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Web Development

Web 2.0 Development Services

Web 2.0 has taken the world by storm and it is here to stay. Whether you wish to start a new venture or expand an already existing business, Web 2.0 can help accomplish these objectives easily. If you too wish to jump onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon there are ways in which you can leverage strategic services to keep you ahead of the race – always.

User Interface

The interface of your website or Web 2.0 platform is paramount to ensuring better customer experience online. Plus it also plays a vital role in strengthening your brand perception amongst users. If you wish to create a winning impression then you regularly need to engage in UI design services that constantly keep changing the look and feel and experience of your site online.

When you have a good quality UI design you can actually jumpstart future changes and maintenance issues later on. Some of the aspects of UI designing include things like information architecture, specification document for UI, interface designing and interaction as well as wireframe mockups.

Front End Implementation

Once the interface has been designed and structured the next stage is to actually implement it. This process is also known as web engineering for the front end. It includes the usage of technology and tools such as HTML and DHTML, ensuring 508 compliance, CSS as well as using JavaScripts on the web pages.

These tools help in ensuring a more interactive interface which performs as per expectations. For example JavaScript pop ups can be used to provide special trivia or facts or tips about a particular product or service on your site.

Testing the Interface

While you may have done a great job in implementing the interface you also need to ensure that it is performing optimally under real time conditions. For this purpose usability testing is paramount. You will need to analyze the expectations of your end users, find out the typical manner in which they will access your site and then perform testing accordingly.

Some of the things included in usability testing include development of personas, creating a holistic usability report, evaluating the site design and architecture heuristically as well as performing user testing from the customer’s point of view.

Prototyping

Creating a suitable and interactive prototype is paramount to showcase your products to clients. Even before actually implementing a product you can develop an interactive prototype in order to ‘test’ out reactions to design and usability features. Thus it is virtually a testing ground to assess customer reactions based on the prototype. You can impress investors, your board as well as potential customers by providing interactive prototypes of your products.

This way you can ‘test’ out the product perception, reactions from customers etc. By assessing these parameters you can fine tune the marketing campaigns and product features to make it more effective. Interactive prototyping involves usage of front end web engineering as well as UI designing.

Using AJAX

AJAX is the abbreviated form of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It involves using interrelated technologies in order to provide more interactive web content and websites. By the exchange of small bits of information with the backend server every web page manages to achieve a far greater range of interactivity and responsiveness.

This also ensures that when an action is performed the web page does not need to be reloaded each time. This greatly enhances the speed of the web page and results in superior user experience online.

The reason the term is called asynchronous is because small bits of data are exchanged with the server and populated into the front end, without impacting the behavior on the rest of the page. All function calls made from AJAX employ JavaScript as the script language. While AJAX certainly enhances response times and generally usability one of the main drawbacks of this technology is its dependence on the JavaScript language.

This scripting language is often interpreted differently by diverse browsers, often leading to compatibility problems online. Some users might purposely disable JavaScripting support on their browser which can also impact readability for such sites.

Measurable Results

With Web 2.0 it is possible for you to measure results of your campaigns and ensure customers are doing what you intend on them doing. For example by examining your web server logs you can estimate how many customers are downloading a particular file, reading about it, from which sources have they visited your site as well as how many clicks they have made into your website.

By understanding such criteria you are in a much better position to make informed decisions regarding strategic business moves on your company.  You can also find out what customers generally feel about your brand and the way they perceive it. Certain technology enables you to read other blogs to find out what is currently being said about your brand.

Folksonomy for More Interactive, Informal Content

The beauty of Web 2.0 is the amount of informality it promotes. One such example is the usage of popular tags. Thus tags like Yankees, Baseball etc. are highly popular. These are often the most commonly searched keywords by other users online and which are then linked to associated content online. It is a brilliant method of categorizing and making sense of the tons of information on the Internet.

The good thing about tagging methods today is that it is done by not only the experts in the subject as well as the creators of the content but also based on the most popular keywords searched for by users. Thus instead of having a fixed, controlled set of vocabulary to tag the content, folksonomy involves usage of informal keywords for this purpose.

Mashups

As the name suggests this technology employs the usage of more than one content source and condensing it into one format. The idea is to provide as much of content rich information as opposed to static text. For example in a real estate ad listing the usage of maps maybe be provided in order to assist users better in locating the information.

The concept of mashups is innovative in that instead of utilizing a single source for information, diverse information sources are collated together – thus providing a superior online experience for the user.

Usage of RSS Feeds

Known as Rich Site Summary, RSS Feeds are a way of aggregating information from diverse sources into a single website. This technology is another offshoot of Web 2.0 where dynamic content is churned out every few minutes instead of the usual static text. Thus it provides an interesting and more interactive experience for the user. It also draws more traffic into the site as users are constantly curious to know what is the latest information posted on the site.

With the help of aggregator software now relevant content from diverse RSS feeds can be collated into a systematized format. Hence if a website is dealing with spare auto parts, it can subscribe to relevant RSS feeds based on specific keywords. This automatically gets populated into the front end of the web pages. The result – interesting, dynamic content which users keep coming back to read.

Wikis and Forums

Both of these Web 2.0 forms are types of open source content online. In essence the members of a Wiki can upload useful content as and when they wish. Even in the case of forums users can actively participate in discussion threads and post their comments and opinions on various topics. This is all about user-centric and user-generated content which gets posted on discussion groups and message boards.

Many bulletin boards, forums and discussion groups focus on a particular niche area of interest. Thus users interested in this segment can leverage these forums and discussion groups to improve their knowledge, post their comments and experiences in this segment etc. Most of the forums are made using software created using diverse languages such as Perl, PHP, ASP as well as Java.

The range of forum software offerings span from simple textual postings to even providing support and compatibility for multimedia types of postings as well as BBCode for formatting. While emailing lists will automatically send latest updates into the user’s mailbox on a regular basis, in the case of forums the user will need to log in to check for the latest updates.

Cascading Style Sheets or CSS

This is mainly a style sheet language which is widely used in presenting a document in particular markup languages like XHTML and HTML etc. However such CSS languages can also be used for XUL and SVG documents of XML types. Using CSS enables users to define fonts, colors as well as the layout of a page exactly in the way they wish – thus providing more flexibility and user-centric data.

This enables the segregation of the content written in HTML from the actual presentation in CSS. CSS also facilitates the document presentations in varying formats like for example in printing, on screen, voice methods etc. Thus the same web page can often be represented in different ways using CSS technology.

There is a definite priority scheme that is outlined in CSS thus enabling style rules to be applied based on the relative weight of each web page.

Call 1-888-44WEBFX or contact us online today to get a Web 2.0 application from the experts.