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Website Designing

Boost visits by optimizing page load time for your Website

Today, even seconds create the difference, users have no endurance for websites with weak load time or poor performance. Nearly all users on the web expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. If it isn’t loaded in 3 seconds, those users tend to leave or reject the site.

A still more startling statistic is that 64% of customers or shoppers who are disappointed with an online store’s experience & loading time will carry their business away. That means you’re not only missing your current visitors and lowering conversion rates, also you run the risk of your site dropping traffic from those consumers who may have suggested your website to others.
So what is aforementioned Page Load Time all about and why is it so powerful during the process of website designing and application development, let’s discuss below.

Search engines like Google apply page load time in algorithms that determine search engine rankings, which signifies they’re more likely to lead shoppers to sites that load fast.Speed is not just the only thing to concentrate on, there are nearly more than 200 signals in Google’s search algorithm, and page load time is simply one of them.Even small changes can shave time off and help raise your rankings.

With this in consideration, let’s take a glance at techniques to optimize while website designing for the best achievable performance.

website designing

Related Post: 10 Incredible Benefits of Social Media and Social Media Marketing!!

1.Minimize HTTP Requests

HTTP, commonly known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Requests are computed whenever a browser retrieves a file, page, or an image from its web server.
These calls lead to use around 80% of a Webpage’s load time.
This signifies that the more HTTP requests you need to load, the longer it needs for the page to go and retrieve them completely, increasing your web page’s load time.

2. Combining CSS/JS Files

Rather than forcing the browser to retrieve multiple CSS or Javascript files to load, try combining your CSS files into one larger file (same for JS).If you find that you only need to load certain images on the desktop or need to run a specific script on mobile only, using conditional statements to load them can be a great way to increase speed.

3.Reduce the number of images you use

Remove fairly images especially if their file sizes are big. This may not only help reduce image HTTP requests but may improve your UX-User Experience such distracting images that don’t correspond to your written content.

4.Browser Caching

Browser caching enables components on your website to be downloaded to your hard drive once into a cache, or temporary storage space. Those files are get stored locally on your system, which supports consequent page loads to boost in speed.As per the latest studies,40-60% of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache. So when users visit your website, you need to make it so the first page they see load instantly enough so they will unavoidably proceed through the rest of your website (with even faster load times).

5.Compress Images & Optimize Files

Images currently take up 60% of the average bytes loaded per page, So as mentioned early, remove any images of assets you believe you don’t need. Also, check the sizes of the existing image and optimize them simultaneously.Manage all your images under 150KB, nothing over 1920px in width, at an average/medium/72dpi quality level.
File Extensions suggested to be used should be either PNG, which must be applied for images where you need transparent background behind.
JPG is suitable for pictures or anything where fine detail is less significant.
This definitely increases your website’s overall performance.

website designing

Lastly, to conclude with, Loading time is a significant contributing factor to page abandonment. The average user has no endurance for a page to take excessively long to load.Google might crawl your site moderately or slower if you have a slow site. And that’s very critical – particularly if you are appending lots of fresh content or performing lots of edits to content on the website.

We have historically focused on the website designing for desktop versions of our site load as fast as possible, but with Google shifting to the mobile index first, an increase in the number of users on mobile devices, we must now also concentrate on mobile speed excessively.

Related Post: Everything you need to know about Email Marketing!

Beyond the rankings, optimizing your page load time is an excellent way to encourage users to get where they’re performing faster and happier shoppers are more easily converted into sales.A one-second delay decreases customer satisfaction.!!
It is rightly said-“Customers Are Won or Lost in One Second”!!

Ouriken with a team of well-experienced website designers makes it simpler by presenting you with the best website designs and is the technology partner that best fits your requirements.

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Digital Solutions

10 Incredible Benefits of Social Media and Social Media Marketing!!

The importance of social media in business is growing at a very accelerated pace. With more and more people joining social media sites and using them on a regular basis and efficient manner, the social media industry is bound to become larger in days to come. It is booming like never before.

Social media is soon becoming one of the most important aspects of digital marketing, which provides incredible benefits that help reach millions of customers worldwide. And if you are not applying this effective source, you are missing out an incredible marketing opportunity, as it makes it easy to reach the word about your product and mission.

With such marvellous growth, every business now needs to leverage proper social media channels in the best possible way. By giving your business brand the social media touch, you not only create more business but also relate with your customers better and serve them on a higher level. It actually makes your digital marketing easier.

According to an infographic published by Ambassador, 71% of consumers are more likely to promote a brand to others if they have a positive experience with it on social media.

1.Improved Brand Awareness

Social media is one of the most stress-free and effective digital marketing platforms that can be used to increase your business visibility. To begin with, create social media profiles for your business and start networking and connecting with others. By applying a social media strategy, it will help you significantly improve your brand recognition. By employing only a few hours per week, over 91% of marketers claimed that their social marketing efforts hugely increased their brand visibility and increased user experience. Surely, having a social media page for your brand will benefit your business and with regular practice, it can also produce a wide audience for your business in no time.

Related Post: Are Progressive Web Apps the Future for Websites?

2.Cost-Effective

For an advertising strategy, social media marketing is likely the most cost-effective channel. The account can be created for free for almost all social networking platforms. But if you choose to use paid advertising on social media, always start small to see what you should expect. Being cost-effective is significant as it helps you achieve a higher return on investment and hold a greater budget for other marketing and business payments. Just by investing limited money and time, you can significantly enhance your conversion rates and ultimately generate a return on investment on the money that you primarily invested.

3.Engage With Your Customers

Social media is a great way to engage and interact clients. The more you communicate with the audience, the higher chances you have of conversion. Establish a two-way communication with your target audience so that their preferences are known and their interest is catered with ease. Moreover, connection and engagement with customers are one of the ways to gain their attention and convey them your brand message. Hence, your brand will reach a wider audience in genuine terms and gets itself established without any hassle.

4.Increased Traffic

One of the other benefits of Social Media is that it also helps boost your website traffic. By sharing your content on social media, you are supplying users a reason to click-through to your website. On your social account, the higher the quality content you share, the more inbound traffic you will generate while making conversion chances.

social media marketing

5.Improved Brand Loyalty

When you have a social media presence, you make it accessible for your customers to locate you and connect with you. By connecting with your customers through social media, you are more likely to upsurge customer retention and customer loyalty. Since generating a loyal customer base is one of the principal goals of almost any business. It is vital to often engage with your customers and start developing a connection with them. Social media is not just restricted to introducing your product, it is also a leading platform for promotional campaigns. A customer considers these platforms as service channels where they can directly communicate with the business.

6.Stronger Customer Satisfaction

Social media plays an indispensable role in networking and communication platform. With the aid of these platforms, building a voice for your company is essential in enhancing the overall brand image. Customers appreciate the fact that when they post comments on your page, they receive a modified reply rather than an automated message. A brand that values its customers, takes the time to form a personal message, which is perceived naturally in a positive light.

7.Marketplace Awareness

One of the best ways to find the requirements and wants of your clients rather than directly communicating with them is Marketplace awareness. It is also marked as the most important advantage of social media. By following the activities on your profile, you can see customers’ interest and views that you might not identify otherwise if you didn’t have a social media presence. As a complementary analysis tool, social media can help you get data and a greater knowledge of your industry. Once you get an immense following, you can then use added tools to measure other demographics of your consumers.

Related Post: Everything you need to know about Email Marketing!

8.More Brand Authority

For earning your business more strong, brand loyalty and consumer satisfaction both play a vital role, but it all comes down to communication. When customers see your company posting on social media, mainly replying to their queries and posting unique content, it helps them develop a positive image in their minds. Constantly interacting with your customers shows that you and your business care about them. Once you get some satisfied customers, who are vocal about their positive buying experience, you can let the advertising be done for you by genuine customers who appreciated your product or service.

9.Enhanced SEO Rankings

Social media presence is becoming a vital part in determining rankings. These days, to achieve a successful ranking, SEO requirements are continuously changing. Therefore, it is no longer enough to only optimize your website and regularly update your blog. Companies sharing their content on social media are carrying out a brand signal to search engine that delivers to your brand validity, integrity, and constancy.

social media marketing

10.Real-time Performance Analysis

Knowing if your advertisement is working or not is essential in order to improve it. When you’re doing any kind of offline advertising, you’re unable to analyse the performance of your ad campaign. Which paralyzes massively efforts. Social media ads, on the other hand, lets you to constantly have a track of how great (or how bad) your ad is working. You’re able to edit your ad on the fly and spontaneously view the results.

Final Words

There is no denying that Social media marketing has several benefits for start-ups and established brands. By frequent updating the appropriate social media marketing plan, it will lead to increased traffic, better SEO, enhanced brand loyalty, better customer satisfaction and much more. Your competition is already growing on social media day by day, so don’t let your competitors take your likely customers. The immediate you start, the faster you notice the growth in your business.

If you want to have your own social media marketing but do not have the expertise to do so. We at Ouriken, implement innovative digital solutions to generate many new connections, products, services, ideas, insights, and efficiencies. When you blend social, mobile, advanced analytics, cloud, and IoT with modernized technologies including user-centred design, Agile and DevOps, and you have strong digital solutions. This benefits the businesses to grow in an enormous way.

We combine in-depth product knowledge and digital technical expertise with a consultative approach. We provide service that helps you to transform your organization and create new and innovative digital services. Our digital strategists and technology specialists are transforming the way our clients think about, assemble, sell and execute digital services.

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Website Designing

The Most Important Things To Consider While Redesigning Your Website

Believe it or not! Keeping the old website for a longer period will not earn you profit instead, it will downline your user-engagement graph and no potential leads will be generated. Also, it will affect the Google ranking.

Website redesigning is crucial for your business. Hence, you need to consider the new trends for redesigning and bid goodbye to the old and obsolete design. Amidst web redesigning, the UI improves, web performance improves, Google ranking improves resulting in more traction and strong online presence. But, these things only take place when a proper strategy is planned and executed keeping users’ perspective in the centre.

Related Post: Are Progressive Web Apps the Future for Websites?

Below are the features you need to consider before redesigning your website;

  1. Mobile-Friendly: If you’ve not combined this to the list, please do. It is the principal criteria for website redesigning. It is a myth that mobile-friendly means developing another website for mobile. It is surely making your business content and design accessible in precision with both web and mobile. In this mobile era, 90% of the users time is consumed on mobile internet. Examining the user behaviour, Google introduced mobile-first index algorithm back in September 2015 which means that now mobile is also one of the major factors to uplift the google ranking of your business website.

website designing firm

  1. Easy Navigation: After mobile-friendliness, it is website navigation. Pretending that while travelling to any favourite destination, you have a travel guide that assists you the significant places and indicates the directions making your journey easy and fun-filled. Similarly, you also need to ensure easy website navigation helping users easy touring and glance at your services. To achieve this, your website needs a navigation menu either at the top or as the navigation slide. Navigation slide aka hamburger menu is less useful compared to the menu displayed at the top. Users simply spare 10 secs in your website and in that duration they like to glance over all the major elements which the slide cannot show. Users must click on that button to slide the menu and select where to go which is not the case in the top menu. The top menu utterly lists all the major headers with a drop-down symbol to make users’ experience smooth and fast.
  1. Optimize load time and improve web performance: While you think of website redesigning you look forward to speed and performance. That is one point you need to have a complete focus on. From the users’ viewpoint, an improvement in the website speed from 8 to 2 seconds can boost your conversion rate by 74%.To optimize the loading time, you initially ponder upon image compression. Images are one of the main reasons influencing website loading time. There are several image compression tools available around the web which won’t let you compromise on the quality. The secondary is unnecessary coding. Yes, this is another reason. Countless times due to unnecessary coding or unstructured coding your website stops working but do you know that it also affects the loading time. For example; the images you have uploaded on the website is in KBs still, it takes time to load. Why? Writing a lengthy or irrelevant coding lines takes time to iterate the entire function and response time increases. Attempt not to include unnecessary coding lines to avoid blunders and improve web performance.
  1. Keep It Simple: The times are gone when a business website was flooded with loads of content and design. But now it’s about simplicity, elegance and communication- how well your site can interact with users. Web designers assure that they pick sober colours that reflect the company’s domain. For instance; Blue is the colour for corporates, bank and medical. That’s why the websites of several corporates, banking sectors, and hospitals are designed using a shade of blue. Moving to the forms or precisely contact forms, It turns out to be a tedious job for users when filling forms become an endless task. Therefore, it is really important for you to know which information you need from the users and eliminate the irrelevant one. Building a form with fewer UI components will not only save users’ paramount time but will also give them a space to tap and type. In plain words, the Keep It Simple principle teaches us to make the design easy and simple for users to understand and use.
  1. Use Call-To-Action (CTA): CTA plays a significant role in uplifting business performance. CTAs can be in whatever form, any size and any context. For example; A submit button designed in the contact us page notifies the company via email about the message a client has dropped in. The foremost purpose of using CTA is to analyze users’ behaviour. Hence, placing it on different web pages help professionals to know their users better.
  1. Social Media Plugins: It is important for you to include social media plugins on the website. If it’s not on the website redesign, do add it. While touring the site, users also go over your social media channels directly from the website to learn about your activities and marketing campaigns. To add social media plugins on your website, you can either place it at the top or at the bottom. But rather at the bottom because the upper section is covered with the company’s logo, contact information, and menu headers and thus, users may avoid a look at it. Attempt adding all the social media plugins you are active in with a catchy one-liner to grab users’ attention.

website designing firm

  1. Contact Information is a Must: It is surprising to know that there are business sites which do not display the company’s contact information. If you don’t add the contact number or email id how will a user be able to reach you? It is seen that 44% of the total visitors leave the website if the contact information is not found. If you hadn’t added in your previous site don’t forget to add it during redesigning. You can either place it at the head of the homepage or display it in large fonts in the website footer. The choice is yours!
  1. Add a Landing Page: You understand it well what your business matters to you. Don’t you? Adding a landing page is the following best element for you to generate good leads. Landing page attracts users to land on your website and glance over the services you provide. Therefore, it should be crisp, short, visually appealing with content highlighting the unique selling points of your business.

Related Post: Everything you need to know about Email Marketing!

  1. Personalization: Yes, it time to adopt the new component on your website which is called Personalization. Personalization enhances the user-engagement rate 2X. But that does not mean you design a separate page for each individual to give a different experience. Personalization means how you interpret your website knowing your users’ interest which certainly does not includes a highly technical or expensive approach. You can personalize your website per language, by country or region selected.

The points mentioned above for website designing are thoroughly analyzed from both business and users’ perspective. To incorporate it or not on the list entirely depends upon how your website is performing and your business domain. Although yes, website redesigning is a must to keep your website up-to-date with the latest trends. Nevertheless, Ouriken makes your it easier by providing you with the best website designs and is the technology partner that best fits your needs.

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Progressive web apps

Are Progressive Web Apps the Future for Websites?

Progressive Web Apps have become quite the buzz phrase in the web development world over the past year. Because of this, many people keep asking, are Progressive Web Apps the future for websites? That is a good question and as a website design company, we wanted to give our insights on the topic.

What are Progressive Web Apps?

Progressive web apps are one of a kind in that they are similar to a standard mobile app but are based on modern web capabilities. Basically, they are a combination of the two technologies that was devised by an engineer at Google named Alex Russell. Consider it as a mobile app that is delivered via the web. They have been in use for around two years while so far, they have not been used in large numbers, progressive web apps have been adopted as a useful option for startups, smaller businesses, and recently a few bigger brands.

 

While a mobile app (or native app) runs as its own piece of software, a progressive web app is alike to a website that can support features such as a home screen icon, push notifications, geolocation, an offline mode, splash screen, background synchronization, and can even access media features on a device such as the camera, audio, and video.

As many businesses are now presently focusing on customers on mobile devices, the question becomes how best to do this? Basically, there are three alternatives: build a responsive website for both desktop and mobile users, build a mobile (native) app, or build a progressive web app (PWA).

Pro’s of Progressive Web Apps

Easy access – Native mobile apps require to be downloaded and installed. A PWA can be seen with a Google search bar and works on-demand without using up memory or data on the mobile device. Possible even more relevant is that a PWA works on all devices while a native app has to be designed for both iOS and Android operating systems.
Economical – Progressive web apps are faster to create and update, therefore the cost is less than a native app.
Offline content – You can reach content offline with a progressive web app. Native apps cannot reach data while offline.
Security – As most sites are now built using HTTPs, you can easily originate a PWA in this secure environment which is a big plus if you intend on having users information contact details, credit card data, or other sensitive data.
Easier to modify – When you update a standard mobile app and you make an adjustment you also must reach the app store and work with them about the update or modification. This process can take some days or a week. With a PWA you can just get a fix or update and then it is life.
Mobile-first approach – Another big advantage of a PWA is they are created on a mobile-first approach for connecting with customers. Twitter, Pinterest, and Starbucks have all transitioned to successful PWA’s in addition to the native apps and have seen improved ad revenues and engagement on the PWA’s.

Con’s of Progressive Web Apps

Speed – While there has been progressing with PWA’s as to how data is cached along with providing Java scripts and service workers to run independently from the main thread, if you have a very passive or weak connection then there can be difficulties. The Accelerate Mobile Pages Project that Google has been behind had certainly helped with PWAs, but they aren’t always going to be as quick as native apps. However, this is one perspective that could soon change.
Missing features – There are Some mobile device features that native apps can use but progressive web apps cannot like alarms, phonebook access, making improvements to system settings, and access to hardware sensors.
Cannot use platform features – Native apps are suitable to use specific benefits from either the iOS or Android platforms like Apple’s ARKit, native graphics API’s, or Google’s Visual Core.
The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that quite a few well-known brands are initiating a move from native apps to PWA’s and after seeing at the positive features versus the negative features it is easy to assume why. Are Progressive Web Apps the future for websites? We feel that websites will constantly have a place in the world as long as desktops are connected but PWA’s are surely making a case to replace some native apps on a business level because of lower costs and more advantages to the users.

Related Post: Everything you need to know about Email Marketing!

Be sure to check back every week for great new Ouriken blog articles.

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Email Marketing

Everything you need to know about Email Marketing!

You own an Email Address. Similarly, 4.4 BILLION people worldwide own an Email Address. That’s roughly 54% of the World’s Population using Emails

Email is considered to be one of the most preferred Channels for a business to personalize their communication with their Consumer or Potential Customer.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the act of conveying a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its widest sense, every email sent to a possible or current customer could be regarded email marketing. It ordinarily involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is intended to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Marketing emails can be sent to a purchased lead list or a current client database. The term ordinarily refers to sending email messages with the intention of improving a merchant’s relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, obtaining new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something instantly, and sharing third-party ads.

Email marketing is one of the most effective approaches to reach and engage your audience. In fact, the value of email marketing is so great that we suggest most businesses develop a strategy for implementation by 2020.

The importance of email marketing

01.Customization

Email marketing is essential for many reasons. For example, it is significant because it is extremely versatile. You can make the emails that you send to promote your business so that they suit whatever need that you might have. You can target many diverse social groups and modify the content accordingly. Since the business world is regularly changing, you have to be able to respond instantly to any changes that the marketing experts present.

02. Emails are Accessible on Mobile

Emails are Accessible on Mobile. There are 300+ Smartphone Users in India. This number is predicted to hit 440+ Million by the year 2022. The 3rd most frequently performed a task on a Smartphone is checking Emails. When people are waiting in line at a Coffee Shop, travelling, or just about to sleep they check their emails. Indians check their emails on their phone an average 3 times a day.

Email marketing

03. Emails are Cheap

Also, another reason why this kind of marketing is significant for any business and should not be overlooked and disregarded is that it is very inexpensive. You can consolidate it into any kind of marketing plan that your business might have, without possessing any additional costs. This way, if you get anything from email marketing, you will, fundamentally, get something for nothing. Generating profit, without spending any money, is something that every serious business will take into concern.

04. Smart and Automated

Let’s take an example

Suppose you own a Gym Setup. You have received a lead of Amit showing interest in signing up for your Gym Services. You decide to drop him an email with some details. After 48 Hours Amit has still not replied back. What would you do? Stop Mailing | Send Another Mail
You should follow-up by sending a second mail. This follow up mail can be sent out automatically. It’s called a Workflow or Drip Marketing.
Drip marketing is a communication approach that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to clients or prospects over time. These messages usually take the form of email marketing, although other media can also be utilised.

Brevo

Brevo empowers businesses to build and develop relationships with their customers.

Brevo was built for you! Their humble beginnings as a digital agency opened their eyes to the needs of growing businesses: marketers need tools that can efficiently scale as they mature. Most marketing suites are created for large corporations and come with an enterprise-level price tag.

That’s why Brevo was created. Serving small and medium-sized businesses is in their DNA and everything about their features, support, and pricing is designed with you in mind. Whether you need to maintain email campaigns, send text messages, or save time with automation, we can assist you to do it efficiently, on-budget, and in your language.

Brevo offers cloud-based digital marketing tools to over 50,000 growing organizations around the world. Which is Available in Six different languages and over 30 million plus Text Messages send per day.

Email marketing

Mail Jet

Mailjet is a cloud-based, all-in-one email service provider (ESP) that enables you to send both transactional and marketing email campaigns. Create your account in some clicks and send your first message in seconds!

Mailjet’s platform allows you to designs beautiful emails in their drag-and-drop editor, ensure reliable mailing on their safe and robust infrastructure hosted on Google Cloud Platform, and monitor & optimize key analytics like open rates, bounce rates, spam hits, and much more.

Why should you use Mailjet?

Mailjet is one of only email service providers allowing a centralized service that lets you send both transactional and marketing emails from the same account and platform. Their pricing depends only on emails sent, as they do not charge for simply sustaining a large contact list, and helps your business as it grows.

They have a large team devoted to improving your emails land in the inbox, including our Deliverability experts who can not only advise you on your methods but also have long-term relationships with ISPs like Gmail and Outlook. This helps assure that valid emails taking off through our servers always land in the inboxes, despite ISP.

From a developer perspective, Mailjet’s flexible API makes their platform really easy to integrate with to ensure your emails are integrated perfectly into your product or service.

MailChimp

With more than 15 million customers sending about 1 billion emails each day, MailChimp’s got to be doing something right. It’s the most successful email marketing service out there, perfect for beginners and more advanced users. For solopreneurs and small businesses with less than 2,000 subscribers, MailChimp grants a free option.

MailChimp takes their Freemium offering earnestly and provides exceptional service to all their customers, no matter what they’re paying—or not paying. You can chat with a representative online or get general questions answered by reading the content available on their website.

Also key to MailChimp’s success is how simple it is to use. It offers an intuitive dashboard that clearly displays all important features, a step-by-step guide that walks you through the email campaign-making process, and a drag-and-drop email template editor that makes it easy to dive into email marketing without any former knowledge or skills.

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