Web Testing Tools: Why They Are Of Importance

One has to rely on trusted test tools while testing applications. This article looks at some testing tools that have stood the test of time and come handy in the QA process. The testing process involves the operation of an application or a system, which is under conditions that are controlled specifically. This way, the user can evaluate the results.

An example of this is when a certain user is at an interface using another hardware and performs an operation whose result is unknown. The conditions that are controlled here should consist of the normal and abnormal states. Testing tools are often used in order to determine whether there will be an occurrence of wrong happenings for both expected and unexpected time intervals.

How to Ensure Quality

One organization has a different way to ensure quality on their software or website. At times, they can be the combined efforts of a single person or a group. However, what is common is that there are testers, tools and developers that are required to work with one another to complete the process for Quality Assurance.

This will have to be closely monitored by the managers of the project. Software and website quality assurance should comprise of the entire development process. This can include the monitoring, improving, procedure following and certifying that the problems located are dealt with immediately.

Tools to Test Quality

There are several test tools that you can use while you perform the QA process. They can be categorized according to their type. These involve the Java testing tools, HTML validators, link checkers, website security test tools, log analysis tools and website management tools. In the Java testing tools, you can find here programs like VisualVM, Cobertura, QCare, Jprofiler and the Parallel-junit. EMMA is also a Java tool that typically targets the software development at the same time as keeping the developer's work speedy and iterative.

HTML Validators

HTML validators on the other hand include the CSE 3310 HTML Validator and the RealValidator. The latter is intended to check the syntax of the HTML code and is mainly used for the Windows platform. Moving on with the Link Checkers, you can find here the Site Audit tool, which is a low cost service that provides web link checking using the Internet. Meanwhile, website security test tools consist of the Fortify 360 and the Hailstorm, which is an automated security testing tool that customizes and configures the analysis based on the requirements.

4 Great PHP Frameworks You Should Try

Designed for dynamic websites, PHP has been widely accepted by developers all over the world. So, what is exactly PHP’s speciality? PHP was actually designed for creating dynamic websites that cater to the different business requirements of individuals. Most PHP applications run on Linux servers and function similar to the windows platform. Now how do you increase the efficiency when you work with PHP? It is for this purpose that we use PHP frameworks. These frameworks are of great use to programmers in their development process. One can choose from various platforms that are available in the market according to one’s development requirement.

Zend Framework: An object-oriented and open source platform that can also be used with PHP5, Zend has diversified components that satisfy many of the common requirements of the development process.

Smarty Framework: Now what do you do when you want to incorporate templates in your web apps? The answer is quite simple. Use Smarty framework, also known as the ‘Template engine’ due to its powerful template inheritance and efficiency in incorporating various templates in the development process. With such great features, it is no wonder that it occupies the top spot among the most widely used framework among PHP developers.

Cake PHP: In order to boost the development process many developers have now started using Cake PHP, which is another open source web application framework. By using Cake PHP one can develop extensible architecture for developing, managing and amending various applications. The coding efforts and cost is reduced by usage of Cake PHP and it uses most common design patterns like MVC and ORM.

Symfony: Symfony is another power packed framework used by developers to develop some of the more complex applications in a faster manner. It consist of various tools that are capable of testing, debugging and documenting the project in an effective manner. It is also compatible with various web design patterns along with most of the common web features.

Now, these are just some of the framework that are in vogue and are being widely used by the PHP development community around the world. These frameworks are designed specifically with a view to boost the process of PHP Programming and developers can choose according to the development requirement they have.

How to Get Your Web Design Strategy Right

For B2B marketers with long, complex sales cycles, landing pages are an essential tool for generating new leads. However despite being very straightforward tools, landing pages are rarely optimised to their full potential. The typical landing page loses over half of its visitors immediately. This leaves a company with only a tiny portion of visitors being converted to leads. So how do you not only keep visitors on your page, but successfully convert them into leads?

The key is to Optimize and Convert.

Design – Keep the look and feel of the landing page consistent with your brand. This will help capitalize on familiarity and perceived value.

Forms – Forms can make a user uncomfortable. Creating forms with the user in mind helps minimize this feeling and maximize lead generation.

Value – Users have to be enticed to provide their information. You will know that providing an appropriate incentive will dramatically increase conversions

Analyze – Perfecting a landing page can take numerous tweaks and revisions. Spend time finding out what works and adjust accordingly.

Design and Layout

When you have only a few seconds to capture a prospects interest, a well thought out and optimized layout can make all the difference to a page’s perceived success or failure. This means you must take care to ensure the following:

• All branding, colours and styles should be consistent with the full website

• A call to action and value proposition should be clearly visible to visitors

• Forms should be simple, easy to complete, and displayed prominently

• Navigation around or away from a landing page should not be provided

On the web, always understand that less is more. It should be clearly visible to visitors which action a company would like them to take. A short paragraph or list stating the value in providing information would provide a clear incentive to visitors.

Form Essentials

Although simple, the structure of a form effects a visitor’s perceived notion of value, risk, and even credibility. It’s enough if you make sure you’ve ensured the following:

• The information collected by a form should be valuable and relevant to a specific goal.

• Limit your fields as minimizing the number of fields will aid in completion

• Email delivery helps as sending an offer via an email instead of a redirect helps you begin to build a relationship with the customer.

Finally, Analyse and revise. Tracking usage statistics and adjusting strategy are key to achieving landing page success. This involves identifying key metrics and continually revising and adapting to the needs of the industry.

The Key Advantages of PHP

Today we are in a situation where technology has completely transformed business. Not only the way we do business but also the way we think of it. With mobile leading the way in almost every aspect of our lives, literally intruding into it, business and the rest cannot lie far behind. Business has evolved from a simple buying and selling process and has taken a much more sophisticated form and has also become very competitive. Surviving in this fierce competition is a success in itself as new ideas are being marketed every day.

Globalization was made possible only due to the vast developments in our communication technologies. In modern times the whole world is connected and the credit goes to the World Wide Web. The rise of internet has had the largest impact on the world in recent years and we have created a whole new world online. Now you can find anything and everything you might ever need online and it includes people and things. The internet serves as the platform for global recognition. Anybody now understands the importance of being recognized in the online world to survive the harsh competition. In this competitive environment having a good website that appropriately represents your message is crucial. Thorough research should be done before creating your online representation aka your website and all the options should be considered.

PHP is a programming language that is absolutely crucial in creating a good looking and well-functioning website. PHP is one of the most popular scripting languages and is used worldwide by almost every web developer out there. There are many advantages in using PHP Programming Language and these are the primary reasons behind PHPs overwhelming popularity. I have listed a few advantages of using PHP programming language.

Efficient and User Friendly: PHP is one of the most efficient and user friendly scripting language out there.

Compatibility: PHP is compatible with almost every possible operating system out there such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS etc.

Fast Data Processing: Websites developed using PHP functions very easily and has one of the fastest data processing features.

Integration Capabilities: Another great feature of PHP is its capability of upload into HTML. PHP easily integrates with all kinds of web applications.

Easy to Understand: PHP is very easy to understand and work with compared to other scripting languages because of its simple features and tools.

How You Can Reduce the Bounce Rate on Your Website

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the site and bounce (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site. We look at some of the ways to reduce the bounce rate in your site and achieve optimum conversion.

1. Create a Blog Section

People love to read. When someone spends time on the internet, they usually read. They love to get information about the query or product they search. So they open a blog for your customize and you can drive them from homepage to blog.

2. Use Related Posts Section

When someone lands on a blog post or a product page, they can be interested in some similar posts in your blog. You just need to make sure he can get those related posts without any hassle. The best portion to show related posts is the bottom part of the post.

3. Use Recent Posts Section

Show all the recent posts, most popular posts or product on the sidebar. So that people not only find the post they want, but also have the easy option to visit other pages which might be different from the landing page. You can also add the popular posts section.

4. Breadcrumb Navigation

We can earn user satisfaction only if we provide the information or product that the users seek. We need to do everything possible to help them find their target information. Breadcrumb navigation helps visitors know where they have landed and also help them navigate to other pages.

5. Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the most important parts for both bounce rate and SEO. So, try to create internal links wherever possible so that visitors get other important updates which might be beneficial for them.

6. Loading Time Optimization

Slow website can destroy your reputation. Slow websites reduce the interest of the visitors and ends up with high bounce rate. So it becomes important to ensure your website has a good loading speed. Try to use minimum plugins, and always delete an unused plugin if you are using wordpress.

7. Ensuring Quality Content

This is the most important thing to ensure to reduce your bounce rate. For this, it is necessary to know the psychology of your target audience, their likes and dislikes, and preferences. And then you have to product content according to that. So, the final task is to product quality content that your audience needs.

5 Tips to Learning Joomla

As one of the most exciting web content management systems, you would obviously be eager to learn Joomla. But where can you learn it? That’s the subject of this article as we take a look at the learning environment for Joomla.

The Joomla Learning System:

This is the traditional way. It involves getting manuals, attending training classes, conferences and workshops that help you learn Joomla.  The other way is to simply get a package and start learning Joomla. At the end of the day, you need to be comfortable with Joomla. That’s it.

Apply What You Learn:

The easiest way to learn Joomla is to start creating a website as you learn the CMS. This way you would make mistakes and continue to learn. Unless you create a website, you would never know the nitty gritties of Joomla.

Joomla Resource Websites:

Another very good to learn Joomla is to frequent websites, discussion forums and follow threads that have a lot of useful information on how you can create and manage Joomla websites. There are Joomla videos, FAQs and learning sessions for beginners and professionals alike.

Joomla User Groups:

Just about every big city or metropolis would have a Joomla user group and yours must be having one too. The JUG typically has enthusiastic, ready to interact and knowledgeable Joomla webmasters teaching you the intricacies of the CMS. A JUG typically meets monthly, but this may vary according to the needs and time availability of the membership of the Joomla group. At these meetings, in addition to meeting fellow Joomla webmasters, you can also get the latest information on what's going on in the Joomlasphere, along with new useful tools and extensions.

Continued Practice:

As we already saw, that to learn Joomla quickly, you need to have hands-on practice during the early stages. However, the Joomla CMS is so dynamic that if you don't constantly practice and explore it, you may either lose track of where it is going or even forget some of the skills. However, if you are regularly engaged in tweaking your Joomla website and keeping up to date with what's going on, you will find out that learning how to design Joomla websites becomes much more easier and creative for you as you discover new tools, tricks and creative ways to make it do your will and design virtually any type of website using Joomla.

Going Mobile? Choose Drupal

Mobile can’t be ignored. This technology axiom is too well known to be repeated. But it is worth remembering that it has been more than 2 years since mobile overtook PCs in web access. The question then boils down to what technology do you use to lap up the mobile advantage. One of the names that obviously strikes us would be Drupal. But why Drupal for mobile?

When you want to go mobile, you already have(if you don’t, you must) 3 objectives in your mind:

• To minimize the effort, time and money to mobilize your site

• To deepen engagement with native app by managing mobile and desktop content in one place and

• To tailor the mobile experience

Back in the old days, when you wanted to mobilize your site, you had to create a completely separate site and hand select content which required separate layouts and styles. For specific devices of course, you needed to create individual styles and layouts.

It is here that Drupal offers you the advantage of being Responsive from the word go. Well, for those of you who ask what responsive means, it basically means that instead of having two sites(one for desktop and another for mobile) with all their additional formatting and maintenance headaches, you create one theme that would detect the device viewing and respond by redrawing the site for that device. Now, that would bring about the following :

• One article = one URL (Basically one codebase for the website)

• Update content just once

• Maintain just a single platform

Got it folks? It needs to be pointed out that responsive also additionally means flexible grids, adaptive widgets, media queries etc. How does Drupal fare here?  Drupal has several base themes(Omega, Adaptive, Zen) that support responsive layer out of the box. The Omega theme, in particular has been one of the most powerful and responsive themes for Drupal. It is fully HTML5 compatible, uses some elements of CSS3, is based on the 960 grid and provides many layouts directly in the Drupal interface.  It also plays well with service module, REST and JSON.

All of us know that drupal core is modular, having a system of hooks and callbacks, accessed internally through an API. It is this design that allows modules and themes contributed by  third-parties to extend or override Drupal's default behaviors without changing Drupal core's code.

Though there are security and usability issues with Drupal, these issues are found with other Content Management systems as well. It would be safe to assume that they’d be fixed in the near future and Drupal’s reputation of the core never being hacked would stand.