Archive | Web Design

The Benefits of Having a Shopping Cart on Your Website

By Randy Roedl on March 18, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

The Benefits of Having a Shopping Cart on Your Website

There are many benefits that a shopping cart will bring to your ecommerce business. To discover some of the many benefits of having a shopping cart on your Website continue to read this article.

A shopping cart on your Website can actually increase your sales. The purpose of the shopping cart is to hold items you are thinking of purchasing as you continue to browse the Website. Shopping carts give customers freedom to explore your Website without losing track of where the items are that they wish to purchase during their browsing. A shopping cart allows the customer to do all the shopping on your Website in one transaction. Customers who are forced to check out every time they wish to buy an item, return to shop again only to checkout if they find another item will become frustrated if they have to do this multiple times.

A shopping cart can also display the cart total price so that as the customer adds items to the cart they are aware of how much money they are spending so that they don’t get any nasty surprises at checkout. Customers who are denied a way to check prices will not be as likely to purchase multiple items.

You will want to stay clear of shopping carts that load too slowly because in today’s world people want things fast and if they have to wait they just may move on to the next Website. So it is important not only to have a shopping cart but also to have the right one.

The presence of a shopping cart on your Website also says, “Professional” to your customers. A shopping cart tells your customers that you care about their shopping comfort and will provide what they need to make their shopping experience an enjoyable one. If they are made comfortable while shopping on your Website they are much more likely to return.

Some shopping cart software programs have the capabilities of being your storefront even being your entire Website. The benefit of a shopping cart with a storefront is that you don’t have to bother with any other Website designing.

A shopping cart makes shopping more convenient for your customer. Without a shopping cart you force your customer to browse and remember where items are located that they are interested in. This might cause them to forget items, misplace them, or just leave in frustration. Try shopping for multiple items in a physical store without a shopping cart and see how frustrating it can be. Without shopping cart customers buy less, think about it that shops without a cart? The person buying only one or two items shops without a cart. Do you want your Website visitors to buy just one item or do you want them to purchase multiple items? If you answered, multiple items, then you had better have a shopping cart on your Website.

Improve Your Shopping Cart

By Randy Roedl on March 14, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Improve Your Shopping Cart

If you want visitors to your site to use your shopping cart you need to make improvements to the usability of the cart and to make the purchase process as simple and short as possible.

Did you know that the checkout process is where more sales are lost than any other time during the buying process? Check your analytics and see if you have a large number of individuals leaving your site before finishing the checkout process, if this is happening than you know that you definitely need to make improvements. In order to determine where you need to make shopping cart improvements you can ask someone who is not familiar with your website to go through the process and check out the usability of your shopping cart. Ask them to specifically comment on how accessible the shopping cart is, if it is easy to use, if they ran into problems were they able to find instructions on how to use the cart, and did they find the shipping and payments methods that they prefer to use?

Investigate how easy it is to navigate around finding products. Do you have a search feature and does it give accurate results?

If you belong to any business forums ask members to rate your site and their shopping experience.

Ask yourself how organized your site is, how secure do people feel making purchases and how user friendly is the shopping experience on your site?

Your shopping cart is one of the most important parts of your Website. Periodically evaluating the shopping cart from a user’s point of view can improve not only your shopping cart but improve your sales as well.

Look at your shopping cart objectively does it meet all of your needs as the administrator? Can you manage all of the product fulfillment, payment and shipping needs in a timely manner without mistakes? Evaluate the hosting, customer service and technical support of the company who’s shopping cart you are using. How happy are you with the features? When upgrades are available is there an additional fee or are upgrades free to existing customers?

Does your shopping cart blend in well with your Website? Do you receive the information you need about your customers and their sales? Does your shopping cart have the capability to have an affiliate program, produce a newsletter or evaluate the shopping experience of your customers?

Does your shopping cart grow with your business or have you outgrown the shopping cart?

What do reviewers say about the shopping cart you are using? Can you find customer reviews of the shopping cart and if so, are they favorable?

After evaluating your shopping cart is customer service responsive to your need to make improvements? Do they give you suggestions or upgrades?

Seeing how important your shopping cart is to the success of your online business spending time evaluating how well your present shopping cart is performing and finding out what your customers think about your shopping cart is important and should be done on a regular basis.

New to WordPress

By Randy Roedl on March 10, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

New to WordPress – How to Start a Free Blog
Are you new to WordPress? There is no need to worry as here are the simple steps to start using WordPress in creating free blogs. The following are the 9 steps in using WordPress to start blogging:
Step 1: Sign up for a free WordPress account
The very first step is to visit http://wordpress.com and register for a free WordPress account with only a valid email address. An email address is used for only one WordPress account only.

Step 2: Entering information
Next, you would have to choose a username which no other users are using and password. After reading the terms and condition and if you agree with these, you will be directed to a page. Here, one can choose to start blogging straight away or leave until you have time to start creating blogs.

Step 3: Creating new blog
To start, a name for your blog domain is required and the name ends with ‘.wordpress.com’ to make it easier for visitors to access the blog pages that they want to visit by typing the name into their internet browsers. The domain name cannot be changed once decided, but users choose put titles of their blog and users can change these anytime. Users can choose the languages and decide whether their blog pages are opened for public or for members only. If a user chose public viewing, search engines will be able to search these.

Step 4: Active account
An account is active when every detail in the previous step has been filled in. you will be notified when you have completed that step and an email will be sent to confirm the login details.

Step 5: WordPress Dashboard
Once login details are confirmed, you can log into you own WordPress blog and you can start personalizing your dashboard. Here, you can choose the themes, colour, updating profile, adding users, writing posts and designing your blog page. Whenever you come across a problem that you cannot figure out, there is always a help section and forums where you can search and ask for solutions to the problems.

Step 6: Dashboard Toolbar
The toolbar allows users to navigate WordPress for creating posts, personalization and adding additional features for easy access.

Step 7: Choosing a Theme
Users can choose from a huge variety of themes to suit their taste and personalize the pages to their own creativity. From the dashboard toolbar, direct your mouse to ‘Presentation’ tab and select ‘Themes’ to choose which themes that you like. You can choose according to the content of your blog. After some time fiddling around, you will turn into an expert and from then you can upload other features that suit your blog.

Step 8: Sidebars and widgets
Adding widgets allow customization of the sidebar of blogs and this feature can be found under the ‘Presentation’ tab in the dashboard toolbar. Widgets let the users to add features such as RSS feeds, calendar, search tools and text boxes and this is much easier with only the used of the mouse without the need to enter codes.

Step 9: First blog post
You are ready to start writing up your blog posts once you are familiar with the features. Coming up with a title and there you go: you can start writing up. When you are done with writing and customization, you can just click on ‘Publish’ button and the post is there in your blog page.

All-about-a-keyword-rich-domain

By Randy R on July 4, 2010 in Blog Beginning, Blog Business, Randy Roedl, Web Design, Websites, wordpress

All about a keyword rich domain

A good domain name will get you a good page rank. It’s always a good idea to register domain names with keywords that you are planning to target. For example, if you are selling toys online, then it would be better for you to register buytoysonline.com

In the above case, When people type in the keyword “buy toys online”, there is a high chance that – your site will be popping out in the first page of search results.

After you register a domain name – in a manner like we have explained above, you can start getting content for the site. Even in the articles that you are gonna publish in your site, keywords are important. Doing so, can get you in the first page of search results in most of the search engines including Google.

Create as many content pages in your site as possible and link between the pages at appropriate places. You may link to the keywords that you are targeting. It would be helping the link juice in your site to flow throughout the entire site.

After creating content pages in your site, you may create some free blogs and write content related to your niche on those sites also. The advantage of doing this is that – in the middle of the articles, you’ll be able to put links to your original site. This can get traffic and also increase the number of backlinks to your original site. When linking to your original site, give hyperlinks to the keywords that you are targeting – and they should point to pages in your original site(the one you’re gonna promote). For example, if you are planning to sell toys, then link to the words “buy toys online” or something like that. And the link should point to pages in your original site.

After that, you may also try some SEO tricks and methods to increase the PR of your newly created site. You can attempt blog commenting, article marketing in sites like ezinearticles, and social submission and social networking as well.

All-about-blogging

By Randy R on July 1, 2010 in Blog Beginning, Blog Business, Randy Roedl, Web Design, Websites, wordpress

All about blogging

Blogging can bring in a lot of money in your pockets. But many people don’t succeed in this, since they are impatient. You should be having the patience in you – to wait and see the results. Money may not be coming the very first month of your blogging. Depending on your skills, it will take some time. First of all, you should make a plan of what you are going to achieve. Your target should be something achievable. Its good to dream big, but don’t target big – start targeting things that you would be easily achieving.

You can start with one blog, and then go on increasing the count when you get used to it. Your first blog should be easy for you to update many times a day. And for updating a blog many times a day, you should be an expert in that field. Think a bit – you will be surely an expert in something. Some people blog – even about blogging. That’s because they are experts in blogging. Just like that, there will be some topic about which you would be easily making a lot of posts each day.

As mentioned above it’s important to select a niche about which you would be able to publish many posts per day. After you find such a niche, create a blog about it and start blogging. If you don’t have any funds with you to register and host a domain name, then you can go with a free sub domain under wordpress or blogspot. After a month, you should be with at least 50 posts. But this is not at all mandatory. It’s up to you, to decide the number of posts. But if you are gonna start it the best way, then go for – 50 articles per month. The more, the better. By this time, your site will be indexed in Google. You can promote the site using your own tricks and methods. And once, you have posts in your blog, you can start bringing traffic to it. I hope you know how to do that.

Once you get traffic in your first blog, you can slowly go on increasing the number of blogs that you update daily. The new blogs that you create will also be getting traffic, if you put a link to those blogs from your first blog. And if you are thinking of making some money out of these blogs, then you can start selling ad space, banners and links on your blog. A blog with traffic can make a lot of money. So, that’s it about blogging, if you are serious about making money online through blogging, then go for it.

All-about-name-suggestion-tools

By Randy R on June 28, 2010 in Blog Beginning, Blog Business, Randy Roedl, Web Design, Websites, wordpress

All about name suggestion tools

Finding names to register is not an easy task. The process may take days and even months. If you are in such a situation, then you may seek the help of name suggestion tools. You won’t be having to pay any fee for using such services offered by nameboy.com, makewords.com etc. All you have to do is – just enter the keyword that you are targeting – and the site will give you different combination of words that you wanted to search. They will even tell you whether those names are available for you to register or not.

I normally register many domain names in one go. And finding names for my websites was one of the toughest thing for me in the domain registration process. But it was only until I came to know about name suggestion tools. I use a lot of name suggestion tools. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages. All the name suggestion tools that I have came across till now offer their services free of charge. Honestly, these tools have helped me save a lot of my precious time which otherwise I would have wasted for no reason.

These name suggestion tools can sometimes do miracles. Who knows, sometimes they can come up with some real cool names that are available to be registered. These tools have helped me to register domain names that got high page rank from the very first Google update. Some name suggestions sites will help you search for random names which are brandable! Should I tell you anything about a brandable domain name? Hey, take the case of Google – it’s a brandable one. And now it has become a noun – people started using it for the word “search engine”. So, if you want to register a quality domain name then you should be surely trying your luck with a domain name suggestion tool.

All-about-SEO

By Randy R on June 25, 2010 in Blog Beginning, Blog Business, Randy Roedl, Web Design, Websites, wordpress

All about SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is something you can do on your own. Learning to SEO your sites is easy and you’ll start doing it better once you gain more expertise in the field. But before you start doing SEO, you should be learning the basics. You should be learning what it means to optimize a site for search engines. You should also understand how a search engine finds and indexes a site from the millions of new sites that are created each day. And after you learn the basic things such as those which are mentioned above, you may learn the different types of methods that can be adopted to do SEO on your websites.

Why should we do SEO our sites? Google is the search engine that most of the webmasters target. So, from here on, we’ll be using the word “google” for search engines. We are doing SEO in order to rank our sites high in Google. But before ranking them, we should at least, try to index the sites in Google.

Google index sites when they come to know about a new site. But how will they come to know about a new site. Google’s crawler search for sites from one link to the other. This way, they go on looking for new sites from one site to the other. So, if you want to index your newly created website, then at least one indexed site should be linking to your website. This way, it’ll finally reach your site when it crawls the site in which your link is there. So, the key in indexing a site is to get a link to your site in other sites that are already indexed.

And after you have indexed your site, you can start doing SEO related works on your site to rank it higher in Google. But what does it mean to rank it higher in Google. Suppose your site is related to “selling Iphones”. And if your site is getting in the first page of the search results related to the keywords that you are targeting like “buy iphones”, “iphone store” etc, then your site is said to be highly ranked one, in Google.

all-about-whois-checkers

By Randy R on June 22, 2010 in Blog Beginning, Blog Business, Randy Roedl, Web Design, Websites, wordpress

All about whois checkers

Have you ever thought of knowing who owns a particular site? A whois checker will allow to know the details about the registrant, registrar etc of any domain name that you wish to check with it. This is a good way to contact website owners when you are planning to buy websites. By using whois checkers you’ll able to find the email address of the owner of the site. You’ll be getting this service from many whois sites out there. Almost every whois sites offer these services free of charge.

The features found in one whois checker may vary from the other. Some whois checkers will allow you to search whois information of email ids as well. So, whois checkers are not just for checking the registrant details of just websites. Some even provided ip whois checking facility. For that just enter the ip address that you want to check. And if there are sites hosted with that ip address, then the whois checker will be displaying the sites that are hosted with that ip address.

If you want to be anonymous and don’t want to allow whois checkers to display your address and other details, then you may opt for adding a whois filter while registering a domain name. Namecheap, provides this service free of charge when you register a domain name with them. They will ask you to enter your name, address and other such details but these details won’t be shown publicly through whois checkers if you are opting the above service. Instead of that, some other details will be shown – and when someone replies to the email address that is shown in the whois details, you’ll still be getting those emails to your original email id.

Why should we use an whois checker? Webmasters usually use these kinda tools when they plan to buy a promising site. Suppose you are planning to buy abc.com – what would be the first step that you’ll be taking? How will you be able to get in touch with the person whois currently owning it. It’s a pretty difficult task without using an whois checker.

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