Roughly a third of American small business owners use smartphones to manage their companies, performing tasks such as banking and customer relationship management.
If there’s a business task to be done, there’s an app that can help you quickly access to your essentials and be more productive and efficient. The folks at Desk.com recently created the awesome Infographic that highlights some useful mobile apps and puts financial management, communication and collaboration at the heart of your phone.
It’s by no means a comprehensive list – there are many smart tools and hidden gems that can make your business operations more effective. So let us add a few mobile apps for small businesses owners that we developed for our clients – check them out:
Love junk food, liquor, and/or fast food? We have a special treat for you.
“DB Best helped us develop three apps called “Junk Food Quiz”, “Liquor Quiz”, and “The Fast Food Quiz”. Join the crowd and play our poppin’ fun quiz games – you’ll feel like eating your iPhone. We guarantee the most fun you’ll ever have.” ~ Min and Jyan
All three apps are quiz games that provide a casual fun way to spend 10-15 minutes at a time. For “Junk Food Quiz” and “The Fast Food Quiz” there will likely be an element of nostalgia. For “Liquor Quiz” it will be a challenge for adults to identify some of their favorite alcohol brands.
The Tools Our Mobile Team Used for Developing the Apps
RevMob – possibly the best mobile ad network for both advertisers and publishers.
iOS SDK
Facebook API
Twitter API
Let’s dive in!
1. Junk Food Quiz
If you love chocolate, cookies, and chips, and dread eating carrots and cabbage, you will savor Junk Food Quiz, the only app that tests your knowledge of junk food. Yes, nine out of ten dentists disapprove of Junk Food Quiz, but you’ll give it two thumbs up.
Junk Food Quiz shows you pictures of junk food items and asks you to identify the maker of the item and the name of the item. It contains 240 questions with 12 levels of increasing difficulty (easy, medium, hard, and crazy hard). You can compete for the title of “biggest sweet tooth” by sharing the game and your scores with your friends on Facebook or Twitter.
2. Liquor Quiz
If you spend more time in bars than in bed and recognize what’s on the shelves of BevMo by sight, you will drink up Liquor Quiz, a new app by Bubblewrapps and the only app in the universe that tests your knowledge of hard liquor and allows you to achieve a buzz with no hangover!
Liquor Quiz shows you pictures of liquor bottles asks you to identify the brand of the bottle and the name of the liquor. It contains 240 questions with 12 levels of increasing difficulty (easy, medium, hard and crazy hard). You can share the game and your scores with your friends on Facebook or Twitter and compete for the title of “mightiest mixologist.
3. The Fast Food Quiz
If you love French fries and fried chicken more than fine dining, you will savor The Fast Food Quiz, the best app around that tests your knowledge of fine dining fast food. This game will completely undermine any diet you’re on, so make sure you aren’t a short drive away from your nearest drive-thru before you play it.
The Fast Food Quiz shows you pictures of fast food items and asks you to identify which restaurant makes the item and what the name of the item is. It contains 240 questions with 12 levels of increasing difficulty (easy, medium, hard and crazy hard). You can compete for the title of “first-rate fast foodie” by sharing the game and your scores with your friends on Facebook or Twitter.
Follow DB Best Video Channel on YouTube and check out our latest videos.
We’re in the process of revamping our YouTube channel where one of the major changes will be the look and feel that allows branding works across multiple devices. Over the coming weeks, you will be able to see the new design.
The changes make perfect sense as, according to our Analytics reports, more and more users are using Mobile for watching our video content:
People watch our channel everywhere, on their couches, at their desks, on the bus.
Anyway, YouTube “forces” channel owners, to get the new design, co-called YouTube One Channel.
As for now, now you can explore a range of DB Best videos including mobile development tips, interviews with our CEO and database migration experts, how to move your app to the cloud and the story of our history.
Navigating through our current channel, you’ll find we have split up our 160 videos into seven playlists:
Company – presents our company’s background, products, services for our clients and visitors.
Modernization – whether you are trying to solve efficiency and availability problems, simplify and consolidate data silos, or looking for ways to minimize licensing and maintenance costs, these videos show how DB Best can help.
Data Management – see how our team can help you reduce your overall IT budget, while achieving greater service availability, compliance, and security across your entire data landscape.
Database Products – for DBAs and everyone who would like to buy our Database Compare Suite or T-SQL Analyzer, as well as the rest of our database products, with these videos it is much easier to make an informed purchase decision or find support.
Mobile Development Portfolio – if mobile is your cup of tea, this playlist is showcasing all new projects from our mobile development pipeline.
Mobile & Web Development FAQ – find out what we are up to and what to lookout for your next mobile or web development project with us.
Web Development Portfolio – if you want to know how we create websites and web applications, check out this playlist.
Visit our YouTube channel now and see what is going on in DBBest world! And stay tuned for more changes in the near future.
Looking for a good place to eat in Dublin? The new iOS app we’ve delivered to one of our clients in Ireland makes it really easy to find local restaurants – with a “little” user reviews, ratings and comments. It’s also a part of the largest entertainment based website in the country.
Add your ratings and your comments to every restaurant listed – you decide their popularity!
The app allows finding your next favorite place by specific location, price or cuisine. See it in action:
Make the most of your visits in Ireland. Get personalized recommendations on your iPhone: http://youtu.be/V4RInEBO5O0
“We wanted to give our website a fresh look and feel that better reflects what we stand for, presents our services and is user-friendly for our clients and visitors.“ ~ Dmitry Balin, DB Best Co-founder and CEO
New DBBest.com: Our Objectives
The general look of the company website (http://www.dbbest.com/) has been updated back in 2011 and was in desperate need of a facelift and revitalization.
As our team started working on the new look-and-feel, we already had several primary goals in mind that had to be implemented in the new design.
First and foremost, we wanted to provide clear answers to what people are looking for when they visit our website. To understand what customers want, we heavily relied on Google Analytics, our internal analytics systems, and feedback from our support and sales teams across the globe.
New Elements and Modules We Introduced with the Re-launch
Responsive web design: flexible layouts and visual aesthetics
New website copy (with conversion in mind) and content organization: easy to navigate page payout with elegant combination of text, calls to action, graphics, and video
Landing page module that allows our marketing crew to create and promote new pages
On-site SEO best practices
Ecommerce module for our database products
Newsletters modules integrated with contact forms
WordPress Plugins We Used for the New Site
WP e-Commerce – a Shopping Cart Plugin that lets customers buy products, services and digital downloads online, using PayPal Payments, Google Checkout, Authorize.net and other payment gateways.
WordPress SEO – possible the best SEO plugin on the market.
Breadcrumb NavXT – adds breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location.
Better WordPress reCAPTCHA – the plugin utilizes reCAPTCHA (with support for Akismet) to help your blog stay clear of spams.
WP Video Lightbox – displays YouTube and Vimeo videos in an elegant lightbox overlay.
Our Redesign Methodology
“The big point is to keep iterating, keep working on it in the “live” environment as best as you can.” ~ Chris Brogan.
When it comes to redesigning a website, we use our iterative approach to changing things, right in sync with our Web Development Best Practices. DBBest.com is a WordPress website which means it’s super fun and easy for our web developers and designers to re-launch the entire ecosystem making all the changes in incremental steps.
The Process
1. The entire redesign process started with website structure and sitemap creation:
2. Our focus on providing fast answers helped us create a clean and simple primary navigation:
3. We came up with a new design of our homepage with a road-map to our products and services:
DBBEST.com’s new home page: before and after
4. We also wanted to brighten up the website using lighter color theme and vivid images that highlight what we do and how we do it:
5. With the new website structure, we have significantly increased the number of pages. Our marketing and technical writers created the whole new content that ideally fits the new layout and graphics:
Such professionally written content is great for search engines and helpful for people:
6. While wireframing on a napkin, we thought it might be a good idea to tell stories about our team, products and services and make the website more interactive. And sometimes putting only words is not enough to tell people what we do best. So we decided to spice up our new page layouts with videos from our popular YouTube channel:
7. Another great idea was to place our full Custom Development Portfolio under one umbrella making the Portfolio section more usable for all types of website visitors:
Moreover, from now on, every project in our portfolio comes with a more detailed description and several media files: screenshots and a video overview.
8. For DBAs and everyone who would like to buy our Database Compare Suite or T-SQL Analyzer, as well as the rest of our database products it became much easier to make a purchase with the “new and improved” checkout process in one convenient place.
9. To create the new online presence, from designing a responsive WordPress theme to working on on-page SEO, we set up a website testing environment. Upon the completion of all the steps , as well as throughout the development process, our Quality Assurance team have rigorously tested the website performance, every new plugin, design and code elements, page speed, and even every new chunk of text.
10. Once we all were satisfied with the results, we released it to the live “production” server: dbbest.com – check it out!
Take the Next Step
Customers often ask, “what would it take to redesign a website?” From our experience it’s a combination of several factors: clear vision as to what you would like to change and why, a professional and well-coordinated team of developers, and a flexible CMS or framework. Luckily, we had it all.
So what do all of you think about our new look? Love the new design? Or hate it? Let us know by leaving your comments below, sharing or liking the post.
