Website aesthetics vs. Usefulness: What matters the most?

Design goes a long way in sending the right message across to your website visitors, but overdoing it might end up spelling disaster. Often, in the quest to create the most visually stunning masterpiece, the essence of the website is forgotten. In this article, we’ll explore how a few Web Design elements can create a negative impact instead of the desired effect. Remember, usefulness is more important than aesthetics, and we’re here to tell you why:

1) Elements should serve a function

Any form/shape/element should serve a function. However, these days, designers design the form and hope that the function will be served on its own. That’s not the case. While designing, identify the core functionality of the site and build your design around it instead of the other way around.

2) If it’s too beautiful, it’s also distractive

Beauty is distractive - and while it’s not wrong to make your website beautiful, if it’s too much it would end up distracting your customers from the real purpose of your site. Blend beauty and functionality and ensure that your site works as great as it looks.

3) Poor usefulness may result in high bounce rates

At the end of the day, you want to make users stay, read, or buy something from you - which might not happen if they’re unable to use your website properly in the first place. High bounce rates due to lack of a useful design might affect your SEO and lower your rankings

4) Fast is better

Incorporating too many visual elements might look great, but will slow down your site. With users’ patience waning thin, no one would hang around for more than 3 seconds on your site. Keep the flashiness to a minimum and focus more on optimizing the site’s performance.

5) Simple is elegant

Going overboard with the design and adding too much might end up confusing your visitors at the end of the day. Users like it simple and simplicity, in turn, makes your website more functional.

Getting these elements right and striking a balance between both might seem like a daunting task – but not to us! Hire skilled web developers and designers from Openwave Singapore today.

Advantages of Using Magento for Building an Online Store

For someone attempting to foray into the e-commerce business, one of the pivotal decisions to make is the platform to use for development. Magento is by far the popular and widely used web building engine for e-commerce at present. It has a massive community and hundreds of thousands of websites are powered through it.

In this article, we’re going to be looking at the advantages of using Magento for e-commerce development.

  

 

1) Spaciousness

With Magento, an e-store can host a massive half-million products on a single site. Along with this, 80,000 orders can be processed every hour. This makes Magento a vastly spacious platform with ample arena for expansion of a store in the future.

 

2) Mobile friendly design

It comes equipped with a mobile-friendly design. The shopping carts here are developed with a more responsive touch, making them easily incorporated into the smartphone and other devices. As a result, e-commerce stores raised on this platform can be more flawlessly transferred to the mobile medium as well, a vital necessity for business today.

 

3) Easier content management

Magneto offers a user-friendly design that enables easy content management for the user. The interface comes with basic functionalities without the need for too much technical knowledge.

 

4) SEO capacities

With Magento, a website is armed with stronger SEO tools. This web builder facilitates better traffic flow into your website, thereby boosting exposure on multiple search engines from Google to Bing and more.

 

5) Stronger integration capacity

The level of integration offered is much higher than others. Websites built through Magento are offered easier synchronization with other tools and websites from E-bay to Paypal, Quickbooks and many more.

 

6) Huge online community

This is by far the most vastly used e-commerce platform at present, with hundreds of thousands of developers and over 240,000 e-commerce sites powered by it. As a result, people using this platform have a massive community of developers online to draw support from in case of issues of any kind.

Choosing the right platform is just the first step. Building quality programming architecture is the next one. If you need professional help, then we’ve got the solution. Openwave is a leading IT services corporation, having helped corporations across the world build quality online stores using Magento in Singapore. Partner with us to get the best value out of this platform!

Leading Web Responsive Platforms & How to Choose Among Them

Responsive Web building platforms offer people with no coding experience a chance to raise a glamorous, user-friendly site. However, there is an ever-increasing variety of such platforms, and it is vital that you go for the one that fits your needs. Here are some factors you need to examine the below functionality to make a website responsive.

 

Features to compare

User-friendliness

Make sure that the builder’s design offers convenience to users, and is easy to navigate through. Simplify the map of the website, and add a few enticing design features for a thorough look.

SEO functionality

SEO is the bridge for your website to reach a good status on the search engine. Different website builders provide varying features, some of them helpful in the SEO area and others not so much. Ensure that you can find a web engine that integrates some sound search engine qualities into your site for optimal exposure.

Price

Evaluating the price is crucial in this process. Web engines offer a variety of tools, themes, and features, all of them for different price ranges as well. Examine your needs, and set a budget for yourself, before approaching the web builder that matches both.

Customer support

Building a medium of interactivity with customers is one of the growing needs of websites. Ensure that the platform that you choose allows you to easily integrate a messaging or chat box to engage with your audience.

Web development platforms

Below are examples of the leading web building engines to look among:

Wix

Wix is one of the most known names in the field of website builders. An expansive app store, as well as greatly responsive templates, make it one of the preferred destinations in the field.

BigCommerce

This is a reputed name with respect to eCommerce websites. It allows businesses to create sound, reliable interfaces as well as incorporate some great themes into the site.

Web.com

Web.com offers strong support for its clients and can integrate some quality features into your website.

Weebly

This is a platform that provides a massive variety of themes and templates to choose from. The builder also uses an easily usable drag-and-drop format that allows you to insert features into the website with zero hassle.

If you’re in need of professional help in responsive website development/design - Openwave Singapore can offer you the solution. We have been entrenched in this field for nearly twenty years now, and can build you a sharp, feature rich website to attract customers and grow your business.

6 Factors that Make the Dotnet Language Stand out from the Rest

Websites can be created on various programming structures and with the help of different applications. DOTNET is arguably one of the more vastly utilized programming platforms, with scores of users over the globe. It is popular for its bolstered security apparatus, its portability, as well as its memory management. We'd like to dig deeper, in this article, to uncover just what makes this programming language unique and a cut above the rest.

Ease-of-functioning and Simplicity

This coding language is often attributed a simplistic quality and ease-of-usage. Building applications in this framework usually is faster, easier and cleaner. Simpler tasks such as site configurations are performed without hassle in this framework.

Wider Range of Functions

With the Dotnet platform, developers avail the benefits of several functionalities that can be synthesized onto their products. This boosts convenience for the customer while making the task less complicated for the programmer.

Different Programming Languages

The Dotnet platform is also known for its versatility, offering developers a range of different coding languages within the same framework. Programmers can suit themselves with a style and eloquence that reflects them best.

Stronger Support Features

This platform comes with a robust set of tools to aid in the coding process. Some of the facilities available include Visual Studio, which provides support for the designing process.

Minimalist Coding Style

Applications developed under Dotnet stand out in their uniquely low coding volume. This allows developers to weave applications with ease, and to edit and manage them efficiently.

Ease of Maintenance

Applications developed under Dotnet have the added benefit of a sound maintenance value. The source code for portals and websites of this framework are managed at one place, making it easier for the programmer to edit and modify them.

There is a diverse range of coding platforms to choose from in this age. However, Dotnet is the preferred language for hundreds of thousands across the world and has been the groundwork for some of the most successful applications today. If you're having trouble with this platform, Openwave Computing in Singapore who are expertise in .Net Web app development to fix glitches and enhance the programming quality of your product.

Should you Hire PHP Developers for Web Development Project?

Are you planning a large-scale PHP project for your organization soon? You have one of two options: create an in-house team for development and maintenance or outsource the work to an external team. Both approaches have their drawbacks and advantages.

Should you outsource PHP development?

In most cases, outsourcing is the better choice – it is both a time and a money saver. Here are some ways why recruiting external developers can be beneficial for your business:

Save costs

Many entrepreneurs believe they’ll be able to build a cheap product in-house. Nothing can be farther from the truth, however. A modest-size project can cost up to four times more if you create in-house. If you create a team in your organization, you have to commit to them long-term, which can greatly ramp up costs.

Build on time

Developing complex applications is tricky and can be a time-consuming process. It’s not uncommon for a project to take twice as long as previously thought if you built it by yourself. On the other hand, external developers already have a team in place where every member knows their responsibility, which allows for fast development.

Experience counts

If you haven’t built internally before, you are going to hit a log of snags along the way. Experienced external developers have already worked with dozens of businesses - they understand the challenges of development and will be able to deliver a high-quality product without too much hassle.

New features

Technology is constantly evolving. It’s hard for an internal team that doesn’t specialize in PHP development to keep up with all the changes. Hiring professionals who are well-versed with the platform will enable you to create a product that has all the latest features.

If you go for in-house development, you end up having to pay hefty infrastructure costs, not to mention the fact that you’d have to spend a very long time finding the right talent. On the other hand, when you hire external developers, you’re just renting a pre-existing setup – which saves you a great many resources. You can build robust, scalable, platform-independent web apps (and web portals and web sites) at a fraction of the cost by going for outsourcing.

Planning on Building an Enterprise-Level Website? Use Drupal 8

Creating a Website for your business is going to be a significant long-term investment in both time and money for you. How well your website runs may also determine the fate of your firm in today's internet-driven world. As such, it’s important that you build an outstanding web presence that showcases your brand in the best possible light and helps you gain customer/client trust.

Why the Drupal 8 CMS makes an ideal platform to build a business website on:

Download and use free

Unlike proprietary website-building software, Drupal is fully free to download and modify. All you have to do is pay for the domain and monthly maintenance costs. The CMS has a big community of developers that provide regular updates and new content for it.

Advanced functionality

There are about 40,000 modules - or software extensions/plugins - available for it. With these plugins, you can quickly add advanced features to your website - international language, video streaming, e-commerce and social media support, for example.

Superb performance

CMSs like WordPress are known to slow down when you load them down with plugins. Drupal, on the other hand, offers super performance even with many modules installed or even when there is a lot of demand being placed on the server.

Very SEO-Friendly

Drupal is search-engine-ready out-of-the-box. Being fully customizable, you can quickly tweak it to be even more SEO-ready than it is already. That means your website will be easy to find on Google SERPs, especially locally.

Scalable

Are you planning on expanding your business in the future? Drupal is a scalable platform - it will grow (or shrink) with the demand being placed on it. That means, with a few minor changes, you can create a bigger website than before.

Airtight security

Drupal has a reputation for being extremely secure. Compared to platforms like WordPress, Drupal-based internet sites are rarely hacked. That makes it a viable option for businesses where data safety is a priority.

Drupal - despite its many advantages - isn’t newbie-friendly. If you want to build a professional-looking, high-performing website, your best bet is to recruit the services of a professional CMS web development company.

Why Do you Need a Business Website? Find out

Almost half the human population uses the internet in some form or the other. Many consumers prefer to research products and services - and even the company offering them - online before making a purchase decision. Despite this, many small and medium-sized business owners (SMBs) still don’t own a Website. So if you don’t have a website, do you truly need one?

Here are some of the significant benefits of building one:

Find more customers

Like mentioned before, a significant majority of customers search for products and services online. By having a web page up and running, you will be able to find more customers not only in your vicinity but also worldwide.

Improve reputation

According to research, customers think better of businesses that have a web-based (and mobile) presence. They are more likely to do buy from them and also recommend them to their family and friends. An online presence gives you a reputation boost.

Marketing made easy

It takes a lot of time and money to market in the real world, especially if you want to print ads in papers, magazines, or create brochures. On the other hand, marketing online is way cheaper, and you can drive traffic to your website quickly with social media, email marketing, and blog posts.

Do business 24/7

Unlike your real world office, your web pages don’t need to shut shop at night. If you sell products, you can create an eCommerce site that will be able to sell 24/7 without a break. If you run a consultation or services company, customers will be able to engage with you at night.

Customer care

It's possible to provide a range of remote services to clients with a web presence, including making instant payments, handling complaints, responding to inquiries, and acting on customer feedback. Keep up with the competition Finally, almost every business - big and small - owns a website these days. If you don’t own one, you risk falling far behind the competition. By owning one, though, you can even realistically compete against big corporations.

Thanks to CMS software and cheap hosting, setting up and maintaining a website is a breeze these days. If you need a professional website made at an affordable price, you can hire a web development team in Singapore for the task.

What makes Drupal the Perfect Web Development platform for Business?

Choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your website from the very beginning is important. If you pick the wrong CMS, you may have to spend a lot of time and money later transferring to a new one. Also, not all platforms will showcase your business in the best possible light. Drupal is a very popular and perhaps the most powerful content management system in the world, at the moment. 

Drupal is ideal for big Websites 

Platforms like WordPress and Joomla slow down when they are loaded with too many software extensions, or if the website has too many pages. Drupal, on the other hand, is perfect for large internet sites. It is based on a PHP framework which, if the developer is experienced enough, allows you to make pages that load in as little as 2 seconds on both desktops and mobiles.

Big benefits of using Drupal

Here are some of the top benefits of using the platform:

• Use for Free: Being open source, you can use and modify it as you please. There are thousands of free modules available that you can integrate into your site for free.
• Fully Customizable: It's possible to build themes or web pages from scratch, which is ideal for businesses that want unique branding.
• Very Secure: Drupal is much more secure than WordPress. The developers release regular updates that patch known vulnerabilities (there usually aren’t many).
• Fast Development: Drupal is module based. A good developer can quickly build up an excellent website by stitching together various modules.
• SEO Friendly: A website built on the platform will be well-optimized and easy to navigate. Google bots can crawl through it quickly, which gives you high search rankings out-of-the-box.
• Mobile-Friendly: The platform supports responsive and mobile friendly design. You can make pages that load lightning-quick on small devices and look good at the same time.

Drupal isn’t a platform suitable for programming beginners, but it is very effective in the hand of experienced developers. If you want an outstanding website made on the platform, you can hire Drupal CMS Developer in Singapore to a competent web development team.

Web Design Trends that are Changing the Internet Landscape in 2017

Last year, we saw a lot more businesses adopting the mobile-first approach and, consequently, implementing responsive design on their websites to make them mobile friendly. 2017 is shaping up to be another great year for Website Design, as we see many innovative trends are being adopted around the world. 

Here are some of the top web design trends that are transforming the Internet landscape in 2017: 

Layouts that bring the focus to the content

Content is still king, and more designers are waking up to the fact that people navigate to websites to read content and not just to view neat animation tricks. In 2017, we expect many sites to be redesigned to make the content more readable and clear, with elements promoting ease of readability. 

SVGs to improve loading times

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are relatively new technology. They are an alternative to traditional image formats like PNG, GIF, and JPG. They allow designers to produce images that can be scaled up and down to match any screen size without loss of fidelity (unlike other formats). What’s more, they don’t require HTTP requests, so pages with them load lightning-quick.

3D design elements

3D design isn’t new, but we saw the mainstream implementation of 3D elements on top websites via technology like Parallax scrolling. This year, we are going to see designers make websites that can be viewed on 3D wearable devices like Oculus Rift.

Colors helping the minimalist approach

There has been a trend in the market to build websites that have a minimalist interface and a clutter-free design. Bold and bright colors are being used to both emphasize the content as well as to promote a brand’s identity.

Constraint-based design tools

Developers usually have to create several versions of a site for different screen sizes. In 2017, the market is being flooded with tools like Figma that allow site makers to build a site only once and have it displayed correctly across multiple platforms.

Are you looking for to make a new website in 2017? Openwave’s leading Web Design & Development team can make you a custom website with leading-edge features at economical prices.

Avoid Making these Costly Rookie Mistakes When Promoting on Social Media

Reputation is everything when it comes to running a business. A bad reputation erodes trust among current and potential customers, which makes it less likely they will work with you or buy from you. In this digital age, mistakes can have huge repercussions. A single mistake can destroy in an instant something that was years in the making.

When promoting on social media, it's important that you keep your wits about you to keep your reputation intact. Here are some costly mistakes you should avoid making while engaging followers:

Posting inappropriate content

Many companies have gotten into trouble over inappropriate content over the years. It's important that your posts be free of political or religious content that could offend certain people. Create content that is relevant to your business and make it a policy to get multiple people to check a post before publishing it.

Attacking or abusing someone

No matter how impolite your customers get online, you shouldn't engage them - it can only reflect poorly on your business. Do what you can to assuage customers quickly. There will always be trolls on the internet, too - people who feed off negativity and attack your company for no good reason. If you don't pay them any attention, though, they will go away.

Not reaching the right people

Your content has to be tailored made for the clients you do business with or customers who want to buy from you. You must know what your customers like, what they are looking for, and what kind of posts they are likely to enjoy reading.

Paying money to get 'likes'

Some businesses make the mistake of paying for 'likes' or social media followers. Paying is a rookie mistake - it's very unlikely that these people care about your posts and you will be engaging an audience that is totally irrelevant to your unique business.

It's important that your content strikes the right balance between usefulness and promotion for maximum effect. A simple way to target users is to hire social media marketing specialists from leading Company or email to salesSG@openwavecomp.com, who’ll help set your campaign right on track.

Top SEO-Friendly eCommerce Platforms that can maximize Sales

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for your online business. Statistics tell us that almost 50% of all online purchases originate from a search query. By getting your online store to rank higher in search engine rankings, you will get more incoming traffic and ultimately make more sales every month.

What does Search-Engine Friendly design entail?

There are a lot of factors that affect SEO. Some of the top ones include:

• Independent navigational links
• Page titles
• Page URLS
• Meta descriptions
• ALT Tags
• H1 headings
• Canonical URLs
• Blogs
• Social sharing
• XML Sitemaps
• Domain names
• IP Address
• 301 redirects
• Robot Noindex

To maximize sales, you have to build your eCommerce store on an SEO-friendly platform. To help you out, here is a list of top platforms that align with the factors above and provide above average search engine optimization:

Magento

Over 500,000 businesses use Magento, and it has near perfect SEO scores. Magento is the platform of choice for big and small businesses alike.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted solution, meaning you have to pay the developers a monthly fee to host your store. You can build beautiful stores on it, though, that always rank high in search listings.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is used by over 250,000 businesses worldwide. The platform is perfect if you want to build a low-cost store with advanced features.

OsCommerce

With OsCommerce, you can build advanced stores with many features, but you need advanced programming knowledge to make it search engine friendly.

BigCommerce

The selling point of this platform is the ability to build megastores with no product limits at affordable prices. It also helps that the platform’s layout is easy for Google to index.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce stores rank very highly on Google. It allows you to turn a WordPress website into a high-performing online store.

OpenCart

OpenCart is a very cost-effective eCommerce platform. It is very cheap to set up and run a store on it, and they don’t impose limits on your products like some other platforms do.

You will need a fast-loading, attractive, easy-to-navigate store to convert a visitor from a search engine to a customer. You can hire an experienced eCommerce development team in Singapore to build a custom store with advanced features.

It’s Crucial for Your Business to Own an Official Website: Know why

So you don’t own a website yet, in 2016? We're in the midst of a digital revolution, with billions of people accessing the internet daily and using it as their primary information resource. People use the internet for shopping, to find local business services, and to compare products being offered by competing companies. By not having a website, it's almost as if your business doesn't exist!

Here are some undeniable reasons why you need an official website right now:

Make yourself more accessible to clients

You will be able to provide useful, relevant information in a single location. That will make it easy for customers to tell what you have to offer and make it more likely they'll work with you.

Find more customers than ever before

The internet has no boundaries. Organisations these days have a chance of doing business with clients from around the world. A website makes it easy to find customers globally that are interested in what you have to offer. 

Keep your business up-and-running 24/7

Unlike your real-world office, a website doesn’t need downtime. It can stay up-and-running 24/7. Consequently, you can sell your products or services all day, every day.

Credibility

Every entrepreneur knows that a business' reputation is as important as - if not more important than - the product they are selling. Having an official site tells your customers you are serious and you are running a successful business. 

Reduce marketing costs

It doesn’t cost a lot of money to market online. You can advertise for free by creating a blog or by offering newsletters to customers or clients. 

Save on upkeep

Customers will no longer have to visit you in the real world for some of your products or services (if you’re offering them online). Consequently, you will get less foot-traffic and can save on some operating expenses.  

There are over a billion websites on the internet at the moment. Your official site, if you decide to get one, will have to compete with them. To create a professional-looking website that can convert efficiently and stand the test of time, hire an experienced web development team. 

Five Festive Season Strategies to Help you Make Huge Holiday Profits

Statistics tell us that over 40% of all eCommerce sales are made during the holiday season. If you want to grow your revenues during the upcoming festivities, you have to plan out a marketing strategy in advance and ensure your website is ready to hook incoming traffic.

Simple Guide to Develop and Launch your first iOS Mobile App

Smartphone sales are seriously picking up, and over 2 billion people are expected to own smartphones by the year 2019. The number of mobile app downloads is expected to increase two times over the next four years as more businesses attempt to leverage mobile technology in an attempt to increase sales and improve brand recognition. If you’re planning on launching an iOS application, we must warn you: it can be an uphill battle.

Build Mobile Application to put your Business ahead of the competition

In recent years, mobile phones have evolved from just an overdriven toy to a hyper operative device. With technology advancing day-by-day, mobiles have grabbed the center-stage in the IT market. This means that it is becoming an essential gadget that can be used constructively to gain a competitive edge over other businesses.  

4 ways a Responsive Web Design can benefit SEO

Imagine finding a brand or product in a website on your smartphone that’s clearly meant for the desktop; imagine all the misplaced texts and images just thrown here and there, making you flinch to the core. What would be your next move? You close the page as quickly as possible. Yes! That's what everyone else will do. With the advent of user-friendly designs, people are seeking an enhanced mobile experience. However, is responsive web design only for the comfort of users? No! From the business perspective, it is also excellent for SEO.