Author Archives: admin

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Responsive Web Design, Web Design

5 Web Design Trends to watch out for in 2018

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As a digital medium, web design services see most changes each year. While their print cousins have remained constant, the web design realm undergoes many trend shifts with every passing year. The year 2017 posed many technology challenges for the web designers, but it was amazing to see the web design world cut through the challenges and design websites that were user friendly, innovative and adaptable with the corporate style.

One of the major paradigm shifts in 2017 saw mobile searches finally overtake the desktop searches. This means, 2018 would be a year when the web designers have to care for mobile functionality while evolving with the desktop designs. Keeping all this in mind, let us try to find some of the major web design trends to care for in 2018.

Trend #1: Move towards Vibrant Color Schemes

2018 is definitely the year when the color palette preferences of the web designers would change. So long the designers and brands only worked with the web safe colors. But even in the last quarter of 2017, web designers had shifted from this norm. Web designers were seen experimenting and getting courageous with their selection of colors. Vibrant shades along with non-horizontal headers found a liking among the web surfers. The adoption of vibrant shades has been aided by technology too. With new technological advances, the monitors and devices of the present era can reproduce a diversity of rich colors.

Trend #2: Use of Drop Shadows and Depth

Shadows have been an integral part of web designing for many years now. But in light of the new advancements in web browsers, they have become more appealing then they ever were. In 2018, the web designers have the luxury of playing with grids and parallax layouts to create depth in designs and an illusion of a world beyond the screen. Drop shadows can increase the aesthetics and alleviate the User Experience (UX) of a website.

Trend #3: Focus on Mobile Surfing

As mentioned before, it is now official that surfers are using their smartphones to surf through websites, more than their desktops. Everyone today is using the smartphone to shop, place order and look for information on the web. A couple of years ago, the biggest dilemma for the web designers was: how to adopt their designs into the small mobile screen. But the mobile technology has matured significantly enough to solve their problem. Latest mobile technology enables the web designers to create menus, sub-menus and buttons without taking up much space. Yes, you might have to shun all those beautiful yet big photos and illustrations from your design, but the rest of the design can be easily accommodated within the mobile screen.

Trend #4: Use of Particle Backgrounds

This is the solution web designers have come up with to solve performance issues of their websites. With a video running in the background, many sites suffered from slow loading time. The animations done using the particle backgrounds are lightweight and they do the tasks a video is targeted to achieve. If an image is worth thousand words, then a moving image is much more than that. So, with the adoption of particle backgrounds one can immediately attract user’s attention and create a favorable first impression. Such motion graphics have already gained popularity on social media and campaign landing pages. It is now time to implement them on the web pages.

Trend #5: Bigger and Bolder Typography

Every web designer knows that typography is the most powerful visual tool that they can dish out for the surfers. With the right selection of typefaces you can set the right tone, evoke emotions and reflect the brand personality. As the resolutions of the device monitors are getting sharper, it is making fonts easier to read. With the exception of Internet Explorer, all the other browsers are today supporting the hand-made and innovative typefaces. The typeface trend of Sans Serif with Serif headings will be explored widely even in 2018. This year will be an year of invention in terms of typography.

If you are looking for a web design service that uses the latest technologies and trends in servicing the clients, then you have to Contact us at Keyline.

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Responsive Web Design, Web Design

What should be the focus of your online gaming website?

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Do you like playing online games? Have you fantasized for long about having a gaming website of your own? Well, then this is the perfect time to launch your gaming website. If the statistics are to be believed 44% of the world’s online population are gamers. More than 60% of Internet surfers have played at least one game online! It is no wonder then that online gaming is a multi million dollar industry and there are unlimited opportunities for newcomers in this domain! With the modern day tools and resources, developing a gaming website is not the issue. The real issue lies in deciding on your focus area. With multitudes of options, it becomes a daunting task for the newbies to decide their business focus. So, here we would like to elaborate on some of the options available.

Types of Online Gaming Websites

There are many types of online gaming websites, and each variety has its own merits. So, you have to first of all decide on what your website would be dealing with. This will help you in choosing the web hosting as well as aid in many web development and design decisions.

  • Flash and Demo Games: There are many websites which showcase and allow their registered users to play games online. Of course the demo games might only allow users to complete some levels, but its a popular concept all the same.
  • Gaming News: Having a website up there that provides the latest news and headlines from the online gaming world is good enough to attract lots of traffic. But getting such insights and scoops can be very difficult, so build channels first.
  • Gaming Reviews: Today’s gamers like to read feedbacks about a game before they start with it. This is the merit of the review websites. They can bring in high traffic, if done with the right information.
  • Website with Gaming Strategies & Cheats: These websites are popular searches on Google. Many gamers like to get the upper hand over their opponents with such insights. But the niche is highly competitive, and you can only stand out from the crowd with thorough knowledge.
  • Community: In this type of website you would not be making money. But have a website up there and you will get followers flowing in. And soon that can lead to other money earning opportunities.
  • Fan Site: This comes quite close to a Community, but there is a difference in its purpose. Here, the gamers get to read about personal experiences of other gamers and their recommendations. There should be interviews from leading gamers, where they share tips and experiences.

We hope the above information would help you in deciding on your choice of online gaming website type. For superior web hosting you can always turn to us at OptraHost.

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Web Design

Web Hosting trends to watch out for in 2018

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The New Year is almost upon us and, like every other aspect of life, 2018 will bring with it new trends for the web hosting industry. As a business owner you would need to know about these new developments and options, before making your choice of web hosting services. In todays online business scenario, it is a proven fact that web hosting is the most important component for your profit making mechanism. With the patience level of the surfers at their impatient worse, it is the web host who helps you sell products and services everyday. So, in the coming year you can expect the web hosts offering some of the below business friendly features in their services.

  • Easy Creation of Websites: Though many leading web hosts accommodate a quick development of websites, many others will fall in line in 2018. In the online world, time is money and there are new competitors emerging everyday. So, it is essential to get a website up there as soon as possible. And in the coming year, every web host would help businesses in achieving just that through their feature rich back-ends.
  • Hassle Free Management of Websites: To stay ahead of the competition, you have to not only research about competitors but also manage your website much better. In 2017, most businesses had to use third party websites to gather and manage information about their website. But 2018 will see a trend shift in that regards. The web hosting packages would now come with easy website management features.
  • More Data centers: Today, businesses are looking to attract Geo-specific visitors to their website, and this task would be made much simpler with the development of more data centers. Not only this, the data centers will have a much secure framework and enhance the capacity of website. With this new trend, websites will run at a lightening fast speed providing a much better end user experience.
  • More Variations in Plans: With the evolution of business operations, today businesses are in search of flexible and customized web hosting plans. They want some special features and other useless ones removed from their package offerings. Customized packages was a major trend for 2017, and it will proliferate further in 2018.
  • Impetus on Customer Support: The web hosting business world will get more intense then it ever was in the bygone years. And one of the key differentiators would be customer support. This would auger well for the web hosting customers. They can expect low downtimes and quick problem resolutions. Surely that would help your business attract more traffic and translate it into sales.

If you want a reliable web hosting solution that would help your business attain success in 2018, then OptraHost should be a great choice. Take a look at what we have to offer.

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Responsive Web Design, Web Design

5 Best Fonts for Christmas Themed Designs

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With Christmas less than a month away, every website owner is already busy in infusing the holiday theme into their website. It starts with the website banners, product categories, special holiday season mailers, and much more. The fact is: Christmas is the merriest time of the year and customers landing at your website want to see something that will relate to the fun of the season. This is why more than 90% of the websites today, have made it a tradition to give a festive makeover to their website during the last month of the year. But the dilemma for web designers is what new to think. Every year, web designers have to come up with thousands of festive season design ideas. They cannot deviate from the color range, which remains fixed at red, white, green, golden and silver. They cannot go much beyond the conventional elements such as Santa Clause, bells and balls, X’mas tree, snow or reindeer with a sleigh. So, what new can you think this year? Well, there is one area which has not been explored much – the Font. Let us tell you about some really cool typefaces that can add the X-Factor to your designs. And here they come:

  1. One Starry Night: Having its roots in the handlettering style, this is a fun font to use in your designs. The swirls and loops in the letters infuses a lot of energy into your text. The letters have a thin typeface that makes sure your content does not look too overwhelming and mingles well with the overall context.
  2. Sentinel: This font comes straight from those old holiday storybooks that the visitors have grown up reading and brings back those fond memories. In terms of its style; the twirling and bold letters look great on any design. The typeface has a certain classic drop case style attached to it, allowing your text to stand out from the crowd.
  3. Mountains of Christmas: A perfect match for all those holiday themed illustrations, this font is an unique blend of the playful and the carefree. Using the subtle Serif style as well as certain staggered-ness in its elements the Mountains of Christmas has soft curving nature with unique character.
  4. Harrington: If you are looking for a perfect headline font to compliment your holiday season designs then Harrington is the perfect font to opt for. Being a classic font, it remains very clean and yet carries a certain degree of fun about it. The decorative letters with slight slants and curves give your headlines unique character.
  5. Nickelodeon: This font aptly brings back the childishness involved in all the fun! This is a thin, nice and simple font that compliments well with many other fonts. The simple Serif style and the quick curves give personality to the content. Use it in the headline or the body text, whether you want to mingle it other fonts or use it solo – this is a very versatile font.

So, the secret recipe to your holiday season web and print design uniqueness is ready. Have fun playing with these fonts!

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Responsive Web Design, Web Design

How to Implement BYOD in your organization successfully?

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BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is the new mantra for modern day work spaces. The IT provisioned and corporate owned devices have already become a thing of the past. Having realized the potential and benefits of BYOD policy, more and more companies are adopting this new trend. With the adoption of this policy, businesses can see a higher employee productivity, greater employee satisfaction levels and lower IT costs. But allowing an employee, to use his/her own device at the workplace has its own list of challenges. And there are many IT managers who have nightmares about data loss and privacy breach scenarios that may arise due to the implementation of BYOD.

With the BYOD policy, the employee would be using their own devices to access various confidential company information. Many such information would be stored in their personal devices. And when they decide to move on, they can easily carry such sensitive information with them. That is the dilemma IT managers face today. How do you offer employees this benefit, without costing your business? How do you control the data and access rights from a personal device?

The good news is, there are many ways to get around these problems. One of the emerging trends in the IT industry is the use of containerized applications. These applications were primarily used beforehand as Mobile Device Management applications. With the mobiles turning into Smartphones, the employees could access and download files from their handheld devices too. So, in came the concept of containerized applications. What does it do? Every employee needs to install this containerized application in their devices. The application would allow the administrators to restrict, block or remove the sensitive files from a device as and when they deem neccesary. This means, while the employee can download and access every file, IT managers have a certain control over how it is used.

But, the containerized applications can be easily misconceived by the employees as spying software. They can view it as an infringement over their personal data and privacy. So, before you implement BYOD in your workplace, it is essential to explain the entire mechanism associated with it. Explain the need and utility of the containerized applications. The employees should be clearly informed that the application only controls the data that is downloaded from the company servers, it will have nothing to do with any other data sitting within their devices.

As you can see, making the BYOD work is not that difficult. With some logical steps the IT team as well as overall employees can stay happy with this new policy.

Web Design

Why e-Commerce stores need to scale up their hosting plans during the Holiday Season?

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With the holiday season just a few weeks away, e-Commerce stores are gearing up for their mega bonanza! In the last year, the online sales has risen by 51% during the holiday season. And this can mean only one thing – you have bumper month ahead! But success won’t come your way, unless you prepare for it. There are thousands of e-Commerce stores out there, and each one would be competing for business. In these competitive times, it is your eye for pecuniary things that will separate you from the rest. A recent survey by the Big Commerce portal claims that 91% of the regular surfers, prefer to make all their holiday purchases online. This means, within the next couple of weeks (when the holiday season shopping commences) you have to get your website ready for a deluge of traffic. You have to cater good shopping experience to each and every visitor. And this means a complete rethink on the existing web hosting plans and often switching over to a new one.

Why do e-commerce stores need to scale up?

  • High Traffic Volumes: Your regular hosting plans might be doing a perfect job all through the year, but the holiday season brings with it a new set of challenges. Your website traffic stands a chance of being increased by many thousands each day. And each person wants a flawless shopping experience at your website. They want fast loading pages, quick product previews and smooth browsing experience. Your existing web hosting plans with their limited bandwidth cannot cater the experience a holiday season shopper is expecting. And this could lead to a massive loss in revenues. This is why, it is a good time to invest in new web hosting plans.
  • New Uploads: This is the time when you will upload a host lot of new items at the back-end of your website. You will have all new product categories, stock new ranges and even upload those attractive banners. What is the point of uploading all those new stuff if they cannot load at lightening fast speeds? Banners, especially, work well only when they are able to load within some milliseconds. But then banners with their huge file sizes need a high bandwidth to load really quick. Similar is the instance of any other back-end uploads you perform during this season. To assure that your new uploads are not impeding with the present content up their at the website, you should choose a new web hosting plan.
  • Security Issues: Customers will transact at your store only if you are able to provide a secure environ for them. You can secure their transactions with a SSL certificate, but you need to also choose a web host who is able to provide extra security for all the transactions done through your website. The last thing you want is a customer’s data breach, and again it is the security levels of your web host that can help you meet this need.

If you are searching for a new web hosting partner to care for your website during the upcoming festive rush, then OptraHost is the perfect solution for all your requirements.

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Responsive Web Design, Web Design

Security Features you should check before choosing a web host

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In today’s world every business needs to go online to boost their sales. And the basis to have a good sales generating website is to opt for secure web hosting. There are thousands of web hosts waiting for an opportunity to serve you, but you should choose one who can offer a safe and secure web hosting environment. Why?

  • 32% of all live websites were hacked in 2016!
  • 454 websites suffered from data breaches
  • Nearly 12.7 million private business records exposed!

You can well understand the vulnerable times that persist in the online realm.

Hacking or data breaches are more than a loss of face, for businesses. They amount to huge financial losses and drifting of customers. How can you stay protected from such unscrupulous acts? Simple first step would be to choose a web host with an eye on safe and secured hosting. This is why you should check for the below given features before choosing a web hosting service provider.

  • Secure Data Center: As mother nature gets more violent with every passing day; cyclones, earthquakes and other natural disasters should be anticipated by your web host. A secure data center should be situated in a safe part of the earth. Not only this it should have various emergency provisions such as diesel power generators and other protective measures. Such arrangements would ensure that your business sustains minimum losses, if any due to untoward events.
  • Minimum Downtime: Though all the web hosts promise a 100% uptime, there are instances when they cannot keep this promise. While 100% uptime is a myth, you should choose a host who offers minimum shortages so that your web traffic is not impacted too drastically. It is also a wise idea to opt for web hosts who offer reimbursements for downtime. Reimbursements not only signal confidence on the part of the hosts, but also ensure that downtimes are indeed quite less.
  • Data Backup: Many web hosts offer the option of data backup in emergency scenarios. Data backup plans come with monthly, weekly or daily basis. Daily basis backups are the best of the lot, as it allows you to get back the updated version of the website in case of any emergency. Then there is also the option for manual backup, whereby you can take a backup each time you have updated something at the website.
  • Manual Reboots: This feature is often provided with the VPS as well as dedicated packages. With manual reboot you can use a control panel to restart the dedicated or virtual server. You can reboot the server when there is any problem or while making any important updates.
  • Less Clients, better the security: While most web hosts would claim to have hundreds of hosting clients, it is good if you can find one who serves only a limited number. Less clients, on the part of the web host, makes your website more secured at the end.

Finally, before choosing a web host do care to visit some of the relevant forums to read reviews. Reviews are gold mines of information regarding the services of web hosts. Visit OptraHost to find web hosting packages that come with all requisite security features.

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Responsive Web Design, Web Design, Web Development, Wordpress

Why Live Chat Feature is essential for your online business?

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Live Chat is everywhere you look around today. While the social media sites have completely utilized its power, there are many large brands who have also integrated this technology into their websites. Live chat allows the users to interact with the customer service professionals directly, in real time. The customers out there, today, are chatting away using their smartphones and computers all the while. So, they are in the habit of getting quick replies for their queries and problems. The live chat accommodates just this. When compared with traditional online communication modes such as email, phone calls and instant messenger services, the live chat is much easy to use. This is why your website definitely needs to integrate the live chat feature. And by including this feature you will get a list of great business benefits such as:

Customer Service Expenses are reduced

Phone support services can prove very costly for businesses, given the toll charges and per hour costs for professionals. Live chat even costs less than setting up for quality email support. A Forrester research found that live chat customer service is 17-30% cheaper than phone support. This is primarily because a live chat agents can tackle multiple customers at the same time.

Positive Impact on Sales

Many studies have proved that implementation of live chat feature inevitably leads to an increase in sales. A research by American Marketing Association proves that live chat feature at a website leads to at least 20% increase in conversion rates and an increase in ROI by 300%! The same study also proves that customers are thrice more likely to make a purchase when there is live chat facility at a website.

Increase in Customer Loyalty

Modern day customers really appreciate brands giving them access to live chat. A research by eDigital Customer Service Benchmark found that live chat catered highest customer satisfaction levels (at 73%), when compared to email support (at 61%) and phone support (at 44%). These numbers are significant enough to show why customers return back to perform business with websites having live chat. A consumer research study by Oracle, found that 90% of customers are happy to do repeat business with websites having the Live Chat feature.

Grow business by catering customer convenience

Everyone knows that the quality of products or services is the biggest benchmark for a successful business. But customer service is the second most important criteria. Live chat provides the customers instant access to the support staff and sales team. When the customers can quickly get in touch with relevant people to ask questions and seek clarifications, they stay open minded to spend more. An Econsultancy report shows that 51% of customers love the live chat as it allows them to multi-task while shopping, while another 21% like it because it allows them to shop while working. So, the live chat feature promotes customer convenience.

Gain a Competitive Business Advantage

So, what type of competitive advantage are we talking about here? A report by TELUS International found that only 9% (of 1000 websites) use real time chat services at their website. So, that means most of your competitors have still not invested in this technology. Now that gives you a great early mover advantage over competitors.

Use Keyline’s web development services to build a feature packed website for your business.

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Responsive Web Design, Web Design

Why you should never compromise with .com Domain Name Extensions?

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Just like you need to choose your brand name after much thought and consideration, you also need to take into account various factors before choosing a domain name. While your brand name should have high recall value in the offline world, your domain name should have the same attributes in the online world. It is no wonder than that business owners face a big challenge before selecting their business domain name. Every business owner wants their brand name to be replicated in the domain name. But many a times they have to deviate from this rule. Why?

The biggest reason for such deviation is the unavailability of their choice of brand name (with .com extension). In such instances they have to add some filler words to find a domain name close to their brand name! That makes many observers curious: how powerful is .com domain extension? Is it so strong that business owners can shun their brand value? Well, this is the time when we would like to throw in some statistics:

  • More than 1.17 Billion people use Google to search for websites
  • Only 11% of all websites are visible (means 89% of them are never found in searches)
  • 75% of the visible websites have .com domain name extensions.

But why is Google so favourable to .com extensions?

The logic is very simple. While Google changes around its ranking logics to provide surfers with best search experience, they keep one thing constant. For them age of a website is a best way to judge its authenticity. So, for Google age is a very important criteria. Now, think about the .com domain name extensions. They were the default options for any website for a very, very long time. They came into existence long way back in 1985. So, Google rates a website, with .com extension, higher than ones coming with other alternatives!

.com domain extension website: Best hotel management college in Kolkata – IIHM Kolkata

The Challenge with finding .com Extensions

Today, the web masters are confronted with problem of a new kind. The high demand for .com domain extensions has led to the prominence of .com real estate moguls! Such businesses are entirely dedicated in collecting as many generic domain names as possible. They buy such domain names by paying $5 and then sell it for thousands of dollars. While the larger brands can afford to splurge such amounts and purchase their favourable domain names from these middle men, the startups and small businesses often have to settle for what they get!

But, here we would like to advise you to spend some extra money if necessary for the procurement of ideal domain name (with .com extension). It would assure a good online business future in the long term.

Where other extensions work?

There are multitudes of domain extensions available today. And frankly speaking, with clever business tactics these can work too. Suppose you are in the education domain, .edu extension is cater made for your business. Again, the .in extension would serve ideally if you are targeting local customers within India.

Visit Optra Host and choose a domain name of your choice, without paying exorbitant amounts!

Landing Page Design, mobile app, Responsive Web Design, Web Design

Which is the best hosting type for e-Commerce stores?

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It is easy to say that e-commerce store is a money minting machinery, in today’s business world. But than that would be undermining various factors that go into making any e-commerce store successful. Marketing activities, content, user experience and many more such factors turn an e-Commerce store into a successful venture! Digging deep into the dynamics of such websites, it can be quickly understood that web hosting decisions can make or break the dreams of a business owner in this domain. The impatient web surfers of the present era hate to wait. They want lightening fast loading times. So, before you choose a web hosting type for your business, we thought of presenting the merits and demerits of each web hosting type.

Shared Hosting

It is like staying in a shared room, where all the amenities are equal for everyone.

Though, shared hosting plans are the cheapest of the lot but they do not work for e-commerce stores. They offer slowest page loading times and that does not auger well for your business prospects. Website speed is very important for high turnovers. With slow loading time you not only lose out on many sales opportunities but offer poor user experience, opening gates for poor reviews. Speaking from the statistics: 79% of users who faced an issue never return back to the website. 44% of these people take their grievances one step forward and share their poor experience story with friends and family. Shared hosting also comes with security issues, where a breach in one website exposes the others as well. So, look beyond shared hosting.

VPS Hosting

Now, you have a room for yourself, you have special amenities for yourself too!

This is the most fitting hosting type for your business. With Virtual Private Servers in your control, there will be no performance issues for your website. Every activity at your website can be tracked and there would be a larger number of resources allocated to you solely, unlike shared hosting. Such hosting plans come with higher clocked CPUs, more RAM and larger disk spaces, which will aid you in putting up a robust e-commerce website on the web. Add to that some of the optional managed services, and you will have all you need to run a successful website.

Dedicated Hosting

It is like buying a villa with all the luxuries of life!

Of course there is no denying the fact that dedicated hosting is the highest performing hosting option, but they may not fit into your present scheme of things. First of all they have a much higher pricing than all the other hosting options, so it would definitely drill a hole into your profits. Secondly, dedicated plans are feasible options once you are hitting “tens of thousands of sales with high six figure visitor counts”. So, based on your current business scale you might not need this costly hosting plan.

Based on the analysis, VPS hosting is the best choice for your e-commerce website. It helps you cater good user experience and attract high sales. It is friendly on the pockets too. If you are looking for cost effective web hosting packages, do take a look at Optra Host’s offerings.