Jigoshop was a ground up build as a WordPress plugin and although it looked like it could be a great solution it was hard to integrate with our Existing Theme structures and Frameworks. Jigoshop was then “Forked” as an Open Source project by Woo Themes and Woo Commerce was born. With a financial backing the software has been on a rapid development curve for a few months now and although stable the whole time  new components have been added making it truly powerful.

We are working with Woo Commerce on a number of development sites and testing each addition as it becomes available. Notably Edison Style Globes is a site we built for ourselves so testing of systems could be fast tracked where we are the builder and website customer.

We are testing software that can import data for those existing online shops using WP ECommerce and we have completed a few. This needs a bit more testing especially if there are a large number of products or variations. Calypsoflash is one such completed transformation. Soundacoustics is a similar theme and is also well on the way to conversion (see before and after screen shots)

If you are looking for a way to improve your sales with ecommerce or just interested to see how it all works, take a look at the sites we have built or get in touch. We have some interesting new solutions including SMS messaging for client purchase notifications.

You may also notice the speed with which these sites load also. This is a new development we have been testing in relation to server software. More about that later….

Andy Rutledge posted an article ( News redux )  recently that attempted to explain how news websites have gone wrong in navigation design. Worth a look even if you don’t have any news articles on your site. This is the sort of stuff that seems obvious once you have read it but mistake are all too common.

Navigation should be user focused and as simple to understand as possible visually.

It is hard to believe that the Times, or any other similar publication, actually cares about the news when they treat it with this sort of indignity. Worse, the design makes it quite hard and often frustrating to simply scan the news and find stories that one might be interested in. As a news reader, I want to be able to scan headlines and logically find news I’m interested in reading. And by logically, I mean according to clear, usable, undistracted organization and filtering.

Using the New York Times as an example, let’s look at what helps make for a confusing and complex experience.

Thanks to Woo Themes who have taken this concept on board and have gone to work on this concept as a WordPress theme.

Big Trousers online ticketing and support introduced today.

It is designed for all customers who register  to report problems with content management, wordpress, computer hardware and software, email, photography and general IT.  Also available are articles in the knowledge base designed to assist your and your business.

The web is no longer prohibited by desktop and laptop computers. With exponentially growing numbers users surfing the web with handheld devices we’ve ensured that our support site is optimised whether you’re viewing it on your 27″ iMac or your iPhone 4.  Also, the support site is hosted away from  our main server so that in the event of server malfunction or maintenance, the support site will still be live and operational. Server maintenance or server downtime is reported by as as it occurs live in the support site.

Tickets are only visible to the registered user and Big Trousers admin. Once a ticket has been resolved however we can convert it’s contents into a knowledgebase item. As a result, questions that are answered and published become available by search in the knowledgebase. From time to time we will also publish tips and tricks in the knowledgebase.

We hope this will be a value to you, our customers.

Click here to register.

This means we are have total control over the server, including the total number of domains, RAM access, installation and configuration of Apache, PHP, SQL and other software, backup systems, email, spam filters, virus checks and total space allocation per domain.
If an individual domain or site is causing issues, we are in control and can switch off that domain while me make repairs, keeping other sites live. If a client requires more storage often we can allocate more for no charge. If a site requires SSL or unique IP we can arrange very quickly.
Over the last few weeks we have been migrating all site files from various shared servers and VPS servers to this new server and as some of you may be aware we have hit some bad patches. In most cases our hand was forced due to ongoing existing problems or lack of capacity for existing sites. For some, unlimited POP email has been the great benefit.
For most of you all issues have been addressed and IP addresses redelegated. Email is the single biggest issue that causes us grief and in this process domains using GOOGLE IMAP email came out far better off. At times DNS caching was a problem and again users on OPTUS connections fared worse.
In the end this process has cost us a bomb in both time and money but with all our client accounts now under one solution we can improve our web hosting plans with better storage and bandwidth constraints. We can also offer a new lower price solution for those just starting out.
We are still working on the final server configuration and from time to time we still are seeing issues with uptime. As we refine the configuration these outages will decline. This server caper is often an enormously complex beast to control but we are aiming high and intend to succeed.
We apologise for any delays you may have experienced in the process but we hope that it will be better for the long haul. Most of you will see a bigger storage allocation for your site files and POP email accounts over the next few weeks as we reset all accounts allocations.

A CDN is a high performance cache that stores static assets like media, CSS files and javascript in various locations throughout the world in order to provide low latency access to them by readers in those regions.

Benefits

• At least 10x improvement in overall site performance (Significant Google Page Speed improvements) when fully configured
• Improve conversion rates and “site performance” which affect your site’s rank on Google.com
• “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
• Optimized progressive render (pages start rendering immediately)
• Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
• Improved web server performance (sustain high traffic periods)
• Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds

Whilst we have hit some bumps along the way we have done enough trials to get a number of sites fully optimised for this purpose. Some existing sites require a fair degree of coaxing on the Amazon server with various permissions errors, and some plugin data (wp e-commerce installations prior to vers 3.8) has been difficult to manage, we feel that it is now time to deploy CDN functionality for our clients.

We are in the process of finishing a site with wp-e commerce plugin version 3.8 with positive results and in time we will have a test of a full site with and without CDN so as to provide a direct test example. In the meantime take a look at Treelogic.com.au. There site is a good example of one that does require speed of delivery. They post images, stories, pdf fact sheets and video as solid content that drives traffic and promotes use of their online store. The examples below show page design and source code showing links to the cdn.

If you have been experiencing slow load times for your site contact Big Trousers to deploy a CDN. If we already host you site it should be fairly straight forward. If not then perhaps we should.

If you get stuck refresh the page. In normal use there would be a single correct answer for the client, however you may wish to answer in different ways to test the way it works.

Of course it is not a requirement that Gravity Forms are used with Conditional Logic, you can use them for more ordinary form fields and option fields.

Whilst there are numerous ways around this problem including forwarding, aliasing, and other solutions, none are perfect or platform agnostic and some feel like a bit of a hack. You could spend a hefty sum on an Exchange server and incur ongoing support fees even but for most small business this is a thing of the past.

Enter Google and their growing suite of Cloud based solutions.

Big Trousers has recently started an association with Google as a Google Apps reseller and as such can provide solutions like domain based IMAP email for your business. Whilst IMAP appears similar to POP3 in some ways it requires substantial server resource and storage. A Google Apps IMAP account gives you 25 GB data storage and state of the art spam protection and security. All this and your email address need not change from you@yourdomain.com. This service is what a Gmail account does but with your domain and email address.

Email is synchronised automatically on any device set up with the account. That is as mail is deleted on a laptop it is automatically deleted from a desktop regardless of whether one is using Outlook,  iPhone Mail app or whatever. Sent mail remain in sync regardless of which device sent the email. Contacts are synced also. There is also a webmail interface that is available for when you have to use some other device via a browser and still in sync.

Accounts cost US$50 per year. If you host your domain with Big Trousers currently then there is no set up fee for the account. A fee to set up imap server ports and ssl on various devices may be required however if you are not comfortable doing this yourself. We can provide a help document for various devices however at no cost.

Full 5 metre high photographic studio and large office floor is a bonus. We will be getting this building up to speed over the next month.

Ride the Worlds Newest Nation here.