The Top 5 Misconceptions of Banner Carousels

Why Banner Sliders are not Bad as people make them look?

Nowadays there is a ton of arguments surrounding the fact that Banner Sliders or Rotators are not as good for websites as they used to be. However, you still see a lot of big brands and company websites that make use of this feature for their websites and doing really great with it.

The fact is, sliding banners, if used correctly, are actually great tools for your website that can help you enhance your user experience and navigation. It has a lot of potential to show quick results and they do. However, a lot of people still don't feel convinced about this.

Given below are the top 5 misconceptions of Banner Sliders that people commonly have.

1. Banner Blindness

This is when your banners often look like advertisements and are hence ignored by users. This is true in cases where your banners use low quality graphics and an ad kind of design. In this case, not just sliders but even simple hero images are ignored. If you carefully curate your design and make it to the point, there is absolutely no chance that your banners will be ignored. Simple, elegant and to the point designs work the best.

2. Divide User Attention

User attention is divided when the designs of the banners include a lot of information and content that cannot be read and perceived in a matter of few seconds. Again, your banner design is at fault here. If your design is simple and to the point, users will easily understand the topic of prime focus of that banner and be ready to look at the next one.

This misconception also arises due to the fact that humans do not respond well to quick movements. This is where banner slider animations come in. If you choose a great banner slider add on, you can select a nice animation that seamlessly transitions one banner to another.

3. They Take Away User Control

When creating banners, experienced web developers make sure that this is not the case. Banner carousels usually have navigational arrows that allow users to manually switch back and forth different banners. Good Banner Carousel Extensions always have this option for users. This in fact gives them all the control over these banners.

4. They Reduce Visibility

There is absolutely no way sliders reduce visibility. In fact, they do the exact opposite. Rotating banners are such a great way to increase the visibility of important information on your website. You can also provide links to these banners that direct the users to exactly what is displayed on them. Since there will be quite a few of these, you can display multiple information in the different banners and include specific links for each. This also enhance user navigation.

5. They Take Up Space

Even though this is true, it is not a negative feature. Well designed rotating banners do take up space, but in fact they also give a quick view of the website's content to the users. Apart from helping you establish relevancy of your website among the users, it also helps you direct them where you want them to be. So all that space is probably a great part of your website.

Banner Carousels are absolutely not a problem. They are simply shown in the wrong light. World renowned brands like Puma, Coca Cola, Adidas etc. are regular users of banner sliders. Sure they wouldn't be doing so if it delivered such a bad user experience now, would they? So have no worries, and go and get a Banner Carousel Add On today for your website.

Hamburgers Kill: How Hamburger Menus might be killing your UX?

Be it a mobile app or a website, being the first point of contact between your business and a potential customer, your top priority is to make their experience as smooth and friendly as possible. How to make the customer journey more delightful is one of the most important questions to ask before anything else.

When you hire a web developer or mobile app development company, the first thing that comes to mind is "Design". The design of your app or website is what ensures a good user experience. A well designed app or website is something that is visually appealing and also aligned with the theme of your business. It should also provide an enriched navigation and aim to guide the customer to what they are looking for in a minimum number of clicks or taps.

One such important aspect of design is navigational menus and over the past few years, the theme of Hamburger menus have emerged as a top choice of navigation. So let's take a look at what Hamburger menus are?

What are Hamburger Menus?

If you have a little idea about design, you might already know what Hamburger menus are. For those of you who don't, Hamburger is a frequently-used design trick for adding or rather hiding extra functionality somewhere off your main screens.

More technically speaking, the hamburger menu is a button placed typically in a top corner of a mobile app or website screen. It takes the form of an icon that consists of three parallel horizontal lines, suggestive of a list. Tapping or clicking this button results in a menu being revealed by either sliding out or popping up thereby displaying a list of options or features for the users to select or use.

Hamburger menus are a much debated topic. While some argue it is a great way of saving up precious screen space, it also termed as something that might be seriously affecting or even reducing time spent by users in the app or website. Although hamburger menus offer a lot of advantages, many studies have proven otherwise.

We will be taking a look at some of the negatives of hamburger menus here and also some great alternatives of it.

Disadvantages of Hamburger Menus:

Some of the most major cons of these menus that might require some serious attention are as follows:

1. Poor Discoverability: Hiding the menu behind a small button means it’s less likely to be found and can be the cause of frustration. Majority of the people prefer links that are more visible and hence information is easy to look for. Hiding vital information and links under a small button can significantly decrease your click through rates.

2. Added User Time: A hamburger requires an action or additional click before a user can use it. This involves added time and effort that a user might not be committed to, especially if it’s just one of many sites they’re visiting in a session. The fewer clicks you make to a piece of functionality, usually the more usable and intuitive. This theory has also been tested, which indicated that hamburgers were likely to be clicked 20 percent less than a traditional open navigation tab.

3. Poor Usability: The positioning of hamburgers is usually in the top corner left or right hand area. On mobile screens especially, these are the spots farthest from user's fingers which force them to make an extra effort to select them. This leads to poor usability and hence lower preference of the website or app.

4. Poor User Journey: This disadvantage is primarily based around multi-push menus, a type of hamburger menus. These menus are built of multiple steps or levels, allowing a user to click down through the site structure from within the navigation. These menus can usually encourage users to skip sections of a user journey through the site or app and probably mislead them to sections they were not interested to visit. This leads to a poor user journey and hence increased abandonment rates.

Great Alternatives to Hamburger Menus

Although the hamburger menus might seem like a great choice at first, it definitely isn’t. They are a good option to go with for very specific use cases though. However, if not, there are some other good alternatives to that as mentioned below;

1. Tabs:

Tabs help organize content in categories, like you would under a navigational drawer. People will instantly know how to use it. The best way to put it is by using labels with icons.

2. Bottom navigation

This is a great option for mobile screens. But websites too can use it creatively. This menu is mostly “always visible” and composed of icons with labels at the bottom of the screen. The navigation bar could be hidden/revealed on downward and upward scrolling or even stay fixed.

3. Side Scrolling navigation

This is an approach for longer lists. Make it scroll-able so that users can move it from side-to-side and view the menus. This is mostly recommended for mobile screens though. Icons with labels can be used to explain the side menus. However, it would be better off to test this option first for your audience before committing to it. Websites can get creative and use side slide out menus instead.

4. Inline Scrolling Navigation

This is best suited for website and not a lot for mobile apps though. You can lay out top categories in the home page. All these categories can then be laid out as a list with distinctive headers. These categories can be represented as horizontally scroll-able cards.

These are definitely just a few of the many innovative ways one can deliver a better user experience. 

Being a little innovative, web developers or mobile app development companies could also create a hybrid to provide you with an even more amazing solution. What this means is that there is no end to the way you can display yourself digitally, just make sure you weigh in your options accurately before making any decisions. 

BuddyPress

How  to Install BuddyPress |

How to Set up BuddyPress or How to Build Social Network by using BuddyPress: buddypress features, buddypress themes, buddypress plugins & buddypress settings

BuddyPress: A fully fledged & Official WordPress Plugin for online community & social networking.

While working with Wordpress websites, we come across various plug-ins which are used to enhance the performance & functionality of website.

One such plug-in which aids in creating the community or a social network with its community features, is BuddyPress. Various functional elements of PHP like plug-ins, themes & widgets can be inherited & get extended with BuddyPress and this is also known as an official plugin for WordPress. It fully supports social networking and online community features such as making user profiles, user groups, activity streams, message attachments & notifications, document collaborations etc. Wordpress.org alone supports more than 700 plugins for BuddyPress.

We just have to log into our WordPress account and then start working BuddyPress by searching through plugin’s area. We have to download and install BuddyPress plugin. After that we are ready to go with it.

Some features of BuddyPress are listed below:

• University, school or college can enjoy campus wide social network
• Groups with specific interests can have their niche of social networks
• Products & Services can be managed with focussed communities
• Internal collaboration & communication tool for company & employees

Matrid Technologies have an expert team of BuddyPress Developers & Designers which has assisted some of the renowned e-commerce stores in US & UK for configuring & developing the BuddyPress PlugIns.For your BuddyPress Plugin Development Services, freely contact Matrid Technologies to Hire  BuddyPress Experts or Hire BuddyPress Developer.

BuddyPress has various components that can be integrated unswervingly with our website. It is also compatible with other plugins. We can even select only those features that we want to use otherwise we can drop them by unselecting them using checkboxes available. The menu items, pages and buttons for the enabled features can be seen as well.

It allows its users to share our thoughts, create groups, connect with people, creating profiles and many more actions can be performed using BuddyPress. BuddyPress is popular for creating dating websites. As it provides numerous features that support dating websites’ modules, we don’t have to add much in dating website that we wish to create.

Matrid Technologies has assisted one of the preeminent company of dating website in New York with the development services of BuddyPress. For any sort of BuddyPress Development , feel free to get in touch with Matrid BuddyPress Experts.

We can install and set up BuddyPress by going through following steps:

For installing BuddyPress we need to follow some steps, along with that we can do more additional settings to enhance its functionality:

•    Let’s start firstly with Installing BuddyPress, for which:

a)    From your WordPress dashboard, we will scroll to the section of ‘Plugins’ to fetch the link for “Add New’ and will search for “BuddyPress” and it will appears primarily.

WordPress dashboard → Plugins  →  Add New →  Search BuddyPress

b)    After selecting the option of ‘BuddyPress’, we need to install it & after it's downloading, we need to activate Plugin. This will leads you to the welcome screen of “BuddyPress”.

Install BuddyPress→ Download BuddyPress → Activate Plugin

•  After activating the BuddyPress PlugIn, we can have the configuration of “Settings” as well. For this we will select the section of “Settings” and then we move forward to the link of “BuddyPress” and select the tab of “Settings” from the screen of BuddyPress.

We can even have the configuration of settings directly from welcome screen of BuddyPress when we firstly install it, from the tab of “Get Started”.

WordPress Dashboard Settings→ BuddyPress → Settings

This will have the various choices for required settings, for profile syncing, creating new groups, profiles or deleting account, allowing activity streams on blogs & forum posts etc. After selecting the required settings, we can save them with the tab of “Save Settings”.

•      For making new user accounts on your site, we need to move to the section of “Settings”, and then we have the link of “General”. From there in parallel to the option of “Membership”, we need to mark the checkbox for “Anyone can register”.

        Wordpress Dashboard Settings →  General → Membership → selected Anyone can register

Along with this we need to scroll down further to link of ‘BuddyPress’, under the tab of ‘Settings’, we have the option of ‘Toolbar’ in parallel to which we will mark the checkbox for “Show the toolbar for logged out users”.

                Wordpress Dashboard Settings →  BuddyPress → Toolbar  → selected Show the toolbar for logged out users.

While learning out from this session for BuddyPress installation & BuddyPress settings, if you feel stuck; then feel free to  hire buddypress experts & developers from Matrid Technologies.

•      In order to set up User Profiles Fields, we move to the section of ‘Users’ and select the option for ‘Profile Fields’. This will allow us to enable the profile fields that we wish to have for initial phase of sign-ups of our users under the required name of profile group or simply “Base Profile”. Once the signup process is completed, we can add new profile fields groups in case more of the information is required from users.

                                         Users → Profile Fields

•      We can also Activate the components of BuddyPress. For this we need to scroll to the section of ‘Settings’, and open the tab of “Components” coming on the screen after selecting the link of “BuddyPress”. We need to activate the components like Extended Profiles, Friend Connections, User Groups, Private Messaging, Site Tracking etc as per our requirements & then easily save the settings done.

WordPress Dashboard Settings → BuddyPress → Components → Save Settings

•      After getting the components for BuddyPress, we can even attach pages to them.

We need to have the section of ‘Settings’ from where under the title of ‘BuddyPress’, we have the option for “Pages”. Pages though get created and attached to the BuddyPress components, anyhow we can some customizable pages for our components by clicking simple sub-option of ‘Add New’ under the option of ‘Pages’, having two blank pages of Registration & Activation. Then after creating the pages, go back to the Settings and then to BuddyPress and assign the pages with required  components. After doing the required settings don’t forget to save them with tab of “Save Settings”.

Settings → BuddyPress → Pages → Add New → Save Settings

For WordPressSupport , get in touch with the Matrid Technologies with our BuddyPress Experts or Developers for your projects & tasks.

Magento E-Commerce Apps

 Magento E-Commerce Applications

Prevailing mobile tech era demands for Magento E-commerce Apps for Magento stores of medium to large online ventures. Crafting in mobile apps for Magento stores is cost-effective than spending for mobile-friendly designs of e- store’s sites. Online stores are operational 24*7 than conventional stores & Matrid Technologies have their proficient Mobile app designers & developers labored for constructing Magento E-commerce apps for such online ventures tirelessly.

Predominating Mobile Technology shows the ratio of 49-51% in terms of customers shopping on mobile apps than visiting sites on desktop, as they are not all the time with their wide screens but in touch with their small screens whence commuting to office, while walking on the roads or enjoying at travelling expeditions. So, Matrid Technologies have fastened their seat belts for making an impressive & functional mobile app for your Magento Store.

Our Magento E-commerce Mobile apps will help you to generate more of the business leads, creating unflappable flow of income & connecting with customers right away. Our Mobile App can be easily customized by customers the way they like with different colors & fonts. It’s the time when being a Magento store owner; our clients can have surplus number of customers with our Magento apps.

Some of the astonishing features of Matrid Magento E-commerce Apps are:

1.    Easily customizable in terms of text, logo, colors, holder images & app themes.
2.   Compatible with both platforms-iOS & android.
3.   Effortless synchronization- now Sync your magento store with our app in one blink.
4.   Customers can enjoy uninterrupted navigation & have unbeatable shopping experience.
5.  Implementing tool of Analytics so that you can easily track user’s actions & experiences.
6. Identical & consistent look of app on every sort of mobile device. For your Mobile App Development Services, you can get in touch with our Mobile App Experts of the 15 years old mobile app development company.
7.    Grasping the modest personality of your brand with our feedback feature of app where customers can leave their eminent reviews & feed backs.
8. Straightaway information & superior quality on all sort of handheld devices.
9.  Co-existing with customer’s preferences & peculiar buying habits our app is meant for grabbing better conversion rates.
10.    Mobile App has intensified functionality & speed.

       Hire Mobile App Developer for your mobile app development tasks & projects.

LOOK FOR SKILLED AND EXPERIENCED ASP.NET DEVELOPERS FOR YOUR UPCOMING PROJECTS

Though there are many open source codes that are developing recently, the usage of ASP.NET has never reduced. If you have to choose between secured or unsecured software, I’m sure you would choose secured. The best choice for a secured and reliable language will be Asp.net. This has been opted my many business and organizations for their concern on safety.

Why ASP.NET?

If you ask me why you need to use Asp.net, I would say ‘it is for secured and trustworthy platform’. Microsoft’s ASP.NET is very useful in creating dynamic web applications. It is a software frame work which is easy and simple to use. It is very friendly and development and design can be done in no time. It has the facility to connect to wide range of information and it can be handy in delivering information as and when needed.

As per my experience, ASP.NET development has increased the productivity of the business as their speed is high and migrating to one platform to the other becomes very easy. Don’t you think it is better to have your apps developed using Asp.net?

Do you know i-phone apps are developed with ASP.NET?

Most of the applications in i-phone are developed and created using ASP.NET which can deliver the desired result. Do you see the weather forecast on your iPhone, those are created with Syntax that connected to ASP.NET webpages and there are many such applications that are developed.

How do you develop an app or webpages for your business?

I’m not going to explain you the step by step instruction to create an app on your own, because the app you develop or create should be flawless so that they work perfectly well. Matrid Technologies iPhone Apps developers are experts who can make the job easy for you. I always believe in the phrase ‘Practice makes a man perfect’ so development work should be handed to someone who keeps practicing the job every day. Trained experts can help you with developing apps and web pages using the latest technology and module.

What can developers do for you?

They help you in creating a new application or web page. They explain you the process and make modifications when required and they can also help you with updating data as and when needed. They help you with maintenance of the application and provide support round the clock. Don’t you think it is always good to handover the work to professional for a perfect work?