Nation Studio

New website you say? Yep, the revamped Nation site is now live!

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

PlayStation Heroes of Tomorrow

PlayStation will be nothing without its fabulous heroes. Heroes of Tomorrow is a selection of 8 incredible characters that will return soon.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Easy Deployment of PHP Applications with Deployer

Everybody tries to automate their development process, testing, code formatting, system checks, etc. This is also the case for deploying our applications or pushing a new version to the production server. Some of us do this manually by uploading the code using an FTP client, others prefer Phing, and Laravel users will prefer Envoyer for this process. In this article, I’m going to introduce you to Deployer - a deployment tool for PHP.

Demo Application

I will be using an application from a previous article for the demo. The application will be deployed to a DigitalOcean droplet. To follow along, you can clone the demo application’s source code from GitHub.

Installation

Deployer is packaged as a PHAR file that we can download to our local machine. We can also move it to the user’s bin directory to make it global. Check the documentation for more details.

mv deployer.phar /usr/local/bin/dep
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/dep

Defining Servers

After cloning the demo repository, we need to create a new file called deploy.php where we’ll define our deployment steps.

The first step is to define our deployment servers. We can authenticate normally using a username and a password.

// deploy.php

server('digitalocean', '104.131.27.106')
    ->user($_ENV['staging_server_user'])
    ->password($_ENV['staging_server_password']);

We can also define the type of this server (staging, production, etc), which allows us to run tasks (more on tasks later) on a specific server stage.

Continue reading %Easy Deployment of PHP Applications with Deployer%

by Younes Rafie via SitePoint

8 Ways to Optimize Your eCommerce Customer Support

In the beginning, a large number of customer questions is a nice problem to have.

A lot of customer questions ≈ a lot of sales.

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But, over time you start to receive the same questions again and again. This can quickly become a time-consuming, tedious daily task that may hinder the growth of your company.

A one person army is a lovely concept, and people do run 7-figure one-person businesses. But you will soon realize that you can't handle it all on your own.

Sourcing your customer conversations to a virtual assistant is not a good solution but support optimization is, and that's what successful businesses do.

You will not only have more time for your business, but your customers will be much happier as well.

Below are 8 ways to reduce your number of customer support emails without harming the quality of your customer service.

1. Set Clear Expectations

There’s nothing worse than being ignored.

We have all had customers who go crazy if they have been ignored. They multiply their ASAP emails and write reviews all over the internet about how careless you are.

This results in lost customers and potential prospects, and your business image is harmed.

If you let people know when they should expect the answer from you, this will make the waiting easier for them.

Note: If you can’t answer your emails the same day, let them know that all emails are answered within 48 hours. It’s better to allow more time than necessary, and if you answer sooner, that just makes your company look very efficient.

2. Don't Hide Relevant Information

This is especially related to the dropshipping businesses.

Store owners wants to position themselves as a traditional business or popular superstores and tell dozens of white lies.

While dropshipping from China, people hide that their packages are shipped from Asia; that their product's origin is Chinese; or that the shipping terms are longer than usual.

Don't do that. Display relevant information multiple times where customers will likely read it.

Be Transparent. Trust requires honesty.

3. Create a FAQs Page

Customers want to help themselves. A whopping 91% say they would look for an answer in the FAQs page if it met their needs.

Let your customers look for answers to their questions themselves. Create an informative and searchable FAQs page. Invest in it.

It provides instant answers and drastically improves your inbox health.

Note: It's not only a customer service tool. It’s the place where people show a clear deep interest in your product or service. Make it sell!

Tools for easy FAQs page management include Shopify, WordPress or HelpScout / GrooveHQ for every platform.

Continue reading %8 Ways to Optimize Your eCommerce Customer Support%

by Tomas Šlimas via SitePoint

Get Your Head in the Game With Intel RealSense

Behind The Hashtag: #100HappyDays

Horizontal scrolling interactive One Pager telling us the story behind the inspiring #100HappyDays hashtag. Nice touch with the 100 perfect pre-loader that blends into the topic intro. Also convenient keyboard browsing functionality that really suits this layout. This micro-site is part of a weekly editorial called 'Behind The Hashtag'. Each week is published in the form of a Long-form Journalism interactive One Page website - each with unique design elements.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Fluke*

'Fluke' is a minimal HTML template with a layout option for a clean long scrolling portfolio. Features include big image slider, Masonry portfolio layout, FontAwesome icons, skills boxes and great to know the download also includes the layered PSD.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love