Author: crapsolution

Greetings, I’m Rebert . I’m a software engineer living in Chandigarh, India. I am a fan of design, technology, and programming. I’m also interested in web development and education.

What is the difference between web development & web design?

Web Design vs. Web Development In A Nutshell
In essence, web design refers to both the aesthetic portion of the website and it’s usability. Web designers use various design programs such as Adobe Photoshop to create the layout and other visual elements of the website.
Design Principles
  • Balance – It’s important for web designers to create a balanced layout. In web design we refer to heavy (large and dark colors) and light (small and lighter colors) elements. Using the correct proportion of each is critical to achieving a balanced website design.
  • Contrast – In color theory, contrasting colors are ones placed opposite one another on the color wheel (see also complementary colors). Web design offers a few other areas where contrast is applicable. Designers look at contrasting sizes, textures and shapes to define and draw attention to certain sections of the website.
  • Emphasis – We touched on this a bit when discussing contrast. Emphasis is a design principles founded in the intentional “highlighting” of certain important elements of the website layout. It’s important to note that if you emphasize everything on the page you end up emphasizing nothing. Imagine a page in a book where 80% of the content is highlighted in yellow…does anything really stand out? This is the time to take a look at that Information Architecture for direction.
  • Consistency – Also called repetition or rhythm, consistency is a critical web design principle. For example, clean and consistent navigation provides the best user experience for your website visitors.
  • Unity – Unity is the relationship between the various parts of the website layout and the composition as a whole. Based in the Gestalt theory, unity deals with how the human brain visually organizes information by grouping elements into categories.
Web Development – A Closer Look
Web developers, sometimes called programmers, take the design created and build a fully functioning website. To put it (very) simply, think of the design as a non-interactive “picture” of a website. Developers take that design and break it up into it’s components. They then either use just HTML or a more dynamic approach incorporating programming languages such as PHP to develop the various website pages. More advanced web developers may choose to utilize a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla in order to streamline development and allow clients an easy way to maintain and update their website.
Final Words
Small- and medium-sized companies looking for a website or a re-design of their existing website may be confused by the blurred lines surrounding the terms “Web Design” and “Web Development.” Although there are individuals that are able to do both, many companies have dedicated designers which create the website layout and then hand the design files over to a programmer who completes the development stage. Hopefully this article will help clear up the common misconception that design and development are one in the same.
Your Turn
  • Do you agree that design and development are two different things?
  • Are there other differences we neglected to mention?

Source: https://crapsolutions.tumblr.com/post/182601863909/what-is-the-difference-between-web-development

The Importance of A/B Testing on Magento 2 /netsolutions.com

When it comes to building a successful eCommerce website, the details matter. Everything from the color scheme to the layout to the content directly affects how your company is perceived, which can mean the difference between a potential customer placing an order or moving along. Using Magento A/B testing is a fantastic way to determine the best approach so you can move forward with confidence.
What Is Good A/B Testing?
A/B testing itself is simply the practice of running two (or more) versions of a piece of content, Version A and Version B (and sometimes Versions C, D, etc.). The platform—in this case Magento—randomly shows different versions to different users, and then you use the resulting consumer behavior data, such as conversions, bounce rates, and so on, to determine which version generates the most value. This process lets you gradually quantify which elements of a user experience have what impact.
Good A/B testing, then, means having robust testing tools, using them correctly, and interpreting the results intelligently.
Onboard A/B Testing Tools
Magento 2 comes packed with a host of integrated features that you may not even know exist. One of the big ones for Magento 2 Enterprise Edition is out-of-the-box A/B testing features that make it easy for you to test multiple versions of your website without installing any third-party extensions.
Depending on how your website is coded, not having to depend on third-party extensions can be quite beneficial, as sometimes even trusted extensions may cause problems in some circumstances.
If you’re using Magento 2 Community Edition, you will need to rely on third-party extensions for A/B testing, so make sure you seek out options that are compatible with your site’s coding.
About Magento A/B Testing Tools
Magento’s tools incorporate Google’s Content Experiments, allowing you to test up to ten variables—A, B, C, all the way to J! Being able to integrate Magento 2’s tools with Google Analytics makes it possible to track many different metrics at a highly granular level, so you can make informed decisions on how to proceed. If you’re already familiar with Google Analytics, you should have no problem using Magento A/B testing, but, even if you’re not, it isn’t hard to learn.
Testable Strategies
If you’re considering Magento A/B testing, you may wonder what types of features and strategies can be tested. Here are some of the main ways you can improve your website’s performance:
  • Experiment with various images to find which one engages visitors more effectively.
  • Try different interfaces and designs to see which one promotes the best user interaction.
  • See which font styles and sizes are most effective.
  • Use different checkout processes to see which is most efficient.
  • Implement different menus and navigational features to see which makes browsing the site most intuitive.
  • Feature different copy such as product descriptions and calls to action to see which content converts best.
  • Highlight different promotions and sales to see which are most appealing to customers.
  • Incorporate mobile optimization features to drive traffic from smartphone shoppers.
Why Testing Matters
If you’re still on the fence about using A/B testing tools on the Magento 2 platform, it’s important that you understand just how much of a difference this simple step can make in your long-term success (or lack thereof).
1. Maintain Upward Momentum
For starters, Magento A/B testing is an ongoing process – you don’t just have to do it once. If you keep testing your website and then updating it according to hard facts, you’re going to see it evolve on an upward trajectory. Changing your website can do more harm than good in some cases, and A/B testing tools dramatically reduce the risk involved.
2. Connect with Your Target Audience
Once you have a better understanding of what your customers are looking for, you can hone in on your target demographic and form deeper connections with your audience. For example, say you test two different logos, and one is preferred. Now you can incorporate that logo into everything from promotional gifts to marketing materials.
3. Prevent Stagnation
Magento A/B testing helps you to foster an environment of constant improvement. It’s easy for companies to become stagnant if they’re not consistently pushing forward. If you’re always looking for new ways to improve your customers’ experiences, people are going to take notice. Not only will your current and potential customer base appreciate the effort, but your employees can also feel proud to work for a company that has true momentum and drive.
4. Improve SEO Strategies
Finally, Magento A/B testing helps you to discover which SEO strategies are working best for you. If your A/B testing tools reveal that one version of a website is getting significantly more organic traffic, you can scale up using those same techniques. SEO often requires experimentation to find the best approach, and A/B testing helps you to discover what works and what doesn’t.
Hire Magento 2 Experts
Coalition Technologies is proud to be a top Magento Enterprise and Community Edition design, development, and marketing partner. We consistently help our clients to maximize their return on investment by implementing creative, comprehensive solutions that work. Whether you need help selecting the right A/B testing tools or building the perfect Magento site from scratch, our team can help.
If you need assistance with Magento A/B testing or anything related to the platform at all, we at Coalition Technologies are more than happy to discuss these services with you. Entrusting A/B testing to an experienced SEO firm means you don’t have to blindly guess your way through the process: We’ve got it covered for you.

Top 5 Emerging Magento Ecommerce Web Design Trends/ magento.com

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There are different kinds of businesses all around us – small and big, online and offline. In today’s era, every company needs to have a website. A website is one of the key ways of reaching target audiences, creating an impression and converting visitors into customers.
Gone are the days when people used to rely on social media platforms only. But building a website isn’t just everyone’s cup of tea, is it?
Building websites require people with expertise. Not everyone can build and maintain all kinds of sites. Magento is there to help these business owners with their open source technology-based ecommerce platform to help build websites easily. They can now control the look, content, and even add functionality like developing an individual shopping cart system with the help of Magento.  But as things grow more prominent and complicated, one might need professionals to manage those.
Magento also offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog management tools. Magento has influenced some web design trends in ecommerce since its arrival. Shedding light on the latest web design trends for Magento, we have listed the top five for you here:

1. Sliders and Call-To-Actions

Call-To-Action (CTA) is not new in web design.  Following the latest web design trends, you need to follow some styles that are necessary for creating a great user experience. CTAs help you do just that. They guide the customers throughout the website so that the customers don’t get lost.
The most common CTAs you will come across is “Buy Now,” “Shop Now”, “Call Now,” and “Subscribe” etc. Magento uses CTA as well. But what’s the difference between the CTAs used by others and the ones used by Magento?
In Magento, you can particularly use CTAs that come sliding on a page. These sliding CTAs are not only beautiful but also serve the same purpose as the usual traditional CTAs. They grab more attention.
Besides these, you can have large background images that slide into the homepage. Multiple photos keep coming one after another. Through this, you can put extra emphasis on some of the products you would like the visitors to see. Now imagine this sliding backgrounds with sliding CTAs. Surely something beautiful.
When you are in a competitive market like ecommerce, you must try to keep things attractive, comfortable and as straightforward as possible. Customers don’t like complexity and competitors who offer comfortable user experiences are likely to snatch customers from you. So this is a tool that is the need of time used by Magento to serve all the purposes at the same time.

2. Parallax Scrolling Replacing Clicking

Parallax is just pure illusion wherein the background pictures move with the mouse, but slower than the foreground images. This creates an illusion of depth, thus catching the attention of users immediately. It is a show stealer.
Use of Parallax Scrolling has got more relaxed with the increased use of smartphones and tablets. These users need scrolling to browse rather than clicking.
Scrolling reduces page loading time over clicking. As users receive all the required data without clicking through multiple pages, scrolling creates dynamic interactions. This makes scrolling more convenient for mobile users while accessing Magento based websites.

3. Grid Layout

The grid layout is one of the latest web design trends and is also included in Magento ecommerce design. It emerged from Pinterest, and then made its way to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. As ecommerce sites have plenty of categories and products, card or grid view is a trending design method Magento didn’t ignore.
The grid layout gives the website a minimalistic look quite neatly and correctly. This kind of design works well with mobile devices.
Grids make navigation more natural and intuitive.  Grids are necessary to give customers a neat, visually pleasing and comfortable surfing experience at the same time. And Magento undoubtedly doesn’t want to lag behind.

4. Hovering Effect

One of the latest web design trends also included within Magento is the hovering effect, bringing a more intuitive feel to the site.
When users hover over an image, button or any other area on the site, they get to see the extra features or contents embedded in there. Hover or animated effects come into action when a user hovers a cursor over a specific area.
These micro-interactions between sites and the customers encourage them to take a step forward than the traditional static sites.
Interactive mouse pointers can also add to the user experience. As the users control their mouse pointer, some portions of the websites are customized.

5. Ghost Buttons

Ghost buttons are often referred to as hollow or empty buttons. They are transparent. They are not something like the standard buttons; the name says it all. If placed correctly and strategically, they are strong enough to draw users’ attention.
These buttons should be used in sites where design is minimal. They let you subtly catch users’ attention. They are attractive and classy. They are not call-to-actions, but you may, however, use them as call-to-actions; if you want to. It is a famous and influential Magento web design trend.

Conclusion

Magento is a life saver for ecommerce platforms. It not only incorporates the latest web design trends to grace the web, the solutions it provides are designed to cater to both the user experience and designers is amazing. So, if you are an ecommerce business owner and want a website designed for you without going through any hassle, get Magento.

20 Website Design Requirements Every RFP Response Should Include

I’ve recently been talking a lot about website design requirements, proposals, and contracts. I’ve done so because I know a successful website design launch is more than software code, text, and images.
Website design success is a direct result of a structured process and solid documentation.
Executing a successful website design project begins and ends with a solid documentation. This documentation can be a proposal, contract, or statement of work. The name of the document is less important than the details contained within the document.
Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, documentation is the key ingredient to executing a website project that is on-task, on-time, and on-budget.
The more you document in the sales process, the more smoothly the process will go for everyone involved.
In a prior blog post I discussed the creation of a website RFP. Now that the creation of an RFP document is complete, I’d like to talk about reviewing and evaluating RFP responses.

Evaluating RFP Responses

Reviewing RFP responses sounds easy right? Well in all honesty, it sounds easier than it actually is in practice.
If the project team solicited quotes from a large number design agencies, the task of reviewing website design proposals can feel overwhelming. Ok not just feel – it can be overwhelming.
The greater the number of RFP injuries, the larger the response pool and variations within those proposals. Hopefully a short list of website developers was made prior to sending out the RFP, which will keep the number of proposals limited and make the review process a bit easier.
As websites proposals arrive, it is important to ask yourself some basic questions to get started. These include:
  • Was the RFP response provided within the allowed timeframe?
  • Was the RFP response presented in a professional manner?
  • Is the RFP response well written?
  • Does the RFP response address all website design requirements?
  • Is the website proposal within the project’s budget constraints?
  • Does the website proposal provide within the project’s timeline?
The above questions are high level questions design to help eliminate any design firm who is clearly not a fit. A late, unprofessional, or incomplete RFP response should be a red flag about potential developers. A RFP response that is priced at twice your budget, or a third of your budget, should also be a concern.
Now that you’ve received your responses and you’ve removed out any red flag vendors, it is time to thoroughly review each RFP response to compare responses in a more apples to apples manner.

Website Design Requirements to Look for in Each RFP Response

An RFP response can be of various lengths. So I won’t focus on volume of text or the number of pages. What matters is the content and the solution presented.
When reviewing RFP responses, make sure each response covers some core elements of any website project. These website design requirements include, but are not limited to, the following details:
  1. Project Plan – This should include a high-level list of project tasks. While this won’t be as detailed as the actual project plan itself, there should be enough details for you to understand the flow of discovery, design, development, and build.
  2. Project Management Tools – The design agency should list their project management toolset. This will vary by firm, as there are lots of great options available. The important thing is to verify there is a structure to the project management process and that tasks, owners, and dates will be well documented.
  3. Team Members – Different design agencies will have different structures for their teams. The larger the agency, the larger the project team. It is important for you, the buyer, to know who will work on your team and to what capacity of work they will provide. You don’t need full resumes of each player, but you should know who’ll you be working with in the coming months.
  4. Content Management System and Baseline Technology – If your website RFP did not specify a desired CMS solution, this will be an important element of your proposal. Make sure your RFP responses list out the CMS of choice and any additional technology that will be used in coding and deploying your new websites. Take special note to anything proprietary. A proprietary CMS package should be a red flag, as it locks you into that developer for the life of the website.
  5. Deliverables – A deliverables list is important because it validates what is going to be delivered at the point of go-live. This could include number of design templates, volume of content migration, plugins utilized, etc.
  6. Functionality List – The functionality list is very important if the website is more than a simple brochure website. The more complex the website build, them more detailed this list of functionality should be.
  7. Content Migration – If your website project will include content migration, remember to document how much content will be migrated over to the new website. This could include pages, posts, products, events, users, attachments, and so on. Not defining the nature of the content migration and the volume of content will cause scope creep and additional costs for you or the design agency.
  8. Image Usage – It is important to understand ownership and assignment of the images used within the website design project. Who is responsible for image selection, purchase, editing, and placement? This will vary by project so clearly define this early on in the process.
  9. SEO – Don’t forget about SEO! This includes keyword research, keyword to page mapping, on-page optimization, meta definition, and 301 redirects. If you rely on organic SEO, protect this traffic source during your redesign. The easiest way to do this it to make sure this topic is front and center during the project scoping and proposal process.
  10. Mobile Responsiveness – Mobile responsiveness should be part of any modern day website project. The only exception to this rule is large websites who have a separate mobile websites or apps. If you do not have a separate mobile website, make sure your proposal includes language for managing display adapted to phones and tablets.
  11. Exclusions – While I do not list exclusions in every proposal, I do list them anytime the client and I discussed an item that is not going into the website project. This helps protect me later in the process, but also clarifies our deliverables for the client.
  12. Third-Party Integration and/or APIs – Mid-market and enterprise companies generally have a multitude of systems and software packages within the organization. These systems need to communicate with the new website by pulling, pushing, or syncing data. If integration or APIs need to be used, make sure the proposal defines the third-party system, data points, data transfer, and responsible party.
  13. Milestones – Milestones can help ensure the project team hits goal at each stage of the website design process before moving to the next step in the process.  Typical milestones include discovery, information architecture, graphic design, theme coding, content migration, beta launch and/or testing, and go-live.
  14. Schedule – Each website proposal response should include a schedule that corresponds to project milestones. This will help you understand how much time is allocated to each milestone and if the overall project will align to your own timetable.
  15. Delays – Project delays can be a result of both the client and the developer. It is important to understand how these delays will be handled and how they will alter the overall project budget and timeline.
  16. Payment Terms– Smaller website projects will tend to have a 50% payment to start and 50% payment at completion. Larger website projects will have smaller payments based on milestones or set timing. Make sure this is clearly defined within the proposal.
  17. Expenses – Expenses could include travel, domain fees, hosting fees, plugin licenses, and/or stock images. Make sure the RFP response details out the items anticipated and the party responsible for payment.
  18. User Training – If your users will be new to the CMS, you might want to establish some guidelines for written training documentation, online training tools, and/or interactive training sessions. Make sure the training methodology matches that of your user base.
  19. Warranty Period – A website warranty covers the correction of software bugs within the website. It is typically established for a set period of days and stated within the proposal or contract. Such a warranty would cover coding by your website developer, but not third-party plugins or extensions.
  20. Ongoing Maintenance – Maintenance is often confused with warranty periods, but they are very different. A maintenance agreement is paid for on a monthly or annual basis and it would be used to provide developer updates to the software over time. For WordPress websites this would include the update of the WordPress core software and any plugins installed on the website. Maintenance can also include security, monitoring, backups, reporting, and one-on-one assistance when needed.
  21. As Needed Post-Live Support – Not every company will want or need a maintenance agreement. In lieu of a maintenance retainer, some companies will opt for on-demand post-live support. This is generally billed on an hourly basis and managed through a ticket or support system.

Next Steps in the Website RFP Process

After you’ve reviewed your RFP responses and narrowed down on your chosen supplier, the next step should be focused on negotiating contracts and final details.
While web is full of advice on contract negotiations, don’t get caught up in the process minutia. It’s important to remember this task is the last step before entering into a long partnership with the chosen website developer.
The negotiations should concentrate on resolving any open questions or issues, which will in turn provide a solid basis to begin the design and execution process. Go into contract negotiations focused on resolving any open issues and clarifying any points of confusion.
If the project team has done a solid job with project scoping and they selected the right website developer, the negotiations should be no more than a signature. If the team has selected the wrong design agency, the task may prove enough to force the team to return to the number two firm.