Category Archives: Web Development

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Analyze Website Traffic Using Google Analytics

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There are often situations where either we or our clients want to know the ways through which they can track the performance of URLs they have been redirecting to a different page. If we are running a marketing campaign, the task of measuring the performance of a landing page or tracking conversion rates and tracing our redirects could provide a wealth of information to push the traffic on our business goals.

But the problem is Google Analytics is not able to track what redirect traffic comes through, rather it only gives the raw traffic numbers to the page without tracking if any URL redirected people to it.

Use of Google Analytics: The process of using Google Analytics to see the traffic sources of a specific page in our Google Analytics account is so easy.

To start, we have to Log into the Google Analytics account and navigate to Behavior > Site Content. From there, we can choose whether to view the traffic sources of all our website’s pages or the exit pages.

Here is the process to view the traffic sources of our site’s landing pages which is important as these are the pages which many visitors will land on first while visiting our site.

The next step would be navigate to secondary Dimension > Acquisition > Source/Medium. Here we will see a list of our website’s landing pages complete with the source of our site’s traffic which is the place where visitors were before clicking on the website and also the medium, which is the ways how our visitors arrived at the site.

Creating segments in Google Analytics to view traffic sources: By using the segments feature in Google Analytics, we can track the traffic stats of a specific web page. This method is more advanced and will give us a more detailed look at the traffic sources of specific pages on our website. The Google Analytics Behavior report only provides us a collective view of all our traffic sources by breaking it down into direct, organic and referral traffic.

Although this is helpful but Google Analytics segments can break our traffic sources down even further such as we can also see when the site’s traffic comes from paid traffic sources or social media sources.


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Top 4 PHP Frameworks

Top 4 PHP Frameworks

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Web app Development world is very vast and PHP is ruling it and one of the best and most favoured server-side programming languages known for its simple to use feature. PHP web app developers is a big plethora of frameworks providing the developers an integrated the, a platform for creating robust applications, reusable components, and permitting them favored quick development of web applications.

A basic structure is received by developer with some integrated modules for developing robust web applications quickly. A PHP framework provides coding standards and developer guidelines by standardising the process and stabilises the product.

Laravel
One of the best and complete PHP frameworks created to quickly build web applications using the MVC architecture. The framework has the huge developer community with some specific packages, the lightweight blade template engine, unit tests, ORM, a packaging system, restful controllers and it is only framework introduced routing in an abstract way.

Background tasks are handled with Queue management facility and also logs activity for all developers while tasks are being normally performed on the front end.

CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter is an ideal framework for rapid web application development with light weight and with simple framework understanding. It can installed easily and simply by just downloading directly from the host. Down load the file and you are ready to go and there are no further software installation is required.
Development of full web application becomes easy with the simple curves and libraries available and the development side is vast and very useful. The features available with it are wonderful and it has in-built libraries for unit testing, form validation email session, and much more. Own library can also be created and share it with the developer community.

Symfony
The framework is considered one of the very stable, powerful, well-researched and modular project. It’s a fantastic platform for developers’ community. Used by large corporations and many open source projects, it’s a very professional framework keeping mind the stability. Like other frameworks the documentation is very vast so as developer community. Best for the development of REST API’S and web applications.

CakePHP
Beginners guide for developers and it is quickly growing commercial web applications. It comes with code generation and scaffolding functionality to speed up the development process while bringing many packages to take care of some of the common features.

Feature of MVC conventions, helping the developers in guiding them in their development process. Security features available including ways to prevent CSRF, SQL Injection, XSS and tools required for validation of form.


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All about Website Wireframe Kit

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The task of designing a website demands for a highly expert web designer and developer as it is a dynamic and ever changing process. If we are starting work with a new client without first presenting our capabilities and concept of art of the requirements, it is definitely going to end up in a quite huge mess. Clients always change their minds and here, wireframes kits play an important role.

It is great to use wireframes as they can help us in creating designs and their concept even before start working on actual work. They are so accessible and easy to use through which we can have readily presentable designs available for our clients within an hour. This better helps the client in understanding the kind of design he is looking for so that they could finalize their final idea by closely working with the wireframe to understand the website.

Look at some of the reasons for using wireframes for our websites:

  • Wireframes have the grayed out appearance through which it is easy for the client to focus on the layout and structure without being distracted by the colors or copy.
  • It gives us the opportunity to provide several very different layouts to the client to choose form so that if they scrap a wireframed layout idea, the loss will be significantly less than a fully designed layout.
  • Designers are free to complete focus on user experience and flow before choosing typefaces, colors, images and other design elements. If a design looks great but does not well, it is not a success at all.
  • It can also be iterated quickly and if the client wants any significant changes to combine elements from different versions, we can implement them on the wireframe more quickly than revising a design.

In simple words, wireframes are basically grayed out layouts that can show our recommendations for the elements to be included on the design. These wireframes do not convey any actual design details as they generally consist of gray boxes but they are focused at presenting the layouts of different features.



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Make Perfect Instagram Profile Page with these Tips

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Social media is the prominent and efficient platform for our brand to reach maximum audience in least time and make them aware about our products and services. These days, numerous consumers are getting shifted towards using Instagram instead of Google for search anything for a brand or business and here, our Instagram profile plays an important role.

It is just like the goal of our website is to convert visitors into customers; goal of our Instagram profile is to convert visitors into followers. Here are some tips through which we can optimize our Instagram profile to make it convert for us:

Make it Public: Our Instagram profile picture will be public by default which means that anyone in this world can view our profile picture and posts on Instagram. If we are creating an Instagram profile for the business purpose, it is exactly that we want. Anyone in the world is able to see our posts and follow our brand and view photos.

Searchable Username: By having a username which is easily recognizable and searchable, it will help the potential followers to search our brand and business easily. If is already taken, we should try keeping business name as the first part of our username.

Easy business name: The next step would be making sure to add our full business name to the “name” section of our profile and this will appear under our profile picture and username in search. If we want to edit he business name, just go to the profile page and click “Edit profile”.

On brand Instagram profile picture: While visiting our Instagram page, our profile is the first thing which is noticed by the visitors as it is displayed prominently in the top right hand corner so it should be easily recognizable with our other social networks.

Actionable and informative bio: Our bio is one of those things which leave a great impact on the visitors along with our profile picture. It is a description at the top of our profile which should be in limited characters. We can use them to let people know about ourselves.

Trackable link in the bio: The one of the biggest issues people face in Instagram is that it is not exactly a great platform to drive traffic directly on our site from the app as there are no clickable links or URLs anywhere except the single “website” box in our bio.


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Use Twig and Timber for Next Website

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There is no doubt that WordPress is a great platform to manage our content on our site as well as for other works on website. It is the most versatile platform proof of which is that currently it acquires more than 23% of the internet as we know it.

The wordpress themes industry is getting pretty large and every day we see many new businesses pop-up, offering their own themes and now one more has been added to these trends which are Twig and Timber.

Twig: It is a PHP based templating system which allows us for writing faster and cleaner codes across all the sites we build. It is also easier to use and focused on more complex development tasks or can even take a brand new CMS when the project or client demands for it.

Timber: Timber is that plugin which is responsible for uniting wordpress with Twig. Along with the advantage of using Twig, it allows us to separate the PHP from our HTML templates. It gives us a more comfortable environment for developing themes.

Pros of using Twig:

  • Fast: Twig is able to comply down to plain optimized PHP code. In comparison to regular PHP, the overhead was reduced to the very minimum.
  • Secure: Twig has the sandbox mode in order to evaluate untrusted template code. Due to this, twig can be used as a template language for applications where the users can modify the template design.
  • Flexible: As the Twig is powered by flexible lexer and parser, developer can define its own custom tags and filters as well as create its own DSL.
  • Easy to Learn: The syntax is easy to learn and along with this, it allows web designers to get their job done faster without getting in their way.
  • Extensibility: Twig is flexible enough for all our needs even the most complex ones due to the open architecture, we can also implement our own language constructs for creating our own DSL.
  • Unit tested: One thing that Twig is fully unit tested and its library is also stable and ready to be used in large projects.
  • Documented: Twig is fully automated along with a dedicated online book and a full API documentation.

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Instagram Marketing Strategies

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We all are very well aware about the significant impact of different social media platforms in driving traffic to our sites and among all social media platforms, Instagram is becoming the most popular and efficient platform on world wide web. An Instagram marketing strategy is a prominent marketing tool for businesses if we want to get the most out of our social media marketing.

It is the popular social app that has over 800 million total monthly active users and if our brand does not have a business profile on Instagram, we are definitely missing a lot for our websites.

Here are some Instagram marketing strategies through which we can drive the more quality traffic on our site:

Developing content strategy: There is no doubt that content is the basic foundation of our Instagram presence and that’s why numerous B2C businesses are using Instagram to make their product and services star of the show while B2B companies generally concentrates on company culture and team recruitment as it is the right approach to showcase our brand to maximum people.

Use of Hash tags: In addition to the images, hash tags are the most important element of our post. While captions are helpful in telling the story behind the images, hash tags allows us to get images seen by those outside our current sphere of followers.

Right filters: Keyword hash tags are not the only criteria to pay attention; it also includes certain photo filters on which Instagram community respond and it is more favorably than others. By using these preferred filters, we can have the significant impact on our engagement.

Two way communication portal: Only the task of posting photos and videos and giving opportunity of interaction to the users is not enough, we should rather start interacting with them. it is a prominent opportunity to market our brand as well as our audience is going to be reading our comments.

Be a part of Instagram community: We can the best of using Instagram if we use it to form relationships with other users as with all social networking. It is not only about posting pictures in our own little vacuum, rather it is about participating in forming community around photos.


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Top Transforming Social Media Trends for 2018

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Today, social media is an essential piece of our business marketing strategy and is quickly becoming one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. It does not matter if we are running a small or big business; social media helps us in connecting with our customers, increasing awareness about our brand and also boost our leads and sales. It provides us incredible benefits of reaching millions of customers worldwide.

Here are the top social media trends that are likely to have a significant impact on the web designing industry:

Video content will become powerful: Concept of video content has grown exponentially in popularity over the years and also will continue to grow as well in 2018. It is predicted by the experts that 80% of online traffic will be driven by video content by 2019. Maximum percentage of social media users also prefer to watch a video than read plain. Mobile video is highly likely to be primary way our users will prefer to watch and it elicits higher engagements rates.

Focus on user generated content: In the coming era of social media trends, user generated content will be preferred by most of other social media users. Social networks are also presenting many interesting and amazing opportunities to use user generated content for building healthy relationships with prospective and existing customers.

Use of chatbots and messaging apps: In the coming trend, social media experience will be enhanced by use of chatbots and messaging apps. A good user experience means having well satisfied and happy customers to our sites. This concept of delivering superior user experience is steadily gaining momentum. Chatbots can give medical practices the chances of quickly interacting with their target audience in personal way.

Influencer marketing: As we know that social media influencers possess the incredible reach with following in thousands or millions and that’s why many online marketers are shifting towards paying these influencers in order to promote their products and services as influencer marketing is believed to deliver 11 times the ROI compared to traditional marketing strategies.

Instagram stories: With the instagrams stories, we can publish content that lives for 24 hours before disappearing. It is considered the perfect way to keep the followers engaged without over sharing content to our instagram profile.

Organic research strategies: Due to an increasing number of strengthen online presence of businesses on social media networks, we have to face a dramatic decline in the organic research and that’s why we have to be more selective about the posted content and stop relying in short term tactics.

Ephemeral content: It is a short lived content which appears for just 24 hours and then disappears on its own. This type of content is gaining extreme popularity among marketers.

Live streaming: It is growing at an alarming rate as it is a nearly free way to drive lots of traffic to our social media profile and more revenue for social media practices.


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Responsive Web Design Trends

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Today’s generation is the mobile friendly generation and to reach to maximum customers, numerous web design companies are offering responsive web design as a part of their services so that users can reach to them whenever they want easily. Responsive web design is basically that design which function smoothly across all the devices like desktops, laptops, phones or tablets etc.

To make our reach to the competitive market, it is important to design website in such a way that keeps responsive web design in mind.

Here is the list of top trends in the field of responsive web designing that are making our website appearance more beautiful:

Vector Graphics: This concept is becoming more and more popular to use instead of raster graphics. There is only one difference which is that scalable vector use points on a vector map for building a certain design while a raster graphic is just a plain old image by using pixels on a bitmap. They provide the benefit of being resized without losing visual quality which is crucial to seamless responsive web design.

Hidden Menus: Hidden menus are the most essential and popular trend in an effort to keep things simple. We are seeing a trend in which minimal home pages are becoming popular and users must click a menu icon for revealing the website’s navigation options.

Single and Long Scrolling Home Pages: This concept sounds like an amazing trend in responsive web designing. It is like a website with one page and includes nearly entire content on that single page. These types of sites have a navigation bar at the top of the screen but the only difference is that by clicking on these options, users are taken to a location already on this page.

Card Based Design: They are the simple and prominent way to organize information into the pattern of a grid. In this trend, pieces of information are organized into cards in a visually appealing way with a distinctive image or block of texts. They are essential for the responsive web design due to its ability to rearrange its structure as per the user’s screen size.

Minimalism: The above trends are about increasing simplicity but minimalism is the trend which falls under the new idea of web design whose goals are to reduce clutter, focus on efficient user experience and simplify the best we can.


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Make Your Website Accessible with these Tips

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There are a millions of users out there and if we want to attract more of them to our site, there are some necessary steps which we must follow to ensure that site are being used by everyone. For this, accessibility is important which is not difficult to implement. All we need to understand the underlying issues which can make a site hard or impossible to use by certain people.

Here are some tips to apply and mistakes to avoid for making the site accessible:

Choose CMS that is supportive to accessibility: As there are many content management systems are available there to help us in building our website but we must choose a CMS that suits our needs and make sure it is accessible also. After that, we have to consult the theme’s documentation for notes on accessibility and tips for creating accessible content and layouts for that theme.

Use heading correctly: We should put our focus on using the correct and strategically heading (h1, h2, etc.) to navigate the well organized and easily interpreted content by screen readers. We should also make sure to adhere to correct order of headings and separate presentation from structure by using CSS.

Proper alternative texts for images: Alt text should be used for the images so that screen readers users could be able to understand the message conveyed by the use of images on the page. It is crucial for informative images such as infographics. The alt text should contain the message we want to convey through that image.

Give links unique and descriptive names: Whenever we include links in our content, we should use text that is able to properly describe where our link will go. Use of “Click here” is not a good idea as it is not descriptive and ineffective for the screen reader users. The most unique content of the link should be shown first.

Design forms for accessibility: If our form fields are not labeled properly, the screen reader user does not have the same cues available as the sighted user. For this, each field in our form should have a well positioned and descriptive label.

Use tables for tabular data: We should use tables for page layouts as they add additional verbosity to screen reader users. Whenever a screen reader goes through the table, he is informed that there is a table named ‘X” number of columns and rows and distracts from the content.