SHOPPING MANIA!

 SHOPPING MANIA!

If you have been following my blogs you are aware that I created a website on Weebly.com to host a site about myself. I chose the layout, created the images, content, and published my site all for FREE ninety nine!

Now it is time to add a shopping cart to my site. I can hear you asking, "But why Brandon, why a shopping cart?". Good question, and after doing some contemplating  it was really the logical next step. I had to figure out if I had something to sale or if I wanted donations to help with the site but  in the end I chose the former. The truth is that I never really intended to make this an eCommerce site, because that idea was reserved for another site that I will create. However, I thought that this would be a good time to put the eCommerce idea through the paces by making some mistakes and seeing what works.

After searching the internet I saw that there are many offerings to add plugins to your existing site to handle the online transactions. These companies consist of Paypal , Selz, Stripe, and Google Wallet to name a few. I ended up going with Stripe for now. 

The first reason I went with Stripe is the ease of adding the plugin that is already present in Weebly. It is as easy as dragging and dropping the plugin onto the page that I specify. In my case that page was my Art page. The second reason is that right now I am taking advantage of the free hosting Weebly offers, and unfortunately that means I'm stuck with Stripe unless I opt to upgrade my site, which would start costing me monthly. Now, don't get me wrong, I think upgrading is a great idea and the cost is reasonable. In the future, for my readers, I will try another template based website builder to see the differences but for now I can't complain. Weebly.com really is a great platform and I do see myself upgrading in the future. 

Lastly, here are the details of the non-binding deal I have with Stripe. 

Stripe

• Instantly start accepting credit cards
• Integrated shopping cart on your site
• 2.9% plus 30¢ per transaction
• Funds deposited after 7 days
• Weebly fee: 3% per charge | Remove this

So, as you can see the deal is not too shabby. I suggest you do your own research and always do what works best for you. I have placed a couple of links if you want to see how the cart looks on my site and if you want to read about the other eCommerce providers. Good luck and God bless!

My Site

http://brandonshoals.weebly.com/art.html

The extra info is for WordPress but will give you some insight.

http://www.wpexplorer.com/collect-payment-using-wordpress/

I WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU LEAVE A COMMENT OR SUGGESTION! 

Website Interaction is a MUST!

Website Interaction is a MUST!

If you have been following my blog you know that I created a web presence highlighting your's truly, me!  As the title says, website interaction is a must so I had to add it. The type of website interaction I chose for my site is the use of social sharing icons, a contact page, and also comments section for my blog. The reason I went this route is that my site is more of a profile of me, rather than a e-commerce or social site. The website interaction I chose will help me stay connected to my readers and visitors. As time goes on I will try different iterations of website interaction to see what is appropriate and works best for my site. I do have other website ideas in the pipeline that will be much different, but for now this works. However, you might be wonder what in the world is website interaction? Well read on my friend!

Website interaction allows for the end user to interact with your website, by using various forms of interaction such as; chat rooms, feedback forms, polls, games, and etc. Website interaction is a valuable tool to drive traffic to your site and also keep your visitors staying longer. Having website interaction on your site will add value to your site and bolster you online presence, while generating new customers. Most social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are great examples of user interaction. These sites specialize in user interaction and it seems that the popularity of user interaction will continue to increase into the future. Most millennials seem to value experiences more than their parents and that is what user interaction provides, an experience. 

Having great content is one of the first steps in increasing user interaction. It is important to make sure your content is relevant and up to date. SEO (search engine optimization) will help you achieve higher rates of interaction by letting the various search engines know that your site exist. It is important to use concise meta data, such as a good description of your site as this will ensure that the web crawlers and users will easily find your website. Making your content easier to read by using proper layout and formatting will also help with more frequent user interaction.

It is not enough to just have clear and interesting content to increase web traffic and user interaction. It is also important to have a more aggressive form of user interaction. Most template based website design programs have many types of additional interaction features that you can easily drag and drop onto your site. For example, if you have an e-commerce site you could use CTAs (Call To Action) to entice users to click on a button or image that would redirect them to what you are promoting. If you were selling t-shirts you could put text on the button that says, “Cool shirts” or “Limited edition shirts”, this would be enticing to a user and may lead to a purchase. Another more aggressive form of user interaction is the use of pop ups. Pop ups will force the end user to interact with your site by forcing the user to click out of the pop up or continuing on through the link. However, pop ups should be used wisely because they can cause frustration for the end user.

Another important factor in website interaction is data collection. It is important to know what your users think about your product or website, and it is equally important to know who your users are. Data collection can be achieved by having a survey or a poll on your site or having your user subscribe to an e-mail newsletter. Both of these methods are valuable for data mining to ensure that you’re marketing to and designing for the right demographic. With a subscription you will have a constant connection to your user which will help drive traffic to your website. Furthermore, having a blog with a comment section on your site will also increase the rate of user interactions. Most users are willing and ready to share their opinions about anything that is presented. However, this can be a double edged sword if the users use the comment platform to post negative things about your site.  

Lastly, it is also important to have the appropriate social share buttons on your website. These social share buttons will help increase visibility to your website via word of mouth. This is one of the best marketing tools because it is free and powerful.

Citations

"10 Ways To Increase User Interaction On Your Website." Business 2 Community. Web. 31 July 2015.

Help! Which Web Authoring Tool?

Web Authoring Tools

Remember that old 70's R&B song by The Dramatics called “Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get”? Well, they could have named the song WYSIWYG, although admittedly that acronym doesn’t roll off the tongue well.

In the programming world there exist a plethora of Web Authoring Tools that will allow you to create dynamic web pages, and view in real time what your code would look like when published. This functionality is called WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get). WYSIWYG is a great feature and most web developers would agree that it is best to learn both WYSIWYG and traditional web authoring tools, such as notepad.

I have reviewed three web authoring tools for your viewing pleasure. Two of the tools are free and the third will require some cold hard cash. I suggest that you play around with the free web authoring tools and find the tool that works best for you, then if you are feeling feisty by all means purchase one!

1. KompoZer:

This free web authoring tool is like your first bike with training wheels. The interface is pretty straight forward, and you don’t have to be a serious programmer to jump right in as it works much like a word processor. KompoZer does have the WYSIWYG functionality and is plenty powerful enough to fit your needs to create a great looking site.

KompZer Download

2. Notepad++

This is like regular Notepad on some serious steroids, like the Incredible Hulk type steroids. Notepad++ is free and has many features that are useful, such as color coded syntax, code collapsing, macro recording, code searching, and auto code completion to name a few. Even if you end up installing another web authoring tool, I highly suggest you have Notepad++ in your arsenal.

Notepadd++ Download

       

3. Dreamweaver:

This IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is what I personally use in conjunction with Notepad++, the bad news is that this one will cost you a little coin. Adobe has done an outstanding job over the years with the Dreamweaver platform and it shows, because many professional Web Designers use DW.

Dreamweaver also has the WYSIWYG functionality along with so much more that it would take me forever to cover it all. Just know, that if you are serious about web development you can’t go wrong with Dreamweaver.

Adobe Dreamweaver Download

The Dramatics!

How do you Make Your Site Visible? SEO!

How do you Make Your Site Visible? SEO!

So, now that you have your site up you want to drive traffic to it, right? What's the use of having a site if no one will visit it?

If you have been following my blogs you know that I created a website for my personal portfolio which you can find here Brandon Shoals Portfolio. I chose to go with Weebly.com for three reasons: it is very easy to use, they have many different layouts to choose from, and IT'S FREE! I plan on upgrading at a later time to paid hosting in order to get some of the bells and whistles they provide, and  it's at a very reasonable price, but for now this will work.

After all the painstaking work of creating content for my site, now it is time to work on Search Engine Optimization. I am sure glad they call it SEO because that is a mouth full. SEO will allow for the  robots or spiders (creepy) that all search engines, like Google, use to rank your site, and list it higher in the search results. Back in the day people would use keywords to put their site higher in the rankings, but a good thing got way out of control when folks started repeating words hundreds of time in their code to improve their rankings. Just in case you don't know these keywords are not seen by the end user, nor is any other of the meta data that is used in SEO. However, these days things are different, and search engine ranking websites is big business and their algorithms are proprietary information. Every search engine uses your description of your website, the pages and or advertisement that you have linked on your website, and how many visitors you receive to rank your website. You will also need to register with search engines either through a service or manually on your own. BUT DON'T BE LAZY....AND DO SOME RESEARCH! 

Ok, so here's the meat of what I did below for my marketing:

1. WRITE A GOOD DESCRIPTION

Search engines use your website description to find and rank your site. So you need a good description for the robots that crawl the web. In Weebly, this is located under the settings tab. Make sure your description is concise and accurate to your website or else the search engine overlords will drop your site. If you need some description ideas google web sites like yours and see what others are doing that rank high on the list.

2. REGISTER YOUR WEB SITE WITH SEARCH ENGINES.

I went to Submit Express and registered for free, but only 5 submissions of your URL in a 24 hour period is allowed, because the search engines might think you are spam. Submit Express submitted to several search engines for me and this worked well for me because I was being lazy. I also went to Google Site Submission to manually submit my site, you might have to do this as well.

3. KEYWORDS

This might not be as effective as it use to be but it won't hurt, so I went to the settings tab in Weebly and put in key words that people might be searching, but don't be a keyword maniac or else they will drop your site ranking.  

4. SOCIAL MEDIA

I also created a Facebook page Brandon's Facebook, and a twitter page Brandon's Twitter this will allow for me to link to my website and drive traffic. Just be careful with linking to existing social media you might have, because people are watching!

So, in the end these are just a few things I did to start driving traffic to my site, but this will be an ongoing project.

 Have a comment, question, or just want to say hi, drop me a line!