A recent survey from “Digital Consumer Behavior Study “ says that 86% of the people read the product review before purchasing any product online. Importance of product review and rating can be easily understandable from the big players like Apple and Google. They allow user to rate application and comment on their purchased application because it helps other to buy such top ratted quality apps. You will notice with yourself that you will not spent $1 before reading such review while downloading application for your Smartphone. Does not this example show power of review and rating system for your digital store? Analysis proves that reviews on a product details page increase trust and validity of your website

Before we buy any product from any online website like eBay, Amazon or any physical store, we either check their product rating or check Yelp.com for physical store rating to make sure that we are dealing with safe hands and not wasting our money for useless items. Magento allows user to rate a product on various attributes like price, value, quality etc. It also allow admin user to create their own rating attribute as per their needs. There are so many reasons to have this feature enable for your online store.

Help to improve your product quality

Success of your online store is only depends on quality of your products. One of the wonderful benefits of review and rating system is that your customer will tell you what is good in your product and how they feel about your services and what they do not like while shopping from your website. Being an owner of a store, you can take action on negative reviews to enhance your product quality which ultimately shows your customer orientation selling behavior. Your Customers may not be good writers but they can help you to identify pros and cons from a list of rating attributes. What’s more, they can even suggest you some good product that you’ve not covered with your store.

Increase Sales and Credibility

“Word of mouth” is already proven successful marketing practice if you are selling product in your physical store. In digital media, Review and rating system has taken its place. It has the power to reach large audience around the world and it’s even faster than “word of mouth”. Reviews and opinions from other user helps user to take purchase decision faster. They feel more confident while buying products based on other user’s review which ultimately leads you more sales and more profit. User rating and review system also helps you to identify the strength and weakness of your customer care department. Taking action on weakness will increase your credibility and brand values

Improve your Search engine presence

All technology savvy people know that how search engine are working. All major search engines like Google, Bing and yahoo are always looking for content friendly website to rank high on their search engine. Their spider always searches for new user contributed content on website for better ranking. Frequently updated web pages with fresh user contributed content are awarded with higher rankings. Customer review and rating system helps webmaster to achieve this goal as his website will always get fresh content on his website’s product page.

With the help of rating and review system, you can best utilize the rich snippet functionality of Google. Rich Snippet allows you to show total number of rating and reviews in Google search result. These significantly grab the attention of site visitor and increase chances of your website visit.

Conclusion:

In today’s digital and mobile commerce world, User contributed rating and review plays a vital role in your website’s success. Good review helps customer to buy product with confidence while bad reviews helps webmaster to raise their product standard as well as their customer orientation behavior. Apart from all, whether it’s positive or negative review, it helps to increase or social media and search engine visibility.

This is just a small example of how mobile apps are changing and will change education of the future, or shall we say how education is imparted in the future.

Let’s cut to the present. Mobile apps that belong to the education category are a popular pick on the iTunes store, Google Play, and even the BlackBerry App World.  The reason is clear; more and more children are becoming technically savvy enough to use their smartphones or tablets and parents are allowing them to download and use mobile apps as a learning tool.

Interactive Learning

Learning will not be boring now. Mobile apps are turning it into an interactive experience. Let’s take the example of all those apps that revolve around improving a child’s vocabulary and pronunciation skills. Why do you think children do not get tired of using such apps; it’s because its various functionalists are able to engage the user and they are able to learn better and the fact that they are able to quickly grasp what they are trying to learn, makes the child want to learn more.

Better Student Assessment

There are plenty of applications available that make it simpler for teachers/faculties to assess their student’s learning. Gone are the days when teachers could just come to classrooms, teach and leave. The focus has shifted on ensuring that students have understood whatever has been taught or not. There are apps already available that allow teachers to take notes, push individuals quizzes designed for a particular student through to his/her tablets or smartphone and teachers can access their replies through their own devices. This is yet another small example how an education revolution is taking place, courtesy mobile apps.

Education becomes Less Burdensome

Books, endless documentation, and other education related paraphernalia over the years was not getting lesser, but was getting more and more burdensome by the minute. What’s more, education material was getting more expensive and not cheaper as should have been the case. Mobile apps are emerging as an equalizer. Yes, mobile technology is still expensive and not accessible to the poor, but it’s getting cheaper and there will be a time when just about everybody will have a mobile and/or portable device. That’s not happened yet but we are getting there.

Already schools are focusing on lessening the physical burden of students by cutting down on their paper load and asking them to Bring Your Own Device to school. What is needed are not books, but just a collection of apps to study. If you look back, digitization has over time, made even the most expensive things cheaper. Take entertainment for example. The digitization of entertainment made it cheaper (at least certain aspects of it) and popularized it. By digitizing education in the form of a mobile app, we are already taking steps to popularizing it and in a way also making it affordable.

More accessible higher education

Let’s call this an offshoot of the earlier pointer. Education, and I am talking about really high quality top tier education, it’s getting more expensive. The problem here is that many people don’t bother going for higher or profess education because of its expense. But, there is a ray of hope in the form of Massive Online Open Course (MOOCs) which has made learning cheaper and more accessible. Courses are being offered online and we are seeing more universities making investment in online learning than ever before. The focus has shifted from the traditional methods of imparting learning (in-class) to making them more accessible by taking them online. There are plenty of MOOCs based applications that are making use of social media to make sure that students can exchange notes and ideate with one another.

This is just the beginning of an education revolution where in the power of mobile, web and technological advancements will converge to offer an enriching learning experience. This essentially will also mean that just about anybody and everybody will have access to good higher education without making a lot of investment in it.

Choices across Countries

Now this is something that I used to dream about, but believe that it will shape up in the next few years. What am I talking about? Mobility giving me a smorgasbord of choices to choose from as far as university courses; so I can choose a humanities course offered by the National University of Singapore without leaving American shores or take up something offered by the Oxford University. I am not talking about online courses, but going one step ahead and thinking about apps that I can download from their sites that will give me access to real time class room lectures and also allow me to participate in discussion etc.

Imagine the revolution this will bring out in the way we consume learning. We get unlimited choices, where we can learn from the best universities of the world, right from where we are at, currently.

Conclusion

We are entering an era wherein education becomes more exciting and where mobility makes available immense possibilities for the access and dissemination of learning. We essentially are limited by our own imagination because the technology is available and evolving rapidly. It now depends on the people themselves whether they are ready to consume learning that is empowered by mobility. There is a bit of rethink required but I have no doubts in mind that mobility enriched education is our future. Brick and mortar schools and colleges will cease to exist as center of imparting learning, but will only be facilitators. They will only keep watch on whether the right learning is being imparted at the right time. That’s it. The world is already in the midst of a mobile and web driven revolution and its affecting each and every aspect of our lives, including education.

It is in our best interests that we are able to make use of it to better our lives.

Very soon from a publishing platform, it made its transition to also becoming a content management system (CMS) and quickly achieved success as a CMS as well. Again, its success came off as a surprise because a) it had to fight off challenge from plenty of other CMSs both open source and proprietary b) it didn’t have out of the box characteristics that differentiated it from its competitors.

But, here we are wrong; users, and I am talking about developers and end users, realized that there was one characteristic that made WordPress a better choice in terms of  a publishing system and CMS as compared to other platforms – this characteristic was usability.

For my money, it was usability, convenience and the fact that it is so easy to use and to understand that has made it one of the most popular open source platforms over the years.

So, let’s take a look at the WordPress story as to why it stole a march over its competitors. The WordPress success story is no different from the countless other products and services success stories. Let’s take a look:

Focused on a Core Target Audience

WordPress was built for a specific purpose and was targeted towards a particular constituency – bloggers. It was aimed at people who weren’t tech savvy but needed a platform that allowed them to create and publish their content easily. WordPress made it big and continues making it big by solving the problems of its core constituency. It doesn’t try and fit in features and functionalities of diverse audiences, that is “something for everybody”; this is precisely what Drupal and Joomla have been accused of doing. They come across as platforms that are trying to please everybody. No doubt these platforms are very good, but they are still not able to capture the pulse of their target audience as WordPress keeps doing consistently.

It’s because, WordPress is clearly focusing its attention on a single target group alone, that it has become so successful. It was able to identify and solve specific blogger related problems, which made it the first choice of bloggers.

Easy to Use

It’s been ages since WordPress made its appearance, actually it released in early 2003, which is just around ten years back, but in the world of web technology a decade is almost like a century. But even after all these years, can you find one open source platform that is as easy-to-use as is WordPress. Frankly, its ease of use is legendary and the fact that even somebody with very limited or zero technical knowledge can install and set it up is one of its strongest selling points.

Want a blog up and running on WordPress within hours? No problem, it’s done! Name another publishing platform or CMS that is as good as WordPress and which can be set up as quickly. That’s it, there isn’t any and that is why this platform keeps scaling the popularity charts day-in and day-out. WordPress developers have focused on building features and functionalities that are content driven and not driven by technicalities.

Contribution of the Blogging Revolution

There is no doubt that the popularity of blogging contributed towards the popularity of WordPress. A look at http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ will tell you that the popularity of one revolutionary activity (blogging) fed the popularity of a revolutionary platform (WordPress). If somebody wants to communicate digitally by having a blog or website up and running, then typically the first choice is going to be WordPress. This is a fact. If you want a website developed using an open source platform and get in touch with a developer for the same, the first question that he/she ask you is whether you want to use WordPress or not?

Some of the top websites in the world run on WordPress, a case in point being Smashing Magazine, TechCrunch, and TED. The fact that some of the top technology sites in the world are using WordPress also feed its popularity.  People will go, “If TED is using it, I want to use it too”. When popular websites use a platform, it gets more credibility and as can be imagined, it is the reputation of a product or services that defines its popularity on the market. This is why WordPress works big time.

It Does its Job and Does it well

What do you want your publishing or content management systems to do? Simple! To do their jobs and to do it well. This is what WordPress does and this is also what makes it so popular. It doesn’t fall into the trap of over-promising and under delivering; it makes no false claims towards technical superiority, but only makes claims with respect to efficiency. This is why it succeeds where others are failing. Ok, let me revise that statement – this is why it succeeds in spite of all the competition. I have revised the statement because it’s not that other platforms aren’t doing well, in fact they are doing quite well. It’s just that WordPress has entrenched itself so well in the public psyche that it’s going to be difficult for its competitors to dislodge it from the throne.

The Big Guy Getting More Popular

To think of WordPress as somebody who wanted to stand up and be counted are gone. Today, other platforms are scrambling to get some part of the digital pie that is being gobbled up by WordPress. We can’t say that the battle for audience’s mind space is just heating up, because it’s been a heated battle right from the very beginning.

The real winner here is of course the consumer who is the center of attention, with every open source platform bringing in various benefits, features, functionalities to lure him/her to use its services.

So, what is it that Magento does differently to steal a march over its competitors? Let’s take a look.

Three Versions

If you are a business that wants to control your overheads by cutting down on your development costs for building a shopping cart,Magento brings to you its Community Edition, open source software meant for businesses who don’t want to make a substantial investment in a proprietary platform. But a word of warning here; as a business wanting to use this edition, you will need to get hold of your own Magento experts, who can modify the core code and add the extensions you want.

If your online business is generating a revenue of between $5 -$10 million, you will want to work with a platform that offers you features and functionalists that help you stabilize your earning and facilitate growth, and that’s where Magento Go comes into the picture. This hosted SaaS based solution is specifically meant for small to medium sized businesses who want to build and launch a comprehensive online store quickly and effectively.

And finally, you have the Magento Enterprise edition for large businesses who want complete control over their online channels.

The varied choice with respect to Magento versions is one of its biggest benefits, and something that other platforms have been unable to match.

Unbeatable Selection of Themes

What is that separates the men from the boys as far as ecommerce websites are concerned? It’s the theme. Now, I know I might have stirred a hornet’s nest here because there are a number of people who believe themes are unimportant in determining the success of an ecommerce website. That might be partly true if you are looking at themes from the visual perspective, but what if you are taking a usability oriented view. Who are you targeting (demographic dispensation of the audience), and what products are you selling, are the two questions you must ask yourself while choosing the right theme for your store. This means there must be huge selection of themes on offer for you to pick from, and that is where Magento scores and scores heavily.

You can choose from the free themes or even premium themes that you need to pay for. The focus of most Magento themes is on ensuring a satisfying shopping experience for users of the site. Something else that stands out are the options available with respect to responsive themes. With responsiveness becoming a buzz word in designing and with far reaching benefits, it makes good business sense to pick from the many available responsive Magento themes available.

Active development community

Popularity of a particular platform breeds growth of the development community and vice versa; this is a logical outcome and we see this in the case of Magento as well. I will not go so far out to say that Magento is as easy to use and implement as say WordPress is, because it isn’t. But if you are well aware of PHP and object oriented programming, you won’t have any difficulty with it. This is the reason why you will find plenty of experienced and proficient developers who are big fans of Magneto and who play an active role in improving this platform and coming up with bug fixes as well as new themes and modules.

With Magento, you are never caught flat footed, because there will always be somebody to help you out. If you are facing a problem while using Magento Community edition, you can always discuss your problem in the various discussion forums focusing on Magento and come with an answer to your problem. Of course, if you are using the Magento Go or the Enterprise Edition, you will get all the technical support from the Magento team, so you don’t have to look elsewhere.

The robust, very active and growing community of developers that are backing Magento, also makes this platform a popular pick.

Complete Bundle of Features for a Satisfying Shopping Experience

First, let’s talk about the Magento Community edition; in this case you are given code level access, web services API and a pre-integrated mobile HTML 5 theme; you can add extensions, APIs and implement a theme of your choice; at the same time it offers plenty of store features like multiple stores, multiple store views, flexible pricing rules and many more.

Magento Go edition is available with technical support, built-in security, is extensible and offers many more features as compared to the Community edition.

Magento Enterprise on the other hand, is the complete ecommerce solution packed to the brim with enterprise level features that ensure your large shopping cart is not just managed easily but also has every ecommerce feature in the book, which makes it profitable.

With such a vast array of features, it will be a crime if you don’t use Magento, wouldn’t it?

Magento Extensions

Go to Magento Connect, this is the platform’s marketplace; go through all the extensions available. You will realize that there is no functionality that you cannot integrate into your store; that is every feature or functionality that will help you manage your store better and/or make it more profitable is available in the form of an extension. Some are paid and many others are free; the key is to pick the one that suits your needs and requirements best.The immense choice in terms of extension is yet another important reason for Magento towering over its counterparts.

Wrapping it up

If and when you use Magento, and I hope it is ASAP, you will realize that you haven’t just made a good choice, you have made the perfect choice. The top ecommerce websites in the world use Magento and this is as good a reason as any to use it. Also, there are all chances that with Magento keeping up with the latest needs and demands of shoppers as well as online merchants, it will continue towering over other ecommerce platforms.

Responsive website is a new way of designing a website in which website adjusts its look and feel based on device, platforms and browsers. It’s follow simple approach

“One website for all device, platform and browsers”

Magento responsive theme is a word to describe responsive design to sell your product using magento commerce platform. Responsive theme in magento allows user an easy access to browse catalog of products, product details, easy checkout, order history etc which help webmasters to increase their online sales and raise the return user ratio. Here are some basic points to know how magento theme looks on various platforms and which are the best alternative approaches used to show menu, sliders, layout etc.

1)  Header

In major website, top portion of the website covers website logo, useful links and category menu with call out buttons to go to checkout or cart page. When we think about mobile phone and tablet, we need to take care that header part does not occupy major portion of the screen. One of the trickiest parts of the header is main navigation menu of the website. With the help of CSS3 and jQuery, we can nicely handle menu part. Ideal solutions are to change your main menu into select box or make a single link which expands the sub menus like shown in below image.

2) Slider

One of the import features of the website is banner sliding. Store owner normally uses this to highlights some promotional activities, special offers and easy access of most selling products.  In responsive terms, it’s advisable to use image based sliders so it can be easily adapted in smart phones. Again with the help of CSS and jQuery, we can convert normal slider into touch based slider for smart phone. Such slider offers in built photo gallery apps type navigation so user can back and forth image by sliding the banners.

3) 2 Columns and 3 columns layout

In magento, majority of the pages are either 2 columns or 3 columns layout. Best approach to handle 2 column layouts is bringing the sidebar below content. Whether your design uses left-column or right-column, write CSS in such a way that content part always remain first when such page are visited on mobile devices.

In 3 column layout, content should display first followed by secondary sidebar and primary sidebar.

4) Layered Navigation

Layer navigation is the most important feature of magento which helps user to filter products very easily. In desktop browser, layer navigation shows all filterable attributes and its options in sidebar. In responsive design, it looks ugly if you display all attributes and its option below content as it will increase too much height of the page. To resolve this, just display attribute title and tapping on this, show its option. This way we can save the height of the page in mobile device.

In custom development scenario, Website Development Company has to take care of all aspect of securities and future enhancement capabilities. Also they have to follow industry coding standard for providing high level of scalability and stability. To achieve all these, Model-View-Controller is the best approach. CakePHP is one of the best MVC framework used by almost all major IT company for custom web development projects.

MVC Framework:  CakePHP follow MVC pattern. Its nicely use Model to perform database related task, Controller to handle web request and View to output data with nice formatting.

ORM: Object Relational Mapping is a programming technique in which there is model class for each database table. In this class, you can define all validation rules for each field, relation with other tables to perform join relation. You can also implement callback function to perform pre/post action especially for database related query.

Components, Helpers, Behaviors: CakePHP has nicely implemented the concept of reusability of code. If you have your own custom function or custom logic which you want to reuse many times in your code, you can nicely implement those with the help of components and helpers.

AJAX Support:  Cakephp has inbuilt helpers of AJAX to implement asynchronized request. You can easily implement ajax based form submit and event observer.

URL Rewriting: CakePHP has easy way to change your URL look to make it more SEO friendly. You can also twist those parts to achieve proper formatted url which user can easily remember and Crawler can also easily access.

CRUD Scaffolding: Just like other MVC framework, CakePHP have the feature of CRUD and Scaffolding. In every project, Create, Read, Update and Delete are the basic requirement. Using CakePHP consol. We can easily implement this functionality with single line of command. It helps to save time and allows rapid development.

CakePHP has many more feature which can help for rapid development with proper industry standard coding style. If you are looking to hire CakePHP Developer for your website development project, we have a team of expert CakePHP developer.

According to recent study regarding mobile usage proves that mobile browsing will rule by 2015. If your website is not mobile friendly then you must have to think over it. If you fail to adopt new technologies, you are helping your competitor to leave you behind.

As a being a technology oriented web designing company, creative glance has start delivering mobile friendly solutions to open source community and our clients. We are now offering responsive web designing and web development work that gives an edge over your competitors. We have recently published responsive opencart theme with the name of Mobile Shoppe at opencart community. You can download from opencart extension directory and see its demo here.

Mobile Shoppe is a responsive opencart theme that has the following features

• User-friendly navigation. As being a responsive theme, it breaks down its layout in such a way that it looks proper and well structured in all mobile devices and all web browser of any resolution.
• Google Font. For better readability, we have used free font of google for headings and web page content.
• It works on both landscape and portrait mode of iphone, ipad and other smartphone. It adjust it looks in any orientation.
• Better user experience. With this theme, user feels the better navigation experience compare to you non-responsive webpage.
• It supports all layout type of opencart. It does not hide any features of opencart.

We also provide responsive PSD to Opencart theme development work for our offshore partners. We appreciate your comments and suggestion for this theme or any other responsive web designing works.

Magento is the latest open-source eCommerce platform that provides merchants with a sophisticated software platform to manage their online sales with extraordinary flexibility and control. After having done around 100+ project of PSD to Magento theme development, we fill confident to convert any simple to complex design integration in magento in viable turnaround time.

Our PSD to Magento Template services comprises

1) Converting your PSD design into Latest stable version of magento
2) We create default categories, products and any required setting to show how your store looks like
3) We provides first development progress demo in JUST 3 days
4) We do testing and browser compatibility checking in PC and MAC for all browsers
5) We deploy on your server once your ready to go

Convert your PSD to magento today! Contact us for more information regarding our service and project Quote.

Normally a home page of the website has all important links on it. Website designer provides the navigation system on the homepage as it the face of the website and user can go on any page from here. Home page of a website contains internal as well as external links on it.

Effective, proper and easy navigation is also important for the search engine optimization. Good navigation system will make your website SEO friendly and you could get benefit of the SERP and page rank of the website.

There are many ways designer can put navigation system on the website. Now a day many designer put flash or animated menu or navigation system which play major role to attract users. You can hire website designer to make navigation system for your website. Here we discuss about navigation system and how can it created in many ways.

Left Navigation:

Normally left side navigation is implemented as either a column or text area on the left top portion of the web page or home page. In left navigation system there are links given on a single text line or there will be expandable menu. It can be simple or animated.

Right Navigation:

Normally right side navigation is not used but whenever it use it is implemented as a column or text area on the top right side of webpage. Mostly this area is used for advertisement rather than site navigation.

Top menu:

Top navigation menu is normally located under the header section which contains logo or header image of the website. These menu items may be single links, drop down menus, or expanding menus. Each menu item can be represented by a graphic or just text. In ether case a hyperlink is associated with each item that the visitor can click on to reach desired page on the website.

Bottom Menus:

Bottom menu is usually used for either a menu bar or footer. Normally bottom menu contains simple text with hyperlink to the relative pages.

Internal Page Link:

Every page of the website should be containing two or three clicks from the home page. Website types consider that which link are more noticeable for displayed. Important pages should be one click away. Through internal linking users can easily find related information quickly. Internal linking can also help search engine spiders to find their way to every single page.

External Links:

External links provides links outside website or you can say that it will allow user to access pages outside of the website. This links normally text strings with hyperlinks.

Be careful when you going to make your website navigation system, because a good navigation system will give you visitors and provide you benefit in the search engine page rank where a complex navigation system will result in bad visits, loss of customers and down ranking.

It is advisable that you develop and design your website with the help of professionals. There are so many options available to choose from various service providers like magento developrs, opencart developers and many more.

1 :- Do manually updating in your website content. Content is the main object in website and you have to keep it unique every time. Timely updates in content will provide freshness to your visitors and they will visit your site on regular basis as they found something new every time. Regular updating in your content will also helpful to grab attention of the search engine and it will give you benefit in the SERP.

2 :- Update your website at specific time period. After update wait until search engine crawl your site and then make next update. This will give fresh content every time to search engine crawlers and.

3 :- Post articles connected to your website topic once or twice a week, share your business and other news and events, and also make post about interesting topics which may attract your client to visit your site regularly.

4 :- To maintain website perfectly its navigation system has to be perfect. Your user wants to go from one page to another they desired very fast and easily without any error or broken links. Check for broken links on your website regularly and if found then repair it as soon as possible.

5 :- Make proper checking of website navigation after every update as there might be some possibility of error occurrence after changes in website. Make your website navigation user and search engine friendly.

6 :- Some time coding also harmful for your website if it has errors in it. Be very careful and write clean HTML code because the errors in Html code may damage your site rankings extensively. So keep attention on coding issues.

7 :- The most general mistakes occur by designer or developer is inappropriate order of Meta tags, header tags. These mistakes are not very big but its impact can be very huge and it can affect very much on website ranking and popularity. You can use validation tools In order to clean the HTML errors.

8 :- Website design is also a factor which affects on popularity of website. Visitors also need some verity and changes in the look of website they visit regularly. Change in the design will provide freshness and new look for your website which will enough to attract and hold the visitors.

9 :- Make proper analysis of your website ranking and its statistical data at regular time and also prepare report of results. This report will help you to know your website progress and it will also assist you to know that which area of your website needs extra attention and care.

10 :- After every update check browser compatibility of your website. Sometimes it happens that after making changes in website it may be not run properly on every web browser.

11 :- It is important to track your website figures provided by the web host as it will help you to find out how many users visit your web pages, what keywords they use in the search and where they come from. Besides, tracking the results is useful for your web pages optimization also.

12 :- Make proper search engine optimization process on regular basis. Promote your website for all search engines. You can do some directory submission, social bookmarking and forum submission. There are so many ways available by which you can promote your website over the internet.

Always remember that you have to work hard for satisfaction of both search engine and your visitors. You can attract them and hold the visitors by regular maintenance of your website. Endless and proper maintenance will help you to lead your website towards popularity and success.

Creative glance is the magento developer company providing services for wordpress customization, PSD to any and many more. You can hire magento developer to customize your application.