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API: Concept and Testing

February 13, 2017By Rakshit Patel

API: Concept and Testing – As we know, API testing is a type of testing a software that is performed as a part of integration testing to determine if they meet our expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.

In order to discuss API and Web services testing, we need to first identify what is an API and how it works. An application programming interface, or API, works to connect an application to the web and to other APIs.

API testing is used to determine whether APIs return the correct response for a broad range of feasible requests, react properly to the cases such as failures and unexpected/extreme inputs, deliver responses in an acceptable amount of time etc.

WHY IS API TESTING IMPORTANT?

API testing is one of the most challenging parts of the whole chain of software testing and QA testing because it works to assure that our digital lives run in an increasingly seamless and efficient manner. While developers tend to test only the functionalities they are working on, testers are in charge of testing both individual functionalities and a chain of functionalities, discovering how they work together from end to end.

The first part of API testing involves setting up a testing environment, with the required set of parameters around the API. This involves configuring the database and server for the application’s requirements. Once you’ve set up your API testing environment, make an API call right away to make sure nothing is broken before you go forward to start your more thorough testing.

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COMMON KINDS OF API TESTING

  • 1. Functionality testing — the API technically works.
  • 2. Usability testing — the API is easy to work with.
  • 3. Reliability testing — the API can be consistently connected to and lead to consistent results.
  • 4. Load testing — the API can handle a lot of calls.
  • 5. Creativity testing — the API can handle being used in different ways.
  • 6. Security testing — the API has defined security requirements including authentication, permissions and access controls. See some API security tips for protective vital data.
  • 7. Proficiency testing — the API increases what developers are able to do.
  • 8. API documentation testing — also called discovery testing, the API documentation easily guides the user.

Of course, automated API testing can be performed in many conditions, particularly when you are pressed for time, making it compelling when you are following continuous software development release cycles.

However, in certain situations, like where APIs are connecting the Internet, it’s nearly impossible to perform only testing automation. Therefore, it’s good to automate if the API calls are giving back the correct responses.

THUMB RULES TO FOLLOW

Now it’s good to have a list of rules of thumb to follow in order to help make the test as successful as possible.

  • Test first for the typical or ordinary results, for what happens consistently and what doesn’t.
  • Add stress to the system through a series of API load tests.
  • Test for failure. Keep the work on and on until you get a Fail output, making sure the API fails consistently and gracefully.
  • Group test cases by test category.
  • Throw anything you can at the API to test for how it handles unforeseen problems and loads.
  • Later on, get creative! For complete test coverage, create test cases for all possible API input combinations.
  • Automate whatever you can.
    So, API consists of a set of classes/functions/procedures which represent the business logic layer. If API is not tested properly, it may cause problems not only the API application but also in the calling application.

Happy Testing!

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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Significant Components of Digital Marketing

February 08, 2017By Rakshit Patel

Many companies are entering this market, but due to the high level of competition, they aren’t capable of making an impact. One of the mistakes that many of these companies are making is not investing in their digital marketing efforts to support the overall marketing objective. Therefore, we will discuss Significant Components of Digital Marketing in this article.

Whether you’re a medical device company or not, not having a digital marketing strategy leaves potential revenue on the table by not reaching the target consumers through all digital channels. A digital marketing strategy is essential to every company’s existence.

Significant Components of Digital Marketing

1. WEBSITE

Your website is a vital part of the digital marketing mix, and if designed correctly, can make all your marketing efforts more effective. However, it is crucial to building a professional website design strategy that aligns with the brand platform of your company. Everything is done with purpose towards a specific goal, making it easy to communicate your value.

In today’s online landscape, your website must:

  • Be responsive and mobile friendly
  • Communicate your company’s values up front
  • Use relevant and up-to-date content
  • Have product-specific landing pages that can generate leads
  • Integrate with customer relationship management and marketing automation tools

2. EMAIL

A solid digital marketing strategy requires a strong email strategy. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to educate large audiences about your product or service. Therefore, it is one of the Significant Components of Digital Marketing.

A successful email marketing strategy will:

  • Drive traffic to specific points
  • Educate and inform prospective buyers with new content
  • Help you stay top of mind
  • Build credibility
  • Establish thought leadership

If you want to generate leads, convert leads, and develop a relationship with your customers, you must use email marketing effectively.

3. CONTENT

When we talk about Significant Components of Digital Marketing, we can’t miss Content Marketing and ContentPromotion.

Today’s consumers are empowered to seek out high-quality digital resources and experiences that lead to better, independent decision-making. Without good content, there’s no reason to visit a company’s website, read their tweets, open their emails, or care about anything they say.

Most importantly, there’s no reason to interact with a company or build a relationship with them. Your company can capture the attention of a potential buyer who wants to know more, but unless your website provides the right content, you won’t be able to convert them. Today’s buyers want companies to facilitate the buying process by providing the right information needed to make a decision without any effort on their part.

A good content strategy involves the following:

  • Create content that represents your brand’s values and vision
  • Share relevant content across all social media channels to present your company to a wider audience
  • Be original and offer a variety of content types
  • Utilize your current and past successes to compile presentable case studies on your website. This type of content presents your company’s credibility and impact on the industry to all website visitors
  • Ensure that all your content messaging is aligned with the overall brand platform
  • Use the right content for your target audience

4. SEARCH (SEO)

Did you know that 77% of online health seekers say they begin their session at a search engine? An essential part of your digital marketing strategy, whether you’re a medical device company or not, is to search for keywords and phrases that individuals might use to find your medical device.

If your company does not appear in the search results, you should invest in SEO measures and online advertising to start increasing your brand exposure. Furthermore, these keywords are the gateway to reaching your potential customers from all around the world.

5. SOCIAL MEDIA

The most effective form of word of mouth is happening online. Now with social media, consumers utilize these channels to express their opinions, learn about new products, and engage with brands and key influences.

As a medical device company, you must ensure that you are also active on these channels and use social listening tools to be aware of what consumers are talking about in order to address their needs directly and keep track of your brand image.

In addition, your social media presence can be targeted toward building relationships with key industry influences in order to reach a wider audience and generate leads. Overall, “54% of B2B marketers said they have generated leads from social media” (SMO).

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6. PAID ADS

A digital marketing strategy is incomplete without the investment in paid ads. In today’s competitive landscape, visibility is key. You cannot expect customers to flock to your website as soon as your product is released. Organic search is very valuable but paid advertisements, such as Google Adwords and display ads, is crucial in gaining exposure in search results.

Here are 5 reasons why you should invest in paid ads:

  • You can choose to pay only when the interested individual clicks on the ad
  • Easily control your spending budget Daily or Monthly
  • You can reach targeted consumers through the right channels
  • Success results are immediate
  • It can be used as an SEO testing tool

7. LEAD MANAGEMENT

The overall objective of all your digital marketing efforts is to generate leads. It is your responsibility to be able to effectively manage these leads, nurture them with the appropriate content, and eventually turn them into customers.

“79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.” Do you have a lead nurturing strategy in place? Are you sending marketing qualified leads to your sales teams?

8. MARKETING AUTOMATION

“80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase” VB Insight. Generating leads has no value if your company is not following up on them and nurturing them properly.

One of the key advantages of utilizing a marketing automation system is the fact that it is customizable based on your various targets, sales cycles, promotions, or any other strategic plan. Hence, this process makes it much easier to monitor leads as they move through the sales cycle. Therefore, you can maximize the potential of every active lead that enters that cycle.

9. WEBINARS

Integrating webinars in your digital marketing strategy is key to positioning your company as a thought leader in your industry. Especially in the ever-changing medical device market, it is crucial to continually educate consumers and individuals in the industry to build trust, increase web traffic and brand awareness, and generate leads. Webinars can also be re-purposed for multiple campaigns. Therefore, Webinars is one of the Significant Components of Digital Marketing.

10. VIDEOS

By implementing video in your digital marketing strategy, you create engaging content that consumers can easily view and share. Based on recent research, “64% of website visitors are more likely to buy a product after watching a video”. Therefore, every medical device company should take advantage of this video marketing trend and create original video campaigns that present the company’s values, product features, and the lucrative benefits to the consumer.

As per our experience, Videos are the most effective Significant Components of Digital Marketing.

11. ANALYTICS

One of the most valuable elements of having a digital marketing strategy is the fact that you can continually monitor the outcomes and be able to optimize your strategy with each campaign iteration. There are several analytics tools that will assist you in tracking the progress of your marketing efforts in order to be able to analyze and adapt over time. This availability of data is key to maximizing your return on investment.

12. SALES TOOLS

Every company, especially one in the medical device industry, requires an active sales force. However, this sales force is ineffective without the right set of sales tools. Your salespeople are your army and you must be able to provide them with the proper ammunition in order to increase your chances of winning in this competitive landscape.

As part of your digital marketing strategy, it is essential to invest in a robust set of sales tools, such as brochures, sales presentations, mobile sales app, and a sales deck, in order to empower your sales force and increase the success rate of your campaigns.

We are now living in the digital age. Therefore, traditional marketing alone won’t result in the profits you’re looking for. Marketing in digital channels is a requirement. So there is no way around it. Just like you devoted a lot of your time and energy into developing your product, it is essential to invest in a comprehensive digital strategy to introduce your product to your targeted markets and continually manage your brand presence.

Ensure that you measure your actions so you understand your digital footprint and whether you are maximizing the potential of your marketing campaign. When done effectively, this can set you apart from your competitors and lead to sustainable success for your medical device product.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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Best PHP Frameworks for Web Development

February 06, 2017By Rakshit Patel

PHP is one of the most famous server-side programming languages used to develop web applications. With the use of proper PHP Frameworks, a developer can create complex, secure and faster applications more efficiently. However, there are many frameworks available for PHP so one might get confused which one to choose for a particular web application. Therefore, we come up with Best PHP Frameworks for Web Development according to their features and popularity.

Choosing a perfect PHP framework before building your web application is a crucial and most important aspect. A best PHP framework for your web application is a must for quicker, safer, scalable and future proof development. Here is the list of the best PHP frameworks.

Best PHP Frameworks for Web Development

1. LARAVEL

Looking for one of the Best PHP Frameworks for Web Development? Laravel is your answer.

Laravel is the most popular PHP framework since 2014. It holds the first position from 2014 to till date. Laravel is free, open source and MVC based PHP framework designed for rapid web application development. It has many inbuilt features like authentication, routing, sessions and caching. These make Laravel Development more powerful PHP framework amongst all other. It also supports PHP 7.

Moreover, it is well documented so any developer can easily learn and start creating a powerful web application. It uses solid and fully tested components of Symfony framework. With composer, a developer can manage all third party packages very easily. It supports all major databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and other.

Crest Infotech suggests Laravel Framework as the first choice for Web Development. If you are looking to develop application using Laravel Framework, you can get in touch with us.

2. PHALCON

Phalcon is the fastest framework amongst all Best PHP Frameworks for Web Development. It is built on C language but offered as PHP extension. None of the other PHP frameworks can beat the Phalcon in the area of speed. However, developer does not need to learn C language. All the functionality are inbuilt and PHP classes are ready to use. It saves processor time and speeds up the overall performance.

It is also well documented and has a built-in security feature. Despite of it being well documentation, developers are facing problems in Phalcon Development. The only reason is, lack of blogs and forums for issues and solutions. Since Google gives importance of speed in search ranking, Phalcon is becoming popular day by day. It holds the 2nd position in PHP frameworks.

3. CODEIGNITER

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a small footprint. It is for the developers who need a simple toolkit to create fully featured web applications. It is lightweight and can be easily installed by just uploading files to your hosting account. No commands, No installations!

CodeIgniter is more powerful and popular because of well documentation, a large community for help. It comes with many built-in libraries including unit testing, form validation, sessions, error handling and many other. It is one of the Best PHP Frameworks for Web Development.

Crest Infotech suggests CodeIgniter Framework for simple to complex Web Development. If you are looking to develop an application using CodeIgniter Framework, feel free to get in touch with us.

4. YII

YII is fast and secure PHP framework to create high-performance web 2.0 applications. It is MVC based and has many built-in features like scaffolding, authentications, caching, role-based access and many others. Therefore, it is one of the Best PHP Frameworks for Web Development available in the market.

YII is used to create simple to complex web application while it is more popular to develop social networking web applications. It helps to reduce development time significantly. We strongly recommend YII Development for your web application.

5. SYMFONY

Symfony is also a popular PHP framework to develop powerful, scalable and flexible web applications. It is a set of reusable PHP components which makes it more powerful and easy for the developer. Also, Symfony has very well documentation and vast community supports.

Most popular Open Source CMS, Drupal is based on Symfony. Also PHPBB, one of the most popular discussion board system (forum) is also written in Symfony. Moreover, it is also used by big name company, BBC and open source project, eZpublish.

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6. SLIM

Slim is a micro framework designed to be very light and so it is called as Slim. It lets you create simple but powerful web applications and APIs. Moreover, it is a faster PHP framework just after Phalcon.

It has many built-in features like routing, template rending, secure cookies, AES-256 encryption, flash messages, error handling, caching and many others. These make Slim Development more efficient and easy for developers.

Slim is easy to use and faster PHP framework so one can choose it for the quicker web application. It is most popular to create lightweight REST APIs.

Crest Infotech suggests Slim Framework develop REST APIs and performance-based web applications. If you are looking to develop an application using Slim Framework, you can get in touch with us.

7. CAKEPHP

CakePHP is the best PHP framework for beginners and creating commercial web applications. Before the arrival of Laravel, CakePHP was one of the most popular PHP frameworks. It comes with scaffolding to speed up the CakePHP Development process.

It has many built-in packages which helps developers to create web application quickly and more efficiently. Compare to all other frameworks, CakePHP also has built-in features like authentications, translations, caching, validations and many other. It has built-in tools to form tampering protection, SQL Injection prevention, and XSS preventions. These make your web applications more secured.

8. ZEND

Zend framework is more suitable for high-performance enterprise level applications. It has focused on enterprise level applications so it is built with security, performance, and extensibility. In addition to that, it has many built-in components like authentications, feeds, forms and many others.

Despite its great features, many developers feel that it is extremely complex and not easy for Zend Development. As we have developed many enterprise level applications for our clients, we have always loved to work with Zend Framework and we have a pool of experts for the same.

If you have any enterprise level application in mind and wants us to execute it using Zend Framework, please get in touch with us.

9. FAT FREE

Fat-Free is one more micro framework with a lot of built-in packages. Although it is not more popular compares to other PHP frameworks, it is very modular and easy to use for developers. It has many great features which make developers’ life easier for Fat Free Development.

Fat-Free is the best suite for lightweight multilingual web applications. It supports all major SQL and NoSQL databases. It has built-in packages including unit testing, CSS compression, image processing and many more.

In conclusion, Crest advises you to pick the Best PHP Frameworks for Web Development as per your web application requirement. If you are still not clear which one to choose for your web application, please get in touch with us and we will help you to pick the most suited.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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AngularJS V/S NodeJS : Compatibility, Applications & Uses

February 03, 2017By Rakshit Patel

It has always been a confusing part for almost every client to choose in between AngularJS and NodeJSfor their web applications development. Moreover, we have come across a number of clients who wanted us to suggest which technology to use for building server side and client side web applications. However, understanding the difference in between AngularJS and NodeJSis must before you pick any of them for your server side and client side Web Application.

Primarily, AngularJS Development and NodeJS Development both are JavaScript frameworks used to develop web applications. Initially JavaScript was used for simple things like Validation of form data, Image zooming on hover of thumbnail, animating html elements and others.

However, from last few years, JavaScript emerged largely and it has become a powerful programming language to create optimised server side and client side web applications.

NODEJS

NodeJS is written in C, C++ and JavaScript languages to interact with server-side and create smooth and powerful web applications. Moreover, it is a cross-platform runtime environment for web applications. It uses V8 JavaScript engine to execute JavaScript code. It’s similar to JRE (Java Runtime Environment), Adobe AIR, CLR (Common Language Runtime), ART (Android Runtime) or Action Script.

It is widely used for creating server-side Real-time web applications.

ANGULARJS

AngularJS by Google is also JavaScript framework but it has unique syntax and tag attributes. Moreover, it is MVC based architecture. Furthermore, AngularJS makes use of custom HTML tags and HTML tags attributes (directives). Although it is written in JavaScript, it is completely different than other JavaScript library like jQuery.

AngularJS is widely used to create powerful single page client-side web application. If you are looking to Hire AngularJS Developer, please get in touch with us.

In conclusion, NodeJS is runtime environment useful to develop server-side web applications while AngularJS is useful to develop single page or multi-page client side web applications.

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COMPATIBILITY

You must install NodeJS in order to write web application using NodeJS. It can be easily installed in Windows, MacOS and Linux. On the other hand, AngularJS does not need to be installed. Moreover, you just need to add core library files of AngularJS in order to develop your first web application using AngularJS. AngularJS is compatible with all modern web and mobile browsers.

APPLICATIONS AND USES

NodeJS

NodeJS is an event-driven architecture which is useful in creating real-time web applications like Chat apps. It also supports non-blocking input-output I/O and has built-in core modules. One of them is the HTTP module which is used to create web server in your NodeJS web application.

Moreover, there are many other frameworks built using NodeJS (express.js, meteor, geddyjs, mojito, sails.js, partial.js etc). These additional frameworks with a built-in set of features help you to write powerful, fast and scalable server-side web applications.

AngularJS

AngularJS allows you to create MVC pattern with two way data binding. Two way data binding means, changes in model are propagated to view and changes in view are reflected in model. It makes your client-side web application more powerful. AngularJS is more popular to create single page client-side web applications.

In conclusion, both are open sources and powerful to their own features. You can derive your web application requirement and choose the one accordingly. NodeJS is used to build real time server side web applications while AngularJS is more suitable for creating single page client side web applications.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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AWS History and Benefits

January 30, 2017By Rakshit Patel

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering computing power, database storage, content delivery. These help your businesses to scale and grow. Talking about AWS History and Benefits, AWS started offering services in 2006. Explore how millions of customers are currently leveraging AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.

AWS HISTORY AND BENEFITS

For AWS History and Benefits, let’s start with the AWS history first. Next part will be all about most important AWS benefits.

First of all, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services in 2006 — now commonly known as cloud computing. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business.

With the Cloud, businesses no longer need to plan for and procure servers and other IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance. Instead, they can instantly spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and deliver results faster.

2003

In late 2003, Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper describing a vision for Amazon’s retail computing infrastructure. Furthermore, it was completely standardized, automated and would rely extensively on web services for services such as storage, drawing on internal work already underway.

Near the end, they mentioned the possibility of selling virtual servers as a service. With this proposal, the company could generate revenue from the new infrastructure investment. They launched their first AWS service for public usage in November 2004 which was Simple Queue Service.

We can’t skip mentioning Chris Brown when we talk about AWS History and Benefits. Yes, Amazon EC2! Amazon EC2 was built by a team in Cape Town, South Africa, under Pinkham and lead developer Chris Brown.

2007

In June 2007, Amazon claimed that more than 180,000 developers had signed up to use Amazon Web Services. If you are looking to Hire AWS Developer, you can checkout our services. We have an expert pool of AWS developers.

2010 – 2011

In November 2010, according to the reports, all of Amazon.com retail web services had been moved to AWS. On April 20, 2011, some parts of Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage. A portion of volumes using the Elastic Block Store (EBS) service became “stuck” and were unable to fulfill read/write requests. Therefore, it took two days to restore full service.

2012

On June 29, 2012, several websites that rely on Amazon Web Services were taken offline due to a severe storm of historic proportions in Northern Virginia, where AWS’ largest data center cluster is located. On October 22, 2012, a major outage occurred, affecting many sites such as Reddit, Foursquare, Pinterest, and others. The cause was a latent memory leak bug in an operational data collection agent.

On December 24, 2012, AWS suffered another outage, causing websites such as Netflix instant video to be unavailable for customers in the Northeastern United States. However, AWS later issued a statement detailing the issues with the Elastic Load Balancing service that led up to the outage.

In November 2012, AWS hosted its first customer event in Las Vegas. On April 30, 2013, AWS began offering a certification program for computer engineers with expertise in cloud computing.

AWS revenue was not stated separately in the past, but in 2012 industry watchers estimated its worth over $1.5 billion.

2013

On May 13, 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program awarded AWS as an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO).

In October 2013, AWS had gained a contract worth $600M with CIA.

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2014

During August 2014, AWS received Department of Defense-Wide provisional authorization for all U.S. Regions.

2015

In April 2015, AWS was reported to be profitable, with sales of $1.57 billion in the first quarter of the year, and $265 million of operating income. Founder Jeff Bezos described it as a fast-growing $5 billion business. In addition to that, analysts also described it as “surprisingly more profitable than forecast”.

In October 2015, Amazon.com said in its Q3 earnings report that AWS’ operating income was $521 million, with operating margins at 25 percent. Moreover, AWS’ Q3 2015 revenue was $2.1 billion, a 78% increase from Q3 2014’s revenue of $1.17 billion. In addition, Q4 2015 revenue for the AWS segment increased 69.5% y/y to $2.4 billion with 28.5% operating margin, making AWS a $9.6 billion run rate.

Furthermore, Gartner estimated that AWS customers are deploying 10x more infrastructure on AWS than the combined adoption of the next 14 providers. During the 2015 re-Invent keynote, AWS disclosed that they have more than a million active customers every month in 190 countries. Moreover, these includes nearly 2,000 government agencies, 5,000 education institutions and more than 17,500 nonprofits.

2016

In Q1 2016, revenue was $2.57 billion with net income of $604 million, a 64% increase over Q1 2015. As a result, AWS being more profitable than Amazon’s North American retail business for the first time.

Since AWS History and Benefits getting more popular as years passes by, AWS adoption has increased since launch in 2006. In Notable customers include NASA, the Obama presidential campaign 2012, Kempinski Hotels, and Netflix.

In 2016, AWS engineer James Hamilton created a ten-year timeline of the online service. Hence, AWS founder Andy Jassy was named CEO of the division in same year.

In the first quarter of 2016, Amazon experienced a 42% rise in stock value as a result of increased earnings, of which AWS contributed 56% to company’s profit. Finally, with a 50% increase in revenues the past few years, it is predicted AWS will have $13 billion in revenue in 2017.

BENEFITS OF AWS

Low Cost

AWS offers low, pay-as-you-go pricing with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments. We are able to build and manage a global infrastructure at scale. Therefore, we can pass the cost saving benefits onto you in the form of lower prices. In addition to that, With the efficiencies of our scale and expertise, we have been able to lower our prices on 15 different occasions over the past four years.

Agility and Instant Elasticity

AWS provides a massive global cloud infrastructure that allows you to quickly innovate, experiment and iterate. Instead of waiting weeks or months for hardware, you can instantly deploy new applications, instantly scale up as your workload grows, and instantly scale down based on demand. In conclusion, whether you need one virtual server or thousands or you need them for a few hours or 24/7, you still only pay for what you use.

Open and Flexible

AWS is a language and operating system agnostic platform. Hence, you choose the development platform or programming model that makes the most sense for your business. You can choose which services you use, one or several, and choose how you use them. Hence, this flexibility allows you to focus on innovation, not infrastructure.

Secure

AWS is a secure, durable technology platform with industry-recognized certifications and audits. PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, FISMA Moderate, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and SOC 1 (formerly referred to as SAS 70 and/or SSAE 16) and SOC 2 audit reports. Their services and data centers have multiple layers of operational and physical security to ensure the integrity and safety of your data.

That’s all about AWS History and Benefits. Hopefully, we have covered most of it. Please comment if we miss anything, we would love to hear from you.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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Various Testing Tools And Their Importance

January 26, 2017By Rakshit Patel

Within the software industry, once a product reaches to the stable manual testing phase, every organization usually considers automated testing to save the costs involved in manual testing.

A variety of open source automation testing tools is available for almost all types of testing such as functional, Web, regression, performance etc. Because of the extent to which these open source tools have matured, it’s time to think about them and have them in your QA automation kit.

1. SELENIUM

Selenium is probably the best option for automated testing of Websites today. Moreover, It is becoming increasingly popular and it is the first choice of automation testers as well as organizations for automating the testing of Web-based applications for both the GUI as well as the functionality.

Selenium is also a package of various test components that consists of different tools.However, Each one has a specific role in aiding the development of test automation for a Web application.

  • Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is used to record the test scenarios in terms of test cases in Firefox.In addition, the recorded tests can be exported to many programming languages so that we can place them in the testing framework.

  • Selenium RC

Selenium starts multiple browsers (one at a time) and then runs the recorded test cases that are saved in your language of choice. Moreover, this helps to enhance the test cases with looping and programming techniques to cover all the required test scenarios and checks.

  • Selenium Grid

It runs multiple instances of Selenium RC at once. Moreover, test cases are recorded and replayed in the form of HTML tables. Furthermore, this is just one more facility to execute the Selenium IDE as well as RC test cases. This helps to check the test results reports in a better manner if they are not formatted already.

  • Selenium web driver

Web Driver is a web automation framework that allows you to execute your tests against different browsers, not just Firefox (unlike Selenium IDE).

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2. JMETER

JMeter is an open source Java-based load and performance testing tool. Besides testing web applications and services, you can also load test other services such as LDAP, mail servers or databases.

3. TESTLINK

Test link is one of the few open source test management tools. Furthermore, it can be hosted on your own server and can be used to manage your test cases and test runs and you can also install and host it on third-party cloud services.

However, There must be many other software testing tools available in the software testing industry.One needs to narrow down requirements and choose one accordingly.

4. WAPT

WAPT is a load and stress testing tool that allows you to build, generate and monitor load tests via a graphical user interface. In addition to that, WAPT comes in two editions and doesn’t limit the number of virtual users you can use like most other commercial tools do.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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Solutions of AWS

Solutions of Amazon Web Services

January 25, 2017By Rakshit Patel

The AWS cloud computing platform provides the flexibility to launch your application regardless of your use case or industry. We will discuss all Solutions of Amazon Web Services today. Learn more about popular solutions customers are running on AWS:

Solutions of Amazon Web Services

APPLICATION HOSTING

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers reliable, scalable, and cost-effective computing resources on which to host your applications. You can use the following AWS components alone or combined to host your application.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You define your virtual Amazon EC2 environment with the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for your hosted application. Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage your compute resources.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): Amazon S3 provides a simple web-services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It is durable, highly available, and secure. Amazon S3 also stores multiple redundant copies of your data.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS): Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable database capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks.

Amazon CloudFront: Amazon CloudFront provides a high performance, globally distributed content delivery system. Your application can use Amazon CloudFront to easily distribute or stream content to your users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, no commitments, and seamless integration with Amazon S3.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS): Amazon SQS provides a high performance, a secure queuing system for your application that enables you to reliably distribute work between your application’s processes.

Amazon DevPay: Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use online billing and account management service that makes it easy for you to sell applications that are built in, or run on top of, Amazon Web Services.

WEBSITES

Amazon Web Services offers cloud web hosting solutions that provide businesses, non-profits, and governmental organizations with a flexible, highly scalable, and low-cost way to deliver their websites and web applications.

Solutions-of-AWS

BACKUP AND STORAGE

Store data and build dependable backup solutions using AWS’s inexpensive data storage services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage solutions are designed to deliver secure, scalable, and durable storage for businesses looking to achieve efficiency and scalability within their backup and recovery environments, without the need for an on-premises infrastructure.

DATABASES

Take advantage of a variety of scalable database solutions, from hosted enterprise database software or non-relational database solutions. AWS offers a wide range of database services to fit your application requirements. These database services are fully managed and can be launched in minutes with just a few clicks.

AWS database services include Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), with support for six commonly used database engines, Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible relational database with five times the performance, Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, Amazon Redshift, a petabyte-scale data warehouse service, and Amazon Elasticache, an in-memory cache service with support for Memcached and Redis. AWS also provides the AWS Database Migration Service, a service which makes it easy and inexpensive to migrate your databases to AWS cloud.

ENTERPRISE IT

With a long history in enabling enterprises to successfully adopt cloud computing, Amazon Web Services delivers a mature set of services specifically designed for the unique security, compliance, privacy, and governance requirements of large organizations. With a technology platform that is both broad and deep, customer-obsessed Professional Services and Support organizations, robust training programs, and an ecosystem tens-of-thousands strong, AWS can help you move faster and do more.

CONTENT DELIVERY

Quickly and easily distribute content to end users worldwide, with low costs and high data transfer speeds. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content or other web assets. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services products to give developers and businesses an easy way to accelerate content to end users with no minimum usage commitments.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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Importance of Testing in the E Commerce Application banner

Importance of Testing in the eCommerce Application

January 23, 2017By Rakshit Patel

E-commerce applications have various business processes like online fund transfers, marketing, inventory management, supply chain management and more.

In order to develop an eCommerce website, we need to find out designs and features which are customer friendly. In addition to that, it is important that these features are properly working and doesn’t have any bug in it, to give the customer a nice and enjoyable experience thus e-commerce website testing is an essential part of the development of eCommerce website.

The eCommerce website testing requires knowledge of the web-based testing techniques. Not just that, the eCommerce website testers test their websites continuously. Moreover, testing is done in different browsers, different platforms, various combinations are tested and also testing occurs on devices like mobiles and iPad.

The e-commerce application testing ensures that all the pages of the website are thoroughly tested all the eCommerce transactions are secure and validated and the application can be now given to end users to use. To check the usability of the application, how user-friendly it is, make the application defect-free are the reason we perform testing on eCommerce application.

Maintain Quality Assurance standards are also a vital part of software development, so to see if our application complies to the quality assurance standards we perform testing.

Some common things which should be tested in eCommerce applications are:

1. TEST PLANNING

Test Planning is one of the early phases of Software Testing Life Cycle. A good planning is a key to a smooth execution phase, whereas, a bad planning can result in unnecessary time consumption. Hence, Test Case writing, resource assignment etc. are some of the activities that are performed as a part of Test Planning.

2. WEBSITE FUNCTIONALITY

First of all, we’ll run through the main functionality of an eCommerce website that needs to be tested. However, your website may not have all these items, or some may not include here. We should test

  • Main pages (i.e.Home page, Featured Products, Special Offers, Information pages etc.)
  • Product category pages
  • Product detail pages
  • Filtering & Product searching
  • Shopping cart
  • Checkout and Payment Systems

Importance-of-Testing-in-the-E-Commerce-Application

4. UI ELEMENTS

UI elements and content play an important role in the success of any eCommerce website and hence, you should actively get involved in ensuring the correctness of UI elements and content.

Think about your own user experience when you visit a website: Are you more likely to purchase if you can easily find what you’re looking for or if you have to click through 50 options?

One of the best and most proven ways to test is something called A/B testing. A/B testing is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. You compare two web pages by showing the two variants.

5. MOBILE RESPONSIVENESS

The website should respond properly to devices on which it is displayed and this is why testing mobile responsiveness is an essential part of the process.

If you wish your website to be used by visitors viewing it on their Smartphone or tablet then you also need to test all of the functionality on each of the following mobile devices.

Many of the browser testing tools can help with mobile websites like Appium, AppAssist, fast lane etc.

6. SECURE PAYMENTS & CUSTOMER INFORMATION

Payments are an essential part of testing eCommerce websites. After all, this is what allows users to purchase for their items without the need to call a number to place their order.

eCommerce business owners also have to ensure that all the payment and sensitive information regarding customers are completely secured at all times like all the payments are processed via servers that are SSL encrypted.

Different payment types should all be tested, e.g. Credit Card, PayPal, Bank Transfers, Installments, etc.

7. TESTING : KEEP IT REAL

It is advisable to test your eCommerce store in the real-world scenarios. However, the production environment is always different in terms of infrastructure, software configurations, shared networks and links. This is the reason the impact of the application is different in a real environment and devices than lab environment.

Lastly, acknowledge that continuous testing and monitoring is essential to make your e-commerce site grow Faster. Hope this helps and happy testing.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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10 must know libraries for any iOS swift developer banner

10 must know libraries for any iOS Swift Developer

January 18, 2017By Rakshit Patel

From the shocking launch of a new language to prominent similarities with other languages, it has been just 3 years and still, it looks like Swift has come a long way! Swift is getting popular each and every day. Any good iOS Swift developer hoping to start new iOS project would choose nothing but Swift language to begin with.

IOS SWIFT DEVELOPER

In order to save your time and make the transition easier and interesting, we have prepared a list of libraries that according to us every iOS Swift developer must know. If you are looking to hire iOS App Developer, get in touch with us.

1.) ALAMOFIRE

Almost every application nowadays deals with web service calls. API integration is the base for almost every application in today’s era. Alamofire is an HTTP networking library built on top of NSURLSession and the Foundation URL loading system. Alamofire comes to the great rescue when one wants to abstract away and simplify networking in the application.

2.) SWIFTYJSON

Well, the API integration part is done and one feels like that is it! Now only part left is to manage JSON and use the data from it. Is it that easy as it sounds? well, you’ll know! And then what saves us from handling explicit data types that cause bugs and crashes is SwiftyJSON. It really deals with JSON in a well readable way which handles options unwrapping automatically for us.

3.) OBJECTMAPPER

So, We made a successful call attempt to APIs and managed well to receive but what next?! Fetching data by mapping resource is another tedious job to handle. ObjectMapper helps us convert JSON into a model object and not just that but vice versa too! It supports nested object pretty well too.

4.) EUREKA

And when you just thought your job is easier, one more challenge arises when you have to display all the fetched data into table views. Not really difficult but boring to very high extent as it is one of the most used element. In order to spice it up, Eureka helps you write them in a simple and elegant way. It consists of rows, sections, and forms. It really saves abundant time especially when your application contains a plethora of forms.

5.) QUICK

A behavior drove development framework not just for Swift but for Objective-C too which is inspired by RSpec, Spectra and Ginkgo. One of the major benefits of using Quick is that it comes with Nimble which is a matcher framework for tests.

10-must-know-libraries-for-any-iOS-swift-developer-banner

6.) SNAPKIT

Another latest approach to set UI for application is using Auto Layout. SnapKit is an Auto Layout library that simplifies coding for the same requiring nothing but just a minimal code that too without losing readability. It is type safe which comes at rescue in order to get rid of programming errors.

7.) RXSWIFT

RxSwift is nothing but the swift version of Rx and serves the same goal as to enable easy composition of asynchronous operations and event/data streams. Consequently, RxSwift is a framework for functional reactive programming.

8.) SPRING

Spring is an animation library. Be it inside of storyboard’s runtime attribute or through code, Spring helps one both ways to set an animation to an object. It supports number of already written animations, transitions and properties.

9.) CORESTORE

The main motive of CoreStore is to provide type safe and elegant interaction with Core Data. It is a wrapper library that provides APIs for all common methods to effectively interact with database.

10.) KINGFISHER

Kingfisher helps us download and cache images from the web. It does that all asynchronously. It caches downloaded images both in memory as well as disk in order to improve application experience to all new level.

 

What are your thoughts on the same, people? Do you know some library that deserves the place in this list? Please leave a comment and let us know.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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Products Amazon Web Services Banner

Products of Amazon Web Services

January 13, 2017By Rakshit Patel

We discussed about AWS History and Benefits in our previous article. It’s time to learn about Products of Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web services offer many products. Depending on your requirement, you can choose best possible Products of Amazon Web Services in your web application. Here I will explain each product in detail to give you the clear idea.

Products of Amazon Web Services

COMPUTE

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as “EC2” is an IaaS service providing virtual servers controllable by an API Xen. Equivalent services include Google Compute Engine and Rack space or on-premises equivalents such as OpenStack or Eucalyptus. Hence, Amazon EC2 is one of the popular from many Products of Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk provides a PaaS service for hosting applications, equivalent services include Google App Engine or Heroku or OpenShift for on-premises use.

Amazon Lambda (LAMBDA) runs code in response to AWS internal or external events such as HTTP requests transparently providing the resource required. Moreover, Lambda is tightly integrated with AWS but similar services such as Google Cloud Functions and open solutions such as OpenWhisk are starting to exist.

NETWORKING

Amazon Route 53 provides a scalable Managed DNS service providing Domain Name Services.

  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) creates a logically isolated set of AWS resources which can be connected using a VPN connection. This competes against on-premises solutions such as OpenStack or HPE Helion Eucalyptus used in conjunction with PaaS software.
  • AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated network connections into AWS data centers.
  • Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
  • AWS Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) provides up to 20Gbit/s of network bandwidth to an Amazon EC2 instance.

CONTENT DELIVERY

Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) for distributing objects to so-called “edge locations” near the requester.
Storage and content delivery

  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides Web Service based storage.
  • Amazon Glacier provides long-term storage options (compared to S3). High redundancy and availability, but low-frequent access times. Intended for archiving data.
  • AWS Storage Gateway, an iSCSI block storage virtual appliance with cloud-based backup.
  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block-level storage volumes for EC2.
  • AWS Import/Export, accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport.
  • Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) a file storage service for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

DATABASE

When we talk about Products of Amazon Web Services, we can’t forget Amazon DynamoDB. Amazon DynamoDB provides a scalable, low-latency NoSQL online Database Service backed by SSDs. Hence, it is one of the most popular NoSQL databases now a day.

  • Amazon ElastiCache provides in-memory caching for web applications. Therefore, this is Amazon’s implementation of Memcached and Redis.
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides scalable database servers with MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL support.
  • In addition, Amazon Redshift provides petabyte-scale data warehousing with column-based storage and multi-node compute.
  • Furthermore, Amazon SimpleDB allows developers to run queries on structured data. It operates in concert with EC2 and S3.
  • AWS Data Pipeline provides reliable service for data transfer between different AWS compute and storage services (e.g., Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR). In other words, this service is simply a data-driven workload management system, which provides a management API for managing and monitoring of data-driven workloads in cloud applications.
  • Amazon Aurora provides a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that has been created specifically for the AWS infrastructure that claims faster speeds and lower costs that are realized in larger databases.

DEPLOYMENT

  • AWS CloudFormation provides a declarative template-based Infrastructure as Code model for configuring AWS.
  • Also, AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides deployment and management of applications in the cloud.
  • AWS OpsWorks provides configuration of EC2 services using Chef.
  • AWS CodeDeploy provides automated code deployment to EC2 instances.

MANAGEMENT

  • Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an implicit service, the authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to the various services.
  • AWS Directory Service a managed service that allows connection to AWS resources with an existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, stand-alone directory in the AWS Cloud.
  • Amazon CloudWatch, provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications, starting with EC2.
  • AWS Management Console (AWS Console), a web-based point and click interface to manage and monitor the Amazon infrastructure suite including (but not limited to) EC2, EBS, S3, SQS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront. In conclusion, A mobile application for Android which has support for some of the management features from the console.
  • Amazon CloudHSM – The AWS CloudHSM service helps to meet corporate, contractual and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud.
  • AWS Key Man7agement Service (KMS) a managed service to create and control encryption keys.
  • Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) a highly scalable, fast, container management service, using on Docker containers.

APPLICATION SERVICES

  • Amazon API Gateway is a service for publishing, maintaining and securing web service APIs.
  • Amazon CloudSearch provides basic full-text search and indexing of textual content.
  • In addition, Amazon DevPay, currently in limited beta version, is a billing and account management system for applications that developers have built atop Amazon Web Services.
  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder (ETS) provides video transcoding of S3 hosted videos, marketed primarily as a way to convert source files into mobile-ready versions.
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides bulk and transactional email sending.
  • Moreover, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides a hosted message queue for web applications.
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) provides a hosted multi-protocol “push” messaging for applications.
  • Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) is a workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications.
  • Also, Amazon Cognito is a user identity and data synchronization service that securely manages and synchronizes app data for users across their mobile devices.
  • Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a low-latency service that streams and resources intensive applications and games from the cloud using NICE DVC technology.

ANALYTICS

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Provides a PaaS service delivering Hadoop for running MapReduce queries framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of EC2 and Amazon S3.

  • Amazon Machine Learning a service that assists developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology.
  • Amazon Kinesis is a cloud-based service for real-time data processing over large, distributed data streams. Also, it streams data in real time with the ability to process thousands of data streams on a per-second basis. The service, designed for real-time apps, allows developers to pull any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up or down as much as you need. Consequently, It has some similarities in functionality to Apache Kafka.
  • Amazon Elasticsearch Service provides fully managed Elasticsearch and Kibana services
  • Amazon QuickSight is a business analytics service that provides visualizations and ad-hoc analysis by connecting to AWS or non-AWS data sources.

MISCELLANEOUS

There are many other Products of Amazon Web Services. Here are rest of them in short brief. Amazon MWS – Marketplace web service allows users to manage complete shipment process from creating a listing to downloading shipment label using API.

  • Amazon Fulfillment Web Service provides a programmatic web service for sellers to ship items to and from Amazon using Fulfillment by Amazon. This service will no longer be supported by Amazon. All of the functionality of this service is now transferred to Amazon marketplace Web service.
  • Amazon Historical Pricing provides access to Amazon’s historical sales data from its affiliates. (It appears that this service has been discontinued.)
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) manages small units of work distributed among many persons.
  • Amazon Product Advertising API formerly known as Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S) and Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS), provides access to Amazon’s product data and electronic commerce functionality.
  • AGCOD (Amazon Gift Code On Demand) for Corporate Customers enables companies to distribute Amazon gift cards (gift codes) instantly in any denomination, integrating Amazon’s gift-card technology into customer loyalty, employee incentive and payment disbursement platforms.
  • AWS Partner Network (APN) provides technology partners and consulting partners with the technical information and sales and marketing support to increase business opportunities through AWS and with businesses using AWS. Launched in April 2012, the APN is made up of Technology Partners including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), tool providers, platform providers, and others. In addition, Consulting Partners include System Integrators (SIs), agencies, consultancies, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and others. Moreover, Potential Technology and Consulting Partners must meet technical and non-technical training requirements set by AWS.
  • Amazon Lumberyard is a freeware triple-A game engine that is integrated with AWS.

Rakshit Patel

Author ImageI am the Founder of Crest Infotech With over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, mobile apps development and content marketing. I ensure that we deliver quality website to you which is optimized to improve your business, sales and profits. We create websites that rank at the top of Google and can be easily updated by you.

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