Why choose CodeIgniter over other frameworks?

CodeIgniter is a robust PHP framework with a tiny footprint, created for developers who want a simple and elegant toolkit to build full-featured web applications. The latest version of CodeIgniter is 3.1.10, released in Jan 2019. It has a rich set of libraries and enhances the speed of web development with the help of its powerful features and functionalities. What makes CodeIgniter better than other frameworks?

Configuration

CodeIgniter has a very simple configuration. All you need is to install the CodeIgniter according to your system configuration in config.php library. You don't have to write the name of your database every time. "Write once use everywhere."

Database Abstraction

This layer remains default with every PHP framework, including CodeIgniter. Database Abstraction layer grants you to build, modify or delete any statement without creating raw SQL. If you have to hire CodeIgniter Developer, you can encounter the high customization advantages of the framework such as new table creation in database, inclusion and exclusion of the columns from rows.

Security

Everyone wants their website to be secured from any attacks possible such as SQL engines and XSRF attacks. CodeIgniter is equipped with in-built security tools that guide developers in customizing security standards for your web app based on the requirements. CodeIgniter unsets all the global variables by default independent of the PHPs register_globals directive.

Community

The fan-following of CodeIgniter across the world is enormous for web development solutions. Whenever you have any query, you can get massive support from this community to solve out your problem in quick time. There exist expert programmers in the community who would love to share their knowledge in web development forums. Get your problem solved by just joining a popular community and discuss your issue with their professionals.

Documentation

The documentation of CodeIgniter is indicated as undoubtedly better than other PHP frameworks. CodeIgniter was developed by EllisLab, a company who receives dignity in high-quality documentation of the framework. CodeIgniter also adds sample cases on libraries, classes, and APIs, even how to begin.

Supports MVC

Model-View-Controller helps make your application fast, secure, and reusable containing independent modules. Alongside, developers can easily manage the code forms separately based on HTML code & data structures. This makes the process of CodeIgniter development more synchronised compared to other PHP frameworks.

Faster development

While compared to other PHP frameworks like CakePHP and Symphony, CodeIgniter requires shorter codes and displays the advantages of quicker development. CodeIgniter also provides a higher level of customization support. By customizing a simple library, the developer of CodeIgniter can modify the behaviour of the framework in the existing library. The new libraries can also be written in CodeIgniter.

Conclusion

The above advantages of CodeIgniter structure celebrate it as the best PHP system. However, the system has a drawback of no inbuilt ORM. Thus, you can reach us at anytime if you wish to hire CodeIgniter developer at reasonable cost.

Top WordPress Security Plugins

WordPress globally powers nearly one-third of the word's websites, from a small personal blog to the complex and giant sites of major corporations like Time Inc., Sony, NBC. It will also provide you with the unique & most popular CMS in use nowadays.

Web hosting providers can provide essential server security, but keeping your site safe is up to you. Website security is complex. It’s continually evolving, and what kept your site secure a year ago probably won’t do the trick today.

Here’s a look at some of the best WordPress security plugins for protecting your website from malware, hackers, force attacks, and other kinds of malicious security threats.

 Wordfence

• Wordfence is one of the most popular and best WordPress Security Plugin. It will provide you a free version of their Plugin, which comes complete with a powerful malware scanner, exploit detection, & threat assessment features. Wordfence also comes as with a built-in WordPress firewall, which runs on your server just before loading WordPress.
• The Wordfence Plugin will automatically scan your websites for common threats, but you are also free to launch a full scan at any time. You will be alerted if any signs of a security breach are detected with the instructions to fix them.

iThemes Security

• iThemes security is also a useful WordPress security Plugin which claims to offer several ways to secure and protect your WordPress website.
• In iThemes security, only with one-click installation, you can stop automated attacks & protect your website and can also fix various common security holes.
• With the help of iThemes, you can track registered users' activity and add two-factor authentication, password expiration, malware scanning, import/export settings, and so on.
• It's process flow work such as scanning through the entire website and try to find out is there any potential on the website. It will also efficiently prevents your website from the 2attacks & ban IP addresses that try to brute force.

Sucuri Security

• Now, this is an interesting Plugin because a team of WordPress security experts creates it, and Sucuri Security is entirely free. It will help you with regular site monitoring by strengthening your existing levels of security. 
• Once you install the Plugin, it will automatically scan your site to look for any known source of security weakness. You can also quickly restore your website to ensure it's in good working condition.
• It will also provide you with regular website monitoring & malware scanning. It will also strengthen your existing security protocols to ensure that your site is protected against the online threats & lurking.  

Bulletproof Security

• Though it is not one of the top WordPress Security Plugin in the market still has some great features such as a setup wizard, setting panel, which also includes links to extensive documentation to helps you understand how the scans and security settings work.
• Bulletproof Security provides you a malware scanner that allows you to check the integrity of WordPress files & folders. As per security purpose, it includes login protections, database backup utility, security logs, email notifications alerts, and so on. 

Google Authenticator

• There are several WordPress security Plugins such as two-factor authentication, it features can also be installed separately with the Google Authenticator & it works with all kind of devices. 

All In One WP Security & Firewall

• All In One WP Security & Firewall is another popular WordPress security Plugin to check vulnerabilities in your WordPress website.
• It's very easy to use & also reduces the security risks by adding recommended security practices. 
• It also allows you to schedule automatic backup and receive an email notification. It also protects PHP code by disabling admin area editing. 
• It protects against brute force login attack and lockdown if someone tries to brute force. It also sends you an email notification if somebody gets locked out due to failed login attempts. 
• It also has a security scanner that keeps track of files and notifies you about each change in your WordPress system. 
• It adds a web application firewall in your website and enables 5G Blacklist to prevent various attacks. It denies bad query strings, prevents XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, malicious bots, and other security threats.
• It detects if a user tries to save a weak password and forces him/her to use a strong password. It also monitors the account activity of all users and keeps track of username, IP, and login date time.
• It blocks and protects your blog from comment spam and works with most of the plugins without any problem. It can also detect malicious code on your WordPress website.  

Wrap-up:

All of the plugins above are great choices when it comes to protecting your website. If you have a smaller site and don’t get a ton of traffic, then you can probably get away with a free WordPress security Plugin.

How to manage your Restaurants Remotely

It is not easy to get success in the restaurant business, which requires long hours, dedication, and hard work. There's much more than just cooking and serving food, like hiring, cleaning, marketing, prep-work, and many more duties that occur after you've locked the doors. This makes dealing with a restaurant remotely a challenge since, without your existence on the location, your staff members or employees might be willing to slip from their peak achievements. Exploit technological tools to continually monitor operations, and be as accessible as you can to respond to questions or concerns. The more you can make your existence felt in any event, when you aren't physically on area, the higher the possibility of success.

With the help of robot restaurant technology, you can be in multiple places at a time. You can manage and access all the reports & operations from anywhere you want. So, let's discuss some of the key points to manage your restaurant remotely:

Going Mobile

Every software which is worth their values and services will provide you with a mobile application. It is no different in the restaurant industry, as well. You can get the same features of enterprise or portal software on your mobile devices through a mobile insight app.

 

Enterprise portal

You need a login from offsite for maintaining your restaurant business remotely. Explore the technology of restaurant offering portal or enterprise software. You'll be needing only a computer and an internet connection to access your restaurant reports with the help of a portal login. In case, if there is more than one site, you can also access all of those sites just by sitting at a single place, granting you to compare and cross-analyze, all without leaving your home.

Real-time updating

It's one thing to collect data and get it offsite. To pick up the best dynamic restaurant insights, you'll likely need data that is near real-time as could be expected under the circumstances. Most restaurant revealing features will show the degree of real-time data you can get. For example, there will be specific reports that will be refreshed every 20 minutes, whereas some will be updated after every hour, and some will let you customize these increments.

Remote Restaurant Management data

You can easily maintain a restaurant application remotely with the help of technology and data on your side,. These are some of the restaurant data analytics you should look into your reports:

Front-of-house

Wait times

These measurements display how much time does it takes for a given size, in a given moment, to be seated at the table. In addition to the fact that this helps to exhibit your very own guest management capabilities, yet additionally gives a window into your guests' fulfillment. Longer hold up times mean confounded visitors. On the off chance that you see these occasions expanding, attempt to cure.

Seating efficiency

How well you're using your seating economy at some random time. Even though you won't almost certainly hit it, your objective is consistently to be as near 100% as could be expected under the circumstances.

Average guests count

By and large, what number of visitors do you have in your restaurant at a given time? It's an increasingly worldwide variety of the measurement above, yet similarly as significant. This measurement gives you a reasonable vision of your data transfer capacity, from the front to the back.

Back-of-house/Kitchen data

Cook time deviation

This shows the typical time it usually takes an item to cook, and the real-time your chefs' experts take to cook it now. You can utilize these measurements as extremity estimation to your speed-of-service, just as a sign of where you may need to (for instance) open another flame broil.

Conclusion

Data is one of the most intense, significant assets you can use to improve your restaurant, regardless of whether by effectiveness, income or consumer loyalty. Using that data with a versatile application or software grants you to outfit this equivalent power, from offsite.

Tips to Outsource your Web Development Projects efficiently

 With numerous countries inadequate with technical talent, outsourcing has become a prominent choice for businesses around the world.  There are many questions raised by entrepreneurs and project managers that Is it a good idea to outsource web development?' or 'What are the best ways to perform outsourcing?' There are a lot of questions and doubts.

The outsourcing of your web development can be performed in two ways. Either contact a web development company or hire a freelancer. Between these two, there are three significant differences.

Trust, quality, and cost

Generally, outsourcing your project or idea to a web development company can be a little pricey compared to hiring a freelancer, but in return, you will receive reliability and quality. Try not to misunderstand me, freelancers are incredible, however, it exceptionally just comes down to what you are searching for. Freelancers are the right choice if you’re in a search for someone who can do your work very quickly and at a cheap cost. However, if you're engrossed in working with a decisive team of experts, outsourcing to the web development companies will be the excellent choice for you.

Communication

It is one of the most complex aspects of outsourcing. While outsourcing web development projects, it is difficult to manage work schedules, time zones, and availability. However, with some right tools & little more effort on your side, the communication can be improved excessively. For enhancing the conversation, you can adopt tools like Github, Slack, Teamweek, Moqups, and much more.

Progress of your project can be recorded with the help of Teamweek, share the code and design work using Github, and Moqups, and better communication through Slack.

Flexibility

Majority of the professional outsourcing companies work in consent with flexible methodologies for software development. Among these frameworks are Scrum, Kanban, and so on., Where the work is separated into smaller parts. This means a team can arrange the work on a project to make the fundamental rotate and modify technical staff accordingly.

Start will small tasks

Beginning with some big tasks is the common mistakes people perform while outsourcing web development. There are such tasks which are more convenient for outsourcing than others. Begin with a project that is generally small and basic in scope, to give you an excellent idea of the capabilities of the company; move slowly and act gradually. The payment can also be linked in describing the milestones of the project.

Reach out to top experts

There are some web development projects exists which needs robust technical expertise that you may lack. For example, VR & AR developers and blockchain developers are difficult to find locally. Moreover, these experts cost a lot more when compared with outsourcing web developers. Thus, web outsourcing grants you to choose the best web developers for your project.

Conclusion

Outsourcing web development project and programming shouldn't be excessively troublesome if you’re ensuring that you will follow a couple of significant rules. The mystery lays in communication and excellent administration; if you are performing both the communication and administration in a right way than your outsourced project will head to great extent.

Different types of it outsourcing

Outsourcing has become one of the increasing trends nowadays. Individuals, entrepreneurs, enterprises, and companies hire remote workers to get their project completed at a reduced cost. At the same time, outsourcing helps enterprises frees up time and focus more on core business process.

Outsourcing is a process of shifting the jobs or tasks to the external workforce for an ample amount of time.

Types of IT Outsourcing

There are several types of IT outsourcing, defined by where the outsourced work happens. These include:

• Moving business or services overseas, which will benefit you for lower costs with a favorable economic climate.
• Homeshoring allows you to work from home instead of an office or any physical workplace.
• Nearshoring helps you for transferring business to another country close by, also sharing a border with your own country.

Professional Outsourcing

• It includes accounting, legal, purchasing, IT, including other specialized services.
• It will offer you very high-cost savings with the required arrangement. Here, the company only pays for services which are provided by having access to high-quality resources which significantly reduces overhead costs.
• It involves a practice when a company hires the third party outside a company or hires an individual from other countries. For example, if a company offers design service and they get an application development project, they outsource the work by hiring a party outside the company. Hiring a professional for a specific period helps a company save a lot. 

IT Outsourcing

• IT outsourcing, is Professional outsourcing which is one of the most common services outsourced today. Some companies use IT outsourcing for functions ranging from infrastructure maintenance and support to software development.
• A good example of IT outsourcing will be if a company outsources its IT management because it is less expensive to contract a third party to do so than it would be to build its own in-house IT team.

Multisourcing

• Multisourcing requires you to have a strategy, a network of relationships and governance as well as requires creating measurements that matter.
• Multisourcing is a term which you can apply for any business idea. It is an IT services from the initial set of internal & external providers as per business goals. 
• It is also known as to be outcome-focused, well-integrated & operates in a "Partner" relationship manner, which will provide you better visibility into real project status information as well as little to no conflict of interests between functions.

 Manufacturer Outsourcing

• Manufacturer Outsourcing services are usually quite industry-specific. There are many Companies which uses manufacturer Outsourcing for leaning towards reducing blue-collar jobs. Such as a car company utilizing this process like installing windows in all their models to cut down on their product assembly time and cost. 
• The only disadvantage of this type of outsourcing is quality issues & perhaps interruption of the production line. However, without this type of outsourcing, companies lack the economies of scale that able them to compete with larger competitors, because many companies can't actually invest in & continuously upgrade equipment.

Operational Outsourcing Service

• Operational Outsourcing service is associated with the manufacturing industry. It has a few operational tasks & steps required to be taken for the result to be achieved properly. Such as machine maintenance is generally outsourced to a third party that specializes in such tasks.

Project Outsourcing: 

• What happens when you get projects more than your workforce? You are left with two options: either increase workforce or contract out the plans to foreign companies. , the companies having multiple projects, hire an external workforce to complete the projects. It helps them two ways: earn benefits and reduce expenses.

When it comes to outsourcing, there is a sense of fear. No doubt it should be, as only then you take care of precautions that you should. You can also read Outsourcing Pricing Models and always think twice and get assured from your side before you proceed.

Cost to Develop a Web App

There are many numbers and figures to answer this question, but in reality "it depends" on the details of your product engineering process. When it's about the development of business, you have to be more careful. Also, avoid spending on irrelevant things. The cost of the web app doesn't only depend on the features you want but also on the development company you hire as well as the process followed by their developers.

There have been many cases where companies avoid clients by getting them to include irrelevant processes which make the cost of project more expensive. Thus, it is necessary to evaluate the company profile, previous projects & clients, understanding their business standards before hiring them for building your website.

How to calculate the cost of developing a web app?

Domain Expenses

Domain refers to the name of your site by which it'll be identified. The most prominent step in web app development process is getting a proper domain name.

You would also require a secure & active server to make your website accessible to the whole world. The cost for hosting your website can cost you upto $40/year. Prices can differ based on bandwidth & hosting(shared/dedicated or windows)  you choose.

Designing

The design demonstrates the standard of the website and attracts the clients. You might fall into a wrong impression from the viewers if your site has an inappropriate structure or hard to read the content. You have to take care of every small detail like font size, font type, picture presentation, and colour selection, for a perfect website. Design of your website should match with your nature and business of your business.

The cost factors in the design are highly dependent on project type, time consumption for designing website, and requirement of the client. The essential cost of design may go from $300 to $1000. While adding more customization to your site, the price can rise upto $5000 to $10000.

Project Complexity

If  you require a website with single one-page excluding other functionalities than the cost of the site will be very less compared to the website with higher features and functionalities.

An essential website containing 5 to 10 pages like Blog, gallery, integration, etc. will cost you around $1500 to $3000. On the other hand, if your eCommerce websites consist of 'n' number of pages including multiple payment gateway options, purchase system, catalogues, etc., then the cost of the website can reach upto $40,000.

Aside from this, the cost of web development companies or developers in India varies from different regions of the world. The cost of web developers in North America ranges between $35 to $200/hour, in western Europe, it is $30 to $150 respectively. In regions like Oceanic and Asia, the prices start from $15 to $80/hour & so on...

Choice of developers

Many developers are working with a team of web development companies while other developers work as a freelancer. The charges of both of them vary accordingly. A freelancer can cost you slightly lower than the development companies($3000 to $30,000) depending on the project requirements.

However, you have to beware while choosing the best for you. Everything provided at a lesser price isn't always best for you. Go through their profiles and past records to know more about the freelancers or development companies. Select the one which provides the status of the work daily and delivers the project on the given date. Building a web application is a one-time cost for the business, don't spoil it in saving some dollars. It may cost you right now, but later it will be a relief with better support from the web development companies.

Hence, the reason why companies cost higher due to its periodic updates and long-time support, which freelancers can't provide all the time. Choose a web development company which fits in your budget and has finished relevant projects in a minimal amount of time. You can hire our professional web developers at just $15/hour. To figure out of what we can accomplish more for your business, connect with us today!

How Chatbot Help in Improving Customer Experience?

A Chatbot is like a personal assistant for humans for responding to their queries and guide them on a specific topic in a real-time manner.

A Chatbot will help you to make the right choice based on their schedule, budget & other preferences. You will feel refreshed by having a personalized tool.

Here are the points how chatbot provides a better customer experience:

Seamless live chat

• Chatbots are pretty much good at managing relations with human beings and with a great thought of pre-programming, chatbots can change the entire business experience.
• Chatbots are also enabled with natural language processes and programmed well to understand vague queries. Chatbots can even find out triggering words from the query and use them to carry out customer's search as being their helper.
• Guess what's most exciting is that Chatbot is multilingual in case if you reach a diverse market which is again a beneficial point for your business.

24/7 customer service

• Chatbots will not only provide 24/7 services but also offer the personalization for helping the customers by promoting relationship management.
• A Chatbot is ideal for customer-centric business because they can serve as 24/7 customer care service instead of like gone days where humans respond manually to comments and queries in your website, blog or any social media.

Why We Love Data? Data = Understanding, as simple as that

• From a business point of view, chatbots are a rich source of data for offering insight in to purchase history, customer feedback, experience, and so on for their consumers.
• Companies can make substantial changes to their products/services and can introduce new offerings with the help of AI market research for getting qualitative data.
• This quality data can be used by business in several ways, such as on the base of inputs they can offer personalized recommendations to customers through their Chatbot.
• Chatbot insight is like a boon for businesses because AI-driven analytics can also predict advanced customer behavior & intent as well.

Unsatisfied Customers do not Return to the Brand

• Studies have shown that 91 per cent of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with you again (Lee Resources).
• Chatbots can afford to keep your customers happy, give them the best services, and most importantly, there’s always an option to call a real person in case you aren’t getting the answers you wanted.

Chatbots Reduce Human Error

• Human errors are possible such as we may forget few things, but chatbots don't forget this is the reason chatbots are more preferable as a trustworthy source of work.
• Chatbots are designed to have access to enormous information that can help them answer your customer’s questions accurately.

Reinvent your forms

• A chatbot spruces situation up because it will fetch your customers information directly instead of filing forms by solving their live chat quires.

Today, in every business AI Chatbot services play a vital role in offering services to your customers even when your offline or in tight sleep. It also lowers down the effort in providing the services to its clients efficiently.