8 Best Practices for Creating Apps for Booking

Nowadays, having a company website is as essential as having an office, domain or telephone number. By 2020, approximately 4.5 billion people, or more than half of the world’s population, are connected in some way to the World Wide Web in order to satisfy their entertainment, education, research and consumer needs.

If your business does not have a website, we provide a number of benefits to you:

1.  It sets the first impression

When your audience visits your website, it gives them their first impression of your business. They will judge your business within seconds. In these first few seconds, you can make a positive or negative impact on your audience. The impression you make on them can either get them to remain on your page and learn about your business, or leave your page and turn to a competitor.

2.  Cost-Effective

Use your website to sell goods and services directly to consumers without various forms such as printed media, radio, television, etc. Having the website will make promoting much easier and less expensive.

3. Online 24/7

Anyone, anywhere and anytime, has access to your website and gets business information and details about your products and services.

4. Advertising and Increase Sales

SEO and online advertising are a great way to be the first company that a potential new customer sees when searching for a product or service online. An effective website with great content can attract many more people and increase sales.

5. Customer Service Online

Websites provide an easier way to handle customer service. In the modern world, people buy products and services using mobile phones to browse the internet.  So, it might help customers find your location while they are on the move. This is especially important for restaurants, cafes, and other eateries, but is also relevant for other businesses.

However, there are a few disadvantages of having a website for your business:

1. Reliability

The information on your website might be updated on a regular basis. Otherwise, you will lose some part of potential customers due to unreliable information on the website.

2. Bad Publicity

If customers are unhappy with your products or services, they may feel the need to reference your website in their reviews or comments. This could potentially be damaging, hurting your reputation and your search engine ranking. Of course, not having a website won’t prevent such things from happening, but it might allow you to monitor and be aware of it.

3. Right development team

It is no secret that there are lots of companies that can design and develop a website. Among the sea of designers and developers, you need to find a team that will understand your business goals and the needs of your customers and convert them into a beautiful website.

Having read that, you might come to the conclusion that having a website is a crucial thing in the digital world, and it is a great opportunity to raise your sales.

Darly team understands this fact, and we are going to show how we can provide your business and your potential customers with a great experience.

At Darly Solutions, we offer two main approaches to creating a website:

Creating a website from scratch

Required knowledge and tools:

1. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)

HTML is the basic structure of web pages and web applications, which makes the content semantic to the web browser. Every web page you see on the Internet is written using one version of HTML code or another.

2. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

CSS is the language for describing the presentation of Web pages, including colors, layout, and fonts. Without CSS, a web page would look like a large white page with some unordered text and image on it. CSS is the thing that makes it all look pretty.

3. Scripting Languages

HTML and CSS cannot be interactive without scripting languages. To make a dynamic web page that will respond to user actions, you need languages like JavaScript and jQuery. Server-side languages like PHP, Python and Ruby might also be needed over time.

4. Database Management

Database Management allows to organize, store and retrieve data from a computer. Database Management Systems like MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL are used on the server-side to do this job efficiently.

5. FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

FTP is a standard Internet protocol for transmitting files between computers on the Internet over TCP/IP connections. FTP is used to transfer a website’s source files to its hosted server more easily.

Creating a website with CMS

WordPress is extremely powerful and can run most types of websites. Statistics show that WordPress is currently the most popular CMS (Content Management System) in the world. It powers 27.8% of all sites on the web, with about 50,000 new sites being created daily. With more and more people viewing sites on their smartphones and other mobile devices, it’s really important to have a site that is responsive to these digital demands. With WordPress, most themes come mobile friendly by default. Usually, WordPress is used for creating blogs where you have to work with a big amount of texts and need to edit them all the time.

Design

The success of any website entirely depends on how good its web design is. It is important so much that 38% of the visitors will leave a website if they find the design unattractive. When your audience visits your website, it gives them their first impression of your business. They will judge your business within seconds. In these first few seconds, you want to make a positive impact on your audience.

You can think of web design like selling a car – it could have the most incredible engine, but if the appearance is hideous, people will not be interested in buying it.

Good website design needs a wide range of professionals having expertise in different areas.

Here in this article, we’ll outline the 5 steps to create the perfect design.

1. Set your goal and strategy

2. Research the latest web design trends

3. Select a team for cooperation

4. Decide on your branding

5. Think about positioning and optimization of your content

We’ll run through all the steps in detail below.

Set your goal and strategy

Before you jump head-first into designing your website, you need to be clear on its purpose. Keep in mind that your visitors want to understand what your business is all about in the blink of an eye. Having multiple main objectives is likely to result in confusion.

Once your purpose is clear, the focus shifts towards what action you want visitors to take when they land on your website. Is your site there just to display information? To sell products? To get sign-ups? The answer to this will ultimately dictate how your website looks and feels. Using E-Commerce as an example, one crucial element of your design is your landing page.

Research the latest web design trends

It’s important to note that just because a web trend is current, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for you. You can look at what competitors are doing and analyze the things and features that you like and dislike. Each sector will have different styles, so it’s important to consider this fact.

Select a team for cooperation

Design of your website plays a vital role in your online marketing campaign’s success. If you want to drive the best results for your business, you must invest in designing a website that encourages people to learn more about your business. At Darly Solutions, we have over 4 years of experience designing websites.

We are a full-service IT company that specializes in web development, mobile app development, UI/UX design and so on. Our team of experts will bring their knowledge and expertise to your campaign. We know the importance of web design and can help you create a website you’ll love.

Wireframes, prototypes and mockups form three of the earlier steps of product design. The great way to explain them is to imagine a parallel between them and the human body. The wireframe is the skeleton or the structure of the product. The prototype is the brain or the organ that decides how the human should move and interact with something. The mockup is the skin, hair, and facial features, or brand, that make the human instantly recognizable.

Decide on your branding

Color is one of the brand’s biggest communication tools. In fact, according to Color Matters, a signature color can boost brand recognition by 80%. There’s a lot of psychology behind people’s perception of color, so it’s important to understand how it’s used in relation to your industry.

Most brands have one dominant color, then two or three secondary colors. Blue is the most popular color, with one third of the top 100 brands using it in their logo.

There are many factors that should be considered like colors, font style, imagery etc. In this case, a professional designer can help and suggest a solution based on your business and your requirements.

Think about positioning and optimization of your content

There are two things that you need to consider: positioning and optimization.

Recent research shows that website users scan a page in a shape that resembles an ‘F’. This is why navigation bars on websites are nearly always displayed across the top of the page. It’s the first thing people are drawn to when landing on the site.

Optimization is the process that helps content rank higher on search engines (primary example being Google). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can increase the quality or quantity of people landing on your pages.

Conclusion

After all of that, congratulations! Your website is now live. You can publish it, but it’s time to check if everything works before you go live! Ask your family, friends, and colleagues to test the site in preview mode (all website builders and E-Commerce platforms will have this), and see if they find anything wrong. You can even get members of the public to test it too. Always take the time to properly check your website. After that, you’re ready: publish your site!

Now, you’re the owner of a live website. But, if you think that you can kick back and relax now, you are quite wrong. Regularly checking the growth and performance of the site will be your responsibility.

However, you can connect your website to tracking tools or at least have an analytic app to install. Alternatively, you can connect your site to Google Analytics.

The truth is, a web designer’s job is never truly done. If you just sit back and admire your work, others will overtake you. So, you need to keep on top of your site’s performance and check for design trends updates.

Nowadays, AI technology is significantly changing the different industries and the healthcare industry isn’t an exception. One of the additions—chatbots—has the potential to save time and money.

But should the healthcare industry use a bot service, it is a question many medical workers ask. However, we can define healthcare as a service that happens when patients visit the doctors, we will strictly limit our potential productivity gains. Chatbots can help healthcare providers with customer service and interact with healthcare consumers through text conversationally. So it is one of the most effective solutions to increase patient satisfaction.

According to surveys and researches published by IBM, up to 80% of routine questions could be answered by a chatbot. And it isn’t a surprise that the big part of these questions are asked by the patients and a simple chatbot can help with that.

For being in a win-win situation in healthcare, the providers should think about how to give patients, prospective patients, and other site visitors a way to answer questions, find the important information, and even book appointments as soon as possible without calling in. It’s easier and more convenient for people. It’s more efficient and successful for providers. And it can save a tremendous amount of money and time. That’s the dream, right? In the healthcare sector, the patient’s experience and satisfaction continue to be the top priority.

Chatbots in healthcare can offer the best health care service.

So the real question for clinics, hospitals and other private practices looking to improve the patient experience: Is it worth it?

Will chatbots really help and make a difference for your staff and patients?

At the end of the article you will find the answers to all your questions, so let’s have a look at how healthcare chatbots actually work, their benefits, and potential use cases.

We can divide chatbots into three categories:

Rules-based: Rule-based chatbots can also be named decision-tree bots. This type of chatbot uses a series of defined rules. These rules are the basis for the types of problems the chatbot is familiar with and can deliver solutions for. Usually, there are very simple or complicated rules. They can’t, however, answer any questions outside of the defined rules. These chatbots do not learn through interactions. They only perform and work with the scenarios you train them for. They follow pre-defined, if-this-then-that “playbooks” that automatically respond to a list of pre-populated queries and questions. These chatbots might answer common questions with simple and canned responses. They might also lead people to dead-ends like “I’m having trouble understanding” due to their limited technical capacity.

Adaptive: Using machine learning (ML), adaptive chatbots can learn patterns the more requests they receive.

AI-powered: An AI-powered chatbot is a smarter version that uses natural language processing (NLP) and ML to better understand the intent of the human and provide a more natural, near-human-level communication. An AI chatbot can quickly determine intent and context, move through more complex and nuanced conversations, and deliver the look and feel of chatting with an actual human being.

Chatbots are created to mimic human conversation. Using chatbots, patients can ask health-related questions, check on their appointments, or explore treatment options without calling in.

Why chatbots are perfectly suitable for healthcare

The chatbot is useful for any type of business. But for the healthcare field, they are especially valuable, because chatbots can provide the required information and actions to patients.

24/7 Service

Anytime chatbots can provide patients service and support. According to this, patients can get immediate engagement and answers.

Follow-up medical care

Quality and results are the most important goals for the patient experience. In many cases, it is difficult for doctors to provide quality care once a patient leaves the hospital. Chatbots could be a good solution for this challenge, and they can give follow-up care by prompting patients to record their symptoms or track their progress.

At-home care

Chatbots can be used anywhere, especially at home. The patient can use the range of actions that include not only looking up symptoms and scheduling appointments, it could also use chatbots for the patients after they are discharged from the hospital. The chatbot could help patients take their medications in time and connect with their doctors.

Keep patient update

This is a new way to address any patient. This will keep the patient and family to remain updated till the last moment. Do you need to go to the appointment? The chatbot will remind you via text message or email. Will the surgery for which you need to be prepared? A chatbot can help patients prepare for any size of surgery or operation beforehand.

Better Patient Experiences

In the end, chatbots no doubt can enhance patient satisfaction. They help improve patient satisfaction scores by providing the convenience of care and reducing wait time. The providers have the opportunity to offer services to the patients and make it convenient for patients to receive medical attention. Chatbots can also facilitate surveys and other patient feedback mechanisms to record and track sentiment.

Use cases in the healthcare industry

• Let’s imagine the patient needs urgent help and information on what to do? The chatbot could quickly quiz users on the health problem they’re facing and recommend a sequence of actions until the ambulance arrives.

• It can be used as a mass email by local or national health organizations. Nowadays, it is especially relevant to people to get to know important details about vaccinations or epidemics.

• It can help patients track their moods or feelings that can be discussed with the psychiatrist or therapist at the next appointment. It could offer tips, notifications and advice between therapy sessions. Furthermore, it even can act more like a personal assistant. It can remind patients to take their medication, help them stay motivated to stick to their schedules and provide other relevant medical information.

• The hospitals and clinics can use the chatbot to allow patients to learn more about their health by asking questions, check symptoms or conditions, and find relevant specialists if they need them.

• The E-commerce industry that sells medical equipment or supplies could build a bot to recommend products to undecided customers. It is one of the ways to increase the visitors on the websites, directing the users to buy the products from it.

• A doctor could set up a chatbot to let users schedule their next appointment easily.

• The bot can be built to help users find in-network providers near them based on city or zip code.

• A medical spa can increase lead generation and user satisfaction using the bot. It is a great idea to ask what users expressly request. Based on the feedback from the users, and add only those services and products which your users have expressly requested. Finally, it could help the best matches schedule a consultation.

Final Thoughts

The chatbots can significantly replace the great part of live chatting with medical personnel. The main advantage that chatbot can provide is improvement in the patient experience. These chatbots are created to be conversational, so they are more responsive and personal than search engines. Chatbots can pull more specific and relevant information for patients rather than search engines. But they can not completely replace a human medical professional’s expertise, but they can reduce the time and money and make it easier for hospital staff to perform their jobs.

Perhaps you are one of those people who believe that any experienced software engineer can be involved in any project. But in reality, it doesn’t work like that: depending on your task, you may need different expertise from the core members of your development team. Below, we will highlight existing types of software development and briefly consider their specifics.

Types of Software Development

The division of software development into types primarily depends on the platforms for which the created project is intended, that is, the user environment where it will be deployed. This could be a web browser, cloud, mobile, desktop, IoT, or embedded operating system. There are also platform-independent solutions that can be run on several operating systems without any restrictions. 

Ultimately, the deployment environment turns out to be one of the main factors influencing the choice of the project’s technology stack, and, therefore, the developers themselves, who have the appropriate expertise.  

Web Development

Web development involves creating different types of software—web applications and websites—that run through an Internet browser. Along with this, you have to understand that to implement your web solution, you will need several specialists at once whose scope of work will be concentrated within the following subtypes of web development.

Frontend Development

Frontend development concerns the creation of that part of the project with which the end user directly interacts. In particular, this consists of creating a user interface as well as functionality that is performed without the participation of a server and database.

Backend Development

Backend development lies in the implementation of the business logic of the project and its connections with the database/databases. This is its server part, which is hidden from the eyes of end users.

Full-Stack Development

Full-stack development involves a combination of frontend and backend development, but unlike them, it requires the participation of more general specialists who are well-versed in both server and browser technologies.

Mobile App Development

Mobile app development is aimed at the implementation of projects for mobile operating systems—usually iOS and Android. At the same time, there are also cross-platform projects that work equally well regardless of what OS is installed on the end user’s device.

iOS App Development

iOS app development involves creating applications completely tailored to work on the iOS operating system. Such projects require developers to have knowledge of Objective-C, Swift, and Java programming languages, as well as platform-native technologies and tools.

Android App Development

Similarly, Android app development is aimed at projects tailored to the specs of the Android mobile OS. To do this, developers need to have strong programming skills in Java and Kotlin, and be able to work with the Android Toolkit.

Cross-Platform App Development

Cross-platform development allows developers to cover several mobile platforms at once. In this case, they create a universal code base based on a single technology stack, regardless of which OS will run on user devices. From a business perspective, cross-platform projects allow you to achieve faster launch and lower budget since instead of several separate applications and teams that will work on them, you can hire just one that will create a software solution that can be simultaneously deployed on numerous platforms.

Embedded Software Development

Embedded software development involves creating solutions to control machines or devices that are more primitive than computers, called embedded systems. This software development model is completely tailored to the specific hardware on which the software solution runs and has significant restrictions on the consumption of its resources.

Desktop Application Development

Desktop application software development consists of creating applications that are used to work offline on user PCs and laptops. Instead of applying the computing power of servers on the hosting provider's side, they rely entirely on the resources of the user device on which they are installed.

DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

DevOps is a set of interaction practices between developers, testers, and other IT specialists in a project team needed to increase their performance and improve the quality of the work results. Typically, DevOps is applied to launch new versions of software regularly. In turn, CI/CD is one of the DeOps techniques, which consists of automating the software development process to ensure a recurrent development life cycle with a continuous delivery of the program code.

IoT (Internet of Things) Development

IoT development, also called M2M development, is aimed at creating software for systems where devices exchange data with each other without human intervention. These could be physical security systems, smart home and smart city solutions, logistics systems, and so on.

Cloud Development

Cloud development involves creating software that is run on a remote web server using a subscription-based delivery model. From the point of view of end users, this approach ensures the high availability of such software products since they only need to have access to the Internet.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) Development

While the development of augmented reality solutions involves using the camera of a smartphone or tablet on the user's device (this is necessary to overlay digital objects in the user's real environment), virtual reality solutions also need the use of special wearable devices, such as VR glasses. 

Blockchain Software Development

Blockchain software development involves the creation of decentralized platforms, consensus protocols, smart contracts, and other blockchain-related solutions. Although this type of development became popular thanks to crypto projects, today, it covers a long list of niches, from logistics and healthcare to insurance and finances.

API Development

API development is the creation of software tools that allow independent software components to interact with each other using a set of definitions and protocols. Typically, APIs are used to integrate systems, services, and applications to ensure seamless and secure data exchange between them.

Choosing the Right Development Type

At the very beginning of the article, we already indicated that the deployment environment is the main factor influencing the types of software products that you should focus on creating. However, there are also a number of other aspects that will help you make the correct choice. These may include the following:

• Project needs and objectives—they will help your team to define not only the tech stack but also the most suitable software development methodologies (usually, they are related to Agile)
• Your business niche—it can be finance, healthcare, entertainment, e-commerce, industrial, education, logistics and supply chain, or something else
• The resources you have—the specialists you’ve already hired, the project budget, access to data that will operate your software solution, etc.

As for small projects, they are usually dedicated to web development, mobile development, or desktop development—in such software development types, the talent pool is usually wide, and you will be able to choose specialists with the optimal ratio between expertise and rates. However, don't forget that choosing development services that are too cheap may mean you end up having to redo the project from scratch because it doesn't meet your expectations.

Trends in Software Development

Finally, let's take a brief look at the technologies that will be trending in the coming years and which ultimately can provide a strong competitive advantage to your project:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning—today, these technologies find a wide variety of applications, from personalized search results and chatbots to smart analytics and forecasting
• Augmented and virtual reality—we have already mentioned these two trends above, so we would like to emphasize that their implementation becomes more and more affordable to project owners 
• Internet of Things—we also talked about this trend above; its relevance is explained by the possibility of on-site data collection from devices to which the user does not have physical access
• Personalized user experience—in general, it can be achieved not only with the help of machine learning but also through predefined algorithms
• Blockchain—it’s needless to say that the number of blockchain software development projects is growing every day, and currently, they cover not only the crypto industry

Conclusion

Now, after reading this article, you will be able to understand what type of project you can classify as and what specialists you will need in your project team. At the same time, whichever of the above-described examples of software development you choose, you can always contact us, and we are guaranteed to implement your business idea according to your requirements.

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