Turnning Your WordPress Blog Into An E-Commerce

There’s plenty of reasons to love WordPress, but access to a huge catalog of plugins to extend what the platform can do has to be one of the most important reasons. As the folks at WordPress.org say, these snippets of code can make your blog do just about “anything you can imagine”.
And they do mean anything, including e-commerce.
Today, it’s sometimes difficult to remember how revolutionary that is. There was a time, not too long ago, when successfully selling of electronic or physical products through your website meant finding and evaluating cryptic back-end software. This either required a lot of knowledge to install and manage, a lot of money to obtain, or accounts with several services to function properly. Now it’s as simple as installing and configuring a few plugins in your WP admin panel. Many are free, and some are not, so take your time and explore your options. To get you started, here are a few of the most popular e-commerce plugins to consider:

WP-eCommerce

Shopping cart software is the cornerstone of e-commerce. Your customers need a way to browse and select products on your site as well as a way to eventually place their order. WP-eCommerce is a free shopping cart solution that covers all the basics, allows coupon codes, works with numerous payment gateways like PayPal and Google Wallet, and claims to play well with any standard WordPress theme. A plug-in that works well with your theme is a huge benefit since you don’t want to change the entire look and branding of your site after you’ve developed a loyal audience.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce (WooThemes.com) is a premium e-commerce solution for WordPress, optimized to work with WooThemes. It’s also available through the same vendor. WooCommerce is an extensible solution, allowing users to choose and pay for the features they really need to make their e-commerce dreams a reality. You’ll enjoy the insights you can obtain from this package’s reporting capabilities, but keep in mind these stats focus on product performance. For insights into customer behavior and other aspects of your business, you may need to invest in a more robust business intelligence solution. You can read up on several advanced solutions at Netsuite.com or turn to Google to find a reporting solution scaled to your needs.

Cart66

Cart66 (Cart66.com) is $25 per month with an annual subscription, but it’s money well spent. This premium plugin showcases strong e-commerce security features and allows for the sale of physical and digital products. What sets it apart, however, is it’s ability to manage orders and payments for both membership sites and subscription services. That’s important. As Inc. Magazine points out, bloggers who can offer expertise and deliver real value to an online community by solving problems in their niche can reap handsome rewards through the regular revenue offered by the membership model.

WPDeposit

If you’ve ever purchased stock photos online, you know that the biggest services sell users credits they can then exchange for the picture they want. Essentially, these vendors are establishing deposit accounts for their customers. It’s a smart model, because bulk purchasing is done up front while the users can return at their leisure to find the specific items they need. As CodeCanyon explains, WPDeposit lets you set up a credit/debit system on your WordPress site that allows you to take advantage of this e-commerce approach.

http://www.zolumns.com | http://www.facebook.com/zolumns

Cool Web Design Ideas and Inspirations for Small Business owners in 2014

If you are a small business owner planning to take the leap of web in 2014, then, this post listing small business website design ideas is made for you. We bring you the best and coolest small business web design inspiration to refer before taking your business, store or yourself online.

Let’s get started then!

Portrait Style Website

Are you a model, artist or photographer interested in targeting people searching for professionals with your set of skills? If yes, then, portrait style website is perfect for you. The whole focus will be on your unique personality and why you are the perfect choice for the job.Portfolio style websites are high on creativity and have fewer pages.

Here is a web design company that creates portrait based websites at just $1000. Check out its affordable design packages

One Page Website

If your business idea and offerings can be explained in few words, then, single page websites are perfect for you. By keeping a sticky navigation bar in the top section of the website, you can help visitors navigate to important sections.

  Zolumns is a reputed single page website company  based out of Islamabad Pakistan, working for small business owners from Australia, USA, UK, & Pakistan.

Minimalistic Design Website

Do you have a limited range of products to show off and are looking for an imaginative design?If yes, then, you can go for minimalistic. However, if you want to sell them online, you need a team of designers that can add ecommerce features.

There are various companies that specialize in small business ecommerce websites but very few give a good deal when it comes to price. Zolumns meida is known for offering the best design price to small business owners. Check out ecommerce website design packages for better cost idea.

While your small business website obviously deserves the best design, a lot depends on your business idea and goals as well. Discuss your website project with us for free consultation and guidance. We will tell you exactly what you need.


http://www.zolumns.com | http://www.facebook.com/zolumns

Generating Revenue With Good Planning

Hello Folks, and thank you all for reading my previous posts, your interest and input will greatly encourage me to keep writing. At this starting point I am trying my best keep my post brief, simple, non-technical and to the point so its easy for anyone to know what I am on about. Lets get to the topic!

A good business plan is essential first step towards the success of any business, weather its online or offline, web design or plumbing store. In today's post we will discuss how we can Generate Revenue by good planning for our online business. .

Workable Plans

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

Optimized for Revenue

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a "food" section, an "accomodation" section and an "entertainment" section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

Advertising

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google's Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

Email Me!  |  Visit Our Website  |  Follow on Facebook

Good Design Practices

Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

1) Uncluttered and Concise Navigation

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

2) Minimum use of images

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

3) Reasonable length of Paragraphs

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

4) Follow the standards

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org/‎ and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

5) Limited use of scripts

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.


Email Me!  |  Visit Our Website  |  Follow us on Facebook

5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers -- all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Email Me!  |  Visit Our Website  |  Follow us on Facebook

5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Thank you for reading!
Salman
salman@zolumns.com