The Online Shop Designer Blog

Creating news articles in Viart Shop is both simple and effective. The reason news articles are effective is that they perform a dual role: on the one hand they can keep site visitors informed about the latest products or services, while on the other hand they can assist with Search Engine Optimisation. Naturally to be most effective for SEO they will need to be carefully written around a chosen keyword phrase, and that keyword phrase should be included in the main article Title, the Descriptions, The ‘Alt’ text if you are using any images (and that is a good idea), the Meta Title and the Meta Description.

To create a News article:

• In admin go to Articles / News
• Fill in the relevant fields to suit – taking particular care to use the keyword phrase in those sections mentioned above.
• Click [Add New] to save.

As a long term strategy try and post effective news articles on a regular basis. Once a week would be good, but whatever it is, make it a habit. It is a great way to help move your eCommerce site away from just codes and prices to meaningful content that Search Engines and customers can relate to.

Over the last few months 2 of my clients have had the security of their hosting accounts breached by spammers inserting scripts to activate illegal mass mailing campaigns. The result was that the server administrators had to immediately put the hosting accounts into suspension until the offending scripts were removed. In other words the websites were temporarily, but completely, out of action.

On this occasion it was fortunate for those involved that their web facilities were not actually destroyed, which meant that I was as able to remove the scripts and re-enable their websites. The outcomes could have been very different however, as I don’t think either client had a current backup.

To manage this situation I suggest that clients do one (or both) of the following:

1. Ask TOSD to change your hosting account’s password to something more complex and secure. It’s FREE – just submit a Support ticket.
2. Take out a Support Agreement with TOSD for just $5.00/month (payable annually). As well as ongoing help and advice with your website applications, a Support Agreement includes automatic, scheduled, monthly offsite backups so that in the event of a catastrophic failure of your web facilities a recent backup will be at hand. And restoration can take as little as 15minutes. Compare that to having to re-create you website and all its content from scratch

Recently I have had a couple of clients who received bogus letters ‘inviting’ them renew their domain name . . . for up to 10 times the normal renewal rate! Well, I suppose if you are going to try it on you may as well set your sites high

Seriously though, these bogus domain renewals look quite professional and are often delivered by regular mail.

If your domain names are managed by TOSD, check these basic things before you pay anything:

• Was the renewal notice sent by TOSD from domains@tosd.com.au?  (TOSD do not send renewals, or anything else, by normal mail)
• Was the renewal fee either $60.00/2 yrs for a ‘.com.au’ domain, or $19.95/1 yr for a ‘.com’ domain?

Still not sure?

Submit a support ticket and ask. It could save you a lot of money.

All websites should have at least one goal.

It may be straight sales (in the case of an eCommerce site), or enquiries via a contact form. Whatever it is, it should still be a concrete, measurable goal.

Why measurable?

Because without information based on facts, a business has no basis on which to gauge the success of their activities, or whether strategies designed to yield an improvement do in fact deliver the anticipated benefits.

But isn’t statistical measurement tedious and just plain hard?

It can be, but here is a fast track way to start off. Imagine a situation where a tradesman specialises in installing outside spas. He creates a web page carefully designed to draw visitors interested in this service. His goal is to get them to contact him for a free onsite appraisal. To gain real insights into how his visitors are responding to his offer there are only three things that he really needs to measure:

1. How many people saw the promotional information web page?
   • AWStats in cPanel reports the page views for all pages, so the number of page views for the page in question are readily available.
2. How many people responded to the information on that page?
   • The way to set this up is as follows:
     • Create a button on the information page with an enticing offer that visitors should click to take them to a page with a very simple form that collects just sufficient details to enable them to participate in the offer (name and email may be sufficient). Make sure that this page does not appear in the main menu and is not accessible from any other link.
     • Once again, the page views for this contact page are available from AWStats
3. How many visitors followed through with the required action?
   • When the customer clicks the [Submit] button of the contact form, arrange for the website to re-direct to a dedicated ‘Thankyou’ page. As above, this page should not appear in any menu and the page views will be available from AWStats.

That’s it. No rocket science. Just three simple numbers that are all available in cPanel’s AWStats.

Now what can be done with the information?

Like so many things in marketing this scenario is a numbers game. In general, more people viewing the information page will result in more people clicking on the offer button, which will in turn increase the number of people who submit the required contact form (the end goal in this case). As an example in a particular month the page views may be as follows:

• Information page: 100
• Contact form page: 15
• Thankyou page (after submission): 1

The last figure seems to be rather low. To address this the Spa installer decides to increase the strength of the offer on the line immediately above the [Submit] button to encourage visitors who have got that far to take the final step. Next month’s figures may be as follows:

• Information page: 80
• Contact form page: 12
• Thankyou page: 4

So, overall the numbers for interested visitors are down (fluctuations month to month are inevitable) but importantly the conversions are up. Clearly, the change to the contact form worked!

Like to know how this can be set up on your website? Contact TOSD via the Support Desk. It may be easier than you think.

It is quite easy to upload and insert images into a Wordpress page or Blog post, but if you have not done it before it can be a little confusing because the system is rather different to other content management systems.

Image preparation

While it is possible (and easy) to re-size images from within Wordpress, it is always best to size then appropriately prior to uploading them. There are two parts to this process:

• Setting the resolution to 96dpi (depending on the image’s source it could be up to 300 dpi, which would result in a very large file that would be slow to download)
• Setting the physical dimensions (width x height) in pixels. There can be a bit of trial and error with this one depending on the available width of the content area of the page or post.  I suggest you start by setting the width to 250px. In most image resizing applications the height will adjust automatically to suit.
• If you don’t have an image re-sizing application have a look at Fotosizer. This is a great little application that lets you resize multiple images at a time.

Image Upload / Insertion

• Open the page or post you would like to add the image to.
• Click at the start of the paragraph you would like to associate the image with.
  • You will see that you can either align the image to the left, with the text flowing around it on the right, or vice versa.
• Just above the row of editor icons there is a lable “Upload/Insert” – click the square icon immediately to the right of this lable. Notice that if you hover your mouse over it, it says “Insert an image”
• The popup window defaults to the screen required to upload an image from your computer. This is the normal situation. Click the “Select Files” button, browse to the folder on your computer that has the required image, and upload it.
• A thumbnail of the image will be displayed, along with fields to complete as follows:
  • Enter a meaningful title
  • Set the Link URL to “None” unless you would like the image to be clickable, in which case you can enter the target address
  • Set alignment to “Left” or “Right” as required.
  • If you have sized the image appropriately prior to upload you can leave the size to the default “Full size”
  • Click “Insert into post”
• The image will now be displayed in your post. Often you may like to create some whitespace around the image so that the text does not appear to be crowding it. If that is the case do this:
  • Click on the image, then click the edit icon.
• In the pop up window click on the Advanced Settings Tab
  • Next to the “Image Properties” line set Vertical Space to 10 and Horizontal Space to 10. You can experiment with these values.
  • Note that you can also add a border if required. Try entering a width of 2.

That’s it!

If you have come this far you have done well. It seems like a lot of little steps when described in detail like this, but it will soon be second nature. Happy blogging

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