What is Wix

Wix is a web platform that allows every user, even without any coding skills to build their own website. The website building is being done by mostly Drag & Drop interface of existing wix elements. You take an element, drag it to it’s place, change some settings and move on to the next element and before you know it, you have a website. Furthermore, it didn’t cost anything unless you need the premium features, like your on domain, and well, you need your own domain. So is this the right choice, well, it depends.

What is WordPress

WordPress is an open source platform, which is free, that has started as a blogging platform, with time, it became possible to build general websites, and then e-commerce websites and today you can even build a server side for a mobile app using WordPress. WordPress also got the reputation that you can use it to build websites without knowing how to code at all, and you can even use WordPress.com to host an run your WordPress website which is a service that is similar in a way to Wix.
the whole system is based on Themes & Plugins, that is very easy to keep adding to your website to add functionality, from contact forms to ecommerce plugins (WooCommerce). But is this the right way to build a website? well, It depends.

Wix VS. WordPress – Platforms Comparison

The first and most bold downside to using Wix is that it is a close platform, where on the other hand WordPress is an open source platform, what does it mean? It means that your Wix website can only run on Wix, you do not own the code, and you can’t even move it to another hosting. If tomorrow they charge you double, you have only one choice, to accept it and pay, or rebuild your website on another platform from scratch. What about WordPress, well the code is yours, you can host it wherever you want, always.

Another big disadvantage for Wix, is that if you need a special feature or element, you are bound to Wix, if they developed it, great!, if not, you will need to wait and hope they develop it in the future. Opposing to WordPress, where the plugin base is widely created by the platform users and developers, and if you can’t find the feature or element you need, well you can develop it yourself by literarily any WordPress developer.

And the most important thing, The reason you are thinking about building a website, you want users, you need traffic in order to rich your goals whether they are selling products, or getting more work for your business. Where Wix stand with this, well, It is known that Wix has trouble with search engines, especially google, to say the least. Why? there are a lot of reasons, but mostly it all comes down to this. Any feature or element provided by Wix, was not meant just for you an your needs, It suppose to serve many users with different needs, which means the code there is more complex, slower that it can be, and as a result less friendly to search engines and your general SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). It’s not that you can’t do well in SEO with Wix, It’s just means that it will be harder when you compare it to a slim, clean code that was written for one specific goal.
So, does it mean that WordPress is better for SEO, Well, It’s highly dependent on who is building the website, It can go extremely well or very poorly. If the site is build by someone with no experience in web development in the spirit of “Well theres a plugin for that, and for that and for that…” Than you can end up with a very poor website, that runs slow, loads a ton of scripts, and with very poor SEO results.
So, does this means you should not use Wix at all? Well, no, Wix is a really great platform that just keeps growing and improve, but like anything else, it is a tool that fits only in some cases for specific needs.

So, when it is right to use Wix to build a website

The cases where you should use Wix for your web development needs, in our eyes, are the following:
First, if you don’t have a budget at all. If you need a website, maybe to present your business, and you just don’t have any budget at all to pay a developer, well, in that case, Wix, at least for the short term, is the solution for you.
Other reasons to choose Wix are for temporary websites, maybe a website for an event, or a short term landing page used for a facebook campaign or a google ad, If it’s for a short term, than in this case, you may not care it takes the page 2 more seconds to load, and the SEO is not even a factor, because you are going to kill the website in 4 weeks.
Who else, well, Graphic designers that have the ability to design everything by themselves, and use Wix to publish their website fast and without any need for a developer. Would we recommend them building their own business website using Wix, well, no, cause again they will be facing all of the downsides we already mentioned.

So, when it is right to use WordPress to build a website

Well WordPress is also a wonderful tool for building websites, but, and theres a big BUT here, The fact that you can build an awesome website using WordPress, doesn’t meant you can’t screw it up, you need to know how exactly to build a website correctly. Unfortunately the truth is that along side a lot of great websites that were built with WordPress, there are many really bad websites that were built using WordPress.
For a user with no development skills, It will be almost impossible to built a really great, fast, secure, seo-friendly website. It’s very easy to start, and throw in some plugins, and get a website, but is it SEO-Freindly, is it fast, secure and effective, probably not. Even an experienced developer it takes from hours to days to get the desired results and create a well sustained fast running website.
Furthermore, WordPress is a completely Swiss army knife, It may have started as a blogging platform, but it evolved to a complete eco-system to building websites. But is it always right to use WordPress for building websites, well, absolutely not.

WordPress also have some big disadvantages that should be considered before reaching out to it. Where you should consider using it, When you should not? Well We recommend you read this article that explains just that.

Conclusion

Every tool has a purpose, Wix and WordPress are no exception to the rule. If Wix is the right tool for you, at least for now, and it’s disadvantages does not interfere with your business goals, that go for it, It is a great platform.
If you have decided that it’s not for you and you’ve decided to go with WordPress, that’s great too. Just remember the general rule with WordPress is that you do need an experienced developer or a development company in order to get a WordPress website done right. and even more importantly, WordPress have disadvantages as well and it is not always the right tool for every job.

The post Should I build a website with Wix or WordPress – Wix vs WordPress appeared first on SideCode.

The webinar currently is only available in Hebrew.

Watch the entire GRapps Offshore webinar.
In general the talk was about offshore services, what it’s like to outsource, pros and cons of of a remote developers dedicated teams and a comparison between In-house development, offshore and freelance work.

We introduced a couple of case studies of active Offshore teams (GRapps “Alpha Teams”) that were established by GRapps for our clients,  showing the remote teams structure, costs of a remote development teams, and the additional services that GRapps Israel provides to support the remote teams workflow.

We want to thank all of the precipitants in the webinar, we enjoyed your questions and getting feedback from you
See you in the next webinar!

The post Offshore Webinar – Building Remote Development Teams appeared first on SideCode.

The webinar is currently available only in Hebrew.

Watch the entire GRapps Offshore webinar.
In general the talk was about the offshore model, what it’s like to outsource development, pros and cons of working with an offshore  remote development team,  and a comparison between In-house development team, offshore development teams and freelance work.

A few case studies were displayed based on GRapps Offshore teams (GRapps “Alpha Teams”) that were built by GRapps for their clients. Displaying the structure of the teams, costs of offshore teams, and the additional services that GRapps provide in Israel to support the offshore remote teams workflow.

We want to thank all of the precipitants in the webinar, we enjoyed your questions and feedback.
See you in the next webinar!

The post Webinar – Offshore services appeared first on SideCode.

What is a server

A server is a computer that is running a server program/s and it’s main goal is to provide services to other computers. when you go to any website like our mobile & web apps development company website, your computer is actually talking and getting the data from our servers.

Now let’s try to understand how it works in the context of a Mobile Application

What is a Mobile App Server

It’s basically a regular server, the only difference is that it is not meant to talk with other computers, but instead, it was built to talk specifically with a single Mobile App (actually it is talking with the user’s mobile device, based on interactions with the mobile app).

Okay, but how to create a Mobile App Server

You’ve probably heard about protocols, HTTP requests, response, JSON, Databases,  OAuth, API, REST API, etc. The most basic notion of all of this is this, When building a mobile app and a server, what is actually is being built is a language between the mobile app and the server, a language that they both understand, and helps them to authenticate each other and communicate with each other.

Do I need a mobile server for my app

Yes, as a rule of thumb, you will need a server for your mobile app. Most Mobile apps needs a “backend”,  a server,  to communicate with and to help them  with keeping track of user data, app data, schedule events and push changes to the mobile app.

There are few cases where a mobile app doesn’t need any kind of server to operate at all (for example, a simple game, or a simple tool like flashlight app).

But as soon as you need to dynamically control the app content or keep user data you will need a strong backend to do so.

Why not use a 3rd party solution

Well, you can, but as any other 3rd party solution, you need to understand that you are relying on someone else to keep your app running. What happens if they decide to double their pricing?, what will happen if they close their service (a good example for this is Parse).

Don’t get us wrong, we are not against using 3rd party solutions, we are all for it, If you can use a ready made solution that was built by skilled people and crafted to do a specific job in the best way, that’s great, you should use it, good example for this are: mailing system (like sendInBlue), sms services (like twilio), payment gateways (like paypal) and many more.

But all of those have one thing in common, they are 3rd party solutions that add features to your app (or help with a specific task), you are not basing your whole app on a third party solution. And if tomorrow one of them closes shop or double their pricing, all you need to do is to rewrite a small portion of your code to adjust to the new service.

One other thing to consider is flexibility, when you call the shots, and you have your own server, the server will work exactly the way you need it to do work , you can get it to do anything, and in result to serve your app in the best way possible.

The post Why Does My Mobile App Need a Server? appeared first on SideCode.

Whether you are going to build the Web App or Mobile App on your own or you are going to hire an experienced web apps development company for your mobile or web app server development,  you are still going to face the same question “What technology should I use?”.

So you decided to build an App, Congratulations! Now you are facing this question exactly. The most important thing here, is to understand that it does matter, and it’s crucial for you App success and your startup future. We will try to give you some guidelines, same guidelines we give all of our clients when they first set foot in our doors. to better understand how to answer this question we’ll need to clarify a couple of things about mobile app development.

Do I need a Server side for the app?

As a rule of thumb, yes, you will need a server for your mobile app. Most Mobile apps and all Web Apps needs a “backend”,  a server,  to communicate with and to help them keep track of user data, app data, schedule events and push to the mobile app, process data, manage the mobile app and more. There are few cases where a mobile app doesn’t need any kind of server to operate at all (for example, a simple game, or a simple tool like flashlight app).

But as soon as you need to dynamically control the app content or keep user data you will need a strong backend to do so.
You can read more about this in this article: Why does my Mobile App need a server?

What Server side Technology is good for a Mobile App?

You can build your Mobile App server using practically any technology that is out there today, and there are more than enough platforms and languages to choose from: php, .NET, Node.JS, Java, Python, Rails, and many more.

So how do you choose? You need to pick a technology that is flexible and scalable, so you will know that once you grow the platform will not give you a hard time.

The second thing is to check how mature is the platform, which means a platform that has been thoroughly tested and used by others, a platform that is not changing every 2 days, and there are more than enough examples for these kind of platforms.

Also you’ll need to think about the community size of this platform, this is important because you need to make sure that you will be able to find strong and experienced developers once you grow, if you are using the new hot and buzzed server technology, it might be too hard for you, later on, to find good experienced developers in this technology.

You also would like to know that if you run into problems, there are others that are using the same tools like you and trying to fix and improve the platform.

Okay, once you get the server technology for your mobile app all figured out, it’s time to think and answer questions about the Mobile App recommended development technology.

Should I build Native mobile Apps or use a Hybrid Apps technology?

Well, let’s talk about the differences for a second.

Native app development means you are going to build two different apps in two different technologies and languages, you are going to build an Android Native App using java, and build an iOS Native app using Objective-C or Swift. Which means you’ll need at least two different developers with a very different skill-set.

If you will go with Hybrid app technology, the code needs to be written only once in one language for iOS And Android at the same time, which means you can make it with only one developer for both platforms, this is a huge benefit for a mobile app development.

Now before you get all happy (Sorry about that) and think this a very obvious choice and you are leaning towards Hybrid development, there are some major downsides to consider here. One example is using native device features. All hybrid apps have some sort of wrappers that utilize packages or libraries that allows access to native features (for example: sensors usage, camera usage, animations, etc), these packages and libraries have to be written with native code. This means you’ll either have to find a library for a needed native feature and if it doesn’t exist you will need to write your own. Also in the long run when a new native feature is added, you’ll have to wait for a package that support this feature to be available, so you won’t be able to hit the market as soon as a native written app, you might see your competitors pass you by.

Another Downside is Android and iOS mobile apps have a very different and distinct user experience and design language that they offer to their users. The classic example is that while your android users will hit the back button to go back, the iOS users will look around for the back arrow.

The biggest downside is the performance, Even the biggest fan of hybrid applications are forced to admit that native applications run faster, consume less memory and in the end gives a better user experience. Hybrid apps utilize heavily on webviews, which on it’s own takes up a decent amount of memory, actually most actions will be slower and consume more memory than the native solution.

Yes, in mobile app development, hybrid App development is great, it saves time and money,  and the technology is growing rapidly in the market, but it has many downsides. Don’t get us wrong, we are definitely not against it, As a web apps development company we just feel it’s not completely matured yet, and prefer to choose the path of best infrastructure  with the best user experience we can get for your app and the user in the other side of the screen.

The post Mobile App & Web App Development – What Technology should I use? appeared first on SideCode.