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Looking for businesses to start in Toronto?

Toronto is an economic powerhouse within Canada. The city holds the most population of all Canadian cities, ranking 4^th in all of North America. Whether you’re looking for professional growth or extra cash, opening up the right business can surely provide a long-term income stream.

The authority of Toronto even featured a 9-step plan for new startups. Entrepreneurs can benefit, settle, and establish a business under the law to make substantial profits from the investments. No wonder why people continue to contribute to the hub’s economy through different ventures.

Let’s review the top five business ideas you should consider in Toronto to make your living better.

01. Cleaning Services

Canadians love to maintain clean and healthy surroundings, presenting endless opportunities in the cleaning sector. Every Toronto home, vehicle, or business requires routine cleaning where you can step forward to take the mundane responsibility.

It’s more a self-employment option for many, requiring literally no great skill, equipment, or timeframe. All it takes you the willingness to handle dirt, basic cleaning supplies, and insurance. The versatile field, however, is rather wide with many embedded segments:

• Maid Cleaning Service
• Window Cleaning Service
• Automobile Cleaning Service
• Carpet Cleaning Service
• Janitorial Cleaning Service

All except automobile cleaning won’t cost you much. Some customers will even provide their preferred supplies to get the job done. It’s something to start small, gradually building of reputation through the connected customers, and enjoy substantial growth.

02. E-Commerce Business

Canada, situated right next to the USA, has almost all leading e-commerce sites in operation. However, the courier system or product delivery management has yet to reach the top level. That’s where you can grab the opportunity to make high profits on limited capital.

Everybody needs personalized hand delivery services now and then, without requiring costly equipment. It’s easy to base the business at your home, establish communication with the involved parties, and set booking appointment schedules. A steady backpack with a bicycle, car, or pickup should do the job.

A lot of Toronto residents have a knack for current, available, established e-commerce. So, you can even start your own site/app based on the local needs. Treating clients respectfully and making deliveries on time can surely help you progress rather quickly in the locality.

03. Home-Based Service Business

Lots of different options are available for you to consider when it comes to home-based business. They mostly require minimum capital, leisure time, and relevant skills. The skills needed are often the ones you already possess. You can also opt for online/offline courses to upgrade your skills.

The best home-based business options to try in Toronto are:

• Online Tutoring
• It’s a rather straightforward approach to share your certain educative skills with others online. The tendency of online teaching still remains popular, following the emergence of Covid-19. You can cast a wide net of your tutoring ventures through many leading online services. It includes – Kijiji, Craigslist, UniversityTutor, Social Media, Libraries, and/or Billboards.

• Affiliate Marketing
• The art of reaching more audiences to increase sales has kept the demand for affiliate marketing high. You’ll need to craft a strong, engaging, informative base platform to refer other website/app products. Building such a website is easy and cheap when you are an expert on the technical as well as marketing side. Otherwise, you’ll have to hire professionals to do things.

• Business Blogging
• Writing informative, suggestive, collaborative online articles are more like an alternative to affiliates. Instead of referrals, you’ll have to create content based on the target audience of a specific business niche. Enticing and quality blogs are simple forms of such work to drive more traffic to sites. And it’s directly associated with search engine optimization (SEO).

Graphic designing, online consultancy, web/software/app development, etc. are some of the top tech-oriented home services you can afford in Toronto. The skills related to these tasks can apply to any place, condition, and time; making them a personalized solution.

04. Food Truck or Catering Business

Everybody loves a tasty treat at celebrations like parties, get-togethers, festivals, etc. It’s a solid idea to serve people looking for healthy, delicious, and easy meals. And the range of available entities in Toronto is endless, featuring convenience stores, roadside food stands, farm/flea markets, and niche sites/apps.

Operating a food vending truck is another alternative to selling meals on roadways and parking lots. You can even set your truck 30 meters away from a restaurant with proper paperwork. However, food courts are not included for such leverage, requiring you to remain cautious.

The initial investment will cost about $5K up to $50K for catering, depending on your initiatives. And it’ll take about $35K to $75K with food trucks. The latter requires extra permissions and paperwork, hence the extra cost. Despite being costly, the regulations for operating a food truck are rather strict in Toronto.

05. Sustainable Product Business

Sustainable business ideas put environmental concerns at the forefront of the operation, profitability, goodwill. It’s a relatively new yet notably popular portfolio to get the attention of general public. But the landscape is rather wide as it’s possible to produce, sell, market sustainable products.

Organic foods and urban agriculture are directly related to green farming. Biodegradable packaging, less paper usage, waste management are associated with recycling. Handmade, second-hand, or homemade clothing are popular options to keep the initial investment within your reach.

Not many works are conducted to reveal the feasibility of sustainable businesses in Toronto. It means you’ll have to figure out the what, how, where of the opportunities closely. Consider investing in projects like renewable energy, ecotourism, green building, etc. with money to spare in hand.

Wrapping Up

Toronto is one of the most diverse cities on the planet with over 200 distinctive cultural communities. The city’s economic growth is more than that of Canada itself, featuring impressive growth opportunities for entrepreneurs.

You better start looking into the overall economic landscape of Toronto to find your ultimate source of income. Launching and keeping up with the venture can provide you with the desired breakthrough in the financial state.

Contact Tectera a web design company in Toronto do design a website.

Looking for Mobile App Vs Web App guide?

Apps, short for applications, are a readily used term among general users. And they’re often found confused with mobile app and web app. Developers to create apps know the disparities rather well. It’s important to resolve this common misconception to make the most of each one.

Knowing whether they’re similar, dependent, opposite can help you choose the right option. Let’s explore the basic differentiating details between web apps and mobile apps in brief.

What is a Mobile App?

Mobile apps are software programs, specifically designed to run on mobiles. These are primarily built for touchscreen devices like – smartphones, tablets, consoles. Most apps are launched and installed via two leading sources – App Store (iOS) and Play Store (Android). Android covers 71% of the total app users whereas iOS holds 28% share in the global market.

You can classify mobile apps into two broad categories based on the platform/system compatibility –

1. Native: Apps are created for a niche platform (iOS or Android), often requiring hardware access for full functionality. Most apps are native apps, developed for a specific platform.
2. Hybrid: A single code base allows the app to become compatible with all available operating systems (OSs). Popular Hybrid apps used by SME/Startup are Flutter, React Native, Ionic.

Apps are developed using specific programming languages and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), depending on the platform.

• iOS app mostly uses Objective-C/Swift (program language) with Xcode IDE.
• Android app uses Java (program language) with Android Studio/Eclipse IDE.

Google and Apple also have proprietary development tools, software development kits (SDKs), interface elements. Developers primarily use these features to create, test, launch native mobile apps.

Mobile App: Positives and Limitations

The general advantages of modern mobile apps can be broadly outlined as follows –

• Rich, smooth, engaging user experience through device-specific features.
• Further access to hardware and even other software for enhanced performance.
• Utilization of device resources to become more responsive and/or speedy.
• Multiple monetization possibilities are included to get direct money from users.
• Offline capabilities enable access to features or contents without internet.
• Real-time communication with users is established via notifications or reminders.
• Easy addition and functioning of new and/or complex features with tools.

However, you’ll have to address some drawbacks while choosing mobile apps for sure –

• Developing an app mostly starts from scratch, requiring extensive workload.
• Costing is high; tends to increase with more features, advancement, complexity.
• Regular/Periodic update is a must for safety and security of data/information.
• Consistent maintenance is necessary to keep up with Store Terms & Conditions.
• Initial approval from the App/Play Store is challenging with many regulations.

What is a Web App?

Web apps are self-sustaining software with no downloading or installing requirements. The software fully runs on web browser, remaining highly adaptive to any device. Its program is stored in a remote server, allowing access to users via Internet when requested. A web app is different from website as web apps display intended content for user interactions.

Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s GSuite are the two best web app examples. Web apps utilize HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python without any standard SDK (software development kit). Instead, developers often have access to custom templates to craft the required features. However, OS compatibility and/or support may be limited for some web apps.

Web App: Positives and Limitations

The standard benefits offered to the users/developers by a web app include –

• Less cost, effort, time requirement in development without any special features.
• In-browser access means no involvement in downloading/installing issues.
• A somewhat steady codebase to remain compatible with all operating systems.
• Automated, direct, instant updates applied to the app without notifications.
• Simple, easy, quick development using many custom templates available online.
• Instant launching for user attention without going through approval process.
• Fast discovery/analysis by search engines for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Likewise, some associated problems of using web apps to be dealt with –

• Working offline and/or under poor internet connectivity isn’t possible.
• Difficult to discover independently or through SERPs with no database listing.
• Unapproved app quality and/or security means safety isn’t guaranteed.
• Limited to no access to specific hardware or software features on the device.
• Variances in versions and updates may cause some compatibility issues.

Difference Between the Two – Mobile App vs Web App

Mobile App	Web App
Requires More User Action	Takes Less/Minimum User Action
Need to Download and Install from App/Play Store	Instant Access through Web Browser
App Gets Stored in Mobile/Device	App Remains Stored in Remote Server
Flexible User Interface	Somewhat Simple User Interface
Faster Navigation through Short Loading Time	Poor Connectivity Leads to Extended Loading Time
Compatible with Complex Functionalities	Minimal Support on Complex Functions
Periodic Updates are to be Downloaded from Store	Updates/Patches are Directly Applied to the Entire App
Apps can Work Offline	Apps Only Work Online
Developing Cost is High	Developing Cost is Low
Specific Platform Coding is Necessary	No Coding Specification is Required
Software Development Kit (SDK) is a must	No SDK Standard Available

Both apps are considerably similar in terms of appearance, response, and functionality from the user’s perspective. That’s where the confusion arises where people start to treat the two app types alternately.

Let’s consider the YouTube mobile app against the YouTube web app to differentiate between the two. You can access the mobile app instantly where the app features a particular interface. Now accessing YouTube through a web browser on the same mobile will come up with the same interface.

Similarly, YouTube exhibits the same features, interface, and functionality as other compatible devices. You can access the YouTube web app from a desktop where YouTube’s native mobile app doesn’t work. Instead, you’ll be asked to download and install ‘YouTube’ software to run the platform.

Which One to Choose – Web App vs Mobile App

Developing an app has become a crucial action required to succeed in online marketing/presence. You may have to develop both, depending on potential audiences, growth, and expansions. Nonetheless, you should go for mobile apps when you expect direct purchases from customers.

Meanwhile, web apps are particularly good when you’re trying to reach more audiences. Anyone with internet access can browse, find, explore, choose your services/products. It’s indeed a viable choice for enterprises, businesses, startups with limited resources, reputation, futuristic ventures.

Contact Tectera a mobile app development company in Toronto to develop web app and mobile app.

Looking for web design accessibility checklist?

Access isn’t necessarily confined to whether users can find, view, enjoy content anytime. In the web design community, the term implies equal accessibility, understanding, and interaction for everyone.

This everyone primarily focuses on disabled users as 15% of the world population makes up this group. It features physical issues related to vision, hearing, mobility, speech, and cognition. That’s why all your content must be aligned accordingly to let these users understand your services and/or products.

Three Compliance Levels of WCAG

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set the international standards to make web content appropriately accessible for the disabled. It features a distinctive three-level hierarchy for the prioritized support:

• A: Must-Have
• AA: Ideal Condition
• AAA: Exclusive

The long, detailed, technical guidelines are difficult to digest even for developers, let alone general people. However, certain standards are more or less common sense to comply with WCAG.

Keeping the technical aspects aside, let’s take a look at the features to make your resources accessible. A simple yet rather obligatory checklist for web design accessibility includes the following.

1. Structure and Semantics

• Headings: Different headings (H1, H2, H3, …) break down a webpage content into multiple segments of information. They particularly help users with vision impairment. Always start your page with a single H1, followed by H2 subheadings as well as H3 subheadings within H2.

Accessibility strategies associated with headings involve:

1. Bypassing of Content Blocks
2. Accurate, Relevant, Catchy Texts
3. Hierarchy or Outline of Page

Title tags slightly differ from H1 in terms of on-page SEO. H1 specifies the primary content heading/title. But the title tag defines the webpage to show up on search engine results.

• Language: Setting a standard language for all the contents is essential to support assistive technology (from conventional to trending). Tools can easily render the rules on captions, pronunciations, texts more precisely.

Go for plain language where possible to keep things simple yet engaging. Hemingway can surely help tighten the words for conciseness. Don’t miss out on the explanation for unusual abbreviations or complex words.

• Lists: Listing several items on a webpage effortlessly reveals how things are related, how many are there, and/or the sequence of sorted items. Don’t list manually to get rid of unwanted issues related to device compatibility.

• Tables: Relevant information of different types is put in tables in terms of a potential relationship. The grid of data should have a header as well as a title. However, it’s recommended to avoid layout tables for visuals.

2. Links and Navigation

• Links: A descriptive, identifiable, creative link text with its intention can offer more accessibility. Readily used ‘click here’ or ‘read more’ isn’t helpful in this context. It’s because the user doesn’t know his/her destination from those words.

Keeping the link text distinctive from the surrounding ones is important. It particularly aids users with low vision or color blindness. Whether clicking on the link will open the requested page in existing/new tabs should be prioritized.

• Focus Order: You can’t expect a webpage to rank higher in SEO with a random order of contents. So, setting the right focus order is a must for every webpage. The primary requisite of focus order involves logic, intuitiveness, sorting.

Links, buttons, controls, form inputs are some of the foremost focusable elements. Custom elements may present difficulty in implementation and markup. So, sticking to native ones (all the mentioned elements) is an ideal practice.

• Site Navigation: Sites/Pages with simple yet catchy navigation have a different taste altogether. It may start with multiple ways to access a webpage. Site maps as well as site search are the most widely used navigational approach here.

A consistent navigation pattern should feature the same functionality for headings, labels, and texts. Having a list can also help the accessibility. You should try the visible or non-visible ‘you are here’ indicator for the users’ information.

3. Images and Visual Design

• Alt Text: It stands for alternative text displayed instead of webpage pictures. Every image must feature a text to describe the content, meaning, intention of the image. It’s essential as slow internet connectivity often prohibits images from loading properly.

Alt texts allow the users to feature a semantic meaning, readable for search engines. The same goes for icons specifically used in the webpage to hold a meaning. Additionally, using alt text is mandatory for images or icons having visual text.

• Color Contrast: Relying on colors alone for distinguished texts may present issues for colorblind people. Instead, non-color indicators like bold, italics, underlines seem like better alternatives. You should enable such features as keyboard focus as well as mouse hover.

Contrast plays a crucial part in attraction by adding visual interest to colors. Testing the color combo is a must to discover and resolve potential vision deficiencies related to appearance. A 4.5:1 contrast ratio is good for regular texts whereas it’s 3:1 for large texts.

• Text Resizing: It involves zooming, fonts, and styles integrated for the readers. Sufficient spacing is necessary to eliminate cognitive webpage overload. It concerns line, paragraph, and even word spacing alongside line height.

Visual styling with the font and format must allow effortless reading for all users. No need to utilize uncommon fonts, unless specified for decoration. Keep at least 200% zooming since smartphone users frequently use the feature.

4. Multimedia, Animations, and Motion

• Audio and Video: Prerecorded items must come with a description, especially a transcript. The transcript should contain meaningful narration, dialog, sounds. A synchronized caption per multimedia content on each webpage is also recommended.

Every integrated video, audio, gif, reel, etc. requires to have general control settings (stop, resume, mute, adjustments). You better use appropriate or standard markups for settings to avoid confusion.  Autoplay of those contents can’t take place either.

• Alternatives: Users with visual or hearing impairments may not get the message from dynamic content. So, providing a sufficient description for every multimedia content is another prerequisite. You may skip the unnecessary ones, but it’s obligatory for the must-check contents.

You can provide a reasonable explanation right below for certain audiences for further clarity. Controls, flashing, captions, media players are also part of the alternative texts. It slightly differs from that of pics as multimedia features need somewhat longer descriptions/explanations.

• Seizures: Some dynamic content can cause the users to blink more than usual. Eye strain becomes an issue with a webpage full of such content. That’s where seizure, a potential negative effect, takes place to restrict the design’s overall functionality and performance.

Neither of the contents should cause seizures, calling in a triggered physical reaction, resulting from photosensitivity. Avoid multimedia, animation, in-motion content to have 3 or more flashes in a second. There’s a general flash/red flash threshold to maintain as well.

5. User Input, Forms, and Dynamic Content

• Keyboard Accessibility: Precise clicking or hovering via a mouse isn’t applicable for all kinds of users. Instead, they have to rely on advanced assistive technology for navigation. It all starts with allowing your entire website to be navigated through a keyboard.

Buttons like ‘tab’, ‘shift’, ‘enter’, and arrow keys should take the lead. Keyboard inputs must facilitate a visible focus order (highlight/border) for all the interactive elements, matching the layout. It further concerns the immediate removal of all focusable elements.

• Form Labels: Forms require users to enter information through radio buttons, checkboxes, text fields, dropdowns. The required input must feature a proper label, letting users know what info to be entered. People with special needs can particularly benefit from such label-form collaboration.

All the form labels better come in a logical layout while keeping things keyboard accessible. Reasonable formats for numeric data should be available. Additional instructions for specific text fields are to be maintained. Also, don’t forget to put asterisks (*) on any side of mandatory form fields.

• Error Handling: Everybody makes mistakes; some are negligible whereas a few ones are grave. And it particularly concerns a wide range of errors to happen. Error messages must become visible upon faulty user action in texts with/without a cautionary icon.

The internal error lying within the source code presents the actual challenge in terms of handling. All the crucial parts must be tested, revised, implemented to avoid large-scale changes. Don’t forget to inform users about your ongoing actions to resolve the errors.

• Dynamic Content: Web elements to update/change in real-time without any reload/refresh are dynamic contents. All the changes are based on selections, inputs, newsfeeds regarding user interaction. Techs like JavaScript, API, Ajax have made these quite easy and popular.

Avoiding silence can break your webpage views in no time, requiring you to help users find the changes. Proper focus, reasonable timeout, independent input are integral parts of such a feature. A multifaceted approach must be implemented throughout for technical solutions.

Wrapping Up

Making your website accessible for all is a somewhat challenging task. The outcome is quite satisfactory nonetheless. There are several tools available to help you audit, detect, resolve accessibility issues rather quickly.

Contact Tectera a web development company in Toronto to create a website.

Looking for website load time statistics?

Imagine the website/webpage to take minutes to load! Well, we all went through that frustrating, irritating, and annoying experience. it’s none other than slower load time/speed to make users turn back from the pages/sites almost immediately.

Load time indicates the time in seconds required to fully access a webpage/website. Internet users click on a link/address to reach an intended webpage/website. The time taken to fully load (≈ appear) on the screen is the load time for that site/page.

What Makes Website Load Time So Important?

You can comfortably enjoy the following benefits by speeding up the overall loading time:

• A satisfactory user experience (UX) through reduced waiting time.
• Potential increase in conversion rates against lower bounce rates.
• Faster loading pushes the page or site in Google ranking for SERPs.
• Greater interactivity with visitors through superior visual stability.
• Fast-loading site or page goes rather well with smartphone users.
• Superb brand perception among buyers to outmatch competitors.
• Fewer servers and bandwidth requirements enable cost efficiency.

So, maintaining a healthy load time KPI is mandatory to keep up with user satisfaction.

Factors to Impact or Control Load Time

What actually makes the difference between slow and speedy for websites or webpages? It’s the following technical facts you’ll need to focus to lower the time requirement:

• Catching
• Code Efficiency
• Core Web Vitals Optimization
• Device Type
• Hosting and Server
• HTTP Requests
• Image Optimization
• Mobile Optimization
• Network Quality
• Third-Party Scripts

Implementing, Optimizing, Monitoring is the strategy to make these factors speed up the load time.

How is Load Time Measured for Websites or Webpages

You may think that load time is an individual metric in play; actually, it’s not. There are multiple KPIs behind the back to contribute to web speeds. The key metrics involved in deciding the speed include:

1. Page Load Time: Total time needed to load a page, starting from user action/click to end with a full appearance on the screen.
2. Time to First Byte (TTFB): Time required by the web browsers to get the first response upon the DNS request.
3. Response Time: Total time spent to obtain a complete request on the clicked link/URL from the web server.
4. First Input Delay (FID): Time needed for the browser to start responding or functioning after the user clicks on the link/URL.
5. Round Trips: Time spent between HTTP requests to the server with the server response to HTTP, featuring a complete cycle.
6. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Time required by the largest webpage image/text to appear clearly on the screen.
7. HTML Parsing: Time spent to fully execute the HTML script upon parsing the HTML into a DOM (Document Object Model).

Must-Know Website/Webpage Load Time Stats

There are cool facts, necessary numbers, and usable practices to find in the 2024 stats related to web loading speed/time. The following facts should intrigue you in a better understanding:

• There are 25 different factors to break or make the load time, depending on the site or page’s intention or purpose.
• Light webpages (featuring simpler HTML) load as much as 487% faster compared to heavier ones with complex scripts.
• The average load speed is 5 seconds on desktop/laptop but the time requirement reaches up to 8.2 seconds on mobiles.
• Load time depends on the site’s functioning industry; healthcare (insurance/hospitals) pages take 6 seconds on average.
• The average FID (First Input Delay) on desktop/laptop is 73 milliseconds which counts 59.73 milliseconds on mobiles.
• An entire website (not a webpage) roughly requires 3 seconds of load time on a desktop due to extra content weight.
• Hefty websites to feature large files (software/games) can take as much as 486% longer time to load fully for general surfing.
• The average time to load an entire website on a mobile device is 22 seconds due to the heavy content attribution.
• Websites or Webpages take 9% extra time to load on mobile browsers compared to their desktop/laptop loading.
• A one-second load time features the highest conversion rate at 40%, decreasing with each additional webpage load time.
• The conversion rate becomes 34% for a two-second load time, dropping to 29% for anything slower than the 2secs frame.
• The likelihood of bounce rate increases by 132% for a 10-second load time against a single-second loading on mobiles.
• Average bounce rates are 8% for mobile users, 51.6% for tablet users, and surprisingly, 50% for laptop/desktop users.
• Scientific pages/sites hold the maximum bounce rate among top web genres, measuring 37% on mobiles.
• Sports sites/pages come first in conversion with a staggering 200 million+ sessions via mobiles in a year.
• Large media sites lose 10% of users on load time; losing about 7M (1sec), 41.4M (2sec), 62.1M (3sec) users per month.
• Nearly 53% of a website visitor simply leave the webpage when the loading speed takes more than 3 seconds on mobiles.
• Website conversion rates exponentially drop by 4.42% with each extra second needed to load within the first five seconds.
• 76% of the users prefer online shopping through mobiles; they ended up spending a total of $210B alone in 2023.
• 39% of online retailers/customers/visitors expect the load time of e-commerce webpages to be three seconds or less.
• As much as 70% of the customers revealed that loading time speed directly impacts their willingness to proceed further.
• Google considers 200 different factors to rank a webpage/website among which load time lies within the top 20 factors.
• Implementing CDN (Content Delivery Network) to use edge servers can increase speeds by a magnificent 72%.
• Replacement of HDD with SSD allowed many websites to become incredibly fast with a load time surge up to 270%.
• Optimizing the website images, making all the image sizes confined to 500KB, can deliver a 10% additional loading speed.
• The top 20 US sites have an average loading time of 08 seconds which reaches 1.96 seconds for the top 10 e-commerce sites.

Please Note that tracking website/webpage speed has been a crucial, interesting, relevant practice for SEO. Lots of dedicated surveys are regularly implemented to measure all the involved stats. So, seeing different numeric values for the mentioned facts in other articles is quite common.

Wrapping Up

To simply put, a faster loading speed rules the internet! Whether it’s search engines, target audience, or ongoing competition – more time to load can break all your plans. So, keep in touch with IT specialists to put continuous efforts into minimizing load time.

Contact Tectera who offer web development services to improve website load time.