Learn the basics of setting up a WordPress plugin in PHP code, including how to setup a menu item and page in the WordPress administration area.
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There Are Many Shopping Cart Types Merchants Can Choose From
There Are Many Shopping Cart Types Merchants Can Choose From
There are several different types of shopping cart options for online business owners to choose from including merchant service shopping carts, hosted shopping carts, and fully integrated shopping carts.
Merchant service shopping carts can be managed through your administration area. They provide an interface to manage product catalogue, define your prices and to change the prices. You can use “Buy” links or buttons located near the product descriptions. These links and buttons when clicked on by the customer bring the customer to the merchant’s site where they enter the personal data and credit card number to complete their transaction. This financial information is obtained off your site thus allowing you to abstain from having to have a secure site. The fact that the customer is directed away from your site may make your customer uneasy. The redirect tells your customer that you are a small business, and they may not like being taken to another site where they may not be familiar with the company that will be solicitation their credit card number.
A hosted shopping car generally needs little or no programming and allows your customer to stay on your site for the financial part of the purchase experience. Hosted shopping carts are a good deal for both the small and medium sized online businesses that do at least $1,000 USD worth of business each month. The fact is that the customer will still be redirected to the hosting site but with interfaces being able to be configured to look just like your site they probably won’t know that they are being redirected. You keep your integrity and look just like the “big corporate guys” but with out the cost of being one. Some programming may be necessary to be able to set up the hosted shopping cart and you want the ability to keep your color scheme to stay the same as your website. In the hosted shopping cart you are able to use your payment gateway and merchant account so that the customer’s credit card statement will contain your company’s name, and not the name of the merchant service. The ability to have your company’s name on the statement is that it avoids charge backs that occur when the customer sees a different name from the one they are expecting.
The fully integrated shopping carts are the best choice for online business owners who can afford them. They have the ability to configure them with extended features that are not possible with the other two options such as allowing for discounts, certificates, ratings and comments from visitors, and the ability to define product categories and subcategories, to calculate shipping costs, and tax. Fully integrated shopping carts do require some good programming skills and can also be used with your own merchant account.
The shopping cart that you choose to use on your Website will help to determine how professional you appear to your customers. The more professional your site appears the more customers will be drawn to your site. The more customers you have, the more sales you will generate. Research all your shopping cart options carefully before deciding.
Become a WordPress Pro
Become a WordPress Pro
WordPress is my website platform of choice nowadays. I find it extremely easy to use and with so many templates or themes to choose from and I do not need to ever hire a web designer.
Add a few SEO plugins and you really have a powerful website. Yes, I said website. I use WordPress as a blogging platform and also as a website.
What I try to do is look through the thousands of templates until I find a theme that looks more like a static site. Then I go into the CSS and customize is just a little to make the theme a little different then the original.
When I want to add content I usually use the page feature. I add my content to a page instead of a post. Maybe each of my sites will have ten or 15 content pages. Then I go into the Options>Reading panel in the Administration area and change one of my pages to a static front page. And presto. I have a nice static website.
Now, if I want to also add a blog on the site, I will just post normally and I have a combination website and blog all rolled into one. The really nice advantage is that I can update anything instantly and I don’t need a html editor. I like this feature because I travel a lot and sometimes use other computers instead of my own. With WordPress I always have a way to update my web sites fast and easy.
For those that don’t know how to set up a WordPress site it is very easy. All you need to do is go to your cPanel of your website. Scroll to the bottom and select the smiling icon called “”fantastico””.
Select WordPress from the navigation bar on the left and then select install. Fill in the data fields which consist of your administration name and password, the name of your website and a short description. All this can be changed in the WordPress Admin Panel once the site is live. Click the install WordPress button and you have your very own WordPress site.
Now all you need to do is add some content and you will have a great professional looking website that would have taking you a lot longer to build if you had to do it in html and especially if you are not skilled with coding.
An Introduction To WordPress Plugins
An Introduction To WordPress Plugins
WordPress is an amazing CMS system that is renowned for its flexibility as not only a blogging platform, but a platform for those who are simply seeking to publish content based websites to the Internet. It is for this reason that usage of WordPress has skyrocketed over the fast few years, as such, a very active community has given the platform support by developing what would have to be the largest directory of plugins for a single platform in history. So, what is a plugin?
A WordPress plugin is a simple script or software package that extends the functionality of the WordPress platform further than what the original developers of the platform have decided upon. It is for this reason that the CMS is quite raw, and offers only basic functionality such as creating posts, pages, and editing basic code. A plugin is generally installed via the plugin administration area in WordPress, and can either be done automatically from the plugins directory hosted by WordPress, or can also be done manually via FTP, or via an upload in the back end of WordPress.
In most cases, you will never need to install a plugin manually, however, as the availability of premium plugins is rising significantly, this is happening more and more. There are two plugin types that you will more than likely find. Freely available plugins, and premium plugins.
Free plugins are usually available en-masse in the WordPress plugins directory, and are searchable based on set keywords and criteria, however premium plugins are usually available via their own marketplace or shopping cart. Needless to say, the need to pay for a plugin generally warrants extra functionality such as code tweaks, creation of clone WordPress installations, and so on, more often than not, functionality that exceeds its own monetary value significantly.
Plugins can transform WordPress almost into its own separate systems. For example, there are many premium shopping cart and membership site plugins that will transform WordPress from a blog to a paid of free membership site. Some will also transform the installation into a sales letter with a payment portal, and other plugins will offer much more simple functionality such as admin extension, social media links, and clone wordpress backup files for your own security. To get started, simply enter the plugins area within your WordPress admin area, and select ""add new"". In this area, you will be able to explore plugins, and their functionality further, and most importantly, you will be able to experiment with different plugins and get a grasp of this brilliant functionality that lies within WordPress.
WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers1
WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers
WordPress is an open source web publishing platform used by millions of people around the world. It’s known to be relatively easy for a beginner to learn and start creating content for their blogs or websites.
However, there are few features that if not setup correctly, can do your site more harm than good. All the steps below assume that you are logged into your WordPress Dashboard (administration area).
The WordPress Tagline
The default WordPress tagline is “”Just another WordPress blog””. This acts as a subtitle for your blog or website and is meant to be descriptive of your content. Leaving this default text in the tagline text box means that your visitors and search engines will see this. It sure isn’t descriptive of what your site is really about is it?
You can easily replace this tagline with your own by going to:
Settings–>General–>Tagline
(make sure to save your changes)
Membership and User Role Rules
You have the ability to add additional users to your blog or website for the purpose of adding content or submitting articles for review. There two settings here:
Settings–>General–>Membership
Settings–>General–>New User Default Role
Be careful if you decide to let anyone register for your site. Spammers love it when this option is ticked without having hardened security measures in place first.
You will also want to choose the default role for new users wisely. WordPress allows five user roles:
Administrator
Editor
Contributor
Author
Subscriber
Each user role is allowed to access different administration areas of your WordPress installation. This can be a powerful way to organize your users but can also be potentially disasterous if one of those users accidentally deactivates a plugin or theme that your site depends on.
You can always add additional users manually without the need to open registration to the public by going to:
Users–>Add New
Set the Correct Timezone
99% of WordPress websites I’m brought in to help with do not have the timezone correctly set to match the location of the owner. The time is detected automatically, and you would think this would be OK, but it can cause a usability issue with your users.
Why? Imagine I live in California and my site offers news and updates about the Stock Market or Wall Street. Further imagine that I schedule an article to post at a specific time in order to target either my night owl readers or the early risers about a specific stock tip.
Well, if I’m in California and I schedule my article to post at 5:00am what happens if I didn’t set my timezone to match my location? You guessed it, that article would be published based on whatever timezone is set by default. This would not position my site as having “”breaking news”” for my target market.
What timezone is set by default? The timezone that gets chosen is directly based upon the timezone that is set on the server computer at your hosting company. I host some of my websites with West Coast based hosting companies but I live on the East Coast…therefore I need to make sure to set my timezone to Eastern Standard Time instead Pacific Standard Time.
(scheduling your article post times is a built-in feature of WordPress by the way)
Set Update Services
When you publish a new content WordPress provides a way for you to let other people now you’ve updated your site. Go here:
Writing–>Update Services
You’ll see that there is an text input box with one web address inside it. That address connects your website with the Ping-O-Matic search engine update service. Every time you add something new, your site tells Ping-O-Matic and Ping-O-Matic tells various search services.
You can add more update services to this list so you can be assured that any new content you create is automatically being distributed and indexed by a variety of update services. You can view a long list here.
Creating Human Readable URLs
When you create a page or blog post in WordPress, it is given a unique ID for use in the programming code and database. Because of this, when you view a page or post url in your browser address bar, you see something similar to this on the end of your web address:?p=123
The code at the end of that url address above is referencing the page/post ID of 123. That’s not very readable or descriptive to a person is it? Additionally that address contains absolutely no keywords that could be utilized by search engines to help them return relevant results to your content. Luckily, you can change how these look and make them much better.
Go to: Settings–>Permalinks
You will see that you have four choices of different url structures to choose from:
Default
Day and name
Month and name
Numeric
Custom Structure
I use different Custom Structures based on the needs of particular websites and I would recommend doing the same. You can learn more about Custom Permalink Structures here.
If You Sell Products or Services Online You Need A Shopping Cart
If You Sell Products or Services Online You Need A Shopping Cart
The shopping cart is a vital part of any ecommerce site. A shopping cart allows your site visitors to browse your site, buy products or services and have a place to hold items while they continue to browse.
A shopping cart is a software application that gives your customer freedom to browse, to add or delete products from a virtual shopping cart and to see a running total of how much they have selected in dollar amount.
A shopping cart integrates with the rest of your site. A shopping cart may have links that allow the customer to search your site for specific items, see what is in their cart, even save their cart’s contents for later.
Shopping carts are designed in many programming languages. You can run a shopping cart on many different servers such as the Windows Web servers, Unix, and others. You can also place the shopping cart on your own web Server by transferring the files using any FTP program.
A shopping cart typically includes a database for storing information such as your product description; customer data, order information and can display this information for the customer on pages such as product detail page, checkout page, etc. Shopping carts also have an administration area where you can manage your store such as adding product, set up shipping and payment options, or process orders.
There are two parts or components to the shopping cart – the part that the customer sees, called the storefront and the administrative section where the owner manages the store. Features of a shopping cart will vary from one shopping cart company to another.
Basic features that most shopping carts should have are: A catalog of products, a search feature to locate items easily, a customer service area where customers can get help locating or buying products, special pages such as sales, featured products, a specific brands.
The administration section of the shopping cart is where the owner manages the store and should include general settings such as product, categories, currency, date format, language etc. and a module for creating and editing products, a place for managing product categories, and a section for managing options such as color or size. Another section that is important is the price setting and changing area. There also needs to be a module for managing orders such as those that need processing, those that are pending, and those that have shipped as well as a returns section.
Now that you know a little bit more about the shopping cart, you can understand just how important it is to have a shopping cart on your Website if you are selling products or services.