Your site reflects your company, your products, your services and ultimately your brand. So it’s important to be visually appealing, polished and professional. A website instantly showcases work or talent, your employment potential may increase, you can be an instant entrepreneur, knowledge can be expanded, you can amp up creativity, you can grow and promote your blog, promote yourself, people can see your ideas any time, and websites connect the world.
Few points to note before planning your new website:
1. Who is it for: Identify your target audience, their domains, region, age group, etc.
2. How big is your website: Create a structure like a blueprint or a sitemap on a piece of paper.
3. Content: Prepare your textual content ready and proofread, which you will like on the Home page, About Us, Contact, FAQs, Vision/Mission/Our Values, etc. before handing it over to the web developer.
4. Imagery: Gather few free/paid images (try free pics, stock images, etc.) Once the free images have been placed on the website. If you like the way the images are looking on your website, you can consider buying them.
5. Brand: Do you have a logo to use? Which font are you going to use? What about color? What about any design elements? Hire a good designer to help you with this. You would certainly not like to change your logo & branding sometime later in the middle of your business progression. It is just the right time to get it done before reaching out widespread via your website.
6. Usability: Usability is vital to the success of your web design. One of the primary considerations is consistency. It is wise to break down all the elements you will use, such as buttons, hover states, and menus. If you include clickable elements in rounded rectangles, then all your buttons should be rounded rectangles and so on.
7. Layout: Designing a website has the same basic principles as laying out a poster or front page. It is essential that you organize your page for ensuring a good balance of images and text. More than half of users feel that good design is no less important when viewing content online.
8. Responsive: We consume the internet in so many ways these days, with people choosing to access the web from many different devices. From smartphones to widescreen televisions, there are so many screen sizes for a website to appear on. According to one study, consumers use an average of five different devices each, and that gives you some perspective as to how important it is that your website is suitable for each of these different devices. Having a responsive site ensures that the user experience is so much better and this will help to keep people on your website. Indeed, it’s said that 62% of companies who designed a website specifically for mobile increased their sales. With this in mind, you are going to have to consider how your design will lend itself to a condensed space like on a smartphone.
9. Inspiration: There are plenty of places online that you can turn to for inspiration. Sites such as Dribbble, Behance, and Awwwards are terrific resources showcasing amazing web design and are great to turn to if you are ever stuck for ideas. By exposing yourself to different design elements that you may not have even considered before, you can be inspired to try something new.
If you are looking for SEO-friendliness, an online portfolio integrated with social networks, a presentational website for professional or personal use, a blog, news portal, or a platform with a heavy load of written content, a simple webshop, or a mid-size eCommerce website then WordPress is a great platform for this. If building an eCommerce site on WordPress, the best practice is to use WooCommerce, a completely customizable WP platform specifically designed for eCommerce solutions. All in all, if you want to a build responsive, optimized, high-performing website – and you want to build it fast – WordPress is likely your best choice.
If you are dealing with more complex requirements and you want to build custom web applications supported with excessive documentation, you should consider Laravel.
The main purpose of creating Laravel back in 2011 was to help developers deal with complicated tasks more easily. That’s why this framework is focused on flexible, straightforward syntax coding.
If you are looking for complex web applications, dynamic websites with flexible back-end systems, membership-based platforms that process a lot of information. Large-scale eCommerce websites with 10,000+ products. One of the most important advantages of Laravel is the incorporated unit-testing feature that enables multiple, simultaneous tests and provides additional stability to web apps. Plus, its pragmatic MVC pattern makes Laravel a highly efficient web development tool.
There are many web technologies in the industry but we have studied the two top players. What did we learn from the above?
WordPress is much better for web presentations, blogs, news portals, and small to medium-sized online stores Laravel is a better solution for large eCommerce websites, complex web apps, complicated backend systems, and another complex, typically custom-made product design.
A hybrid between WordPress and Laravel is also possible and it might be a perfect fit for experienced PHP developers who want the familiarity of WordPress and the streamlined workflow of Laravel incorporated into their projects.
What database to choose for your website?
MySQL The most famous SQL relational database can be used for both start up’s & large enterprises. • Help you to create a replica of the Database to reduce the workload. • Increased Scalability • Allow you to divide the databases into small chunks to make use of low-level servers.
Oracle This object-relational database helps you to achieve great customer service and reliability. • Provides great platform support • Better scalability and Reliable Note: Oracle recently released a NoSQL database.
MongoDB The most popular NoSQL database, an open-source that provides greater customer service. • With enhanced Dynamic schema you can improve your data without affecting the existing data. • Provides great scalability and high performance.
Apache CouchDB It makes the perfect utilization of JSON and JavaScript for various database operations. • Will allow us to access your databases through the web browser. • More flexible and easy replication.
Importance of website’s Backup
Backup copies allow data to be restored from an earlier point in time to help the business recover from an unplanned event. Storing the copy of the data on a separate medium is critical to protect against primary data loss or corruption. It’s important to have website security tools in place to protect your site from hackers, or to detect if a hacker has gained entry to the site.