We all know how important E-Commerce websites are, especially with COVID-19 preventing people from purchasing items inside stores. For this post, we have decided to create an easy to follow checklist to get your e-commerce store up and running as smoothly as possible.
One very important, but often-overlooked factor for a quality E-Commerce store is a smooth checkout experience. Your checkout page should be clean, appealing, and easy to get through. Remember, you want the least amount of resistance for the customer to put their credit card information in.
The most important part of any E-Commerce store is being able to accept payments. Several factors that need to be taken into consideration is fees, security, fraud prevention/detection, and customer support. The best one that we have found is Stripe. If you are looking for a processor that can help with CBD or other "high-risk" products, reach out to us and we can help you navigate between the processors.
We have all seen E-Commerce stores that have a ton of products but no easy way to filter through them to find exactly what you're looking for. Make sure that not only are your products are easy to find but that you have an appealing & effective filter system. If you are looking for a good example check out our customer Explore More USA. We integrated a filter system where a visitor can search by the state in which the national park is located and by price range. Your ultimate goal is to get the visitor to the checkout page with the least amount of friction possible.
When selling items both in-store and online, you need to keep track of exactly which customer purchases what. For most of our E-Commerce stores, we integrate a comprehensive CRM solution in which all customer's orders are tracked and logged. Additionally, we categorize each customer for their preferred type of product. An example would be a customer from Explore More USA keeps purchasing shirts with national parks in Utah. We would assume that they are much more likely to purchase a new shirt from Utah than someone who seems to prefer shirts with national parks from California.
A newsletter is a critical part of any marketing strategy. It allows you to stay in constant communication with your customers and let them know about your new products, discounts, and more. Creating a newsletter and gathering a following seems like a daunting task. However, we have a unique automation system that allows you to easily gather information and create a set of triggers that will automatically send out emails depending on what that individual likes to shop for, how much their typical cart total is and more!
Recently we received a fill out through our contact form that was quite concerning to us so we decided to post on our website about it in hopes of helping at least one other person. The submitted information contained the following message:
"Hello, This is Melonie and I am a qualified photographer and illustrator. I was confused, to put it nicely, when I found my images at your website. If you use a copyrighted image without an owner's consent, you need to be aware that you could be sued by the copyright holder. It's illegal to use stolen images and it's so wicked! Take a look at this document with the links to my images you used at sigma1.com and my earlier publications to get the evidence of my copyrights. Download it right now and check this out for yourself: REMOVED LINK FOR YOUR SAFETY If you don't get rid of the images mentioned in the file above during the next few days, I'll file a complaint on you to your hosting provider stating that my copyrights have been severely infringed and I am trying to protect my intellectual property. And if it is not enough, trust me I am going to take legal action against you! And you won't receive the second notice from me."
This type of scam is designed to scare the website owner or reader into clicking the link in hopes of resolving a potential lawsuit. Do not click on it! These types of links typically have malware or other types of malicious software.
When we design websites for not just ourselves but for our clients, we ensure that we either use royalty-free images/videos or we directly purchase the rights.
Bringing SEO and SERP optimization into line with a quality interface is the Holy Grail of web design. This means that your website shouldn’t only look fantastic and offer a world-class user experience, but also rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Well, then, how do you ensure that your web-site design is perfectly compatible with SEO?
Of course, the simplest way is to engage SEO Services in Las Vegas and let professionals do all the leg-work for you. With their experience, know-how, and resources, they can help your website SEO and design reach a state of harmony. On the other hand, if you’re planning on taking a D-I-Y approach, here’s what you need to know:
One of the easiest ways to make a well-designed website compatible with SEO is to tighten up the website design. With fewer elements in a less complicated layout, your website becomes more accessible for the bots that search engines use to index your website. No doubt, if your site can play nice with Google bots, it’s more likely to rank higher in Google.
Visually, this results in a more straightforward, less cluttered design. This also has the added benefit of making your website easier for users to scan and comprehend. Try to visualize some of the most successful sites out there. Think of what Google’s homepage looks like or how easy it is to scan down a Twitter feed. This is the type of simple design your website should aspire to achieve.
Selecting the Right Pictures for SEO
Although many websites still dump their most vivid graphics into JPEGs, this does more harm than good, primarily when sites use JPEGs in the headers of a page. Google likes signals that appear near the top of a page, and to waste that opportunity on florid graphics work is a poor choice.
So, does this mean that you have to wipe all the make-up off your website’s face and make it walk plain out in the light of day? Well, no. With the advent of web fonts, it’s possible to embed gorgeous graphics into SEO-friendly elements, like the H1 tag. There’s no need to compromise: put the H1 tag into the page and then style it using web fonts. This way, you get to keep your gorgeous graphics-intensive design, and you also get all the SEO benefits of well-purposed headers. It’s a win-win.
Keep in mind that designing a website that's SEO-friendly is anything but easy. So, even if you have a wee bit of knowledge about website design, it’s always a smarter decision to engage professional Las Vegas web design services to bring your website SEO and web design into line.
Keeping backups of your websites (as well as your client’s sites) is a critical part of running a business that is very often overlooked. This, unfortunately, causes a lot of headaches and potential loss of revenue down the road that can easily be avoided by keeping backups in an offsite location.
We keep three separate backups on different storage devices, but that is beside the point. For this tutorial, we will show you how to connect your WHM account to Amazon S3. We chose Amazon S3 as it has very reasonable rates, and you only pay for what you use.
To begin, create an Amazon AWS Account. Navigate to the S3 section, as this is where we will store our data.
1. Create a bucket and select your preferences
2. Navigate back to your AWS Management Console and search “IAM”
3. Click on the dropdown for “Delete your root access keys”
4. Click “Get started with IAM Users”
5. Click “Add User” in the top left of the page
6. Add a username and check the box for “Programmatic Access” and click next
7. Then you will have to add this user to a group. You will need to create a group, in the search bar type in “AmazonS3FullAccess”, this will allow all users in this group the ability to create, read, upload and delete the properties in you S3 Account.
8. Finalize the creation of the user and get the keys so we can plug them into your WHM Account.
9. Log into your WHM and navigate to “Backup Configuration” and select your preferred settings.
10. Move to the next tab over titled “Additional Destinations” and enter your AWS User keys. Validate your credentials to ensure that both accounts can communicate with each other.
From there you should be good to go!