Over the past 18 years, I’ve been asked many times, how much does a website cost? I get this question almost on a daily basis. So I figured I would share my opinions to help both web designers and customers looking for a new website or a website re-design. (more…)
Optimize your website in 2018 by having quality content and building links from high authority websites – these are 2 of the 200+ factors Google looks at!
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and has the aim of putting a website in the first position with Google. It’s like a strange race, as everyone wants to be first for their own keywords and people approach it in many different ways.
Google’s Andrey Lipattsev announced in March 2016 that on-page content and link building are joint first in importance in Google’s algorithm, with RankBrain (their artificial intelligence algorithm) third. This means that for a website to reach Google’s first page of results, it needs to:
There are at least 200 major Google ranking factors, see www.indigoextra.com/200-website-ranking-factors-google-seo, with some saying that there are actually over 10,000 factors in total, so how can you optimize a website for all these multitudes of different factors?
As Google evolves and particularly with the introduction of the RankBrain algorithm, optimizing a website for search engines has become closer and closer to optimizing it for human beings, with a few important differences.
Some factors Google look at are quality and length of content, the amount of time visitors spend on a page, whether visitors quickly click back, then click a different result in their search engine, does the number of visitors increase over time, does the page include at least one image, etc.
To optimize for these on-page aspects, it’s essential to write content that is well researched, a decent length and offers something unique to the people reading it. Don’t just think of reaching a certain word count, but be sure that you, or your SEO company, write content that actually engages the reader, that you yourself would enjoy reading and that includes something original. The unique text is a given, but unique content, with unique ideas presented in an original way, is what’s needed to grab your readers’ attention.
Similarly, with link building, the links that will give you the most benefit are the links that will also drive the most traffic to your website. A link from an original article in the form of a guest blog on a high authority site will drive a lot more traffic to your site than a link from an obscure social media portal no-one uses, whereas links from Facebook and Twitter are social media platforms that everyone has heard of and which will carry more weight.
It helps if some of the links include the anchor text that you want to rank high for, however, it’s important that the links are natural enough, therefore don’t be tempted to use keywords in every single anchor text – a healthy mixture of keywords, the URL, and phrases like ‘click here’ works best.
Finally, those other 200 or 10,000 factors we mentioned! Google RankBrain’s job is to sort through all the different factors and decide which ones are truly important, test them out and constantly refine them (over 500 times a year). They include things like having a responsive web design, so your site looks good on any device, ensuring that your page speed loads reasonably fast, making good use of meta tags and ALT tags and including illustrations or photos on your site.
If you focus on quality content and quality links, then you’re 2/3 of the way there and a well-designed website and guidance from an SEO expert will help you win the SEO race.
A digital presence is necessary for any business (even vendors in farmers’ markets have a listing of some sort). So while you are researching the best ways to go about getting your own website, look up Content Management Systems, and specifically, WordPress. (more…)
If you search for the rising demand of WordPress Themes, you can never stop saying “Wow.” Today, the web is overcrowded with the myriad of eye-catching and feature-rich themes. As WordPress is widely growing as a collaborative community, more WordPress Themes shops are opened. (more…)
With the continuously growing number of hacking attempts on eCommerce sites, finding vulnerabilities in your website to make it secure has become more important than ever. Given the fact hackers launch attacks on sites running on popular e-commerce platforms such as Magento (and others), you must take precautionary measures to avoid becoming a victim of such attacks.
Thankfully, Magento releases security patches to make a store protected against vulnerabilities detected in the system. So, if you’re running a Magento store, it is a good practice to update the store as soon as possible. Or else, you might suffer massive data loss. Besides, it is needless to say the damage a hacked site can cause to your reputation among visitors (and customers).
Magento rolled out two new security patches named SUPEE-7405 and SUPEE 7616 this year. But, sadly 80 percent of Magento stores still haven’t applied the patches. So, if you’ve discovered any security breach in your e-store make sure to install the latest available patches that could help improve the security of your Magento store. But in case you’re having difficulty in implementing the security patches, it would be better to take assistance of a reputed Magento e-commerce development company.
In this post, we’ve covered the installation procedure for the latest SUPEE-7405 security patch on your Magento store version 1.x. But, let’s have a brief overview of the patch first.
Introduction to SUPEE 7405
SUPEE 7405 security patch was released on January 20, 2016, and provide fixes for vulnerabilities like SQL Injection, Cross-site Scripting, Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF), etc. These vulnerabilities can steal your critical customer information or gain access to administrator sessions. This security patch has been made available for Magento versions 1.4.0.0 till 1.9.2.2, and 2.0.0.0 till 2.0.1.0.
Installation of SUPEE-7405 Security Patch
When it comes to installing the SUPEE-7405 security patch, you can accomplish the task with or without SSH. In this part, we’ll be discussing both these ways to install the patch in question.
Installing SUPEE-7405 With SSH
In case you have SSH access to your server, then begin installing SUPEE-7405 with SSH. Below are the steps you need to follow to perform the installation:
Step 1 – You can download the SUPEE-7405 patch from Downloads page:
https://www.magentocommerce.com/products/downloads/magento/
Or else, simply install the patch just like any regular Magento upgrade by making use of Downloader (which comes added with Magento 1.9.2.3 version).
NOTE: Before installing SUPEE-7405 patch make sure to install all other previous patches to keep your site secure from previous patches identified in Magento version.
Step 2 – Prior to the installation process, you must disable Magento Compiler from your system. To do so, go to System → Configuration → Tools → Magento Compiler. Once you’ve opened up the compiler makes sure to clear the compiled cache.
Step 3 – Next, you must verify the Magento version on which your store is running. You can easily check your store version by looking at the following code saved in Magento Mage.php file:
$ grep -A6 ‘static function getVersionInfo’ app/Mage.php
public static function getVersionInfo()
{
return array(
‘major’ => ‘1’,
‘minor’ => ‘9’,
‘revision’ => ‘2’,
‘patch’ => ‘2’,
}
The code determines that the version of your Magento store is 1.9.2.2
Step 4 – Upload the patch file into the root directory of your Magento install, and then execute it using the below given command:
sh patch_file_name.sh
In the above command, the filename could be something like:
PATCH_SUPEE-7405_CE_1.9.2.2_v1-2016-01-20-04-35-33.sh
Once, you run the above command a message will be displayed as following confirming whether the patch was installed successfully:
Patch was applied/reverted successfully
Step 5 – Lastly, you just need to verify whether your Magento store is functioning correctly or not. Also, you’ll have to flush the PHP opcode caches (like APC/XCache/eAccelerator). Keep in mind to flush the cache after applying the patch (or when you restart your web server).
Installing SUPEE-7405 Without SSH
Of course, applying a patch will become easy in case you have SSH access. But what if you don’t have such access? In that case, follow the below listed steps to install the SUPEE-7405 patch without SSH:
NOTE: Before you begin the installation process ascertain to upgrade your Magento store version to 1.9.2.3.
Step 1 – First off, make sure to install all the previous patches prior to installing the new one. Simply put, ensure to install the security patches SUPEE-1533, SUPEE-5344, and SUPEE-5994, to name a few.
Step 2 – Next, you’ll need to disable the Magento Compiler from your system. This requires you to navigate to System → Configuration → Tools → Magento Compiler from your admin panel.
Step 3 – Now, you must download all of the already patched files available in Github repo (or the ones mentioned in the below table). And then, upload those files in your Magento root directory.
Magento version | SUPEE-7405 |
Magento 1.9.2.2 | SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.9.2.2 |
Magento 1.9.2.0-1.9.2.1 | SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.9.2.1 |
Magento 1.9.1.0-1.9.1.1 | SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.9.1.1 |
Magento 1.9.0.1 | SUPEE-7405-1.9.0.1 |
Magento 1.8.1.0 | SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.8.1.0 |
Magento 1.7.0.0-1.7.0.2 | SUPEE_7405_Magento_1.7.0.2 |
NOTE: Make sure to keep a backup of all the files that you are replacing.
Step 4 – Empty your cache. Also, flush the PHP opcode caches like APC/XCache/eAccelerator after patching. And at last, test the functionality of your Magento store.
Conclusion
Are you a Magento store owner and concerned about hardening your website security? Well, then you must update your version according to latest security patches as they come with fixes to deal with vulnerabilities detected in Magento versions. This post will guide you the process of installing the latest SUPEE-7405 security patch for Magento version 1.x.
What is Design? It is nothing but an act of creating order out of chaos. Everyone is now hopping on the design bandwagon, new design systems, its thinking, designing business model or design ideation. Companies like Apple, Netflix, Facebook are all revolving around “Designing.” And with the development comes the realization that traditional approaches to problem-solving are no longer enough.
In several respects, asking about designing is like asking the fish where is the water. Every physical product and the hypothetical organization has a design. But probably, all those schools of design and designing businesses even the Magento Developer believes that they are adding value over and above what has been. For many people, design as a process is nothing new. They have been doing this ever.
Since the design is a living principle, the words we use to describe also adapt and develop. Here are some words described which are latest for every designer to know.
1. Design thinking
A design thinking is a creative process that helps to design meaningful solutions in the classroom, at your school, and in your community. It brings together many different elements of an overall process.
There are five steps involved in design thinking:
a. Empathize – working to understand your customer fully through observation and interviews
b. Define – synthesizing findings from the previous step to form a “user point of view.”
c. Ideate – structured brainstorming of possible solutions
d. Prototype – giving a physical, digital, or diagram form to selected ideas
e. Test – putting prototypes into practice to see if they meet the user needs to be identified at the beginning
2. Deep empathy
Humans are not purely objective and unbiased. We need emotion to uncover insights. The idea behind deep empathy is to encourage design which can be used to engage with a customer and connect them on a meaningful level. I know, it is not a new thing, but using is simply lead to an approach where design is engineered to appeal to more than purely a visual level.
The techniques of emphatic design start with the gathering, analyzing, and applying information discovered from observation. Emphatic design is a low-cost, low-risk way to identify potentially critical customer needs. It’s a major source of new product ideas and has the potential to redirect a company’s technological capabilities toward entirely new businesses.
3. Localization
Localization is the process of adapting designing trend to satisfy the particular demands of a given territory. As designers, we need to be aware of the differences in localization when introducing a new feature or improving an existing one. Sometimes designing a button can pose a challenge. Often many languages are more talkative than others, meaning your design must account for text expansion and contraction in translated languages.
4. Brand Storytelling
Emotions are better glitter by words and transport people into a different mindset. Stories are what make people decide if they like you and if you understand their needs. Brand storytelling can’t be done with visuals alone. A great designing only makes it happen. This is a traditional concept, in fact, it is considered one of the best marketing technique in the world.
5. Authenticity
It simply refers to the concept of representing ideas, products or services via a possible, grounded and relevant approach. All design, by its nature, are an exercise in persuasion. Authenticity is referred to as the hallmark of the brand platform.
For design to be authentic, it needs to reflect the values, ideas, and aesthetic of the underlying perception accurately. This sounds simple but is a valuable as it requires significant effort to get it right done.
6. Context transparency
Context transparency means part of the underlying design remains apparent into the original design elements. The transparent context allows both fluid interaction and active manipulation. It is neither natural nor invisible; it exists but is not entirely distinct. Transparency gives movement, flexibility, and adaptation to different modes of interaction, which is necessary for modern systems designing.
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Author Bio :
Claudia Jhonson is a web developer at Magentax Ltd. an offshore Magento development company that has been remarkable in delivering high-quality Magento Ecommerce development service. You can go through her articles which are based on tips and tricks for handling Magento development projects.
Right now, someone somewhere is in the exact same boat as you – what with the weird WordPress error you are confronting. So relax, pal. You’re not alone. And that “fatal” error isn’t as apocalyptic as you think. (more…)
Community building is its own sweet reward. Who doesn’t like the idea of a virtual space where your targeted audience comes together to share ideas/Q and A/ wrangle/ et al?
The next question, of course, is whether it can be done on WordPress. The answer: Come on. It’s WordPress. It can handle anything. Checkout
So for those looking to build a virtual Common Room/ Frat-house/ What-Have-You, here’s a list of top 5 plugins to make it real:
Price: Free (licensed GPLv2.0 like WordPress.org). Paid ‘extensions’ can be found as regular WordPress plugins (“BuddyPress compatible”)
Available at: WordPress Plugin Repository
You can’t put ‘WordPress’ and ‘community’ in a sentence together and not end up talking about BuddyPress at some point. Figured we’d just get it over with now.
I sound resigned, because really, there’s no better plugin for community/network-building than BuddyPress. Attempts have been made and failed spectacularly. BuddyPress continues to reign supreme.
It’s feature-packed and free, ‘nuff said.
This plugin packs practically everything you would need, and more, for creation and management of communities: Member profiles, Activity feeds, User groups, Messages, etc. And that’s just the beginning.
With BuddyPress core features as the foundation, you can begin layering more features with BuddyPress-compatible plugins to add even more configuration options and variety on top of your user-network.
Recommended: Start with W3 Total Cache (Check it out here) and work your way up as needed.
Price: Free (licensed GPLv2.0 like WordPress.org). Paid ‘extensions’ can be found as regular WordPress plugins (“bbPress compatible”)
Available at: WordPress Plugin Repository
bbPress is like a skinny, lanky Loki to BuddyPress’ Thor.
This plugin is another one that started or ended up being adopted by Mullenweg and co. (like WooCommerce in 2015). Regardless, the core plugin on its own is light, easy to setup and integrate, and highly extensible with other WordPress plugins and bbPress add-ons.
The plugin only adds basic forum functionality to your website. But with creative customization and crafty themes, it will work for all sorts of visual ambiance. Case in Point: Support forums for WPMU-DEV, Woothemes, and dev4press.
Price: $23
Available at: Code Canyon
This is one of the best-selling WordPress forum plugins on Code Canyon.
Sabai adds extremely filterable and easy to navigate ‘discussions’ and ‘Question and Answers’ streams to your website. It lets you create custom fields (for the search filters), and has a visual form editor to create the search forms. It comes with 9 widgets, 10 email notification templates, and more.
Design tinkering-capabilities aside, the plugin itself is pretty smart. It has code snippet highlighting, ‘featured’, ‘flagging’ (for spam moderation) and ‘favorite’ Q&A, Role/Reputation-based access system, and more. Think Stack Overflow, focused on you.
The fact that it is also translatable and supports RTL is no surprise (good plugins and themes do that), but it sure cements the faith in the plugin. It uses JavaScript responsibly (for improved interactivity) and needs no FTP connection to update.
Plugins like these make me happy. They pose fewer problems for users to fret over later. The only damper comes from the fact that it is probably late for an update, but if you are a web development company that knows what it’s doing, then it shouldn’t be a problem.
Price: $21
Available at: Code Canyon
Another easy-forum plugin and it’s so shiny you can almost hear it.
Pro Forum highlights code snippets, lets registered (to your website) users create topics, replies, and comments using the TinyMCE editor WordPress packs as default (improved with some shortcodes). The topics can be made sticky (for when certain topics come up all the time).
Users can add/upload images, set access permissions on their content (Privacy). It works well with your theme and can be further customized easily.
It’s a lovely, no-nonsense plugin that sticks to the necessary and drowns the rest.
Price: Free core plugin. Free and paid add-ons (optional)
Available at: WordPress Plugin Repository
The best things in life are free. This plugin is (mostly) one of them.
DW’s Q&A plugin covers all the basics and goes the extra mile too. Users create, edit, and delete questions, moderators order/delete them. Everyone can search using the thorough filters. There is a voting feature (best answer), content privacy (depends on user submitting the question), sticky discussions, ‘follow’ discussions, et al.
It supports CAPTCHA and at least 11 languages. It has email notification system. There is a free add-on that enables Embed question and Social Sharing, which is perfect.
The entire plugin is like a beautifully decorated suite with furniture choices available. You can work those in as desired.
Endnote
There are more, and there will be more community and forum plugins since the trend is taking hold. The plugins mentioned here are in no way latest, but they are coded for efficiency and they are reliable.
That’s all you need from a good plugin really.
The ceaseless evolution of smartphones, the launch of new mobile operating systems on a daily basis, a variety of options for mobile applications and high-speed internet connection have certainly changed the way people use their smartphones. According to Cisco’s recent report, the usage of smartphones has grown up to 7.4 billion. Today, people prefer to use their smartphones to access the internet and thus, insisting companies to move their focus to “Mobile first, Desktop second” tactic to increase their traffic and conversions. (more…)
Clean and efficient code is crucial for making a WordPress site load faster. Especially, when you're running an online shop, it's imperative that visitors can load the web pages as quickly as possible. One best way to achieve such an objective is to make use of a theme framework for WordPress such as Genesis.
The Genesis framework helps offer child themes that are specially designed for fast loading sites. Also, most of the themes are compatible with the WooCommerce plugin, which helps in incorporating better e-commerce functionality into your site.
Here's a list of some excellent Genesis Child Themes ideal to be used for creating WooCommerce powered e-shop:
If you want a flexible, mobile responsive and HTML coded theme suited for creating a child theme in WooCommerce, then you should give the Jessica e-commerce theme a try. Designed by Web Savvy Marketing, the theme helps in building an e-commerce site, by helping you pick WooCommerce, iThemes Exchange, and WP e-Commerce plugins.
Key Features:
Dedicated section for displaying advertisements, widgets or text
Social media integration
Help add product review, ratings, categories
Fee shipping option and more.
Cost: $59.95
A clean and elegantly designed theme, AyoShop is perfect for building any online shop – be it clothing, jewelry, or some other shop. It's a free theme created by Designmodo.com – that provide support for styled child themes. The great aspect of AyoShop is that it is simple to use and does not contain any bloat.
Key Features:
It comes loaded with all of the Genesis Framework features.
It is WooCommerce ready
Features a responsive layout that can be tested using the Opera mobile emulator.
Access to AyoShop's documentation is available online and much more.
Cost: Free (however you need to subscribe to designmodo)
Do you want to build a WooCommerce ready child theme inspired by Apple's iPhone 4S design? Well, then look no further than Clip Cart. It boasts a professional and future-proof responsive designs for the modern mobile platforms like iPhone, iPad, and others. Clip Cart helps in integrating shopping cart functionality via Cart66/Cart66 Cloud plugins.
Key Features:
Comes with a highly customized front page template.
It works across all the major browsers
Offers comprehensive documentation and great forum support
Contains custom shortcodes and so on.
Cost: $69
In case, you specifically need to build a food-related site on WooCommerce, then Daily Dish is exactly what you need. It has been developed for users who seek to make use of a clean and new design for putting up a food website. But, another great thing about Daily Dish is that it can also be customized for creating a non-food blog. This theme is the perfect example of setting up a site with balanced white space and elements – that helps make your content easily stand out.
Key Features:
It includes several widget-ready areas
Offers plenty of different page templates.
Cost: $99.95
Another great modern style child theme suitable for building an e-commerce site and WooCommerce support is Brutal. Created by Zigzagpress, the theme provides (optional) animation-style effects – that will allow your visitors to scroll down the homepage. You can use Brutal for building almost any site, ranging from corporate, marketing, to a portfolio and many other websites.
Key Features:
The theme is mobile ready and adapts beautifully to any device screen size
It is localization ready
It comes with theme options panel
It comes loaded with Genesis SEO options and features.
Cost: $49
Last in our list of Genesis child themes is Vanish. The theme provides complete support for the WooCommerce plugin, helping you develop a WordPress online shop that allows selling products and services online. Vanish theme is a must-have for people who wish to create a visually alluring online storefront that can have a profound impact on their visitors.
Key Features:
It is a fully responsive theme
Vanish features minimalistic style, making it an excellent choice for creative projects
Impressive typography settings and more.
Cost: $49
Using Genesis child themes for building an e-commerce shop will ensure in improving your website speed and performance, which ultimately enhances the users experience. So, here in this post, I've tried covering some of the best Genesis child themes suited for building WooCommerce store.
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