Responsive Website or Mobile App: Do You Need Both?

Choosing between a responsive website and a native app is more a business call than going into the technical capabilities of what each platform has to offer. The reason is that the same set of customers that access your business through a desktop could potentially connect with your brand on the go through their smartphones.

According to mobile industry reports, 7.12% of all website traffic worldwide came from handheld devices in 2011. In 2012, that figure rose to 11.78%.1 According to eMarketer (a leading digital media market research firm), more than 58% of American adults will be regular mobile web users by the end of 2016. Tablets and smartphones are becoming the default choice for connecting to the internet. The web has become an essential part of our lives, and users are connected to their internet devices from anywhere and all the time.

It’s a difficult choice to make since both options present advantages and disadvantages that must be taken into consideration when moving forward.

It’s a tough call to make when deciding between responsive design or an app, but in the end, it depends on the goals of your business.

If your company can afford it, it’s highly recommended that you build both a responsive site and a native mobile app in order to help your business work towards capturing the attention of your entire mobile audience. The native mobile app will provide a mobile centric experience for your existing and most loyal customers, while your responsive website can help provide an optimized experience to new and old visitors browsing your website or discovering it for the very first time.

For example, popular ecommerce brand Nasty Gal has a responsive website and a mobile app to help provide the best experience for its shoppers however they wish to shop the brand’s products.

Most companies can’t afford to do both, which is why it’s important to understand the advantages of both options when addressing your company’s mobile priorities.

Responsive Design isn’t A Cure-all

Responsive Web design is certainly the most affordable option for your business as compared to the development of a mobile app. Take into consideration the initial costs of redesigning your website to be mobile friendly, then the cost of occasional upkeep and upgrades.

If visibility in the search engines is an increasingly important part of your strategy to grow your business, then a responsive website is critical in helping grow traffic to your website. A mobile app lives in a closed environment and cannot be indexed by the search engines, which requires driving traffic to this app through alternate methods.

Depending on your designer and the size of your website, a responsive Web design often takes far less time to create then does a mobile app since there’s no app store approval or extensive guidelines to follow as compared to what Google Play, the Apple app store and the Windows Phone app store require for launching an app.

If the goal of your destination online is to be universally accessible from any device, then responsive design is the solution. A mobile app is designed for a unique experience; exclusive to the operating system it lives on, which means it isn’t a one size fits all fix.

However, don’t think of responsive design as the easy way out when it comes to optimizing your website across mobile devices. Although a responsive website optimizes your experience, it doesn’t incorporate all the smart phone features like the camera or GPS that a native mobile app can.

A mobile app will provide users with unique functionality and speed that can’t be achieve with a responsive website, but can be experienced on the operating system you choose to design your app on.

It’s better than not having a mobile-friendly version of your website, but it’s not the finally solution for your customer’s experience with your business on mobile. Again, the choice between responsive and a mobile app depends on what your goals are for mobile.

Consult Analytics to Inform Your Native Mobile App

A mobile app offers a compelling, unique and mobile specific experience for your customers, which is one of the main reasons why your company should consider designing an app over worrying about making your existing website mobile-friendly.

First and foremost, if you have existing data to analyze than it is important to use your analytics tools like Google Analytics or Omniture to see what mobile devices are used the most to visit your website in the past few months. This can help inform what operating system you decide to design your app on.

Whether you decide to go with iOS, Android, Windows Phone or another less popular operating system, it’s essential to match the features of the operating system with the type of app you’re looking to create whether it’s an ecommerce store, a content focused website etc.

Besides being able to utilize more of the features incorporated in a mobile device into the experience, a mobile app often has access to more data from a user and therefore, can provide a more personalized experience.

This personalization through data could play out in the types of push notifications an app sends you, product recommendations, suggested content to view or other specific user-driven actions. When a user makes a profile on an app, it makes gathering data about a person and their online habits much easier for a business and much quicker and smoother for the user continually using this app to shop, find events to attend, listen to music and perform other tasks.

As of now, a native mobile app offers the best user experience for a person on a mobile device since there are still limitations to how HTML 5 can be parsed on mobile.

As the complexity of the responsive website increases, the more likely the user experience will begin to suffer. A native mobile app offers the best user experience to your audience, taking advantage of the phone’s functions and the expectations of customers using these devices.

Lastly, in-app purchasing drives 76 percent of all app marketplace revenues to date since once it is setup, it’s particularly easy for users to make a purchase with pre-entered credit card information.

This is best suited if your app will offer micro-purchases, which our low price point products or services within the app, like buying virtual goods, membership to the premium version of the app or access to additional content.

Why Your New Website Should Be Responsive

Responsive Design

This article is for the benefit of those who are looking to get a new website designed in the very near future and want the best for them. We will try to answer the question, why your new website should be Responsive. Of course this is also going to help those who are still not aware of what Responsive Design is all about.

PC Sales Declining – What Does It Mean For Your Business
So why do we design websites? The ultimate motive is to reach out to as many people as possible and deliver the message that we want to get across to them. It is also true that it is the first time that PC sales are going down than the previous year. More and more people are now buying products that can replace their PC like tablets, and iPads and using them to go online and surf the net. They are also buying devices like smartphones, iPhones and the likes. And if more and more people are starting to use other devices, shouldn’t your website also be accessible on these devices?

Regular Websites Do Not Work On All Devices
Unfortunately, most websites do not open so beautifully on these devices as it does on a PC; simply because these sites were designed to work on a PC. One simple option would be to build a mobile version of your website targeting a particular device. But the number of devices is just too many, and new ones are getting added to the list of existing ones really fast. The devices also differ significantly in terms of screen width, resolution, and orientation. So the challenge for designing for every screen is huge and is not a practical solution to the problem.

Responsive Web Design has the solution
So how does Responsive Web Design solve our problems? Well, with this relatively new technology, you no longer need multiple websites targeting multiple devices. You just need one website that adapts to the device on which it is being viewed. It does so with the help of fluid images and smart use of CSS media queries by determining the width and resolution of the device. The website changes layout resizes images and adapts quite magically on all devices.

Imagine a website with responsive web design that adjusts to the device that your customers are using to view your business online. Imagine the content, the text, titles and the images actually moving so that they fit within the size of that specific screen. Whether it’s a tablet or an iPhone or an iMac or a PC desktop! You can literally see the adjustments happen as the browser size shifts from one size to another.

Benefits of Responsive Websites
This relatively new technology is being called the future of the web by many. It is a paradigm shift akin to the transition from table based layouts to CSS, which made a huge impact on the web design industry.

Easy to Maintain
Creating multiple versions of your website is costly and cumbersome. Considering just a desktop, iPad and iPhone for example, means that you will need to triple your efforts when looking to make an update to your web page. With Responsive web design you’ll avoid this extra effort completely. Your website will work seamlessly on different devices and so when you need to update your website you only update one platform through your content management system. In the long run this will save you time and help avoid headaches with having to work on multiple versions of your website.

Improves your SEO
The benefit here is in the fact that you will only need to optimize content for one link. The URL structure remains constant for all devices. With Responsive design you have one URL that is easy to update and optimize your content which in turn optimizes your content for all devices. Whether it’s a Samsung phone, iPad or desktop responsive web design makes it easy for the Google crawlers to index your website pages.

Higher Conversion
If you are selling more of your goods and services online then you are converting more. If your customers are finding your business and making purchases through the use of tablets and mobile devices then your conversion is increasing. If one of your many conversion metrics happens to be sales then you’ll see an upward shift in your top line as well!

Increases Mobile Sales
It’s no secret that the mobile revolution has been in full force for quite some time now. People are buying online and they are using their tablets and smart phones to make those purchases. To get them even more comfortable in doing so responsive design is a must.

It is estimated that within the next few years, there will be more people online using mobile devices than those using PCs. Therefore, it makes sense to be where your customers are, otherwise, you lose out on business.

Why Good Advertising Works?!!

“Advertising doesn’t affect us” - For those of us in marketing, this is a familiar thing to hear. You can respond to this by pointing out that U.S. companies would not invest $70 billion (yes, that's the size of TV's ad market) in something they thought didn't work. Companies expect advertising to produce returns, just like any other investment. The reason why many of us think advertising doesn't "work" is that we tend to believe that advertisements are trying to make us do something immediately.

This is wrong.

Successful advertising rarely succeeds through argument or calls to action. Instead, it creates positive memories and feelings that influence our behavior over time to encourage us to buy something at a later date. No one likes to think that they are easily influenced. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that we hardly respond to attempts at persuasion.

Instead, the best advertisements are ingenious and well suited at leaving impressions. In sum, the best advertisements use images, jingles, and stories to focus attention on the brand. They are not just creative for creative's sake. The crucial challenge for marketers is: What's the best way to translate these memories into actions?

There is a debate between two groups. The first group believes in raw persuasion. Its focus is on making an argument that will encourage you, with the delivery of "new news," to buy something right away. The second group believes in the power of engagement. Its focus is on creating a positive experience that will influence you over the longer-term and help you decide to buy something at a later date. Here, the objective is to seed positive ideas and memories that will attract you to the brand.

But this distinction is largely a myth. Advertisers actually have little control over how audiences receive their message. New news might appear relevant and credible to some while others consider it unpersuasive. Similarly, a TV commercial designed to engage the viewer might cause you to buy the brand immediately, simply because it reminds you of how much you enjoy the product. So it differs from individual to individual.

Once in a blue moon an advert might leave you thinking, "Just what I need!" More often, however, you barely attend to the commercials you see. Unless you see the advertisement again and again it doesn't trigger the urge to buy something at a later date. Even then, it is not the ad that matters. The ideas, impressions and positive feelings about the brand that matter.

So contrary to many people's beliefs, advertising does influence them. But advertising's influence is subtle. But engaging and memorable ads seed memories that influence our behavior. You may not think advertising influences you, but marketers do!!

A Snapshot of the Benefits of Professional Web Designing

The Professional Web Designing Companies provide effective and efficient online and brand engineering solutions which are actually measurable. For designing the best website as per your business requirements, taking the help from website designing companies in India can be great of great help. The companies can help in the following ways:

Custom Web Designing: You can get the custom design as per your desire and business requirements. The companies design specifically as per the needs of their clients.

Dynamic Website Design: It refers to the category of content that should be generated when demand for page is raised by the customer in the web browser. For this type of content you require a dynamic website and designing of this website is known as Dynamic Website Designing.

Search Engine Optimization: You can get good visibility of your site with search engine optimization. This involves the free advertisement with no investment.

Graphic Designing: The Web Designing Company offers innovative graphic designs to the customers that can grab the instant attention of the clients. It involves a creative and systematic plan to solve a problem or achieve certain objectives, with the use of images, symbols or even words. It is visual communication and the aesthetic expression of concepts and ideas using various graphic elements and tools.

Social Media Optimization: Social media is becoming immensely important for business as well. Social media optimization(SMO) is the use of a number of social media outlets and communities to generate publicity to increase the awareness of a product, brand or event.

You can take the help from web designing companies to enable the publicity of your products on the social media.

E-commerce Web Designing: This is one of the most important criteria required by the internet marketers. The companies can help in creating the e-commerce website that are attractive as well as user friendly and which can increase conversion rates and online visibility. This is really important for sales optimization.

There are many other things on which you can take help from professional web designing companies; like redesigning, responsive design requirements, creating browser compatibility and many more. If you plan to get a unique website developed for your company, have a look at the following link: www.thedesignboyz.com

Branding - A Key Secret for a Successful Business

Branding

Do you have an established business or going to launch a new one? It is very much important to promote your business, products or services along with manufacturing useful products or giving a good service to the customer. By good product or service you can satisfy the existing customer but if you want to flourish your business by attracting new customers it is very much important to promote your business. “Branding” is a big name in the field of business promotion whether it is online or off line.

Before starting the branding of your business you must know the exact definition and importance of branding. A Brand is a name, term, design, symbol that distinguishes your product or service from your competitor’s one. “Branding” is a process of converting your product or service as a brand. Branding is a part of business marketing and it is a long term process. A classic example of branding is “Live Stock Branding”. It was adapted to distinguish one person’s cattle from another by means of a distinctive symbol burned into the animal’s skin with a hot burning iron. Branding has a huge significance in business marketing and promotions. Few important utilities of branding are listed below...

• Branding is used for the advertising of business, products or services
• It generate awareness for a new product or service
• It spread a startup business to the potential customers
• It makes an existing product or service more popular
• Branding helps to keep the good online reputation of a business in market

History of Branding: The word “Brand” comes from an old word called “brandr” that means “to burn”. In the Vedic Period the branding concept was flourished in India. In the Vedic period a herbal paste discovered by a vedic rishi named as” Chyawan” was used for good health. In the modern age it is become a brand called” Chaywanprash” a very renowned health product in India. The concept of trademark is coming from the historical period.

Concept of Branding: The main utility of branding is not only growth in the sales graph of a product or service but also to increase its awareness. If we able to rich our product to the maximum number of people then the probability of increasing sales of that particular product will definitely increase. Suppose a company has a multiple number of products but due to some reason only few products are getting good amount of sale. In that case that company has to run an extensive branding for those products which does not getting good amount of sales.

What is brand awareness?

It is not only important generate a brand but also to make awareness of that branding. The process of spreading a brand among the maximum number of people is call brand awareness.

Brand Elements: Following are some elements which are used for branding

• Name: A word or group of words used to identify a particular company, product or service
• Logo: A logo of a company can be used as a brand
• Tagline: A catchy tagline can be used as a brand
• Graphics: A specific graphics can be a brand
• Color: A particular color as a brand
• Sound: A unique tune or set of notes can be used as a brand
• Customer Relation Management is a very vital branding element.

Process of Branding: Branding is a vast and time consuming process. The entire process can be divided into two parts on is online branding and another is off line.

On Line Branding: This is the age of internet and websites. For this reason websites are very good media for online branding. Now a days maximum marketers use different websites for the branding of their products and services. Whenever we are visiting any website we can see the banners, different display ads of different company products and services. These ads attract the attention of the users and increase the awareness of that product or services.

In today’s time we can search and find anything in “Google”. We can define this as search engine but instead using the term “search engine” we are the term “Google” because “Google” is itself a brand. Whenever we are searching anything in Google we can find text ads on the Google SERP page.

In today’s world our life is incomplete without social media. We all participate and share all the memorable moments of our life in different social media websites. If we think about social media the name which comes first is “Facebook”. Again facebook is a brand name for social media. Beside facebook there are many social media websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube etc.

How Social Media Websites are used for Branding?

We spend a good amount of time in a day with different social media websites. These social media websites have become an intimate part of our life. Now a days all small, medium or large business owners use these social media websites for the branding of their business. They use to make their official page in these websites and update about their products, services, new releases in these social media websites so that it can rich maximum number of people. In Twitter we can tweet about the updated products or services.

Advertising in different social media pages also help in branding a lot. The marketers and the business owners are giving ads in social media websites like face book, LinkedIn, You Tube etc. They give adds in different face book pages according the location, age, demography etc so that the add can rich to maximum potential customers and branding can happen properly. Youtube is a video sharing website. Here companies can run the video adds of the products and services.

What is Email Marketing?

In today’s world email is a very important tool for communication. We all use different email platform throughout the day. Even we can do emailing through our mobile phone from any places. Due to this huge use of email many organizations are doing the branding of their products and services through email. The marketing through email is known as email marketing. For email marketing we required a landing page template with the all information’s of the business and services. Then this page is send to different preexisting customers through email. These promotional emails are known as ”newsletters”.

Off Line Branding: Off Line branding is the process of branding without internet. This includes manual branding by general discussion, a eye cache tagline, distributing booklets with the short description of products and services.

Evolution and Adaptation of SEO

Search Engine are a special kind of website by which we can search anything by using a particular keyword or keyword phrase. Search Engine Optimization is a technique of make a website SEO friendly that is if someone search with a keyword then he or she will find the website in the top pages of search engine. Some of the main search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.

Though there are many search engines in the world of internet Google is most famous out of them. The age of Google in this field of search engine is all most 15 years. From the very initial time of their origin Google is doing different experiments to give better user friendly search results. For this Google have set a rule book for Search Engine Optimizers. This rule book is known as Google algorithm. Google time to time change the basic structure of its algorithm. To get better search result and make it SEO friendly we have to follow the algorithm of Google. Some of major Google updates are Panda, Caffeine, Penguin and last but not the least Hummingbird. A brief idea about these updates are given below

Panda Update: Panda is a algorithm changes of Google that mainly fight against the spamming and low quality website. This Panda update was first released in February 2011. The main theme of this update is to give low rank to low quality websites and high quality to high quality website. This update gives a surge to the new websites and social networking websites and show anger to that website which contain excessive amount of ads. This update affects the 12% of websites. Though Panada first release in February 2011 it become in action widely from April 2011.

Google Panda

How webmasters come to know about this Panda updates?
Ans:- The webmasters noticed that the keywords which were in good rank few days ago become out of search suddenly. There was a sudden fall in the graph of Google Analytics that is the visitors become low.

How Panda update works?
Ans:- The panda update of Google works against spamming, duplicate and promotional content. The main slogan of this update is “content is king”. Panda update always give good search results to those websites which have unique and relevant content and whose content get changes frequently. Panda hates circulating a single article or blog in different article or blog syndicating websites.

Following is a brief check list for success against panda update

• Unique website content
• Relevant content
• Contents for both the user and search engines
• No keyword staffing
• No clocking or door way pages
• No hidden text

Google Penguin

Penguin Update: "Google Penguin” update is change in Google algorithm that affected science April 2012. This algorithm fights against “over Optimization” and “Black hat SEO “process. This update penalize those websites which violets “Google Webmaster Guideline”. In this algorithm Google also give importance to social media websites beside normal organic SEO. The main features of Penguin updates are as follows

• No “Over Optimization” that is the excessive use of keyword reach anchor text in the content.
• No keyword staffing
• No doorway pages
• No permanent 301 redirects
• Avoid unnecessary back links from link firms to increase the page rank. In single word the “page rank” concept is no longer useful for SEO
• No link exchange or reciprocal links
• Share all the contents in social media websites
• Practice guest blogging

 

Google Hummingbird

Hummingbird Update: The latest update of Google is “Hummingbird”. This update is launched in October 2013. As we all know this is the age of smart phones, tabs, ipads etc so people have started searching through these mobile devices. Due to this reason the keywords have become” conversational “and” highly descriptive”. This algorithm has become extraordinarily social and conversation basis. The main features of humming bird update are

• Regular up gradation of contents
• Conversation based keywords and contents
• Long tail keywords
• Social Media Optimizations

Though these Google updates have been launched in different times they always work parallel so their effects will always be there. Beside these major Google updates there are many other small algorithm updates and different versions of these major updates. By these above changes in algorithm the Search Engine have been evolutes and adapted.

“Cloud Computing “– A Big Name in Internet Business

This is the age of technology. With the help of modern technology we can do many hard work very fast and easy way. Internet is a very important part of human life now days. We take the help of internet in both our personal and corporate life. With the help of internet we can access lots of information’s from any part of the world in a very fast way.

As the technology become much more advanced the internet also become very much advanced. In the field of internet the most important term is “Server”. A server is a place where we can store and access a huge amount of data through internet. In the ultra-modern age of internet a very use full term is “cloud computing”. In simple term “cloud computing” can be define as storage and access data and programs through internet which are stored in the hard drive of local computer. We can explain it by a simple example- as we store different data and programs in the hard drive of our computer and can access it directly or through Local Area Network (LAN) connection. In cloud computing we can access the data of our local hard drive through internet in a very fast way and from any corner of the world.

Cloud Computing

It may be a big question in the mind of many people that how this cloud computing system works? The answer is that there is much software to run this cloud computing system. A brief idea about some cloud computing software are given below

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): In this system a business subscribe to this application and can access the data through internet.


• Platform –as-a-Service (Paas): Here a business can create its own custom application for use by all in the company.




• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Here some famous websites like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon provides a readymade infrastructure which can be rented by other companies.

Following are some examples of cloud service providers and cloud Drive

• Google Drive: It is a cloud computing service provided by the Google. Here we can store a huge amount of data and access it any time online. We can access this drive not only from the PC but also from the tablet, ipad and smart phones


• Apple icloud: Apple’s cloud service is primarily used for storage and synchronizes all the data like mail, contact, calendar etc. I cloud also stores media files.


• Amazon Cloud Drive: Storage at the big retailer is mainly for music preferably MP3s that we purchase from Amazon.

Advantages of Cloud Computing: Following are the advantage of cloud computing

• By cloud computing system we can access the data and programs stored in the local hard drive through internet any time anywhere.


• It makes the server fast and time consuming.


• This makes the documents sharable that is the documents can be access by more than one user.