“We’re living in a world where people can become businesses in 60 seconds.” Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb.

And that is now possible thanks to the leaders of the sharing economy, but to become one of them you are going to need a little more time than that.

Speaking from experience here. We’ve developed a number of marketplace platforms, including Arcbazar, the first and the largest crowdsourcing platform for architecture and design projects.

In this article, we are exploring the major challenges of peer-to-peer marketplace development and showing how industry leaders are tackling them with technology.

These challenges are all about the core purpose of a marketplace: reducing search and transaction costs for buyers and sellers.

Continue reading “3 Key Challenges of Peer-to-Peer Marketplace Development and How to Solve Them With Technology”

“There are bad sides to everything but I think, for the most part, online dating is one of those things that is really solving one of the society’s problems.“ Gary Kremen, co-founder of Match.com.

Don’t you agree?!

A lot of entrepreneurs do, as the global revenue in the Dating Services segment amounts to US$4.6 billion in 2016. And the market is still growing at a pace of about 4.7%.

Online daters pursue different goals. Some look for serious relationships, some want to just flirt, others are in search of ‘no strings attached’ hook-ups. In response to this demand, there is already a wide array of successful online dating platforms trying to cater to those needs, along with diverse interests of users.

Continue reading “How Much Does It Cost to Build a Dating Website?”

Let me guess, you are probably looking for an optimal solution that:

• works
• can be delivered on time and within a budget
• something you won’t hate yourself for in the future?!

We all do, but options are endless and it is extremely difficult to navigate for non-tech professionals.

On top of that, most of the advice on the topic is so contradicting that it makes you even more confused.

We will do our best to shine the light on the situation and help you make the right choice, be it a custom or an off-the-shelf CMS.

So we’ll relieve some of this decision making burden, by dissecting and comparing the main types of solutions available. We will start by looking at the types of off-the-shelf CMS solutions, continue with custom CMS systems and finish with a summary of advantages and disadvantages. Let’s dive in.

Continue reading “Custom Built Website vs Off-the-Shelf CMS: Which One Is Best for Your Project?”

Have an idea for a hotel booking website, but unsure of how to approach the development process?

In this article, we’ll help you see the main aspects of creating a hotel booking website, including existing business models, inventory sourcing, as well as development options.

Continue reading “How to Create a Hotel Booking Website?”

If you are looking for a less geeky, more business-friendly explanation of the differences between Symfony and Yii that will help you actually understand what to choose for your project this article is for you.

This is not a typical X vs Z framework article, in which programmers go into full detail about all features of frameworks in question and discuss implications of these differences only from the ‘programmer’s perspective’.

In this article, we’d like to show you the most important points for you, as a client, when it comes to choosing the technology for your website or web app. Therefore, you won’t find an exhaustive list of differences between Yii vs Symfony here, only what we think will help you make your decision.

Continue reading “Client Perspective on Symfony vs Yii: Which is Better for Your Project?”

Acquiring new customers is up to 25% more expensive than retaining new ones (Harvard Business Review).

Return users and customers can be a particularly healthy profit source for virtually any business. Website owners use a lot of strategies and tools that help bring those users back.

For years, entrepreneurs have been re-engaging users with emails, SMS and mobile app notifications, now there is one more tool – web push notifications.

This article will take you behind the scenes of websites with push notifications, explaining how everything works and how others leverage this tool to see great results.

Continue reading “How to Take Full Advantage of Web Push Notifications?”

Planning to launch a new website? First of all, congratulations on the new endeavor!

If you feel a little overwhelmed and unsure of how to best approach your new project, this article is for you. We’ll show you in bird’s-eye view what you need to take into consideration when planning your new website:

• Key issues to address
• Optimal sequence of steps
• Major options you’ll probably face along the way.

You can also use this article as a blueprint to prepare project specifications for a vendor (web development team, designer, SEO agency etc.).

Continue reading “8 Point Checklist for Planning a New Website”

If you are still into Apache vs Nginx comparison, this article may help make up your mind and give a bit broader look at Nginx.

For quite a long time we had been using Apache as a default web server and Nginx only for high load projects until one day Apache went down with only 300 users.

That situation and further experience with Nginx shifted our perception of it as a server suitable only for high loads to a server that is just better for almost any project.

Having worked with Nginx for a few years already, we’ve seen its advantages in projects of various scale, even very small.

However, we’ve noticed that many of our American clients still stick to Apache. It happens, either because they don’t think that other web server will make a difference or don’t know a better alternative.

Knowing the pros and cons of both technologies, we truly believe that Nginx is the best option in most cases and we’ll show you why.

Continue reading “Apache vs Nginx: How We Chose Nginx Over Apache After 300 Users Case”

If you read tech news, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard about progressive web apps (PWAs). However, after going through the articles and videos available on the topic, we saw that most of them have been created by developers for developers. That’s why those of you on the business side may still be struggling to understand what a PWA really is and what its business applications are.

In this article we will explain the concept behind PWAs, as well as show how PWAs are different from all other apps and websites we already have. Most importantly, we’ll give you ideas of how you can use PWAs for your business.

• Why Progressive Web Apps?
• What are progressive web apps and what is really new about them? What are their benefits and limitations?
• How can you apply PWAs to your business?

Continue reading “Does Your Business Need a Progressive Web App? [Infographic]”

It depends!

I am sure you’ve heard that one before. However, we’ll do our best to demonstrate exactly what the cost of your app depends upon, so by the end of this article you will have an idea of how much it may cost to develop your web application.

What Are We Estimating?

Let’s make sure we are on the same page when talking about a web application, as quite often this term gets misused.

According to Wikipedia, a web app is a client-server software application in which the client (or user interface) runs in a web browser. This is basically a desktop software that runs in your browser and you don’t need to install it on your computer.

Please note that in this article we are considering only custom web application development (because it is what we do). Therefore, we are not talking about websites built with an off-the-shelf CMS like WordPress or Magento.

In addition to that, we are concentrating only on the development cost, excluding custom design and UX from this calculation.

Continue reading “How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Web App?”