Technically Easy

Category: Websites and Blogging

This category will contain any blogging-related posts, that includes platforms such as WordPress and Blogger.

How to Reduce the Load Time of a Blog by 90%
The load time of a blog is a critical factor not only for retaining visitors, but also for performing well in search engines. There are many ways you can reduce the load time of a blog, and in this post I will look at an actual example of how I managed to reduce the load time of a blog by 90%!.

Before I go into the steps, I’ll provide a little background. I recently switched hosts, and while the new host is cheaper, I noticed a decrease in performance. On top of that, I am on the shared hosting plan, so I don’t have the performance luxury of a VPS.

Since I have chosen to have my blogs on a cheap plan, there aren’t as many options available to me as there are for the more expensive plans, such as memory caching and more dedicated hardware.

While there are limitations, there are also options that I can use to help with the load time of my blogs. The good news is that the options to increase the performance of my blogs don’t cost anything, and can actually be done in minutes, and not hours or days.

In the next several sections I will show you the performance of my blog before optimizing it, and then after it is optimized. There are a few things to note:
- The blog I am optimizing is a simple gaming blog called Skyrim Travels.
- It currently uses the free service from CloudFlare to help with content caching.
- The blog uses a child theme based on the Thematic theme.
- For WordPress caching, it uses the Hyper Cache plugin.
- All tests for load time will be performed using Pingdom Tools
With the above points in mind, let’s first take a look at the starting point for reducing the load time of the blog.

Reduce the load time of a blog – before

To begin, I head over to Pingdom Tools and analyzed the load time of my Skyrim Travels blog. You can use any online tools for measuring your blog, but I find Pingdom Tools to be easy to use and easy to understand.

After running the test I got the below result.

Pingdom Test Before Optimization

The load time of the blog was at 2.55 seconds, which wasn’t too bad, but it still was higher than I would have liked it to be. Actually, I was surprised and thought it would be higher.

The performance grade indicated 61 out of 100, which I don’t like. You can see some of the issues in the lower part of the image, with the colour red meaning something could be improved. There were several issues with the performance, and the good news was that many of the issues in red could be fixed easily and with minimal effort on my part.

The one thing I do want you to be aware of when performing tests on your blog is the number of requests that are made to display a page of your blog. The more requests a visitor needs to make, the longer it will take to display the content. Try to reduce the number of requests needed for your blog as much as possible. In the case of my blog, I could reduce the number of requests automatically as I fixed the issues.

Pingdom Test Before – Content Breakdown

Speaking of requests, the image above helped show me the content for the various requests that are made to my blog. The two tables on the right showed the content type of each request and the domains receiving the requests. From the table I could see that 19 requests were made for scripts and another 19 were made for images. The Skyrim Travels blog does have a lot of images to display, so I won’t worry about those requests, but I could do something about the number of script requests.

Apparently a lot of CSS files (15 requests), are also downloaded from the blog by a visitor. I should be able to also reduce this number, as well.

On the left side we can see the content size by both type and domain. While I won’t worry too much about the size, I should be able to reduce the number slightly. The largest size for content are the images, which I should be able to compress further, but at this time, I do have other options. The scripts and CSS files I should reduce slightly as I perform the optimizations.

Reducing the load time

Now that I know some of the issues that I needed to fix, let’s look at each issue and the solution that I implemented to fix the issue.

Note:

When I did the optimizations for my blog I disabled the Hyper Cache plugin as well as set CloudFlare to Development Mode. This allowed me to see the effects of the changes I was making to my blog. When All optimizations were done, I re-enabled the Hyper Cache plugin and turned off Development Mode in CloudFlare.

Combine external JavaScript and CSS

For my WordPress blog, fixing this issue was fairly easy as it just required me to install and configure one plugin – Better WordPress Minify. I have used other minify plugins in the past, but I find this one has worked the best for me.

I simply downloaded and installed the plugin and BWP Minify appeared on the left from my WordPress dashboard. From there I clicked the BWP Minify option to view the General Options page.

Since I wanted to minify both the JavaScript and CSS files I clicked the Manage enqueued Files tab at the top. When the page to manage the files was first displayed I was shown the following message:
```
No enqueued files detected.

Please try visiting a few pages on your site and then refresh this page.

You should clear this list once in a while to get rid of files that are no longer being used as this is not done automatically.
```
I then visited my blog – it doesn’t get much traffic so it would take a while for the enqueued files to populate the lists. Once I viewed a few pages, the two lists were automatically populated.

I accepted the defaults, and clicked the Save Changes button at the bottom. Once the changes were saved, I opened the blog to ensure it was still displaying correctly. Minifying resources such as JavaScript or CSS can affect the look at feel of your blog so it is always best to view multiple pages on your blog, and to try out various aspects, such as commenting, to ensure everything is still working.

Note:

Since I disabled both my caching plugin and CloudFlare, I could see the effect of minifying my JavaScript and CSS files immediately. Had I kept either enabled, then I would have seen the cached version, and not the results of the minified files. Ensure that you disable any caching before viewing your blog after minifying the files.

Once I confirmed my blog was still displaying correctly, I looked at resolving the next issue.

Leverage browser caching

Resolving this item involved editing the .htaccess file on my server. All root folders for your WordPress blogs should have a .htaccess file created. All I needed to do in this case was open the file in a text editor and add the following lines:
```
ExpiresActive on
# ExpiresByType overrides the ExpiresDefault...
# cache expiration time of 2 days|A172800.
ExpiresDefault A172800
ExpiresByType image/jpg A4838400
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A4838400
ExpiresByType image/gif A4838400
ExpiresByType image/png A4838400
ExpiresByType image/bmp A4838400
ExpiresByType image/x-icon A4838400
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml A4838400
ExpiresByType text/javascript A4838400
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript A4838400 
ExpiresByType text/css A4838400
ExpiresByType text/html A4838400
ExpiresByType application/x-font-ttf A4838400
ExpiresByType application/x-font-woff A4838400
ExpiresByType font/opentype A4838400
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash A4838400
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A4838400
ExpiresByType application/javascript A4838400
ExpiresByType video/mp4 A4838400
ExpiresByType video/ogg A4838400
ExpiresByType video/webm A4838400




Header append Cache-Control "public"


Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate"


Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
```
The above lines set the cache expiration time as well as the cache control settings. I won’t go into detail about what all the lines do, as they are well documented online. For your blog, you may want to adjust the times and cache settings as you may wish to use different values.

That was all that was needed to enable caching for the files. The next step was to remove the query strings from files to properly enable the caching.

Remove query strings from static resources

This is the last issue that I had to fix. By default, WordPress tends to add the WordPress version to the static resources by appending “?ver=” to each of the files. This has a negative affect on caching, and also one way for miscreants to determine which version of WordPress you are running, and then take advantage of any vulnerabilities in that version of WordPress.

You don’t need to have the version number appended to any of the static resources, so it is best if you just remove it.

Removing the version query string was really easy; I just had to add the following function to my functions.php file in my theme:
Once the function was added to my theme, I reloaded my blog and viewed the source. All static resources no longer had the version query string appended to the end.

One additional change in CloudFlare

I had corrected the issues that were reported by Pingdom Tools, but there was one additional change that I needed to make on CloudFlare to ensure that my blog not only loaded as fast as possible, but also allowed me, once I re-enabled CloudFlare, to preview any new posts without having caching issues.

Since my blog was already in CloudFlare, I didn’t have to go through the setup. So I logged into CloudFlare and selected my blog and then clicked Page Rules at the top. By default, CloudFlare allows me to add three page rules with the free CloudFlare account.

The three page rules that I added were as follows (you will obviously change the URL to match your blog):
1. URL: *skyrimtravels.com/wp-admin*
  - Disable Security
  - Cache Level: Bypass
  - Disable Performance
2. URL: *skyrimtravels.com/*preview=true*
  - Cache Level: Bypass
  - Disable Performance
3. URL: *skyrimtravels.com/*
  - Browser Cache TTL: 30 minutes
  - Always On: On
  - Cache Level: Cache Everything
  - Edge Cache TTL: a month
What the above three rules do is disable any caching when I access the WordPress dashboard (anything in wp-admin), or preview a post (preview=true in the URL). Everything else, like viewing my blog, I use the cache settings outlined in the rule. The cache settings will cause everything to be cached on the CloudFlare servers for one month. Anything that doesn’t have a browser expiry cache, will default to 30 minutes.

So after the browser cache expires in 30 minutes, and a new request is made for the same resource, the resource will be returned by the CloudFlare server instead of blog’s web server. The reason is because there are many CloudFlare servers around the world so regardless of where the visitor is located, it will be faster to download the files for my blog from a closer CloudFlare server than from my host’s server.

To avoid any issues with accessing the login page since it would use the third rule, I also installed the Rename wp-login.php so I could rename it to something like https://skyrimtravels.com/wp-admin-mylogin. It doesn’t matter what you name it as long as it begins with wp-admin so it would use the first rule, and not the third one.

Once all the above changes were made, I returned to Pingdom Tools to rerun the tests.

Reduce the load time of a blog – after

After making the changes I outlined above to my blog I was interested to see what improvements would result from the changes. Needless to say that I was surprised with how much of an improvement was seen once I ran the tests. One thing I should not, however, is that because I had to prime both the WordPress and CloudFlare caches, I had to run the test twice to see the improvements.

The image below shows the results of the test after the changes to the blog.

Pingdom Test After Optimization

The most notable improvement is in the response time, which is about 90% lower than the initial tests I ran. I ran the test multiple times and all tests reported around the same response time.

The second improvement is in the number of requests – decreased from 56 to 33 (41% decrease). This is a result of minifying both the JavaScript and CSS files into one or two files. The results of the minify also impacted the size of the files being download, which you can see in the page size. The initial test showed a page size of 348.6 KB, while the latest test shows a size of 278.3 KB, which is a 20% reduction in size.

The combination of reduced requests and page size have a drastic effect on the response time of the blog, as it would on any site.

Let’s have a look at the content that is being downloaded from the blog.

Pingdom Test Before – Content Breakdown

The content information is largely affected by the minifying process for both the JavaScript and CSS files. When the two file types are minified, both the number of files that need to be requested, and the file sizes are reduced. The file size is reduced because the spaces, carriage returns, and comments are removed from the files.

As you can see above, the number of JavaScript and CSS files has been reduced. Both used to be two of the three most requested file types on the blog, with combined requests of 34. Now, after minifying the files, the total requests is 22 – a 65% reduction.

The largest reduction is with the JavaScript files. The initial test had 19 files being downloaded, and the now the requests number 4 (79% reduction). While not have as much of a reduction, the number of CSS files decreased from 15 to 8, which is still a nice 47% decrease in the number of files being downloaded.

As for the file sizes, that has also decrease, as well. The total size of the JavaScript files decreased from 116.64 KB to 51.8 KB, which results in a decrease of 56%. The CSS files didn’t have the same amount in decrease, but it was still a nice change – from 19.96 KB to 14.94 KB (25% reduction).

As I mentioned above, the decrease in both the JavaScript and CSS files are a result of minifying both file types.

With just a few changes made to my blog I have managed to significantly improve the response time for the visitors. There are many ways to optimize a WordPress blog, such as reducing the number of plugins, choosing themes that don’t load a lot of resources, but the changes I applied here can work for any blog, and Website.
June 20, 2017
e-Commerce Anxiety: 5 Things Holding You Back from Success

Starting a new project can be daunting for anybody, especially when it affects your livelihood. Sadly, a lot of aspiring online merchants give up on their dream of owning and operating their own e-commerce site due to fear of failure.

To a certain extent, this is understandable. A successful e-commerce vendor is equal parts entrepreneur, marketing expert and customer service representative; and that’s a lot for a newbie to handle.

But thankful, there are ways to conquer this anxiety and get your e-store up and running, without a lot of stress and heartache.

Here are 5 things holding you back from success in the e-commerce world.

Fear of Failure

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

You will, without a doubt, encounter some obstacles to creating your first e-commerce store. It’s all right. You won’t be the first one. Not to mention that the web is full of articles (just like this one!) to help you combat almost any hiccup.

So don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. It’s the only way you’ll learn.

Brand Identity Crisis

By now, you probably have an idea of the types of products you want to sell, whether it be apparel, cosmetics, hand-crafted home décor or collectible novelties.

But the truth of the matter is that someone out there is probably selling the same goods. How do you make your brand stand out from the crowd?

It’s important to remember that successful vendors sell more than just products, they sell a brand identity that connects with shoppers.

Are you selling make-up or “cosmetics for the timeless beauty?”

Are you selling sports memorabilia or “man-cave essentials?”

Research your target audience and develop a brand personality that speaks to them.

Funds

If you are troubled by the idea of programming your own website or paying a developer to do it for you, I’ve got some good news: there are various platform providers that take the stress out of how to make an e-commerce website by offering the tools you need to launch your site quickly and easily, including payment processing, content management, product management and more.

Design Disasters

If you are nervous that an ugly website could distance shoppers, well, you’d be right. Research shows that 25 percent of shoppers leave a site without buying simple because a website is a pain to look at or use.

Ensure a smooth customer experience from start to finish. Develop a website that is easy on the eyes, free from clutter and keeps important functions (like the search bar, contact page and cart) front and center.

Similarly, you’ll want to remove any roadblocks or disruptions from your checkout process.

Marketing Know-How

Does the idea of doing your own marketing give you cold feet? Well, before you shell out big bucks to an agency, you might want to take advantage of the numerous low-budget, high-ROI opportunities out there, including social media, email marketing and blogging.

Social media, for example, is a wonderful way to consistently interact with customers and stay top of mind. You can also run contests, host surveys and encourage followers to share images or video of them using your products.

Email marketing is perfect for keeping consumers abreast of upcoming sales, product launches and limited-time offers. Not to mention that it has one of the highest ROIs around.

Finally, blogging is useful for building a following and boosting your SEO. Don’t know what to write about? Start with some how-to guides, seasonal fashion tips or little-known facts about sports memorabilia. Just so long as it relates to your products.

In the end, there are no obstacles so insurmountable to discourage you from at least exploring the world of e-commerce. Don’t be afraid to experiment. After all, it’s your store and your story.

June 9, 2017
10 Mistakes to Avoid for an Effective eCommerce Blog
More and more people are buying products online because of the convenience and cost benefits this gives them. If you are running an eCommerce website, you should consider complementing it with an effective eCommerce blog. This is because:
- Search engines see blog pages as fresh content for your site, which is good for SEO since you will have internal links pointing to your site and your blog content will be keyword optimized.
- A blog humanizes your website. You can express better what your team’s passion is and what you care about on a blog as opposed to an eCommerce website, where focus is on selling.
- You will be able to advertise your wares to visitors who visit your blog just for the content (who had no intention of buying from you). You should, however, be subtle in how you market your wares.
- A good blog will bring you out as an expert in your niche and build trust, factors that will improve conversion rates.
- You can include social media badges that can be used by your visitors to share your content. This further increases your reach.
- The comments your visitors leave will give you valuable feedback on what you need to improve.
Creating a blog does not have to be difficult. You need not post daily and you can even invite guest bloggers. If your blog is to make real impact, it needs to be better than what your competitors are offering.

You should know the common mistakes eCommerce business owners make with their blogs so that you can avoid them.

Only writing about your products

An eCommerce blog, unlike an eCommerce website, gives you freedom to express yourself. Avoid the common mistake of only talking about your products as this will bring monotony and readership will go down.

Other than your products (what you are selling, where it came from, how it is made, and features that differentiate it from what is in the market), you can also blog about such things as:
- Your story (the history, vision, and growth of your business).
- Events that you are participating in or that you are running.
- Tutorials on how your product is used.
- Advice on related products that you may not be offering.
- Updates on your company.
- Major developments in your industry.
- Announcements such as when you have a sale.
- Something interesting that is trending and that would interest your readers.
Lack of focus

There is no contradiction with the previous point. Although you should write more than just about your products, do not deviate too much from the topic.

Do not write about each and every topic that you think about as this will create disinterest in those who read your blog posts for specialized information.

You do not have to produce a blog postevery day as this could lead to burnout, preventing you from finding something relevant to write about.

Blogs that are hard to find

You may have a very good blog but you will not get visitors if it is hard to find. In eCommerce websites where blogs are an afterthought, you would have to Google the blog to find it.

You should ensure your blog is accessible from the main website and you should use it to link back to your site.

Poor blog design

Whilst many eCommerce websites are investing heavily in their main websites, little investment seems to be going to blogs. This leaves them with blogs whose design is inconsistent with that of the main page.

Readers will notice when a blog seems to have been put up in a hurry. The layout, font, and other design elements should be consistent with those of the main site and if possible, have the same web design company develop both your site and your blog.

Forgetting SEO

One of the greatest benefits of blogging is that it boosts your SEO efforts. Avoid the common mistake of forgetting SEO rules such as keyword optimization and link building.

You should only use White Hat SEO tactics since Grey Hat and Black Hat tactics could lead to the banning of your site.

Mediocre title

Some bloggers concentrate on the content and forget about the title. Your title is the gateway to the blog and you should ensure it is short, mobile-friendly and attention grabbing.

A boring title will devalue your article. However, this is not to say that you should turn your title into the equivalent of a Vegas billboard.

Neglecting the intro and the CTA

If you have a good title that entices a reader, whether or not the reader will continue with the rest of the article will depend on the intro.

Another common mistake is assuming that readers will visit your site if they find your content interesting. You need a CTA (call-to-action) to entice your readers to visit your site.

Not having a target audience

Face it, your blog will not be liked by everybody. You should write with a target audience in mind. What works for millennials will most likely not work for baby boomers.

Your target audience should be based on what you are selling.

Neglecting comments

Enable commenting on your blog. Comments give you valuable feedback that you can use in product development and to make improvements to your current products.

Answer questions raised in comments and do not delete negative comments as they humanize your brand.

Doing it all yourself

Join a blog community for content from guest bloggers. You should also consider getting content from your employees. This will give a fresh perspective to your blogs and eliminate boredom.

Other common mistakes that you should avoid are:
- Ignoring social media (through social media buttons).
- Not promoting the blog through such forums as mainstream media, article submissions, and press releases.
- Grammatical mistakes resulting from failure to properly edit the content.
- Failure to use visual effects to add to the attractiveness of the blog.
You would be surprised at just how many eCommerce businesses, including the most prominent names, make mistakes. Making these mistakes will make your efforts futile.

You will not only waste time and money, but you will also miss golden opportunities.
June 5, 2017
Intranet Communications Keep Employees Engaged
Modern employee communications take place online. Employees are more productive when they understand how they fit into a company and are helping to achieve those company goals.

Open communication provides feedback to management as well as faster troubleshooting when problems arise. This communication leads to employee retention and better customer service.

A company intranet system can provide this communication. Your intranet should engage people and reward them for participation.

Gaining employee buy-in

According to employee communications specialists, a business should consider the responses it wants from the workforce.

Surveying employees can provide feedback on the type of information they want to receive and how they will interact with this information.

By including employees in the planning process, you help gain employee buy-in of the process and make staff feel like an integral part of the company.

Some uses of a company intranet may include daily bulletins, employee events, policy changes, company performance, and press mentions.

Allow people to respond online with questions and comments. Try surveying employees to gain a consensus, or provide an anonymous form for suggestions or complaints.

Customize your own intranet based on the needs of your organization.

Types of news to share across your Intranet

New contracts, expansions, and new hires are always newsworthy. New people in different positions can be introduced to the entire workforce through an employee intranet.

Special projects, programs, and discoveries help educate employees on company business. A new patent or a new piece of equipment can be the focus of a daily or weekly update.

Some additional types of news you may want to include are:
- Updates across different divisions or locations.
- Interdepartmental updates and goals.
- HR updates and employee benefit news.
- Awards and honors such as outstanding service, perfect attendance or community outreach.
- Sports and recreational updates such as intramural events or the locally sponsored Little League team.
- Weekly highlights or records.
- Special events like charity drives, donation programs, or the Go Fund Me of an employee’s family in need.
The great thing about an intranet is that you can also customize your site based on specific group needs.

The finance department may sound dull to the person involved in engineering, even though finance processes payroll and determines yearly bonus checks.

Marketing, contracts, and manufacturing all have specialized news needs that can be met by creating a group within a group online.

Use these smaller groups for daily departmental updates that won’t clog up the newsfeed of the larger organization.

Emergency procedures, OSHA, MSDS

Every business must have emergency procedures for fires, floods, and other mishaps. Emergency procedures vary based on the individual business, and the intranet provides a local backup for safety procedures specific to your location.

The intranet can update emergency evacuations and other procedures on a regular basis. This can include everything from an armed robbery to an employee having an unexpected meltdown that may be dangerous to other people.

Create quizzes to test employee knowledge for emergency plans from earthquakes to a simple power outage.

Intranet solutions can also provide a backup for federally mandated paperwork. In addition to standard onsite binders, you can store backup information on OSHA, FMLA, MSDS and more.

Health advice

Company communications demonstrate how a company cares for its workforce, emphasizing good health in the workplace. Encourage people to take breaks, exercise and eat healthy food.

Many companies offer free flu shots prior to winter and the intranet provides a simple way to remind everyone of your upcoming clinic.

Employees who have personal problems at home should be encouraged to talk to people who can help either in the company or outside. Human Resources usually work with people who have problems within the company that can interfere with work performance.

Intranet management

Your intranet will be run by a team of technical workers who manage and maintain the site, as well as content managers who create and share company news.

The person in charge of the company intranet must be responsive to people and know how to use communications software.

In addition to the talent for working online, you will need someone to coordinate departmental news across many channels, assisting, rather than hindering your already busy managers in customer service, operations, and human resources.

Capitalize on the benefits of an employee intranet now, using employee engagement and communication as a method to increase employee happiness.

Make sure your employees are being heard at all levels from management to entry level with a customized intranet solution today.
April 28, 2017
How to Organize Website Data with MySQL
Suppose you have a tight budget and do not know much about technology, but have a unique idea for a useful site full of elaborate content.

What is your next logical step? The answer is getting a low-cost web host such as iPage and explore the many user-friendly web tools provided.

Here are ways to efficiently store information on your site using MySQL database, which comes free with iPage.

What is MySQL?

MySQL (often pronounced “my sequel”) is an Oracle-owned relational database, allowing you to enter, store and utilize information in tables, columns, and rows. It is useful for creating a marketing list with various data about your customers.

Typical information stored in this type of database includes ID, name, address, phone number, and email addresses.

You can think of it as similar to a spreadsheet, except it is much more powerful since it can be used for web development. MySQL integrates with WordPress, Drupal, and other open source content management systems.

It is considered the standard database for websites.

Common Reasons for Using MySQL

As an example for the utilization of a database, Amazon stores, all of its product information in a database. Many popular sites with search engines, such as Wikipedia, Craigslist, and YouTube draw from databases in response to user queries.

The two primary reasons for using this technology are to organize website data and provide easy, quick access to data. Here are some of the top benefits of connecting MySQL to your website:
1. Warehousing for terabytes of data.
2. High-speed performance for specific applications.
3. Scalability and flexibility for customization.
4. Reliable 24/7 access to data.
5. Organizing and indexing data protected by encryption.
6. Backing up data and recovery strategies.
7. Support for application development (PHP, Perl, Java, Visual Basic, .NET).
8. The capability of quick application downloading .
9. Performance monitoring tools.
10. Saves time and costs.
While programmers need to learn SQL and a programming language, it is not necessary to know the code for storing information in MySQL. For example, you do not have to know how an engine works to drive a car.

For a more user-friendly graphical experience, you can use a free software tool called PhpMyAdmin, which is an intuitive interface that resembles a website instead of typing in statements.

How MySQL Makes Life Easier

Multi-use tables used for multiple purposes, not only allow you to use tables to store customer information, but you can use them to store information on products, vendors, and employees.

Each table denotes a particular type of information, which divides into columns and rows.

For instance, use employees as an example of a table, the first column reserved typically for employee ID numbers. The second column might be for the last name, the third column is the first name, and the fourth column would be contact information.

Rows called “records,” represent individual people. If the table is about inventory, then each record would be a separate product.

For the database to connect to the web securely, MySQL allows the administrator to set users, passwords, and privileges. If you are working with a team, you may only want certain members to access certain tables and not others.

Your web host, whether it is iPage or another platform, will provide you with the instructions on how to connect your website to the database. If you like, you can create multiple databases on the same server.

The left column of your admin web interface gives you simple configuration tools for tasks, such as backing up a database. An option is to import an entire existing database from your computer or wherever you have stored it.

You assign a unique name to your various databases, and you list them in the far left column of the admin interface.

Once you select a database, you will then see a list of tables in the left column. You can create as many tables as you want, whether it is for finances, records, web content, or any other type of information you want to store.

It is a great tool for archiving blogs, marketing campaigns, and future content. You can export tables to Excel spreadsheets.

Conclusion

MySQL offers essential database functions that anyone can handle. If you want to learn database programming, you will need to dedicate more time to learning a programming language.

Either way, it can help you organize your business more efficiently and bypass investing in expensive enterprise software. This solution is practical for keeping all valuable company data in one place.
April 25, 2017
5 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an Online Business

Regardless of the kind of business you are running, an online presence provides you with a platform to boost your sales. This is why new blogs and websites are coming up every day.

However, online business is an art on its own, and if you don’t get it right, you might incur great losses. But, how do you get over these loopholes and establish a successful online business?

Here are 5 mistakes to avoid when starting an online shop.

1. Waiting too long before launching a product

Most newbies in the online business always make this mistake. They wait too long before launching a product to sell. Stop waiting for the magic number of 1000 or 10,000 subscribers before you start selling.

You might be too good at luring many clients to subscribe, but what else are you offering? Online shopping is gaining publicity, and if you don’t have anything to sell to your customers, you might lose them in the end.

There is never a right time, just launch a product and start selling. If no one buys your product, learn from your mistakes and launch another product that is more relevant.

2. Failing to LISTEN to your customers

Customers make or break a business. If you need to know the quality of your product, you need to listen to your customers. Not just those who buy, but those who refuse to buy it or those who buy it and refuse to use it.

These are the ones who will give you honest feedback on your product and the changes that you need to make. They will also let you know how to improve the overall shopping experience resulting in customer satisfaction.

3. Failing to optimize your site for SEO

When shopping online, customers are looking for a site that is easy to navigate and doesn’t take ages for the web pages to load.

SEO makes it possible for your site to stand out from the thousands of sites with the same product as you. Therefore, always try and keep up with the changing trends in SEO so as to improve your rankings and make it simpler for potential clients to find you.

4. Failing to be different

It is next to impossible to establish an online shop that sells a product which no one else isn’t selling already. Therefore, the only advantage you have lies in what makes your product stand out.

What is unique about your products and services? Selling a product just because someone else is successfully doing it is never an option. This is because everyone has their “secret ingredient” that makes them different.

If you do not have that defining feature for your brand, then you will look just like the others in your business and you won’t be able to make any major sales.

Failing to be different is something many people struggle with online, and is usually the main reason for failure.

5. Just putting up an image and some content

How interesting is it to navigate around your site? Do you just post an image and some content and move on hoping to attract customers somehow? How about some creativity?

Apart from just posting web content and stopping at that, try out some creativity and post videos that help market your products. Also, at the end of your posts, create room for customer feedback and comments on their shopping experience.

For instance, if your online business deals with for example aircraft parts like marvel schebler carburetors, it is important that you respond to online customers’ complaints quickly and professionally to avoid negative comments that can damage your business reputation.

Starting an online business comes with its own challenges. However, there are many mistakes which can be avoided if you do your research before starting out.

There is never a wrong or right time to do it.

Stop procrastinating and start acting on your goals.

Optimize your site to ensure a smooth shopping experience and watch your sales grow!

April 21, 2017
What Makes a Success Story Website?
Your site is built and you’re ready to invite people from anywhere and everywhere to check out your content. Assuming you’ve built a solid foundation on the basics – relevant original content and easy navigation – here are valuable SEO strategies to maximize your content marketing efforts.

Low Cost Hosting

One way to cut hosting costs of a website is to use a platform such as iPage. Not only does it only cost a few dollars per month, it provides user-friendly tools, making it easy for anyone to create websites. This solution can be used by website owners or an outsourced online marketing team to cut costs. At the same time, iPage provides useful tools for creating very professional websites.

Easy Access Business Information

When people come to your site they should be able to figure out immediately where they can find answers to their questions about your business, especially contact information. If you don’t include a contact page, at least give some type of contact information such as an email address or social media profile on your about page.

The easiest way to ensure visitors have no way to get confused or lost about your business location or who to contact, is to include contact information or a link to it at the top of your home page. Links to social media profiles are extremely powerful CTAs to encourage interaction with your brand.

Another reason why you need easy-to-find CTAs relates to your mobile audience that uses smartphones to make purchasing decisions while shopping. You can increase conversions if you provide easy access to coupons or coupon codes. Many local brick and mortar businesses still promote their phone numbers and physical addresses at the top of every page to remind followers that their businesses are more than just websites.

Fresh Brand-Building Content

Whether your site comprises articles, blogs, videos or other formats, you must constantly update your content to stay relevant. Websites that only consist of less than ten pages and never evolve, tend to never develop a significant following, even if those ten pages are incredibly awesome. People have more reason to return to your site if it keeps growing in content. This article provides important tips for building and managing SEO-driven web content.

A key SEO advantage to creating as many web pages as possible through an expanding blog series is that it gives you increasing opportunities to get indexed by search engines. Google is more likely to take your site seriously as a hub for authoritative thought leadership if you keep adding valuable original content about your brand. Over half of websites worldwide use a Content Management System (CMS) to make content creation more efficient, according to W3Techs.

Brand awareness is essential to business success, since consumers witness hundreds to thousands of brands per day. They have so many choices thrown at them during any given online session, that you need to take measures to ensure web visibility. The more informative web pages you add to your site, the better chances you have of attracting people in your target market. Here are SEO factors in which Google weighs strongly in its search rankings:
- High-quality content.
- Relevant link building.
- Elaborate content of at least 1,000 words.
- Use of at least a single image.
Part of what drives traffic is SEO, but it’s worth repeating that another crucial component is updating your content. According to HubSpot, sites that publish over 16 blogs per month get three times more traffic than sites with less than five new posts per month. Another interesting statistic is that updating old text and images can increase organic traffic by over 100%.

Customer Reviews

The reason it’s important to allow audience interaction through a social media company is because customer reviews are now a huge influence on final purchasing decisions made by consumers. The public now puts more faith in reviews than from media advertising. If you find that negative feedback overshadows positive feedback on your social media profile, take that as a marketing research hint.

Something you must realize before trying to craft a scheme to flood the internet with positive reviews is that most consumers have become skeptical of overly positive reviews. If every review is a glowing endorsement packed with marketing jargon, guess what happens? People think the reviews are fake. They even have tools to investigate review authenticity.

If automated software determines that too many positive reviews trace back to the same email account, it could be a red flag to many objective observers. Search engines might penalize and downgrade those reviewers as web spammers. Allowing a certain amount of negative reviews can give a more authentic presentation. Negatives can become positives by learning from consumer feedback what improvements need to be made.

You can expand your site’s universe of online reviews by encouraging customers to post reviews on third part local directories such as Yelp. You can also increase exposure of consumer feedback by including video testimonials on your web pages. Videos can be the best vehicles to share product information, particularly with product demonstrations and honest customer testimonials of how brand experiences met or exceeded expectations and improved people’s lives.

Focus on Direct Call-To-Action

Your site needs an obvious call-to-action at the top of every page to encourage visitors to check out your content. CTAs come in many forms, usually as short text phrases or buttons with short messages, symbols or images. They hold monumental importance in directing attention toward a specific action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form or clicking to learn more.

The most important aspect of CTAs to remember, besides making them obvious, is that they are easy-to-read and have a clear purpose. Some website owners prefer buttons that say “buy now,” while others want to present less of a sales push, so they add extra layers to the sales funnel for information seekers.

The sales funnel represents the path you pave with breadcrumbs to lead your prospects to whatever golden treasure you’ve crafted for them. Web pages full of informative nuggets are the breadcrumbs while your golden treasure is whatever purchasing opportunities you present for your target followers. CTAs are like the billboards and freeway signs that invite people to the places and stories you offer to make their journey more interesting. Ideally, this journey will lead to establishing long-term relationships with customers.

Conclusion

Websites come and go, but if you want yours to last for years and grow through time, it’s wise to implement a set of basic and creative strategies. Don’t be afraid to allow interactivity with your audience and be bold enough to give clear call-to-action statements that direct followers to your landing pages. You have the best chances of gaining high search engine visibility by embedding SEO strategies into your content presentation.
April 17, 2017
Getting Your Personal Business Online – Building the Website
First, there is big corporate businesses, then small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and small personal businesses. The first two don’t have much trouble when setting up their online presence since they might already have a following or the staff they need to build their online presence.

Small personal businesses, on the other hand, always have a hard time since you are a one or two-person team of desperados trying to make it in an otherwise competitive online world.

Does that mean you should ignore the internet and keep marketing your business on other platforms? Perhaps not.

According to VPN Mentor, the internet had over 3.7 billion internet users by the end of 2017. Coupled with the fact that over 64 percent of all in-store sales (approximately $2.2 trillion) had some connection with the internet, it is evident to see how much your personal business can benefit from owning a website.

Are you ready for the website?

Most personal businesses have to do significant trade-offs when choosing what to invest in and what to ignore for the time being. You will have to decide whether to spend a couple of thousand bucks on a website or whether to put that money into paid per click campaigns and social media campaigns.

A quick cost-benefit analysis will help you do a short-term evaluation of priorities and choose what will keep your business growing and running.
- Don’t spend too much on your website if the business isn’t yet stable unless your business plan revolves about the website.
- You have to be willing to invest time, money and effort into building a reputable website that will convince people your brand is the best.
- Don’t expect instant results. Be prepared to let search engine optimization (SEO) and other content marketing processes to run their natural course before you begin making sales.
Getting started with the venture

The trick to benefiting from your website is building quality. However, since getting brand specific domains is a bit tricky, most people will prefer grabbing their domain name and let it sit until they are ready to set up a decent online retail website.

Others will get an affordable and reliable hosting account and set up a simple blog explaining what they do. Just something simple and enough to keep the domain occupied and the few people who might search for you online covered.

Is this a good idea? Well yes. Some online presence without spending anything on it will help you drive subliminal sales to your website. Moreover, this simple setup will be a way to gauge how hard it will be to penetrate your local search for your business specific keywords.

Your Starter Website Must Have Professional Content

Professional content with the right keywords will do you justice on the search engines. Most of the times, people, and search engines will be looking for information on the internet rather than hunting for refined products.

Focusing on creating great content around your niche with the location name mentioned a couple of times and then drafting an elaborate about us and contact page to tie you to the niche will help you build your credibility as you build other aspects of your business waiting to invest on a reliable web design.

Content creation will always be cheaper than a comprehensive web design. Running an informative website as a starter will kick things in motion and prepare you psychologically for the massive investment you will make when getting that custom website.

Your final design must look and feel professional

With almost 1 billion websites out there, yours must be outstanding if you are to make any impression on your audience. First impressions matter. All your visitors will judge you depending on how good or how bad your website looks.

At all times, keep your appearance neat and professional. Emphasizing on speed and user experience is way better than any graphics. Convince your visitors that you are serious about business and they will do business with you.

Getting your business online gives you access to more customers. However, to succeed, you need strategy and a unique way to add value to your local audience.
March 30, 2017