Mr Branding

Friday, March 27, 2020

How Online Businesses are Analyzing Email Risk Scores to Fight Fraud

Online fraud is costing businesses $57.8 billion in a year. Yet, in order to stay competitive in today’s business environment, you can’t afford not to process transactions online. Since customers can make a purchase with just an email address, fraudsters are taking advantage of many...

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Article: 5 considerations when picking an Ecommerce Website Builder

There has never been a more important time to transition your business operations online than 2020.

Using the Squarespace platform (my favorite website builder) as context I’m going to list 5 important (and often overlooked) functions to consider when choosing an Ecommerce website builder.

Squarespace truly is an all-in-one platform allowing anyone to register a domain, build a beautiful Ecommerce website, sell their products and even send marketing emails to their customers. Let’s begin!

One Page Love Exclusive Coupon

OPL10

Yay! Squarespace has been kind enough to give One Page Love readers the exclusive coupon OPL10 for 10% Off your first website or domain purchase. (There is a free 14-day trial with no credit card needed, so you can try risk free.)

1 – Ecommerce Template Offering

Template considerations:

How many Ecommerce templates are available in the range?
Are there template customization restrictions?

Squarespace offers just under 100 beautiful website templates focused on highlighting your brand and letting you tell your story. These templates are all just starting points, as each allows unlimited customization and Ecommerce integration.

If you would like to launch a full Ecommerce store, there are at least a dozen pre-design Ecommerce-first templates to get you going faster:

Squarespace Ecommerce Templates

Squarespace Editing Interface

Learn more about Squarespace Ecommerce Templates

2 – Ecommerce Analytics

Analytics and report considerations:

How detailed are the analytic reports?
Do the analytics identify trends?

Not only does Squarespace allow you to see where traffic is coming from but also the products people are viewing, adding to cart and purchasing:

Squarespace Analytics Previews

Learn more about Squarespace Analytics

3 – Simple Payment and Checkout Options

Payment considerations:

What type of payment will you accept?
Can you generate promo codes?
Can you create gift vouchers?

Squarespace accepts PayPal, Apple Pay and credit + debit card payments by simply connecting a payment processor like Stripe or PayPal to your store.

Squarespace also includes built-in tax tools and makes it easy to connect to third-party finance tools (like TaxJar). You can also offer your customers promo codes, the option to purchase gift cards and product waitlists, which can be used for fun pre-order announcements!

Squarespace beautiful checkout experience

Learn more about Squarespace Checkout, Taxes and Payments

4 – Inventory Management

Inventory considerations:

What happens when stock is low?
Is there a limit to the amount of products you can add?
Is there an easy-to-scan list of your product inventory?

Squarespace allows you to manage your inventory with an easy-to-use interface and quick views into your variants and stock levels.

Additionally you receive email alerts and automatically display Limited Availability Labels on your site when your stock levels are low.

Squarespace Inventory Views

Learn more about Squarespace Inventory Management

5 – Third-Party Extensions

Last but not least are considerations for Third-Party Extensions:

How can you leverage third-party tools to enhance your business operations and website capabilities?

Squarespace Extensions allows you to connect your Squarespace site with extensions to help streamline shipping, manage bookkeeping, sell products across the web and market your store.

Squarespace Third-Party Extensions

Once setup you’ll be amazed at the amount of time saved per month. This naturally allows you to focus more on sales and not tedious operations.

Learn more about Squarespace Third-Party Extensions

FAQ: What are the benefits of using Squarespace?

Squarespace is a leading online website builder. What sets them apart from the rest is their superior level of design and customer support. They have a huge support team and are available 24/7. Other main benefits are:

No Website Hosting Needed - their platform is fast and secure
Online Content Management - all edits are done within your browser, no software needed
Easily Drag and Drop Images - unlimited galleries with unlimited bandwidth
Free Domain Name - when registering for your first website, if you pay annually (renews at standard rate)
Beautifully Responsive - all templates work for all devices, so you only have to design your website once. Test and preview how your website will appear on a range of screen sizes.
Blog Sections - can easily be added to start sharing your journey
Commerce Solutions - are an upgrade away if you want to start selling products
Email Marketing - gather email addresses, send marketing emails and analyze the reader email activity

That’s a wrap! Don’t forget your 10% Off coupon: OPL10

OPL10

I hope you enjoyed this round-up on what to look out for in your next Ecommerce website builder. Props to Squarespace for creating a platform where we can create beautiful Ecommerce websites, easily. In case you missed it last month, I wrote a tutorial How to use Squarespace Email Campaigns.

by Rob Hope @robhope via One Page Love

Instagram Rekindles: The app plans to launch new features and remodel a few old ones

Instagram is a photo and video sharing application. Since its initial launch in 2010, its developers have constantly shown improvement by adding and revamping its features and tools quite often. Instagram is a user-friendly application, and because of its easy-to-use features, it has now attained...

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

How Aaron Osteraas Made the Content to Code Career Transition

From Tinkering to Developing: A Programmer’s Journey

As Aaron Osteraas can tell you, the path between discovering what you want to do for a living and actually doing it is rarely linear.

Now a Software Engineer at Tigerspike, a digital services company headquartered in Sydney, Aaron’s journey toward becoming a developer began when he was in high school, yet it wasn’t until his early 30s that he obtained his first full-time development job. The years in between were filled with starts and stops, challenges and successes, and a whole lot of tinkering.

“I was always tinkering with the family computer, which was mostly, ‘oh god I've broken it how do I fix it before I get in trouble,’" Aaron said of his technical beginnings. He had an appetite for building and modifying hardware, which he attributes to the joy that comes from doing something with your hands. He’d collect spare hardware, buy and sell parts, and at times resort to scrounging and trading. “There were computer parts strewn everywhere,” he said.

But by the time he graduated high school, Aaron had checked out academically. He wasn’t confident his grades were good enough for university, so he enrolled in TAFE, Australia’s largest vocational training provider, and spent six months learning XML before realizing that “making mobile websites for 2004’s best mobile phones in XML was pretty damn far from my idea of a good time.”

So he dropped out of TAFE and eventually found himself working in the world of content, where he stayed for seven years. Though he worked his way up to a managerial and editorial role for a handful of companies within the technical realm, Aaron found himself consistently unsatisfied.

I had this itch to solve technical problems, and working in content, I wasn't able to scratch it. That's what a lot of programming is, problem-solving. And it's not that this is unique to programming, it's just the type of problems – and solutions to them – are more enjoyable to me.

Back to School

During his long stretch in content, Aaron maintained enough of an interest in tinkering and programming to eventually enroll in a Software Engineering degree program.

I took one subject to start off, as I felt I needed to validate two things: one, that I could learn to study again, and two, that I would enjoy it.

Aaron found the validation he was after, but it wasn’t until a few years later, when he learned his company had been acquired and his job was on the line, that he decided to leave content behind and commit fully to becoming a developer. Knowing he could be let go in as little as a week, Aaron enrolled at RMIT University full-time to pursue a degree in Software Engineering.

Aaron was finally where he belonged, but it wasn’t easy.

There was a lot of frustration. I found certain languages, concepts, and themes difficult to grasp, and others came with remarkable ease. So when you're going from, ‘How easy and fun is this!’ to swearing at the computer asking why something isn't working, it can be emotionally turbulent.

In conjunction with the difficult subject matter was the overwhelming amount of career paths to choose from.

The world of programming is outrageously broad, there are innumerable paths you can take, and there's temptation to try and take them all because everyone loves the new shiny thing.

The more career paths he discovered, the less sure of himself he grew.

The post How Aaron Osteraas Made the Content to Code Career Transition appeared first on SitePoint.

by Joshua Kraus via SitePoint

What is a Slug in WordPress?

Final product image — What You'll Be Creating

Slugs. Slimy little critters that have a nasty habit of getting into your vegetable garden… Or maybe not! In this post, we’re talking about a different kind of slug, and that’s the slug that forms part of the address (or URL) of the individual pages and posts in your WordPress website.

A slug is unique to each post, page or archive, and will tell a browser exactly where to go. But there’s more to them than that, and there are ways you can use them to boost your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO) and user experience (UX).

So let’s start by examining what a slug is and then move on to looking at how you can optimize your slugs in WordPress.

Slugs Versus Permalinks

You may have heard of another term relating to links in WordPress, and that’s permalinks.

So what’s the difference between a permalink and a slug?

The permalink is the entire link to a post. So the link to a post on an example website might be https://example.com/what-is-a-slug-in-wordpress/.

That full link is the permalink. It consists of three parts:

The protocol: https://
The domain name: example.com/
The slug: what-is-a-slug-in-wordpress

The permalink in WordPress refers to that link but is also a unique link you can fetch in your theme template files using the the_permalink() function.

For the purposes of this article, we’re looking at slugs. The slug in that link is what-is-a-slug-in-wordpress.

You can see that the slug is based on the title of the post.

In WordPress, you can opt to use ‘pretty’ permalinks based on the post title, or ugly permalinks based on the post ID. I’ll show you why it’s better to use pretty permalinks and how to optimise your slugs for SEO and UX.

Slugs and SEO

Slugs are very important for SEO. In addition to the post title itself, they tell search engines what your post is about, and should include keywords that you are aiming to rank for.

So if you used slugs that consisted only of the post ID (e.g. post-3456), that wouldn’t be very helpful to search engines.

But if you use a slug that is based on the post title and includes keywords, it will help your post to rank more highly.

I’ll show you how to edit the slug for an individual post or page to include keywords shortly.

Slugs and UX

Slugs also have a role to play in UX. If you want users to remember the link to a post and be able to use it again without copying and pasting the post, or without searching for it, you’ll need to create a slug that’s short and memorable.

So for a post on slugs I might use something as simple as example.com/wordpress-slugs. You’d have no trouble remembering that and knowing what it was about (unless you were interested in slimy critters, in which case you might get confused).

To create such a memorable slug, I could edit the slug in the post editing screen for my post. If my site is set up to have an extra folder in its domain structure and the link to the post is example.com/blog/what-is-a-slug-in-wordpress, I might use a redirect to redirect example.com/wordpress-slugs to it. But the slug that search engines see would be the first one. This means you can create a slug for your post that includes all your keywords for SEO, and also create a short slug for users that redirects to that.

How to Optimize Slugs in Your WordPress Site

There are two ways to optimize the slugs in your WordPress site. The first is to configure your permalink settings and the second is to edit the slug setting for an individual post. You can’t do the second one unless you do the first, so let’s look at that first.

Configuring Permalink Settings

To access Permalink settings, go to Settings > Permalinks in the WordPress admin screens.

WordPress gives you six options:

Plain: This is based on the post ID. While it’s short, it’s not memorable and not at all pretty. I wouldn’t advise using this option.
Day and name: This is prettier, as it includes the name of the post as well as the date it was created. But it is quite long, so not so good for UX.
Month and name: This is shorter than the day and name option and still includes the post title, so might be a compromise if it’s important that your URLs include the date, or if you have duplicate content each year and need to differentiate it. Don’t use this if you want your content to be evergreen.
Numeric: This option uses the post ID and is ugly, so won’t benefit your SEO or UX.
Post name: This is the prettiest option. It’s the best for SEO and for UX, and is what most WordPress sites use.
Custom Structure: Use this if you want to customize the structure. For example you might want to insert /blog/ between your domain name and the slug. Or you might want to include both the post name and the post ID in slugs. Use the tags provided by WordPress to configure this, making sure you copy them correctly.

The Permalinks setting screen also lets you configure the links used by archive pages for your tags and categories. These aren’t slugs in the strictest sense but you might also want to configure those, changing the default category to something else. This could be beneficial for UX or SEO if you have specific words that are meaningful to your users or that you want to rank for.

So instead of example.com/category/category-name, you might prefer to use example.com/services/category-name if your categories are actually services, or example.com/department/category-name if you’re running a store.

To enable pretty permalinks, go to the permalink settings screen and choose the options you want. Then click the Save changes button to save your configuration. Once you’ve done that, you can edit the slug for an individual page or post.

Editing Individual Post and Page Slugs

Once you’ve configured your permalinks settings, you can use the options on the editing screen for an individual page or post to make the slug more memorable or SEO-friendly than the default.

By default, WordPress creates a slug that’s based on the title of the post. So if I create a post called 20 Ways to Make Your WordPress Site Soar, the slug will be 20-ways-to-make-your-wordpress-site-soar.

To see this in action, create a new post (Post > Add New), give it a title and save it as a draft by clicking the Save Draft link.

Now click on the title of the post in the post editing screen. The full URL of the post will be displayed above the title, including the slug.

Now click the Edit button next to the link and edit the slug (the last part of the link). You might want to make it shorter, so I could change mine to make-wordpress-soar:

Or you might want to edit it to include a specific keyword that you want to rank for in search engines, such as ‘WordPress performance’. In that case, you could change it to 20-ways-to-boost-wordpress-performance:

Note that if you wanted to rank for the search term ‘wordpress performance’, you really should edit the title of the post as well to include that term, as that will have an even bigger effect not only on your ranking but also on the number of people clicking through to your site after they find it.

Once you’ve made the changes you need to, save your post by clicking the Publish button.

A Word of Caution When Editing Slugs

Editing slugs is very easy to do. If you have a post that isn’t performing, you might be tempted to go into WordPress and edit its slug as a way to fix it. But if you do that, the permalink will change, which means that any existing link to the post (using its old slug) that you’ve shared in the past will break.

You can fix this by installing a redirection plugin and setting up a redirect from the old URL to the new one. In fact, when configuring the redirect in the plugin settings, all you’ll have to do is use the old and new slugs and the plugin will do the rest for you.

The Redirection plugin is free and makes redirects easy. But if you want to be able to set up more complex redirects, you could try one of the premium plugins available at CodeCanyon.

Some of the best redirection plugins on CodeCanyon include:

5 Second Redirect, which keeps stats on your redirects so you can see their effect.
SEO Redirection Pro, which helps you optimize your redirects for SEO.
WP GeoIP Country Redirect, which will automatically redirect to country-specific URLs based on location.
WordPress Ultimate Redirect Plugin, which includes automatic reducers when you edit slugs and much more.

Best Practice For WordPress Slugs

Sometimes you’ll need to find a balance between SEO and UX when configuring your slugs. But it’s worth understanding some principles which will help you adopt best practices with your slugs. These include:

Use pretty permalinks to ensure your slugs are text and not post IDs, and that they are as short as possible.
Edit your slugs to include search terms if you want to optimize them for SEO. These should also be in the post title—meaning that you don’t actually need to edit the slug if you start with the right title!
Make slugs short and memorable for UX. Remove filler words like ‘and’ and ‘of’, as well as numbers for list articles.
If you edit the slug of an existing post, make sure you set up a redirect so the old slug will redirect to the new slug.
If you change the title of a post, the slug won’t automatically change. You’ll have to edit it manually (and set up a redirect if it’s an existing post).

Summary

Slugs are an important part of WordPress. As part of the permalink, they make each post and page unique so it can be correctly displayed by browsers.

But optimised slugs will also enhance your SEO and your UX. If you configure your slugs so that they work harder for your site, you’ll get more visitors and provide a better experience for them.

The Best WordPress Themes and Plugins on Envato Market

Explore thousands of the best WordPress themes ever created on ThemeForest and leading WordPress plugins on CodeCanyon. Purchase these high-quality WordPress themes and plugins and improve your website experience for you and your visitors.

Here are a few of the best-selling and up-and-coming WordPress themes and plugins available for 2020.

by Rachel McCollin via Envato Tuts+ Code

Apple now blocks all third party-cookies in Safari

Safari is a Web Browser on Apple devices that was initially released in 2003.Safari’s new version 13.1 upgraded through the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) privacy aspect. Apple now, finally, boasts the ability to block all third party-cookie by default in Safari that means advertiser or...

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Reddit To Increase It Engagement Rate With Newly Introduced Polls Feature

Reddit is allowing its users to increase engagement by introducing Polls option where they would be able to post questions for the audiences. It would be to activate the users who only scroll the app but does not post, or share a comment in real. While talking about the new feature, Reddit said...

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by Aqsa Rasool via Digital Information World