CMS

Content Management System

Content Management System Trends That Can Enhance User Experience

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Is your content management system (CMS) being used for mere storing and managing content? Or has it been designed for providing best user experience to your website visitors?

A meaningful digital experience has become quite significant these days to stay ahead of the competition. Not only your website design but the content management system also plays a major role in providing a comfortable user experience to your visitors.

Thus, a content management system should be more than just a tool for broadcasting the content on your website. With so many changing trends happening in website design and development, the trends in content management are also changing at a fast pace giving importance to customer experience and business growth.

Let’s know the content management system trends which have helped businesses in presenting the content in a much more futuristic manner.

Integrating With Other Applications

The content management system should have the ability to sync with other applications. This feature has become mandatory these days as there are so many tasks in business to be done from a single platform.

Whether you want to integrate your content management system with CRM or a payment gateway, the process should be streamlined and properly managed in order to provide a seamless functionality to your visitors.

Research and Analysis

Having a website which is well-designed and excellent in functionality is not at all worth with a proper research and analysis on what your users are looking for.

The CMS including analytical tools can inform you exactly what your users are looking for. This research and analysis would help you in creating the content which can provide best user experience resulting in higher engagement and conversions.

This would help you in ensuring that you are answering to all the queries and demands of your customers and creating the content with different contexts in mind.
Customized for Managing Multiple Platforms

Besides your website, your customers would be exploring your business through your mobile application, emails, phone call center, etc. Is your CMS connected to these cross-channel touch points?

You may ask why is it necessary for a content management system to manage each and every part of your marketing process. If your CMS is connected to the multiple platforms, it would provide you a convenience of accessing the entire information from a single platform.

But, how would this help your customers? The ease of accessing information would obviously lead you towards providing a better and quick response to your customers.

Infusing Artificial Intelligence

There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Studies revealed that AI market will grow to $5.05 billion in next three years.

Artificial intelligence can be included in content management system for analyzing content, content optimization, and natural language generation.

AI is considered as the most effective way to engage customers and generate more leads and traffic. Thus, syncing content management system with Artificial Intelligence is highly demanded these days.

Aligning Content Management System with Latest Trends

Executing latest trends in your content management system would help you to have an intelligent and futuristic approach towards your business and stay ahead of the competition.

As your customers’ demands are evolving it becomes important to ensure that your website content management is one step ahead to justify their requirements and provide best business experience.

17 Popular WordPress Plugins for Content Creation

17 Popular WordPress Plugins for Content Creation

Having a strong content marketing strategy is very important to maintain contents for your website, all through the year, fresh and firm! Long posts create higher traffic hence WordPress recommends lengthy and quality content for great results. Wouldn’t it be good to ride along a few top most WordPress plugins for powerful content creations? Keep in mind it’s much more than just writing!

  • Editorial calendar: The plugin lets you choose when you want the content to be published and displays it in the overview. You may drag to move, edit text and manage authors right on the calendar
  • Edit flow: WordPress editorial group communicates with you featuring calendars month on month, displaying your content, notifying you on updates and providing you a private thread for admin discussions. It even allows one to create user groups, a feature aimed at large organisations where the publishing teams may be quite big involving a lot of people. Editing, retaining and deleting the default user groups is possible.
  • Curation Suite: Content curation is picking up a variety of content from multiple sources and presenting it in an organised manner for a better reach. Curation Suite provides one with immense capabilities for the same; publish and curate in the dashboard, search and add content from one-click curation, edit using visual editor and more.
  • WP RSS Aggregator: RSS feeds are frequently published information on news, blog entries, media and so. RSS feeds help publishers to release data automatically to viewers. WP RSS Aggregator allows you to release multiple RSS feeds from various sources, with the use of its shortcodes. It’s the best RSS feed solution with features: Set names for feeds, no limit to the number of feeds one can import, control feed item storage in databases, set feed import interval, customize output as needed, integrate with YouTube and daily motion site directly, extendable and many more.
  • Listly: The plugin lets you post in lists and share these more often than you do others. List posts are those that show content in bulleted lists, as in, top ten eCommerce platforms, 10 WordPress plugins for contents and so. The plugin is possible to be integrated with other sites, editable, responsive, has multiple layouts, social, enables adding voting buttons, enables selective sharing from a single list, enables the whole list sharing and suooorts a great SEO!
  • YouTube plugin: The plugin lets you create responsive media content, make playlists, create galleries, auto play enabled lists, have an improved Ajax support, easy insert of visual and text modes, auto play for videos, embed channels, localisation and many more.
  • ImageInject: ImageInject lets you search among 1000s of free images based on any keyword, choose and insert into your blog post. One can customise the way this insertion is done. Flickr, Pixabay and many more image sources are supported. Focus keywords can be inserted in WordPress SEO by Yoast for image search optimization
  • Opinion Stage: This plugin lets you set up polls, surveys, drive traffic from forums online and in media, gather details of people participating in polls, and generate revenue by embedding ads in polls. You can check more here.
  • Infogram: This lets one easily create data visualisations and embed them for sharing in any publication. One can access directly from WordPress visual editor authenticating into own library, supports integration of public images with infogram using the URL, and allows multiple users post to WordPress using the shortcode.
  • Zedity: This plugin lets you add multimedia content in the easiest way with no technical jargon skill required. Its features include 100% visual content creation, easy generation of HTML5 and CSS, and more flexibility than WordPress visual editor. You can do all by yourself!
  • My Curator: My Curator lets you customise RSS, twitter, google alert and all media sources you are interested in. Simply speaking it’s a way of using WordPress to display content to you based on your preferences set up, as in your keywords, your sources, in your native language. You can curate content for your convenient review. Check more here.
  • Search Everything: This plugin enhances the default WordPress search enabling you to configure WordPress for search pages, attachments, comments, custom fields and more. You can choose to exclude posts and categories from search. Activate, configure and search are the three simple steps to use WordPress search!
  • Widget Content Blocks: WYSWYG lets you manage widget blocks having the default WordPress edits enabled and having to write no HTML. It helps you insert media, add headings, lists, shortcodes, WP links and more.
  • Tiny MCE Advanced: This plugin helps you effectively manage the buttons on the toolbar. It encompasses 15 other related plugins and automatically provides common services like paragraph tab in editor, importing CSS from dot CSS and so.
  • Ether Content Builder: This plugin has a great UI and helps anyone with no coding knowledge to build content pages in no time. It comes with a creative visual composer and set up for regular WordPress updates
  • Envira Gallery: It’s the top most responsive gallery plugin from WordPress. It lets you create galleries in a few clicks, lets you share in media, integrate with Pinterest, build for smart devices and desktops in one shot, image proofing, woocommerce integration, album creation for photos and more.
  • Aesop Story Engine: It’s a plugin for storytellers in WordPress. You can build storytelling themes using the multimedia components done on the fly when you build posts in WordPress. You can use its audio feature for showcasing interviews, video feature for showing videos, content feature to streamline content into any structure as you want (say into multiple columns like in magazines), character feature to remind viewers on key characters of stories, map, parallax and many more.

Well, that’s a huge content on WordPress content creation plugins we believe. Not all plugins are for everyone’s suitability; choose what you believe as the best for your needs. Should you require any assistance, ask us now.

Should you use free WordPress theme?

Should you use free WordPress theme?

Websites themes should be in such a way that they don’t hallucinate the audience rather impress them; not reduce the load time rather improve it. For blogging websites, every blog isn’t the same as the other. A photography blog requires different aesthetics compared to that of a wildlife blog site. The pioneer of blogging site, WordPress, the well-known content management software gives you both free and premium themes. Which website design suits you the best and why?

Broadening the online presence via content marketing requires a great content management platform (CMS) as in WordPress. Using a free WordPress theme in order to save a few bucks is like selling your own brand without the necessary ingredients in it. Don’t defame your brand with a free theme!

  • Free themes lack the features you may need to compete audaciously with the competitors. Spinners, different menu kinds, AJAX load for a great UX and many more good features aren’t available with the free theme. Widgets, sliders, whatsoever be it, there’s definitely a big difference between what the premium ones offer and what the free ones do.

When can you still go for free themes? To redirect a link to their site or to make use of certain widgets really adding some sense to the site or use it to go for paid themes later may be!

  • Professional classy looks given by the premium themes aren’t given by the free ones; how do you expect to impress the corporate audience then? Unless you really have a small goal for now and have future plans of revamping from scratch, don’t lose your customers; pay for what you get and you get better for a better pay!
  • Support from the WordPress professionals/agencies/any consultants is very meagre for the sites built on free themes. To make a change or to pick up bugs or to apply a fix or for anything, you require a support. All of us aren’t professionals in development and might not know everything on CSS/HTML/PHP or JavaScript. To deal with the themes in all technical terms you need the support. Vendors selling you the themes definitely offer a great support for you have paid them.
  • Responsive web design/responsive website/mobile friendly website/all device compatible website/user friendly website aren’t jargons anymore but every business knows the importance of having them; Not just business but even the customers know how a site should look on their phones & know why if it doesn’t look so. To go responsive and to provide the best results or the best user experience you definitely have to pay for it!
  • Premium themes aren’t costly enough to afford. A few dollars is all that takes to get some of the best selling themes!

Now that you have a good idea on why pay for themes, you might require the assistance to perform the design. Hiring a developer, checking with him what theme he uses, taking a look at his earlier designs, installing WordPress a good host, installing the theme, doing the right coding, launching the site on https, all of these require an expert service; looking for one? Ask us right now, at QeHTML!

Which CMS is best for your needs

Which CMS is best for your needs?

The revolution, content management systems have caused today, has resulted in a non-technical or a nerd can equally update any website with this tool. While the basic necessities of an ecommerce website, as in having responsive websites/responsive web designs for web development and mobile friendly websites for the best conversions always hold good, it’s not to be missed that having a user friendly CMS is necessary to have the content managed quite independently.

WordPress, Drupal, Joomla are the most popular Content management systems worldwide; picking one of them to choose the specific business profile is the need of the hour.

CMS Comparison chart goes below:

Having seen the basics and goodness of each of the CMSs above, let’s talk a bit on features and stats related. WordPress holds the biggest of the 3 in market shares with 65%, while Drupal and Joomla hold the 3rd and the 2nd most popular CMS respectively worldwide. Free themes and free plug ins are available for all three of them. Frequency of updates is good for all of them being from 30-40 days whereas the choice should depend on the need as per the facts mentioned in the smart art above.

To talk on the skill level needed, Technical expertise is not a necessity and text paste from MS word to a WordPress site is easy while Drupal needs the highest expertise technically also it is the best to produce advanced sites and Joomla is in between WordPress and Drupal where there’s a less effort to understanding it and the best for fairly complex sites.

Having spoken a lot about the 3 highly prevailing CMSs, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, hope you must have a really fair idea of what your need is and what is the best for you. if you are looking for the best service provider to do this for you, just ask us.

Most Important Factors to be considered before choosing a CMS

The growth of hand held devices and the respective users today have necessitated businesses to use responsive websites or responsive web designs in web development because having a mobile friendly website is very important to broaden the customer base. In addition, having the content at par with the trends and technology is extremely important if you wish to stand apart, as an ecommerce service provider. Having a lot of Content management systems today, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, CMS Comparison to choose the best and the most user- friendly CMS has become a big challenge.

Eye-alluring CMS doesn’t mean the best-for-use one; let’s go through some of the factors to be considered in studying the systems and the top 5 CMS prevailing today.

What is an open source CMS? A content management tool built on a platform built on a code easy for anyone to use and distribute is termed an open source CMS. To mention on popular CMSs, it is WordPress for blog build and growing ecommerce sites; Joomla for appreciably established ecommerce companies; Drupal for big enterprises. To mention on the ease of learning, WordPress is the easiest of all and Drupal is the toughest while the rest are moderate.

To know which is the best for you, consider,

  • Functionality in crux: Managing a website, that’s creating it, adding, deleting, editing and maintaining the webpages should be accompanied by a few other functions that’s necessary for the core stability of an ecommerce website. Check if the CMS you choose suffices it.
  • Editor capabilities: Editor being one of the core elements of CMS, used by publishers for provision of heading and lists should let the editor have an access to handle images, files and whatsoever is required for the web design.
  • Asset management: A bad CMS design affects the usability. CMS providing for the images are preferred along with the capability of image editing, pdf uploads and more.
  • The best Search option: Users mostly look out for the search option in a website. Make sure your CMS does this at the utmost perfection.
  • Flexibility in customization: The CMS should be easy enough to retrieve and show the content customized for the device/pc. Make sure you check upon this.
  • User feedback: CMS enabling user communication via a chat or comments or ratings is a must, with the necessary plug in or 3rd party interfaces. Check it.
  • Role maintenance: CMS should be capable enough to let the blogger lend permissions of add/change/comment over the blogs or manage the functions/accesses as necessary.
  • Versioning: Having a CMS that controls versioning to get you the last saved state in case of an erroneous move, is an advantage though not a mandate need
  • Multi web support: Driving more than one website with a single CMS installation sounds attractive. Isn’t it? It is useful too.
  • Multilingual possibility: CMS supporting multiple languages is not something to be ignored, even if you are a domestic business today. It eases the future expansion, make sure to have it.

In short, to choose a CMS, consider the below: Adaptability, Manageability, Scalability, Security, User friendliness, Plug ins connected, HTML CSS support availability, Social media & SEO compliance, the ease to migrate and internationalization capability. To get the best of CMS services, don’t hesitate to give us a call or visit our website.

Have Joomla Website? Have you ensured security?

Have Joomla Website? Have you ensured security?

To achieve a secure Joomla set up, there are ten aspects to be diligently taken care of.

1. Cheap hosting providers to be strictly avoided. They use shared servers hosting 100 other sites of which a few are high porn ones. Sharing the same IP, your website would be slow too also with a bad reputation due to a bad surrounding. Easily prone to hacking as well; hence better to go with the list of recommended and Joomla approved hosting providers.

2. Backups are important- Ensure to take Joomla backups so when hacking occurs we have a hold to build from scratch.

3. Adjusting settings of PHP is a must. Skipping the settings for security of PHP is a threat to Joomla. Ensuring all the smallest possible settings and tweaks to make the PHP server and Joomla, prevents all if not just a few security issues at the occurrence itself avoiding further consequences.

4. Avoiding same password username all over is a well-known basic good practice while many of us fail to follow it we ought to admit. (Joomla, bank, yahoo, gmail, facebook, amazon and what not!) Also admin account should be named something other than the word ‘admin’!

5. Missing to ensure all are fit in a newly installed brand new Joomla powered website isn’t any sense. Anything can go wrong anytime leading to Joomla issues unless a regular maintenance of Joomla installations is made.

6. Having no development server to try the upgrades and installations, before pushing to the live site is a bad practice. Mistakes can be corrected well before they reach the live site.

7. Installing all the 3rd party extensions isn’t quite healthy. To ensure optimal Joomla security one should go with the least extensions needed. While some of them are secure, most others are flooded with vulnerabilities. Hence it’s the best recommended to go with the professional components from reputable companies.

8. Updating Joomla releases is an absolute necessity. Every stable release as and when it comes up needs to be updated by a website sitting on it without which the website is never going to consume the release fixes and vulnerability removals leaving the site open to all problems. This is the case for extensions too

9. Joomla forums are to be kept in touch with, so one doesn’t go ahead with posting crazy stuffs. Version of Joomla, 3rd party extensions’ version and all to be kept in place so when there’s a hacking in future we just to know what to do and how to get out of it!

10. Fixing just the corrupted file isn’t enough in case of getting hacked. Logs to be checked, passwords to be changed, entire directory to be trashed, rebuild from scratch to be done and take care of all warnings so security issues don’t pop up.

Having said these, we ensure we are up to date with the trends in web design, details on CMS security, and content management software to ensure we have a secure CMS. If you are looking for the best in web designing incorporating all the aspects in the best manner to the classy design that impresses Google, feel free to contact us.

What do I expect from WordPress 4.5?

What do I expect from WordPress 4.5?

Where quite a few content management software and content management platforms exist, we enjoy WordPress as always. Today when a responsive web design or a responsive website is looked upon as a must to impress Google, we are in an urge to the best of responsive web designs for a great ranking and better businesses. Let’s see how WordPress supports us in its new avatar.

While most features in the Beta WordPress 4.5 released around Feb week 3 would make it to the final, expected in April, some may or may not but it’s definitely exciting to know on what’s new. Isn’t it?

To talk on features in WordPress 4.5, the upcoming WordPress version , it adds the long awaited theme from customizer to the WordPress core. Rather than uploading custom logos using the options panel, the core support lets us do it from the theme customizer. Support for logos happens with the size values in the respective commands. Themes not supporting this wouldn’t be showing up in the customizer.

An enhancement to the visual editor which is of a great writing experience to users comes up as a wonder in the new WordPress version. Of the time saving shortcuts, CTRL+K or Command+K on Mac makes your link insertion into posts much easier. Pressing CTRL+K, typing the url and continuing writing the post without removing the hand off insert the link inline.

Quick shortcuts for inline texts that came up in WordPress 4.3 are ameliorated with more in the new one. However if you don’t like them, very well you can disable them in the editor.

Moderating comments eats up the time of bloggers when there’s a new comment submitted. WordPress usually sends an email notification that takes us to the page of comments where we can approve but not formatting or so. WordPress 4.5 comes up with the edit link to do the formatting.

Responsive preview in customizer is the next wonder which lets you click the device icon to switch between devices. Desktop, mobile and tablet previews available would give you an idea how the site would show your devices.

Optimized image size generation is an enhancement to the one in WordPress 4.4 where smaller screen users saw smaller images as suited. Now it comes with saving costs on data plans too without any quality loss. Saving images optimised for web is still recommended.

Allowing users to login using their email address is the next new feature so no more the pain of having to keep your user name by-heart!

For developers, Selective refresh in customizer lets developers make changes without having to reload the whole page making the process faster to do things better with live previews. Customizable embed templates lets one use posts from other sites or WordPress blogs where the embed templates are customizable for the custom displays we simply want! WP_Site Class for multisite WordPress installs is a feature to run and manage multiple WordPress sites from a single WordPress installation.

Having said these, we assure you we are up to the trends in the web designs, CMS and the expectations of Google in a website with respect to the design and customer experience. If you are looking for the best in the web design with all the aspects taken care diligently to suffice your worth, feel free to contact us.

Drupal 6 : End Of Life!

Drupal 6 : End Of Life!

Drupal is the content management software or content management platform for creating integrated digital frameworks with any number of add-ons to customize your content presentation.

What is it about drupal versioning? Of Feb 24th 2016, Drupal 6 is at EOL (End Of Life). What this means to you?

=> Drupal 6 would no longer be supported on a larger note; not used for creating new projects or documentations or modify the existing projects for bugs.

=> Core commits on Drupal 6 would be nil

=> Security advisories or support for Drupal 6 would be nil

=> Drupal 6 releases on project pages would be flagged as not supported

=> Update for Drupal sites would go antedated any sooner

Upgrading Drupal is definitely necessary but to which version you would want to upgrade depends on the complexity of your website and the modules contained in it. A lot of modules have been built in Drupal 8, as in Views and WYSWYG editor. Migration can be done as an experimental step from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 directly so upgrading would be simple using an interface or using Drush which is the command-line shell and scripting interface to make life easier for those who spend their working hours hacking away at the command prompt. Upgrading to Drupal 7 is as well possible using the core update aspect and this would be supported till Drupal 9 comes in.

Upgrading is a must; for sites that aren’t upgraded by now it is only the paid support that’s available from vendors for Drupal 6.

To mention on the support for the version upgrades, the community initiatives to support Composer is available on Drupal.org, taking the help of the community members and the maintainer of Composer and Packagist.org.

Support for the 2 Composer end points, which is for Drupal 7 projects and for the Drupal 8 projects is available with Drupal.org. These separate endpoints enable Drupal.org to translate Drupal-style version numbers into the true semantic versioning as per the expectations of Composer. Additionally supporting a transparent movement to a better semantic versioning for contrib projects on Drupal.org is also being aimed at. A beta of this Drupal.org Composer support in March might come up soon.

Drupal.org provides support allowing users to follow more content types, as in Forum Topics, Posts, Case Studies, documentation Book Pages and more. But then, email notification for any activity on a wide variety of content on Drupal.org is very much getting possible for the users, which forces us to provide some better tools for managing those notifications.

Having said these, we assure we are up to date with the software updates and the implications they have at any scale for any kind of business or website. If you are looking for the best content management system provider to handle your website content and system upgrades, feel free to contact us.