What You Need To Know About Developing An E-Commerce Website

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

Many companies are examining how an e-commerce website can increase their profits. Many small businesses offer items to their clients via drop shipping or other methods, in order to maximise their income while keeping their costs as low as possible.

Such companies & businesses may think all they need to do is develop  a virtual store and buyers will flock to them to purchase items, however the reality couldn’t be further from it.

There are several things you need to know about developing a website which will serve an e-commerce function. By keeping these things in mind when your site is being developed you will find it easier to do business online.

Use images as much as possible
You want to make sure your site is visually strong. Using clear pictures of the items you are selling is an integral part to having a thriving e-commerce site. For companies selling services rather than goods, ensure your e-commerce site also includes your portfolio, to allow potential customers to get a feel for your work and become interested in what you have to offer them.

Please note: images are not just related to the items you are selling. Including icons that make the website easier to navigate is another vital aspect.

Instead of simply including a button that customers click to purchase an item, you should include an image that they will connect with buying.

Ensure all images and elements load properly.. and quickly
You want to make sure that, when your website is being developed, the correct code is being used. It is important every image and element loads properly. Nothing turns a potential customer off faster than an imperfectly functioning website.

Make your shop front easy to find
It is important the virtual shop front on your site is easy to find. It can be separate from the main portion of your website but it needs to be easy to find and connect to. You don’t want people to have to search around to find your storefront as they are likely going to visit another website instead and go with your competitors for their items or services.

Navigation & information: show the advantages of your products or services
A list of product categories or a grid of them can be the perfect thing to help your online store. Special deals and new arrivals are also good to coax the common web surfers to buy. You probably know that there is a huge chunk of online surfers who don’t know what they want exactly; they just want to hang around. Your goal as an online seller is to tap into that market and show them what they are missing out on.

At IT Pie we offer a range of web design and development services. We have access to the latest technology and always create functional and beautiful to look at designs. As a result, our clients online traffic is maximised and our client’s projects are profitable.

Google Analytics: Making It Easier To Measure Your Results

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

Google Analytics announced several updates to Goals, including a new set-up flow, new templates, and new verification capabilities, making it easier for you to measure customer behavior and evaluate your performance.

How to get started
Goals are set at the profile level. To find a profile in your Google Analytics account, click the Admin tab, then navigate to the account, property, and profile you want. Click Goals, then Create a Goal. Follow the flow to set up and start measuring your Goals.

Templates: An easier way to set up Goals
Google have redesigned and added new templates to the Goals set-up flow, so you can add meaningful and actionable Goals to your Analytics account quickly.

When you use a template, the Goal setup flow is prefilled with suggested values (based on your industry) that you can either keep or change as you walk through the process. The templates are organised into four business objectives (Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry, Engagement) to help you think about the purpose of each Goal, plus you can still create custom goals. Note that “revenue” goals don’t necessarily imply a direct sale – these goals are user activities which have a strong impact on your desired business outcomes. Depending on your business model, a Revenue Goal could be a purchase, such as a completed checkout; or it could also be a successful lead submission, such as a scheduled appointment.

Verify each Goal before you save
In addition to the templates, there is a new way to check your setup before you save. You’ll find a verify option at the end of the setup flow that lets you see what the conversion rate would have been for the past seven days had this Goal been setup. Using the verify option gives you immediate feedback, so you can decide to save or modify the Goal configuration you’re working on.

Analyse how different Goals perform and relate to each other
Use the Goals Overview report under the Conversions section to see how your goal completions happen over time. Develop a sense how often a Goal conversion happens, and look to identify relationships between different Goals.

Ultimately, understanding how your users interact with your site allows you to make important decisions about site content and effective use of your marketing and advertising resources. In addition to the Goals overview report, you can look at the reports in Multi-Channel Funnels. These reports focus on your visitors’ entire path to conversion — including the different off-site interactions they had before making a purchase or completing a goal. See if you can discover new insights and additional opportunity through Goals.

Top 4 Website Design Fails

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

In the digital age a website is no longer an optional extra. Nowadays, it’s an essential and multi-faceted marketing tool; it can attract people to your brand, provide them with information about your products and services, help you to capture their details for further marketing, and even allow them to make a purchase directly.

Getting a website right requires a lot of thought and planning. The devil really is in the detail so you’ll want to avoid these 4 website design fails if you want to succeed:

1. Not making usability your top priority

Whatever it is you want users to do when they reach your website – whether it’s signing up for a newsletter or buying a product – you have to make it as easy for them as possible.

Placing obstacles in their way like unnecessary navigation steps, forms hidden below the fold just makes it all the more likely that they’ll abandon their visit before they’ve done what you want them to.

To avoid this, get people to test your website thoroughly for usability and fix whatever it is that’s turning them off.

2. Being invisible (or as good as invisible) to search engines

When people search for the products, services or information you offer you want to appear in the first few results. The reason being that the number of click-throughs you can expect from a search result decreases exponentially as that result drops down the list.

Making your website search engine friendly begins at the design phase: you need good site architecture so that search engines can find all your pages, the ability to update and edit content so that Google et al knows that your information is up to date.

One of the worst errors you can make is to design your site completely in Flash or to use a Flash intro. News flash: the search engines can’t read Flash at all.

3. Slow page load times

If your website’s bounce rate is really high then one of your prime suspects should be page load times. If your pages aren’t loading for users within 5 seconds, they’re getting bored of waiting and leaving to find your competitors.

Bad website designs put loads of unnecessary scripts (i.e. programming routines) in page templates. These scripts have to be run, in sequence, by the user’s browser before the page is fully loaded.

Solution? Get rid of all unnecessary scripting. If you’re providing a complicated site and have to include heaps of code then compress it as much as possible and put it at the bottom of the page so that the content appears for users as soon as possible.

4. Ignoring mobile devices

Global mobile internet usage accounts for around 10% of people accessing the web. In the UK that figure is much higher, with some estimating that it exceeds 50%. Building a website that doesn’t work properly or looks terrible on mobile phones and tablets is therefore a serious web design crime that could put off a huge number of potential users.

Website owners currently have three choices for making their website mobile friendly: making an app; redirecting users to a version of their website specifically designed for mobile devices; or, designing a responsive website which will work nicely on mobile phones and tablets.

The last option is the cleanest since it doesn’t require any downloading or redirecting. There are currently few websites that are utilising this technology well so getting there early could help you gain competitive advantage.

Is your website failing? Don’t wait for disaster. If your website is guilty of any of the above errors then now is the time to take remedial action. The pace at which online technology is developing means that users won’t forgive your shortcomings for long. You could end up trailing in the wake of your more forward thinking competitors. For a free consultation with IT Pie, call 029 2070 6336 now.

Google Analytics Dashboards Now Include Real-Time Widgets

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

The Dashboards feature in Google Analytics is a great way to arrange a set of related custom widgets into a report you look at frequently. Earlier this month however, Google expanded its dashboard functionality by adding four new real-time widgets that you can plug into any dashboard (new or existing).

How do I set up a real-time widget?

If you have set up a dashboard widget before, then this will be very familiar to you. Create a new dashboard or click on the +Add Widget menu option of an existing dashboard.

Pick any of the four widgets available in the Real-time: section and customise the widget. Below is a widget that shows active visitors from Canada but split up by Traffic-Type:

Here is how this widget was set up:

The ‘Counter’ real-time widget was chosen and given a custom name (“Canada Active Visitors”). Next, a ‘Group by’ on ‘Traffic type’ was set up; this is how you are able to see the split between referral and organic visits to your website in the widget. Finally, a filter was set up to only show visitors from Canada.

How do I combine with other dashboard widgets

By creating and combining widgets, you can perform many types of analysis at a glance.

Using filters you can compare different segments of your real-time traffic. For example, you can create two separate widgets that have different filters for the Country dimension (say Country==UK for one and Country==India  for another) and you can compare real-time UK traffic versus India traffic, side by side.

You can go further and set up real-time and non real-time widgets on the same dashboard. Here is how a dashboard may look like:

This is a non real-time widget that provides context on where visits come from across the globe over a period of one month.

Your Website’s Bounce Rate Might be Costing You Money

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

Google works hard to improve the quality of its search results and provide Google users with the absolute best search results possible. Over the past two years, Google’s focus has been on improving the quality of material being delivered. In doing this, they have focused on many new elements, including social engagement and a site’s bounce rate. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t know that, nor do they know how, ultimately, a low bounce rate affects their income – negatively.

What is Bounce Rate?

There are a lot of competing definitions for exactly what counts as an official “bounce”, but the only one that really counts is Google’s. According to them, a Bounce rate is “the percentage of visits that go only one page before exiting a site.”

Now, although Google have been analysing bounce rates for a long time,  they have only recently added a lot more weight and credibility to the statistic. What does this mean? It means that we now need to be taking a harder look at our site’s bounce rates and what we can do to improve them, especially if a page isn’t ranking well in search results.

How Do I Find My Site’s Bounce Rate?

The easy way to get this information is directly from Google. If you don’t already have Google Analytics connected to your site, you need to take a few minutes to set it all up; Google Analytics really is a great way for you to monitor you traffic. Not only does it allow you to reflect the data that Google uses to rank your site, but it’s also free.

The average bounce rate for a content based website is approx. 50%. However, if a website can get its bounce rate down below 50%, it will start to see search engine ranking improvement. But how do you do that?

How Do I Improve My Bounce Rate?

There are actually many ways you can tweak your website that will help keep your visitors on it. The key is to get them to click on other, internal links to additional content on your site.

A few quick improvements you can make to help facilitate an improvement in bounce rate include:

  • Ensuring you have at least two contextual links to other, relevant pages within the body of your page. If you’re a blogger, you could link back to a previous post or two which is relevant to the one your current visitors are reading.
  • Add an “Other Articles You May Enjoy” section at the end of your content. Sites that showcase more content on each page typically get more clicks to internal content. This maximises the traffic you’re already getting – and Google likes that.
  • Reduce the number of outbound links on your page or at the very least, have them open in a new window. Simple enough.
  • Encourage social engagement through comments.  The longer you keep them engaged on your site, the better the odds that they click to another page.

There are many other factors that can affect your site’s bounce rate but this is a great start. If you improve on these elements you should start to see a slight reduction in your bounce rate over time. We know it may seem like a lot of effort, but ignoring your website’s bounce rate may cost you money. The higher your bounce rate, the lower Google will rate your website – resulting in lower search rankings and a loss of potential customers visiting your website.

We like to encourage questions and communication, so if you have anything you would like to ask us please feel free to call or email us.

Five Major Trends That Are Changing The Web Industry

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

The web world is always moving and changing. Most of us are tied to the web, whether we use it for our own personal use or for work, which is why it’s important to know what’s changing on the web, how it’s changing and how it might affect us. If you haven’t been keeping up-to-date with the latest changes, here’s a quick overview of the biggest modifications in the web industry right now.

Responsive Design

As the web market continues to grow, the demand for responsive website design intensifies. You need to think of your lay-out, design and code to plan a responsive website; one that provides an optimal viewing experience for users on all devices (whether that be a laptop, Ipad or android phone).

Right now, we’re facing a sea change in the web design world – bigger than anything since the Web 2.0 revolution nearly ten years ago. Sites without a responsive component are a step behind. It’s an integral component of any web strategy, so take a look at your current website, compare it to the best and ask yourself: how does it compare?

Mobile Domination

Last year, CNN cited the presence of five billion mobile users on the planet – a huge percentage of the world’s population toting mobile gadgets, which further represents a gigantic demand for mobile information. Mobiles hence demand the attention of designers, programmers, developers, writers, marketers, and anyone else whose life is touched by the web; basically everyone.

Online Shopping

A large portion of us is an online shopping junkie. We buy sofas, clothes and even food online. More people are climbing on board online shopping, meaning the more online shoppers there are, the more and bigger online stores become, resulting in a heightened demand for the tightened integration of CMS, CXM, and CRM.

The Decline of SEO

SEO is still important, and it’s most definitely going to stick around for a while, but it will no longer have the immense clout that it once had. There are two major reasons for this; both reasons are rooted in search engine algorithms. First, search engines are becoming prescient. They know what words you’re going to type in the search bar before you do, and have the ability to anticipate searches based on your search history, geographical locale, demographic, and other features. Anticipated searches and user-specific results mean that SEO is getting weaker by the minute. Second, the algorithms are adept at weeding out junk pages, content farms, spam sites and irrelevant information. Rankings have less value when a search engine acts more like a human than a search bot. And that’s what we’re dealing with now — search algorithms with humanoid complexity. Yes, SEO is declining, yet his is not the decade-old declaration that “SEO is dead!” Nobody’s dead yet. SEO is just changing just like everything else in the web world, shifting in style and approach, and therefore its influence is waning.

The Rise of Personal Influence

We all know that Web 2.0 is an intensely personal and interactive web experience. With personal blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media overkill there is no longer any reason to feel like the web is an impersonal entity. But the social trend is coming to maturity. Personal influence matters more and more; a single tweet from one individual can create a massive ripple in the Twitter pool. Likewise, the more prolific and skilled a blogger, the more you’ll see his smiling mug in the search results of Google.

The Internet is full of people writing information, people selling goods, people selling services, people sharing their lives, people uploading photos, people communicating with other people. Internet equals people. Therefore, it is no wonder that the web will ride on the wave of personal influence.

If you think that these trends are just changing the web – you’re wrong. They’re changing the world. Although this article doesn’t chase down the various ramifications of these changes, you’ll probably want to do some thinking about how to respond in your own unique situation. Change is happening. We must learn to accept it, embrace it, and thrive.

9 Alternative Search Engines to Improve Discovery

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

1. Duck Duck Go

This search engine is a great option if you value your privacy above all else. The team behind DuckDuckGo believes in better search functions without tracking its users. Its features include “goodies” (special search queries such as calculations and programming), browser extensions and perhaps most of all, peace of mind.

Duckduck-collage

2. Wolfram|Alpha

Instead of searching the web for answers to your questions, Wolfram|Alpha conducts dynamic computations based on built-in data, algorithms and other methods. The search engine’s goal is to build on existing knowledge and become a single, reliable source for definitive answers.

Wolframalpha-collage

3. Ark

When Facebook doesn’t cut it for finding people, Ark comes in handy. As an alternative to Graph Search, you can search through more than 1 billion people based on filters such as location, college and employment. If you just moved to a new city, Ark comes in handy to find others with similar interests.

Ark1

4. Blekko

Blekko’s slogan is “the spam-free search engine,” and its mission is to combine traditional algorithms with user knowledge and partner expertise in order to deliver results from the most reputable sites. Blekko has an “editorial” approach — it wants you to feel like your search results are handpicked for what you’re looking for online.

Blekko-collage

5. GoodSearch

GoodSearch donates 50% of revenues to charities and schools that its users choose. Additional features include GoodShop, a catalog of merchants that help support causes; GoodDining, a year-round “dine out for charity” program; and most recently, GoodSurvey, which lets people take market research surveys to earn money for their favorite causes.

GoodSearch is powered by Yahoo and has 510,000 unique monthly visitors.

Goodsearch

6. YaCy

YaCy focuses on decentralized web search. This means that the engine allows you to search the entire public Internet through a worldwide peer network, in which everyone’s information is equal and content is never censored. YaCy is free and can be downloaded from the website.

Yacy

7. Apache Solr

Similar to YaCy, Apache Solr is an open-source, standalone search server. Developed from the Apache Lucene project, Solr’s features include full text search, faceted search (using multiple filters), clustering information based on categories, rich document (DOC and PDF) handling and near real-time indexing.

Apache

8. Dogpile

InfoSpace (now Blucora) created Dogpile to save users time. The search engine uses powered metasearch technology through Google, Yahoo and Yandex. Since these three search engines have their own ways of finding information, Dogpile looks at all of them and delivers results that are most relevant to your search.

Dogpile

9. Ixquick

Ixquick is another great choice for users looking for privacy and powerful search. Ixquick doesn’t collect or share any information, and it awards results with stars for every search engine that “agrees” on it. For example, a search result with five stars means that five search engines agree on it, increasing accuracy. You can enter any advanced search, and Ixquick will send the query to the search engines that can handle that specific query.

Ixquick
Original article on Mashable.com 

3 Ways That Local Businesses Can Benefit From a Website

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

Here’s an odd statistic: half of all local businesses don’t have a website of any kind. Of those that do have one, many report that it’s a complete waste of time and that they wish they hadn’t bothered to build one. However, there is a small subset of local businesses that have benefited from websites because they know how to do it right.

These businesses are no different than the one that you probably run. It’s just that they didn’t slap together a web page and call it a day. They put some thought into it and came up with a website that drives business. Here’s how you can do so for your business:

Think About How The Web Can Benefit Your Business

Look, if all you’re going to do is throw up a static web page then it’s not going to help you any more. The days when simply having a webpage was a novelty and thus something which brought business because it was so interesting to see you had a site are long gone. However, if you can think outside the box, you can make your website truly useful.

Consider a Nail Salon

Let’s take an example of a local nail salon. You wouldn’t think that such a place would actually be able to get much benefit from a website. After all, women come in to get their nails done and they call to make appointments. What value could they derive from a website?

Let’s look at what a nail salon does and what the web is good for in order to figure this out. A nail salon does manicures and pedicures. They often paint designs on fingernails. Sometimes they offer additional services such as hair dressing and even makeup.

The web is good for displaying things and for sharing information. Now, how about we combine the two? Take the nail salon and put together a website where you offer a selection of images showing the various options that women have for designs on their nails. Let them pick online and place an “order.”

This way, if there is one specific person who knows how to do that design, they can make an appointment on the web. Plus, because you’re making your designs available to a larger audience to see, you can bring in new customers who might not have dropped by the store yet but who saw a design, fell in love with it and decided they had to have it done.

You could also offer beauty care tips and suggest products that you sell in the shop which women might find useful to have, again, offering you an expanded audience because these women will remember that you were the one who told them about it.

Remember FourSquare

While FourSquare is popular for restaurants, it’s easily adaptable to almost any kind of a local business website. For those not familiar, FourSquare is kind of like Facebook for local businesses. It’s a way for people to share what they’re doing and where they’re going.

This means that the local barber shop could get on foursquare and become more popular for offering particular hairstyles. The local deli can advertise their meat specials for the week and offer a delivery service. The possibilities are endless if you think creatively.

Build Yourself Up On Google Places

Google Places allows people to find a local business for pretty much anything they want. Now, while you don’t need a local business website in order to rank well with Google Places, it helps.

Plus, I find that when I’m looking for a place on Google Places, the place that offers me a website is the place I’m more likely to frequent because I can learn more about the company by what they have on their site and what they talk about there.

Bottom line, there’s no good reason not to have a local business website. Pretty much any business can benefit from one in one way or another and it’s really just a matter of having a good imagination to come up with a way to make one useful rather than a waste of money.

At IT Pie we cater to both large and small businesses, and custom build each website to bring each brand and company to life online. If you need a website, or have one that just isn’t working for you or your business – talk to us. We’re here to help you maximise your potential.

5 Tips To Maximise Online ROI

Posted on by
Reply
{lang: 'en-GB'}

There are times we all feel like field generals, deciding where to deploy our limited resources along the many fronts of the marketing wars. But the best leaders are one step ahead with strategy – looking for results by reading the signs that others don’t see.

Yet, the signs are right there in front of us: clicks aren’t translating into purchases; consumers aren’t returning; online advertising spending is wasted on tactics with little or no ROI. We’re seeing story after story in the marketing trades about the reshuffling of ad dollars, with more and more budget being plowed into online ad spending and social media. Despite the economy, online marketers aren’t shy about investing in clicks, paid search, back-links, and tweets. But are their online efforts resulting in action? Marketers need to put the brakes on less-than-strategic online spending and instead determine which tactics deliver the most actionable outcomes.

The good news: We are also seeing signs that point us in the direction of engaging with customers through action-causing tactics, while discounting the siren’s song of sheer click numbers.

But how do we pinpoint these high-ROI tactics? There are countless analytics available, but I decided to go beyond click data and ask consumers how they’re making decisions about their online advertising choices. My company recently commissioned a study by public opinion measurement leader Opinion Research Corporation to help us understand what’s happening inside the minds of consumers as they’re making choices about what online advertising they’re engaging with – and what actions they take over time after seeing the advertising.

The results represent a big, full-color, blinking sign for marketing leaders.

ORC asked 1,000 consumers the type of online advertising they’re most likely to read and act upon, among banner ads, pop-up ads, email offers, articles that include brand information, or sponsored links. Article-based advertising was the most preferred – 51 percent of respondents said they are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to read and act upon the material.

And here’s another critical sign from the study about how consumers take action based on what they see online: When asked how frequently they conduct internet searches for products or services they read about in online articles, half the respondents said “very frequently” or “somewhat frequently.”

Those are some pretty strong signs directly from consumers. It tells us they are willing to interact with a product or brand in an in-depth manner if the information is presented to them in ways where they can read the information, evaluate it, and then decide to click through for more details.

As marketers, we owe it to ourselves and our clients to use consumer feedback to earmark online marketing budgets for tactics that deliver the highest ROI, deliver the most action and bring value to the brand.

Here are five tips for maximising ROI and measuring the impact of online advertising:

  • Mix brand storytelling into your tactical approach. If you can build a program that breeds consumer feedback and fosters measurement, consumers will be willing to engage with content-rich information, and take the next step in contacting the advertiser.
  • Set benchmarks for every step in the conversion funnel and measure against them. Not everything is measurable, but it’s important to capture data on every step possible.
  • Take on the tougher measurement tasks. Determine how online advertising and social media activities are impacting consumer attitudes toward your brand. You can try unconventional methods such as using social media to get qualitative feedback from your other marketing methods.
  • Integrate by measuring the flow of consumer interaction among social media, websites, blogs, and product landing sites. As marketing disciplines have converged (PR, advertising, and digital are using sometimes indistinguishable tactical approaches), it challenges us to update our measurement tactics as well. Count the clicks, but measure brand impact, too.
  • Remarket to consumers who show an interest in an article or ad about your product or company. Study the downstream value of the first interaction. If a consumer has expressed interest in your category, it’s an indicator for further dialogue (and ads).

The signs are clear. Consumers are telling us to give them information in context, and if it’s good enough, they’ll take action on it. Then, it’s up to us to measure it.

Read more at www.imediaconnection.com