PHP Developer

On-demand service industry has been growing in India. Today we have on-demand service starting from cabs to laundry. This is catching up a trend among the new generation as it makes their life easy. Soon things like getting a haircut, fixing a tap becomes a part of on-demand service industry.

Say you have a great idea that would be a part of on-demand service economy, and then you need to know just two things to get started – a business knowledge of your industry and technologies you need to run your business. This blog is all about the latter one.

Mobile app for all participants

Most of the on-demand services operate by making aggregation of local services in their industry. In simple sense business make a tie-up or an agreement with the other business entity or individuals at different locations. These business entity or individuals are called vendors.

I get chance to speak with many small business owners like you through mediums such as phone, skype, hangout and sometimes face to face. Every time when they speak about the internal business management software, the topic of workflow comes along the way.

Being small business owner, you may have mindset that business process management system (BPMS) is for big organizations and it’s too complex for small teams. You may be partially right. This blog will throw some light on business process management system for small team.

You are at the center of your small team

If you are running a business with small team having around 10-30 people, then no matter what, you would be at the center of your small team. Every information flows through you. If the team is spread across the geographical this becomes even more complex. Most of your time is spent communicating between your employees.

If this is you, then you are reading the right blog. I know you don’t need a full functional business process management system. But what you need is a component of BPM- that is workflow management system.

If you are reading this post, then you are well aware of what those terms SaaS and CRM mean. May be you are in the process to evaluate the best CRM system for your business. You are doing this because CRM from brands such as Salesforce, Sap or Microsoft is too complex for your medium sized business to fit in.

So which is the best SaaS based CRM for your business? Believe me, none of them are your best fit. Now you may think that this is baseless argument. Of course, it’s not. I am going to tell you the thoughts collected from various entrepreneurs during my freelancing from last 5 years. Read ahead, if you are interested.

Missing factor in SaaS based CRM system

Your company finds a sweet spot in the market by differentiating on how you serve the customers. This is directly dependent on how the company operates internally. In simple word, business process directly reflects the customer service. Better the business process at your company, best you serve your customers.

Now that said, most of the CRM available as SaaS focus on 3 key areas – Marketing, Sales Customer service. This is required by all the companies irrespective of their size. These CRM can be customized to a predefined extent to increase their relevancy to your business. But they real miss is the business process integration.

So you have done with building your online service or a product. The very last feature is to have online payment system for your customer to pay you. This is last feature, but very crucial one. You may use online payment service such as chragebee, chragify , recurly etc and integrate with your system. But wait, they charge you more and the fact is you end up paying more in long run.

Think of it; you can build your own, fully controlled online payment system by using payment gateway from the bank where you hold business account. Yes, it’s safe if you consider 5 things described in this blog. Read them and get your developer to follow them during development.

Save your order with the payment gateway response

Every order or subscription done at your website is being saved in database. Your developer includes business relevant information such as subscription end date or number of pieces ordered in the database. However, he may miss out with the key information – payment gateway response.

Payment gateway response is information given out by the payment gateway for every transaction – be it successful or failure. This is very important information at times. In fact, during a dispute between you and your bank this information is a key. Hence make sure that your developer saves it in the database.

Today I have revamped a my blog design. The new design is attractive, mobile friendly and more informative. Cover photo of this article hosts the new design of the website.

But wait, what’s wrong with the old design ?

After using the old design for year and half I have found many drawbacks of the old design.In simple words It was not impressing the customer who have landed on my website. Below are the few things which every consultant like me must have in their website.

Have a vision: Have a vision for your website.Just having blog don’t get more customers. Vision of my website is to introduce myself & my service to my customer.

Today I have launched a brand new design for  my personal site. This new website design which you have landed on is more mobile friendly and loads fast.This is more attractive than the former one.

 

Last few days ago I got a request from a client to develop a website just like naukari.com. My first reaction for that was “yes! I can develop a job portal for you”. Then he replied “I want it exactly like a naukari.com”. So after that I requested him to give me the list of requirements. He said “I need all the features of naukari.com”. He just wanted me to clone the website! Realizing this I happen to explain him why this doesn’t work. Today I am writing a blog about the same.

Cloning a famous website will not help you to establish the business. The straight forward reason for this is that a person who wants to clone a website generally does not have a domain knowledge in which he is trying to establish the business. Want to realize this? -read the above paragraph again wearing the hat as my client. Read his replies and think of his approach to build a business.

We term such a kind of business as “me too business “.  Mostly these kinds of businesses build all the features of a famous website without knowing the reason for that. In fact one thing these people fail to understand is the big websites found today were not big from day one. They started small, studied the market, established in market, found a problem to solve, built a product/business which solves the problem and adds the business value. That’s the right path to walk on.

The other reason that makes the “me too business” to fail is their lack of understanding of problem. These kinds of businesses try to solve the same problem what already existing website without understanding the depth of the problem. Building a product is not about giving many features; it’s about solving a real-time problem. In fact the software itself is worth nothing if it doesn’t solve the problem to the fullest extent. It’s not the software makes the product, the approach taken to solve a problem does.

Today one of my readers asked me following question via e-mail.

 “Which is the world’s best PHP framework in these days which have all the features, fast, robust, everything and developer using that can develop very good web application.

Second i want to know what is better for a web application using any frame work to develop it or just start it from scratch using PHP. Because some suggest that direct codes writing is better than using any framework.”

I choose to answer it here:

Here is post about one more session in mobile developer summit today. The title of this post is the also the name of session – The other side of usability. In one word it’s all about optimizing the apps for speed.

Here is the key takeaway :

1. Apps response time is crucial element to engage the users. Speed bottleneck can easily make the first time user to abandon the apps  and finally uninstall.
2. The wait loader can easily give bad impression about the apps. Hence avoid it wherever possible.
3. Load the text content first and then load the images. You can download the images in bulk in a single HTTP request
4. Do layout optimization. Avoid over drawing UI elements
5. Identify the bottlenecks and fix them. Below are the few way to identify the bottleneck…
   • Hallway usability testing
   • Competitor Analysis
   • Start using the apps yourself
   • User comments an feedback

This sessions had a good showcase on how the apps can be improved. The speaker shows the different version of an example app, improving it on next higher version.

 

Today, I discovered that IRCTC is testing a new user interface. As per my observation not every request is routed to new interface, instead a random request is sent to this new interface after the user clicks on the “Find Trains” button.

At first I thought this new interface is public , however during my continued search for trains on different browser tabs I was landed on to the old interface. Hence I just took a screenshot of new interface.

To speak about new interface – it’s pretty good. Following are the few features I observed in the new interface:

Plan My Journey
The new interface includes few good enhancements.Now the auto suggestion for “To” & “From” station appears just after 1 letter is typed. Below the “Find Now” button a section appears after a click of “Find Trains” which help to filter the result by journey class – like 1A, 2A,3A,SL . Below that I  found 3 more sections like “Train Type” , “From Station” , “To Station” , for which I still wonder about the reason. May be “From Station” & “To Station” will list all the station which come between the specified stations before  search. As of now, these columns just display the specified stations before the search with a check box.