Why should your business go mobile?

Businesses have been exploring every possible way to target customers these days. Customers these days are on the move and they are using mobile applications for convenience. Be it smartphones, tablets or other mobile devices they have all the required information. Hence, it has become imperative for businesses to have a mobile app or a mobile friendly website.

25% web traffic recorded from mobile devices

The use of mobile to visit any website has been on a rapid growth since the inception of smartphones into the market. There are other devices such as tablets etc. which also is involved in the growth of user base. There was time when almost all the web traffic was from PC’s or laptops but, today roughly 25% of web traffic has been recorded from mobile devices and also the mobile app market has reached almost $30 billion in revenue (netsolutionsindia). It has also been predicted that by 2017, 25% of online retail transactions will take place on mobile (mashable). This depicts the market potential for mobile/tablets and the urge to have a mobile strategy in place for every business.

Having mobile apps for your business does have other huge benefits like building loyalty, reinforcing your brand, increasing your visibility & reach, increasing sales, increasing exposure across mobile devices and connecting with on-the –go customers. There are also benefits from customer side such as easy access of inventory, getting notifications about events & launches, one-touch access, direction to store locations from anywhere and many more.  Mobiles/tablets are also convenient in use than laptops/desktops as they can be accessed on the move. It all depends on the ways in which you want your business to portray to your customers and the ease with which you want your customers to reach you.

After finalizing to go mobile, a question that arises immediately is “Should I have a mobile app for my business or a mobile version of my website?” Let us first decide depending upon the nature of business you are running. If at all you are running a retail business then, having a mobile application does have its advantages as people can look at your catalog online and make purchases. But, what if you are running a consultancy? You would have nothing to showcase other than your services. Then, in this case your objective of a mobile friendly website should work. Hence, before going mobile, business owners should be clear in their objectives of whether to develop a mobile app or a mobile version of website.

Mobile apps are considered to be one of the coolest tools for marketing your product to your customers, get returning visitors and also help engage your customers in a new way. They are going to be one of the biggest weapons for marketers in future. Have you decided to go mobile yet?

How important is it to, test your application?

How would you feel, when you find out that, the product you bought recently, is faulty? You will definitely be annoyed with the company’s product quality. To avoid such situation companies have their items undergo a quality check process before releasing them to market. Similarly, whenever you deal with software development vendors, to develop a software system for you, do you ask them to test?  If you do not, then this is why you need to.

Testing is an integral part of software development process. It is an investigation conducted to provide information about the quality of the product or service under test. Software testing needs to be carried out not only to find bugs in a program/application but, also to check whether an application works as expected. It is just a procedure to detect software failures so that they may be discovered and corrected.

Let us consider a simple example. You are the owner of an accounting firm dealing with numbers for your numerous clients. To avoid multi-tasking and reduce time & effort for calculating amounts payable and receivable, you planned to develop a software system that will help you in your daily task to make your job easier. You plan to develop this through a software vendor. Neither you nor your software vendor tested the application before implementing it to your system. You were elated to have solved your problem but, suddenly one day due to some reason your application crashes and you lose data. How would you face such a major issue? This could have been avoided if at all the application would have been tested. Hence, testing is required to avoid future issues. Testing cannot establish that a product functions properly under all conditions but can only establish that it does not function properly under specific conditions.

Testing can be employed at any point of time during the software development process. While sometimes test effort is carried out after coding is completed, there are Agile methods where in testing is an ongoing process. Every software vendor has testing teams of their own who are competent enough to carry out different forms of testing though priority on testing is a bit on the lower side. Some of them might compromise a little for quality. But, there is one such company which focuses much more on quality than other things. With a large pool of certified testers, this QA Testing Company in India has the potential to meet customer expectation by delivering a robust, stable and quality product for its clients. To know more about their testing approaches and testing expertise please click here.

PHP and its benefits when working with Mindfire Solutions!!

PHP which now stands for Hypertext Preprocessor was originally Personal Home Page. It is a server-side scripting language designed for web development. It can be also used as an open source general-purpose programming language. By using PHP you get the flexibility to deploy it on most web servers and also as a standalone shell on almost every operating system and platform free of charge.

By using PHP, website developers can enhance the function and appearance of websites and is considered to create dynamic web pages. It can be easily mixed with HTML which is why most web developers prefer using it. There are also other factors that drive companies to use PHP such as cost, ease of use, compatibility, speed etc. So, if you are looking for web development that is based on these criteria’s then PHP is the response.

Ask for Risk Free Trial* on PHP Development

PHP & Mindfire: PHP in Mindfire has been one of the oldest technologies with which Mindfire Solutions has worked on. With its 9+ years of relentless development service to clients worldwide, Mindfire has earned a lot of recognition in this area. Irrespective of the complexity of the job, Mindfire has the ability to deliver any task which involves PHP with the help of its Zend Certified developers. Be it any kind of web based application or frameworks, Mindfire Solutions has the capability to deliver. Mindfire provides services including web/product development, CMS, porting and migration, flash/flex integration etc.

How do you Benefit?: If, you have decided to outsource your PHP development requirements to Mindfire Solutions, then, check the Risk Free Trial* offer. You can get in touch with Mindfire Solutions with a sample development query and Mindfire will devote some time to provide you a sample of their coding capability. To understand this offer in detail, please contact our offshore PHP team by dropping an e-mail to info@mindfiresolutions.com or sales@mindfiresolutions.com with “Risk Free Trial” as subject line.