User Friendly websites with Previous Next Magento Extension

As a user you might see some sites which might look appealing to site administrators or owners but not to you. Designing a site should hold consumer friendly features instead of owner oriented. There are two main goals of any eCommerce site.

1)      Grab potential clients:

Surfing internet and enjoying in this way is now a hobby of many people. Especially if somebody is looking for online shopping, he would search many sites to select a best one based on many metrics such as better look, better information, better features, best tools and excellent customer services etc. In this huge eCommerce market it’s important to at least incorporate those features which can attract these site walkers.

2)      Retaining Existing customers:

Since these are the customers who already are inspired by your services, retaining them could be a challenge because they would expect more enhanced services frequently.

Let us see now what elements are important to fulfill above targets,

1)      Site Load speed

This is probably the first and the foremost element that can send your potential customers away in seconds. Most of people today have now access to high speed internet but still in many areas there exist slower internet connections. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to analyze from where your customers are coming. If most of your customers are using slower speed channels you would need to work hard on speeding up things by keeping your site simple. You would not want to add flash contents, excessive code etc.

2)      Accessibility:

Your site should incorporate features which should allow customers to easily browse and access your site such as by using alt tags, valid HTML and CSS coding and incorporating user friendly tools such as Previous Next Magento Extension which allows customers to quickly navigate to products while staying on the same page.

3)      Navigation:

This is one of the most important elements of your site success. Once visitors arrive at your site, they would hunt for products they are looking for. If you have buried deep down somewhere these products, it would repel customers away. You should provide clear and easy navigation such as Layered Navigation, Ajax add to cart, and as we mentioned above Magento Previous Next Extension. There are many more tools to be utilized.

4)      Proper and related information:

People might come to your site for number of reasons such as to find good news at your site, visit blogs, or looking for products. Those who are looking for products would be eager to see detailed product information that is easily accessible and product images to see how the product looks like actually. Again there are several Magento Free & Paid Plugins available in the market to help you implement these options.

Keeping your site up-to-date with these options ensures your chances to catch more customers hence increasing your sales and business…..

Dynamic websites with Background Images

Whichever business you intend to start there might be different approaches to follow. Some may lead to prosperity very soon while some might work but will involve time delay or other complications. Having a website to start an eCommerce business is a wonderful plan to follow. Among several strategic factors, a very important one is which eCommerce platform to chose? The layout of your site, what functionality it will provided etc.  It is hard to imagine someone using static website today. Let us see how dynamic sites can help up,

1)      Content Management System:

CMS is a great tool to manage your site data. It allows non-technical persons to easily handle it. All the data is stored in a database server. Whenever a user requests a file, it is generated on a real time.  It is also a secure form of managing content because not everybody can edit. You can assign rights as you desire. You can quickly publish your data and eliminate the need of extra resources.

2)      Faster response time:

CMS comes with server side caching engine.  It increases the page generation time for users by temporarily keeping the copy of site pages that are accessed.

3)      Dynamic News and Blog Engine:

Displaying news and articles requires a dynamic website. You can easily add this content in a database through CMS and display it according to your choice on your sites along with user comments.

4)      Server Side scripts:

Due to the availability of database, you can build strong scripts to capture and utilize data effectively e.g. obtain related content from the database to link to your unique content pages for SEO propose

5)      Dynamic Product Listing:

With few and simple steps you can create or edit products, assign them to any categories and display them dynamically on your site.

6)      Search:

From simple to complicated queries, you can easily obtain results from the database.

7)      Dynamic Background Images.

You will see many sites today changing their look or will display specific messages in anticipation of some events such as charismas. It is a marketing strategy as well. Business owners in order to please their customers around the world and show closeness with them update Background images of their home page or whole of site. It also reflects to customers that your site is constantly being maintained and checked. So they stay confident shopping at your site. If we talk about Magento a leading eCommerce platform, there are number of such plugins for magento based stores which allow us to manage these background images automatically. You just have to upload your desired images and define rules. Rest of the work is automatically maintained.

Today most of the sites need to update data automatically and frequently. This can only be achieved with the help of dynamic sites. There are hundreds of tools available for Magento such as Magento Background Image Module and other ecommerce platforms for different purposes which can only work for dynamic sites…..

Magento Background Image Module

Online Marketing and Product Labels

If you have worked hard to produce some great products according to the requirements of your customers. The next step is to inform them about your products. You would be eager to let them know how well your products are as compared to the competitors. This certainly is accomplished by marketing effectively. There are several techniques that can be used to deliver updates to customers such as email marketing, telephonic advertisement, Ads, social media etc.

The base line of all online marketing starts with SEO. You must have a SEO friendly site or a blog. A separate and effective landing page for products must be created to drive traffic to your site. It should have a unique URL, properly coded, photos, Meta tags, unique content and title tags. Having all these in place ensures that your site will come up in search engines effectively.

Another way of marketing is email marketing. You can send special deals designed only for email receivers. It also increases trust and good relations with customers.  Online marketing involves Google AdWords, PPC, social media, forums, blogging etc. Online advertisement allows you to influence customers in very effective manner.

Above mentioned strategies are all related to market your product, but you can adopt certain strategies that be used to advertise the product itself such as by using product labels. Labels are very effective in telling customers what the product is about or any sales offer quickly and concisely. Combining all these great strategies ensures more chances of catching customers.   If your store is based on one of the leading eCommerce platforms like Magento, osCart etc you can easily find plugins for product labels. Because Magento is the leader of all, there are many great Magento free and paid plugins already in the market to advertise your products…..

Product Labels Pro Magento Extension – Create your Custom Labels

Product labels are one of the very strong marketing tools that most of the internet marketers use today. They give quick information to customers and encourage them to buy your products. A flashy image on your product can advertise its quality, uniqueness, “why choose it” or any of its other attributes. It allows you to compete with established competitors. According to Amber Waves (U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website), %66.5 billion was spend just on packaging in 2005 just to do better marketing exceeding the amount the industry spent on advertising.

Definitely packaging is not something that can be done for eCommerce but the concepts of marketing are important. Product Labels Pro Magento Extension uses this great strategy without any cost to help increase sales by catching visitor’s attention with your own uploaded images and your custom defined text.  Let us see some of the ways Product Labels pro can encourage customers to buy your product,

1 Consumer Choice:  It is the most effective way of informing customers about different choices they can make. They can discriminate among products hat which one better suits their needs. Therefore your product must be labeled in a way that it can attract more and more customers.

2. Economy Friendly: You don’t have to spend any amount on packaging and labeling physically. Place any type of Magento sale labels, special prices labels, new products labels or whatever by creating custom images and text. You are free to choose any size and form, put stunning effects to give your customers a pleasurable browsing experience.

3. Continuous improvement and competition: Product labels will also serve as a metric for product improvement. If a vendor uses any promotion like product labels, naturally competition will grow and other vendors will try to take lead by making improved products.

4. Outlining Key Features: Labels can serve the purpose of defining key features of the product for which a group of people has been looking for in a brief and quick view. So without wasting any time customers quickly understand if the product suits their needs.

5. Promotion: as stated above, most of the labels are utilized for running effective marketing campaigns e.g. a label with text “50 % off” will attract more clients than a product without label.

But choosing a right label is extremely important; it should be user-friendly, and   adequately informational.  You should find below information in order to effectively use labels,

1.       Information your customers will find useful

2.       Suitable colors and content

3.       Effective promotional appeals that can attract customers

4.       Where to put your labels

5.       Do you want to use text, image or both as a product label?

6.       Would you like to have multiple labels on category and listing pages?

7.       Do you want your labels to be automatically applied on products based on certain conditions (when talking about eCommerce).

Products labels Pro Extension allows you to do more than that with its rich backend functionality. It allows you to create countless rules with comprehensive set of conditions to apply them on products. Based on these rules, labels will automatically be applied. So no worries for you, this plugin gets the work done for you amazingly.

Magento Modules and Widgets Part – 3

In the previous post we developed a basic Magento module and a widget. We saw all the stuff dealing with configurations, blocks etc.  Today we will add this widget on the frontend block created earlier.

But first let us see how we can create static block from the Magento admin panel as previously we had created it by using our code.  Login to the admin panel and then navigate to CMS and then select Static Block,

–          CMS -> Static Blocks -> Add New Block

 

1. Enter the Title of the block
2. Enter the identifier for this block
3. Select your desired store view. In Magento you can have multiple store within a website such as a store for China, another store for Europe etc.
4. Select “Enable” from the drop down to activate this block
5. In the WYSIWYG editor, you can put HTML or PHP code. We will see this part later. 

Adding our first Widget to CMS Page:

Navigate to CMS->Pages from the admin panel and then select Home Page. Next on the left column select “Content” section which shall appear as below,

Once you click on the highlighted icon in the above image, you will be given a popup choice as below,

 

 After selecting the widget from the popup:

 

Refresh your page on the front-end and you will something like as below,

 

 

 You also can create Widgets from the Admin Panel as well such as mentioned below. Let us see below.

Creating Widget from Admin Panel:

Navigate to CMS->Widget and then click “add new widget”. You will get something like below,

Select the type of this widget such as CMS Static Block and choose the design package/theme accordingly. After you press continue, you will see below,

You can give here widget title, store view and sort order in case there are more than one widget defined for this block. In the layout updates section you can define from the broad range of locations where exactly you would like to place this widget,

You can select your static block to be shown on all anchor categories or just specific ones on the very left side. From the Block reference you can chose the position of static block such as on left column or footer etc.

Now finally chose the static block for this widget from the widget options (in the left menu) and there you go.

So that we have completed this tutorial, we will see in future some more implementation of Fme’s magento services and these widgets. In case you need any information on particular topic, do write to us…..