Why is Responsive Web Design Important for E-Commerce?

It is a common question that why a business needs to make a responsive website and why it is essential for e-commerce to do it asap?

There is a list of factors that necessitates business to have a responsive website.

Read the insights to unleash the facts behind the reasons of having a web responsive website.

Increased mobile usage

About 91% people use the mobile device or a smartphone and 55% of website traffic is from mobile devices.

The number alone establish the relevance of creating a website which is responsive and doesn’t devoid the user of the experience which he otherwise will have on the desktop website.

With the increasing number of users going mobile there are in fact more mobile devices on Earth than there are humans.

Clearly, this means that your prospective customer will be accessing your website through a mobile device.

If their experience is ruined because your website wasn’t responsive, you may lose them to the competitor in like a matter of seconds. 

The number of online shoppers is growing

With the comfort and ease that online shopping is providing, it’s very difficult for people to consider retail stores for shopping.

Now with that said, if they are going to shop online and that too with their mobile devices we need to create mobile responsive websites to match up the contemporary requirements.

Social media drives website traffic through mobile devices

If 55% of social media consumption is happening on mobile devices that will practical translate that your website will be visited by mobile users upon sharing a link on social media like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or Google Plus.

So if you are planning on to leverage social sharing of content, go responsive!

Make the Google smile!

Google recommends responsive development for good SEO rankings. The responsive website performs better in search rankings because it provides a better user experience.

Additionally, Google has separate search algorithm for mobile phones so a site which ranks high via a desktop search won’t necessarily rank high via a mobile search if it is not responsive. Furthermore, mobile searches already overtook desktop searches.
These facts dictate that making the mobile responsive website is no more an option.

Fitting to multiple devices sizes

The problem is that when we think about mobile devices we only think about smartphones and tablets. Mobile devices also include smartwatches and Google Glass and many more devices which are yet to get launched.

Now, a responsive web design will look good in any given device size and we give the user a seamless experience without increasing bounce rate.

One site is easier to manage and increases ROI

To keep two versions updated all the time is a lot of work and multiple version which are improperly managed may give interrupted user experience while the user is interacting with the website.

With a responsive website, you won’t worry to manage two separate website versions and it will adapt to any given device ensuring best user experience.

Also, it will reduce your content management costs which in turn will lead to higher ROI.

Responsive sites provide a better user experience

All the reasons to implement a responsive website sums up to providing a better user experience. Pinching and zooming ruins the user experience and responsive website ensures no more pinching and zooming and side-scrolling!

And a needless to say that a better user experience reduces bounce rates improves brand image and boosts lead conversions.

How to get a responsive website?

At Consagous, we have dedicated team of mobile app developers who are expert in delivering mobile responsive websites at competitive rates. Reach us here

Consagous also offers high end blockchain development solutions.

Courtsey:- https://www.consagous.com/responsive-web-design-important-e-commerce/

Difference UX and UI Design

Looking for a one-liner and easy to understand ‘difference between UI and UX design’? Just so you know, you have stumbled upon just the right source.

In a layman language, UX is the experience that a person has as they interact with your product and UI is basically the look and feel of the product.

Of Course this is the simplest version of the UX and UI definition and is giving a very limited view of the subject. And obviously for a detailed version, one will have to dive in deep.

Let’s understand it in bits and pieces first.

What is UX?

The technical definition given by Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen says, “The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next, comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use.

True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings, there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.”

Decoding the same, UX encompasses the entire journey of a user which includes but is not limited to:

 The process they go through to discover your company’s product

    The sequence of actions they take as they interact with the interface

    The thoughts and feelings that arise as they try to accomplish their task

    The impressions they take away from the interaction

It is the role of UX designer for ensuring that the company delivers a product or service that meets the needs of the customer and allows them to seamlessly achieve their desired outcome.

For that, user research is conducted to get the context of the users of the product and those learnings are used to mockup wireframes and prototypes to direct the user from one window to the next.

What is UI?

As the Business Dictionary explains it, UI is “Visual part of a computer application or operating system through which a user interacts with a computer or a software. It determines how commands are given to the computer or the program and how information is displayed on the screen.”

The role UI designer is to work on websites, apps, wearables, and other programs.

They may be responsible for things like designing the layout of a digital product’s interface and the visual elements on all the pages or screens of the system.

What’s the difference between UI and UX?

To get a better understanding let’s go through the take of various influencers on the subject.

1.    Ken Norton – Partner at Google Ventures, Ex-Product Manager at Google

“Start with a problem we’d like to solve. UX design is focused on anything that affects the user’s journey to solve that problem, positive or negative, both on-screen and off. UI design is focused on how the product’s surfaces look and function. The user interface is the only piece of that journey. I like the restaurant analogy I’ve heard others use: UI is the table, chair, plate, glass, and utensils. UX is everything from the food, to the service, parking, lighting, and music.”

2.    Andy Budd – Co-founder of Clearleft, Founder of UX London

“Common logic would suggest that, if you design the UI, and a person experiences a product through the UI, that makes you a User Experience Designer. However, this would also imply that designing your own home makes you an architect, and fixing a tap makes you a plumber.

Often the words used to describe a discipline end up being divorced from their original meanings. For instance architect literally, means “head mason” and plumber means “lead worker”.

Two names which clearly no longer articulate or explain what that profession does.

In a professional context “User Experience Designer” has a specific meaning and set of skills, based on a community of practice reaching back over 20 years. In this world, a User Experience Designer is concerned with the conceptual aspects of the design process, leaving the UI designer to focus on the more tangible elements.”

3.    Craig Morrison – Head of Product at RecordSetter, Founder of Usability Hour

“I hear this question all the time, and I’ve answered it multiple times. Ultimately I’ve come to this conclusion…

There is no difference between UX and UI design because they are two things that aren’t comparable to each other.

For example, it’s kind of like asking…

What is the difference between red paint and the chemicals the paint is made up of?

There is no difference.

Red paint is made up of all sorts of different chemicals that when combined together make red paint…

Just as the user experience is made up of a bunch of different components, user interface design being just one of them, that when combined together make up the user experience.

Here are a few other questions to illustrate my point…

What is the difference between a MacBook and the shape of the keyboard keys?

What’s the difference between tea and the type of material the tea bag is made from?

What’s the difference between a car and the color it’s painted?

If we’re talking about delicious cake (and why wouldn’t we be?), UI is the icing, the plates, the flavor, the utensils, and the presentation. UX is the reason we’re serving cake in the first place, and why people would rather eat it than hamburgers.”

4.    Patrick Neeman – Director of Product Design at Apptio, Founder of Usability Counts

“User Experience Design is the complete experience, and it may not be even on the screen. User Interface Design is generally visual design and information design around screens. UX goes back to the Nielsen Norman Group’s definition of UX — any touch point a user or customer has with a system, digital or not.”

5.  Scott Jenson – Product Strategist at Google

“I don’t get too wrapped up in this distinction as they frequently are used interchangeably. However, when pressed, I see the UI as focusing on the product, a series of snapshots in time.

The UX focuses on the user and their journey through the product. The UI tends to be the specifics of screens, focusing on labels, visual style, guidelines, and structure.

The UX is the path through a product, escaping the screen and articulating the user’s journey and motivations, justifying why things are in the UI and even more importantly, why things are left out. The UI copes with constraints, the UX challenges them.”

6.  Clayton Yan – User Experience Designer at UserTesting

There’s a lot of confusion around what UI and UX are, what the main differences are, or if there are any differences at all. They are definitely different things, but they must go hand in hand to create a beautiful and intuitive experience.

The way that I’ve always explained it is to think about building a house. When you’re building a house, you need to think of the broad structure and layout.

• Do you need 2 or 3 bedrooms?
• Do those bedrooms each have their own bathroom?
• Is the living room the first thing you walk into after entering the door?
• Is it a one-story or two-story home?

To me, UX is the overall experience of your house (or product). Do things make sense? How does it make your user feel?

The next level of the user’s journey is the interface they actually interact with. Continuing with the house example, the UI is the visual theme throughout the house. What type of wallpaper will you use? Do you have the same flower vases around the house? Or different ones?

The UI is, like its name implies, the things the user will actually interact with and see. This includes buttons, forms, pictures, etc.

UX without UI means you’ve got a frame and structure to your house, but it’s not beautiful and cohesive. UI without UX is like splashing awesome colors and details throughout the house but having your front door leading straight into a bathroom. You need both to create an awesome end to end experience.

Typically, UX design goes ahead of UI design, because you want to do research, broad sketches, and general workflows first. Then once you’ve got the broad strokes nailed down, you work on the UI design to bring it all together so it feels like a beautiful, well-designed product.”

So, what do you think? We hope that we have clarified most of your doubts, for any further queries reach us

This Content has been taken from https://www.consagous.com/difference-ux-ui-design/

Using PhoneGap in Eclipse to develop applications for Android or other mobile platforms

If you have been hearing a lot about this new kid on the mobile development block - PhoneGap (http://phonegap.com), and are as confused as I was when I started diving deeper, you've come to the right place to sort out your understanding a bit.

1)What is phonegap?

"PhoneGap is an open source solution for building cross-platform mobile apps with modern, standards-based Web technologies. Based on HTML5, PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best... HTML and JavaScript."

The meaning itself does not make things very clear though. Let me explain clearly. So today, suppose you have a web application that you want to organize on multiple platform, say Android, iPhone, etc. In this app, you want to use one or more of the platform services to obtain some kind of data or carry out some kind of processing. That means, if you're the developer of such an app, you'll most probably have to deal with consuming the platform's contact book using, for doing which, each platform would obviously have its own different ways. So there are 2 problems here:

1) How can you query the platform's contact book from within your web application which is being written in javascript and has no knowledge of the platform's APIs.

2) How can you do so in a platform agnostic way, so that your web app works not just on Android but also on iPhone, notwithstanding the different ways of using the contacts book in both.

Phonegap tries to be the response to both of the above questions. How? It gives APIs which conceptual the stage's contact book for you, so you just manage the Phonegap API and let phonegap do whatever is left of the enchantment for you.

2) How do I set up/install Phonegap on my system?

This present one's not as insignificant as a setup.exe, unfortunately! Phonegap requires a group of things to be introduced on the machine before beginning. I discovered this archive about introducing phonegap - http://wiki.phonegap.com/w/page/16494774/Getting-started-with-Android-PhoneGap-in-Eclipse. Tragically, I sat down doing every one of the means and till a couple of hours, I was not in any case ready to make my first phonegap hi world application.

Along these lines, the best activity here is to take after the above archive till the "step 1f" i.e. install eclipse, android sdk, android advancement devices, apache ANT, and ruby. What's more, you're practically done! Truly, don't get scared by the rest of the means in the doc. Stage 2 onwards is a more extended method for introducing phoneGap and more significant when you wouldn't utilize Eclipse. Also, that as well, doesn't some way or another work as expressed.

Phonegap can be specifically introduced on Eclipseas a module. You should simply go to Help>Install new software>Add and utilize the download website " https://svn.codespot.com/an/eclipselabs.org/portable web-improvement with-phonegap/labels/r1.2/download". At that point ensuring "contact all accessible refresh destinations" is checked, introduce the phonegap module. Voila! No compelling reason to download phonegap sources from github.

3) How do I create my first phonegap application?

On Eclipse, first create a new phonegap project by clicking on the phonegap comnand you see on the coolbar. Then if you don't have downloaded sources for phonegap, check

"Use Built-in PhoneGap" on the project wizard. Click Next and create the new Android project in the Android project wizard. (Note: You can also simply create an Android project, making sure that the android main activity class extends DroidGap class instead of Activity class. Make sure you add "phonegap.jar" as an external library to the build path.).

You see that a phonegap application is only an android application with the fundamental movement class broadening phoneGap's droidgap class and it's onCreate technique stacking a html page as opposed to playing out any local usefulness. You can supplant this html page by one of your own decision in the advantages/www folder. Check out http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/phonegap/creating-an-android-hello-world-application-with-phonegap/for some great illustrations.

You can now utilize the phonegap APIs, for example, the contacts API, media player API, geolocation API, and so on. Swell is a program based emulator (a chrome augmentation) that you can use to test the PhoneGap applications. (Testing on the Android emulator is somewhat moderate with web applications).

How is Laravel Advantageous with PHP to create Advanced Application?

An advanced web application involves lots of attention and complexity. The developers need to use various frameworks for creating PHP framework and web applications to have a secure and well-organized development. Laravel framework is such popular framework which is used since last few years by the developers to create PHP based framework.

Laravel is actually an open-source PHP framework which is anticipated for web application development based on the model view controller MVC  architectural pattern. Some of its features are modular packaging system that provides different ways for accessing relational databases. It has become one of the most important and popular PHP frameworks that have shown authoritative control over the other platforms.

The real potential of this framework has created many fullstack developers who are able to create inconvertible and advanced applications. 

The benefits of Laravel developers are really massive. Let’s know about the important ones

• Templates with lightweight
• MVC Architecture with organized code
• Advanced built-In Tools
• Modular and Extendible Framework
• Built-in authorization libraries

These are some of the features that show that Lavarel is really amazing with PHP for creating advanced applications. And, this is the reason fullstack developers are increasing, as it completely makes their development task simple and easy.

Why Choose Symfony Web Development ?

These days developers build very complex websites and cloud apps using symfony development. From core PHP, it's hard to develop good and complex websites and cloud apps, therefore developer moves towards framework which makes it easy to build a complex and user-friendly website.

As we know PHP as a scripting language has given birth to several frameworks in its wake. There has been the YII, the Cake PHP, the CodeIgniter, the Symfony and several of the other frameworks which have helped the most seasoned of the PHP programmers in developing the most complex of the web applications and websites.

Symfony  provide many features :

•     It is a combination of PHP components and web application framework.
•     It's a cross platform which lowers workflow, time and cost while delivering superior quality of applications. 
• Symfony provide quick, easy to learn and flexible website development with advanced features.
• By using Symfony, you can build powerful enterprise applications.

Symfony is an open source framework and used to create powerful web applications as it is supported on PHP Programming to preserve web applications to remove repetitive coding. Symfony is based on PHP 5 to boost up building and maintaining web applications. Symfony development offers robust structure, component and tools to create powerful web applications. Symfony implements Model-View-Controller (MVC) and it is high performance PHP framework for web development.

There are many advantages of using Symfony:

•     High quality solutions at lower cost while maintaining best quality.
•    Give Support after implementation. 
•     MVC structured code and  ready to use plugins.
•   Maintaining the coding standards, big community of Symfony Developers & Simple to extend.
• With Symfony you can code faster, MVC design pattern, database engine independent, SEO friendly and attractive URLs, test driven development, quick application development, inbuild ORM support.

Consagous Technologies is a topnotch Symfony web development Company provides one-stop solution for all your Symfony Application Development requirements. Our Symfony Web developers have many years of experience and rich knowledge in Symfony Development. For more details about web development visit at Consagous Technologies.