Ah, GoDaddy.

The father of loads of website domains and the place of website hosting.

GoDaddy has been around for a long, long time. For 23 years to be exact.

And it was about time they got a little facelift.

GoDaddy Goes All-In With New Logo Design And Identity

GoDaddy was established back in 1997 and is a website registrar and web hosting company.

The company hosts over 19 million users, and if that’s not impressive enough, let me hit you with this statistic.

78 Million website domains have been registered through them.

So, if that doesn’t prove credibility, then I don’t know what will.

I personally use GoDaddy and have been using it for many years now.

Just a few months back when I was using GoDaddy, I remember thinking, “Man, this website and logo needs some help.”

(before)

And I’m happy to announce that I checked back in recently and was shocked but what I saw!

I did a double-take and thought I might be on the wrong website.

So I double-checked the domain and to my delight, it was the right website domain that I had typed in. (All those years of typing classes in 2nd grade paid off)

Their site looks so good, so modern, and so sleek now. I love it.

(after)

Here’s what GoDaddy had to say about it all.

“We thoughtfully considered every detail of our brand design system and centered it around our Design Ethos.

Our design originates from a tasteful, considered aesthetic, with every creative piece distilled down to its essential form.

The GO is a clear statement of advocacy for entrepreneurs everywhere – a symbol of empowerment that encourages them to stand on their own two feet.

Always bright and dynamic, our brand colors speak to the creativity of our customers.

Our wide palette connects with people across the globe and promotes inclusivity for all cultures. We use color to bring joy to our brand.

Our bold, serif headline font is elegant and expressive projecting a fresh, modern voice.

It presents a hint of flair for professionalism, giving the brand a distinguished feel.

We use it to establish strong moments of brand for customers.”

I personally love all of the changes that GoDaddy underwent.

The colors, the new and understandable typeface they’re using, the new logo that’s got the word “Go” in it and it’s shaped like a heart.

I really think they took a huge step in the right direction when it comes to approachability.

When you change everything about your website and logo and design, well… that can be truly nerve-wracking.

Kudos to them for taking that huge leap of faith, because I really think it worked out in their favor.

No more weird animation dude sticking out of the side of the logo. Just a really cool, well-thought-out modern logo and great colors.

I personally like all of the changes made, although I know that’s an unpopular opinion.

What do you guys think?

Let us know in the comment section below what you think of GoDaddy’s new identity and design!

Until next time,

Stay creative, folks!

Read More at GoDaddy Goes All-In With New Logo Design And Identity

In the world of design, whether it be graphic or web, you’ll always have a need to create vector graphics. Of course, there are lots of tools out there to help you with your need, but are they really the best? Today, we’re going to be taking a lot at one of the most robust apps on the market to see if it really lives up to its hype. We’re going to be reviewing Gravit Designer. Many have described it as an amazing alternative to Illustrator and Sketch, amazed by its multitude of features. But before we get more into the details that set Gravit Designer above many other designing tools, let’s find out more on our subject today.  

What is Gravit Designer?

If you haven’t already heard about it, Gravit Designer is a completely free software that gives users the power to create and design icons, presentations, illustrations, prints, apps, and even screen designs. With this program, you’ll have access to a wide range of very powerful tools to help you leap over any obstacle you may come across.

With an impressive toolset that includes UI design, icons, marketing tool graphics, concept art design, and animators, it’s a wonder that this thing is free. To top it all off, it can run both as a desktop application and in-browser, and it runs smoothly on most operating systems.

Features

A lot of these apps come with useless tools that they overcharge for, but Gravit Designer seems to be loaded down with surprisingly useful ones. Check them out:

• Artboards
• Layers and symbols
• Booleans
• A knife tool
• Path graphs
• Very high export quality
• Text engine
• Grids, anchors, and auto-layers
• Multiple fills, effects, and blending modes

This list is fairly comprehensive, but there are a few other features on the app that are worth checking out for yourself. Even with just the features listed above, Gravit Designer is nothing to shake a stick at.

Price

As I mentioned before, Gravit Designer is completely free and offers no upgrade packages. Everything that the app has to offer is 100% accessible by anyone that uses it. The reason price is included in this review is so that we can compare the prices of similar apps.

Most apps similar to service and features like the ones Gravit Designer has to offer cost between $5 and $20 for the mobile versions and anywhere between $30 and $50 for the desktop application. Now, compare that to Gravit Designer’s price tag of… well, free, and you can’t beat it.

In the words of Alexander Adam, CEO of Gravit:

If it will definitely remain free and it will never be crippled by the stupid freemium or whatever, then we could offer additional things for equipment that could be paid (since we also need to pay those server accounts) but the Designer will remain free since we want everyone can have access to a professional free design tool.

User Satisfaction

One of the biggest deciding factors when purchasing a vector design tool is seeing how well it sits with other users. As of right now, there are very few, if any negative reviews on Gravit Designer. This is great news for anyone looking for a helpful tool. Combine that with the fact that it’s completely free, and you have yourself a great app.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a few reviews that list some cons to the app. Here are a few examples:

• You cannot export to most popular files. This means that you can’t pick up where you left off if you decided to swap to another platform. This can cause massive delays if you need to switch things up.
• The app changes constantly. With all the attention it’s getting, there are almost constant updates to keep things fresh. This could be viewed as a negative or a positive, however, as it’s always good to get refreshing updates.
• Since it is free, it does often lack some of the power the other paid programs produce.

Again, for a free app, you really can’t be too mad at the features Gravit Designer offers. Ignoring the features, the interface is very straightforward and easy to follow. It makes it difficult to get lost and allows you more time to focus on your designs. Depending on your needs, or if you’re just starting out in the industry, Gravit Designer is definitely worth looking into.

Here are some honest opinions of people who have tried it and shared their experience with the world on g2crowd:

I love Gravit Designer because it is a fantastic multiplatform application for vector design.

It does not matter if we need to work with vector images, icons, if we want to build a website, a mobile application, or simply create presentations with art concepts. Gravit Designer for Windows is the application that we must install on our PC, and the best totally free and very easy to use.                                                                                                                       JUAN M.

The best thing about it that it’s free. When you struggle to pay for your tools or get overcharged on cards while still need to complete work for yourself or client, gravit has your back.                                                                                      Paulius P.

Gravit has a modern, accessible UI, and it’s far easier to approach. I actually find it superior to Illustrator and similar applications in this regard.                                                                                                                                                Jeff C.

The takeaway

Gravit Designer is definitely a contender in its category for the best software you can get your hands on. Yes, it does lack a few features that the competing paid programs offer, but considering that Gravit Designer is free, it’s worth looking into. The features that it does offer are very inclusive and easy to use, and the interface is very user-friendly. All-in-all, Gravit Designer is a great addition to anyone’s desktop.

We would love to find out your opinion on Gravit Design after you give it a try. What other weather app design tools do you use? We would love to hear more about it in the comment section below. Also, if you enjoy reviews like this, and want to stay up-to-date with the design world, then be sure to tune into Webdesignledger daily for new and creative content.

Read More at Gravit Designer Is the FREE Designing Software You Need

(The UltraWide Time of Alan Walker – LG UltraWide Festival 2018)

For all you creators out there! LG understands there’s more to the final output. There’s also the “process.” All the hours spent working, toiling, creating, that no one ever sees. The endless brain-strain and ideating a creator dedicates to their goal is what makes up their UltraWide Time. Few will ever see or understand the process, where all the work and magic happen. But LG understands.   

One of the highlights of this year’s LG UltraWide Festival is Alan Walker, a multiple-platinum DJ/Producer. Alan says he spent years wondering if the countless hours at his computer desk would ever be rewarded. “Making music takes a lot of time and effort, not something that just happens with a snap. It takes time but is a very fun road to go.” He still spends long nights composing on his UltraWide monitor.

Then there’s Action Movie Kid. Daniel Hashimoto and his son created a smash hit YouTube channel. It features a kid surrounded by eye-popping special effects. For this dad and son, “quality time” is spent in front of a camera and computer. Daniel says “my UltraWide Time is for imagination. Every afternoon we come up with something amazing.”

The theme for this year’s LG UltraWide Festival is “My UltraWide Time.” LG focuses on the long hours and tireless effort of passionate creators. This year, instead of your final product, LG wants to know about your nitty gritty “process.” Who would have ever thought? It’s simple to enter. Take a short quiz, describe a moment, or share a story about your creative process. Get all the rules and details at LG UltraWide Festival event page, or simply do a search for ‘LG UltraWide’.

LG actually understands the hours it takes to create just a few moments of work, and is excited to show creators some support through this event. This is the 4th straight year since 2015 that LG has given a boost to deserving creators through the UltraWide Festival.

In fact, LG’s support for creators extends beyond the LG UltraWide Festival. LG equips world-class DJs with UltraWide monitors through the UltraWide Studio program. Also, LG’s UltraWide Academy Sponsorship nurtures the next generation of international artists. Top design, art, and animation schools are provided with state-of-the-art equipment and space for all things creative. The UltraWide Academy Sponsorship first sponsored a brand-new computer lab at Parsons School of Design in 2016. Next was the Royal College of Art in 2017. This year, LG decked out the Vancouver Film School, recently ranked the No.1 International Animation School, with an academy lab. LG is clearly showing its long-term commitment to gifted students in the process of honing their talents.

The new facilities impressed Vancouver Film School’s Head of Animation, Colin Giles. He says, “The creative digital art is an exciting canvas for any idea you can create with the possibilities being endless. The students will benefit from this strong partnership with LG and the LG UltraWide Monitor Academy Lab by having access to a literal canvas that removes any possible barrier to their imagination. With a wide, seamless screen that allows for a more immersive use of the software at hand and a color range that meets their own imagination their creations will jump into reality. ‘The more you see, the better you create’ has never been truer than at VFS.” To see photos of the VFS Academy Lab, head over to @LG_UltraWide Instagram account

Once in a great while, a company truly understands creators. It’s nice to see LG focusing on the long, hours of work others rarely see. It’s especially heartening that the process is getting some respect. It’s time worth cherishing, as much as the result.

Read More at It’s UltraWide Time!

Have you ever thought about being able to design a website from top to bottom and element by element without having to write a line of code? Elementor turned this daydream into reality by creating the ultimate WordPress website-building solution.

Now you can design a total website, including the header, the footer, and everything else, without even having to think about writing a line of code. Even better; with only a few clicks you can spice up your website with plenty of dynamic visual content.

It’s no wonder than in not much more than 2 years, Elementor, #1 page builder, has acquired a base of more than 900,000 happy users. How did they do it? Every one of Elementor’s highly specific features was created with web professionals in mind.

1. Introducing Elementor

One major problem many web designers face is feeling constrained by, or “stuck” in a theme. Elementor solved this problem by offering web professionals a tool that gives them the freedom to create websites the way they want, without having to design from scratch, and without having to resort to code.

This resulted in the first WordPress theme builder in which everything is designed on the frontend; giving you total control over layout customization and instant results.

Not entirely satisfied, Elementor’s team took things several steps further with Elementor 2.0; a souped-up version in which nearly all its new features have already been released.

Why wait? Check out Elementor 2.0 and see for yourself. You’re sure to be impressed!

2. The Latest Elementor Features

For Bloggers

Now you can design your blog just as you’ve always visualized with Elementor’s new Single & Archive Builder. You can not only complete your design lightning fast, but you’ll have total control over every design detail as you proceed and optimize your workflow without conceding anything in terms of quality or flexibility.

You can use Elementor’s special Blog Archive and Single Posts elements to customize and add personality and spice to your blogs. You also have Search Results page design options that will make it as easy as possible for users to locate what they’re looking for.

Design You Own Header and Footer – Zero Code Required

This brand-new feature takes web design to an unprecedented level by allowing you to fully customize your headers and footers, as opposed to having to choose among several options (or none at all). It’s not all that hard to do either, especially for those who’ve had some experience building toy houses from building blocks.

This is an especially cool feature when you want different headers for different pages, plus you can apply a sticky header feature that follows along as users scroll, making it easier for them to navigate.

“Escape” the Theme and Create Dynamic Content

This is accomplished by using several Elementor features. Single Post and Page allows you to apply a template you’ve design as many times as you want. The Blog Archive feature helps you put together your blog design piece by piece and watch it all come together in real time.

Create your own 404 template, customize your Search Result page to your liking, and use Dynamic Widgets like Featured Image and Author Box when creating a template.

Creating Great Content? Use or Reuse It as Much as You Want

The nicest thing about dynamic content is that once you’ve designed it you can use it again and again, anytime you want, and with a single click. In fact, Elementor enables you to create a content framework and apply it across your site; again, with a single click.

Another nice thing about dynamic content; making the smallest change to a static template automatically used to require writing code. That’s no longer the case.

3. What Made Elementor the #1 WordPress Page Builder?

First of all, the Elementor 2.0 design team kept the amazing features that quickly made Elementor #1 in the first place (reaching 900,000 active installs under 2 years).

Such as:

Total Layout Customization

Most WordPress theme builders promise high levels of customization. The Elementor team took it a step further by giving its users virtually total control over such items as section widths and heights, column size and position, and content position along with dynamic settings for padding, margins, and column gaps.

An Impressive Variety of Beautiful Templates

Elementor’s pre-designed templates cover major industries and styles, along with a host of different niches. Should you feel the need or desire, you can always create a page yourself, and add it to the library for later use with other websites or share it with others. You can also import and export templates.

A Free Package of Cool Elements

This package includes advanced widgets like Google Maps and Carousel, plus it gives you access to a variety of customizable widgets that help you create any layout you want, down to the minutest detail. You can also increase the number of design elements and options by adding your favorite plugins or widgets and do so without any need for coding.

100% Responsive Design

Since anything less than 100% responsive design can break a website, Elementor’s team devoted 110% of their energy to ensure your pages will look flawless on any device. Device preview screens, percentage-based element widths, and device visibility control ensure that both you and your users will see the same thing and be satisfied.

Like What You See? Try Elementor Now

Elementor seriously changed the way in which websites can be designed. Thanks to its newly-released features, it’s easy to design a fully-customized website from top to bottom without needing a single line of code.

That was just a starter, Elementor 2.0’s features have given its users even greater power and flexibility to build what they envision including forms & integration, whether they are veteran designers/developers, or just starting out. You can acquaint yourself with Elementor’s infinite possibilities, its use of dynamic content and its building-blocks style from the get-go. You might even become addicted.

Read More at Designing a WP website without coding? Do that with Elementor

You probably heard someone talk about serverless technology around the office or at some conference conference your boss made you go and while understanding it’s merit as a technology doens’t come easy for a person without a technical background. With that said, I’d like to go over the biggest benefits of moving away from a traditional server and stepping into the cloud.

At its core, serverless is not the lack of servers but the existence of a server that does not need to be managed. Using microservices uploaded to Lambda that executes a little bit of code at a time and returning a value, you can build large-scale enterprise level application without having to see a single line of PHP. Now, this might not make everyone as happy as it does me but for a front-end developer like myself, that’s a godsend.

So why is this such a big deal?

It stands to reason that any new technology trying to challenge the old ways of creating, running and hosting web and mobile apps will have a tough time getting support, yet the serverless community has grown exponentially in the past year and the reasons behind the movement are clear.

• Lower costs
• Faster deployments
• Graceful scaling

How does this affect me and my store?

Well, there are a number of major upgrades that a serverless approach can bring to your store. Let’s start with the obvious. The cut in costs. Using a serverless technology is cheaper than your traditional hosting and if you ever hosted a Magento store (or basically any other self-hosted solution) you’ll know just how expensive running, even a semi-successful store can be.

For AWS Lambda, the monthly compute price is $0.00001667 per GB-s and the free tier provides 400,000 GB-s. The monthly request price is $0.20 per 1 million requests and the free tier provides 1M requests per month.

There are more and more companies sharing their stories on how the cut costs using serverless and if you want to you can read about how companies save money with serverless.

The second reason why going serverless can be of significant value is the unparalleled scaling that can be achieved with serverless. If you do any online shopping around the holidays, especially during the “Black Friday” sales you probably saw your fair share of stores that were down, crumbling under the weight of countless users trying to browse, add to cart or compare products.

Creating microservices for all your websites functionality will improve your page load speed, remove scalability concerns and making changes to your code or business logic will be far easier to implement.

How would this even work?

So how exactly would you go about switching your store from a traditional server and going serverless?
To make things easier for everyone to understand I’ll won’t get too technical as doing so will turn this article into a 15K words software documentation, and let’s face it. I’m not smart enough to pull that sort of thing off. What I will do is break the store into small sections and explain how I would tackle the situation.

1. The CMS

I’m referring to the static pages like homepage, contact page, about us, etc. For this section use a caching system to create static pages from the CMS and have them served from a cloud service provider like AWS or Microsoft Azure. Most e-commerce content management systems (CMS) already come with a half decent caching solution so you might already be familiar with the concept.

Personally, I’d go with Amazon EslastiCache. It’s easy to install and deploy and won’t break the bank.

Amazon ElastiCache offers fully managed Redis and Memcached. Seamlessly deploy, operate, and scale popular open source compatible in-memory data stores. Build data-intensive apps or improve the performance of your existing apps by retrieving data from high throughput and low latency in-memory data stores.
— Amazon ElasiCache

To keep this article short and sweat I’ll link[http://blog.e-zest.com/how-to-implement-aws-elasticache-in-magento/] to a tutorial on how you can integrate ElastiCache with Magento(as this is one of those platforms that just won’t work without proper caching).

2. The catalog

The catalog is the part with all the categories and products and the main issue you have with them is the rendering speed. Having thousands of products with filters applied will slow your website to a halt. Now imagine having 10, 100 or 1000 concurrent users browsing, filtering and comparing products.

The solution? Microservices!

Here is where AWS Lambda shines brightest. Every interaction that the user can have with the website is split into small functions. So having 10 people on your site or 1000 won’t make a dent in the page load time as AWS will scale to best fit your needs.

But wait, there’s more!

The best part of this approach is the fact that you only pay what you use. That’s right. No more paying for big server bills when your store gets no visitors. Here’s a neat little AWS pricing calculator to help you figure out what to expect in terms of cost.

Static files, like images and videos, can be served from S3 or even better: CloudFront to reduce costs and increase speed.

3. The cart

This is probably the subject that most people that stayed this far along in the article are interested in. Carts are extremely complicated and cumbersome systems that will eat that CPU as if it were made out of tacos. The problem with conventional stores is MySQL bottlenecks and when that happens you entire website stops responding until MySQL catches up(either that or the entire thing just goes down).

The fix is not that complicated. Stop using MySQL! Since you are already using AWS Lambda why not use DynamoDB, it’s easy to setup, cheap and reliable and before you start calling me a sellout for pushing AWS on you all, MongoDB is another solid option, in fact, I kind of prefer it to DynamoDB as I’m more used to using it. Here’s a quick guide on how to get started with Lambda and MongoDB.
Besides moving away from using MySQL, I’d urge anyone that gets a lot of orders to consider using an API like Magento’s API to handle orders. At the moment, having an expensive server with all the bells and whistle can withstand 3 to 5 orders/second which as it turns out, it’s still less than stores like Angry Birds store or Anki.com need.

The way it would work is as simple as it is efficient. You handle the order queue via a javascript based checkout system that interacts with the store API validating and recording each order. Here’s a tutorial on how to do this in Magento: https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.1/get-started/order-tutorial/order-intro.html

So what’s the problem?

Why isn’t anyone and everyone using this solution yet? There are a lot of people that already use this solution and it saves both time and a lot of money. So why are there still people not using this? One reason might be the fact that serverless is still a new technology. Not everyone feels comfortable with it yet and because it’s so new the tools needed for development are not popular enough. Take for example AWS Lambda debugging. It’s a basic need for every developer and yet Amazon doesn’t have a tool that provides all the support needed for development. So we end up looking for tools Like Thundra.io and Dashbird.io(amongst others).

In conclusion

Moving from a traditional self-hosted solution to the cloud will be a complex problem for store owners but at one point or another, they will find themselves having to face difficult decisions vis-a-vis their platform and scaling capabilities and going serverless can solve many problems.

I’m anxious to see what’s to come in the e-commerce space. Perhaps we’ll see our first in-the-cloud e-commerce solution. The sky’s the limit! (get it? cloud computing – sky? ok, I’ll stop).

Read More at The e-commerce space is changing. Here’s what you need to know

As a small business owner, at one point you have choose if you want an agency to create your online representation of your business or if you want to do it yourself using a website builder like Simbla. Sometimes, having an agency create your website can get pretty pricey and miscommunication is usually the number one reason why projects remain unfinished or fail. With Simbla however, the entire process is effortless even for a non-technical person while the results are impressive, considering that you get to create a complete website with an online database and all the other features of a professional website.

I remember working with several website builders over the past ten years or so. Most of the times, they were basic tools with just a few features, intended mostly for amateurs. Simbla, however, is more than a website builder. At least, it is more than what I would have expected considering my past experiences. While the drag and drop interface makes the whole creation process quite effortless, the database integration feature adds to your website the element that makes it a real website, a professional online representation of your business.

With Simbla, making your own website seems a good alternative to working with an expensive agency. Here’s one way to do it and our favorite website builder to do it with.

What is Simbla?

An HTML5 SEO ready website

Simbla is a website builder that uses Bootstrap 3 to create HTML5 websites that look great and are also great for SEO. You will find several similar tools that will not allow you to create SEO ready websites. This is a particularly important thing because you want your content to be easily readable and visible by the search engine crawlers and thus, properly indexed.

Simbla websites are capable to generate valid standard XML sitemaps that you can integrate into your Google webmaster account and thus facilitate Google crawler’s access to your local files. The metadata generated is also in standard format, with typical titles and keywords and the URLs are search engine friendly as well.

The websites are easy to create unlike with other website builders. Also, the HTML5 feature is a good thing, considering that this version of the Hypertext Markup Language supports multimedia and is natively supported by al web browsers, desktop, and mobile alike.

How does Simbla work?

Everything you need is right there, on your own canvas. Simbla allows you to create a professional looking website with a working online database in just a few minutes, without much of an effort. Moreover, users are allowed to create alerts and send emails as a response to database actions as well. What else do you need to know about all its features?

Two modes for the website builder

Simbla features two different modes for their website builder, an easy mode for the beginners and an advanced “pro” mode for those who already know a thing or two about website design and coding.

(select a template or start with a wizard)

(Choose a plan)

(Your canvas)

1. The Easy Mode

This is exactly how it sounds: an easy mode that allows the user to create a new website in just a few minutes without the need to know how to code or design a website. What’s great about the app is that everything you create with it looks professional and out of the box. There’s no way to tell that in fact the website was designed and developed through an app and not by a team of coders.

There are already made modules and prebuilt sections you can choose from and if you want to preview your work in real time you can do it without the need to write content. Everything you implement on your website will be instantly populated with dummy content. Therefore, there’s no way you can do something wrong. In order to insert your own text and images, you just have to click on a specific part of the module and insert your own content. I cannot remember another website builder that is easier and faster to work with.

2. The Pro Mode

This mode is dedicated to those who know what they are doing when it comes to Html code and web design. In other words, if you’ve been around the block and think about yourself as an experienced web developer, you can access this feature and control every single detail of your website, starting from the first page and up to the last dot posted after the last phrase.

Upon entering the Pro Mode, you will receive a notification. At this point, if you are unsure about your skills, you can return to the previous mode. If not, you will see that the working canvas is a little bit changed and that you have more freedom on how to build your website. The drag and drop features are still present but at the same time, you get to start with a blank canvas and bring your website to life, step by step, by adding the elements you envisioned it should be there.

What kind of knowledge do you need in order to properly work in the Pro Mode? Well, you need to know a few things about how a website is structured, how menus, headers, and dynamic content are implemented and displayed. You will also need to know how to add different structures to your page and what each of them means and how does it work.

Simbla’s App Market

No website builder would be complete without some extra modules and apps to be installed on the newly designed and set up web pages. There’s an app market available on Simbla that includes modules for blogging, news, e-Commerce, product catalogs and a Knowledge base. Let’s take a quick look at four of these apps:

The Blogging App

One of the most important marketing strategies you can develop for a website is to create valuable content for your audience. The best channel for doing it is, of course, the blog. You can create and update your own blog right from the Simbla interface and add it to your website

The News App

Do you have some important news to share with your audience? Or, do you think that a newscast feature will be useful in the future? There’s no problem, Simbla allows you to add scrolling news headlines to your website. The interface of the module is similar to that of the blogging feature or other modules implemented by Simbla and therefore, you will find it easy to use and set up.

A Product Catalog

Whether you already run an e-Commerce website or you are using the web only to showcase your products, a good and professional looking catalog may help you market your business better to your customers. Fortunately, Simbla features an easy to set up the app for product cataloging and presentation that you may use as a part of your website.

The e-Commerce App

A website builder with an e-Commerce app? Can this be for real? Yes, it can. Thanks to Simbla, we can now design and launch a website with just a few clicks and set up a professional and working e-Commerce store. You can now organize your products, display them in your own store and let your customers easily checkout once they choose to buy one or more of them.

The CRM system

One of the most important and dynamic features of SIMBLA is the integration of a CRM system within the app itself. This means that the database, the website you have designed and all its related apps are integrated and available in one place. Thus, the CRM system will allow you to manage your online business, your customers, sales, meetings and the website itself better and easier.

Also, with the CRM system you have access to a smart sales dashboard and some new cool features like the sale pipeline and a new way of editing and creating data. While still in a beta version, the system is in continuous development and we can expect a final version quite soon.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a cool and professional tool to build your own website in less than an hour and without needing any of coding or designing skills, Simbla may be your best options. It has everything you need to start building from scratch, it allows you to build an online database along with the website and it includes several other apps that may be of help in the beginning or as your website grows. Moreover, a new beta CRM system which will include some cool new features will be released soon.

Did you try Simbla or a similar app? What do you think about it? Do you see yourself building a website with Simbla?

Read More at How to Build a Website the Easy Way – Simbla Review

Both as a web designer, and as a user of the internet, you know that a fast website is a good websiteSpeed of a website is something which you don’t notice, until it’s missing that is.

Then it becomes frustrating. A bad user experience. A reason for bouncing off a website never to return.

If you want visitors to enjoy their experience on your website, you don’t need to think only about the design of the website, but how fast the website performs for ALL of your users!

Because good design is only one part of a good user experience.

After website design, the speed of page-loading is one of the most important factors which contribute to the success of a website. Besides that, it’s also a ranking factor.

Why is speed so important?

The necessity of having a fast website is a factor has been studied time and time again.

A negative experience is created in the mind of the user who is perceiving a site as being slow. A site’s conversion rate is also affected very negatively by slow performing websites.

Have a look at the graph below by research firm Soasta

Loading time vs conversion rate study

As can be clearly seen from the graph above, as load time of a page increases, the conversion rate drops drastically. The best conversion rates actually happen when pages take less than 3 seconds to load. Unfortunately, very few websites are actually able to provide such a fast user experience.

Is your website one of these slow-loading sites? Are you killing conversions and are not even aware of it?

But there are solutions which can help boost your website’s speed.

What is a CDN?

The term CDN is an acronym which means content delivery network. That is a fancy way of saying, a network of servers which are optimized to deliver the content (of your website) in the most optimal way.

But how does this content delivery network provide benefits to my website and how does it make the website load faster?

The CDN’s network of servers is an infrastructure which is designed to handle the load of traffic of a website better than that of generic hosting services.

Most hosting services, especially the ones aimed at generic websites are geared at creating a stable but generic environment, at a low cost to both the hosting service and the client. These websites typically run on generic environments, such as Apache, PHP, MySQL and other stacks of popular hosting frameworks.

However, the environment has not been specifically optimized and tuned for website speed. Shared hosting services are typically quite slow, particularly in their initial response. The fact that each environment is hosting multiple websites simultaneously means that they suffer from a resource bottleneck problem. Essentially, each website is hosted on the same server as many others, they are “sharing” the same resources. But while the term used is sharing, in reality, they are competing for the same resources. To keep costs low, this sharing creates a situation where each request sent to a website has to wait before it can be served. (Incidentally, if you are looking for a good share host, check out this review of Inmotion hosting – we really don’t complain much here)

Have a look at the below. One of my websites, which is aimed primarily for ecommerce (dronesbuy.net) is hosted on a shared hosting environment, without a CDN.

Have a look at the following waterfall graph:

Load time without CDN

Can you see the waiting time above of 1.26 seconds?

This is the time it is taking for the server to start “working” on the request sent to it. Essentially, at this point, my website is queued up, competing for resources with other sites hosted on the same server as mine.

This is an implicit delay in created by using a shared website hosting service

Bear in mind, that this delay is before the server event starts to send any kind of content back to the user.

With a delay of 1.26 seconds, you can forget having a page-speed load time of less than 3 seconds.

This is a problem. So how do we go about solving this problem?

On the other hand, a CDN’s primary function is to make websites load fast. Their actual infrastructure setup is designed such that they help deliver a lightning fast website.

But how does a CDN actually speed up my site?

How a CDN speeds up your site

There are a few reasons why a website can load slowly:

1. the shared hosting server has a lot of websites (to keep the price cheap) and is thus overwhelmed. The response times are therefore slow.
2. Images and other large content of the are not optimized and take a lot of time to download.
3. The website has installed many different WordPress plugins which are generating many CSS and JS files and other resources
4. The hosting server is located geographically far away from the actual visitors of your website (think website hosted in the US, with readers mostly in Europe)

There are other reasons, but these are the main ones which generate the largest loading time hits.

You can take mitigating steps to fix each of the above-noted problems individually, but we’ll focus mostly on the last two in this article.

Your shared hosting is overwhelmed and slow

Shared hosting servers are by their definition – slow, especially if they are cheap. It’s just the economics of it.

When a hosting company rents or buys a server, they need to share that cost with their clients.

Put simply, and for the sake of example, if your server costs $100/month and you want to price your plan at $10/month, you need to host 10 accounts to break even.

If you want to price your plan at $5/month, you need to host 20 accounts to break even.

You get the gist. The cheaper the plan, the more the accounts you’ll need to host on the same server.

If a hosting service is advertising itself as cheap, and you want your website to be fast – run a mile!

So what happens, on shared servers, each time somebody visits your website, the server is (at the same time) handling the websites of all of the other users / accounts on that same server.  

With shared hosting, it can take more than a whole second to even start working on delivering your website’s contents.

You can clearly see that delay on the screenshot above.

VPS vs Shared hosting environment

If you want to make a website fast, this delay of one second in response time is creating a serious issue for you.

Here are our first recommendations

1. If your website is using WordPress as the CMS, choose from the best WordPress hosting companies, the ones with known good service and great reviews. Stay away from cheap hosts.
2. Going for the highest plan you can afford, a Virtual Private Server is a good balance between a (cheap but slow) shared hosting site and a dedicated server (fast but expensive). With a VPS, your site will have plenty of resources to deal with the load and respond within a few milliseconds, rather than a whole second.

The images of your site are not optimized

Images are one of the primary reasons why websites can be slow to load. 

It’s always great advice to use images in your articles. They help to create a break in large pieces of text. Images are also great for readability.

“An image is worth a thousand words” or so they say.

But images can also create problems.

Primarily, images which are not optimized for speed can have a serious negative effect on the loading time of a website.

It’s actually quite a laborious process to remember to save each file in a speed-friendly format, and compressing them to a size which is small enough but which does not lose any of the quality of the image.

Besides being labor-intensive, some people are simply not aware of the need to optimize images.

So what’s the solution to this problem? We need to find a method which will automatically optimize images.

Here’s where a CDN comes to the rescue. CDNs are designed to address this problem without requiring any manual intervention

This is because image optimization (including lossless compression) is typically a built-in feature of most CDNs

That means you don’t have to worry about the images. While you handle the design and creation of a website with awesome imagery, the Content Delivery Network will automatically compress and optimize the images.

The website is using a lot of scripts

This is another factor which has a bad effect on the speed of a website.

Almost all plugins which are installed on a website have an impact on the loading time of your website – each plugin adds more and more assets to the site, making it slower and slower.

Each plugin which is used to create a specific piece of functionality is also slowing down the site.

Some plugins create more JS files, CSS files, and other assets, so some are worse than others, but all of them have at least a bit of an effect. The fewer plugins you install – the better. This is a golden rule.

Each plugin also adds overhead in the form of requests.

Have a look at the following screenshot from a site which has not been optimized for speed. You can see that the performance scores are very slow, whilst the fully loaded time is horrendous.

Slow loading time due to many requests

Thankfully, there are ways to mitigate these problems:

1. Install as little plugins as possible on any website
2. Combine the files created by all the plugins into a few files only
3. Enable HTTPS and then HTTP/2 on your website for better overall loading times

Once again, a CDN can help with the combining the files into fewer files and delivering that content over HTTP2.

The CDN actually performs compression and minification of JS and CSS files; this makes the overall size of your site’s resources smaller and therefore, faster to load.

Setting up of HTTP/2 in also highly recommended. HTTP2 is something which is a whole topic of its own so we’ll recommend a couple of great articles on WebDesignerDepot and on CollectiveRay blog which we’ve already written.

HTTP/2 has been created specifically to make improvements in the loading time of websites. It is designed to address certain shortcomings which older technologies did not deal with.

CDN services typically can enable HTTP/2 on your website, simply through the flick of a switch. HTTP/2 requires that HTTPS has been enabled on your site. Once again, CDNs typically have built-in support to serve content over HTTPS. Thanks to the CDN, you can enable HTTPS without incurring the cost and complication which is associated with secure website certificates. A CDN is also able to improve the overhead associated with the SSL/TLS handshake (which is a heavy operation). This ensures that even with HTTPS enabled – the site incurs no overhead.

There’s still one problem which we haven’t addressed which can slow down the loading speed of your website.

What is it and how can we fix it?

The geographical location of your website server

There is one thing which can negatively your website’s loading speed, even after you’ve performed all sorts of speed optimizations mentioned above.

Have a look at the following diagram.

Hosting server location vs visitor location

This shows the typical time it takes for web data to travel from the one side of the Atlantic to the other. You can see that loading a website hosted on a different continent that your website is visiting from, is a problem. If your website is hosted in the continental US, any visitor outside of the US will experience this problem.

Of course, this applies all over the world. It can even happen within continents if the visitor is located far away from the hosting server.

The distance your website’s content has to travel has a direct (and negative) effect on how fast your website loads.

If your website has a localized audience, choose a good hosting service which is physically close to your target audience. If you are targeting users in New York, choose to host your website on a good server in New York.

However, what do you do if your website caters to an international audience?

You can’t choose a server which is located close to the visitors of your website.

However, there is a solution. As you might have guessed, the solution involves a CDN, because a CDN service specifically addresses this problem.

Let’s see an updated version of the previous diagram, this time we see how the loading time is affected if we use the services of a CDN such as Incapsula CDN, one of the largest players in the CDN industry.

Without CDN vs with CDN

Just like we discussed at the beginning of this article, a CDN service is designed to shorten the distance that content has to travel to reach the visitors of a website.

A CDN service is set up by creating a network of hundreds of servers in different locations in multiple countries and geographies. These servers, known as caching servers or edge servers, each contain a local copy of the images and files which your website needs serve.

When a user accesses your website, these files are served from the nearest physical to your visitor.

This reduces the problem of distance and makes a website much faster to load compared to if a website was not using a CDN.

Have a look the following diagram, which shows the geographical distribution of caching servers around the world – making it possible to always serve content from a location which is physically close to your visitor.

CDN global server map

How to set up a CDN for free

The great thing about CDN services is that they operate on a freemium model – typically they offer a free plan. This free plan provides the localized caching functionality we have shown above.

If your website grows beyond the limits of the free plan, you can then move to a higher plan which suits the needs of your website better.

The easiest way to implement a CDN does not even need a plugin, it’s done by what is knows as a reverse proxy.

This only requires you to perform some changes to the DNS settings of your domain. You’ll find exact guidance for most hosts from the CDN you will opt for, or you can ask for support from the CDN’s support staff.

You can see below how your website together will work together with the CDN to send content to visitors. The origin server is your website’s server.

CDN setup using proxy server

The CDN server actually receives the hit when a user visits your website. It then sends the request to your site, such that any necessary dynamic content is generated. Once it gets a response, the CDN sends the dynamic content and all static resources to the visitor.

This removes a lot of load from your hosting server – making your website load faster and able to handle much more visitors simultaneously.

Conclusion – are you ready to make your website faster?

As we’ve seen in this article, setting up a CDN can start from the very cheap price of free! Besides not having to spend anything, the loading speed of your website will be much-improved giving your site’s visitors a better user experience for your visitors.

If you’re looking to have a fast website, a CDN is a must.

Read More at What is a CDN and why does your website need it