6 Steps To Becoming A Web Designer

Web Design is a technique for designing digital environments or websites from the front end. It involves areas like graphic design, Standard Code, Photoshop Skills, ready-to-use software, and most importantly, responsiveness.. This means, in the broadest sense, when building websites, you’re solving a problem.

However, like everything good, web designing is not a cake walk. There’s actually no “best way” to learn web design, but you need to first develop the skills required for it.

Today, we’ve made a list of 6 crucial requirements every novice web designer should have.

1. First, get basic skills

Start with learning how to use HTML , CSS and JavaScript to build static web pages. Once you are done learning how to develop static web pages, try out  JQuery and Bootstrap and other frameworks to make your websites look more beautiful.

Combined with other web skills like scripting language, CGI, and modules, they can help you create powerful websites. Also, read extensively on this subjects for inspiration and techniques.

2. Familiarity with web design tools

For instance, Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver are good image design tools. However, note that before a finished web is published, web designers usually need to make a web prototype. This is aimed at avoiding unnecessary mistakes when starting the real design.

These days, Axure, Mockplus, Invision are the most popular prototyping tools in the market.  There are also many tutorials about web design where you can learn the tools for the trade.

3. Sensitivity to market needs

In this age of information technology,  industry trends can easily fade out. So, you are expected to be sensitive to market needs. In other words, you should do enormous researches on technological trends and your competitors. Especially since most people care about the fundamentals that make their websites user-friendly.

A web designer’s job is to, through his/her designs, positively influence the number of target users and views on a website.

4. Brilliant aesthetic

As the old saying goes, looking good is good business. The first thing that catches the eye on a website is its appearance. Only a few people actually care about the content of a website.

Appropriate web design portfolios and suitable use of colours will often result in comfortable user experiences, making them forget to leave. On the contrary, mussy wireframe and conflicting colours would increase bounce rate.

5. Constant study

Innovation is a basic requirement for being a sought-after web designer. With the development of cutting-edge technologies, the bar of web designing has been raised  higher and higher. If you make little or no effort, you would go ‘extinct’ soon. You need to be constantly aware of new technologies and skills. This would make your work look always fresh.

Bookmark the best web design inspiration galleries for new inspiration. Also visit pages that have nothing to do with web design. Say, like the best architectures, best furniture designs, and other stuff that get you really inspired. It’s not all about seeing great websites. Sometimes, even nature can get you inspired.

6. Get feedback

Design something, polish it to the point where you think it absolutely rocks and then get some feedback for it. Most times, feedback is the best way to get better.
Having someone to look up to and say “I want to be that good!” can really help too. That way,  you reach your goals faster,  as getting targeted feedback & critique from them can shape your thinking and “level up” your abilities.

Hope this helped. Let us know in the comments!

Big Data Analytics: Your Best Bet For Business Growth

Big Data. Analytics. If you ask twenty people what these terms mean, you are likely to get twenty different answers. 

Big Data Analytics is a simply analysis of patterns and behaviours of people –like clicks on social media apps and corporate websites. Why would a business want to do that? Well, your traditional data processing tools can not handle such data. However, with big data analytics, you have different architecture, as well as algorithms to process and store them.

In today’s digital world, with the impressive number of it that is generated every second, data is king. Apparently, with such an overwhelming amount of data, businesses now have a large pool of information to work with. Patterns can then be yielded on consumers’ habits and provide feedback on the company’s actions.

In effect, big data analytics helps businesses reveal various hidden patterns, latest trends in marketing, customer choices and other vital business information. Simply, big data analytics helps in building business relationships by providing a holistic view of customers to enhance communications.

Big data analytics offers three key benefits to enterprises.

Vital Information about Traffic Source and Conversions

Interestingly, even the smallest businesses generate data these days. A business with a website, a social media presence, or one that accepts credit cards has data collected on its customers based on site traffic. 

For any business enterprise, the two key performance metrics needed would be to track the website’s conversions and traffic sources. Therefore, to make its marketing strategies more effective, a company needs to know from where its visitors are coming. Through business analytics, the company can know the number of visitors arriving at its site via the different search engines.

Behavioural Patterns of the Website Visitors

Like it or not, the quantity and diversity of what you know about your market is key to business growth. Companies, no matter how small, get better insights into what customers want, how they use it, their purchase channels, etc. This is how businesses create/maintain their privacy policies and security needed to protect all that user data. For instance, the backlash against Microsoft 10 recently must have required that Microsoft gather data on why customers wanted to opt-out.

Additionally, big data analytics help to show visitors behaviour with respect to a company’s website. The company can identify how much time visitors spend on specific pages of its site. With this information, decisions can be made on the pages of its site that require some work. Consequently, for the pages that are not performing well, improvements can then be considered.

Effective Determination of KPI’s

Using big data analytics, an enterprise can effectively determine its key performance indicators. For example, this might include the number of generated leads, revenue earned and online sales made. Soon, with this important knowledge, the business can figure out clearly what’s working and what’s not.

Big data has the potential to improve internal efficiency and operations for almost any type of business and in many different departments. Businesses can track performance, optimise delivery routes, better track employee performance and even recruiting top talent. Also, data can be used to quantify what makes a good manager or employee, thereby, improving the HR and hiring process at any level.

Evidently, data is slowly but steadily breaking away from the IT department. It is becoming an integral part of every department in a company.

Are you a budding or a seasoned business owner? Did these tips help? Tell us in the comment box!

Etisalat Nigeria Becomes 9mobile

By now you would have heard that Nigeria’s most innovative telecommunications company, formerly known as Etisalat Nigeria recently morphed into 9mobile, unveiling the new name and logo whilst promising to continuously provide innovative and value-adding propositions which it has delivered since inception 9 years ago.

At a press briefing in Lagos, Chief Executive Officer, 9mobile, Boye Olusanya, said the new brand identity reflects the bold and creative attributes which the organization shares with its valued subscribers.
 


The telco said that the new name and brand is a deliberate representation and confirmation of its Nigerian heritage and 9ja-centricity.  Although its name and brand changes, it assured its customers that the values on which it operates remain the same.

The new logo, a number-themed one, represents resilience and continuity and also reflects the network’s futuristic perspective. The colour green, both its light and dark variants, reflects vibrancy, dynamism, life, and youth as well as the brand’s ‘Nigerianness’.



Rebranding has commenced at all of the company’s offices, Experience Centres, online and physical touch points, to facilitate seamless integration, as 9mobile guards its position as the most customer-centric and leading innovative telecoms company in Nigeria.
Click here to visit 9Mobile’s web page.



 

SnapTravel raises $8 million for a hotel booking service that works over chat

Chatbots – automated bots that let you interact with a service or brand via messaging apps or SMS – haven’t yet become breakout hits, as a group. But that hasn’t stopped investors from pouring in $8 million into a hotel booking startup called SnapTravel, which lets users find and book rooms via SMS texts and Facebook Messenger.

The $8 million Series A round was led by iNovia Capital, a backer of Luxury Retreats which just exited to Airbnb for around $200 million. The round also included participation from seed round investors Lightbank, Bee Partners, and Hedgewood, along with strategic investor and Expedia board member Peter Kern, among others.

iNovia’s Chris Arsenault is joining SnapTravel’s board with the close of the round.
The startup itself was founded in spring 2016 by tech entrepreneurs Hussein Fazal, whose prior company AdParlor grew to $100+ million in revenue, then sold to AdKnowledge back in 2011; and Henry Shi, who previously built uMentioned and worked at Google, where he helped launch YouTube Music Insights.

Unlike a number of chatbots on the market today, SnapTravel isn’t a fully automated solution – arguably, to its advantage. The “bot” part of the service aids with onboarding and can answer users’ simpler questions, but when things get tricky, human agents are able to step in. For example, if you booked a non-refundable hotel but your flight gets cancelled due to weather, an agent would respond to your questions and try to help, rather than leaving you to deal with an unsympathetic bot.
You can also ask the agents for help with questions bots can’t handle – like if the hotel is pet-friendly, or if you can get adjoining rooms, among other things.



“Customers want a travel agent experience, but they didn’t want to call; they didn’t want to walk into a store,” explains Shi. “They just wanted to email us or message us,” he says, of when the company began testing ideas. That led them to realize that delivering the hotel booking experience could work over chat.

SnapTravel’s human agents effectively operate as modern-day travel agents. They’ll call hotels for you, as needed, and even phone to confirm your check-in and attempt to negotiate a free upgrade on your behalf.

Shi says that hotels honor SnapTravel agents’ special requests around 70 to 80 percent of the time, and they are able to upgrade customers to better rooms around 25 percent of the time.
Though still an early stage startup, SnapTravel has made a bit of a name for itself due to its deals and its “app-less” business model.
The company filters through thousands of hotels from sources, then leverages machine learning algorithms to narrow those down to the top options, based on factors like price, location, quality and overall value.

As customers continue to use SnapTravel to make their bookings, the service learns more about individual preferences – like if you want free Wi-Fi or free breakfast, for instance – and then takes those into consideration for its future recommendations.

SnapTravel doesn’t necessarily have any deals you can’t find elsewhere, but it can feel like it, at times. As its own website explains, it has access to the same unsold hotel inventory that others do. The service’s hotel inventory comes both directly from hotels themselves, as well as via partners like Expedia, Booking.com, Amadeus, Hotels.com, and Sabre (pending).

But while agreements between hotels and some hotel booking services disallow them from posting their super-low rates publicly, SnapTravel is able to work around that restriction because it’s only displaying prices through private, 1-on-1 chats – not publicly on the web.

But SnapTravel is not always the place for the lowest priced deal or the most options, some reviewers have found.

However, lower cost is not SnapTravel’s only draw, Shi points out.

“We’re 100 percent free to the customer…the way we make money is the commission on the hotels,” he says. “But we’re building a relationship with the customer because we’re chatting with them over a channel that’s very intimate, like SMS or Messenger. For us, it’s a conversation – and that conversation doesn’t stop when you make a purchase. It goes from search to purchase to upgrade to even post-checkout,” Shi explains.
At Facebook’s f8 developer conference earlier this year, SnapTravel announced that it had already achieved over $1 million in revenue on Facebook Messenger. It has since surpassed that, and launched its service on SMS and chat app Viber.
It eventually wants to reach users worldwide through other platforms, as well, like WeChat and Line.
SnapTravel’s app-less biz model

The company believes that chatbots hold potential – especially in the case of Facebook Messenger, in terms of reach. (Messenger topped 1.2 billion monthly users worldwide in April, for example.) SnapTravel doesn’t need to get anyone to download its app in order to work.

The team appreciates that SnapTravel can advertise to users in-app through things like Sponsored Messages, and retarget them directly in their messaging inbox when they fail to complete a transaction. In that latter case, SnapTravel says it has seen a 30 percent jump in conversions when retargeting in this way on Messenger.

“Being able to re-engage customers is critical for any commerce company. Typically, with an [online travel agency] when you come to the website and bounce, they have to follow you around the internet using display ads,” notes Shi. “That’s a very noisy and ineffective channel,” he adds.
“For us, being able to use Sponsored Messages on Facebook has been super effective. We’re seeing double-digit lift from these re-engagement efforts,” Shi says.

With the additional funding, SnapTravel says it will invest further in its Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities in order to reduce the reliance on human agents as its scales. In this envisioned future, that would mean an automated bot would be able to understand a conversational input from a user, like “I’m going to New York next week Wednesday for a night, and need a room at the usual spot,” for example.

Without needing a human to translate that into a booking request, SnapTravel would then send the customer to the booking form for the right hotel and take their payment through Messenger.
Currently, SnapTravel is a dozen or so product engineers based in Toronto, in addition to an operations company stateside. With the new funds, the startup plans to expand to a team of 20 to 25.

Microsoft Forgoes Paint in Fall Rollout

For those who loved and grew up with the popular and simple drawing program, we will now watch Paint cry.

Microsoft is officially listing MS Paint as a “deprecated feature” with the launch of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Come fall 2017, the program will “not be in active development and might be removed in future releases.”

Microsoft Paint is a program that came standard with all Windows operating systems, starting way back in November 1985 with Windows 1.0. The program allows users to paint pictures with their mouse, add text to images and more. Though a very basic program that has since been outclassed for at least a decade,  it held a close relationship with young children and diehards alike.

MS Paint offered a place for newcomers to computers to learn and play with software-aided art. It also provided a challenge for established artists to make something beautiful out of a slightly-archaic medium—lists of the best art made with Paint are astonishing to browse through if you have even a basic knowledge of what the program is capable of.

The move makes sense, as a newer and much improved version of Paint came out earlier this year called Paint 3D. This new program allows users to make #d models and have a much finer touch for intricately drawn pieces. Microsoft will most likely focus its efforts to the new program and introduce a whole new generation of young tech-savvy artists to drawing digital faces on their favorite actors and cartoon characters.

Make sure to open up Paint one last time before the fall update arrives and scribble out a badly-drawn toast to the pioneering digital art program.

Apple App Store Well Ahead of Play Store—But Google is Catching Up Fast

Revenue from in-app purchases and subscriptions continues to climb, new data shows.
Non-gaming revenue grew 56 per cent year-over-year in the second quarter, according to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data.

Total consumer spending in non-game apps totaled $2.4 billion during the quarter. Apple App Store revenue grew 52 per cent to $1.9 billion, while Google Play revenue growth grew 72 per cent to $500 million.



Revenue from in-app purchases and subscriptions continues to climb, new data shows.
Non-gaming revenue grew 56 per cent year-over-year in the second quarter, according to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data.

Total consumer spending in non-game apps totaled $2.4 billion during the quarter. Apple App Store revenue grew 52 per cent to $1.9 billion, while Google Play revenue growth grew 72 per cent to $500 million.

Google is closing the gap.

More than 13 billion non-game apps were downloaded during that time, according to Sensor Tower’s report, up 12 per cent. Nearly five billion of those downloads occurred on the App Store, while more than eight billion occurred on Google Play.



This means that Apple is not only generating significantly more revenue from apps overall, but the company is also earning more on a per-app basis. However, Google’s ecosystem is now outpacing Apple’s in terms of both downloads and revenue growth, so the gap may close with time.

Amazon Already Behind the Times with Go Grocery Store, It Seems

Amazon made waves in North America when it launched the pilot of a grocery store with no staff. (Well, one staff.)

The concept was cool and Amazon is working toward opening its first store to the public this year. But it turns out that a company in China is ahead of the game, with more than a dozen automated shops in operation and over a hundred others planned.

BingoBox in Shanghai is the response to rising labor costs in China, which have pushed manufacturers to implement robots in retail settings, reports the Financial Times:

The entrance to the BingoBox in Shanghai, a single-aisle affair dropped Tardis-like into a parking lot behind a supermarket, is unlocked by the use of mobile phone app. Customers scan items for payment, with theft prevented by the use of real-name registration and video monitoring.

Upward of 200 more BingoBox stores—which have proven especially popular at night—are expected to launch within the next couple of months. Chen Zilin, who founded the chain, told FT that he was “very happy when Amazon Go was announced” because, prior to that validation, critics called the entrepreneur’s idea “stupid.”

There is also the advent of the Wheelys Moby-Mart, which takes the concept one step forward by being not only staffless, but also autonomous. Based on the success of Wheelys Café, a mobile coffee shop with a franchise presence in 60 countries, the Moby-Mart is open 24/7 and features no workers, no lines, and no checkouts.


The Moby-Mart is currently being beta tested in Shanghai, but its creators promise the store is “not science fiction.”

“By using AI, patented inventions, and the famous cloud, the Moby turns technology unvisible,” the company Wheelys says. “Running on electricity and equipped with solar panels the Moby is also the most environmentally friendly store on the market.”

Tesla of the Sea: Building the World’s First Autonomous Cargo Ship

Two companies in Europe are bringing the concept of self-driving vehicles to the sea.
The Birkeland, an autonomous cargo ship, is being jointly developed by agriculture firm Yara International ASA and Kongsberg Gruppen AS A, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Norwegian companies expect the ship to set sail by late 2018, which puts them well ahead of the competition in a race to deploy the world’s first crewless, autonomously operated ship.

The move, which could have a salient impact on seaborne trade, could happen faster than the International Maritime Organization can bring legislation governing crewless ships into effect.
Experts in the industry believe early autonomous vessels will gain traction for short routes but it is not expected that self-operating ships will be used for major intercontinental routes for some time, mostly due to the risk of breakdowns in the middle of the ocean that would require onsite crews.

In addition to being autonomous, the so-called “Tesla of the Seas” is also going to be environmentally friendly.
British manufacturer Rolls-Royce is also working on autonomous technologies designed for oceanic use; its cross-hairs are locked on tugboats and ferries, according to WSJ.

Alphabet Announces Q2 Earnings and Google CEO as New Board Member

Alphabet has announced its Q2 earnings, netting a total revenue of $26 billion. This is up 19 per cent from $21.5 billion during the same period last year. These totals exclude traffic acquisition costs, which are the fees Google pays to online publishers that refer traffic to Google. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.

The rising revenue comes from increased mobile ad sales and YouTube videos. The popular video-sharing site has 1.5 billion monthly users. The market for digital videos is growing every year as online video merges with more traditional forms of advertising.

Alphabet’s profit is hurt by a $2.74 billion fine levied from European regulators due to Google’s practice of favouring its own online shopping service over competitors.

The company’s “other bets” section also contributed to the smaller increase in share price as it posted an operating loss of $977 million. “Other bets” include self-driving cars from X, smart homes from Nest and life-sciences technology such as sterile mosquitoes from Verily.

Alphabet also announced that Google CEO Sundar Pichai has joined the company’s already insider-heavy board of directors. The mega-popular search engine’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin also sit on the board.

Pichai became Google’s CEO when Alphabet was created in 2015. Since then there has been solid growth from Google while Alphabet has remained a bit stagnant due to its varying interests and accountability mandates. Pichai’s main focus has been machine learning and AI growth along with the creation of Google’s own branded hardware.

Pichai is the 13th member of Alphabet’s board of directors and will have the second Google vote along with Diane Greene, the senior VP of Google’s cloud businesses.