Monthly Archives: November 2019

3 Ways Your Site Might Fail Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Google announced a new search results label stating if a site is “mobile-friendly” or not. Now, when you’re on your phone, you’ll know in advance whether the site you’re planning to visit is optimized for your device.
Accompanying the announcement, Google said they are also experimenting with a ranking boost for sites passing their “mobile-friendly check.” First, you should know that the object of a robots.txt file is to tell search engine crawlers, such as Google, what pages or files it should or should not look at on your website.
A common use of robots.txt is to avoid the appearance of login or thank you site in the search results. Robots.txt is often also used on websites operated by a content management system to block other administrative directories on your website that are used to run your content management system.
Second, a responsive or mobile page usually relies on CSS stylesheets and javascript files to view a changed template on smaller screens. Normally these files are stored in your web server’s external folders and then accessed by individual web pages.
So what do you think will happen if a robots.txt file prevents Google from accessing these CSS stylesheets and javascript files? Google thinks that your website is not mobile-friendly–it looks perfectly fine on your smartphone in fact!
Here are the 5 most popular things that make Google’s Mobile-Friendly Review a supposedly mobile-optimized page fail.
1. CSS and JS blocking:
Google has already stated specifically that blocking Image, CSS, and JavaScript resources from their bots are contrary to their webmaster guidelines and can adversely affect your indexing and ranking. But worse, these are the elements search engines need to make your mobile site find. This is a simple solution: don’t do it. Stay rid of these orders from the meta robots. Check your files with robots.txt; especially if your resources are delivered through a CDN.

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2. To close the buttons together:
Another thing Google is looking at is the closeness of your links. Fingers are much clumsier than mouse pointers (especially if you’re me) and as a result, Google uses link size and proximity as a mobile-friendly factor.
Make sure that important buttons have a height and width of at least 7 mm (or 48 CSS pixels) to ensure that your site passes the tap test. You can make less important links smaller, but you must be sure that within 5 mm (32 CSS pixels) of them there are no other links.
3. Content Is Wider Than the Screen:
Making sure you don’t have to scroll sideways to see your page might sound like a no-brainer, but it was one of the most common flags the Mobile Tester threw out.
Typically, the correct use of the viewport meta tag is your best width management solution. This enables you to instruct browsers to show the dimensions of a page based on the size of the screen.
So, at last, we could conclude that if your website works well on your smartphone, you can definitely run it through a mobile-friendly review tool to ensure that you are not penalized unknowingly in mobile search.

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Why Consider Instagram Over Twitter for Marketing Your Business

These days, social media marketing is all the rage, and Instagram and Twitter are two of the most popular social media platforms. Both of them have a huge user base, and both are also very easy to use. But when it comes to marketing your business, you might find Instagram to be more useful than Twitter. Because Instagram’s user base surpasses Twitter’s—which means that you can potentially reach more people with your Instagram post than with your Tweet. With over 1 billion monthly users, Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. Whereas, Twitter has approx 270 million users worldwide.
Let’s take a look to know the key differences between Twitter vs Instagram and which platform is better to use for your brand.
Twitter is like everybody’s open diary. When stuff happens around the world, be it relevant or not, you can expect people to talk about it on Twitter. Twitter is where you go to if you want to know something about a tragic incident or breaking news, You don’t go to Instagram to see pictures of it. Twitter is where the updates are. However, many experts and users say that Twitter has become too noisy, and more or less they are right. There are just so many things going on that it’s hard to get a hold of anybody’s attention. Of course, a well-written Tweet can still generate a lot of engagement, but it’s harder than ever to stand out and get people to pay attention.

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Meanwhile, Instagram is receiving a lot of attention these days. It has been shown that this addictive app fully engages users. You have probably experienced this yourself. When you start looking on your Instagram feed, it’s difficult to stop or to even pay attention to whatever else. Every photo on an Instagram user’s feed is given equal attention because the pictures scroll down one by one. These features are great for brands to keep the conversation going, and build solid relationships with their customers. Twitter’s engagement is much lower, although it allows instant communication through its retweet, quote, and reply features. A big difference between Instagram and Twitter is that Instagram knows how to keep user attention, whereas Twitter just runs in the background.
Both Instagram and Twitter offer advertisements and sponsored posts, but the engagement might be significantly different. On Instagram, you can monetize posts, stories, and IGTV videos, while on Twitter, you can only use posts in different formats to promote your products or services.

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For you to be able to market your business effectively, you need a lot more attention. There are so many different social media platforms and networks now that it’s hard to keep users focused. But that’s where Instagram is getting it right. However, you need to create strategic posts and have a significant number of followers. To boost your following, get the services of a company that will assist you to engage more users, attract more followers, and creates more relevant content.

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5 Typical errors in the development of mobile applications

Mobile apps are software programs designed for smartphones and tablets for mobile devices. They turn mobile devices into functional and fun miniature powerhouses. Many smartphones come preloaded with some of their manufacturers ‘ mobile apps and their related mobile service providers (e.g. Verizon, AT& T, T-Mobile, etc.) but there are many more apps available through device-specific app stores. Most mobile apps include programs to run on desktop computers. Nevertheless, mobile apps need to work with different limitations than their desktop counterparts. Mobile devices have a wide variety of screen sizes, memory capabilities, processor capabilities, graphical interfaces, buttons, and touch functions, and developers have to accommodate all of them. Here we will discuss the five most common errors made in the development of mobile applications.
1. Is the app meeting the expectations of the user?
It’s not an easy task to attract new visitors to your app every day. Every single user has a different set of expectations. The first interaction of an app with the visitor is the most important stage that should be taken care of. It is an extremely bad idea to initially hold long registration forms with animated splash screens as well as various elements blocking the relevant content.
Get a standard sign-in / register procedure in place demanding name and email address only. In addition, try to integrate social media login so that users can sign in directly through their social media profiles.

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2. Do you have too many platforms to develop?
After all the platforms, one of the biggest mistakes committed by brands is going on at once. Clearly, by having their presence on each platform, they want to make the most of it. You need to decide on the platform you want to go for. The platform has its own pros and cons, whether it’s Android, iOS, or Windows. Android currently has the most apps followed by iOS. While selecting the forum, you also need to remember the target audience.
3. Improper projections of the deadline and the budget:
The planner must carefully study the plan and scrutinize all the details in order to make the correct estimation and determine deadlines. It takes time for that approach. If you insist on immediate project evaluation, don’t be surprised when the budget and deadlines will be tripled in the app development process. It should be taken for granted that a quality product will always take a long time to develop.
4. Unnecessary characteristics:
It’s good to understand the intent and meaning of the app clearly and avoid burdening users with the need for complex functions. This is one of the most common errors when ordering “all-inclusive” apps: they are heavy, pricey, and awkward.
5. Is your app being checked enough?
This may be called a stupid mistake, but it’s very common. It is imperative to test your app before it is released. More than 1,000 apps are released every day to make the competition tough. What’s more, the last thing you’d want is to miss your app while you’re launching.
If you have any issues with the creation of mobile apps, please contact us. We, Cleonix Technologies, are a web development company specialized in all web development and digital marketing strategies in Kolkata. To produce an amazing outcome, we collaborate with companies of all shapes and sizes. If you think it’s time for your company to stand out from the crowd, we can help you get started!

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How to improve your site speed for SEO

An often overlooked ranking factor of SEO is website load time. Google has stated clearly that website speed is an important factor that they want webmasters to pay attention to. A study has found that just one-second delay in page load time can decrease the number of page views by 11%, customer satisfaction 16%, while 7% will be registered for loss in conversions.
However, the process of enhancing the speed of the website is not quite easy, but you can make it easy by getting a good website speed optimization service. Here, we have discussed simple ways to boost the opening speed of your website…
Minimize the HTTP Request of Your Website
A recently conducted study has suggested that more than 80% of websites in the World Wide Web take time for downloading different web content such as images, Flash, scripts, stylesheet, etc. Since the HTTP requests are forwarded for each of these components, excessive on-page content can extend the opening time of your website.
Thus, it is very important to reduce the number of components from each page of your website, as this will help you to reduce the number of HTTP requests, which is a significant part of improving site performance.

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Image Optimization
Images play a greater role in web page opening time. Oversized images always take a longer time to load, thus you will have to take measures to keep your images as small as possible.
Likewise, format and SRC are also two important factors that can slow down the opening speed of your website. JPEG is the best format you should go with, but you can also apply PNG. However, BMPs or TIFFs are not recommended, if you want to boost your site’s performance.
Enable Compression
Compression is a technique, where you will have to Zip your high-quality content that comes with 100kb data or more. The technique minimizes the bandwidth of your pages and reduces the HTTP response.
According to professionals, more than 90% of today’s internet traffic use browsers that support Gzip, thus it will be a great option for you to apply the tool and prepare your server to enable compression.
Enable Browser Caching
Whenever we visit a website, the elements available on the page save in a cache, so that the browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request, when we re-visit the page again. If someone visits your website for the first time, the person downloads the HTML document, stylesheets, Javascript files, and images.
Static resources should come with the life span of one week, while other resources like ads or widgets should come with the life span of at least one day. However, you can set the expiry time of cacheable resources like JS and CSS files, media files, image files, PDFs, etc. for at least one week.
Reduce the Number of Plugins
Too many plugins will not only slow down your site’s performance but also invite many security issues along with technical difficulties. Thus, remove all unnecessary plugins, try selectively disabling plugins, and experience a better server performance.
Following these above tips, you’ll have a clean, lean website your visitors will love to visit.

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Advantages of using LESS

Today, three major CSS preprocessors, Sass, LESS, and Stylus, are on the market. First of all, we need to know, what is preprocessor? A CSS preprocessor is a language for scripting that is a CSS extension. It is compiled into the standard syntax of CSS and then the web browser reads the CSS. Less looks very similar to CSS, but it provides features such as variables, functions, blends, and operations, etc. that make it easier for you to create dynamic CSS. Less is a pre-processor CSS that helps you to customize, maintain, and recycle the webpage style sheets. Less is a CSS extension and a dynamic style sheet language that can be run on the client-side or on the server-side. We’ll talk about the benefits of using less in this post.

1. It’s faster and easier than CSS.
2. Cleaner structure by using Nesting.
3. Less codes compared to CSS are simple and well structured.
4. Less supports compatibility for cross-browsers.
5. Change / update can be done faster because Less variables are used
6. More time is saved compared to CSS
7. Coding is faster because Less provides a list of operators
8. Use Mixins solves code reusability and integrates all of a class’s properties into another class by simply including the class name as one of its properties
9. By referring to your ruleset, you can recycle all your classes
10. Less has a lot of mathematical and operational functions.
11. You can import other LESS files into a LESS file that can define variables and use them in the Less file imported.
12. There are more predefined functions and you can also create your own functions and use them all over the code.
13. Less also supports Lazy Loading feature, i.e. you can define your variables anywhere in the file, such as before or after variable use.
14. Maintenance in Less can be done more easily as variables are used.
15. Less provides a list of operators that speeds up coding and saves time.

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