8 Reasons To Use WordPress For Your Website Development

If your business is based solely on a store model chances are you are missing out on some great revenue. Not only will you be missing out on revenue generated through online sales, your competition will be moving ahead at a much faster pace. If you would like to stay competitive in the environment today you need to have an online presence. If you think it is going to be too expensive or too much work, then you are definitely mistaken. CodePlateau is a WordPress Website Development Company in Pune that helps young budding entrepreneurs gain a Digital footprint with development of world class yet affordable websites.

CodePlateau has an expertise in PHP development as well as using other common programming languages to build a website. However for the course of this blog, we will discuss the top 10 reasons to use WordPress to build your website.

Top 8 Reasons To Use WordPress To Develop Your Website:

WordPress Is Easy To Use and Manage:

CodePlateau helps build the most beautiful website by using the functionality of WordPress. Once the custom website has been built you don’t need to know coding or computer languages to continue to work with WordPress. You can make changes to your website as and when you feel.  It is one of the easiest platforms to use. We can even provide support and maintenance services if you need, but seeing how easy it is, you will probably choose not to avail that option.

WordPress Websites are Different:

You can do so any things with a custom developed WordPress Website that its functions are limitless. It can be an ecommerce website; or have a simple blog. You can have complex multipage product brochures for your customers to browse. Think of it and we will develop a WordPress website as per your need.

Use Of Themes:

Depending on the type of website you need, you can use tens and thousands of themes that are freely available. The WordPress themes are like the clothes that your website wears. You can make it look any way you like. If you do not like the free option you can always buy a theme that catches your fancy.

 Plug-In Power:

WordPress used to be a plain blogging website development source. The game changer for WordPress was the development of Plug-Ins.  Plug-Ins are like special website application that allows your website to have additional functionality. You can boost your SEO, add Social Integrations, Avoid Spam. Ahh, the pleasures of working with WordPress.

WordPress Popularity:

Tonnes of companies, even big brands are using WordPress or content management systems like WordPress to develop their websites. WordPress is really popular which means it is not going to go away soon. WordPress will support your website for years to come.

 SEO Friendly:

WordPress helps boost your SEO by itself. It is extremely SEO friendly and you can also add additional plug-ins to give your website more of a push towards Google’s top rankings.

Open Source System:

Since WordPress is open system, developers are constantly working on making improvements to it. They are also working towards building more plug-ins and other functionality to WordPress that wasn’t available even a few months ago. WordPress keeps evolving and you can keep adding these cool features to your websites as you go.

Affordable:

One of the main concerns most people have with building websites is the cost involved. CodePlateau provides an unbelievable WordPress Website Development Service from Pune. WordPress Website Development is very affordable and highly cost effective. If you’re working with a shoestring budget this service is for you.

 

If you are thinking about building a custom website designed for your business, think about CodePlateau. CodePlateau is Pune’s top rated WordPress Web Development Company. With a high number of professional engineers as well as several great projects already under their belt, CodePlateau can be the perfect partner for your business.

Common Mistakes To Avoid In Ecommerce Websites

E-Commerce websites are not truly the norm. So many of them have been sprouting up on the internet that it becomes difficult to differentiate one from another. There are however some web developers and web design companies that are not really doing a good job with their ecommerce website. CodePlateau Technology Solutions is the preferred choice of ecommerce web development service provider in Pune. It has a tonne of experience designing and developing a large number of first class ecommerce website. With their substantial amount of expertise in the field as web design and web development agency they have listed out some common mistakes that need to be avoided when best ecommerce websites design and development.

List Of UI-UX Errors to Avoid While Designing Ecommerce Websites:

Complex Navigation System:

The best e-commerce websites are not the ones with the best products. The best ecommerce websites are the ones which make the best products easy to find. If the architecture of the website is not up to mark and the navigation on the website is unnecessarily cluttered it will definitely lead to a bad user experience. The simpler the layout the easier the navigation and the better the site will be.

Proper Product Focus:

The primary aim of any e-commerce website is to sell the products displayed on it. If the user experience of the visitor is not primarily focused on him finding the products then your e-commerce website has been designed pretty poorly. CodePlateau, Pune’s No. 1 ecommerce website development company has built several websites for their customers that have vastly improved the sales figures. The ROI on these websites have been astounding. One element to surely take notice of it the way the product is displayed and found.

Complicated Checkout Process:

If your checkout process involves more than 3 steps chances are the customer is going to drop the purchase and leave. You can actually find out the customer information journey if you have tagged your e-commerce website with Google Analytics. Try to make the checkout process as simple as possible. CodePlateau’s ecommerce website designing came in quite handy for one of its clients when they improved only the checkout process and saw an incremental gain of almost 70% in the first month itself.

Confusing Content with Call To Actions:

If you want your customer to visit your website and make a purchase you need to show them what to do. Do not confuse content with Calls To Action. A Call to Action button is to be separate. The best ecommerce websites designed by CodePlateau provide an intuitive feeling to the buyers about where they need to go to complete their shopping experience. Each website should try and achieve that sort of intuitiveness. The website should be designed in such a way that it becomes abundantly clear to the buyer what needs to be done. Do not confuse content with call to action. Sure your blog post might mention somewhere that the customer needs to buy this product for the holidays, but without a proper call-to-action this message will fall on deaf ears.

 

Best Ecommerce Websites Design

Partner with CodePlateau as they truly become a extension of your business. They will carefully understand your business needs before working on a fool-proof plan. Implementing it to provide you with a E-Commerce website that works best for your business. Clean interface, logical url structure and a simple checkout process that is sure to increase your return on investment. CodePlateau is one of the leading E-Commerce Website Development Agencies in Pune. They have several years of experience under their belt working with national and international clients. Call today for a free consultation.

 

 

What Every ECommerce Website Needs To Have – Part 2

E-Commerce Website Development is not an easy task. There are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration while building a ecommerce website. In our previous blog we talked about the structural factors that you need to consider while developing an ecommerce website. In this blog post we will be looking into the technical aspects of an ecommerce website development process that you need to pay attention to. CodePlateau the best ecommerce website development team from Pune has built several E-Commerce website for its clients and this checklist is a culmination of all those years of expertise.

Checklist for new E-Commerce Websites

Check Webmaster Analytics:

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a Webmaster Account and verify your website on it. The Google Search Console is a new method of tracking the details of your website. It provides several suggestions, warnings and information about other issues that your site might be facing.  Pay close attention to the errors mentioned on the Webmaster Tools because it could impact how your site is placed in SERPs. Although Google claims that it does not penalize websites with 404 errors it does mention that it could lead to bad user experience which could lower your search engine rankings. Also, we will never know when Google might publish an update that penalizes sites for having broken links, and 404 errors. Work on this problem daily so as to not accumulate a lot of problems in the future that might become too much to handle.

Have A Sitemap during ECommerce Website Development:

You will need a good sitemap for your e-commerce website. Sitemaps come in two forms, XML and HTML. A xml sitemap is designed specifically for Google crawlers to ensure that they are able to see all the pages present on your website. A HTML sitemap helps the user browse the content on the site from a single page. If you intend on building a very large website it makes sense to split your xml sitemaps into several categories. Keep the static pages in one set and the constantly changing pages in another. That way the bots know where to look when a page has been altered and indexes it faster.

Hire Robots:

Just Kidding. But make sure to upload a robots.txt file to your ecommerce website. A robots.txt file acts like a gateway to your website. Think of it like a bouncer outside of a busy nightclub. The Robots.txt file decides who gets to enter the club. Not only does it control who can visit the website and who cannot, but it can also restrict bots from visiting certain sections of the website that you don’t want the bots to go to. Add “disallow” directives to the Robots.txt file to indicate that these pages should not be crawled, and then upload that file to your server.

Be Responsive:

Not you, your website. It needs to be responsive. With the variety of different phone sizes,  screen sizes, not to mention the number of tablets, phablets available in the market it becomes imperative to have develop a ecommerce website with a responsive design. A responsive design enables the elements on your website to change size and shape based on the size of the screen that the web page is being viewed from. Not having to scroll left or right to see the entire product is a godsend to the customers and it adds a lot of clout to the user experience.

Even if you have an app for your website you should still enable website responsiveness on your website. There will be several customers who have not downloaded the app and would prefer to use the mobile version of your e-commerce website development.

Stellar Checkout and Payment:

You have to make sure to get the checkout system from your e-commerce website to be as simple as possible. It has to be designed so that the user can use it intuitively. Don’t make the payment system too complex either. The faster they clear the checkout the more they will appreciate the site and use it to shop more.

What Every E-Commerce Website Needs To Have – Part 1

E-Commerce Websites are popping up across the country far and wide. With so many E-Commerce website being developed the quality of the final product seems to be going down. People are taking up more and more projects without really understanding the fundamentals required to develop a E-Commerce Website.

If you are in the market for an ecommerce website then CodePlateau, India’s premier website development company based in Pune can definitely help. We have put down a checklist that your web development team needs to follow while building an ecommerce website.

Checklist for new E-Commerce Website

Site Architecture:

Even before building the site, the site architecture needs to be mapped. What goes where, what products will you list under what heading. This is important for a lot of reasons. One of the many reasons this is vital is because your architecture will define your URL structure. Website URLs need to be simple and easy to understand. You need to try and be consistent in your URLs structures and lay them in a logical manner.

Your URLs need to also be name properly. This is what a typical URL structure should look like for your ecommerce website: company> category>product>types. This is just a basic understanding to give you an idea. The larger the site the more complicated the URLs will get and that why the site architecture is very important.

Always remember to keep an opening to add more products or services. 

Navigation Assistance:

Breadcrumb Navigation is a great way to help your site visitors to find what they are looking for. Some site can have a lot of categories or product types. The user should be able to easily navigate between the different layers of your website with a single click. Not having to restart the entire search from scratch is a huge bonus for the customer.

Image Optimization:

When building E-Commerce websites it becomes very important to build first for the customer and then for the Google bots. Customer  like to see various images of the products before they buy them. Our minds are stimulated much more easily with visual stimuli than text. Unfortunately Google bots don’t see the images like we do. For them a space occupied by images is just a blank space. That is unless they have been properly optimized. ALT Tags are used to inform Google what the image is about. Use Alt Attributes for all images. Don’t try to trick Google. Describe exactly what’s in the picture, but be smart about it.

Social Media Integration:

If you want your website to be really popular Social Media Integration is an absolute must. Having social icons on your website gives your customers the opportunity to follow your brand on all the socials. It also provides an impetus to the customers to share their wish list, shopping list or other items on their own socials. If you have any influencers following your brand, their one post could decide the fate of your site.

Social Media will also give you other SEO benefits. Increasing the websites popularity even if it is through social media will be a good signal to Google. It will definitely help give you a boost in your search engine rankings.

We will continue the checklist in part two of this blog. These tips have been all about the surface changes that you need to make to ensure your E-Commerce websites success. In the next blog we will be looking into the technical aspects of the website that needs to be taken care of. CodePlateau is one of the premier ecommerce website developers in Pune.  Their expert ecommerce website development team Pune has worked with several national and international companies on their ecommerce website giving them an opportunity to learn from their mistakes till they’ve perfected their art.

CSS Audits and Why They’re Important for Web Development

CSS Audits and Why You Should Do Them

If you work for the best Web Development Agency in Pune then you will at some point have done a CSS audit. If you’re anything like us then you will also hate doing an Audit. It is however part and parcel of your website development services and extremely important for the health of the website.

What is a CSS Audit?

A CSS audit is kind of like looking for clues to solve a puzzle. A puzzle that when completed give you a faster more optimized website and a worksheet for future recommendations. You start by looking at the sites code and dig deeper. You will consider how many CSS Stylesheets you have implemented. How many are being called and if they’re really necessary. Does it affect the sites performance? Is the code written well? You end goal is to improve on the work you have already done. Our website development and website redevelopment services in Pune insist on having a CSS audit of your code to ensure that you get the most optimized code in your arsenal.

Benefits Of A CSS Audit

Pitching a CSS Audit to your clients is hard work because they normally have no idea what you might be referring to. What clients want to hear about are the benefits that Audit will provide them. As the Best Web Development agency in Pune, we have gotten quite good at explaining to our clients why a CSS audit is necessary. These are the tangible benefits that you can show your clients once your audit is complete. (Ensure to take the before and after results to give them a more clear understanding)

Reduced Filed Sizes:

Completing a CSS audit takes time. As the web development agency we ensure to be clear with the clients about our timelines. We need to sift through hundreds maybe thousands of line of code and ensure ways to clean it up. See if there are ways to cut down on the number of properties being called up. At the same time ensure not to hamper the functionality of the website. A CSS Audit when done properly will eliminate the junk and keep only what it necessary to ensure that the visitor to the website has less to download when they visit.

 

Ensure Guideline Consistency:

They  not only help the clients with their website but also the web development agency. As you’re auditing ensure to make documentation regarding the styles and formats you have used. Make notes of how you have used your code and why so that in the future you can refer to them and eliminate yourself a whole lot of time while you are conducting audits on another property. This is also beneficial to the client because if they were to switch web development agencies the other website development agency will have an idea of what was done and why.

Code Standardisation:

Whatever you do maintain standardisation. You may wonder why this is such an important piece, but it is. Depending on your methods of segregating code you will be able to find your mistakes sooner. If you leave enough comments in your code, other people may find errors which you could not spot because you were close to the projects.

Performance Improvements:

This is what it is all about after all. If nothing else your client will definitely understand the difference between a heavy site and a light site. Site loading times can be displayed accurately and it is one metric that will definitely not confuse them. Auditing code, along with combining and zipping up stylesheets, leads to markedly faster site speeds.  As their web development agency it is your prerogative to explain to your clients how much better a faster site will help with the user experience and help bring in more customers for their products or services. Especially in India where the connection speeds are not the best, having a light, highly functional site can do a lot of good.

 

Conducting an audit is the first step in achieving a clearer code metric. All that documentation will help in future projects and also keep the door open for further changes if necessary. CSS Audits can be time consuming but the benefits way outweigh the problems. As a web development agency that is constantly working on redevelopment of website this is the crucial step in our method of success.

PHP 7 release – is major syntax changes?

Are you as shocked with the release of php 7 after the 5.x(5.6) version?

Here is story – Andrei Zimievski has initiated a project to implement the native Unicode support throughout the PHP. It was planned to release with PHP6 along with other new features. However this development is Abandoned. so there was an intense debate about the name of the next major version.

Finally they decided to vote and came with name PHP 7. You can see arguments and voting in document are available – Name of Next Release of PHP

The whole feature set of PHP 7 is not defined. We can see top major changes.

Top Features for PHP 7

1) Huge Performance Improvements –

phpng (PHP next generation) – Main goal to improve performance that could at least match what Facebook HHVM provides.

Zeev Suraski written article on which he clearly take HHVM as competitor.

I believe it would be good enough to beat the speed of HHVM.

2) JIT Engine –

According to Dmitry Stogov of Zend, the development of PHPNG was started with the motivation to research the implementation of a JIT engine for the Zend Engine based PHP.

A JIT engine can dynamically compile Zend opcodes into native machine code that eventually would make the code run faster next time it is run.

3) AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) –

Another change that boost up the performance . AST is intermediary step for the PHP compilation process.

An AST would provide several advantages that he described in his proposals, including the potential for more optimizations that would make PHP run even faster.

4) Asynchronous Programming –

Facebook hack already implemented asynchronous programming which push PHP core development team to integrate asynchronous Programming feature in PHP 7.

An event loop is part of the code that takes care of handling events related with I/O operations and other asynchronous tasks that may be going on in parallel, like accesses to files, network, databases, timers, etc..

In simpler terms, this would allow future PHP versions to easily implement support to the execution of parallel tasks within the same request, thus pushing PHP performance improvement potential to a totally different level.


5) Standalone Multi-threading Web Server –

This is what PHP make more scalable. PHP can already be run from multi-threaded Web servers like ngynx, lighttpd or even Apache in worker mode, however that is not the same as having PHP run on its own multi-threading Web server.

A multi-threading Web server can handle many simultaneous requests using a single memory pool, thus avoiding the memory waste that happens when you run PHP as FastCGI or in Apache pre-fork mode.

Despite running PHP as a standalone multi-threading Web server is not yet in the plans for PHP 7, it is certainly something good to have, at least for PHP 8.

When will be the PHP 7 Release Date?

Different people estimate it will take between 1 to 3 years. A reasonable guess is to expect a final PHP 7 release some time in 2016, although it is not impossible to see early alpha versions still in mid October 2015.

Conclusions

We should thank Facebook to make the PHP core developers wake up and move faster to integrate these great features from HHVM and the Hack Language. PHP 7 version will be certainly exciting. Keep up with all the CodePlateau social accounts to stay in touch with the latest news about Web Development.

Resource: PHPClasses