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….

I recently read an account of John McElborough’s talk at Brighton SEO 2011, wherein he advocated some ethically questionable SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tactics involving creating a private network of fake blogs.

John McElborough - Brighton SEO

Now that is sounding familiar. We suggest that simple ideas that make sense and over time will create traffic through natural SEO.

Make sure the page title matches the first heading
Sounds sort of simple but test this with your own SEO approach

Incoming links are good.
This is how the web knows your stuff is good

Use titles that are relevant to the content.
How many times do I have to read “New story” or “Sale on now” as a post title? As Matt puts it, this is High School essay writing stuff.

Use descriptive anchor-text for links.
This does happen quite a lot and we often see the link click here.. or read more…

Keep writing
This is the mantra, write.. write again… write more, and keep doing it.

Stop wilfully conflating optimisation with being a slimy liar. Stop being a dick on the internet. Write something interesting, and keep doing it for months and years. SEO will then follow naturally.

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.

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.

Interesting job for Risk Management and Compliance firm Heath and Ford.
Mostly mobile, David Butters insisted on trialling Google service IMAP for his email. This service costs $50 per address but give full IMAP configuration for email on his domain. Sent folders and inbox are automatically synchronised on all devices.

Big Trousers can configure Google IMAP for any domain giving small business the services of a dedicated email server but with Google’s SPAM protection and “cloud” service backup and audit trail.

The new WordPress site uses the new features of the Google Maps API to show training venues by map view and Street view.
Check it out now at aceplus.org.au