The sheer amount of businesses going into the mobile marketing ship is staggering. So today, you have an anchorage of marketers sweating and clamoring to come up with the best kind of layout for their application. The mobile App is a greater turner for marketers and SEO experts alike. Perspective wise the application industry has travelled beyond the reach of mere developers and designers so just to aid the business altogether, a lot of ready-made layout templates are rising just to assist the businesses better.
So your client does not have to wait for a very basic idea or look of the app that he wants made or your client can simply present an idea to you and you can have the application developed in relatively less time. That’s the advantage right? But there’s more, a lot of these templates come in with built in customization options so depending upon the pricing list you pick you can actually save a lot of development time and pitch your app idea through these templates. Let’s try get a taste of what we mean and look through some of the templates.
The One follows a series of templates by produced almost solely for the purpose of large scale businesses looking to mass produce an application that can earn them more viewership in the digital context. As the somber outlooks suggests, the template’s basic purpose is to translate business functionality and formality within the application, delivering dynamic and customized updates to you side by side. It’s multi purpose so therein is the first case for its appeal that we have picked out. There is more to its appeal however as the button space is something you can still easily edit in this template with a look of your choice. And top things off, this entire design seems to follow a certain minimalist path which is already trending as a design.
This one is especially needed by all you digital marketing brands going into the web design. In fact given the landscape of rapid digital branding, this is probably important for any business that is looking to tap into its audience in a different manner. Why a chat template? Because it is a standard that works very easily. You want a background on it? That’s easily manageable too and it just lets you work with your own look for your website. Chat functionality in mobile apps can be a great method to receive customer feedback through. But even better if Im using a mobile app in which I can talk to a staff personnel about something that seemed off with the website to me, then that just strikes a more personal chord with me. So if I as your customer am getting the feeling that you are doing the extra bit to reach to me then obviously I will be more inclined towards doing business with you.
So with chat functionalities, the customer view is pretty simple. They want a simple experience when giving feedback to their service provider. So recreating Whatsapp is not the concern for you, you want to give them a panel which is easy to use and completes the business need without any hiccups.
I added this one to get across a rather important point to a lot of developers or shippers of applications. Responsiveness has caught on as a raging fever and everyone, literally everyone, wants to port their websites on mobile to a responsive platform just to increase their appeal in their audience. Many marketers are still unsure how responsive in mobile has generated so much appeal but others are of the opinion that this is all because of the user friendliness that these interfaces offer. This one makes enough sense because if you consider the edge Apple had over Android, it was purely because of the ease users spoke about when using iOS’s apps and its interface. With templates like these becoming more widespread in the generic market for Android, a lot of phone users have been attracted back into going for Android. And considering how Android is so open, it makes sense as to why everyone is opting for responsive concepts in their mobile apps.
Coming to the template, it is not all that different from your website layouts that you see as the rage online. The difference in most of these templates is that they have been built to be fluid to use so as is the case with responsive mobile design, all the input fluidity and user experience is taken into context when these templates are being designed. Flubia’s approach is to take the content centered approach with the responsive design so overall template is one which I would give a thumbs up to.
This seems pretty standard right? Well yeah but in case you want to spend less time developing and coding on the application which alright at times because time constraints are pretty real. So in case you’re looking for something which can help you get your products or services listed on your application then this is one template which you might want to consider. Why? Because it is exceedingly generic so really you can meld it to your requirement as you want. And really the presence of this template is a simple message to the app makers: you’re low on time so you can and should use this. This is how digital branding works in a nutshell, you have less time and a lot of cyberspace to influence. By cyberspace I mean your audience’s cellphones of course.
This also helps when you want to use a menu for any other kind of items that are expansive. The one I can think of at the top of my head is something akin to a policy look up which can contain pages upon pages of text but it’s important material so it can be listed topic wise in a template like this. Not too much expenditure required on making complex menus.
Tutorial/ Assistive Websites for App Making
I have a lot to say about this one because this is easily one of the most debated things on web right now. So effectively there are really two camps which are arguing, one of them is arguing about how effective and efficient these sites are for time catering and optimizing. The other camp is talking about the developer market as well as the customizing element of each mobile application and how sites like these can really take away a lot from that development task.
I am more bemused by the divisions surrounding the issue rather than the site itself. Remember the core point, businesses want to save time so they need to be aware of the positives and negatives of any “app making” scheme that they chase. That is what as a client they should know and in case they aren’t aware well that’s why this article is here in any case. The conundrum in widespread implementation is that too many similar apps might start coming out if built by the same platform. There are enough business implications within that anyway which I will save for another post. On the other hand, the business pace is simply not patient with too many “from scratch” development of mobile applications as marketing is done “on the go” and people want quicker results.
To get to the site in question, this is a very well layered and well put out method of implementing a mobile application from static interface symbols and templates. The on site guide as well as flexibility in adding your own template makes for a more engaging usage and gives the option of putting out a better application .
This is one of the more recent styles of putting out an app. I refer to this term as PSD engineering and literally the output is the final layout that you would use for your mobile application. In terms of converting it to HTML or even XHTML, is very doable in the mainstream world of web development profession. This is a bit similar to the “from scratch” development implementation which is not a dead method by any means.
With PSD conversion however you’re handling less of the design aspects via the code and are just letting your graphic team work with the separate elements. Depending upon the expertise of your team, you can build a layout from scratch or edit an existing template. I mean now I do not have to worry about whether the image resolution or the image selection for the app are the correct ones or not. I, as the coder, can let the design team handle that bit and then the development bit simply become focused with ensuring that the CSS and scripting that links these elements together is done well.
The advantages? Your mobile app development team work as separate units but keep a checks on each other and try to churn out an output that sits well. But even more so, I can show the aesthetic look of the app to my client and put him to ease about what the application is going to be. So your developer can happily work on building and connecting the database while you go in and produce the frames of the app so that the client knows what is happening.
My take..
I have seen enough of the web design industry to say that “this is the method I want to stick with”. Like I said the sheer number of developers available for Android or iOS has made it difficult to standardize one method as the ruler of all in making apps. Is that good news? Absolutely because it leaves different needs and targets for different minded individuals and businesses.
A music label looking to build a catalogue of its products and artists wont care about the business effectiveness of the site as much as it would want to inspire an image of itself in its audience. Similarly, a strategy consultant’s main concern would be with ensuring that his business service is fully communicated to his audience to the site’s dynamics would have to translate that. With the difference in need comes in the difference of method, so by now this is a given that one size shoe does not fit all. And that I think should be your favorite element about this industry.
