Benefits of Web Apps for Education Companies

Imagine your website as a guide for people looking for healthcare answers. But, too much text, complex navigation, and poor mobile layout can stop them from getting the help they need. Who are these visitors about to pick your services, and how do we ensure they find what they're looking for?

• 77% initiate their healthcare journey via search engines.
• 60% of these explorers click through to websites brimming with the healthcare insights they're after.
• 71% feel disappointed with healthcare websites that fall short on information.

These figures send a clear message to healthcare providers: A strong online presence is vital. To engage and keep potential patients' trust, your website should be accessible and filled with the information they need.

What is a Good Healthcare Landing Page?

A landing page has two key goals: promoting and advertising. Here, we put together a short guide to share our insights, knowledge, and everything else you need to create a high-converting healthcare landing page.

Mobile-Friendliness

Studies show that the average American checks their phone every 12 minutes. Nowadays, a mobile-friendly website is a must-have for every business. 

Responsive Web Design (RWD) makes your website attractive for users with any screen, device, or browser. It automatically adjusts the layout and content based on the screen size, ensuring a user-friendly experience on phones and tablets, without the need for zooming or extensive scrolling.

Clear Content

Ensure your content is focused and minimalistic, directly conveying your business's offerings. A healthcare landing page must be clean, emphasizing key points. 

Include a prominent Call-to-Action (CTA) - a brief, compelling phrase that encourages visitors to take the next step. This CTA must stand out, guiding users clearly on what to do. 

Remember, visitors quickly form opinions; make those initial moments count with straightforward information, ensuring they find what they need swiftly.

Direct Navigation

To enhance your landing page's navigation, focus on a seamless user experience. Use an active voice to directly guide visitors to their desired information through simple, intuitive steps. 

Incorporate clear labels, a straightforward layout, and visual cues to ensure easy navigation. 

Regularly test your navigation with real users to identify and fix any hurdles, ensuring your landing page is as direct and user-friendly as possible.

Top 5 CMS Platforms to Create a Landing Page

Building an effective landing page is key to a successful marketing strategy, and selecting the right CMS platform can greatly enhance your ability to connect with your audience. Here's a top list of CMS platforms ideal for crafting landing pages, each providing distinct features to meet different requirements:

1. WordPress

The most popular CMS in the world, known for its flexibility and extensive plugin ecosystem. WordPress offers both simple functionalities for beginners and advanced solutions for experienced developers and complex products. 

With over 58,000 plugins and thousands of themes, WordPress offers rich opportunities for customization. You can use SEO and analytic tools, social media integration, and contact forms — everything you need for a healthcare landing page.

2. Wix

Wix is renowned for its simplicity, featuring a drag-and-drop interface and stylish templates. It offers an intuitive platform that requires no prior coding or design knowledge.

Ideal for small business owners and web development & design newbies. Wix’s simple platform will enable even a private healthcare practitioner to create a professional-looking landing page.

3. Velo by Wix

For more experienced users, Wix offers an advanced Velo development platform. It provides rich customization options, allowing direct editing of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, giving full control over the website's look and feel. 

Velo also allows for the integration of APIs and external databases, making it possible to build dynamic, data-driven healthcare landing pages.

4. HubSpot CMS

HubSpot CMS shines by integrating powerful marketing tools directly with website management. This includes email marketing, SEO strategies, and other inbound marketing techniques, all within one platform. 

It's ideal for marketers and businesses looking for a single platform to manage their website creation and ongoing marketing activities.

5. Webflow

Webflow offers complete control over website design and interactive features through an easy-to-use visual editor, so you don't need to know how to code. It's great for designers and developers who want the freedom to create without complexity. 

With Webflow, you can design unique healthcare landing pages that stand out and communicate effectively, thanks to its detailed design capabilities and responsive design options.

Conclusion

The landing page is the connecting bridge between the online, digital marketing message, and the visitors’ next step. The landing page must look good on a smartphone, have informative content, and clear navigation. 

For medical businesses and practitioners, it’s essential to have a landing page for each service they’re offering. Are you a doctor, a medical center, or a big healthcare corporation? Contact us for a consultation on attracting more patients. 

First announced in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, today, the concept of the next-generation internet, called Web 3.0, opens up a whole niche for startups. Below, we will look at its basics, describe its advantages and disadvantages, and also find out what technologies can be used to implement Web 3.0 solutions.

What Is Web 3.0?

The Internet that we are used to is defined as Web 2.0. It allows all users to upload content themselves, making it publicly available. This became possible thanks to the emergence of social networks, which over time, instead of providing users with the desired freedom, began to limit them with all sorts of rules and censorship. This, in turn, has become the main reason for looking for new, alternative concepts that would go against these restrictions, giving users more control over their publications.

In this regard, instead of centralized networks, the operation of which was tied to central servers, decentralization was proposed. It had to provide a “smart” distribution of content to servers located throughout the world. Thanks to this approach, widespread availability of user content would be ensured. With this approach, to block specific publications, the consent of all network nodes is needed—instead of just one, as was the case with Web 2.0.

As for technologies capable of implementing a decentralized network architecture, these include, first of all, blockchain, which would transform the centralized Internet into a distributed content database. Actually, this radical transformation would give the world the Web 3.0 Internet.

Today the simplest Web 3.0 formula looks like this: "read + write + own".

Why Is Web 3.0 Important?

Due to its undeniable value for ordinary Internet users, Web 3.0 can be of particular interest to businesses that are constantly developing in the digital plane.

Specifically, by increasing content accessibility, reclaiming ownership of user-created content, and overall end-to-end user centricity, businesses can benefit from launching personalized Web3 websites, apps, and services that aim to increase trust and engagement among their users, as well as providing advertising based on their behavioral patterns.

This way, businesses can strengthen their relationships with consumers and, therefore, increase their profits.

How Web 3.0 Works

As you can already understand from the above, Web 3.0 is based on decentralized networks, but this description is not complete. In particular, Web 3.0 also implies that any Web3 website or application must be able to process information like the human brain, that is, as artificial intelligence and machine learning already do today. This is how an alternative name for the 3rd generation of the Internet has appeared—the semantic web.

This requirement for the “intelligence” of the Internet arose for a reason: since, due to decentralization, users and machines interact with data directly, this data must be recognized by the network not only using predefined algorithms—now, its context has become no less important.

Benefits of Web 3.0

With the right approach, virtually any company that continually grows its online presence can reap a number of benefits from Web 3.0 software development. These include the following:

• Increasing customer loyalty achieved through the AI and smart chatbot introduction aimed at completely personalizing digital content and services;
• Improved analytics thanks to more complete and accurate sets of user data obtained from disparate sources (and, as a result—the ability to create more accurate marketing strategies);
• Automation of a wider range of tasks provided by blockchain, ML, and AI;
• Increased security that only distributed registry technologies can guarantee;
• New partnership opportunities without the involvement of third parties thanks to blockchain and smart contracts;
• Supply chain optimization, also enabled by blockchain that provides full control and transparency of supply chain operations;
• Copyright protection provided by giving users full control over their data (also thanks to blockchain).

Challenges of Web 3.0

Despite the existence of decentralized solutions, it is too early to say that the 3rd-gen Internet already exists. To make this thesis true, developers have to implement connectivity between Web3 solutions so that the data they collect and process become globally accessible.

For example, if we are talking about Web 2.0, in it, data exchange occurs via the HTTP protocol. In this case, there is an intermediary between the participants (namely, the server) on which information, databases, applications, etc. are stored. The concept of Web 3.0 implies the organization of a new level of network interaction, without a server. So far, such technologies do not exist—it can be explained by the limitations of physical equipment and infrastructure in general. 

An equally serious challenge is to ensure proper speed of data transfer and processing in the Web 3.0 development solutions. In a more global sense, this means a scalability problem since the need to maintain a proper balance between decentralization and security is most often achieved by limiting throughput, as we can see in the examples of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

At the same time, options to circumvent these obstacles are already being considered—a potential way out of the situation could be the creation of a cross-chain infrastructure to integrate all blockchain networks. Similar solutions (though not so large-scale as to replace the whole Web 2.0) have already been implemented in the Polkadot and Cosmos projects.

Technologies that are powering Web 3.0

Earlier we talked about the need to use AI and ML in Web 3.0, but let's take a look at the full list of technologies that will be relevant for each Web 3.0 developer.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Together with machine learning, artificial intelligence in Web 3.0 provides better analysis of user data and creates a personalized user experience based on it. Thanks to this, users get the content they need faster, without getting confused by colossal volumes of useless or only partially useful information. These technologies can also be responsible for automating resource-intensive processes such as data sorting and forecasting. Finally, we should not discount natural language processing—one of the areas of AI that ensures more accurate and context-sensitive recognition of user queries by machines.

Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLT)

In Web 3.0 application development, blockchain and other DLTs provide better security when storing user data by eliminating centralized control over it. These technologies also make it possible to create tokens (including non-fungible ones, NFTs), which are decentralized digital assets stored on the blockchain. They define ownership of real or virtual objects and, in the future, can be used to protect copyright.

3D graphics and animation

With the faster content delivery typical to Web3, 3D graphics and animation solutions will become commonplace. In particular, Web 3.0 opens up new opportunities for creating realistic three-dimensional objects to ensure an immersive experience that was previously unavailable with any other digital technologies. Supplemented with reality-like animation, these objects can act as avatars of living users and thereby make them full-fledged participants in meta universes.

The future of Web 3.0

Given all of the above, it is unlikely that Web 3.0 will be a single system—we are sure, it will be a comprehensive solution that goes beyond the traditional web. This approach will ensure the management of the Internet by the user community and exclude content monopolization.

As for specific areas of development, the most promising are considered to be meta universes that combine physical, augmented, and virtual realities with their own blockchain-based tokenomics. At the same time, it is important to understand that despite the many points of contact, currently, metaverses and Web 3.0 are different things since those that exist today are still products from centralized IT companies, with their typical problems. Therefore, the solutions that will mark the emergence of Web 3.0 will differ significantly both from the point of view of technical implementation and the very concept of interaction with users as well.

If you, like us, consider the Web 3.0 direction to be promising for your business and already have an idea that will bring this concept closer to reality, you can contact our Web 3.0 development company. We will advise you on the implementation of your project and also select specialists who will guide you from collecting project requirements to its launch.

According to analysts, global employers are unable to fill about 40 million IT vacancies due to a shortage of technical specialists in their region. And the situation is expected to worsen further. For example, in the USA, it is projected that by 2030, there will be a shortage of over 85 million programmers.

What to do? The solution is simple: consider an extended development team as an alternative to in-house developers.

What are these teams? What are the benefits of this approach to creating digital solutions? We will discuss this and much more in this article.

What Is an Extended Development Team?

An extended software development team consists of specialists who work together on a single project, but can be located anywhere, even in different time zones. This type of work organization is typically designed to combine the internal team with external specialists.

In other words, by involving an extended team in your project, you can gain all the advantages of outsourcing while saving budget and maintaining full control over the development process.

According to research, 92% of G2000 companies use tended teams and other forms of outsourcing. Now is the time to consider involving freelance specialists and experience all the benefits of this approach for your business.

Key Benefits of an Extended Team Model

Integrating external specialists into an internal team helps achieve even the boldest business goals through the following advantages:

Access to Global Talent Pool

Do you want to create a truly innovative product that no competitor offers? Be prepared for the fact that the local market may not have a programmer with the relevant experience. Alternatively, a lack of personnel may make it very difficult to attract the right specialist.

‍The number of developers varies from country to country. In fact, the difference can be significant even within the same country. For example, in the USA, the highest number of software engineers resides in California. There are over 628,000 in this state, while in Michigan and North Carolina, the number of specialists barely exceeds 100,000.

In such a situation, extended development teams can be a real lifesaver. With their help, you will be able to attract experts from any corner of the world to your project.

Cost-Effective Scaling

Hiring an employee in-house is always costly. According to numerous studies, it can cost a company anywhere from $28,000 to $35,000. And this is just the cost of provided benefits, insurance, vacation, and additional payments (such as overtime). In addition, you'll need to spend on training and onboarding staff.

Apart from the high costs, all of this takes a lot of time, and the need for scaling sometimes cannot be delayed.

However, if you consider involving external specialists, these problems can be easily avoided. A reliable provider will quickly find the right specialist, and your expenses will be limited to payment per hour or based on the actual volume of work completed.

‍Additionally, with the extended team model, you have another opportunity to save. This is possible due to the lack of regional constraints—as the cost of labor for developers is evaluated differently in various countries. For example, in North America, the average software development hourly rate is $77. In Eastern Europe, the same service can be obtained for $58 per hour, and in the Asia Pacific region, developers charge even less—around $28 per hour.

Faster Development and Delivery

An extended software development team helps accelerate development cycles. Here’s how this happens:

• Involving developers from different time zones allows such a team to work on the project almost around the clock. Is this possible with in-house specialists? Hardly.

• By expanding your team, you can save time on hiring and staff training. On average, the recruitment process in the IT field takes 35 days.

• You can hire several extended teams to handle different tasks. They will work on the project in parallel, thereby reducing development time.

Flexibility and Adaptability

The hiring model discussed in this article allows you to be as flexible as possible when it comes to changes in project needs. Let’s break it down further.

• Have the project goals changed, and you need to scale quickly? As you know, finding an external specialist is much faster than hiring an in-house employee. Additionally, you can adjust the requirements for candidates as the product evolves.

• Geographical flexibility also plays a role here. If you're experiencing a shortage of the right talent in your region, you can look for experts in the required technology stack overseas. With extended development teams, anything is possible.

Hassle-Free Management

When working with external specialists, you can fully control the process of developing a digital solution. At the same time, managing such a team is economically efficient and requires less time.

Why?

• When turning to trusted providers, they take on all the responsibilities for staff selection. You don’t spend time and money on searching, interviews, and hiring.

• The high qualification of extended teams frees you from the need for micromanagement. This allows you to focus on project management and achieving global business goals.

• Outsourcing service providers typically have established communication channels. They use specialized tools like Slack, Trello, or Jira to bridge geographical distances. Moreover, such companies often provide a project manager. It’s their responsibility to ensure smooth collaboration.

Operational Process of an Extended Development Team

To ensure the seamless integration of external specialists into your internal team, several stages of organizing updated workflows must be followed. Remember, your team is the foundation on which the creation of the software product will be based. Therefore, no detail should be overlooked.

Initial Planning Stage

This stage is crucial for the success of the project. Clear planning is the key to knowing the direction you need to move in.

It includes the following steps:

1. Formulating business goals. Start by defining the product you want to create and how it will benefit your business. It is also recommended to immediately outline the required features to be developed. This will help clearly define expectations for the final product and avoid misunderstandings between stakeholders and the team.

2. Assessing internal resources. Identify what knowledge and skills are needed to achieve the set goals. After that, assess your internal team. Are there enough specialists? Do they have the necessary expertise?

3. Project timeline and budget planning. Set realistic deadlines and determine the expenses you can afford. Consider development costs, project management, and potential unforeseen issues.

4. Choosing the collaboration model. If the project requires external developers, you have several options. Among them are outsourcing, dedicated teams, and the extended team model discussed in this article. We will discuss the differences between these three approaches later.

5. Risk assessment. Suppose you have chosen the extended team model. Think in advance about the risks you may face, such as communication gaps and potential time zone differences. In addition to the risks associated with engaging external specialists, consider other possible problems, including technical ones.

Finding the Right Tech Partner

Opt for a proven company with a good reputation. This guarantees that highly qualified professionals will be selected for you, whose expertise fully matches the project requirements. 

Here are a few tips to help you choose a reliable provider:

• Study the company’s website, focusing on its portfolio.
• Read reviews about the provider online.
• Compare the specialization of the potential partner with the plan for your project.
• Assess the cost-to-quality ratio of the services offered.
• Ensure that the company’s values align with yours.

Building the Development Team

The main task at this stage is to ensure smooth integration of the new specialists into the existing team. To do this, it is important to clearly define the roles they will perform on the project.

And a few more recommendations:

• Work on staff selection together with your technical partner. This does not mean total control or direct participation in the interviews. Just stay in the loop to ensure the candidate matches your requirements as closely as possible.

• Balance the size of the extended team. Make sure the number of employees corresponds to the goals of the project and its budget. A team that is too large may lead to unnecessary costs, while one that is too small can increase time-to-market.

Onboarding and Integration

This step involves introducing external specialists to the nuances of your internal processes:

1. Familiarization with the project specifics. Before starting work, make sure the hired developers fully understand the project’s goals and its specific requirements.

2. Setting up communication channels. Inform the extended development team about the communication channels used in your team. Set up tools like Slack, Trello, or Jira for project management and daily communication.

3. Providing access to technical infrastructure. Ensure that all team members have access to the tools necessary for efficient work. These may include version control systems, code repositories, etc.

4. Discussing internal procedures and rules. Communicate to the team how you plan to measure project progress, which metrics you will use to evaluate performance developers, and how often you expect feedback from them. This will help avoid misunderstandings and conflicts.

Establishing Clear Objectives

What do you think is the most important thing at this stage? The answer is simple. You need to ensure that both in-house and external specialists are working towards the same goal. To do this, you should:

• Clearly define the project goals. This may involve creating a product from scratch, implementing new functionality, or maintaining an existing system.

• Set milestones. Break the project into smaller segments. Each segment should have specific deadlines and deliverables. This will help track progress.

• Define KPIs. Predefine metrics to measure the team’s performance. These should relate to both the technical characteristics of the product (e.g., code quality or delivery speed) and the achievement of business goals (e.g., return on investment).

• Discuss communication issues: Frequency of meetings, reporting formats, communication channels—all of these should be discussed with the extended software development team at the very beginning of the collaboration. This will ensure you always know what stage of goal achievement you are at.

Project Kickoff and Execution

When all the details are discussed, it's time to start working on the project.

Project kickoff is the official start of collaboration. Now, the team needs to gather together (in whatever format possible), discuss the final details, and set the tone for the subsequent work.

The further work on the project includes:

• Prioritizing tasks. If the team uses an agile development methodology (which is most commonly used these days), this step involves planning the upcoming sprint. Specifically, it means defining the scope of work and aligning the team’s focus.

• Moving toward set goals. The team starts coding, testing, and building according to the project’s defined requirements.

• Monitoring progress and making adjustments. As the team completes tasks, it is important to track the status of the project. This allows for timely identification and resolution of problems.

The success of this stage depends on how accurately the previous steps for organizing the work with the extended team were followed.

Dedicated vs Outsourcing vs. Extended Teams: A Comparative Analysis

All three terms—dedicated team, outsourcing, and extended development team—refer to outsourcing work on a project to external developers. However, there are significant differences between them. Let's explore them further.

When to Consider an Extended Development Team?

There are several situations where it makes sense to consider the extended team model.

1. Need for rapid scaling. Is your business growing quickly? Do you need additional staff but don’t have time for long-term hiring? An extended team can help.

2. Need for specific expertise. If your internal team lacks certain skills, it’s not always necessary to hire a full-time employee. You can find an external specialist who will integrate into your team and contribute to the project.

3. Risk of missing deadlines. Is it time to release the product, but your internal resources are exhausted? This is another reason to turn to external developers. Extra hands and minds can easily save the situation.

4. Limited budget. Hiring external specialists is cheaper than increasing your full-time team. This is why extended teams are optimal for startups.

5. A responsible project requiring personal control. Not every project can be fully outsourced. Often, the client wants to retain the right to control the development process themselves. This opportunity is exactly what extended teams provide.

Want to get the best global talent at your disposal? Need to relieve your internal team? Want to speed up time-to-market and beat your competitors? Create an extended software development team on your project, and all of this will become a reality.

Challenges of Managing an Extended Development Team

If you’ve decided to integrate external developers into your internal team, you should consider not only the benefits of this approach, but also the certain challenges that come with it. It’s better to know about these challenges in advance.

• Communication Barriers. If you’re bringing in foreign specialists, be prepared for language, cultural, and time zone barriers. However, some of these can easily be turned into advantages. For example, thanks to different time zones, work on the project can continue around the clock.

• Integration difficulties. External developers may use work methods different from yours. Therefore, it’s important to discuss all expectations for collaboration in advance.

• Limited visibility. It can be challenging to monitor the work of remote employees as closely as you would like. To avoid this, it’s important to use reliable communication channels, reporting tools, analytics, and project management systems.

• Risks related to data security. This is especially relevant for projects involving sensitive user data. To minimize risks, work only with a trusted provider who ensures the reliability of the provided staff.

• Team engagement. It’s logical that full-time employees are more invested in the company’s development and the project’s success. Therefore, when bringing in external specialists, make sure to focus on their adaptation and motivation.

As you can see, with a thoughtful approach to forming extended development teams, all potential challenges can be easily overcome, leaving you in a winning position.

Future Trends in Extended Development Teams

The popularity of the extended team model in the field of software product development is gaining momentum. What transformations can we expect for this approach to organizing workflows in the near future?

• Focus on the use of AI and automation. Innovative technologies will allow companies to optimize project management and minimize the risks associated with working with remote employees.

• Preference for hybrid work formats. Companies will become increasingly interested in combining internal teams with external specialists. This will allow them to tap into the global talent pool while still maintaining control over processes.

• Emphasis on Agile and DevOps. Recent practices show that more and more teams are abandoning classical development methodologies in favor of flexible approaches. This allows extended teams to integrate more smoothly into internal processes and stay on the same wavelength as the in-house team.

• Expanded integration of specialized tools. Collaboration platforms are an essential attribute of extended development teams. As this model of cooperation spreads, new tools will emerge, and existing services will be improved.

• Maximum focus on data security. This issue is critical for all companies that engage external specialists. As a result, improved security protocols will emerge, and decentralized development and blockchain will become more relevant.

In summary, the future of extended teams is closely tied to the implementation of progressive technologies, process automation, and the increasing spread of this work format.

Create Your Extended Development Team with Darly Solutions

Darly Solutions is your reliable partner in creating unique digital solutions that will become a competitive advantage and the hallmark of your business.

We are ready to strengthen your internal team with specialists in Web and mobile development, UI/UX design, and testing. A qualified project manager will seamlessly integrate our experts into your processes and ensure smooth operations.

Contact Darly Solutions for a personalized consultation and experience the full potential of an extended development team from a trusted provider.