box. By default, Laravel is configured to use the file cache driver, which stores cached objects in the file system. For larger applications, it is better to use an in-memory cache such as Memcached or APC. However, with Laravel it is even possible to configure multiple cache configurations.

• Fixing technical vulnerabilities- Laravel helps to secure the web application by protecting it against the most serious security risks: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting. Laravel itself is secure. We can tell you first hand that the codebase is fanatically guarded, and that the code has been vetted by several people.

• Configuration error and exception handling- Error and exception handling is already configured for any new Laravel-based project. In addition, Laravel is integrated with the Monolog logging library, which provides support for a variety of powerful log handlers.

• Automation testing work- Laravel is built with testing in mind. In fact, support for testing with PHP Unit is included out-of-the-box, and a phpunit.xml file is already setup for the application. The framework also ships with convenient helper methods allowing for expressive testing of the applications. It provides easy ways for simulating basic behavior of users (making requests to the application and examining the output, for example, clicking links, filling out forms).

• URL Routing Configuration- All Laravel routes are defined in the app/Http/routes.php file, which is automatically loaded by the framework. The most basic Laravel routes simply accept a URI and a Closure, providing a very simple and expressive method of defining routes.

• Open Source- It is free, open source framework that will allow you to build large & complex web applications easily. All you need is a text editor & PHP installation to get started.

• Composer Feature-  Laravel uses composer dependency manager for the installation and up gradations of different third-party packages. This feature allows developers to easily manage all the required dependencies instantly. This is very useful for any developers to create applications of any sizes.

• Message Queue System Configuration- The Laravel queue service provides a unified API across a variety of different queue back-ends. Queues allow you to defer the processing of a time consuming task, such as sending an e-mail, until a later time, which drastically speeds up web requests to your application.

• Internal Templates- Laravel uses Blade, a lightweight yet powerful templating engine which is pre-installed in it. The blade templates are compiled into plain PHP and cached for optimal performance.

• Object Oriented Libraries- Laravel is the only framework that includes a variety of pre-installed libraries. The most popular and useful library of Laravel is the Authentication library. This library has very advanced features for login and database securities.

Little Known Ways to Make Your Website Load Faster

There is nothing more frustrating than a website that takes a gazillion years to load. As every second counts in this fast paced world, it has become more imperative than ever to check with your website designing company that your site loads faster.

Aside from the usual incorporation of the proper SEO and website optimization into your website design, the best website developer will also see to it that your website speed is at par with the needs and demands of potential visitors. When it comes to proper website development, a reliable website maintenance company knows some of the secret but proven effective ways to make your site load faster than ever.

Go for a Caching Plugin

This particular method can be considered as one of the most important ways you can try. This is found to be most effective for the WordPress-based websites. Since WordPress is something based on the PHP language, the moment the site loads up, there are lots of PHP calls being executed. The plugin will cache your page then store it as HTML files. You can choose from different cache plugins available in the market today which can give a remarkable boost to your website’s loading speed.

Use a CDN Service

Content Delivery Network or CDN is a type of service which can improve the loading time of your site through reducing the server load as well as offloading static resources such as image, theme, JS content, CSS, and others.

Stick to a Clear Website Design

The use of a clear template can decrease the loading time of your website on other devices. This will also reduce the loading time of your website on regular PCs. When your site can load faster in the portable devices such as smartphones and tablets, your website will see a remarkable boost in its traffic, thus making your site more popular along the way.

Stay Away from a Dense Footer and Sidebar

Most blogs use the footer and sidebar for showcasing various widgets. These widgets can slow down the loading speed of the website through consuming a heavier user load. In order to avoid it, many blogs today go for a minimalistic design for increasing its loading speed.

You can remove any unwanted widget from the sidebar and footer to reduce the loading time of the site. To increase the loading speed of the site even more, you can also try getting rid of the individual post widgets. The social sharing buttons found on the home page and next to a post can delay the loading speed of a site up to a great extent. You can remove these buttons to speed up the performance of your site.

Turn Off Commenting

It is something that most blog owners will want to avoid, since commenting depicts a site’s popularity. This is why usually blog owners don’t follow this method. However, turning off commenting can make your site load much faster. You also have to avoid the use of external commenting systems. These systems make use of large files and scripts which can increase your loading time. It is completely upto you whether you want to try this method or not.

Web Development Trends to Watch Out For in 2017

Website development has been a dynamic industry that layers and reshapes itself depending on the changing trends and the newest technological advancements introduced.

The year 2017 promises to bring an exciting surge of ecommerce web design and development including the use of design snippets inspired by virtual reality and artificial intelligence and more, What trends in web designing and development will stand out this year?

Virtual Reality to Rise to Fame

Virtual reality is among the hottest subjects of discussion in 2016. The trend is also expected to take websites a notch higher in 2017. There are now many websites which instructed their website development company to employ virtual reality. This trend is expected to spread wider and further this year.

How will virtual reality affect web design and development? An expert web development company can root for more advanced and immersive 3D effects made possible by augment reality on sites in order to give visitors a more engaging and memorable experience.

For instance, if it is a real estate site, a web design company can use the virtual reality quotient for real estate tours to assure a more engrossing and interactive feel for website visitors. VR-based websites can in fact show amazing potentials in increasing the CTR of a website since when you engage visitor better, you will also have better chances of success.

Artificial Intelligence to Change the Rules of the Game

Artificial intelligence is the hottest buzzword in 2016 as it steadily makes its way to web development industry recently. It is said that artificial intelligence shakes hands with website development and design. In fact, it is no longer new to find a graphic design company that makes use of artificial intelligence technology in coming up with customized sites.

How does this process work, then? A website development company assigns dedicated AI assistants. You will be asked several questions about the website you are planning to build. These questions are meant to grasp a better understanding of the particular theme of your business and the industry it belongs to. Based on the extensively programmed algorithms, the assistant will then create the most suitable combination of branding, layout, design and content for your site.

Static Site Generators to Join the Crowd

Static site generators create websites from plain text. The static websites enjoy a good amount of perks such as improved security, speed, deployment ease and smarter tackling of surges in traffic. In the same way that content delivery networks and APIs are increasingly becoming more vital for the web, modern site developers also hold high hopes this year for the rise of static site generators.

The year 2017 sure has seen the launch of a plethora of brand new trends and endless possibilities that any website development company must be aware of in order to make their websites edgier and more competitive than ever before. You can harness the potential of these latest trends when you employ the services of the most dependable web design and development company.

To what Extend can SEO Affect Your Website

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. It’s the process of getting traffic from the “free” or “organic” search results on search engines.

All major web companies such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have search engines, where web pages, videos or even listings are shown and ordered depending on what search engines consider most relevant to users. SEO techniques are used by all the sites that rank #1 in your searches! Therefore, mastering SEO will be an amazing advantage to your website as well as to your business.

Get Top Ranks With SEO

The task of getting top ranks in search result pages with SEO is not possible unless your website has some SEO optimized content. Therefore, you need to bring your website to a high position in order to start earning money. That’s why search engine optimization helps a lot as it’s effective to help a business thrive on the internet. Experts use a lot of different ways to bring their websites to the top. They engage in on-page and off-page activities to give a little boost to the rankings, and not just that, to traffic and conversions of your websites. And after proceeding on doing that again and again, your website will become very popular!

Once getting a top-rank position, your website will get more exposure and will gain a lot of visitors, some of them turning into loyal readers. Of course there will sometimes be people who don’t like your website and you can’t let yourself be discouraged by that, each person has their own taste. Most important thing on SEO optimized websites are the architecture and links so your website can be in the spotlight of the engines. Also, you should read the rules about SEO before getting into it so you don’t violate any of them.

SEO Explained

While owning a small business and wanting to draw more attention to your website, you can start by understanding SEO itself. Even though it’s not some rocket science, it can be complicated. You’ll need to understand how to combine parts of it to get the most out of them. Some of them being: 

• Your business + Website
• Demands of the niche you are in
• The rules (as stated above)
• The competition

In all my time studying SEO, I’ve learned that the competitors are the hardest thing about SEO. You have to be better than them in every way possible or they will out-rank you. They will not wait for you to catch up with them and they will try to bring you down by any means possible. Therefore, having attractive content as well as good links, you are on your way to the top of the ladder!

Conclusion

In conclusion, SEO is not hard and it’s not easy, you need to do your homework before hopping in this kind of journey. Your website should be relevant, have keywords and links to your other articles or to high trusting websites such as Wikipedia.