CMS vs Static Website: Which One Should You Choose

One of the most important decisions to make before having your website developed is whether to a CMS based dynamic website or static website. It is a common question business owners and individuals face every time they decide to make a website. Even though CMSs like WordPress are very popular today, static websites also have their own benefits and use. Let’s take a detailed look at what these are and which one you should prefer for your next website project.

What is a Static Website?

Static website is developed from the ground up, written in code – CSS3, HTML5, PHP and JQuery. It is built entirely by the designers and developers. With static websites, you can have more freedom in designing layouts, every element of page can be twisted, allowing great precision in the designs you create. Static website is much faster to develop, reducing designers’ workload and makes them more affordable. Usually static websites are brochure type sites where content does not need to be changed. Updates, whenever required, will normally have to be done by developers.  

Pitfalls Of Static Websites:

• There is a latent complexity in updating. Even a minor error within the code can disrupt the whole layout of the web page.
• Additional costs are required to pay to web developers for modifications.
• Search engines won’t favor static websites with static content over a similar website that has its content regularly updated.

Benefits Of Static Websites:

• Pay lower development cost. Static websites are built in a less amount of time.
• They have simple web hosting requirements. They do not require a database to store their content in.
• Easy to build own website with WYSIWYG tools. Get various cost effective software packages designed to allow users to make their own websites visually appealing, without having much knowledge of HTML.

What is a CMS (Content Management System)?

A CMS is a dynamic website, designed to be scalable when it comes to content development and most importantly its features. Users are empowered to update content at their convenient time, without breaking the website layout. Frequent content updation is always possible with web pages, blogs, photo galleries and more. The of the most popular CMS platforms include WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, in that order of popularity.  

Pitfalls Of A CMS Website:

• It needs a greater cost of web development. You would also require a professional CMS developer for making your website.
• To know how to work with CMS websites, you need to learn how it is structured so you can control naming, categories, menus, etc.
• Customers who have slower bandwidth may have to wait a little longer for their CMS website to load. CMS driven websites include media like dynamic content and images and if not optimized for web, can slow down a website, hampering user experience.

Benefits Of A CMS Website:

• As a user, you get full control over the content of your website without the need for knowledge of HTML, CSS or other languages. CMS customization can be done easily, whether you do it yourself or hire someone to do it.
• It depends on what type of CMS you pick; there can be a huge collection of content types to work with beyond just text, photos, audio or video.
• It is SEO friendly. Websites that update content regularly gain more of an attention from search engines (like Google) and will often rank higher in search engine results (SER) pages that are an essential competitive aspect for business websites.

To Conclude

If you want a small website with content that probably won’t change much over time, you can go for a static website. In all other cases it is always preferable to go for a CMS driven website, for their scalability, SEO friendliness, and ease of updation.

5 Mobile Marketing Strategies For Your Ecommerce Brand

For eCommerce businesses and brands, mobile as a medium cannot be ignored anymore. Mobile marketing has become one of the most important marketing tools. The accessibility of Mobile has open up new opportunities for ecommerce marketers to reach out to customers anytime, anywhere.

In this blog, I’m going to share with you some effective mobile marketing strategies that you can use to increase traffic and sales for your online store.

1. Responsive Web Design

Responsive website design is the most important factor for an effective mobile marketing strategy. Never forget that your website is the most vital tool when it comes to communication or marketing, since it connects you with your audiences.

Responsive design can offer the best version of your eCommerce website or store for each device that customers use – from desktop to tablet to smartphone. If you are an owner of an eCommerce website then ensure your website is all set for various devices. Responsive design offers a user friendly experience to users. This is incredibly important because, it brings you to the next initiative of marketing your store.

2. Display Advertisements

The most effective strategy is to spread brand awareness and re engage your customers by displaying ads. With respect to mobile devices there are umpteen opportunities to leverage this medium and ensure the results of your efforts are as valuable as possible. By considering mobile usage throughout the design and creative process, you can ensure that your ads are optimized for small screens – short and transparent images with “buttons” which are easy to click from touch screen phones.

Present networks through Google offer advertising opportunities on mobile websites so that you can show your ads on those sites with your targeted demographics. Advertising with Google is always a wise choice; it is important to remember that the current era is of mobile ads. Through AdWords, ads can be displayed to market brands on devices like tablets, smartphones or desktops. With Google, you can always manage costs as you would like depending on your campaign requirements.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social Media marketing is an integral part of digital marketing campaigns. Majority of social media users use mobile devices; they are active on platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and others where there are great capabilities to market your brand and reach wider audiences. However, there are a lot of options available for marketers to advertise on! They can excellently drive traffic to the websites by using social media platforms as a marketing funnel.

Whether you are using usual brand promotion ad or reengaging customers with products, your objective of social media marketing must be clear. You should keep in mind that, your campaigns are viewed from mobile devices. So place your advertisement campaigns accordingly. For instance, if you are doing a video advertisement on Facebook, then by default that video ad plays silently on auto play, keep all essential information in the beginning of the video so that people don’t miss them out even if they don’t watch the full video and use a descriptive image to promote a video advertisement. This helps communicate the core message of that ad, you are trying to elicit.

4. Mobile-Friendly Email Marketing

E-mail content must be concise with easy to read text and short call to action liners. Subject line should not be cut off in inbox. With so many users on smartphones when they check their inbox, it is important that your campaigns are well optimized for mobile devices. Once you get the email address for potential customers, you can drive effective website traffic and boost sales.

Most of the buyers check their inbox from their mobile devices, not from desktops. Make sure your efforts don’t go in vain. Also ensure your email marketing is mobile friendly. For this, you can use responsive designs (just like responsive websites) for e-mails. Use easily readable fonts, compelling images, clickable icons & call to actions. E-mail content must be created with limited word counts.

5. Tailor Content for Micro-Moments

An important factor to consider when building mobile marketing strategies is your “Content”. Create content which can boost your brand’s digital presence. The solution must be served as per the needs of your users. Fulfilling your consumers’ goals through relevant content is essential to grow your brand. A great digital presence matters a lot in the industry today. These are micro moments and with the development of smart phones, content is ruling the digital era.

With content, you can be much quicker than before; you must deliver value and at the same time you should be relevant. So as to leverage “I-want-to-buy” moments, it is must to customize your content. You can form messages which surround the mind of your consumers, creating informal content that speaks to the unique requirements of your target audiences. Users don’t read long paragraphs on their mobiles. Your potential customers look for accurate replies and the simple way to find your products.

Set Off A Mobile Marketing Strategy

Mobile marketing is rapidly emerging as a core marketing focus for many brands. A smart strategy requires the right amalgamation of imagination and creativity with a data-driven mindset. Majority of them need a commitment to offering the best end users experience possible. A well produced mobile strategy can be a game changer. Without taking your audiences into consideration, better strategy can’t be built.

7 CMS Myths You Should Be Aware Of

The world of CMS has been growing tremendously in the past couple of decades, more so since the launch of open source CMS frameworks like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. What was once the expertise of few IT companies became abundant and free and led to the explosion in the web development market.

Companies nowadays have an easy way to create dynamic websites, add content and graphics and do revisions and editing at will. CMS simplifies the content management process and offers a framework for keeping everything well organized. Not only this, it also streamlines collaboration among staff members so that everyone can be on the same page from different locations.

Over the years, there have been a lot of misconceptions about CMS in general and individual CMS frameworks in particular. Here are 7 of the most common CMS myths that need to be dispelled right now.

Myth #1: You Can Make Text Updates In A CMS

Majority of people believe that using CMS, they can only make text updates. However, this couldn’t be far from the truth, since most of the platforms allow you to update almost any part of the website including text, images, videos, page layout, menu items, sidebar widgets, etc. Any good CMS offers lot of flexibility in terms of what you can add or edit which means you can create media rich textual content to reach to the wide audiences without any hassle.

Myth #2: Open Source CMS Systems Are Easier To Use Than Proprietary Systems

One of the worst myths is the notion that everything open source is free and easy. Just because the source code of a system is available to everyone doesn’t make it easy to use. There are hundreds of open source CMS systems and there are even more proprietary systems. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and have their own level of complexity. Some are easy, some are not. For example Drupal, even though an open source and popular CMS, is quite complex in its structure and difficult to use.

Myth #3: A CMS Needs Extensive Maintenance

Maintenance of a CMS is rather simple because of its flexible features and functionalities if you choose the right CMS for your organization. Any good content management system reduces task redundancy, tasks that are laborious and tedious are completed with a much greater level of efficiency and accuracy.

Myth #4: There Are Security Threats Involved in CMS

Security threat is a real problem for any online system that stores data, not just CMS. Content management systems like WordPress get a bad name for security attacks simply because of the sheer number of websites powered by WordPress. With more number, the chances of getting hacked is also more. To avoid hacking attempts, user authentications with strict password types along with other security measures go a long way. Any good CMS has extensive security parameters which safeguard your content and protect critical content assets powerfully.

Myth #5: Open Source CMS Systems Are Cheap

This one of the most enduring myths in the CMS world and the primary reason why everyone seems to go for open source CMS platforms. Sure, the open source software is free. But that’s not enough for you to get a workable website. For that you need someone to design and develop your website, you need a server to host the website and again, someone to maintain the website. All these involve real costs and sometime these can add up to a significant amount.

Myth #6: CMS Is Not For Small Businesses

Many people think that Content Management System is not a viable solution for a small businesses who don’t have enough content to update on their website. They would rather have a static website than a full fledged CMS. The truth is a good CMS system can benefit even the smallest of businesses. With the help of CMS, small businesses can streamline content placement, staff can make better use of their time while controlling content from a central location. As your company expands from small to big, you definitely need content management system which can simplify your business process and minimize those growing pain points. Not just that if you have a scalable content platform you can easily create content and use it for SEO and online marketing to get more traffic.

Myth #7: Using a CMS Means That You Don’t Need A Developer

It is true that All popular CMS platforms make website development quite easy and often don’t need development skills. But to customize a CMS as per your unique requirements and design style does require programming skills like any other system and you need a good CMS developer for that. CMS systems are standardized and have a huge range of features. You may not use all of these features or you may have unique requirements that are not covered in standard features.

Making A Final Choice Of CMS

When it comes to choosing the best CMS, it is essential to be aware of all the facts. There should be proper research and study before making a final choice for CMS. One should not be misled by a few myths and get carried away.

5 Reasons Why You Should Integrate Your Website & CRM

No matter how small or large an organization is, it needs a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system or software. Every organization needs to manage their contacts & keep the track of interactions with them. And a CRM system is really good at capturing customer data and making it accessible to every concerned stakeholder in the organization.

This is the reason why integrating your CRM system with your website is a very good idea. Since your website is the most easily accessible touch-point for your customers, it also acts as a great input source for gathering customer data. And if the website is integrated with a CRM system the whole process of converting enquiries to leads and following up on them can be easily automated.

In this context, given below are five specific reasons why you should integrate your CRM system with your website.

1.Single (Precise) Data Source

One of the biggest reasons of integrating your website with CRM is that it will save a lot of time of your staff (and other sales or contact systems), as you have just one single precise data source for each contact. Furthermore, because there is no manual element in adding the data to the CRM, there is less possibility of the errors being generated or duplicate records being made. When you extend this process to hundreds of thousands of contact data being received from your website forms, you will have a centralized and accurate data bank of potential customers, that you can confidently use for better sales conversions.

2.Reduce Administration Overhead

If your website and your CRM are not yet integrated then perhaps you’re spending far too much time by manually copying and pasting the most recent order, enquiry or other data from your website to the CRM, or worst of all, not fetching that data in your CRM at all.

With the automated integration between the two systems, you are reducing your administration overhead (and therefore saving both time and money) as all that manual copy and paste, or export and import, is made redundant. This results in increased productivity as it allows your staff to work on other tasks.

3.Better Profiling

A key advantage of CRM is the capability to profile customers or leads, to decide what they might purchase and how these customers or leads are useful to you. The more information about the customer you have, the easier it is to make a better profile and the more precise the data you feed in, the better the profile becomes.

By integrating your website with CRM, you will get more complete picture of your customers’ interactions with your organization, from initial enquiry to sales, communications and finally feedback. It provides you access to get more reliable and consistent information. You are informed about your customers in a better way and you’ve better knowledge of your customer’s behavior and their buying habits.

Better customer profiles let you to manage more effectively various target marketing campaigns and other actions, while the website integration allows you to follow the effectiveness of these campaigns online with the help of conversion rates and customer response.

4.Increase Sales

Improve your organization’s sales by integrating CRM with your website! Fundamentally it all boils down to one thing – more and true data leads to better profiles, which shows the way to better-quality leads which in turn leads to higher conversion rates.

Many organizations waste a lot of time and money on their websites, creating awesome content stuff and adding forms for potential customers to contact them. By integrating your website with your CRM, it streamlines the sales funnel, as immediately after the initial contact there are potential leads in the system, and it offers your sales team better data to work with, eventually leading to more sales.

5.Immediate access to up-to-date data

One of the advantages of integrating the website with your CRM is having direct access to the most recent data. Automated integration between your CRM & website happens real time. There’s no more wondering if yesterday’s or last week’s website orders have been appended to the CRM as yet. This is highly beneficial when it comes to talking to a customer with self-assurance, all the information of their latest purchase or other interaction is available to you, and which, in turn, contribute to improved customer satisfaction and increased sales.

In order to benefit from a seamless integration of the website and CRM system, B2B companies should discover new ways of engaging with their audience, enrich it through personalized content and efficiently manage relationships with them through various communication channels.

How to Integrate Data From SugarCRM to QuickBooks?

Ever Imagined Why Healthcare Sectors Integrate CRM With WordPress? Here’s Why!

Are you in the healthcare industry? Does your WordPress website leave you behind when it comes to customer satisfaction? This can be easily fixed by offering your WP customers the benefit of SugarCRM and WordPress integration in the form of a dedicated SugarCRM Customer Portal which they can access from their WP interface. Better and automated system, making their business function smoother and faster.

Huge changes are sweeping across the healthcare business and are dramatically impacting healthcare organizations. For successfully building brand loyalty and maintaining long-term relationships with customers it is must to retain and satisfy customers in the face of increasing competition. Providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies are focusing more on patient care and satisfaction. At the same time, patient expectations for accessibility of information and interactions have risen dramatically.

To adapt in this dynamic environment, organizations must be able to rapidly respond to changes in market conditions and customer requirements. The solution must be such that it enables you to share information across systems and organizations, helping to assure consistent, up-to-date information.

How Customer Portal Pro works!

“Customer Portal Pro” allows you to manage all of your customers, partners, dealers and affiliates. You can organize your customers using custom attributes and keep track of your compatibility with them. It works well because it’s easy, powerful and you can manage everything from the ‘admin’ section of your site.

This plugin can integrate Accounts, Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, Meetings, Calls, Cases, Documents, Tasks, Notes of Sugar modules to your WP customer interface for their use.It will cut down your task of communicating with your WP customers and enables healthcare organizations to improve visibility, reduce complexity and remain quick in the face of massive change.

Modern healthcare systems must quickly evolve to meet the expectations of the connected users. It has been observed that costs have increased steadily irrespective to the medium of delivery, so ways have to be found to better, and cost efficiencies in delivering healthcare services. Customer Portal Pro enables healthcare sectors to go beyond this and build meaningful relationships with customers.

Simplify Business Functioning with Odoo Implementation

Are you seeking a solution that simplifies the challenging business functions? Odoo ERP can help you make your business, a power-packed solution. The numerous features and functionalities infused in Odoo ERP will make your business highly reliable and popular among your customer base. Modern businesses require a comprehensive ERP solution and Odoo ERP boosts the productivity and generates desired revenue.

Business Centric Odoo Services

Odoo Implementation

Odoo Enterprise Resource Planning that was earlier known as OpenERP is one of the leading ERP solutions used by top organizations as it is the perfect match for their challenging business requirements. Odoo ERP software fulfills all the crucial needs of simplifying the business functioning for better outcomes.

Odoo Customization

With this service businesses can avail tailor-made modules, apps and plugins. Creating customized modules and configuring it to the business system makes it accurate and reliable. Business owners can get expected outcomes with less investment.

Odoo Support and Maintenance

Sit back and rest assure about the ERP software, once you integrate Odoo ERP with business system. The support and maintenance service ensures of seamless business functioning.

Why Implement Odoo Solutions

• Odoo ERP is highly scalable
• It is open source
• Can be efficiently deployed
• Can be easily configured 
• It is highly modular
• It is available for free
• Seamlessly integrated and customizable

If you are in search of a solution that makes your business consistent and accurate, integrate Odoo ERP software, which is the perfect solution for organizations seeking simplified processes for great ROI.