Little Ripples

I've recently finished a new online store for local Polzeath Clothes Store Ocean Blue Clothing.

You maybe thinking that it's a bit late in the day to be coming into the online store market - about 10 years too late !!  However the advantage of starting at any point is that you can make sure you make the most of the current trends and technologies.  And in this day and age that means being up with Social Media trends - so not only are there buttons for Facebook - Clothing Retailer and Twitter but we've also incorporated the Google Plus button.

*  The front page has a Facebook Fanbox wall with the latest status and some of their friends.

* Automatic statuses are sent to both Facebook and Twitter.

One thing that hasn't been added are social media and a Facebook 'LIKE' button. Although that is something that will be suggest in future improvements.

THE IMAGE VIEWER

One of the biggest features of the site is the image viewer.  This gives you a better view of the image as you roll over.  If there's more than one view then easily change the picture by choosing another view underneath.

Other Store Features include.

* Easily searchable

* Google Checkout and Paypal payments.

* Multiple Attributes ( colours, sizes )

* Unlimited amount of products can be added

Admin Features

* multiple Images and Files (like Spec Sheets and Flyers) per Product

* Product Attributes (like Size or Color) can be added to Product

*Product Types for Classification (like "Car", "Motorbike" or "Music Album")

*Shopper Groups for Customers (allows different Price Levels and Payment Options),

*multiple Prices per Product (Quantity-based and/or Shopper Group-based Prices)

*flexible Price Display (number & currency formatting; including or excluding tax)

*On-the-Fly Price Conversion between different Currencies using Live

Rates from the ECB or other banks

*Shop Statistics / Control Panel with a Summary of new Customers, new

Orders....

*Stock Level Control for Products and Item

*Order Management with Order History, Customer Notification and Order

*Edit Functionality

*basic Reporting Feature: sold Items, monthly/yearly Revenue

*Order Status Management

* manage different Currencies, Countries & States

Ocean Clothing is mostly a Womens Clothing store - at present they stock

for The Masai , Great Plains , Fitflop , NYDJ more will follow.

A few years ago a friend of mine who ran his own business used to tell me that his frequent visits to the local pub where  actually where the large part of his business was generated.   It's hard to believe. Although I had to give him that as a  mechanic who specialised in MOT's, Exhausts and Tyres he did  service pretty much every other regular at the pub including  myself.  Don't think for a second that it was chore from him  though, I'm sure he enjoyed his after work drinks as much as  anyone. The clever things is he'd made this normally time  consuming and costly pursuit into a plus point.

So how does this transcend to social media. Do contracts and  money exchange in the same way on social media website.  It may not be as powerful a method of being chosen to for jobs as  knowing someone in the physical world but you can use these tools to your advantage in promoting yourself and what you do.

Your ONLINE Social media CV

Are you aware that potential employers and clients  will try  and search you online.  Keeping this in mind then you need to  keep in mind that your Social Media presence needs to show your  good points.

Here's some things you should remember.

* Make sure if you get tagged it goes into quarantine first.

* when writing status consider whether if that's in with image you want  to put forward of yourself.

* Loads of photos of 'nights on the town' aren't going to look  good. Although letting you hair down once in a blue moon  shouldn't be anything to worry about.

The fact of the matter is Facebook isn't really geared up to  help you promote yourself in a business but it is the leading  Social Media site so unfortunately we have to deal with it.

They're are better social media platforms for businesses.   LinkedIn is widely recognised in business circles as leading  social website for professionals.  It can often get forgotten  though as other platforms are more dynamic and engaging. Here's  some tips on usage LinkedIn Profile Tips

After I initially making creating my account on LinkedIn and entering only basic information - to get some insight into what  LinkedIn is all about I hadn't made many visits back there.  On  recommendations from others though in that LinkedIn has given them proven results in increased revenue I've now spent a half  an hour following the above tips.  Why not add me as a contact  on http://uk.linkedin.com/in/littleripples - it's always good  to have more contacts.

A new player to the social media circus is Google Plus - and  Google Pluses Circles is absolutley perfect for being able to  present yourself in the way you want it to the people you want  to get that message to.  To be honest it's a format I've been  craving for ages.  In the realms of twitter I've now got a  handful of accounts. One for every hobbie or interest I have.   This has happened on the basis that I reasoned that people who  sign up for my feed on Polzeath Beach wouldn't really want to  hear me going on about SEO techniques .   And with facebook I'm  more fussy about who I add to my friends list, as I don't want  to be showing pictures of the family on the beach to every tom  dick and harry that I meet. Google+ is the perfect solution to that the only problem at the moment is that take up is slow and thanks to an oversaturate social media market may not take off.

Check out this movie about Using Google Circles.

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Spending time on Social Media websites may not be as a bad usage of your time as you may think.  Used wisely it may help you reach some of your business goals and on the flip side you can use it as an excuse to chat to your mates online !

If you're building or re-building a website  I'd highly recommend using a Control Management System like Joomla or Drupal.  Here's some advantages.

* They're Free

* They're constantly being developed and improved on.

* you can get them to look how you want easily as they built in MVC - making the website easy to skin and changed layouts. 

* Excellent community tools.

* Add components to intergrate your website with Twitter, Facebook and other social media website. 

Drupal vs Joomla

Reading from several blogs on this topic it's pretty obvious it's a close run thing.  And really depends on you skill level and what you want to achieve.  Drupal has apparently a hard learning curve and out of the box can be a bit lacking.  However once you get into the framework it's the powerful.

Both have Shopping Cart solutions that can be added.   Due to having more experience with Joomla I more often than not would pick this as my tool of choice.

Please feel free to leave comments and links on more blogs and thoughts on this subject.

Finding out more about your website - Who are your users - what pages are they visiting - What  devices are they using - where are they from.

This information can save you money, help you spend your budget in the right areas and earn you more money from your website.

So how can we get this information.

Actually theres a FREE website statistics software that's more than capable of giving you an insight into these questions and much more. In fact you are probably already using it but will almost definatly be under using it. That tool is Google Analytics

Yep it's a tool I under use aswell so I'm going to have a look at some methods of getting more from it

Google Analytics TIPS

CREATE CUSTOM REPORTS

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Here they create a report listing cities and bounce rates ! Not something I'd of thought was particularly useful.  SO let's take a look to see if we can find some useful applications of creating custom Google Analytics reports.

To start with I've decided to run a couple of reports that will give me an insight into what mobile use we have on the website.

In the metrics I have chosen - Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Avg. Time on Site, Bounce Rate, % Exit, % New Visits

Dimensions - Mobile

Sub Dimensions - Browser, connection speed, Flash Version, Java Support.

The idea of this Custom report is to see how many people are using the website from a mobile device and how much of the content we're giving them can they actually see.

SETTING UP GOAL CONVERSIONS

For example the Surf Mag I work for would like people to see they're Surf Magazine Subscriptions.

I've made a list of the goals of the website a prioritised them, adding them all as goals and monitoring the urls that sending people to represents an achievement.

* Selling Surf Mag Subscriptions
* Users clicking on Adverts
* Views of the monthly Surf Guide

You can also set goals of 'time spent on site' and 'pages per visit' - to monitor how many users you can persuade to stay on the site beyond the article that has got them there.

MAKE AN ALERT

These two videos give a good insight into this feature.

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Again I've gone for a custom alert that will give me some insight into mobile use.

ALERT NAME: 'Mobile users too Quick to leave !!'

PERIOD: 'Day'

ALERT CONDITIONS:

This applies to 'Mobile' - Condition 'matches exactly' - Value 'Yes'

Alert me when 'Bounce Rate' - Condition 'is greater than' - Value '50%'

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This alert should make me aware if the site isn't providing what it should do to the end user.

I'll be making another blog on this next month to see how we got on and suggest some more ways to use Google Analytics