Get the Web Design Expertise With Openwave!

Bloggers Vs WordPress: What you need to know?

Most of us have heard of both these blogging platforms: Wordpress and Blogger. But how much do we know about each of these? In this article, we take a look at the positives and obstacles in each platform these platforms and compare them on the parameters of flexibility, customization and ease of use.

If you want to customize your blog, you get added freedom with Wordpress (something Wordpress doesn't offer) as Wordpress is Open Source. When you choose Wordpress, you gain full access 2 the database and all the image files in the Wordpress platform including the PHP and CSS files. Now what happens when you can access the entire Wordpress system?

When you have access to the whole of the Wordpress CMS, you can be as creative as you like with the effect that your blog will have functionalities that normally won’t be a part of websites built on other platforms. A small caveat here: you don't get this functionality if your website is hosted on Wordpress.com. But you will still be able to host files other than images like PDFs, Office and Word files. 

 

Where Wordpress Scores

One of the difficult things to do when it comes to Blogger is manipulating your XML schema. Here, most users choose customized templates. But the problem with Blogger is that their documentation is sparse though some of Blogger’s tags are indeed documented. 

 

Wordpress scores here with the advantage of greater flexibility when you categorize posts. Users do not have sub-categories with labels on Blogger. On the other hand, substitute-categories are an integral part of the Wordpress environment.

Usability

Wordpress gives you free hosting for up to 3GB of space in comparison to Blogger which gives you only 1. But apart from that, it is Blogger that scores on the usability front. It is very easy to start if you are a lay user. On a Wordpress self-hosted blog, you need to download the software, upload it to a server, configure the database settings and run the installation program included in the software. 

 

So, Wordpress does emerge stronger though Blogger is easier to start with. We’ll look at more on these platforms in our upcoming articles!

The Two Principal Approaches to Redesigning Your Website

The question that occupies everyone that wants to redesign his or her website is will entail a complete overhaul of the website’s design, layout, content and user experience? Most companies go for the jugular when redesigning their website, ending up with budgets overshooting but conversions plummeting. So what is the right website redesign strategy? Will a mere redesign lift your sales and revenue? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this article. 

 

Traditional Website Redesign

The first step in website redesign is to analyse risk. Risk analysis involves enumerating the number of changes that you make in redesigning the website and also the scale and impact of those changes. Let us say that you propose to change your home page title and layout as also the navigation bar. Now the first two fall under the category of sweeping changes as their reach and impact on the customer’s mind is more pronounced. 

 

Some of the most common changes that people do in a website redesign is:

• Changing the home page title(s)
• Changing the images and icons
• New graphic designs with headlines
• Changed call-to-action buttons
• New navigation and forms
  
  

The Right Approach

The right web design approach would have a mechanism in place to measure the changes in web design against user traffic on the website. The key is to undertake a redesign that improves user experience while conforming to the same objectives that your business is built on.

This can be done only with the help of a correct conversion optimization strategy. Formulate proper test cases with timely executions and separate them from one another to make informed inferences about user preferences. This would mean getting the right alpha and beta tests to mitigate risk.

Evolutionary Site Design

A much better way to redesign your website would be to undertake what is called Evolutionary Site design (ESR). This approach posits continuous improvement in place of a complete overhaul in website design.

In ESR, you need to separately list out all components of your website in order of customer preference. From home page titles to product page templates to service value proposition statements, you need to measure and test every component step by step against customer traffic.

This way, you not only bring about a more gradual and well thought out design change that can be fully measured and also rolled back in parts. So, which way are you going to go?

5 Steps to Success in eCommerce

If you are planning to build an ecommerce website for your business, then you must have a clear idea of what you’re going to do at the start. What is ecommerce? It is simply the process of transacting business, namely the buying and selling of goods over the internet. But with maddening competition and rising customer expectation you need to ensure you have the right strategy in place to take you to the top. So, what do you need to get right?

1. Unclutter The Sales Process 

 

When you design your website, look at how many clicks a customer has to make before he eventually makes the purchase. Study after study has found that the primary reason why people abandon a shopping cart before making a purchase is due to the number of stages that they need to pass before finally making a payment.

2. Are Your Customers Aware of Product Availability?

The customer needs to know beforehand whether the product he wants to buy is available or not. Customers get annoyed when they make the effort to order the product, add it to the catalog, and get until the ‘purchase’ button only to find that the product itself is unavailable. The customer will go, in this case never to return.

3. Make Your Site Compatible Across Browsers

Cross-browser compatibility is essential if your business is to reach customers across boundaries. Browser preferences vary across the world, and though Chrome has become the numero uno in that category, other browsers still hold sway over large populations and you need to ensure that your ecommerce website is perfectly viewable in them.

4. Use Graphics, But Make Them Simple

Images are better than words and Graphics do play a positive role in enriching the overall customer experience. But make sure you don't have too much of them so they take a toll on your website performance. Optimize your graphics for the web or otherwise your website may take too long to load and kill the very purpose of attracting more customers.

5. Move Towards a One-Step Checkout Process 

 

However responsive and well-designed your website may be, the customer will not make a purchase on your website without your payment system being secure and efficient. Host your website on a secure server and make sure your payment system is PCI-DSS compliant, has email and multi-payment options and is customized for your website.

5 Steps to Sucess in #eCommerce - http://t.co/Oujsaf8OgK

— Lydia Shah (@Lydia_shah) September 8, 2015

The 5 Top WordPress E-Commerce Plugins

Wordpress might be simple, but it is certainly not short of functionality. Many people are of the opinion that it is a platform to build blogs. This view does a great injustice to the immense capabilities of Wordpress especially in fields such as ecommerce. Its versatility is evidenced by its wide range of capabilities that allows customers to go live with a well-designed and secure online store while saving much on costs as well. 

 

This article looks at 5 of the top Wordpress plugins and their specific functionality, including area they could improve upon. 

 

1. WP eCommerce

Though now surpassed by the Woocommerce plugin, WP eCommerce still offers a wide range of features and is used by a large number of people all over the world. That WP eCommerce has a huge community and is led and driven by it is a great advantage though some of its features still have limiting conditions.

2. Woocommerce

The official No.1 in the league, Woocommerce has cemented its position as the default plugin for Wordpress. The Wordpress themes shop WooThemes maintains Woocommerce and the plugin ia actively supported by its developer community. The only disadvantage of this plugin is that it is priced quite high with just a 1 year license. 
                                                                     But people still think it’s worth paying for its sheer 
                                                                     ease-of-use!

3. Shopp

Feature-rich and packed with immense configuration capabilities, Shopp combines a free plugin with paid support. Almost all of its features have strikingly different features from what you would have seen elsewhere. Coupons is a case in point. With a good add-on price and a detailed feature-set, Shopp is definitely up there with the best plugins Wordpress has on offer. Now, if only it had a few more payment providers!

4. Cart66

You must have heard of this plugin owing to its price. But do you know that it also offers features free for which others charge a fee? Cart66 (Pro, not its Cloud counterpart) is a Wordpress plugin that gives you total value for money on the security front. On the payment front too, Cart66 stands head and shoulders above the rest. Its compatibility with almost any Wordpress plugin and its rich-feature set have fuelled its rise to the top.

5. MarketPress

MarketPress is a Wordpress ecommerce plugin that differs from the rest in that it allows you to run multiple stores yourself. With stock notification for different products, coupon tracking facility, and even giving third-party vendors the power to run your store, MarketPress is a plugin that is immense in its versatility. Coming to the price tag ($19), though it might seem very low, you actually need to pay much more for supports and upgrades!

A Look at How B2C is Influencing B2B eCommerce

With businesses looking to get a share of the mindspace of the customer, it is B2C ecommerce that attracts the most attention in the eye of the media. But across the world, it is B2B ecommerce that is driving sales. But the explosion of B2B ecommerce has meant that some quintessential B2C characteristics have spilled over to the B2B market as well. This article takes a look at both these models and some of their commonalities.

The B2B space

In the one to many B2B ecommerce business model, companies have their own online B2B store in which customers can purchase goods. This is a simple model but requires a well-oiled, sophisticated supply chain infrastructure to back it. 

 

B2B online sales isn’t going anywhere, it is here to stay for the long run. And the growth of B2B ecommerce is mainly going to come from the surge in mobile phone buying across the world. This has set off a race among companies to put out mobile versions of their products as the smartphone era has got people buying and selling with abandon at the touch of a screen.

The B2C impact?

In the many-to-many model, many companies join to form an extensive private network, or a marketplace that is open to suppliers of all hues. Now, this is administered by a third-party who has the expertise necessary to see it through. 

 

Studies have shown that B2B companies can greatly reduce their costs if only they guided customers to an online ecommerce environment that is self-service oriented. But the crucial difference between B2B and B2C comes with fluctuation of prices. With customer-specific prices and discounts that vary based on who is selling how much, B2C has much more of unpredictable price changes than its content counterpart. 

 

So how exactly has B2C influenced B2B ecommerce? Well, in many important areas:

• Customization
• Making catalogs more attractive
• Inventory availability in real time

With facilities like real-time inventory availability, B2B has made itself more attractive to the lay businessman because it does away with unnecessary third-party links in the supply chain. Add customer reviews to customization and personalization and you get an almost B2C-like environment!

A Peek into Magento for the Uninitiated

Magento has remained the No.1 ecommerce platform ever since its inception in March 2008. Robust, flexible and Open Source, it is built on the Zend framework and delivers just what the customer wanted. The leader though it is, it’s not difficult to learn for all you need is sound knowledge of HTML and CSS and you will learn the rest with the Magento environment itself. 

 

The Building Blocks of Magento 

 

Now, to build an ecommerce website with Magento, you need to be familiar with the MVC pattern. The MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern is used to separate an application’s concerns with the model representing an object, the view representing the visualisation of data and the controller acting as both, essentially controlling the data flow.

But there are many other components apart from the models and the views in Magento. When you look at the code of Magento, you will find many modules without views. On the other hand, you will find additional modules such as ‘sql’, ‘helper’ etc. What you need to understand here is that Magento has its own set of modules each having their own M’s and V’s and C’s. These modules create the separate portions inside a typical Magento page replete with the headers, links, footers, mini-carts, and so on. 

 

The Magento code structure is extremely well-designed in the sense that there exists a clear distinction between the ‘core’ code and community ‘third-party’ code. What does that mean for you? This means that you can install third party extension and modules without any fear of it impacting your site’s essential look and feel.

Now, with this Magento is able to achieve some great features such as product comparison, CMS system for static pages, layered navigation, multistore feature and much more. It is able to achieve all this with its superior API integration that other ecommerce platforms still have a lot to learn from. As to how Magento does this, wait till the next article!