Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Ecommerce Web Design
Magento Jewellery Ecommerce Web Design
Feb 2nd
We are proud to launch this ecommerce web design project for a diamond jewellery company in Farrendon, near Hatton Garden. They specialise in diamond rings, eternity rings, earrings and bracklets.
This project was re-designed and built using the Magento Ecommerce Platform. We analysed the existing purely diamonds website clients to understand exactly what they wanted and how we could improve the old website. As we are Magento Developers we customised the core Magento framework to make the sales process much easier for the client by giving more options when choosing your diamond ring.
The client has fedback great praise from her clients that have told her how much better the new ecommerce website is and how much easier it is to use, this has led to better sales as the client has told us;
Areatrade recently built us a new website using the Magento platform, to replace an outdated website we’ve had for over 5 years. From the first meeting with Chris I felt confident they could produce exactly what was required to take our website/company forward, and I am pleased to report that they didn’t let me down. Spending such a large sum of money is incredibly daunting when More >
Wedding Accessories Ecommerce Web Design
Feb 2nd
We are proud to launch this website design project for a wedding tiaras / accessories company. The initial brief was to design the company logo / branding.
Once the logo was complete we moved onto the ecommerce web design, the platform we chose for this project was WordPress. WordPress Cart was an ideal solution for the client to begin selling her products online, as it is easy to update and gives the client full control over her products. We set up a blog and implemented her social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Google analytics was installed on the website to allow us to gauge the success of the Google Adwords (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns we are currently providing.
Visit the website: http://www.glitz-n-glam-uk.co.uk
Let us know what you think of this new ecommerce web design.
2011 Small Business Marketing Budgets
Nov 24th
Small businesses are expected to continue to invest larger shares of their advertising budgets in the favour of websites over other forms of advertising according to a recent survey undertaken by Zoomerang and Growbiz Media. This shows that smal businesses will continue to push their websites aswell as direct mail, e-mail marketing, social media and print advertising.
Website Design and Ecommerce Web Design have contributed to the rise above all other advertising forms as more companies understand that the future of their business is linked to the quality of their website. It is estimated that 39% of all small businesses with fewer than 1000 staff are spending around 20% of their budgets in favour of their website and 17% of all small business plan to increase their web spenditure throughout 2011. In comparison 15% reported they will increase their email marketing budgets and 13% their social media investment.
Amazingly only 54% said they had a website design and only 13% had a website blog. Looking into the website features the majority (80%) of websites contained general business information, 45% customer service, 35% lead generration and 30% had an Ecommerce Web Design element.
This shows there is huge room for improvement amongst small business owners to More >
Blekko the alternative Search Engine which eliminates Spam
Nov 1st
Blekko a $24 million venture backed project which has been in the making for over 3 years has been launched its pubic BETA version. With this initial roll out Blekko are also releasing several new features for both mainstream and the sites super users.
Blekko is designed to eliminate spam searches using its proprietary slash tag technology. Basically the search engine checks all queries to see if they fall within one of seven main categories, health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. Every search that is made that is recognised to be in one of these categories Blekko technology will assign the correct slash tag and display only results that are relevant to the search.
Webmasters and Blekko super users are able to apply slashtags to their URL’s so that Blekko can read them , this is aimed at stopping spam results such as huge link farms and bad neighborhood sites which are not maintained.
Don’t panic if your business does not fall within the initial seven categories, like our main keywords: ‘website design’, ‘Ecommerce Web Design‘, ‘social media’, ‘search engine optimisation’,etc… Blekko has plans to release more as time goes on, they are just starting with the biggest traffic sites More >
Paypal Debuts Mobile Express Checkout to improve Ecommerce Web Design
Oct 28th
Mobile payment processes have long been the bane of would-be mobile commerce titans. The balance between security and ease of use has been difficult to achieve, but Paypal’s beta partners for Mobile Checkout Express have seen great results from using the product so far.
Starbucks, one initial partner for Mobile Checkout Express, will use Paypal’s newest mobile payment product to let customers quickly reload their Starbucks Cards from within the company’s iPhone app.Mobile Checkout Express will allow users to opt into the service and stay logged in between various mobile apps.
Paypal says the new product is also easy to use for existing merchants who already use Paypal Express Checkout on their web-based stores.
Many of Paypal’s beta-tester merchants for Mobile Express Checkout have reported double-digit sales growth on their mobile ecommerce web design platforms since adding the feature. Paypal plans to give Mobile Checkout Express merchants the ability to accept credit card payments in addition to PayPal (through a VeriFone partnership) in early 2011.
In other mobile news, Paypal is introducing new location-based features More >
49% of Small Business Owners Use Smartphones
Oct 22nd
At present we are seeing more smart phones being sold than actual computers. This will the inclusion of iPads and other such mobile devices such as laptops and bluetooth headsets old technolgies such as pagers are a distance memory.
According to a recent Foresters Survey of nearly 10,000 small business owners, it seems that a huge 49% of small business owners are reported to own smartphones. The stats break down like this:
35% – BlackBerrys 33% – iPhones 25% – Androids 7% – Windows Mobile devices.
The survey also interestingly shows that even though 82% of Americans own a phone, 50% have internet on their phones but only 17% actually have smartphones. It would seem at the moment most users are opting for a cheaper model.
Viewing A Mobile Phone Website Design Versus Viewing Website Designs On PC’s
Whichever way you look at it website design / Ecommerce Web Design needs to cater for this new wave of mobile digital experience. Viewing a website design on a computer is a completely different experience to viewing the same website on a mobile device, smartphone of no smartphone.
An average time spent viewing a website on a computer is between 3 – 4 minutes (depending on the website), whereas More >
Accept Credit Card Payments on Mobile Devices
Oct 15th
In recent months, a few new mobile payment solutions have been introduced to allow mobiel payments from Ecommerce Web Designs.
In fact, when using one of the available services, retailers of any size — even a farmer’s market vendor, babysitter or upstart vegan donut maker operating out of a kiosk — can start selling their products to anyone with a credit card.
The three services profiled here — Square, Intuit GoPayment and PAYware Mobile — hail from experienced entrepreneurs and seasoned payment veterans, and each offers a slight variation on the same idea that you can accept payments from anyone, everywhere.
These variations, however, are significant depending on the type of business you run and the amount of transactions you plan to process. You can use the information below to help in the decision-making and merchant setup processes. Make sure to pay special attention to transaction fees, hardware costs and merchant restrictions or requirements.
Choosing the Right ServiceSquare: Square is a startup from Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame, which means you can expect the product to be attractive, and the service to be slick, consumer-friendly and receive regular improvements on an iterative basis. As a startup, Square lacks the powerhouse financial names attached to the More >
Are your Ecommerce Website Design Payment Systems compliant?
Oct 7th
What we need to know about ecommerce web design and PCI Compliance…
If you use a hosted payment gate (e.g. your customers leave your Ecommerce Web Design and enter their payment details onto a secure gateway such as WorldPay)… Nothing changes. All your PCI Compliancy is handled by the gateway.
If people enter card details directly onto your Ecommerce Web Design (Even if the actual payment is processed by a gateway) your website…
- Should not store unnecessary cardholder data
- Should be running a PA-DSS Compliant Payment Application
- Should host the site on a Dedicated Server enviroment with a Level 1 or 2 PCI Compliant Service Provider (with the Database and Application Server seperated). (Yes thats TWO servers!)
- Should carry out quarterly vulnerability scans of their server network
- Will need to complete SAQ-D because they are storing data (even though it’s for a short time in system memory). The SAQ-D is complicated and can cost a lot of time and money to complete!
Please note that at the time of writing this, Out of 600+ shopping cart systems out there, Only 60 are currently compliant.
This is a new enforcement by credit card companies and the banks where you can be charged up to £250,000 for every card that is used on More >
Ecommerce Web Design Tips
Oct 7th
“Make sure your promotion codes require customers to buy at least two or more items. Then display your cross-sell offerings on the promotions code page. This gives customers incentive to increase their ecommerce purchase amount, and helps them find additional products on the website with which to do so.”
Meredith Keller Owner Smaller Box
Latest Ecommerce Web Design
Nov 2nd
This is one of our Ecommerce Web Design. We are very excited about this project which mixes website design, website development and Ecommerce Web Design into one. Will let you know when it is live..
Please let us know your comments….