“Prevention is always better than cure”

How true are these words for a WordPress website! Every day you would hear a new story about a WordPress website being hacked which is sure to shake you up if you own one yourself. The best way to combat this fear is by ensuring that your website is secure through proper measures.

Here are a few preventive ways that would ensure your WordPress website doesn’t fall prey to any malicious activities! And if nothing seems to work out, hiring a WordPress developer is never a bad idea.

1) Get the updated version of your WordPress

The best way to keep your website safe is by using the latest version of the platform which can support the plugins. We all are guilty of avoiding the core updates of WordPress on the belief that they might somehow break some of our plugins in terms of functionalities as a few of them might not be compatible with the recent versions of WordPress, which in fact is wrong.

You have to understand that if you have the latest updates for your site then it becomes better equipped against malicious actions such as hacking. This is why, even if you detect a few broken plugins initially, subsequent updates both from the plugins and the WordPress would repair them.

2) Know the latest WordPress security threat

If you are a WordPress website owner, then you have to be vigilant at all times for the new threats that might pop up from time to time. For instance, it has been observed that during the WordPress updates, the site is at its most vulnerable state.

Just like other websites, every update that comes to the site brings along the fixes for previous security issues. But the problem is most hackers use the previous threats as a dry run and prepare more improved threats which they send with the new versions. So keep your eyes open and make sure to take steps to prevent them from wreaking havoc on your website.

3) Keep your plugins, themes and scripts updated at all times

Truth be told, WordPress plugins are much more vulnerable to malicious activities than the WordPress core files. Sloppy coding used in the development of WordPress plugins worsens the situation, which is why huge stress is given on hiring good and capable WordPress developers.

It is, for this reason, you will find that there are certain updates which come regularly from official sources for these plugin issues. Remember, these updates should only come from the official websites and not from third parties.

Moreover, removal of unused plugins is always a good idea as it gets rid of needless files which might make the website vulnerable. The same thing can also be said for the themes and scripts as well. Keep your scripts and website theme updated with modifications coming from official sources to ensure smooth working.

4) Getting a secured hosting server

Getting a secured hosting server is undoubtedly the best way to keep the hack attacks at bay. Most of these websites are known to have threat monitoring teams which are responsible for keeping an eye on the latest security threats.

They are well equipped to tackle any such threat by simply making the necessary changes on their firewall coding. A record 41% of WordPress websites were hacked due to server breaches in 2013 which actually made people think about the importance of a secured server. Therefore, if you want to protect your website then it is time to get the right and secured hosting server.

5) Shuffling the WordPress login and admin name

You have seen your banks and other online service providers asking you to change your password and username time and again, which is something that must be done for your WordPress administration as well.

If you make the mistake of keeping the default initials for a long time, then you are in for a big trouble. This is why changing the default initials is strongly advised and they should be done during the actual WordPress installation process.

Moreover, hiding the admin name will make it difficult for hackers (proving good for you!) which might allow you to recuperate against an initial attack.

6) Strong password combination

One thing that is going to protect your website is the right password combination but sadly not many people tend to pay heed to it. People are known to use passwords as easy to guess like 123456 which truly make the job of the hackers all the easier.

This is why we would suggest you to use a proper password combination which must include alpha-numeric letters along with special characters. Moreover, reuse of password is a strict no-no as they can be as dangerous as a weak password combination.

In addition, if you have a tendency of sending your passwords over plain text then think again, as it is the best way to get hold of your password without you even knowing it.

7) The right WordPress security plugin

As we turn to the technical side of the security issues, nothing speaks of protection louder than the perfect security plugin. Here you have to be careful about getting the right security plugins so that they can identify security threats and neutralize them as soon as they detect any potential concern.

Here, you can use an SSL which will encrypt your communication and keep it out of the reach of the hackers. With some small and careful coding, you can keep your WordPress website safe at all times.

8) The important Google search console

The best way to protect your website is by using Google Search Console. Search engines like Google are designed to provide only clean results, which is why they tend to alert you if there are any malicious files in your systems.

Although, this would be a bad news for you as it also tells you that your site has already been compromised, but keeping abreast of the situation is still better than not knowing at all.

9) Securing the WordPress database

As the name suggests, the database is the one-stop destination for all information on the website including its history and one of the favorite places for hackers of all shapes and sizes. The first thing we would advise here is to use separate databases for different websites and also avoid access to a single user.

If you would manage a single database for all your websites, chances are high that if the concerned database managing all the websites is compromised, all your connected websites will be crippled at once. However, if you manage an individual database for all your websites separately, if by any chance, database gets hacked, only one website is at stake and not all.

Changing the name of the database is also a pretty clever way to throw off the hackers. Moreover, allowing access to databases should be restricted to give an extra layer of security to it.

10) Website backup is necessary

It is true that you take all the necessary steps to protect your websites but they can still be compromised which is why creating a backup would be wise. Hence, you should get your WordPress backup plan sorted out beforehand to avoid unfortunate surprises.

Remember, keeping a backup does not only protect the important data from hacks but they are equally useful if there is a technical glitch or other such accidents. So preparing a backup plan from the onset would be the best way to go about securing your WordPress website.

11) Securing WordPress with professional proficiency

It doesn’t matter if you do it yourself (if you know what you are doing) or hire the best WordPress developer, securing your WordPress website and that too with true professionalism is important.

The best way to do so is simply by putting in measures like limited login attempts which are a common deterrent for hackers. Moreover, it is highly recommended to be on a safer side by making use of Two-Factor Authentication.

12) Correct file permissions

As we know that there are particular file permissions for directories and files but not changing them for your website is a cardinal sin. Therefore, changing file permissions accordingly should be your top most priority to avoid security breaches.

13) Getting a firewall

In simple terms, firewalls are like security professionals who look after the security status of the website round the clock. So, installing and updating them regularly is the need of the hour.

For WordPress websites, you would need to install a Web Application Firewall. All you want to do here is ask your host service provider for its availability, and get it installed and let the Firewall do its magic.

Over the years, WordPress has established itself as a suitable and rather a useful platform for different blogs and websites. However, because of its popularity, it also becomes susceptible to a number of different threats like hacking.

This is why having a set of precautionary measures would be a good idea in order to keep your website and data protected at all times. If you find that securing your website is not your cup of tea, it is better that you hire WordPress developers, rather than repenting at the end.

The post 13 Quick Preventive Ways to Ensure a Secured WordPress Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

“If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business.” – Bill Gates.

These simple words of wisdom are quite enough to set the tone for your E-Commerce venture. As a matter of fact, being on the internet is not quite enough; the virtual world is pretty much like the real world, you could be anywhere and no one might ever find you.

So, the idea is to be where you can be seen and to make sure that people adore you when they see you. The internet of things is not an affair of the millennial crowd. Yes, your business might not cater to the Gen Y but that doesn’t mean that you should not have an eCommerce website.

Even if you are running successful offline retail units, the situation may soon implore that you move online because the consumers are becoming more comfortable shopping online day-by-day and you do not want to disappoint them.

There are plenty of E-commerce platforms that can help you launch your business on the web but as it is said earlier, it is not enough just to be on the web. Your choice should be in accordance with your requirements and should help you create the desired experience for your existing customer base and also to expand it. Here are some top E-commerce platforms that offer you a wide range of themes and the flexibility to build a great experience for your consumers.

Top 6 E-Commerce Platforms

1. Magento

Magento has come up as a popular e-commerce solution for big and small enterprises alike. You can download and install it to your server for free. Magento is pretty intense on features, so much so that you need to host it continuously. It is for this reason that Magento is chosen by various massive retailers including Musikshopen.com, Shoprite.com.au and Petsworld.in. If you can use it to effect, your products will roll.

• Perfect for novices with no technical knowledge and experts alike
• User-friendly admin area to set the basic store easily
• Highly scalable, and thus allows you to scale your store from 100 products to 1,00,000 on the go.
• Provides you with built in SEO support and newsletter management.
• Allows you to receive payment through multiple gateways.
• Optimize your site for mobile viewing.
• Handles customer service, coupons, gifts and more…
• It manages your inventory and handles shipping charges.

Being loaded with so many features, Magento has certain cons too. The backend development of Magento is pretty complex and takes real expertise to manage this particular platform. Fixing things may further demand professional technical assistance.

This user-friendly e-commerce site comes for free but you can, of course, buy the enterprise version for around $15,000 per year and Magento packed with all the support you may ever need comes at roughly $50,000 per year.

2. BigCommerce

BigCommerce empowers your business with plenty of great e-commerce store management features along with easy online payment facilities. All you need to do is sign up and set up your e-commerce store to your heart’s content with the countless customization features on offer.

• Taking care of orders, managing and adding products, tracking analytics – this all is fairly easy in BigCommerce.
• It secures your web store with top of the grid security features.
• Offers you an in-depth insight on analytics and statistics.
• BigCommerce is well equipped to deal with sudden spikes in your traffic.
• It integrates with PayPal and allows credit and debit card transaction and customer privacy is ensured as the checkout is done via SSL.

BigCommerce offers Standard, Plus, and Pro packages for $29.5, $79.5 and $199.5 per month respectively. While the Standard and Plus packages are fit for growing business, the Pro level subscription is great for big enterprises that deal with a lot of traffic and a large number of products. For the top features, you can go for the Enterprise package that is custom priced according to your requirements.

3. Shopify

Shopify is a one-stop e-commerce solution for beginners and veterans alike. The best part is the simplicity and cost-effectiveness it offers you. It is truly multipurpose and allows you to set up a store real time fast. You can start selling an unlimited number of products online through Shopify in a matter of a weekend. Let us take a deeper look –

• You get a working core platform straight away; you can obviously twist and tweak it to your liking, yet you get a well-structured shop effortlessly.
• The platform optimizes your store for viewing on mobile or tablet.
• Shopify integrates with Paypal; allows you to receive online and offline payment from multiple gateways. Bank transfer, cash on delivery, credit and debit card payments- you can allow your customers complete freedom if it suits you.
• Just change the color to match your company colors, edit the texts, put the pictures and prices; you are all set to fly.

Buying a platform on Shopify does not drain your resources. You can avail the basic facilities to start off with for $29, for intermediate and advanced features you need to spend $79 and $299 respectively. Most importantly, it is completely worth the expenses.

4. Volusion

Volusion is an ideal e-commerce solution to help your company with all the technical support needed to scale and grow. It has an easy to use interface that does not require loads of experience building e-commerce sites to get the most out of it. If you are just starting out, Volusion can be a worthy friend.

• Volusion is pretty easy to handle and works fine even for those who have no ecommerce experience.
• It has an amazing inventory management system.
• Volusion helps you build a complete website, integrating both e-commerce and non-commerce parts.
• You can choose from more than 300 responsive designs.
• You get 24/7 support, dedicated account managers and built-in marketing & SEO tools.
• You can manage your store on the go through iOS, Android and smartwatch apps.
• It accepts payment through debit and credit cards, PayPal and Amazon Payments.
• With advanced inventory management, secure hosting, security and easy order processing, Volusion is quite a superstar when it comes to e-commerce development services.

The only drawback is you cannot sell unlimited products through all the subscription packages. Only the premium pack worth $135/mo allows you to sell unlimited products.

Other packages are Mini worth $15/mo Plus $35/mo and Pro worth $75/mo.

5. 3dcart

3dcart gives you access to an advanced structured store that can handle thousands of products without any experience or site building skills. This feature-rich e-commerce platform has powered more than 23,000 stores around the globe and offers you its services without making you spend a fortune.

• Its unlimited storage allows you to handle massive catalog on the go.
• Hundreds of designs to choose from and all designs optimize for mobiles and tablets.
• It handles order management and processing.
• It is marketing and SEO friendly and also supports customer reviews.

You can avail the services through Mini, Starter, Professional, Professional plus and Power plan packages worth $19.99, $35.99, $65.99, $99.99 and $129.99 per month respectively.

6. Big Cartel

Big Cartel is a great platform for the creatives like musicians, artists, and designers to sell their goods directly to the fans. It is way easier to use than most e-commerce platforms and you can get it running in a very short amount of time. While being super simple and user-friendly, Big Cartel is not as high on features like other platforms, but if it is perfect for your niche, it indeed is a great tool.

• Big Cartel is perfect for those who are looking for a simple ecommerce store without much functionality. This works in favor of small ecommerce store owners, but might be frustrating if you are looking to base your store with 1 million products on it.
• It tracks your inventory and manages your orders.
• The feature-light approach of the platform is otherwise well-supported by in-built automation tools including time-sensitive discounts, pre-orders and other functions.
• It lets you sell in person and sell on Facebook.

You can avail Big Cartel for free forever, provided it limits you to 5 products and cancels some features. The paid packs are expectedly cheap. You can buy the Platinum, Diamond and Titanium platforms for $9.99, $19.99 and $29.99 respectively.

Time for the conclusion and some borrowed wisdom

The ‘E’ in e-commerce is for anything but Easy. So, you should be willing to handle your online business venture with patience, care and love. Understand what you need and create a vision of your desired destination and put the strong foot ahead. In short – choose your Ecommerce development services well and pour your heart into beautifying your store and perfecting your services.

Way to go entrepreneur!!!

The post 6 E-Commerce Platforms That Can Make Your Business Fly appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Today as many as 74.6 million sites are proudly powered by WordPress. And what makes WordPress such an ever-growing platform? Perhaps the number of plugins it boosts. There are more than 29,000 WordPress plugins available today, and a new plugin gets added almost every hour.

With such huge popularity that WordPress has, it is only obvious that people are now inquiring more about the WordPress eCommerce solutions. The trend to sell online is up, and since the people have good experience with WordPress, they want to use WordPress as their eCommerce solution too.

Moreover, the conception that the WordPress is free along with tons of easily available WordPress plugins proves to be an icing on the cake. Undoubtedly, WordPress lives up to the expectations quite well and has a lot of easily customizable e-commerce solutions to offer. But at the end, it is all about the details.

Make the Most Out Of Your Business – Learn About Your Needs Well, With Strategic Implementation

There is only one mantra if you want to setup a flawless ecommerce store and that is to delve yourself deeper into the details, specifications, and requirements. The ecommerce plugin that you have just thought of using should not be because your agency suggested that but because it meets your requirements perfectly.

You must be very clear regarding what all you wish to achieve from your online store. Are you targeting just a small area or a wide demography? Is your ecommerce solution robust and scalable enough to handle multiple users at a time? Do you need a pricing calculator? Would there be a different set of prices for customers and wholesale dealers? These are the questions you need to have answers of.

eCommerce is not as easy as it seems. Just like a brick and mortar store needs proper strategies and planning, HTML and CSS stores are no different. It is not just about a payment gateway and an online shopping cart. It is more than that. It is about the experience. It is about functionalities. It is about navigation. It is about products and a lot more!

You cannot simply wake up one fine morning, and decide to go with WordPress and eCommerce. You would need to study your requirements and goals properly.

You would need to figure out where you would like to see your business 5 years down the line. What all geographies would you be targeting and so on? You would need to consider factors like scalability, flexibility, and robustness.

A design firm can surely help you, but you would need to help yourself in terms of the goals and expectations. Makes sense?

Further, the most tempting reason why people tend to go for WordPress e-commerce is because it is free. Well, it is not! The basic versions might be free, but then they are not just enough to keep your store going and would simply not serve the purpose in the long run.

Having a clear idea about the needs would thus help you figure out a potential fit, costing, implementation and other aspects.

General eCommerce Considerations

Before you splurge into your idea of having your own e-commerce store, it is better that you know about the important e-commerce factors you need to worry about.

• Cost
Each plugin comes with its own cost. There are some which are free while the others are paid. There are different criteria for each one. You need to know about these plugins and choose accordingly. Some plugins come with an annual license that is to be renewed every year while others are simple; they come with a onetime fee. Know your budget and before you buy a particular plugin blindfolded, analyze all other alternative options.

• Aesthetics
An e-commerce store is all about the embedded UX/UI experience. You need to be very clear with the looks of your store. How would you like it to look? Should it match closely to your existing WordPress website?

Looks of your store might vary as per the different plugins used. You may even choose to go for a custom WordPress theme. A custom theme helps you design your e-commerce store the way you like – from the margin, padding, font, and text – everything is in your control. Hiring an expert WordPress designer would serve the purpose best here.

• Responsive
It goes without saying; your e-commerce store should be responsive. Do not even give a second thought to this, go with our words, and we’re sure, you would never repent! After all, you won’t like your e-commerce store to be rendered differently on different devices? While navigation might work just fine with phones, the text might be too much shabby on tablets.

This is where the responsive design store comes to the rescue. Responsive design makes sure that your store looks and behaves fabulous no matter on which device it is accessed. It works by rendering the same HTML differently on different devices such that the UX/UI experience is same all around.

• Ease of use
It is your store, and you would surely like to have a few customizations every now and then. You need to add new products, remove old products, introduce discounts, run offers and so on. Thus, choose a platform which provides an easy to handle mechanism.

Functional eCommerce Considerations

Obviously, you won’t like your customers leaving your store just because they were not able to find their preferred mode of payment. And thus to avoid such bad experiences, it is essential that your attention to functional e-commerce considerations should be very much required.

• Product types
You need to study the compatibility of your product offering with your selected software. Not all plugins support digital downloads, or affiliate links or other such offerings pretty well. Take out a chance and review this before settling on one plugin.

• Pricing scenarios
How would the pricing work? Would you set it volume purchase or attribute? Do distributors need to have a different pricing? WordPress undoubtedly has come a long way, but still a lot more is to be achieved. There are not many WordPress plugins which can support you here.

• Payment terms
Next, what all payment modes would work for you? WordPress plugins perform well when it comes to universal payment modes like PayPal and credit card. However, if you like to make it global and are looking to have wire transfers, net 30 and others, you might not be left with a lot of options.

• Sales Tax
This is one of the trickiest portions. You need to choose a WordPress plugin which is robust enough to handle complex requirements and calculations. Thankfully, you can find various WordPress plugins that have the ability to distinguish between services and products and also between state, country and the respective tax laws.

• Shipping
Would you like to integrate your store with shipping vendors like USPS, FedEx, and others? Are you looking to have international shipping? How are shipping charges calculated? Get enough information on each of these subjects, and keep it all well documented before you finalize a shopping cart plugin.

• Discounts and coupons
Undoubtedly, this is going to be one of the most attractive parts of your eCommerce store. This is what could serve as one of the most efficient weapons to lure customers towards your store. Be very specific about the types of discounts and deals that you would need. Strategize if you would like to provide incentives every time a person purchases and so on.

• Returns and refunds
There are two ways to initiate returns and refunds. You can ask your customer to initiate return directly from their user account, or you can have an RMA process. This most likely would need to be managed by you, and in most of the cases, this is outside the reach of basic plugins.

Technical eCommerce Considerations

A lot is being said about functional and general e-commerce solutions. Next, let’s talk about technical e-commerce considerations.

• SSL certification
SSL certification boosts trust of your customers in your store. It is a secure socket layer that ensures that all the sensitive information like credit card numbers and stuff is protected and secured. Check if you would like to have this certification and accordingly check if your payment gateway and shopping cart provides it.

• Security
Since an e-commerce store involves sharing of secure information, if you want to collect sensitive info like credit card numbers and others, it is highly recommended that you have a PA-DSS and PCI compliant solution in place.

• Search Engine Optimization
How would you reach to your customers? One of the ways is by enhancing your store’s visibility in search engine results pages. And this could be fairly achieved by search engine optimization. Make sure that your chosen solution allows you to optimize your store with proper Meta titles and product descriptions. It should support schema and allow you to input all tags essential for on page SEO.

WordPress Ecommerce Solutions

You are all set now! You have all the required info about various aspects to look for in a WordPress plugin and all set to make a well-informed decision. It is the best time to review the various WordPress e-commerce solutions that are available to you. Check out!

• WooCommerce
This WordPress plugin ensures that your store looks beautiful. You can easily transform your WordPress site into a robust e-commerce store quickly with WooCommerce.

It is available for free by WooThemes and is known for rendering flawless looks and embeds awesome user experience, all thanks to its array of features and payment gateways. It comes with an average rating of 4.22 on 5. You can further choose to augment the functionalities of WooCommerce through various easily available free and premium extensions.

Further, it is secure, SEO friendly and boasts of an equally great community. Perhaps this is the reason that WooCommerce is been downloaded more than six million times till date.

• Cart 66
Cart 66 comes with easy to use interface, inventory management, affiliate program, Mijireh support, and others. It basically has everything that you would need in an e-commerce store. Its lite version is available for free. However, you would have to shed $95/year to use Cart 66 cloud version. With 165k downloads till date, cart 66 lite comes with a rating of 3.0/5.0.

• WP e-Commerce
This is yet another wonderful plugin available for e-commerce stores. It comes with a rating of 2.9/5/0 and is being downloaded three million times till date

• MarketPress
MarketPress like its counterparts is secure, easy to use and is compatible with all major payment gateways. It also features its own pre-made themes. With 150k downloads till date, it comes with a rating of 3.9/5.00.

In Nutshell

To conclude, like we already said, it is all about the requirements and your business needs. Just find out the most suitable match – one that matches exceptionally well with your requirements. You should always choose a plugin which matches 80% of your requirements. Avoid randomly picking a solution and then spending weeks on its customization. It would only hinder your productivity.

Setting up a WordPress e-commerce store demands a lot of hard work and strategic execution. It is thus highly recommended to focus on more important tasks and let an experienced WordPress designer do the required development and installation. It is always better to do the tasks we are good at and allow the rest to be handled by professionals. Agree?

Please leave your thoughts and comments below.

The post How to Choose the Best WordPress Ecommerce Solutions? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

WordPress started out as a bloggers paradise, it stayed and evolved as one of the best stops for bloggers for years, and has now slowly and steadily enticed the business bigwigs to sell their products through it.

And why not, its accessibility and user interface is much more easy and interactive than its many competitors. Moreover, its hands-on services are like no one out there! All you would need to do is get yourself some bang on plugins and you are on! And if this seems like a big task to you, simply hire a WordPress developer.

What these plugins are, really? Let us check out the best ones.

Best WordPress Plugins for ECommerce Sites

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a simple, powerful and extendable e-commerce platform for WordPress. It promises to woo your customers when they visit your online store. It has been rated at 4.1/5 by WordPress and has nearly 2 million downloads in its kitty, It surely looks like the plugin that is capable enough to boost up your store in a good way.

WooCommerce is flexible in a way that it allows you to customize your store based on your products and business nature. It has the strength and advantage to be built around WordPress best practices.

The plugin offers a very user-friendly interface that allows you to keep up with the performance of your online store without much hassle of clicking and coding, as it is all available on the dashboard.

The plugin is entirely customizable, compatible with WordPress themes and also offers a PayPal Gateway for easy shopping and payment. Apart from these, it allows credit card payment options, cash on delivery and all other payments being secured by Mijireh.

It is even tied up with ShareThis and ShareDaddy to allow you to socially link your store.

2. WP E-Commerce

This Plugin may race ahead of WooCommerce where the number of downloads is concerned, but it lacks in ratings from WordPress. This is due to the fact that it is far behind WooCommerce where functionality is concerned.

Nevertheless, it is compatible with WordPress, fully customizable, and provides priority support for privileged members. Like WooCommerce, WP e-commerce also offers PayPal integration and various other payment options making it a likeable tool by store owners.

cThe plugin is workable out of the box and provides multiple options that make your store market-ready. These include Google sitemaps, new product widget, flexible coupon rules, Bulk purchase discounts, Google base integration etc.

This plugin offers a drag and drops option to users which makes the whole shopping experience blissful for your customers. The plugin makes your store SEO ready, offers SSL certificates and catalog management.

It may not match up to WooCommerce where functionality is concerned, but with its unique features, it gives a good fight.

3. Cart66 Lite

Cart66 is touted to be the easiest plugin to install for WordPress. The plugin is integrated with PayPal and also Amazon 3 which allows you to manage orders, promotions, shopping options, etc.

That is not all; Cart66 also allows you to do your taxes without breaking a sweat. You can send customized currencies, and email through this plugin to add a little oomph to your online experience.

The plugin is available for free download, but it is just better to configure it so that you have the whole package and your online experience does not get bottlenecked just because there is a certain feature that is not available for the free download.

4. MarketPress

This plugin is, of course, easy to use, and also provides the standard features any e-commerce plugin would provide such as being compatible with other WordPress themes; it is based out of AJAX and provides various payment options such as PayPal, Google Checkouts etc.

This Plugin offers internationalization options that can make your store go global. Loaded with features, and compatible with WordPress, this plugin is just what you need to take your online store to the next level.

It does not only allow you to customize the store but also provides shipping options which make this a global platform. This plugin was developed to offer its users a good interface and a state of the art user experience, the awful experience that other plugins offer inspired WPMUdev to work on MarketPress. A plugin made just for the user has to be something, right!

5. Easy Digital Downloads

This plugin caters to a specific market. It allows for easy digital downloads. If your business is all about the digitized era and your store sells digital media, then this is the go-to plugin for you.

This plugin is not like others that are loaded with features. It is more character-specific and focused on catering to a very specific market. All its features are integrated to help make that experience better.

It boasts 200,000 downloads and a 4.8 ratings. Having said it is not loaded with the whole bag of features, it still does come with the basic ones that are needed to get your store online. Easy digital downloads include various payment gateway options – Obviously – Promotional code system if you happen to have offers and things, option to download multiple files, bulk purchases, etc.

Even though this is not a plugin for all, it does cater to your needs.

6. Ithemes Exchange

Developed by iThemes, and a rating of 5/5 the plugin is well worth your time. It has a very simplified interface that makes it a breeze to work with. Apart from this, it is fully customizable and compatible with WordPress.

It is packed with features that would help you get through the hassle of setting up an e-commerce site unscathed. Ithemes Exchange is compatible with WordPress, fully customizable, and provides priority support for privileged members.

Like WooCommerce, WP e-commerce also offers PayPal integration and various other payment options making it a likeable by store owners.

7. Jigoshop

This is the big guy, built by an experienced set of designers, for the big brands, of the big people. This plugin offers superb functionality and customizability with a whole load of features that suit almost any and every platform of the online store.

As we said, this is the big guy; this plugin offers the features of Easy digital download and WooCommerce. So you can have a store selling some fancy products while giving your customers the option to download media files at the same time.

This plugin will also allow you to offer affiliate products, group products, and other products. Jigoshop also provides the required sales reports to keep you updated with the performance of your store while keeping track of the stocks available.

This plugin is internationalized offering various shipping methods, is fully extendable and has a strong support community.

This plugin is free with nearly 300,000 downloads with a user rating of 3.9/5.

8. Shopp

Shopp adopts a very professional front. The plugin offers a secure cart that is integrated within the plugin which means you don’t have to have security add-ons.

It has catalogue management, Discount feature, and multiple image options and is super SEO friendly. It has JavaScript enabled a very responsive design, which makes the user experience all the more special.

The plugin does have a lot of features, and when we say a lot – it is more of an understatement, and it is free with a package available for starters and go pro versions.

9. Eshop

Very simply, Eshop is an online e-commerce store plugin for WordPress. This plugin not only allows you to sell your products but create them as well. Every e-commerce success story has strong customer relation behind it, this plugin allows you to create customer sign ups to help you build and stay in touch with your customers on a regular basis.

This plugin also allows you to offer downloadable products and for the physical kind, it offers various shipping methods.
Where the money is concerned, multiple gateways for you to receive the money are provided, and options to calculate taxes are provided so you can ethically run a respectable business.

The plugin boasts a user rating of 3.8/5, fairly good, maybe not the best but it does have 500,000 plus downloads, and we don’t think so many of them will go for a product which is not worth their time.

10. Quick Shop

Quick Shop plugin has the bare basics and is so simple; it is just the right thing for a beginner. With emails and PayPal integration you can start earning money about 10 minutes after you download.

The plugin is customizable, compatible and oh so simple to use.

And if any of the above plugins fall short of any of the functionalities, even though they have the whole online store, shopping cart, money matters covered, you can always use extra plugins or customize the existing ones by hiring a WordPress developer.

The post Top 10 WordPress Plugins Essential for Ecommerce Sites appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Created in 2003 as a Content Management System with a difference, Joomla currently has around 3 million websites running on it. That’s quite a feat, and it’s not without reason that Joomla is considered to be an increasingly popular CMS. After WordPress, it’s considered the world’s most popular CMS and as of October 2015, it had been downloaded over 50 million times!

It gives its users the freedom to create their very own websites, ranging from business to personal, and more. The benefits of opting Joomla CMS include page caching, printable versions of pages, composer integration, RSS feeds, Google ReCAPTCHA, support for language internationalization, collapsible side bars, blogs and what not.

But, are these the only benefits of Joomla CMS? Most certainly not! Scroll down to go through everything that Joomla has to offer you –

Benefits of Using Joomla CMS

1. Publishing Blogs on Joomla is as Easy as ABC

If you fear you require extensive knowledge of CSS, PHP or HTML to use Joomla to create websites, then you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it, and the only thing you need to know about uploading a blog is to simply copy paste the content and hitting on the “publish” button. Yes, that’s pretty much it. Read this article on How to set up a blog in Joomla! to gain a better perspective.

2. Open Source Infrastructure

Did you know that open source software powers most of the internet? And the king of open source web scripting language is PHP. In fact, such is its popularity that even biggies like Citibank and Harvard University prefer using PHP.

The language was used to create Joomla too, with MySQL being its go-to for data storage. This combination has made it that much easier for developers across the globe to create extensions for Joomla, as well as supporting the CMS itself.

3. Flexibility

With over 8000 Joomla extensions, you there’s just no limit to how functional and interactive you can make your website. For those wanting to add social media widgets onto their website to integrate social networking, you have an extension for that! If you want to focus on consumer feedback and need to create several customizable forms, don’t worry – Joomla extensions have got your back!

These extensions are divided into 33 different categories, including communication, editing, marketing, social, languages, site management, and living. Every extension is clearly labeled and is given a rating out of 5 stars to indicate exactly how useful (or how useless) it is for users. Review categories include functionality, support, ease of use and documentation. Exhaustive, right? But it’s one of the best benefits of this platform.

4. Content Management is a Piece of Cake

The primary function of Joomla is content management. This means that unlike in other CMses, in Joomla, you can easily manage users with various permission levels easily and without having to switch tabs. Second, creating a new website in a specific hierarchical order is extremely easy. What this means is that you can create and access your website in a streamlined, like this chart – website>blog section>articles on SEO> 2015>What are the benefits of SEO?

Want to know more pros of selecting Joomla CMS? As is always the case, you do not require any coding experience to create your websites in an orderly fashion, and that’s because Joomla was built to do that in the first place. You also get complete control of all the elements of your website via your administrative panel.

5. E-commerce Becomes Easy with Joomla

If you’re an e-commerce company that’s still contemplating about which CMS to opt for, well, you needn’t contemplate anymore. Joomla is an e-commerce friendly CMS that offers many components created specifically for e-com.

For example, you can easily manage your products and their content without having to switch over tabs to do your job. Then there are 3rd party components that run inside the Joomla like Virtuemart. It gives you several options like PayPal and Google Checkout, shipping, product management, and payment gateways.

The topside is that it’s very simple to use, much like Joomla’s other e-commerce solution – RokQuickCart. These components are ideally suited to a company that has a business presence online and would like to add a shopping cart system to their existing Joomla!

And as is always the case, Joomla CMS means you get your own set of awesome e-commerce extensions.

6. A Strong User Community

Did you know that Joomla has a community of over 200 000 users? What this means that each and every single one of those people has used this CMS and can help you out with any problem that you’re facing. How?

Because anything you’re facing right now has already been faced (and solved) by them! Every single person there can be considered a tester, and the Joomla community is unusually active. Loopholes, updates, security concerns, software bugs – everything is detected very quickly and uploaded on its forum.

In fact, the community has a high number of web developers, whose presences ensures that Joomla security updates are received as soon as possible. You can also make use of the Joomla Documentation to get access to a wealth of online resources for additional help and support.

7. Built-in Basic SEO Functionality

Joomla is SEO friendly, and one of the main advantages is that Search Engine Friendly URLs are built in it. Initially, all that you had to do was to enable them in order for them to get you better SEO rankings. However, this option is on by default since Joomla 1.6.

You also have the freedom to choose your own meta keywords and meta description of your web pages, which again improves your SEO. The bottom line is that Joomla allows you to do basic SEO yourself. And if you want, you can make your website more SEO friendly by simply following these 11 steps.

If that’s not enough for you, then instead of paying money to hire an agency to do SEO for you, you can make the most of all that Joomla has to offer in terms of SEO functionality is to simply download the best SEO plugins the CMS has to offer

8. High in Security

Joomla is highly secure. The high-security feature persists only up the time of installing after downloading. Thereafter, the security is somewhat threatened if you do not routinely install the latest security updates or utilize unreliable third-party extensions.

9. Numerous Extensions

Joomla has 8,000+ extensions to choose from. From including social media channels on your website to get buyers’ feedback, you will never see a shortage of extensions. The extensions are grouped in 33 different categories, including communication, marketing, social media management, languages, editing, among others. Each extension is labeled and is rated out of five stars to show precisely how valuable it is for clients.

10. Abundant Templates

Joomla has abundant templates for almost everything. Be it developing a user-friendly website or a corporate portal, there are templates for all kinds of usages. However, one important thing to bear in mind is that the templates are version-specific. And that means a Joomla 1.5 template will not work in a Joomla 2.5 website.

The post 10 Benefits of Using Joomla CMS For Your Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

59% of B2B marketers firmly believe that email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. Furthermore, McKinsey & Company showed that email is almost 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers compared to social media.

Email is the most market competitive method of gaining, building, and retaining customers. Currently, there are over 2.6 billion email users across the globe, however many startups and companies avoid investing in emails, thinking it is meant primarily for big or established players and companies in the marketplace.

This is primarily because of the misconception that email marketing and campaign in general are either obsolete or ineffective.

This is far from the truth.

You don’t have to be a large company or have a huge budget to effectively implement and manage an email marketing campaign. Here are ten WordPress plugins that simplify the task of creating and managing powerful email campaigns.

WordPress Plugins For E-mail Marketing

1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a lightweight, modular plugin. Hence, you only need to install the kind of subscription for that you need instead of installing/integrating the whole package.

Once the plugin has been activated, you select, configure, and customize the type form that you want to display on your website (e.g. Slide in, Footer bar, a Lightbox, etc.). Configuration includes adding the duration, exit intent, loading delays, opti-in title, etc. Finally, you can choose a form design and customize the opt-in.

The exit intent pop-up is an important feature of the plugin. It allows you to “catch” the visitors to subscribe to your emailing list when they are about to leave your website.

2. LeadPages

LeadPages is a full-fledged tool for creating landing pages, but can be integrated with its WordPress plugin. It allows you to create custom landing pages using templates and then hooking them up to your email list.

Additionally, Leadpage offers various modules that allow you to create custom opt-ins and in converting website links into popover subscriptions form, and allow visitors to subscribers to join your primary emailing list or other sub-lists (e.g. a webinar).

3. SendinBlue Subscribe Form and WP SMTP

SendinBlue is an email marketing solution provider, similar to MailChimp. The “SendinBlue Subscribe Form and WP SMTP” is it plugin for WordPress that allows you to leverage SendinBlue’s tools to create custom subscription forms. You can also create and send newsletters to your subscription lists.

The plugin offers SendinBlue’s powerful analytics as well. You can segment your contact lists and easily track emails using WordPress’s built in wp_mail() function, and gain access to real-time statistics on clicks, opens, and bounce rates.

4. MailChimp

MailChimp is a popular and powerful email marketing platform that seamlessly integrates with WordPress websites. The installation is simple. Once installed, MailChimp allows you to create custom sign-up forms and add sign-up checkboxes on different forms on your website e.g. contact form and comments section.

You can design email newsletters using ready-made and customizable email templates, setup autoresponders, easily manage subscribers, track emails and view analytics for different email campaigns.

5. Layered Popups for WordPress

Pop-ups are one of the most aggressive, yet a highly effective method of building your emailing lists. Their effectiveness, however, depends on how well-configured they are: their timing, non-intrusive nature, and possible actions that the visitor can take.

The “Layered Popups for WordPress” is a plugin that allows you to easily create custom, attention grabbing pop-ups. These popups can be configured to match your visitor’s preferences and the actions you want them to take on your site. Change design, type, dimensions, adds animations, buttons, and CTAs.

Additionally, you can A/B test different opt-ins in real-time and see how they affect user engagement, and selecting the one that best resonates with your audience and drives your goals. The plugin integrates with Google Analytics allowing you to track the performance and further improve the popup.

6. Opt-in Panda for WordPress

This plugins allows you to gate your valuable content by showing a glimpse of the content. If the visitor wants to further read the content (article, blog, etc.), and scroll further down, an opt-in will ask them to subscribe to your emailing list. The opt-in gives the option of subscribing using social media as well.

Additionally, the plugin also allows you to show exclusive in-content freebies before your visitors (e.g. short eBooks, whitepapers, and other downloadable material). You can easily track how visitors interact with your opt-ins using built-in analytics.

The plugin is SEO-friendly, allowing bots to easily crawl and rank your content. The opt-in can easily be integrated with all the major email service providers including MailChimp, SendinBlue, AWeber, GetResponse, and ActiveCampaign.

7. Attention Grabber Plugin

A handy notifications bar is an effective method of grabbing a visitors attention when they visit your website. The Attention Grabber plugin is the free alternative to the more costly Hello Bar. It’s easy to install and is quick to integrate with your WordPress website and offers a range of features including customizations and tracking sign-ups.

8. FreshMail for WordPress

This plugins allows you to easily create custom and pre-configured sign-up forms and popup opt-ins. Additionally, you can setup automatic checkbox subscriptions based on user action (e.g. leaving a comment, completing a survey, etc.).

The plugin seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce checkout, Contact Form, and Google Analytics. Once integrated into GA, you can easily track the effectiveness of your opt-in.

9. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular contact forms for WordPress because of its ease of use and customizability. The plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms and place them on any of your website’s pages.

You can easily customize the appearance, mail contents, and form fields of the form, and integrate with MailChimp.

10. SumoMe’s List Builder

Catch visitors to subscribe to your emailing list when they are about to leave your website using a Lightbox from SumoMe. The lightbox is customizable, optimized for mobile devices, allows sharing of content to social media channels, and easily integrates with email marketing service providers including  MailChimp, SendinBlue, AWeber, GetResponse, and ActiveCampaign.

Additionally, the plugin offers a scroll box for gathering email addresses when visitors scroll down the content. It also comes with a range of analytics tools including heat maps and the ability to integrate with Google Analytics and see visitor stats in real-time.

The post Top 10 WordPress Plugins For E-mail Marketing appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

WordPress is a software that is constantly being upgraded and improved upon and if you’re wondering whether you should update your website to the latest version of WordPress, then the answer is yes! Why should you do so? Well, the seven reasons you will read about below will surely convince you as to why it is so crucial for you to stay up to date when it comes to your WordPress website.

In fact, neglecting updates will put your website at a risk of inconvenience and attacks. Here are the top seven reasons why you should have your WordPress website updated:

1. Superior Performance

Everyone wants their website to be equipped with high speed performance and ease of usage. Upon having your website updated, you will experience exactly that. An update will ensure that your users experience a superior and smooth performance each time they visit your website. Here are some examples of how previous updates have helped with enhanced performance:

• Sites using complex queries were at ease after WordPress 4.1
• With WordPress 4.2 came a superior JS performance for the navigation menus

When it comes down to SEO, quality performance is essential and after having your website upgraded, you will ensure it performs to the best of its potential.

2. An Enhanced Set of Features

When you update your WordPress website, you will gain access to a whole range of new and improved features that will make your website a lot more versatile, robust. You will be at liberty to perform tasks that you may not have been able to perform with older versions. WordPress 3.0 came with custom navigation menus and multi-site installations while 3.1 made it easy to navigate between sites by adding the Admin Bar and also improvised on internal linking.

As the updates keep rolling out, WordPress development escalates and the features get more and more impressive. WordPress 4.1 brought with itself inline image editing while much quicker plug-in updates were introduced with the arrival of 4.2.

3. A Website Richly Secured

WordPress as we all know is open source software and 23% websites from all over the world are powered by WordPress. Its popularity makes it more targeted by hackers and data thieves who can study source codes and use the information to break into websites. Security experts are capable of studying codes and they also report security fixes and bugs. Each time the security reaches a stage of vulnerability, it gets reported after which the WordPress team get to work so that an update can be released that is helpful with having the issues fixed.

To put it in simpler words, if you are using a version of WordPress that is not the latest, the software in use will be highly prone to security vulnerabilities. So stay up to date with WordPress themes, its core and plug-ins so that nasty and malicious hackers can be kept at bay and you can rest assured that your website is safe and secure.

4. Guaranteed Compatibility

You need to know how to update your WordPress website properly so that you can make sure the software is compatible with plug-ins. If you install a plug-in that is brand new while using an old version of WordPress, it may not be compatible to the new plug-in and you will most likely be required to update the version you are currently using so as to ensure its compatibility with the new plug-ins you’ve installed. In addition to this, you will not be able to take advantage of the latest features associated with the updated version either.

5. Bug Fixtures

One of the main reasons for upgraded versions of WordPress is to have the bugs fixed. At times it so happens that bugs seem to slip in through cracks which is why minor releases of WordPress seem to take place so that the bugs can be cleaned out. Why was the recent update of 4.2.3 released? So that it could fix up some 20 bugs that had got into the 4.2 release. If you are facing some issues, you know it’s time to make the change to the newer, latest version of WordPress.

6. Adaptability to Change

Some of you may be comfortable with the version you are using and may not want to make the shift to the newer version of WordPress on your website. But you must understand that the updated versions hold the best of everything WordPress software is capable of delivering and for this reason you must make the shift. At some point or the other, you will need to make a change and keeping your website updated will make you more comfortable with experiencing changes that are so necessary to ensure the effective and efficient functionality of WordPress.

7. Visitors Well Treated

Websites are not created aimlessly. No matter what the reason, be is simply for fulfilling the content appetite of your readers, or for generating income, in order to satisfy the needs of your visitors, you will need to stay on top of your game. One crucial way of doing so is by updating your WordPress website.

If the version you are currently using is old, it will obviously not be equipped with the newest features, bug fixes or security needed for enriched performance. This will no doubt lead your visitors to get frustrated with your website and do you think they will be visiting it again? Well you know the answer to this question. And if your website traffic seems to be facing a decline, it’s needless to say that your business won’t exactly be performing very well. So use the updated version of WordPress and keep your visitors happy.

The above mentioned reasons are clear cut motives loaded with an abundance of benefits associated with updated versions of WordPress. So move on to better performance, security, features and compatibility and ensure visitors keep coming back to you by staying up to date with your WordPress website.

The post 7 Reasons To Update Your WordPress Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

PHP latest version 7.0 is about to be launched in the market with its exciting features and impressive performance.  According to W3techs, PHP has a market share of 81.5%. Among all PHP versions, 98.7% PHP websites are using PHP V5. However, the latest PHP version is expected to outperform all the previous versions.

If your website is developed on PHP based Content Management System like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and Drupal, then this is the best time to upgrade your website because PHP 7.0 is a full package of surprising and cutting edge features.

PHP 7 is still in the development stage and a competed version will be released in November. But you can download its latest beta version and experiment it on your website to test what will and what will not work for your website. It will help you to fully prepare your website for the full version of PHP 7.0.

The first beta of PHP 7.0 was released in July 2015 along with the announcement of releasing full version of PHP 7.0 on November 12, 2015.

Here is a list of top 7 things you need to know about PHP latest version 7.0.

1. The Name

PHP 6 was expected to be a major release but the project failed due to several bugs. The performance was also not up to the mark. However, people confused the latest version of PHP with modified PHP 6.0. The dispute was resolved by naming the latest version as PHP Version 7.0 instead of PHP version 6.0.

2. Zend Powered PHPNG

Since 1999, Zend Engine has been used to power up PHP. It was launched when fourth version of PHP was released. Zend Engine II was launched along with the introduction of PHP Version 5.0. PHP latest version is powered with Zend New Generation. This is why it is also called PHPNG.

PHPNG supports almost all extensions except the following.

• Interbase
• MSSQL
• PDO_OCI
• OCI8
• SYBASE_CT
• PDO_DBLIB

A complete installation and usage guide for PHPNG is also available online.

According to Zend blog, PHPNG is already outperforming Facebook’s HHVM. Endi Gutmans, the founder of Zend, believes that PHP is a complete and dynamic ecosystem of innovations.

3. Abstract Syntax Tree

Abstract Syntax Tree or AST has already been implemented in PHP 7.0. It enables you to implement Syntax in intermediary structure easily. It allows you to emit opcodes directly from parser and remove a number of hacks to make implementation easier.

The use of AST will bring you two primary advantages.

• Firstly, it makes maintenance of parser and compiler easier.
• Secondly, it allows you to decouple syntax decisions from other technical issues.

4. Facilitating Error Handling

Handling catchable and fatal errors in PHP has never been easier than in PHP 7.0. PHP updates show that the new Engine Exceptions will replace old errors from PHP V5. In order to further facilitate the users, the Exception Base Class does not extend in the new Engine Exceptions.

This way, it provides you two different kinds of exceptions to handle the errors. The first one is traditional error handling and the second one is Engine Exceptions.

5. Cloud Computing Solutions

Zend has partnered with globally reputed cloud computing systems to allow its users to make their applications portable. With cloud computing solutions, you will not only be able to retrieve or extract your files, but you will also be able to exchange your files from one cloud to another cloud server whenever you need.

This PHP7 development with Zend will facilitate Ecommerce stores. Without affecting speed and performance of your web store, you will be able to develop light-weight websites along with keeping your data safe and secure. It will also allow the entrepreneurs to store their company data with optimized security.

6. 64-Bit Windows Support System

PHP is primarily naïve Linux member but the users can also run it on Windows systems. PHP 5.X series didn’t provide 64-bit Windows support system but PHP 7.0 does provide this support. Along with improving PHP 7.0 performance, it will allow the websites to support native 64-bit integers as well as large files.

The 64-bit Windows support system is in experimental stage. If the experiment is successful then the users will be able to confidently keep running their websites with new versions of Windows in future also.

7. Doubled Speed

PHP New Generation engine has been conceived on the idea of improved speed. With Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation, you can instantly run compilations instead of waiting for execution time. According to Zend, this PHP7 development will offer improved PHP7 performance in two ways.

• Firstly, it will allow you to serve the same number of users or traffic load but by using fewer servers.
• Secondly, the code of your site will be executed faster.

According to the official website of Zend, PHP 7 will be 2X faster.

PHP 7.0 is also significant to cleaner website for faster speed. For improving the speed and site performance, PHP 7 operates by cleaning the environment in two different ways.

• It removes the functionality which had been deprecated in PHP 5.0 version. Here is a detailed study of deprecated functionality in PHP 5.0.
• It removes the dead SAPIs and extensions or those which do not support PHP 7.0. Here is a complete understanding of how it removes dead SAPIs.

When upgrading to PHP latest version, remember that PHP 7.0 will break the code of any running legacy app. PHP 7.0 will also come up with surprises for developers including Combined Comparison Spaceship Operator and Declarations and Scaler Type Hints. With all these innovations and development, managing your PHP developed website will become easier than ever.

The post PHP 7.0 – Things You Need to Know About PHP Latest Version appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

The overall impression of a website depends on the quality of its design. Whether the users are impressed or not upon visiting the site depends on its layout and visuals. This makes the web development stage one of the most important in creating a successful online presence.

Every web development project has to go through certain steps that take the project from initiation to completion. The web development steps divide the project into easily manageable phases. Although the exact phase of the web development process varies slightly, the most basic steps remain the same.

Below are 5 essential stages of the design process that will help you understand how a website is designed and developed on a professional scale.

Step 1: Project Planning

Project planning refers to determining the overall goals and objectives of the web development project. This is arguably the most important stage in the entire project. It is further divided into the following five parts.

1. Requirement Assessment – Requirement assessment refers to finding out the precise requirements of the website. This includes determining the target audience, website goals, detailed features, and other similar information about the website.
2. Project Summary – The project summary sums up the website’s requirements. The document is typically concise and serves as a reference point throughout the web development process.
3. Determining Required Resources – The project planning stage also defines the software and other resource requirements for the website project. In this step, any 3rd party media needs are identified. All of the resource requirements are then added to the budget of the project.
4. Key performance goals – The website planning stage also involves determining key performance goals. Project deadlines, budgeted costs, and page speed are some of the website design and development goals that are set at this stage.
5. Competitor Analysis – Finally, this stage also involves conducting a competitor analysis. Which are the rival businesses of your website? How many visitors will visit the website? What will be their bounce rate? Other important things that are considered at this stage include visual branding, call to action, navigation, and layout.

Step 2: Determining Project Scope

The next stage of the design process includes determining project scope. Creating a well define scope of the project will help in ensuring that the website project ends on time and within the specified budget. One of the best ways to delineate scope of the project is through a Gantt chart.

A Gantt chart offers a visual reference of the project. The chart shows activities involved in the project. It also shows the timeframe for the completion of each stage. It helps in specifying scope of the project. Moreover, it also creates accountability between the website design team.

Step 3: Website Design

The next critical stage of the website design process is designing the website itself. In this stage, the website development team focuses on selecting the theme, color, layout, features, and other aspects of the website.

During this stage the website designers incorporate various elements such as company logo, color that strengthens brand identity, a theme that reflects the company’s product portfolio, and layout that is elegant and looks appealing.

The website designer will create one or more prototype designs for the website. This is then sent to the website owners through email with the mock-ups of the website.

Step 4: Website Development

In this web development stage, the website development team takes individual elements of the website and uses them to create a functional website. The stage involves developing a home page after which a “shell” is created for the interior pages.

The shell contains navigational structure and site layout without the web content. Once the website owner provides the content, it is distributed throughout the site in the specified areas.

On the technical side, the website development process includes elements such as designing interactive contact forms, implementing payment gateways, and choosing a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress, Joomla, and Magento.

Step 5: Website Testing and Deployment

The fifth and final stage of the website is the testing and deployment process. In this stage, the website designer adds final touches to the site and tests the website before deployment. The designer will test the complete functionality of the site to ensure that it runs smoothly without any glitch.

The website designer will test the scripts and forums, ensure that the site displays well on different devices and platforms, verify internal links, and other similar tasks.

The website designer will also validate the website codes to ensure that it meets the latest website standards. This ensures that the website performs smoothly without any issues and problems.

The website is then shown to its owners to obtain final approval of the site. After the final approval, it’s time to deliver the site. The web design team will upload the site on a hosting server specified and selected by the website owner using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program.

After the website has been uploaded to the hosting server, a final run through is conducted to ensure that the site performs without any problem. This step is performed just to validate that all the files have been uploaded correctly, and that the site is fully functional.

Finally, the website design team adds finer details to the website to optimize its functionality and performance like plug in installation, on page SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and page speed optimization.

On a final note, you should know that the web development process takes a lot of time and effort. Designing a visually appealing website that stands out from the competition is an uphill task. But the rewards are certainly greater than the effort, cost, and time required to craft a beautiful website.

Step 6: Content Creation

Content is one of the most important aspects of a website. Two fundamental aspects of website content are—driving engagement and search engine optimization (SEO).

Since content engages readers and promotes them to take action; therefore the style of content writing is important.

Writers should avoid long and lifeless content, which fail to attract visitors’ attention. And instead, they should write interesting, short and to-the-point content not only to grab the attention of visitors but also to prompt them to click through the other pages. If your pages need large content, then structure the content into small paragraphs, and supplement those with visuals to make it interesting for the visitors to engage.

It is also the content that plays the most important role in boosting the visibility of a website in search engine results. Search engines easily find websites with content, which are well-structured, informative and are rich in keywords. So, write your website’s content with rich keywords for better Search Engine Optimization.

Step 7: Visuals

In website design, images play a very important role. Images have a lot to do on websites. In addition to giving websites a professional look and feel, images also help in building trust for your brand.

Images make texts on websites easier to understand and also strengthen the appeal of the texts. Appropriate images help a lot in conveying the underlying messages in the texts.

Content with images is known to engage more visitors, increase the number of clicks and hence boost the revenue.

But, do not use large images that slow down your website. Use a tool, such as Optimizilla to compress the large images to restrict website slowdowns.

So, use the right images to appeal as well as communicate with the visitors of your website.

The post 7 Web Development Steps to Design the Perfect Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Attracting more people on social media depends firstly on how you create and deliver the content and secondly on what you create. The social media audience tends to read the attractive and captivating content more than less appealing content, which is why the use of other types of media including short videos, infographics, and photos has increased in recent years.

If you are a WordPress blogger and want to attract more people to your website, then search engine optimization solely is not enough. Try the given 8 essential social media WordPress plugins to make your content more attractive on the largest communication platforms of the world.

1. Fat-Free WordPress Sharing Buttons and Digg Digg

There are different ways to add social media sharing plugins to your website. You may ask you web designer to attach attractive sharing buttons which may be heavier and reduce the loading speed of your website.

Fat-Free social media WordPress plugins allow you to not only make your website more alluring but also improve social media sharing with light-weight buttons.

The coding of popular social networks is automatically installed on the buttons on your website. Digg Digg is a plugin which speedily adds the social media sharing buttons to any desired position on your website. When setting up Digg Digg, make sure that you add your Twitter account and Twitter name.

2. Open Graph Protocol

Many bloggers take advantage of the social networking sites and build audiences by creating groups or pages on the social networks and sharing their content on them. Open Graph Protocol is one of those social media WordPress plugins which support content sharing and promotion on Facebook.

When you share content on Facebook, you have the authority to edit the information for making the post more attractive.

But Facebook fetches some information from the edited and shared post for re-sharing by the social network’s audiences. This is called cut-off titles. The process may reduce the attractiveness of your posts and make your content appear vague.

The official Facebook plugin is integrated with Open Graph Protocol to allow you to craft the updates on Facebook. Open Graph Protocol also provides insightful graphs and reports about your posts. The graphs and reports analyze the content sharing and liking on the basis of geographies and demographics.

3. Twitter Cards

For ideal search engine optimization on Twitter, there are two essential elements for every post shared on Twitter. Firstly, the name of the author should be included in the post, and secondly, a short link should redirect the users to your content directly. But both the necessary elements should not make your content unattractive or boring. When you share the content without using Twitter cards, it will appear like this.

But if you use the Twitter cards, your content will not only be optimized but it will also appear richer and appealing. Here is how your tweets will be customized.

Given here are the most important WordPress plugins or Twitter cards. The plugins can either be integrated with the help of a WordPress developer or you can also read the CMS Integration Guide by Twitter to know the techniques of integrating these plugins.

JM Twitter Cards – It help implement Twitter cards.

Jetpack – It is also used for other social networking sites. It helps improve search engine optimization.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – It is also an SEO related plugin which can alos be used for Facebook, Google+ and other social networking platforms.

4. Customize Text with WordPress SEO by Yoast

If you want simpler and manual text customization other than Twitter Cards and Open Graph Protocol then you may also use WordPress SEO by Yoast.

After installing Yoast, go to meta title and meta description sections and edit the information for every post. The edited information will be automatically used to share and promote content on social media.

Even if you are not using social media WordPress plugins, still it is important to edit the meta titles and meta descriptions for better presence and performance on the internet and social media.

5. WP Video Lightbox

Making video embedding easier and reducing the loading speed are the primary functions of WP Video Lightbox. It helps you to embed the video links without making them appear messy or tacky. WP Video Lightbox supports video sharing and embedding from all platforms including Youtube, Vimeo, Flash, and iFrame.

6. SocialBox

There are different ways to promote your content and motivate the visitors to become your subscribers or share your posts. SocialBox is one of the simplest but highly professional social media WordPress plugins. Its allows you to include the toolbars to your sites and pages and showcase the number of likes, visitors, subscribers and followers in the simplest possible way. It also helps you to build better audience and improve your social media reputation.

7. Monarch

Like Fat Free, Monarch is also a social media sharing plugin which allows you to display the social media sharing buttons on your desired positions. It also allows you to edit the sharing toolbar, add effects to the hover or add more buttons or columns to the toolbar. You can also further customize the buttons for different posts and designate them to appear as fly-ins or pop-ups. Monarch simply allows you to customize the social media sharing toolbar completely according to your choice and without the help of a web engineer.

8. Social Comments

A lot of people step back from commenting on your posts or sharing their ideas just because of the long visitor forms required to fill for commenting on the posts.

For maximizing the social engagement, install the Social Comments plugin which allows the people to start the conversation or share their views using their social networking accounts on Google+, Facebook, Twitter and others. Most of the readers are either already logged in to their social networking accounts.

Otherwise, the WordPress fetches their personal information from their social media accounts without asking them to fill long-tail forms. The Social Comments not only improves social engagement but also makes your website popular across the globe.

By taking advantage of the social media WordPress plugins, you can improve the presence and performance of your website and attract greater number of people.

The post 8 WordPress Plugins to Improve Social Media Presence of Your Blog Post appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.