eCommerce mistakes you want to avoid when creating your online business website

Building a business based on an eCommerce website is aways a challenge, so it is important to get basic things corrent first time to succeed in the ever competitive online market. Check if you have covered below points with your ecommerce website development.

1. No proper marketing Plan

You can build the best website of the whole wide world and no one will come buying stuff from you if they dont know about it. Having a digital marketing plan along with a traditional marketing strategies will give you the best results. It is always wise to hire a qualified experienced persons for this who can advice you not just digital marketing, but traditional as well.

2. No proper Branding – Logo or a unique theme

If your website does not have a quality logo to brand yourself, the visitors might not take you serious. Never keep your site without a logo, today the logo designs can be created for very cheap prices. If it still is out of your reach, create one yourself, but dont leave your site logoless.

3. Lack of customer interactions and recommendations/reviews

Reviews are the best marketing on your site you can ever put. There should be always methods for the customer to make inquiries and complaints easily.
It gives a chance for you to find out whats working and whats not in your products.

4. Showing Social profiles and stats when those are not grown fully.

Yes, We know, that you wanted your facebook followers featured on your website footer and your developer developed it at a cost. But enabling it when there is only few people following your page works totally negative to your business. Always remember to enable followers and stats only when they are looking impressive.

5. No proper story for your business

Every successful business has a great story about them to tell, if you dont have a great story, then customers might think you are not passionate about the products you present. So be creative and word your story well in your About Us page, state your vision, mission and goals clearly in that page in simple words. It will be a good investment to hire a experienced content writer for this one time job.

6. No Address in contact page

Al thou you may do the business entirely online, but people might be interested in where are you located for various reasons. Having your location mentioned in your contact page will not only make your customers more confident, it might open new business opertunities from your locale as well.

7. using a free email address.

Always use a proper email address from your domain name. Be creative about it too. You dont have to use info@yourdomain.com becuase everyone is doing it. if you are selling autoparts – turbo@yourautobusiness.com would be a good email to use for contact.

8. Trying too many things with SEO and lack of proper SEO strategy

You overall SEO strategy should be optimized to focus on your strongest markets and prioritize your keywords. Putting same amount of effort to a keyword that is less important will deprive the attention needed for you most important keywords.

it is always better to select your best keywords and a local SEO strategy to maximize RIO from you SEO budget.

You can talk to us about creating a successful ecommerce website with confidence that we know all the pitfalls of online businesses and will not let you fall in to those. Contact us today

The CSS font shorthand rule

When styling fonts with CSS you may be doing this:

font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
font-variant: small-caps;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: 1.5em;
font-family: verdana,sans-serif
And thats a lot of code to type and the CSS file gets big with if you have a lot of font rules!
There’s no need though as you can use this CSS shorthand property:
font: bold italic small-caps 1em/1.5em verdana,sans-serif
Much better! Just a few of words of warning: This CSS shorthand version will only work if you’re specifying both the font-size and the font-family. The font-family command must always be at the very end of this shorthand command, and font-size must come directly before this. Also, if you don’t specify the font-weight, font-style, or font-variant then these values will automatically default to a value of normal, so do bear this in mind too.
This is useful when you want to make your Joomla templates load faster, you can reduce the file size of your CSS files considerably by using this method.

Magento : How to replace the default logo in transactional emails

Here is a screenshot of the magento admin panel.

Navigate through menu > System > Configuration> Design > Transactional Emails.

Select and upload the logo , then set the ALT text. and save. Alt text is important as most email clients block images in email s by default.

Joomla Contact Us Form Issue – PHPMAILER_RECIPIENTS_FAILED

PHPMAILER_RECIPIENTS_FAILED

Some times this error occurs because default contact form tries to use users email address as the FROM address. Some hosts doesn’t allow this to stop spam.

So we need to change the FROM address to the Joomla configurations FROM address in the line 162 of file components/com_contact/controller.php.

After that , for convenience, we can add users email as REPLY TO address.
alter:

line 162 of file components/com_contact/controller.php.

Code:
$mail->setSender( array( $email, $name ) );
to:

Code:
$mail->setSender( array( $MailFrom, $name ) );
$mail->addReplyTo( array( $email, $name ) );

There may be other reasons to cause this error , this is just a one case and this case is hard to find since the mail error doesn’t generate much information.

Database Error: Unable to connect to the database:Could not connect to database

You should check the configuration.php file of your Joomla application and make sure the following lines are correct:

var $dbtype = ‘mysql’;
var $host = ‘localhost’;
var $user = ‘user_name’;
var $password = ‘YourPassword’;
var $db = ‘database_name’;
var $dbprefix = ‘jos_’;
You should make sure you are using the correct MySQL username and database in your configuration.php file. You can use the MySQL Databases tool in your cPanel in order to check the correct username and database for your Joomla. In addition, make sure that your MySQL username is added to your database. This issue can also be caused by errors within the database itself. In such cases you can try restoring your Joomla database.

Joomla Tip : Creating a new file on a joomla installation

Whenever creating a new file for the Joomla! installation you must avoid using certain text editors such as , WordPad, Word, for example as they unfortunately have a tendency to add unwanted and unnecessary code that may cause problems later on. Always remember to save files in plain text format.

How to add CSS and Javascript to Your Joomla Extension

When creating a quality Joomla extension you will place your styles and javascript codes on seperate files.

Then here is the way to add those files in to the joomla extension the proper way.

$document = JFactory::getDocument();
$document->addStyleSheet(JURI::root().’mod_name/css/stylesheet.css’);
$document->addScript(JURI::root(). ‘mod_name/js/script.js’);

Redirecting non-www to www with .htaccess

If you want to redirect all non www requests to your web site to the www version, all you need to do is add the following code to your .htaccess file: Needless to say that you must be running on apache with mod_rewrite enabled.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirecting www to non-www 

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^my-domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://my-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Why it is better to have a Dedicated IP ?

Every small piece of information transferred on the Internet is passed via an IP address. This address is just like your home address, and like a physical address can contain multiple houses , multiple websites can reside at one IP address. This setup is called shared hosting.

A dedicated IP gives you with your own private and unique online address that one can use to go directly to your website. A dedicated IP is necessary for services that require the passing of delicate and private information such as credit cards, social security numbers, and purchase information.

Benefits of having a dedicated IP over a shared IP:

Run Special Software on Your Server

Certain programs require a dedicated IP address before they can be set up and used. A dedicated IP allows you more options for available scripts.

Open Custom additional Ports

Gain access to additional ports you may need to run special services on that are blocked for shared IPs.

Avoid Negative Impact from Others who are sharing the same IP

On a dedicated IP you avoid possible negative action taken against shared IP users should someone on the same server get blocked.

Rank Better in Search Engines

Many experts believe that sites with a dedicated IP rank better in search engine results than those on a shared IP.

Browse Your Website by IP

Handy for situations where you want to access your site, but your domain name is inaccessible or not configured properly.

Enable SSL on Your Website

SSL Certificates are crucial if you have a business-oriented website and want to collect sensitive information such as credit card numbers. 

Inserting an Iframe to Joomla article using JCE editor

Have you tried to embed the an iframe in an article using the JCE editor in Joomla ?

You may have been frustrated to see your iframe code stripped off when the articles is finally saved.

Most of the time iframe is the easiest way to include external content in an webpage such as videos, forms and social feeds.

A quick fix for this would be to allow iframes in JCE editor settings below.

In Joomla admin, to to components > JCE Editor >

Profles -> desired Profile -> Plugin parameters -> Allow IFrames.

The setting is available in the media settings tab.