OSCMS Design

Metrics to create a well formed Magento Store

2012-02-27T16:21:00.002+05:30

With advance in technology, even the competition in online arena has grown quite fierce. In order to keep up with the latest trends and survive the competition, a website has to be extraordinary to fare well. Managing an online store is no less than a herculean task. Moreover, with influx of a large number of stores it has become even more difficult to perform well and attract more visitors. However, when it comes to good ecommerce website development, Magento ecommerce development stands out as one of the most reliable and effective solutions. Magento development provides a flexible, robust, interactive and feature rich online store that help in attracting a good volume of relevant traffic and thereby generating good ROI.

In order to derive the maximum returns from a Magento ecommerce store, it is imperative to have a well designed and quality store. And for this, there are certain things that should be kept in mind. Read further to find out what are the metrics to create a well formed Magento store.

1. A good Conversion service provider: When you plan to have a good Magento store, you must ensure that you hire a professional, reputed and reliable conversion service provider. Only a good service provider can guarantee a cutting edge Magento solution. So, make sure that you hire a good Magento service provider. Always check the credibility of the service provider.

2. Reputation: When looking for a service provider, you must check the reputation of the service provider company. A company with a good reputation is definitely a good choice. Reputation tells a lot about the company, its background, capabilities and standard. You can check out the service providers on Google to get an idea about the reputation they enjoy. If you find anything fishy, it is better to start looking for another service provider.

3. Experience and skills of developers: The experience and skills of developers matter a lot. In order to create a unique, interactive and cutting edge Magento solution, one should have the detailed knowledge of the technology and should be quite skillful. And this can only be accomplished by highly skilled and experienced Magento developers. These skilled developers are well experienced and are capable of providing a tailor made and a cutting edge solution to suit all your requirements.

4. Standard of technology used: A good solution needs to be developed using state of the art technology and latest trends. When you look for a Magento development service provider. Make sure that the company makes use of the state of the art technology to develop quality Magento stores. Also, you should ensure that the service provider makes use of the proper technology which facilitates a better and robust store.

These are some important metrics that are needed to create a quality Magento store. With all these metrics, you will surely get a great solution that will help in triggering the success rate of your business. Keep all the above mentioned points in mind so that you get a perfect Magento solution.

For an effective website Custom web development is the way to go

2012-02-27T12:23:00.002+05:30

The present day technological developments has laid a lot of stress on developing the website. A fully functional website goes a long way in ensuring a considerable amount of increase in lead generation. The utilization of internet has grown manifolds in the present day and an average user spends roundly 4 hours sitting online, browsing through the internet. Thus it becomes absolutely necessary for the businesses and the highly self motivates professionals to develop an effective website.

Custom web development pitched against template development

Using a ready made template for building the website sure is a tempting offer. It not only available for free, but provides the users with the website with in few minutes. However, it lacks in its flexibility and a customized approach towards website development. When you opt for the custom web development, you get enough scope and liberty to include all the features that you can possibly think of in your business web design.

The businesses are growing with time and the boundaries defining the scope and limitations of the business are also diluting. For instance, a book publishing company can any time choose to diversify its operations and enter into printing greeting cards, Flayer, business cards and a lot more. Thus when it comes to an effective website, flexibility is an important attribute to look forward to. Whereas in template website development, the business has to adjust according to the template, which can get really aggravating and irritating with time, when one opts for custom website development, the website is build based on their specifications.

Custom website development – Benefits:

To begin with, the foremost advantage of opting for custom website development is the uniqueness and a flamboyant expressions of one's personality and individuality. The user have been around the internet for a while now and they have already seen it all. If your website has nothing new and different to offer or look at, it better not be there at all. What custom website development does is that it allows the users and businesses to express their personality and individuality and register a conspicuous impression with the users.

When you opt for custom website development, you can determine the flow of your website. You can define the navigation and the flow keeping in mind your target audience. Navigation plays an important role in determining the success of your website. It is one of the major elements which attracts the users to the website. You can include the pages that you require in the website, make it a really complete website with full information and details and decide upon the flow in which the information will be displayed. Of course, the template website design will not provide you with such an opportunity.

Besides, if you choose for professional website development, you get various other benefits such as a fully functional and cross browser compatible website, that works optimally on the virtual world and can be accessed easily through various platforms. W3C validation, pixel perfection and search engine optimization are the other worth mentioning benefits of custom web development. Thus for an effective website, opt for custom website development.

PixelCrayons is a professional web design company that specializes in business web design & development, markup services, CMS & ecommerce solutions.

5 Most important steps in creating a CMS website

2012-02-24T12:58:00.000+05:30

In today's time, the importance of a content management system has increased manifold. Considering the hyper competitive environment, it has become imperative for websites to be extraordinary in terms of design, layout, features and functionality. A CMS web design incorporates all the essential features in a site and provides a flexible and powerful interface. This is why a CMS design has become the top most choice of people across the world. CMS development guarantees a lot of benefits in terms of traffic, SEO ranking, conversion rate and ROI. Although it is true that a CMS helps in reaping maximum returns, but is is also equally important to create a quality CMS empowered website. When it comes to this, most of the people find themselves in a tough situation. This is because there are plethora of CMS solutions available today and moreover, there is no dearth of companies providing CMS solutions. Mentioned below are the 5 most important steps in creating a CMS website.

1. Research well: When it comes to creating a CMS based website, the first and most important step is to research well and acquaint yourself with different types of CMS available and the functionality they offer. This becomes all the more important when you are not too tech savvy. You should put in some efforts and time in finding out about different CMS available and what features they support. It will give you an idea about what to expect from a good content management system. It will also ensure that you get a suitable and appropriate CMS solution for your site.

2. Check the core functionality: Once you have searched, you should check out the core functionality of some of the CMS. Check whether the CMS supports basic functionality that you want in your websites. A good CMS has a strong and robust core functionality which facilitates the smooth functionality for a site.

3. It should have user friendly features: It is very important to have a CMS with user friendly features. You should check the various features offered by a CMS and ensure that is user friendly. It will be of great help in case you are not too comfortable with technical things. User friendly features make the task of editing, updating or deleting things on site too simple.

4. Make sure it offers enough extensions or plug-ins: When you look for a CMS, another important thing to check is the extensions or plug-ins offered by it. A good CMS offers a wide range of user friendly features that help in extending the functionality of the site. With the help of these plug-ins, you can add any desired functionality as and when you want.

5. It should be cost effective: Last but not the least, make sure that the CMS you select is a cost effective solution. It should be available at an affordable price and should offer great features that help in improving the performance of the website so that you can reap good returns.

Pixelcrayons offers best CMS design & development services & opensource content management system solutions which includes wordpress development, joomla development, drupal development services at affordable price.

Magento Development ascertains all the features you need in online store

2012-02-24T10:31:00.002+05:30

Today a lot of stress is being laid on ecommerce website development. It is your short cut to ensuring an easy entry into the very house hold of the customers and it makes the entire process of buying and selling the products really handy and effective. It is not just cost effective and saves a lot of time, but the ecommerce market is only slated to increase and grow with time and the users are more willing to trust and utilize the ecommerce services for buying the products and services that they require.

Realizing the same shift in the trends, a lot of large and small scale entrepreneurs and business owners have decided to opt for ecommerce web stores. In fact a lot of stores are already alive and kicking on the virtual world. If you have been wondering for an effective ecommerce solution to power your online store, the best solution lies in Magento Development.

Magento development undoubtedly ascertains all the features that you can possibly require in the online store. To begin with, it is an open source ecommerce publishing platform and thus it does not put a lot of pressure on the budget. Besides, it is a lot better option, when you compare it to various other open source or even premium solutions. A detailed look on the features and functionalities offered by Magento Development are discussed below:

Effective product demonstration - this is the main requirement of a good online store. Magento development allows the users to display multiple images per products. What's more? Magento development also allows the users with the option of zoom in viewing the products. Thus you can show the center, right and left angle of the products to the users and they can zoom in and view it in detail. This plays an important role in ensuring more sales and building the trust of the users in the online store.

Flexible marketing tools - Magento Development not only helps in acquiring the online store but it offers you flexible coupon rates and other marketing tools etc to effectively market your online business undertakings. You can promote and market your products by offering discounts and flexible coupon rates and thus enjoy further increased revenues.

Flexible payment and shipment options - shipment is necessary for the functioning of the online store. Magento offers the users easy and flexible shipment options i.e. multiple orders in a single shipment or multiple shipments for a single order, so on and so forth, depending on the nature of the order. Besides, Magento development supports a number of payment options and gateways. Payment gateway integration can be done easily if you have opted for Magento development.

Search engine optimization and better product page performance - the performance of your product pages matters a lot and more often than not, it gets compromised due to heavy page size and a lot of images. Magento development offers SEO of the online store by letting you define the URL, Meta tag description and a lot more.

In the end, to avail the best services, you must consider hiring professional Magento Developer for the development project. The services of these Magento Developers are available at highly competitive rates and you gain an edge due to their expertise and market knowledge.

How to convert your Joomla Website in an online store?

2012-02-23T15:43:00.002+05:30

This is the era of technology and almost every aspect of our lives is dominated by great technology. It is because of this great technology that today, we can shop and sell products and services online. In today's time there are number of technologies available that have made the website development process much easier. Also, it has successfully managed to convert websites into live online stores. Thus, selling and buying things online is so much simple now. There are many applications available that help in creating an online store, Joomla is one of them. Joomla is basically a cms web design platform, but it provides excellent support for online store development as well. As a result, the demand for Joomla development has increased manifold. Read further to find out how to convert Joomla website in an online store.

Joomla is a great content management system with a robust core functionality. It is a very user friendly application that can be easily managed by everyone including those who are not very tech savvy. It has a wide range of features which make the task of editing, updating, and maintaining a site very easy. In fact, it is possible to convert a Joomla based site into an online store to meet the modern ecommerce needs. You can do this with the help of VirtueMart. Let us first find out what VirtueMart is. It is an open source platform that helps in catering to the online needs of creating a Joomla based online store. VirtueMart is PHP based application and you can use it for free. In fact, more than 2.5 million people have downloaded VirtueMart.

One of the best things about VirtueMart is that it is very easy to use and can be downloaded easily. After downloading VirtueMart, you can go to the Joomla admin panel and then install it. Just these few simple steps and you will have your own tailor made online store ready for you. After this, you can work on things like setting up a name for your store, payments, currency, postage etc.

if you want even more, you can always use the Add on facilities in order to include more facilities to your store or to make it visually more attractive. For instance, you can add features like a menu category, display for new products, featured products, hot products, and many more. Besides this, there are many additional add-ons that you can use in your online store. This is not all. In case you need some tips and want to learn new tricks, then you can also join forums that include reviews about Joomla and VirtueMart.

From the above discussion, it is evident that you can get a fantastic online store form a Joomla based website. All you need is right efforts and strategies. You should always hire professional Joomla developers to get the best quality online store. A professional Joomla developer is well equipped and has the relevant experience to provide you with a cutting edge online stores.

Magento and its importance as an Ecommerce platform

2012-02-23T10:12:00.002+05:30

In today's time, managing an ecommerce website has become quite toilsome because of the hyper competitive environment. Along with ecommerce website development, one needs to put in great efforts, time and well planned strategy in order to survive and compete in the fiercely competitive online area. All this combined with the daily ordeal of managing and keeping a close watch on all the business tasks makes it quite tiresome and frustrating for business owners. Therefore, to get rid of everyday hassles, one needs a good flexible solution that can make things easier. One such solution is Magento development.

Magento is a highly flexible, robust and user friendly solution that can boost the performance of your ecommerce site and can improve its results in terms of traffic volume, search engine ranking, conversion rate and ROI. It is quite a versatile solution that helps immensely in expanding and scaling up your business. It has a long list of useful features. It supports multiple stores hosted on multiple IP addresses under any domain names. One of the best features of Magento is that you can administer all the stores from one single and powerful control panel.

There are many other useful and interesting features offered by Magento. For instance, it allows you to upgrade to new versions in just a click. All this is done in a seamless manner. Moreover, the Web service API and superb integration options offered by Magento let you to easily customize your ecommerce store in any possible manner that you can think of. The back office of Magento is quite robust and gives full control to the users to fine tune their business strategy with the help of its advanced reporting tools.

What this means is that almost every data that you may require is available to you in a matter of few clicks. This data could be anything like the number of visitors , or their shopping experience etc. along with this, Magento is also fully integrated with Google Analytics, A/B and Multivariate testing capability, different performance statistics etc. it also provides you with abandoned shopping carts reports. Do not just stop counting yet. For there are many more features. The invoice and bill management functionality of Magento is simply superb and helps you to keep a close watch on your cash flow. If you plan to up-sell or cross-sell your products, then Magento has tools for that too.

The importance of Magento for an ecommerce site can not be ignored. It holds a lot of potential that can empower an ecommerce store to accomplish its business goals in the most effective manner. From the above discussion it is evident that Magento guarantees a smooth running and feature rich ecommerce store that will help you reap maximum benefits. To ensure that you get the best Magento development done, you should only hire a professional and reliable Magento developer. Professional Magento developers have the capability and required skills to provide a cutting edge ecommerce solution to meet all your business requirements.

5 Easy to use Drupal plugins to improve website functionality

2012-02-22T12:34:00.002+05:30

Drupal is a well renowned content management system. What makes Drupal highly reliable and most preferred is plethora of useful features and a wide range of modules that help in enhancing the functionality of a website. Drupal development provides a flexible, robust, interactive and user friendly website. This is why Drupal CMS web design is highly preferred by a majority of people across the world. Mentioned below are 5 easy to use Drupal modules to improve a website’s functionality.

1. Database Administration: This is a great Drupal module and provides Drupal administrators a direct access to their Drupal database tables from within the standard Drupal user interface. With the help of this module, you can easily execute scripts in order to create and alter tables. You can also back-up one or more tables. It also lets you view/edit/delete data within tables. Tables can also be emptied or dropped.

2. E-Commerce: This module is a collection of a number of modules. This is used to sell goods or services in an effective manner. It makes the task of selling quite simple and has a lot of features. Some of its key features are-

a. Subscriptions and recurring payments
b. Inventory management
c. Invoice generation and shipping notifications
d. Transaction reports and sales summary
e. Transaction and payment work flow
f. Order history review feature for customers

3. FCKeditor for Drupal: This is another useful Drupal module which replaces text area fields with FCKeditor. This a HTML text editor and brings a lot of powerful functionality like that of Word. It is a light weight module and does not require any kind of installation on your computer.

4. Glossary: This is a useful module especially for those who are not aware of the technical jargon. This module scans posts for glossary terms. The glossary indicator is inserted after every found term, or the term itself is turned into an indicator depending on the site settings. In order to know the definition of a term, users can simply hover the mouse over that term. When the indicator is clicked, it leads the user to that term presented within the whole glossary. This module uses Drupal's built in taxonomy feature. Therefore, you can organize your terms in a Drupal vocabulary. You can also create hierarchical structures, synonyms and relations. Nodes can also be attached to the terms to provide detailed explanation on the keywords.

5. Image: With the help of this module, users with proper permissions can upload images into Drupal. It automatically creates thumbnails. You can post the images individually to the front page or can be included in galleries. Galleries can be personal(linked to a user) or global to the site. The administrator can administer images and can also set various parameters.

These are the 5 useful Drupal modules that will help in improving the functionality of a website. It is always in your best interest to hire professional Drupal developers to get the best results. A professional and experienced Drupal developer can provide quality results at an affordable price.

Some important Elements of Joomla Web Design

2012-02-22T10:11:00.002+05:30

That Joomla is a well renowned and highly preferred CMS web design is a fact well known. It is a highly advanced and flexible solution which has made the entire task of developing and maintaining a site so simple. Joomla development provides a high quality solution which helps a website to reap maximum returns. It offers a wide range of features and many benefits which can help to trigger the success rate of a business.

The best thing about Joomla is its robust core functionality. Some important and key elements of a Joomla web design are:

a. Content management
b. User management
c. Customization templates
d. Multiple currency and language options
e. Online poll

All these features not only help to strengthen a website but they also empower a site to function smoothly and fare well in a highly competitive online domain. It gives full control to the user and makes things like editing, updating, deleting and maintaining a site super easy. The whole layout and fell of the design can be customized as per one's requirements.

Another great thing about Joomla is the plethora of useful extensions offered by it. These extensions extend the functionality of a site and help to perform complex tasks easily. Some of the useful Joomla extensions are:

1. JCE Editor: Joomla has a default editor called TinyMCE which has great features. But if you want more control over editing, fonts, table builders, smilies etc. then you should use this extension called JCE editor.

2. Community Builder: This is a great Joomla extension and provides many features like extra profile fields, image upload, ajax email, front end work flow management and a lot more. Besides this, it is the place where many users of Joomla community share their experiences.

3. JomSocial: This extension is a collection of components which help in extending the capability of Joomla and help in building a personal social networking site. It has a large number of user friendly features such as private messaging, buddy system etc.

4. Xmap: In today's fiercely competitive arena, it has become tough to attain and maintain a good search engine rank. But this can be done with the help of this extension called Xmap. This extension allows you to create a visually appealing HTML sitemap for your site. This proves to be immensely beneficial in terms of search engine ranking as it ensures that search engine crawlers are able to crawl your site easily.

5. Slide show Pro module: This is another great Joomla extension which helps to develop all types of slide shows on the site. This extension supports three languages and can prove to be a perfect extension if you are looking for having slide shows on your site.

Joomla is a great solution that provides easy to use interface and gives full control to the user. You should always hire a professional and reliable Joomla developer for your website. Professional Joomla developers have the requisite experience and skills to provide you with a cutting edge solution.

How to Decide The Best CMS for Your Website?

2012-02-21T12:45:00.002+05:30

In today’s world most businesses prefer to opt for a CMS web design solution when it comes to running a website. But when there are so many choices available in terms of content management systems how do you zero in on the best? WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento all have their own pros and cons and offer amazing web solutions in their own right. Zeroing in on the best CMS design platform can be a tricky affair and to make the right choice you need to keep certain factors in mind. Here are some factors which you should consider while choosing a CMS for your website.

1.Purpose - Are you looking for a simple blog or do you need a highly functional website? WordPress is the easiest and the simplest of all the CMS design solutions and an ideal platform for blogging. If you are looking for a dynamic and highly functional website Joomla or Drupal would suit your purpose. They may not be as easy as WordPress but allow you to create highly functional website. If you need an online store Magento being a dedicated ecommerce platform would serve your purpose.

2.Design Freedom - Web development is all about exploring creativity and the CMS solution that you choose should offer you complete freedom over the design. You wouldn’t like to be told to design within certain limits. It should allow you to custom design the template in software like Photoshop and then integrate it into the CMS. This will allow you to achieve unique looking websites.

3.Technical Expertise - Your own technical expertise in an important factor while choosing a CMS solution for your website. If you don’t have any knowledge in coding and web development you need to opt for a user-friendly CMS such as WordPress as others such as Drupal and Joomla require you to have basic coding knowledge to manage a website efficiently. You don’t want a situation where you have to depend on the developer for making small changes in the website.

4.Cost - This is another key consideration while choosing a CMS solution for your website. It is true that most of the popular CMSs in the world are open source and freely available which cuts down your cost of development substantially. But if you are looking to create a niche website you might need to use some proprietary software such as Adobe CQ5IBM Lotus Web Content Management, OpenText ECM Suite etc.

5.Community Support - One of the primary reasons for the popularity of the open source CMS design solutions is thanks to the strongly knit community they have. This serves as an ideal helping hand when you need support as and when issues crop up within your website. Choosing an obscure CMS will deny you of timely support as they lack the community networking and discussions as the popular CMSs have.

These things kept in mind will allow you to choose the right CMS design solution for your website and allow you to maximum returns out of it.

Pixelcrayons offers best CMS design & development services & opensource content management system solutions which includes wordpress development, joomla development, drupal development services at affordable price.

Custom Web Development: First step towards online success

2012-02-21T10:51:00.002+05:30

Most of the times, it is observed that people find it quite intriguing when their online business does not pay off the expected results. This even after all the efforts were put in by them. But what people often overlook is the fact that running an online business successfully requires not only good efforts and strategies but also the right custom web development. In fact, good custom website development is imperative and the first step towards online success. A good business web design guarantees that your business runs smoothly and grows at a steady pace by drawing maximum benefits in terms of traffic, sales, and ROI.

It is a fact well know that a business requires a positive approach, a good strategy and a visually appealing interface in order to attract maximum visitors. All these features are guaranteed by a custom design. For online success, a business should have two most important features. First, ability to draw relevant traffic and, second, capability to attain good search engine ranking. A custom design promises both these features. It involves the complete overhauling of the site including its design, layout, navigation etc. so, as to provide a user friendly, interactive and a very appealing site. All this guarantees that more and more visitors flock your site which ultimately helps in improving the conversion rate as well as the sales rate of your business. This is not all. A customizes solution also guarantees good search engine ranking. Search engines rank websites on the basis of certain parameters. Among these parameters, a user friendly site with a relevant and fresh content is very important. A customized solution makes a site more user friendly and hence it gets indexed by major search engines.

Sometimes, it is observed that the reason behind the bad performance of a business is the lack of features in the site. With a custom design solution, you can change the look and feel of your site as per your your specific requirements. It gives you the complete control of the look, design, and feel of your site. Therefore, you can get it customized in a manner that will prove to be more conducive for your business. A custom web design strengthens a website's ability to perform better by drawing more visitors and making it getting indexed by search engines easily. It also facilitates a better growth for the business by providing long term benefits.

Thus it is evident that a custom web design solution guarantees online success and is the first step towards it. If you are frustrated with the under performance of your online business, then it is high time that you started using a customized solution. There is no dearth of companies providing custom web development solutions. But you should select a company carefully. It is important to hire a reliable and professional web design company that is capable of providing cutting edge customized solutions. Therefore, it is in your best interest to research well and then hire a company.

Should you use templates for website designing?

2012-02-20T16:11:00.002+05:30

The design of the website plays a key role in attracting the users towards it. In the present day, there has been a lot of stress on presentation. It no longer matters if you have the best features, products and services etc., if you fail to showcase the same in the best possible way, user centric of course, you would loose out on business. The same has introduced to the world a wide range of fervent website design and development services providers. However, the conflict remains in the minds of the website solicitors - whether to opt for a design template or hire a website design and development company for the purpose of web development.

Here in this write up, we discuss the various reasons, in the favor of and against, using the design templates for designing the look and appeal of the website. Take a look to know more.

Arguments in the favor of web template designing:

Templates provides nice designs - some of the templates available on the internet are really gorgeous and if you are lucky enough, you get exactly the template which defines the look of your business endeavors and activities.

Templates save time - developing the website through professional developers may require more time, but getting a template can solve the purpose within minutes.

It saves money - templates are available for free and hence you don't have to invest in the design or hire professional services providers for the same.

Arguments against the use of templates:

It kills exclusivity - if something is available for free (or for that matter, even costs less) do you really think it will remain exclusive? You can easily find several other business websites using the same template as yours and thus where is the chance to stand out? If your business is unique, better give it the much deserved unique treatment.

Templates not flexible - When you use the template design, you are limited by it. You can not add any other feature, or remove any of the existing features. It seldom happens that you receive a template which caters exactly to your requirements. More often than not you have to settle down with what is available and of course, have to make the best out of it.

No search engine optimization - when you opt for custom web development, you receive SEO semantic coding, where each and every aspect of the website is made to perform better on the search engines. No such SEO semantic coding is carried out in template design. Thus your website does not appear early on the search engine results and you do not receive the organic traffic, which you other wise would have.

The solution:

There is no problem as such, so there is no point for the solution as well. The choice between acquiring a template for developing the website or using the services of the website designers and developers for custom website development, depends solely upon your own needs and aspirations. If you are looking for exclusivity and highly competitive and web optimized features, the choice lies in custom website development.

Pixelcrayons offers best CMS design & development services & opensource content management system solutions which includes wordpress development, joomla development, drupal development services at affordable price.

Basics of Drupal Website Design

2012-02-20T12:51:00.002+05:30

The field of website design and development has taken a new turn altogether. With the advent of highly technical and web optimized content management systems, it is now really simple to own a fully functional and efficient working websites. What a content management system does is that it allows the users to effectively manage the content of the website – the documents, images, videos and pod-casts etc and also provide them with additional superior services.

When it comes to the choice of an open source content management system, the users have quite a number of choices, namely WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Magento for ecommerce website development etc. Here we shall discuss the basic features of Drupal development and how it can provide you with a top notch web application or website.

- Drupal CMS is open source and hence freely available
Drupal has been developed under the GNU Public license and its source code is made available to the public for free. Thus any Drupal developer can easily access the source code of the Drupal CMS and utilize the same to power the various websites.

- Search engine friendly solution
Drupal CMS is a 100 percent search engine friendly solution. Search engine optimization is required to ensure that the website receive good amount of organize traffic. By allowing the users to accordingly manipulate the URLs, Meta tag description and other related tags etc, Drupal development offers the users a thorough search engine optimized web solution.

- Drupal offers a lot of features and additional functionalities
This is the basic and the most lucrative feature of Drupal Development. The powerful content management system that Drupal is, it offers the users with a lot of features and functionalities, which is hard to find any where else. The various advantageous features of opting for Drupal Development includes – options for registering users accounts of different users, Graphical User Interface, options for RSS Feeds which make available all the updates happening in the online Drupal community to the users in no time, Page layout customization, menu management, content management and a lot more.

Also Drupal development provides the users with a lot of additional functionalities like interactive discussion forums, allows web casting, enables the users to develop photo galleries, blogs and even multiple blogs, shopping cart integration, social networking sites and a lot more.

- Drupal follows a modular approach
Drupal follows a modular approach. There is a vast variety of Drupal modules available which can be used and configured accordingly, to add on to the scope and functionality of the website. Drupal modules is what really makes the Drupal development truly king size, extensible and scalable. Certain examples of Drupal modules includes – Chat Box – it allows the users to chat in HTML interface, Instant Messenger services, Guest book modules, modules pertaining to ecommerce and a lot more.

- It has amazing designs
Drupal offers it users a wide range of themes and Drupal designs to choose from to unify the look of the website. However these templates have been used evidently by a lot of users and if you wish for a unique looking website, you can anytime opt for PSD to Drupal conversion.

Thus it can be summed that Drupal development provides the users with a lot of features and functionalities. If you have an ambitious website development project and need a really sturdy and effective back end system to support it, Drupal development is your answer. For high quality Drupal development, ensure the services of a qualified and seasoned Drupal Developer.

PixelCrayons has a team of qualified drupal developers who have specialization in drupal cms web design & development, drupal theme/template design & custom development, customization & installation services.

Importance of Security for an Ecommerce Website

2012-02-17T14:45:00.002+05:30

With the number of websites on the web increasing steadily with each passing day, there are lot of issues that need to be addressed to ensure a safe and secure functionality of a website. When it comes to an ecommerce web design, security is one of the major issues and is of paramount importance to make a website function smoothly. If you are running an online business or thinking of ecommerce website development, then it is imperative to have a well secured site. Read further and you will find out about the importance of security for ecommerce web development and also how to secure your ecommerce website.

An ecommerce store requires good volume of traffic to gain potential customers and improve its conversion rates. But in order to attract visitors, an ecommerce website should offer the best of everything. Not only the good features, but good security is equally important. Online transactions are mostly fraught with some hesitation on the visitors part. This is they are required to provide their sensitive information like credit card details etc to make an online transaction. Therefore, people think twice before trusting a website. Now this makes the task a bit tougher for websites. A website should have a robust, safe and secure structure to assure the visitors about their security. It should be able to convince the visitors that their information will be safe and they can make a purchase without worrying about anything.

Therefore, security is very important or else a website will not gain any potential customers. And without potential customers business will go down the drain. Now that we have seen that security is of paramount importance for an ecommerce site, let us now see how an ecommerce site can be secured against security threats.

1.SSL: SSL stands for secured socket layer. There is the acronym SSL or a closed or an open lock on some web pages. When the lock is clicked, it shows various certificates that tell you whether the site is encrypted or not. However, most of the people are not aware of the fact that all the information that is sent or received via Internet is encrypted using a public or a private key. The public key is used for encryption and the private key is used for decryption. It ensures that various layers of security measures are used during the entire transaction process.

2.Firewall: A firewall is used to block any unwanted intrusion. And most of the computers have a firewall. By putting a firewall on your ecommerce website, you can ensure that other users are blocked from accessing or altering your customers' information that is saved in your server.

3.Digital signatures: Digital signatures help to authenticate the information. You should ask for passwords during transaction since they can be used as digital signatures. Most of the ecommerce sites have this feature which has boxes with letters or numbers in disarray and customers are asked to copy them correctly. This helps in verifying a customer's identity.

Is Drupal a right CMS for a business website?

2012-02-17T10:48:00.000+05:30

The present day user is spoiled. The choices are too much to choose from and there does not seem to be a good enough way to make the choice. Drupal is one amongst the various open source content management systems available today like Joomla, WordPress etc. However, the number of choices have spoiled the users and their decision making capabilities as it gets really tough to make the choices between the several open sources.

In this write up we will discuss the various reasons why Drupal is the most suited CMS for developing the business website. Take a look.

- Drupal is an open source content management system
Drupal CMS was developed over 10 years ago, under the GNU Public License. It is an open source content management system, which means that its source code is available for free and thus it can be easily acquired and used to power any web applications. The initial stages of the website is met with budget constraints and anxiety and thus Drupal CMS, being an open source systems help the website solicitors combat the same.

- Drupal for web development
Drupal’s default installation is a database-backed web platform with file maintenance tools and a high level of security. Many developers take advantage of Drupal’s extensible architecture to go far beyond the “core” package.

- Develop a social platform with Drupal
Drupal CMS is primarily a social and multi user system. It allows the users to log in the website and explore it as both - authenticated and anonymous users. Drupal development provides the website owners with multiple levels for user control and thus you can easily control the levels to which different users can access the website.

Besides, with Drupal development you can easily reach beyond the limits of your own website and mark a presence of Twitter, Facebook etc. Thus Drupal is completely a social website development platform. If you wish to make your website more popular and have more amount of unique visitors, Drupal Development is your answer.

- Highly scalable and extensible website development with Drupal
Drupal CMS web design is highly scalable . It is in fact regarded as one of the most powerful open source content management systems for developing the websites. The best part is that Drupal follows a modular approach. You can utilize any of the Drupal modules to increase the scope and functionality of the Drupal powered web applications. With the use of right Drupal module, you can include chat boxes in your website etc. Drupal CMS provides the users with highly resourceful additional functionalities like graphical user interface, Social networking sites, multiple blogging platforms etc.

Thus for a large and extensible website, Drupal Development is the solution you have been looking for.

- Drupal offers you amazing designs
If you are looking out for a way to dynamically present your website in a visually stimulating and impressive way, Drupal development is your answer. With the availability of several Drupal themes you can easily launch your good looking and impressive website. If you wish for a rather bespoke website, tailor made according to your business, you can anytime avail the services of Drupal Developers and convert the PSD file into Drupal. This way you get a completely web dynamic application, powered by the Drupal CMS.

If you wish to arrange the best of the Drupal features into the website, always go with the professional Drupal Development.

How to Judge the expertise of Joomla developer?

2012-02-16T12:56:00.002+05:30

Joomla is a powerful open source content management system, which is being widely used to power large scale complete websites. The lucrative feature of Joomla Development is that although it builds really strong and large scale complex websites, but you need not be a technical expert to work on and manage the same. If you have the right Joomla template developed by an expert, you need not train your staff to manage the same and you can easily work on the same.

However, while selecting the right Joomla expert, you must check their expertise and knowledge, based on the following criteria:

- Qualifications:
An expert Joomla Developer has to be skillful and qualified. Thus you need to have a close look at the Curriculum Vitae of the Joomla Developer you are currently in talks with. Make sure that he has cleared his college with flying colors. The college / university must be affiliated under Government authorities and must have an international level recognition.

- Look for the skill set:
For precise and correct Joomla development, look for specific skill set in the Joomla Developer that you are quizzing. The right candidate needs to have the correct precise knowledge of PHP (Hypertext Pre Processor language) along with working knowledge of Apache and MySQL. These are the fundamental requirements of an expert Joomla Developer. Along with that the knowledge of Object Oriented Programming (OOPs concepts) HTML and CSS is a preferred option.
More the technical skill set, the better will be the development project provided by the expert developers.

- Expertise in Practical Applications of the Theoretical concepts:
Qualifications or rather theoretical knowledge alone is not enough. An expert developer should be able to take out the best learned notebook chapters and apply them in the practice. If you are interviewing the fresh graduates, you can go by the working projects and software they have build in their college and quiz them about the same.

- Portfolio of the Joomla Developer:
Even if you are searching the right Joomla experts over the internet, you will get to see their portfolio online. Pay close attention to the quality and the precision of the web applications. Check the levels of pixel perfection if it markup conversion and Joomla integration. Also check what all features and Joomla Modules were included, if the project was feasible, what value addition it brought to the company and website owners. Also you must take into account the frameworks that were used – was APACHE involved, did they made use of OOPs concepts and Object Oriented PHP etc in the program.

- Experience of the expert:
Experience sure plays a crucial factor in the selection of the right candidates. The custom web development process tends to get over whelming, confusing and quite demanding. The experience of the Joomla Developers allows the experts to handle the oppressive situations and make the best out of it. If your project is demanding and large scale, go with the more experienced Joomla expert.

- An eye for detail:
This is more of an attitude than skill. The expert Joomla developer must have an eye for detail. The large scale projects require patience and perseverance of a seasoned developer. The developer must work hard and sincerely to ensure maximum features and functionalities in the website and make it competitive enough. The eye for detail induces perfection and excellence in the design and thus is a highly required quality in the expert.

How to design a successful website for your business?

2012-02-16T11:11:00.002+05:30

Owning a website is imperative for the business. In the present day Internet has grown in leaps ad bounds altogether and thus a business website allows the users to get an instant access to the more interested and qualified clients.

However attention must be paid while designing the website. The design of the website is what ultimately draws the users towards the website. If the design of the website is not good, it only shows that the entire website is a half hearted attempt and thus the brand is viewed in the negative light.

Proper planning must go in the entire process of website development. Plan what all features you wish to show in the website and how should they appear. You can also take help of the professional web designer or the web design company to assist you in the same.

The navigation of the business web design must be skilfully designed and the flow from one page to another must be clear. Also certain design elements like Flash etc has a negative impact on the usability of the website and hence they should judiciously used.

Lastly, give complete information in the website. Include the physical address and contact information in the website and allow the users to reach to you easily.

Web Design Tools

In the wake of present day technological developments, there a lot of web designing tools available with the web designers and developers to develop the website on. These tools play an important role in assembling all the features and maximizing the output of the designers and developers. Provided below is the quick glimpse at the 5 most used web designing tools by the web designers.

1. Colour Lovers - If the theme and color scheme of the website is giving you a tough night sleep, COLOURlovers is the solution you need for now. It is the international community of designers and artists from various fields, who flock the site to get the color inspirations and ideas and feedbacks and comments on their different projects – either personal or professional.

2. Expandrive - Expandrive has taken its name for the popular PAN Drive and works exactly alike. It can be plugged in to your PC or MAC machine and enables you to open the files, make certain changes and save the same on remote computers. Expandrive helps enhance every single application by connecting it with the data available at remote machines.

3. Web design library - The web design library works on an international basis. It is the resource available with the international users to conduct and discuss the though processes, researches etc regarding the designing process. With the help of web design library, you learn how to effectively and efficiently present the information online, in a way that it responds the most to the users. It covers both theoretical and practical knowledge.

4. Stripemania - Stripe mania is a simple to use and freely available Web 2.0 tool which provides you with diagonal stripes to include in your design. You get the liberty to choose the size and spacing between them. Besides, to make the design really exquisite, you can add the gradient effect in all of the stripes.

5. Zend Studio - Zend Studio 7.0 is the future of the tradition professional grade environment of PHP application development. Zend Studio 7.0 helps in optimizing and maximizing the potential of the web designers and developers by allowing them to quickly develop and administer the codes, swiftly solve the application problems and improve the collaboration effort between different teams.

Professional custom web development services by PixelCrayons, specializing in custom website development solutions & custom web application development solutions.

Five Reasons of choosing WordPress CMS for your business blog

2012-02-15T12:06:00.004+05:30

If you have been wondering around a plausible CMS web design to develop your business blog on, the search ends at WordPress cms. It was originally conceptualized with the aim to provide a blog publishing platform to the users, and provides arguably the best features you can ever find in the blog publishing platform. The same are discussed below.

1. It's free - The most basic advantage of opting for WordPress development for your business blog is that it is available free of cost. In the present times, businesses have laid a lot of stress on cost cuttings and thus the free of cost attribute of WordPress Development is arguably the most profitable option. Besides, the free of cost attribute does not come at the cost of functionalities, as further in the article you would discover how effective the WordPress CMS web design really is for your organization to develop a business blog.

2. Highly scalable through WordPress plugins - There is the reason why corporate houses, even the giant fortune 500 companies prefer WordPress development for their websites and blogs. WordPress follows a plugin architecture, which means it is extremely scalable and can grow with the demand of time. Plugins are the software fragments which when added to the main software or website, improves it functionalities. WordPress development is the simple yet highly scalable solution available today.

3. A wide range of WordPress themes - Themes are essential to perfectly represent the content of the blog. It brings about a consistency in the design and makes the entire content appear beautiful and inviting to the users. WordPress offers the users with a wide range of WordPress themes to choose from. However, if you wish your blog to appear like your website, or perhaps uniquely represent the business undertakings in the web world, you can opt for PSD to WordPress conversion, where the WordPress web application will be made, based upon the design provided by you in an image file.

4. Simplicity personified - that is exactly what you get when you use WordPress CMS web design for developing the blog of your company. It may get quite infuriating, having to manage the blog and understand lengthy and tedious procedures to upgrade your business blog. But WordPress development provides you with useful features to easily administer and work with your business blog. With the options of WordPress widgets, upgrading the business blog with new content and items is as easy as “drag and drop.” With WordPress widgets you can simply get hold of the content item you wish to add in your business blog and drop in the WordPress CMS web design and it will be automatically upgraded in the blog. If you are looking for an easy, sorted and painlessly simple CMS solution for the business blog, WordPress development is the solution you have been looking for.

5. Its safe - it is completely safe. You have Akismet, an in built software for the purpose of spam protection, and you have various WordPress plugins to create the back up of the data you display on your blog. You can be relaxed with WordPress development for your business blog.

To effectively integrate the resourceful features of the WordPress CMS into your business blog, always rely on the expert services of WordPress developers. Any competent WordPress developer understands the vastness and technicalities of the WordPress CMS and thus provides you with the professionally crafted solutions in no time. And just saving time, a professionally designed and developed WordPress business blogs stands a far better and superior chance to attract the visitors as compared to the amateur blog application development.

How to improve the social image of an ecommerce website?

2012-02-15T10:44:00.002+05:30

For every company, establishing online presence is essential to grow its clients/contacts base. There are varieties of methods to improve online presence like through posting blogs, sending bulk emails, newsletters, events, etc. As the traditional marketing requires goodwill from customers, the modern era online marketing requires social image on the internet. Retailers today have great opportunity to leverage their social media since it is beneficial and effective to them and their consumers as well. Here are few tips to improve your social image of an ecommerce website.

1. Link to Social Media - Social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, etc. plays an important role in building online contacts. Your ecommerce web development methods should adopt installing these plug-in in your e-commerce website and the links should properly re-direct to your web pages created on the social networking website.

2. Interactive Fan Page - Many Social networking websites provide great opportunities to websites to build their own web pages for free or at a very nominal fee. Even the low investment for paid membership would bring great returns for your online business in future. Develop an interactive web page for your e-commerce website on social networking websites. Branding of your e-commerce website must sync with the web page on the networking website. The latest technologies and ecommerce website development methods allow keeping the events and blog posts in sync with the corporate website and social networking web page.

3. Special Offers - Build special offers and discounts for customers who "Like" your page on social media. Everyone would be definitely delighted by the freebies, offers and discounts. When they are excited about the offer, your online marketing is done; they would definitely promote your product to their friends list.

4. Effective Content Strategy - This is yet another factor that impresses the online buyers or consumers of an e-commerce website. Publish regular blog posts, events, news, awards, etc. on your website. Again remember that you should have your e-commerce web development method must adopt all these dynamic activities. Hire a professional to regularly respond to the comments they left on the website. You should also post tips, buying guides, FAQs, etc., hence your customers would not only buy products they can also visit your website any time when they seek advice. Make sure your tips are valuable to them!

On the contrary, you should also follow your customer and leave comments on their activities. This would build a good retailer-consumer relationship. Do not forget to have a well-built customer service that works round the clock for your customer’s online queries.

5. Monitor your Competitor - Be a member of your competitor’s groups and communities and monitor their activities. This is vital to analyze your business strategies with the market. Stay in touch with them for their “to be launched” products, its pricing, their events, etc.

6. Gather and Display Testimonials - Get feedback and reviews about your service, website, offers and discounts and the quality of the products you sell, from your customers. You can improve your service through the feedback and display valuable testimonials on your website.

If you have all these strategies in your mind while planning your ecommerce website development or in the website upgrade stage, then you would definitely monitor potential changes in your online business and create good social image on the internet.

PixelCrayons offers best magento ecommerce development, online shopping cart development, Magento development & designing services and other ecommerce software services.

Business Web Design Solutions: How to choose the best?

2012-02-14T14:59:00.002+05:30

In today's hyper competitive online arena, it has become imperative to have a great website with superb functionality and excellent user interface. A website is a crucial medium that plays a pivotal role in attracting visitors and also plays an equally important role in turning visitors into potential customers. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that a website should be visually appealing, interactive,and user friendly. All this can be achieved with the help of custom web development. In fact. Almost every business organization opt for a relevant and creative business web design to establish its brand and attract large number of visitors. But to get quality results, it is important to choose the best business web design solution. Read further and you will find out how to find a good web design company.

Do they enjoy a good reputation?
When looking for a good business web design solution, you must first ensure that the service providers you check out should have good reputation. It will ensure that you are on a right track and will ultimately help you to find a reliable and good company. To get an idea about their reputation, you can check out the company in Google. You can also go through the company's renowned clients in their client list. All the positive points tell a lot about the reputation and the trust that a company enjoys.

How does their portfolio look?
Another important thing to look out for is their portfolio. A portfolio says a lot about the company's accomplishments, its capabilities and strength. Observe the portfolio carefully and find out what all services they offer and what projects they have worked on. It will help you to analyze whether they can meet your expectations or not.

Do they have enough experience?
Experience counts a lot. With experience one gains more insight into the technology and learns different ways of doing great things with a given technology. Therefore, an experienced company is likely to provide you with a state of the art web design that will prove to be very beneficial for your business. Also, an experienced web design company clearly understands the specific needs of clients and know how to provide a perfect design.

Do they have good knowledge and skills?
You must ensure that the company you hire has a team of highly skilled and knowledgeable designers. They should be well versed in different technologies and should be aware of the latest trends in the web design industry.

Is their service cost effective?
It is of paramount importance to find out whether the service provider offers cost effective services or not. It is better to confirm their packages and price list prior to hiring as it can later send your budget aflutter. A company that offers cost effective solutions is certainly the best as it will help you reap maximum returns from less investment.

By keeping the above mentioned points in mind, you can find a good and reliable custom website development and designing company. Just keep your eyes open and analyze things well to find a good web design solution provider.

What makes WordPress websites more functional?

2012-02-14T12:37:00.002+05:30

With time, the number of WordPress empowered websites have increased steadily. This is because WordPress development promises a robust, flexible and feature rich website. A WordPress CMS web design makes the entire task of managing, updating and maintaining a website very simple. This is why it is preferred by a majority of people across the world. But what makes WordPress websites more functional and hence more preferred? Let us find out.

First and foremost, WordPress is an extremely user friendly content management system. It is quite flexible and its wide range of features give full control to the owner to edit, update and maintain a website as and when required. Another great thing about WordPress empowered websites is their super rich functionality. A WordPress website is highly functional. This is because it has a large number of helpful and tailor made features that enhance and improve the functionality of a site.

WordPress is a highly advanced software that is designed to meet all the basic requirements involved in managing and operating a website. In fact, you can manage all your WordPress based websites, blogs etc from one central location. WordPress also allows you to monitor all your sites, their statistics, editing, uploading and updating very easily. Moreover all these tasks can be done without any hassle. Few key features that make a WordPress site more functional are

1. Multiple Domain Management: With WordPress manager at your disposal, you can easily create and manage any number of sites. It also lets you to track everything easily and you can also make up to a hundred different domains through your dashboard. This is not all. It also lets you to regularly check and find out whether your domains are running well or not. It really saves a lot of time,. If done manually, all this will consume a big amount of time.

2. Domain Templates: This is another great feature of WordPress manager. With the help of this feature you can create templates for every site. A template has different customization features like plug-ins, desired themes, PHP scripts etc. Thus you can easily give a specific design to your blog by setting up a relevant domain template that meets your requirements. Also, if you wish to create more blogs in future then all you will have to do is to apply the template that you used on the other site. Thus all this is done minus hassle.

3. Full WordPress support: This feature ensures that all the domains that were set automatically will have the latest version of WordPress installed. This not only saves time as you do not have to check for the out dated version but it also makes things simpler as you have to log in only once in order to access all the dashboards.

It is because of all these wonderful features that a WordPress website becomes more functional. Although there is no dearth of WordPress developers but you should always hire a professional and reliable WordPress developer to get best results.

CMS web design- Ultimate need of web bloggers

2012-02-13T11:59:00.003+05:30

In current dynamic online world, just having a simple-looking, ordinary website or blog is not enough. In this speedy business environment, you must have a website that is up to date, reflects a clear image of your business and informs the customers about your specialties, latest news, products and services. And, CMS based websites make all these challenges much easier. CMS web design platform has become the number one choice of bloggers and website owners as it allows them to manage and update their own website content. In addition, CMS development helps them to publish content on the web in an attractive and advanced format. By choosing a CMS design for your website, you can change the images, videos, text and look of your website according to your needs and specifications. Uploading multimedia and PDF files and controlling visitors’ activities without taking the help of developers are some exceptional features of dynamic websites created by using CMS platform.

CMS is a precious gift for all those who want to update their website on a daily basis and do not want to call their web designer each time they require something updated on the website. If you are a blog owner, CMS designs give you the ways to get a control over the content. However, it is installed by web designers on the servers but the best part is that it can be easily used by anyone who has little computer knowledge. Thus, no need to wait for your web designer for every small issue, as a CMS based design allows you to update your website whenever you want with little training. Data can be anything in CMS such as documents, pictures, movies, phone numbers and many more. By using CMS, a bloggers can easily add, delete and update text as well as images in his website.

When a blogger presents fresh updates and unique contents on his blog, he can easily attract more and more visitors to his blog. As a result of this the traffic of his blog will surprisingly raise and thus the blog ranking on search engines will be increased. And, all this can be achieved just by maintaining and organizing blog’s content in best possible ways which can be done effectively by with the help of CMS. Popular CMS like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are powerful and flexible open source platforms that simplify website development, maintenance and optimization. When you choose these tools for your website, you can obtain a thoroughly secure and reliable website. Hence, there is nothing wrong to say that CMS has become an important tool for the success of blogs and online stores and no one can deny this truth.

However, there are some people who are not very familiar with the importance and benefits of Content Management Systems and they think that CMS development is only advantageous for low-traffic websites and hobby blogs. But the fact is that today lots of most popular blogs and high-traffic websites are running on CMS platforms. Reliability of CMS web design can be accepted by the actuality that the official White House website is powered by Drupal CMS.

Pixelcrayons offers best CMS design & development services & opensource content management system solutions which includes wordpress development, joomla development, drupal development services at affordable price.

Get fully Customized Website with Wordpress CMS

2012-02-13T10:16:00.001+05:30

Those who are looking for a fully customized website can achieve their goal by choosing WordPress as a CMS. WordPress is the most popular CMS and blogging platforms available today by which you can create thoroughly professional, visually appealing and fully functional website. This brilliant CMS web design software is constantly being improved and upgraded over time by keeping the current market trend in mind. In present online business world, where each of us is trying to achieve better visibility on the Internet, having a website that is search engine and end-user friendly has become crucial. This is where WordPress customization comes into the picture. It plays a major role to enhance the value of your website in the eyes of visitors. Following are the benefits of having fully customized website:

1. When you have a customized website, you will see that visitors are coming back frequently to view your website. Thus, your brand identity will be increased.
2. A customized website supports SEO friendly features so your website will obtain higher ranking on search engines.
3. You will see the better flow of visitors’ traffic to your website.
4. Better targeting of positive audiences
5. Rising ROI graph

WordPress development offers lots of plugins and themes for website customization. With the help of unique plugins and themes, you can turn WordPress into a fully customized CMS based website.

Themes: If we talk about WordPress themes, they are the collection of PHP files, CSS file(s), associated images and sometimes JavaScript files. As WordPress offers a themes directory, thus you can easily pick the required theme and can amend it through the appearance section of the WordPress back-end. WordPress also offers Child Themes by which you can ensure that your website is functioning properly through multiple upgrades. According to Matt Mullenweg, the founder developer of WordPress, “Child themes are the only way you should build your WordPress site on top of a framework”. Let’s see some of the best theme frameworks.

Genesis: Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced WordPress developer, by using Genesis theme framework you can build a secure and search engine optimized website.

Elegant Themes: This is one of the most popular premium theme frameworks that provide striking and user-friendly WordPress templates.

Woo Themes: By choosing this framework you can obtain exclusive, advanced themes with great customer support.

PageLines: If you are looking for drag & drop theme framework, PageLines could be the best choice for you.

Thematic: It is highly extensible and SEO friendly theme which supports grid based layout samples, drop-down menus, plugin combinations, short-codes for your footer, and much more.

Hybrid: It is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme which supports 15 custom page templates and multiple widget ready areas. It allows you to construct any type of website as per your needs and specifications.

Whether you are going to customize a theme framework or a theme, it is recommended to create a child theme to obtain a fully customized website.

Plugins: Website’s functionality can be improved by WordPress plugins. Always pick popular and well supported plugins in order to obtain a fully functional website. From WordPress Plugin Directory, you can choose the required Plugins. For example, by using ‘Menus Plus+’ plugin, you can create multiple customized menus with pages, categories, posts and URLS. Sometimes organizing a menu list can be quite difficult for CMS based applications of WordPress. But when you use Menus Plus+ plugin, managing or organizing a menu list becomes quite easier for you. All you need to do is to just drag and drop, and your menu will get ready.

By hiring expert WordPress developers, you can obtain specialized WordPress customization services. They will take care of your website or blog customization in a cost-effective and timely manner. As WordPress supports highly flexible architecture, thus developers can easily integrate custom made themes, plug-ins and widgets in your website so that it becomes more striking to your end-users.

Why wordpress is most preferred for blog development?

2012-02-10T13:48:00.002+05:30

WordPress was started as a blogging tool and today it has become a brand name to publish professional as well as elegant content online. In the area of website development, WordPress is getting more and more popular day by day due to offering a wide range of brilliant features. It has made the blog posts creation, comments approval, and customization of the look and feel quite simpler for the bloggers. This CMS web design tool provides endless customization opportunities with huge number of available plugins and themes by which blog owners can easily obtain the desired look and function. As WordPress offers a wide array of benefits thus it has become one of the most preferred platforms for blog development. Let me give you some benefits of WordPress development.

Excellent Themes Support: While using WordPress, you will never feel the shortage of templates as thousands of ready-made themes are available for you. Whether you want keep your blog simple or want to make it fancy, everything is accessible over here.

User friendly & Easy to Use: This is the chief reason to choose WordPress. It will not take more than five minutes to install it on your server. Bloggers can easily add new articles and blog posts, can effortlessly update blogs pages, and also can personalize their themes through the WordPress dashboard which is easily accessed with a special login page.

SEO Friendly Nature: While creating a blog, search engines friendly behavior is the main concern. As, WordPress offers an ample amount of functions like sending pings to other blogs or websites, tagging your posts, making categories and using h1 and h2 tags, it is easy to create a search engine friendly blog by using WordPress.

Handiness: Handiness or convenience is one of the biggest reasons to choose WordPress. Now no more visiting is required at a particular place and time as WordPress is completely online platform where multiple users are working at the same time. Thus, you will never find yourself alone to rectify the same issue. Moreover, you can access it from all places whether it is your home or a coffee shop. Because of being such convenient, WordPress has because most accepted blogging tool.

Plenty of Plugins: WordPress plugins are very helpful to extend the functionality of a WordPress powered blog. Whether you want to add a photo gallery or a contact, or even want to make connection between social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, all these things are no longer difficult now with the help of WordPress Plugins. There are endless options of plugins to choose from and the best part is that they will not affect your overall budget.

A Great Community Support: As WordPress Offers a large user community support to all the WordPress developers thus whenever they face any kind of problem while developing or maintaining a website, they can go through WordPress forums and communities in order to find the answers of their questions.

If you want to create your blog, hire a qualified WordPress developer to get the best results possible. Before picking a developer, make sure that he has experience and proficiency to build a user-friendly and attractive blog.

Magento Web Development Solutions: How to choose the best provider?

2012-02-10T12:08:00.002+05:30

To manage the online businesses, people rely on different technologies so that they can firmly survive in the battle of current competitive era. Lots of convenient technologies have introduced with time in order to improve and enhance online businesses. And, now management of online businesses has become a quite simple due to modern technologies. Magento ecommerce development is one of those brilliant technologies which offer the best possible ways to boost the functionality and success of an ecommerce store. Undoubtedly, Magento development offers the excellent ways to manage and operate an online business successfully. But, to cash the maximum benefits of Magento, it is vital to obtain an extremely flexible and robust website based on Magento. And this is only possible, if you hire an experienced, qualified and professional Magento developer. When it comes to choose skilled Magento developer, there are few things that one should keep in mind.

The main motive to create an online store is to reach out to great target audiences, increase sales and gain maximum profit. This goal can be accomplished when you hire a reliable Magento developer. Hiring the expertise of one could be bit difficult sometimes as there is no lack of Magento service providers. Therefore, one can easily get confused in the existence of massive number of service providers. If you are the one who is planning to hire a Magento developer, be careful and look certain important factors before picking someone.

The most important thing is to find a Magento partner. Search for a trustworthy Magento ecommerce website development company who has a great database of satisfied customers with lots of testimonials. It will ensure that the company has access to Magento support, forums and services, and thus your project will go smoothly. Next thing you have to do is to check the portfolio of the Magento developers. This is very important as it gives you an idea about the core capabilities of the developers and tells whether or not they are capable enough to provide the desired results. As there are a huge number of knowledgeable Magento developers so, you can easily find an expert.

Try to contact with your selected service provider. However, there is nothing wrong if you get in touch with them through internet but try to meet them personally, if possible. Try to directly communicate with developer in order to know their previous records. Give them details of your requirements. It will give you an idea on whether they are comfortable to work on your project. Also, it will help you to know their strengths and weaknesses. After checking out the portfolio of some companies, ask for references from the Magento clients of the company. Never appoint a Magento developer on the basis of his resume. First, take the opinion of few people, and then hire the services of efficient one. Now, properly evaluate the developer’s website and make a decision on the basis of cost vs. quality. Browse the website to analyze whether the charges are reasonable or not. Last but not the least; do not compromise in terms of quality and make sure that you are getting the appropriate services at an affordable price.

How an Ecommerce Website can make your business successful?

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Having online business, or let’s say ecommerce business has never been as easy as it has been today. There are loads of tools, resources and software available that give you step-by-step knowledge and guide you through the entire process. Therefore, ecommerce website development isn’t an Achilles’ heel anymore.

Ecommerce website development could have cost you a fortune if you were thinking of ecommerce web development some years ago. However, due to huge amount of shopping cart software on hand today, you have a range of options to choose from. These software programs have made it possible to have ecommerce web design at affordable prices.

Advantages of Using Open Source Technology:

Open source technologies like Magento are far more beneficial as compared to their commercial counterparts. These benefits may be less glamorous from marketing point of view but are highly beneficial from business point of view. Here are some advantages of using open source technologies:

1. Reliability: Products developed with open source technologies are error free and highly functional. The fact that any error that may arise in any product developed with open source technology can be corrected easily as the source codes are freely available on the World Wide Web.

2. Stability: It is very important for a business solution to be stable. Open source technologies offer higher stability as compared to commercial technologies. The constant modifications and up gradations that happen in these technologies help them combat with the ever changing business environment.

Many people are turning to online shopping today and that is why there are many success stories to take a cue from. However, there is a first time for everyone who enters into this business. These people make scores of basic mistakes. Have a look below to see what these prominent mistakes are.

Handle shipping and delivery on a war footing

Of the loads of back-end work you need to do, handling the shipping and delivery is an important issue. If you want your ecommerce business to be a successful one, you will always need to have products in the stock. You also have to see to it that the products are shipped in the fastest possible way.

You need to have a strong customer support, it imbibes confidence in the minds of the customers. It is a two-way process and therefore both the parties are the beneficiaries.

Choose a niche wisely

In simple words, do not try to be an Amazon in the making. It is a tough task to sell every possible item in the world in one single store. So, choose a niche that you can target and work on. It would be of more practical value to work on a single niche than wasting your time, money and energy on all things around you.

You will soon be a jack of all trades and master of none. Niche markets generally have lesser competition giving you more opportunities to work on. You can easily target your customers and make effective sales. But remember, niche markets mean less audience and even lesser profits.

PixelCrayons offers best magento ecommerce development, online shopping cart development, Magento development & designing services and other ecommerce software services.