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Best Platforms For Building Websites

Building a memorable, beautiful website looks great on any device. It is the most dominant tool for communication and a unique way to connect with the world. Nowadays websites have become an essential part of our day to day life. Regardless of what the profession is, there is a website for each to build an image and boost growth. This is the only medium where both seekers and givers come under one roof and the best medium to introduce oneself to the internet and also to improve one's business.  

Uses of a website in the business:-

• Represents your business/organization

• Platform to introduce business and services

• Will provide round the clock support

• Improve sales and profit

• Gives quick feedback

• Increased credibility

Care should be taken while choosing a platform to build a website where a platform is a programming language that the site will utilize. A decision should be taken depending on the site's functionality, features, maintenance cost, database, servers etc. Most important among all is to consider the skill of the team who will handle the troubleshooting and maintenance work. Go for the one which gives you a full bang for your buck.

Most popular development platforms include:-

> PHP - PHP scripting language is one of the simple, easiest and widely used language for building websites. This allows the developers to quickly grasp the development environment. While working in PHP if any problem or error occurs that makes you stuck, it provides full support to overcome the situation. It's easy to find the documentation online on PHP for free because PHP is an open source scripting language and does not require a lot of system's resources that results in much faster than any other language.

> ASP.NET - ASP.net framework reduces the amount of coding and is used to build large applications where the same things are developing over and over. It is very useful and reduces the amount of coding. ASP.net enables data caching from the database that makes the website work very fast even after regular visits to the database. This is language independent that enables the developers to select a language which is suitable for the application and offers crash shielding.

> JSP - Java Server Pages is a server-side programming technology that helps in the creation of dynamic, platform-independent web-based applications. It includes Active Server Pages (ASP), pure servlets, Server-Side Includes (SSI), JavaScript and static HTML.

> Magento - Open source technology that provides a flexible shopping cart system, search engine optimization (SEO), powerful marketing, and catalog-management tools. This is one of the best e-commerce platforms. Benefits of using Magneto include:

• Easy to install and add additional layouts

• flexible and scalable

• Effective and cost sensitive

• Offers more than 50 payment gateways

> Joomla - This is an open source Content Management System (CMS) used to build websites and online applications which is free and separated into front-end templates and back-end templates. Joomla is developed by using PHP, Object Oriented Programming, software design patterns, and MySQL.

> Drupal - It is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) which is reliable and secure that allows organizing, managing and pushing the content. Drupal is built on PHP based environment.

> WordPress - It's easy to learn, use, and update. It makes the website load faster with a catching tool and an easy way for users to sign up for the monthly newsletter. Wordpress provides a lot of support & security and it's great for SEO.

> OpenCart - It is a robust open source shopping cart system with rich in its features and user-friendly. This allows creating a brilliant online business at a very low cost.

>  ZenCart - Zencart is free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software for small and medium-sized enterprises. It supports client status modes and has multiple payment and shipping options. This helps the organizations to grab a foothold in the global market.

> Shopify - It is a fully-featured content management system with a complete control over the website's navigation and design. It's easy to host the entire business website on shopify.

> Prestashop - Prestashop is a powerful, professional, and dynamic e-commerce solution for any business that helps to grab the global marketplace. It offers customization opportunities and a unique interactive interface.  

The first step towards any project is to come up with a platform that suits your website requirements. Need to set the website goals and the right choice lies here. The need for business varies from person to person which includes alot like selling a product, post and present content, brand popularity, etc. After focusing on the needs you'd like to use the website with a better scope by figuring which platform to use for your project. Actually, the best platform depends on what you're trying to achieve and there are no such best platforms. It actually depends on your specialization as a web designer and the complexity of websites you're trying to build.

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Does Low Website Speed Affect Your Business

Are you tired of seeing the rotation of your browser's load status icon never stops when you access certain websites. Sometimes the website you are trying to access takes a lot of time to load that your patience is finally run out. How long will you be spending on such a website? Not much time, right?Yes, the speed of your site has a greater influence on your user's satisfaction than any extra "bells and whistles". It doesn't matter however great your website looks if it takes a lot of time to load, the users will move away.The stats published by Akamai say that almost 40% of internet users will ignore a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.First impression is the best impression It may be a proverb but it's also a fact. The first impression of the visitor will be negative if the page doesn't load on time and the person will step backward automatically. Hence you are losing a visitor who could be your potential customer.Load speed is the base of any great website, and so you need to take it as it is the foundation of your website. If your site is slow, it's pushing you backward.Let's look where all it gets affected.

1. Conversions and Sales As aforesaid, most people leave a website when it takes more than 3 seconds to load, which is a straight loss of potential clients and thus loss of potential revenue. So, website speed can rigorously influence your conversion rate.Suppose your website gets 1,000 visitors a month, you could miss 400 of them if your site slows down. You can think how much that will influence your conversion rate! If you're a small company rivaling for new customers, you can't afford to slow down. Conversions fall by 12% for every extra second taken for loading and revenue increases by 3.2% if you improve average loading speed from 4 to 2 seconds.

2. From Visitor's point of view A slower website will annoy the visitors from the starting itself and that can influence the rest of their time on your site. It is estimated that 47% of users require a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, especially for Ecommerce websites. Website load speed is your first opportunity to give a wonderful user experience. As mentioned it's all about the first impression, and you only get one chance at it. When a website pops up fastly, you just built your initial positive experience in the user's thought. And your site may get registered automatically in their mind.Creating a memorable user experience has a simple formula. Give the visitors what they're seeking for, and do it as fast as possible! Anything that slows users down or distracts them leads to a poor user experience. When it comes to user's point of view, Google's research shows that faster site speed leads to satisfied users, increased productivity, and more time users spend browsing.

3. Low PageSpeed hinder SEO Performance A slow website is challenging not only for the end-user but also for the website's SEO. That is, it can make your website to place lower in search engine results. That means your websites visits from search engines get reduced to a great extent and revenue or conversion of the customers from this will be reduced.While looking through the SEO point of view, Google, Bing, and other search engines use site speed as one of the many factors that decide rank. It's also applicable both on the desktop and mobile platforms. If your site's speed isn't up to level, you may have to face the ranking penalties.The purpose why site speed is considered by the search engines is because of they want to point users to sites with the best overall appearance and information. Search engine optimization is a keen-witted business. No-one truly knows how Google's algorithm works except the Google techie heads.But one thing we at Mizzle know clearly is that Google will not rate and rank slow loading websites highly as Google's mission is to "make the entire web faster". It doesn't mean the website speed is a massive ranking factor, but, yet it is a factor, which Google's Search Engine head Matt Cutts has openly revealed.As far as SEO is concerned it is not just the Pagespeed being a ranking factor, but there is another factor that could hinder your website's SEO performance if it loads slowly. Google bots will not be getting the right updates about your site and its blogs while crawling. And hence it would affect your SEO rankings.You are having a website with faster page load doesn't mean it will be solving all your SEO problems, instead it makes sure that your website is getting crawled and indexed frequently and the website's pagerank is improved.

4. Slow Website cause Higher Bounces Rate Bounce rate is nothing but how many visitors left your website without clicking on a single link on the site. They might have even left without looking the contents or the products advertised. Sometimes it may be due to the lack of good look and feel or they didn't find what they were looking for.Page speed is inversely proportional to the bounce rate. Lower the speed, higher the bounce rate. Your bounce rate is an indication of what the users felt while going through the site, i.e. if your site's bounce rate is low the visitors of your site are happy and exploring your site. A huge bounce rate implies they're moving out quickly. It will directly affect your sales, conversion, and SEO as well.You must now be aware of the importance of Website speed. If your website is loading slower or your users are complaining about the site speed or your website is not performing well in Search Engines, you must get your website optimized to improve the page load time.

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Best social media tools to grow your business

Social media has gained its own importance in our everyday lives. We rely on Social Media for various purposes. One of the popular social media platforms is Facebook that it holds over 2 million active accounts. Other platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat are some of the other popular ones that are growing year by year. Day by day, we can see an increase in the number of social media users, and if you still not using any of the social media platforms to grow your business, then you are definitely missing the best opportunity ever. Some of the household terms that are actively using and exploring includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. These platforms provide wide range of opportunities to share your brands and convert users and even visitors to our customers. Remember the fact that, you are not the only one who are targeting the customers to grow your business. All active social media channels are now a platform for competition that you need to step up your own campaigns to attain your goals. Now, the influencer marketing and user generated content has occupied its own space in the social media industry. All social media platforms are updating itself with the latest trends that if well utilized, you can stay on top of the game. Below listed are some of the social media tools that will help you keep your social media presence active and strong. Let’s dive into it. • Unbox Social To grow your industry in a way you dreamed of, you need to continuously analyze and monitor your performance. This is the same in case of social media. There are a lot of analytical tools available where not all of them work well and give you in-depth analysis. So, for better social media analysis and reporting you need to go with the best analytical tool. Unbox Social is a social media analytical tool that works well and give you an in-depth analysis on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. With the help of this tool you can easily track various metrics to measure your performance. Now, with this tool your analysis process works easier and quicker. With this tool you can even generate social media reports in pdf, Ppt or xls formats and you can customize the reports by the time period for which you want it as well as by the format. Another feature that Unbox delivers is the news feed where the home page of unbox displays news feed section just for you. This keep you updated on what’s happening in your industry and you don’t miss out a single piece of news anymore. • BuzzSumo BuzzSumo is a tool that measure social reach. This tool holds various features like competitor research, content insights, and brand monitoring. The powerful content insights feature allow you to identify the content that your audience are looking for and it optimizes the content marketing strategy to drive management. With the reports and insights, you can have valuable information that aids in enhancing your campaigns. It mainly covers snapshots of most shared domains by social network, content overview, and analysis of your content across various social media platforms. Another advantage with this tool is that, it makes competitor research easier that let you know where you actually stand. This comes in the form of competitor content performance reports, and competitor comparison reports. • Buffer Reply Buffer is a social media tool to drive a campaign which involves a number of social media platforms. Buffer reply is one of the tools that buffer offers. The features of buffer reply make it more convenient for you to manage conversions across all social media inboxes via single platform. As customer service management holds large space on social media, buffer reply offers the features that help you do the same. This tool allows you to make meaningful interactions with your audience that you can get full overviews of conversations with customers. Along with all these, Buffer offers another tool named Analyze that help you to track your performance through the facts on social media and lets you know which content performs the best. • Hootsuite Hootsuite is a social media tool which is capable to promote a business and drive a campaign. It covers almost all of the major social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. To maintain your social media presence, this tool offers you an automated scheduling that you can create an inventory of all the content that you wish to post along with other creatives that really work. It also provides you a team management feature that makes the teamwork run in a smooth manner and also it features a way to protect your brand from social media risks. • Bubochat The direct message feature was introduced on Instagram and people make use of this to interact with others. This includes businesses whose products they want to use. In some cases, the number of messages that comes to your Insatagram direct message will be bulkier as different people from different places come at different time zones. You may feel difficult in maintain the Instagram IM but at the same you want to build a relationship with your target audience in a most trusted way. So, one of the important part of building relationship- with them is by responding to each and every message that you receive. The Bubochat Instagram direct message chatbot works well in this case by giving automatic response to all the messages that you receive on time. With this, your Customer Management System is covered for on Instagram. • Mention Now, you can monitor all your conversations based on your brand on social media and all other blogs, websites, forum and lot more with the tool Mention. As brand building is a constantly evolving process, it is very important to be aware of when, where and in what way people talk about your brand. With the help of mention tool, you can get alerts at the same spot when there is a mention about your brand. With this you can continuously track your reputation across different social media networks. Proper tracking and well understanding of your audience’s statement of your brand is an important task. You can build a direction for your social media strategy by following all the conversations and mentions about the brand across social media and web. • Videoshop Video content is one form of content that works today which is referred to as the ‘Future of Content Marketing’. The long form vertical video feature has gained its own space on social media, especially on Instagram. Recently IGTV have come up with a new content type on the platform from which you can create engaging and innovative videos. For easy, streamlined video editing on your smartphones, you can use the tool Videoshop. With this app, you can remove unwanted moments, integrate music, and add subtitles. This tool is perfect to make IGTV videos that results in an increase in your engagement. This works for other video type content as well. • Canva In this creative world, visual content is more preferred than text content. To pick up the right visual content strategy, Canva can guide you. Canva, with variety of templates fits well for all social media platforms i.e.; from Facebook to Email invitations and even twitter header. With Canva, that holds infographics, you can make your content more interesting and meaningful by using the elements like numbers, bar graphs, text, vectors, pictures, etc. The photo editing feature offers wide range of free badges and icons. For excellent visual content, you can even add textures, frames, etc. This tool is the best for creating great photo content.

I hope that the above discussed tools will help you and it is a tricky task to pick the one since there is hardly any single tool that fits the bill. Depending upon your goals and marketing campaign, you can pick the tools that fit your needs.