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What Consumers Want from E-Commerce Websites [Infographic]

Shoes, cars, baby food, bicycles…are just a few things we buy online. Regardless of the product or shopper, the experience is just as vital to having a profitable e-commerce website and business. So what are consumers really looking for from e-commerce experience? After analyzing through a mine...

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

Modal Video – jQuery Modal Video Plugin

Modal Video is a jQuery plugin to show videos on modal boxes. 

Features

• Beautiful transition
• Accessible for keyboard navigation and screen readers.
• Rich options for YouTube API and Vimeo API

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed

6 Essential WordPress Plugins for Solopreneurs

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Much like a single parent doing all the cooking, cleaning, and parenting, a solopreneur must be all things to their business. They must be tech oriented and able to throw together a good looking and functional website. They must be the sole salesperson and one person marketing team. They are often the accountant, shipping clerk, customer service associate, and pretty much any other role you can think of. That’s a lot of hats and a ton of pressure on your shoulders. But if it were easy, everyone would be doing it, right?

This article is about taking a few things off your plate. Easing the pressure and helping you, the solopreneur, for a change. If you can save some time and increase your overall performance, then you can focus on more important things or even take a day of. Without further ado, here are 6 essential plugins for your WordPress site:

1. Tawk.to

Offering live chat as a solopreneur isn’t easy. Yet with the Tawk.to plugin you can get it done. Tawk.to is a free messaging app that lets you chat with your website visitors.

Each page you designate on your website will get a handy chat window in the bottom right corner that you can fully customize to your needs. Once your visitor clicks on the chat window, they are prompted to enter their name and email to start chatting.

Tawk.to can be monitored directly from the backend of your WordPress site, from the Tawk.to website dashboard, or even from an app on your phone. You can set it to send notifications just like a text message so you can chat with website visitors on the go. If you are offline, you can set your status to reflect that, which gives your visitors a nice offline message while still giving them the option to leave a message for you to respond to when you return.

Last but not least, you get a live dashboard that gives you real-time stats about your visitors and useful customer service metrics like engagement, availability, and positive sentiment. For a solopreneur, Tawk.to is a great way to provide next level customer service with no added costs.

2. Sumo

Sumo is like the swiss army knife of marketing. It is the ideal choice for a one-person marketing operation with little to no technical skills.

Downloading Sumo for your WordPress site gives access to a huge suite of tools that give your website a professional touch, helping you get more conversions.

With heat maps, you get a visual of where your visitors are clicking and how they are scrolling through your website. This gives you greater insight to how effective certain writing, buttons, or visuals are doing to convert to sales and sign ups.

You can create pop-ups that only show when your visitor is about to leave your page. These prompt them for a coupon code to save the sale or premium content to entice them to keep reading.

And that is just a taste of the dozens of marketing tools Sumo gives you. The Sumo tool is essential for anyone who needs a full marketing department without the price of one.

3. MailChimp for WordPress

For solopreneurs, automation is everything. Any task you can get off your plate lets you focus even more time on acquiring and supporting your customers. MailChimp gives you that added automation your business needs through interactive email chains. When a customer signs up to your newsletter or requests a quote, you can set MailChimp to automatically email them with a welcome message or prompt them with a message requesting more information for that quote. This process gives the illusion of a personal touch and can move your potential customer along the sales process without you ever lifting a finger.

The MailChimp for WordPress plugin connects your WordPress website with your MailChimp account giving you the flexibility to add mobile responsive signup and opt-in methods to your website manipulating any code.

When creating user-friendly forms, you can customize everything from button width and height, to background color, and even text size. Pretty much anything you can think of can be customized to your liking without compromising any functionality.

4. Beaver Builder

Solopreneurs wear many hats, and too often one of those hats isn’t programmer or website designer. Luckily, for those of us who weren’t blessed with extensive development knowledge, Beaver Builder can be our champion.

Continue reading %6 Essential WordPress Plugins for Solopreneurs%

by Jacob McMillen via SitePoint

7 in 10 Twitter Users on Social While Watching TV

GlobalWebIndex have proven that Twitter users are in fact keen second-screeners. A survey of Twitter users between 16 to 64 shows that this fact is led by the younger generation, though it’s shockingly still half of 55 to 64 year old’s who are doing the same. With 70% of social media users using a...

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

Grab Our Free Printable Docker Cheat Sheet

Applications have become hard to implement. Getting a dedicated server, installing, setting up and maintaining applications are just the beginning. With complex and tightly coupled systems, different services and programming languages, there’s always the chance that things will break.

Docker makes delivering software easy again. It allows you to set up everything --- the software you’ve developed, the OS it will run on, the services it needs, the modules and back-end tools such as cron jobs. All of it can be set up to run in minutes, with the guarantee that it will work on the target system as well as it works on your development environment.

Our Docker Cheat Sheet gathers all the commands you’re most likely to need in your Docker workflow, so that you can focus on your work and not on searching the deepest, darkest corners of Google. Enjoy!

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by Ralph Mason via SitePoint

7 Setup Tips for WordPress Beginners

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Welcome to WordPress! Starting your first WordPress powered blog or website is an exciting, and sometimes confusing, time. You are likely worried about making mistakes and also wanting to get up and running as soon as possible. The intention of this article is to do just that. We aim to cut straight to the core of what you’ll need to build a safe and secure site that is custom fit to your needs, and is easy to manage.

As with any website, you should spend very little time updating, tweaking, and troubleshooting, and more time creating content and interacting with customers. With that in mind, let’s jump right into it.

1. Picking and Learning Your Theme

Picking a theme can be daunting, especially considering there are hundreds of thousands of themes to choose from. The good news for any WordPress beginner is there are a handful of tried and true WordPress themes that are extremely popular and customizable. Divi and Genesis are great options for beginners. They are user-friendly meaning they don’t require in-depth developer skills, they are affordable, and they have a large community to draw support from.

Beyond choosing the right theme comes learning how it works, and how you can customize it to your individual needs. This is accomplished in two ways:

1. Crack open the setup guide.

It will give you in-depth instructions on how to download your theme, how to install it on your WordPress site, and how to tailor it to your needs. In it you will find resources to troubleshoot common issues and a section of FAQs that you can draw from when you are feeling a little lost. When all else fails, reach out to customer support by opening a support ticket.

2. Find the discussion board.

An active community is crucial when choosing a theme for your WordPress site. Customer support will help you fix your site and make minor customizations, but the user community will be the ones who give you feedback, show you major changes, and steer you to plugins and tools that will make your site look better and perform better.

2. Protect Your Hard Work By Backing Up Your WordPress Site

Being new to WordPress means you’ve likely never seen the white screen of death or have fallen victim to a malicious hacker who has locked you out of your site. Regularly backing up your WordPress site will ensure you can get back up and running when the day comes that you lose access, or your site breaks from some faulty plugin.

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by Jacob McMillen via SitePoint