On E-Commerce

Just a couple of days back I was having a chat with my friend. He was celebrating his baby’s 1st birthday and had to run between his native in Kerala and Chennai, his working place.

He and his better half traveled between these places at least 4 times in last one month. Travelling with a one year old is indeed a tough task. But I thought how more hardships he would have to make had he not booked his e-tickets from his computer! Going to the reservation counters 4 individual times and standing behind the long queues! Thank God! Life these days is a lot easier.

My friend's incident was just an example. Every day, e-commerce is making life easier for thousands of people. Since 1991 when the Internet was opened to commercial use, plenty of businesses have taken up residence at web sites. Unlike the traditional business way, e-commerce means to run the business online. Every possible business is now available online. If you need insurance, you can get it over the web or if you need any electrical appliance, books or DVDs you can buy from an online store like Amazon. According to the current market trends, if you operate a business and have not considered using ecommerce, your competitors will leave you behind for sure.

It seems pretty clear that business is moving ahead fast in this technologically driven world. In order to keep pace with the transformations in the business environment, most businesses now-a-days turn to ecommerce web development to spread their business to the potential customer scattered all across the globe. There are two main types of ecommerce. These are B2B which is business to business ecommerce and B2C which is business to consumer ecommerce. The forerunning web development companies maintain the principles that drive the future ecommerce and evaluate where a company's business is heading in the future. Most of these ecommerce development professionals offer free consultation to companies going for ecommerce web sites. It is, however, essential to develop a dynamic and interactive web site with feature rich design and user friendly applications. The companies can have more interactive features so that the consumers keep visiting them and interact with them on a regular basis. The contents need to be updated frequently to stay up to date with all the related information so that customers can make their buying decisions accordingly.

These days most people first do their research on the internet to compare the price and quality of the products and once completed, they tend to transact over the web primarily because it is very convenient. But the rapid development of the internet technology and ecommerce has actually buried the risk factors and excavated new opportunities. It is very important for a company to keep the client data safe. The risk factors, hence, are being dropped down along with the recent development of secured payment gateways, electronic payment solutions etc. E commerce development companies worldwide have taken up risk management strategies to pro-actively manage risks and insurance related issues. Chances of forgery, therefore, are slim and the safe transaction system encourages more and more people to shop online. A high converting ecommerce site creates a profitable stream. It also reduces the cost of the order as traditional paper based orders have a higher cost to process. So the sooner a company implements ecommerce in their business the more able they will be to reap the rewards.

Author Bio:

Indrajit Basu is a creative writer by profession and works as a Corporate Communication Executive in Pixint Graphics, Chennai, INDIA. For more information on e-commerce website design and e-commerce web development, please visit http://www.pixint.com

A Critical Appreciation on Web 2.0

It is proved time and again that hype and marketing are some of the main keys to good business. Be it a movie or a hair gel, hype brings you the initial business. The quality and worth of the product is certainly taken under consideration, but not at first. Similarly, when the buzzing around on Web 2.0 started, it created a lot of hype. But later the idea, however, has faced both good and bad criticism.

Before judging, its worth we understand what Web 2.0 is all about. Web 2.0 is nothing but a vision. It doesn’t mean any upgraded technology in www (World Wide Web). The term rather suggests the new trends and possibilities in its usage. It aims to enhance the scopes in functionality, application, security in file sharing and collaboration of the web. We know that in spite of many earlier speculations, web world today is far from being crashed; rather it has now become more important than ever. Every now and then new sites and applications are popping up that are both exciting and immensely popular among the target users. Now, the companies who survived the dot.com collapse were in search of something that can turn the tide towards their business again and they felt that the term “Web 2.0” is a kind of all to action taking the web and its usage to the next level. The idea was proved to be right for in the next one and a half years, the term has clearly taken hold. There had been more than 9.5 million searches on "Web 2.0" in Google during this time.

The most revolutionary feature since the development of web 2.0 is certainly Blogging. Personal websites were there since the early days of web. In this process, an individual has to buy web hosting space and a domain name to host the site. Again he had to pay the web design company to create the website. Even if we keep these expenses apart, there were certain other limitations as well. The owners could not modify or update the site by themselves. The process was both expensive and time consuming. But in recent times, Blogging has made the job a lot easier. Of course, it doesn’t give you all the features that your own website could have given, but who cares! It’s all about making your voice heard and in blogs you can do it, for free off course! In fact, it has become so popular that even public figures like cine stars, players and politicians are now using blogs to raise their points and share their thoughts.

Actually Web 2.0 is combining technologies like AJAX to allow the customers to actually interact with the information. The use of such strong JavaScript tools is actually enabling anybody to contribute to and interact with the data. Trusting the users to provide the right information at the right time; it’s revolutionary but certainly not risky. We now have several examples that prove amateurs also can surpass professionals if they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia is perhaps the most popular example. The experts don’t prefer Wiki but they always miss one critical point, it is not the best but it is good enough. The end users don’t read an article to become professionals or experts; they read them for the basic information and Wiki provides a lot more than that. There is another field where we can feel this freedom of choice, it’s reading news. Normally it’s the media who decide whether an event can be called a news or not and until now, they decided for us what is a news and what information is worth a reading. But today, with sites like Reddit, we can get information about absolutely any event happening in any corner of the globe. This reduces our dependence on newspapers and gives us an extra edge as readers. The choice is now ours! The term, however, sounds like a buzzword created for marketing. Nevertheless, the idea is tempting and brings new perspective in the usage of web.

We have mentioned earlier that Web 2.0 is nothing but a concept, an idea to make websites more user friendly. Each day new ideas and concepts are contributing to the development of the web. Compared to the earlier websites, the new ones look a lot more trendy and sleek. We are giving more importance to the accessibility and usability area so that physically challenged people can also use the web. Bold icons, simple navigation, W3C validation, bookmark links, fast loading – all are part of that gradual development. They would have definitely taken place along with the advancement of time, even if we haven’t coined it as "Web 2.0". The key concern is updating ourselves with the changing time. It’s good to see that we are making the web usable to all. The endeavor is certainly appreciable no matter whether it is Web 2.0 or Web 200.0. New ideas are always welcome as they pave the way for the next revolution.

Author Bio:

Indrajit Basu works as a Corporate Communication Executive. He is writing blogs of current web design & graphic design technologies. For more information on Web Design Directory and Graphic Design Directory you can visit www.thewebdesignmarket.com

Web Design Companies and the Art of Web Design

The art of website design doesn’t actually have a long history. It is because the invention of World Wide Web (www) took place only in the early 1980’s and it’s only a decade that the Internet has gradually become part of our day to day lives. 

We can, therefore, say that the art of web design is still in its early youth. Yet the art so far has undergone a number of transformations over the years. Earlier, HTML offered users limited involvement on the website. But the scenario has changed these days with other developments like Flash, Flex, Ajax and more. The web is getting bigger by each day and the users are luring more web design companies to make themselves available on the net.

Internet has made our business easy. Every breed of business persons are trying to reach to the global customers. So we can find a variety of web businesses these days like affiliate marketing, online trading, e commerce business etc. A web business has got its own advantages and disadvantages. It gives you an opening to the global market. But in a web based business, the venders don’t have the advantage of impressing the clients in person. The prime target of a web design company, therefore, is to bring forth the information of a website to the viewers in the most organized manner possible. But that is not all that a web design company aims at. In this age of “feel good effect”, displaying a mere collection of information is not enough. The viewers are always attracted to the visuals in a website. The design and graphics thus plays a significant role in making a website popular. This is where the significance of the graphic/web design companies and professionals comes. Imagine a book full of information but with no picture and another with information and images organized in an attractive manner. It’s quite obvious that you will buy the second one. Well, the web design companies and professionals are those who are here responsible to organize the information with images to meet the required technology specification.

In this world of neck to neck competition, all the web design companies aim at complete satisfaction to their customers. So the graphical brilliance and the information are not all they need to take care of. There are a few other major particulars like accessibility or usability and visibility which play an equally important role in making it popular. Web accessibility describes the degree to which a website is convenient or handy to the users. Usability, on the other hand, is an attribute related to quality that evaluates how easy-to-use a user interface is.The easily consumers can access the website the better business it will bring. This “user friendly” nature of a website therefore is something a web designer must take care of. Another major factor that the web design companies are bound to consider is the visibility of the website that they are making. Web visibility means being findable and viewable online by your target audience That is, the web site must be easy to find through all major search engines. The higher the rank, the more reach it will gain.

There are a number of web design companies or graphic design companies around the world and they all claim to provide finest services that suit your budget. Such promises are quite overwhelming but sometimes confusing too. A smart way to narrow your search down can be to see the portfolio of those web design companies. There you can find some of their best designs which might give you an idea about their creative potential.

There might be yet another problem. Every person is not equally proficient in understanding the technicalities and may be still interested to have his or her own website. What should they see in the portfolios? Well, you can check a few things that don’t require any technical knowledge. First, you can see whether the sites in the portfolios are loading quickly or not because your customers may not have the patience to wait for your site to load. Next comes the clarity in navigation. You should find required information very quickly from a site. An obscure and unclear website can upset the clients. You must be cautious about that. After that, you can check whether the site works in all major browsers like Internet Explorer, Opera or Firefox. If not, it is certain that the site is not friendly to all web browsers which can affect your business. A good website usually doesn’t have too many popup windows. They are eyesore to the web browsers and overusing popup windows in your web site will surely do no good to your website. A person not well off with internet can also check these small yet significant points which helps to make a decision.

All these factors should be under consideration when you plan to make your own website. A technically sound web design company takes care of all these factors. But as a client, you must be entirely satisfied with the services of a particular graphic design company before you make your pick. The basic tests mentioned here can give you a guideline to find the web design or graphic design company that suits you most and gives you the worth of your hard earned money.

Author Bio:

Indrajit Basu is the Corporate Communication Executive in Pixint, a New Jersey based creative and usability service provider with a workforce in Chennai, INDIA. For more information on Web Design Services and Graphic Design Services you can visit www.pixint.com