Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Image of Wordpress in comparison of other blogging platforms


In today's time, almost every one either has a blog or is planning to have one. Blogging provides us with an excellent medium of communicating with others. WordPress is a well known CMS web design solution and is highly preferred as a quality blogging platform. However, there are many other blogging platforms available. Read further to find out how WordPress development fares when compared to other blogging platforms.
Like most of the other blogging platforms, WordPress is also an open source technology and is free. When it comes to storage allowance, WordPress offers more than most of its competitors. It also provides you with the option to install it on your personal website which many other blogging platforms do not provide. By installing WordPress, you not only get the complete control but  you also get all the bandwidth your internet hosting plan allows.

Many blogging platforms allow only the hosting of image files. Whereas WordPress has another benefit over other platforms as it allows you to host not only images but also a variety of files including Microsoft  Power-point, Word documents, PDFs, videos etc. Being an open source solution, WordPress offers limitless flexibility. This is why it is a favorite among many bloggers. 



When it comes to appearance and widgets, WordPress allows you to customize them completely and lets you to create your own version of a quality blogging experience which you can offer to your visitors.

Now lets us talk about the benefits offered by WordPress. First and foremost, WordPress lets you house your blog on your own server. When it comes to themes, WordPress gives you access to different themes so that you can select and pick the layout you feel would be most appropriate for your website. It also provides you with the ability to change the theme if you feel like.

Next comes extensions and modules. Modules play a very important role in extending the functionality of a website. WordPress has a large number of modules to offer. One can use any module which one feels is suitable for enhancing the ability of a site. You can make your site more feature rich and highly functional by downloading and installing different modules offered by WordPress. Moreover, WordPress has a large community of WordPress developers. And they keep coming up with better solutions to improve the core features of WordPress. This community of developers also ensures that you do not have to seek professional help if and when the need arises. Almost every problem's solution is offered by the community of developers which have developers from across the world.
When it comes to cost, WordPress certainly scores over other blogging platforms. First of all, being an open source technology, it comes for free. All one need to second one is the modules. In fact, most of the modules are also available for free. But there are few for which you will have to shell out money. But that too is an investment as it helps in providing good long term results for a site.

From the above discussion it is evident that WordPress is a quality blogging platform which offers innumerable features and many benefits for a website. It guarantees a highly dynamic, interactive, and a user friendly website. And it offers a lot more in terms of profit when compared to other blogging platforms. You should always hire a professional, reliable and a credible WordPress developer for your website development. It will ensure that you get a cutting edge blog with all the requisite features and a visually appealing interface and layout.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

WordPress Developers: What Type of Services They Provide?

WordPress is the most preferred platform when it comes to CMS web development. The robustness, scalability and user-friendly nature make WordPress website development the first choice for any business when it comes to developing a blog or a website. You shouldn’t be surprised that this platform is powering millions of websites around the world. To get the maximum out of this platform you need to hire services of a WordPress developer who has sound knowledge of the platform and is aware of the latest trends in the world of web development.

Internet is a cat and mouse game and you need to constantly think about tomorrow to be ahead today. Someone has rightly put it that it takes just one click for a trend or technology to become obsolete. Thus a good developer becomes such an important entity in this entire process of getting a website which helps you beat competition.  The services offered by a good WordPress developer can be divided into three broad categories–

1. Custom Development – To stand out amidst competition, your website has to be unique and professional developers offer you custom WordPress development services. They design your website in Photoshop which is the best design platform in the world. Once the site has been designed it is then converted into suitable markup such as HTML/XHTML and CSS before it is integrated into WordPress admin.  The codes undergo W3C validation which ensures your website has flawless coding which will help it perform well on the different web browsers and search engines. Thus you get a website which stands apart and gives your business the much needed competitive advantage. 


2. Search Engine Optimization – This plays a very important role in the success of your website. A good WordPress developer will hand code your website using semantic coding techniques which help in attracting search engine crawlers. They scan through your website easily and offer you higher position on the SERP (search engine result page). They design table-less website which is a must for good SEO. Apart from this he/she will also carry out on-page and off-page optimization which helps your website gain higher ranking easily. This is done by carrying out a targeted keyword research, competition analysis, cross-linking etc. They also make use of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. to attract more traffic into their website.  



3. Website Maintenance and Support – A website needs to be maintained to be in sync with the changing market trends.  A professional wordpress developer offers you support and maintenance support which may be in terms of carrying out some major and minor changes in the website such as adding a new functionality using a plugin. Apart from this they also offer round the clock support which takes care of situations where your website crashes or has faced an external threat such as virus or Trojan horse.  They offer you support in a number of ways via telephone, video conferencing, emails and live chats.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Planning steps to create an effective website

Creating a website is one thing and creating an effective website is quite another. There are tons of websites on the web. But not all fare well on search engine results in terms of sales and ROI. The reason behind this is the manner in which a website is created. To ensure good success, it is important to opt for quality custom website development. In order to survive in the hyper competitive domain, it is important to have a good custom web development to get a dynamic and interactive website.  Mentioned below are the steps to create an effective website.

First and foremost, analyze your business theme and set your priorities right. Before you actually start deciding about the website and its features, it is imperative to analyze your business and your basic requirements. You must set your priorities. You should identify the key areas of your business that you want to highlight in the website. Also, make sure that you have a well planned list of things that you want to include in your business web design.

Second step is to identify your market area. You should identify your target audience. For this you need be clear on what type of audience you wish to cater to through your site. You should also work on including such features that make your target audience return to your site. You also need to work on how to enhance the goals of your business. For this, it is important to include the 'frequently asked questions' section in your website.

Next step is to create a website. But you must keep in mind that designing a creative, dynamic and interactive website requires thorough knowledge of technology and excellent designing skills. Therefore, if you are not technically sound, you should better hire a good designing company.  Even a small mistake can ruin your designing project. Therefore, you should start looking for a professional and reputed web design company. It is very important to hire a reliable web design company which is capable of providing quality website development services. You can find out web design companies by searching on Google. A reputed and reliable company will rank well on Google's search results. Before hiring a company, it is important to check its credibility and reliability.

You should go through the service provider's website carefully. Look for the testimonials sections. Testimonials from clients tell a lot about the company and quality of services provided by them. If you find some bad reviews then it is better to be careful. Secondly, you should also go through their portfolio. Portfolio tells you about the capabilities of the companies designers. It also gives you an idea about whether you will get what you are looking for.

Once you have checked out the company's background and are sure about its credibility, it is time for you to hire them and select a good designing plan for your site. Make sure that the company you hire offers quality service at an affordable price.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

How to make your WordPress website more SEO friendly?

With each passing day, the number of websites on the web is increasing steadily. It is not just the number that is increasing, with it the competition is also growing and has become quite fierce. In order to survive in hyper competitive online arena, a website must be well structured and should have the basic functionality. WordPress is a great software that provides quality websites. This is why the demand for WordPress development has increased manifold. A WordPress CMS web design guarantees a flexible, robust, feature rich, interactive and user friendly website. But at the same time, it is also necessary to make a website more SEO friendly. After all, it is a search engine that decides the fate of a site. Although WordPress is quite SEO friendly but there are ways to make a WordPress website more SEO friendly. Read further and you will find out.
1. Content
Content is one of the most important aspects of a website. With a fresh, relevant and quality content, you can easily make your WordPress site SEO friendly. You should design your  WordPress style sheet in such a way that the content appears close to the top of the page. It guarantees much better and easy readability. This is important since many search engines scan only the first half of web pages.

2. Links
Besides great content, you should also have good links. When it comes to links, both quality as well as quantity matters. You should know who is linking to you. With WordPress you can easily find it out by using pingbacks, trackbacks and blogrolls. You can also use 'Related Posts Plug-in' to get your articles linked to other similar articles that you have.

3. All-In-One SEO Plug-in
The default installation settings of WordPress do not provide enough control for page titles and meta tags. However, you can do this with the help of a plug-in called All-In-One SEO plug-in. It provides more control and lets you add page titles and meta tags that will ensure good SEO results.

4. Image Optimization

It is not just the text that should be optimized for better SEO results, but images also need better optimization. You can optimize your images by writing alt tags and carefully naming your files. This will ensure  good volume of traffic to your site. If you can not do it manually, you can use a plug-in called 'SEO friendly images' for this purpose.

5. Sitemap
Sitemap is another very important aspect of a website. You must add a sitemap to your WordPress website to make it more SEO friendly. A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to index your web pages. If you are technically sound, you can prepare a sitemap on your own. Or else you can opt for an automatic sitemap generator to create a sitemap for your site.
6. Search engine friendly URLs
Another good way of making your WordPress site more SEO friendly is- Go to the site dashboard and select 'settings'. Now select 'permalinks'. Enter /%postname%/ in the custom structure field and click 'Save Changes'. When you do this, your pot titles will appear like yoursitename.com/postname. This great format is not only SEO friendly but also very user friendly.

7.Keywords
You should use keywords in all your posts and on your pages and also in the titles of each post. Keywords should be used appropriately to enhance visitor experience and improve SEO rankings. You can also hire professional WordPress developers to make your WordPress site more SEO friendly. A professional and skilled WordPress developer will optimize your site for best search engine results.

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

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Is Drupal a complete Web Solution?

With the number of websites on the web increasing manifold every day, the competition has only grown fiercer and this is precisely the reason why a website needs to be extra robust, flexible, attractive and user friendly. Advanced technologies like content management systems have made it possible to attain such a website. A good content management system proves to be a complete web solution. Drupal is a well known CMS that offers a range of features and plethora of benefits to the users. This is why demand for Drupal development has increased a lot. A Drupal CMS design helps to achieve perfection in terms of quality design, functionality and visual appeal. So, is Drupal a complete web solution? Let us find out.

Drupal is a user friendly and flexible CMS that gives full control to the user and makes the task of editing, updating and maintaining a website much easier. It incorporates a lot of useful features in a website and enhances the overall performance to boost traffic volume, conversion rate, sales and search engine ranking. Here are some of the key features provided by Drupal development.
1. Easy to edit and update: It is very easy to edit or update a Drupal empowered website. It has the WYSIWYG editor which helps you to do all the tasks effectively. All the changes can be done quickly without any hassle.

2. Large number of modules: Drupal has numerous fantastic modules to offer. These modules help you to extend the functionality of the site in a desired manner. These modules also help in organizing and managing the content in an efficient manner.

3. SEO friendly: Drupal is a search engine friendly solution. It gives you an upper hand when it comes to controlling your URLs. It helps you in customizing the content in such a manner that makes your site gain better search engine visibility. It also ensures that search engine spiders are able to read the whole content.

4. Dynamic solution: Drupal is based on PHP. PHP is a programming language which is compatible with various operating systems and hence it enhances your website's performance and makes it more dynamic.

5. A big community: Drupal has a large developers' community that provides you with regular news, feeds, feedback, articles, polls, surveys, etc. Hence it ensures that you will never find yourself in a fix in case you are stuck with something , as the community provides solution to almost all problems.

6. Reliable and secure: Since Drupal has a big community, it ensures that Drupal is reliable and secure because extensive work is done in order to improve it further.

7. Revert back option: Just in case you do not like the new version, you can anytime revert back to the old version. Moreover, you can do that all by yourself and do not have to depend on a professional to do that for you. It just takes a few click to revert back to the old version.

From the above discussion it is evident that Drupal is very effective and quality solution that enhances the website's performance and boosts its ability to generate maximum profit in terms of traffic, sales and search engine ranking. It can be said that Drupal is a complete web solution. However, in order to derive maximum benefit out of Drupal it is imperative to ensure that Drupal development is done in a quality manner. Therefore, you should only hire professional and experienced Drupal developers. A professional Drupal developer can provide you with a perfect Drupal based website that would be highly professional, dynamic, interactive, user friendly and robust.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Let’s talk about the two ways of Joomla Web Designing


In the present times of website designing and development, Joomla CMS has carved a niche for itself. It is a powerful open source content management system, widely used for developing complex large scale community websites. As an open source content management system and amazing and impeccable options for extensibility, Joomla has become one of the favorite content management systems for the web designers and developers.

Two broad ways of Joomla Web Designing –

Broadly speaking, the web designers and developers have two ways of developing the Joomla powered web application. These two ways are – getting a template based design and the next option is developing the website from the scratch with PSD to Joomla conversion.

Both of these options are discussed in detail below –

Using a template design – One of the resourceful features of Joomla development is that it has been grown owing to the vast community of the Joomla developers. The online Joomla community is one of the largest online communities for any open source content management system. The online community comprising of fervent Joomla developers provides them with a platform to share Joomla designs and extensions and support each other.
In order to design a website, one can choose from a plethora of Joomla themes and designs already available over internet. The same design can be obtained, either free of cost or at little premium charges (i.e. if you wish to have a premium website) and you can develop the website based on the same template / theme design.

The plus point of this option is that it relatively takes less of time and is more cost effective, as premium templates can be obtained, comparatively at a much lower rate than developing the website from the scratch.

However, the negative point is that a template design is developed according to the wishes and perception of the web designer / developer. It is not really a solution customized for your needs as an enterprise, and you would have to sacrifice and adjust your business needs, in order to fit into the template design.

Developing from the scratch i.e. PSD to Joomla conversion – To be really honest, this is the scientific and apt way of going about developing a Joomla powered website. Any business house is a unique identity and thus a template design is not fit enough to represent the individual aspects of the corporate entity.
Thus for a distinct and personalized solution, opt for PSD to Joomla conversion.
Understanding the process of PSD to Joomla conversion –

The process of PSD to Joomla conversion starts with you as a corporate house sending the PSD file to the web designer / developer.

A PSD file is photoshop design file, which allows the users to design a unique looking and impressive website. However, such files lack browser compatibility and do not provide any level of user navigation. In order to receive a browser compatible and dynamic website, PSD to Joomla conversion is must.

Before integrating the Joomla CMS into the website, first the PSD file is coded into the basic markup language, i.e. HTML. PSD to HTML conversion process begins with slicing the PSD file into various sections i.e. Header, Footer, Body, Navigation Menu etc. and there upon coding the same to reveal a web compatible, pixel perfect, and SEO semantic web application.

Once the PSD to HTML conversion has been carried out and the resulting markup has been tried and tested across various web browsers and is confirmed to have W3C validation and cross browser compatibility, the Joomla CMS is then integrated into the web site.

Thus not only does the PSD to Joomla conversion include all the important features, they also allow you to uniquely represent yourself in the virtual world. 


Author Bio- PixelCrayons is a business web design and development company that specializes in custom website development, all kind of CMS & ecommerce solutions like Wordpress Development, Joomla Development, Drupal Development, Magento Development etc.