Wednesday 19 January 2022

3 OpenCart Extensions every OpenCart Developer must use in 2022

OpenCart is now the most favoured platform for eCommerce development. And here are the best 5 extensions every OpenCart developer must use in 2022 for efficient development and give a competitive edge to the e-stores.

Meeting the customer demands and offering an amazing shopping experience to your online shoppers is the main objective of every eCommerce business owner. And to achieve this, it is important to customise, design, and develop an eCommerce site thinking perfectly from the customers’ point of view. Also, this makes it essential to choose the right eCommerce development platform. And here comes the name OpenCart. 

When it comes to eCommerce website development, most business owners prefer to hire an OpenCart developer over the other platforms. Even eCommerce developers prefer to use the OpenCart platform for building eCommerce sites. And the main reasons are that OpenCart is a feature-rich platform and is specially designed for e-store development. Also, it is the first choice of developers because of the availability of a wide range of plugins and extensions that make the entire web development process simpler and efficient with OpenCart. 

And here’s you can check out the top 5 OpenCart plugins that must be used in 2022. 

OpenCart Social Loginiser:

This OpenCart extension offers eight social login options that allow the customers to visit and check out the social media pages of the web store without even getting themselves registered. The customers can visit various social media portals like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more. Visitors can also sign up or log in to their social media profiles and then visit the pages if the store has this OpenCart extension integration. 

OpenCart One page Checkout:

A lengthy checkout process can be frustrating for the customers and can lead to more cart abandonment. This makes it essential to streamline the checkout system of an online store. If the site is built with OpenCart then this is possible with the integration of this one-page checkout extension that puts together different checkout fields and steps on a single page, thereby enhancing the customer experience while checking out. This extension also allows guest checkout and also supports different shipping and payment options as well, which is a plus point. 

Zopim Live Chat:

Responding to the customers instantly or offering real-time support and service to the customers can make your site more reliable and can keep the customers engaged to the store for a longer time, providing a better customer experience. And this makes it important to add features like instant or live chat or communication options to the store. The Zopim Live Chat extension offers this feature to the site. Developers can implement a live chat option, ensuring faster and real-time communication options and enhanced customer satisfaction. 

Apart from these 3 major ones, there are many more amazing extensions you can use for your OpenCart website development like OpenCart exit pop-up extension, Abandoned carts, Advanced sorting, SEO PackPro, and a few more to enhance the functionality of your e-store. Leading OpenCart development companies like PHPProgrammers have expert OpenCart developers who can ensure to use the right and the latest extensions to make your e-store the best place to shop online. 

Tuesday 4 January 2022

Skills You Must Look for in a Laravel Developer Before Hiring

There are millions of Laravel developers around today and choosing a skilled and experienced one can be a daunting task. Here are the skills you must look for before choosing to hire a Laravel developer for your next web project. 

Laravel is one of the most popular open-source PHP-based frameworks that offers developers a pool of benefits and features for effortlessly building and maintaining websites and web applications. Laravel has a comprehensive web app development ecosystem with in-built features, extensions and packages that make it the best choice when it comes to robust web application development. You would be surprised to know that today Laravel powers over 1.2 million websites and web apps on the internet. It is not only a favoured choice of the developers but even most of the business owners choose to hire a Laravel developer for web app development. Some of the benefits it offers are high scalability, faster web app development, and easier management of resources. Some highlighted features of this well-built framework are that it is designed on the MVC structure, ensures complete web app security, has artisan CLI, a blade template engine, a seamless database migration system, and unit testing. 

However, with the high usage of Laravel and the increasing demand for and a number of Laravel developers around, it can be a little difficult to find a highly skilled and experienced one for your project. Also, it is essential to choose a skilful developer to ensure to get a competitive Laravel web app for your business. Remember, all developers may not possess all the required skills and abilities. Hence, you need to consider a few things before hiring one for your project. 

Skills you must look for before hiring a Laravel developer for your web app development. 

Web development skills:

Make sure the developer has knowledge of the fundamental web development technologies like CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. Knowledge of these technologies is important for efficient and seamless Laravel web app development. With HTML, developers can creatively and easily add elements to the design of the web application like the body text, headline, and subheading. And while HTML helps to add the content, CSS helps to make the elements on the design look pretty, styling the elements and content. And JavaScript helps to add functionalities like call-to-actions, etc. 

Database management skills:

Database management includes things like organising the website data properly on the database maintaining proper tables, fields, columns and rows, sharing the data across the organisation, easy database access, and other related database tasks. Some of the popular database systems are Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and a few more are there. And a proficient Laravel developer must have strong knowledge and understanding of these. 

Understanding of MVC and OOP:

Laravel is based on the MVC architecture, which makes Laravel development more organised and effortless and also makes it easy to work cooperatively together in a team. Moreover, for working with Laravel, it is essential to have knowledge in object-oriented programming, classes, objects, methods, traits, etc. So, make sure to hire a professional who has a strong grasp of both MVC and OOP. 

Other essential soft skills:

Apart from the above technical skills, the developer should also possess some must-have soft skills like creative thinking, time management skills, proper project evaluation, and effective and easy communication skills. 

Well, these were the most essential skills you must look for in the Laravel developer before hiring for your project. Also, make sure the developer is associated with any of the leading Laravel development companies like PHPProgrammers to leverage the benefits of a good company like reliability, on-time project delivery, excellent and strategic teamwork, and efficient web app development.