WordPress

Expand your eCommerce store with these WooCommerce plugins

WooCommerce serves as the best free WordPress plugin in ecommerce space. The popularity of WooCommerce is attributed to the ease of deployment and overall flexibility of the platform. The best part of woocommerce wordpress pluginis that they can integrate with an existing WordPress site and increase the capabilities of your estore.

WooCommerce is a plugin by itself and you can expand its capabilities by utilizing & integrating other plugins into it. Here are few powerful plugins that can help maximize conversion of your WooCommerce store.

WooCommerce subscription – The extension/plugin is used to configure the system for customers to signup & receive information related to products & services which are of interest to them. This is an ideal way to earn recurring income by having users to sign-up for weekly, monthly or annual subscriptions.
WooCommerce Direct Checkout – This free plugin help customers to add items to the shopping cart with help of few clicks like adding an item to the cart and then checkout the product; whereas the premium paid version provides one-click option for easier checkouts.
WooCommerce Menu Cart – The website development for the initial version of WordPress theme did not have a menu cart icon in the top right corner of your header. This free version of this plugin solves the problem with the cart icon and also provides information related to total cost & quantity in the cart. The premium version gives the flexibility to place the cart icon anywhere on the page.
WooCommerce Extra Product Options – This paid plugin provides additional product options for customers during their purchase e.g., if you have a pizza estore, you can provide additional toppings list in the form of checkboxes in the product page. The tool also updates the image with the selected extra product options hence making it interactive.
Email Customizer for WooCommerce – The flow of email communication between your eStore and customer is immense. This paid plugin provides options to customize the email templates using various headers/footers, colors and custom links for social media to make them pleasing to the eye. The email content is fully editable and developers can also preview changes as they develop, modify or enhance an email file template.
WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts – This paid plugin is used to set promotional prices and conditional discounts for customers e.g., you may want to give a discount on iPhone case along with an iPhone purchase; provide quantity/special discounts on special shopping dates like Easter or Black Friday promotions. This plugin provides flexibility for the eCommerce store to manage pricing and discounts.

There are numerous other plugins to manage shipping discounts, auctions & customizing product page designs. You can also set up an online store without writing a single line of code and trust on the power of aContent Management System plugins like WordPress. To know more on the WooCommerce custom developmentservices we provide,contact us right now!

What you can do with Square for WooCommerce?

Square is the POS system available for free downloading in Google Play or App Store & could be run on mobiles and tablets for digital receipts, reports of sales, inventory checks and much more, small, medium and large sized businesses.

Square integration with Woocommerce today is believed as a huge omnichannel business very useful & necessary in the retail sector! While Woocommerce is a great one stop shop for selling anything anywhere online or offline; but there’s something more being looked forward to by the people, that is, a system that syncs mobile, store inventory and desktop estore. How does this integration benefit the purpose?

Tracking in-store and online payments in one single place is easy with Square where accepting & processing payments on Woocommerce estore is very much possible today; credit cards are accepted too. Taking payments for online and offline store can happen in a single shot!
Synchronizing product library into Square POS is quite easy for online selling with Woocommerce thereby you save the time of explicitly taking time to put in the items! SKUs, images, product description or details, product pages or anything you set up in Woocommerce or Square is updated in the other by a simple step “Initiate a Manual Sync”.
Checking out on online and offline store for regular stock check can be quite tedious for businesses. Manual inventory tracking is time and expense consuming. Now with this integration, inventory sync automatically happens in both stores with every product update in any of the 2 stores. Accidental out-of-stock-product addition for buy then an embarrassing message “No stock” is no more a case!
Tracking sales in 2 separate lanes can be quite challenging in terms of time and effort. With the integration now, sales dashboard on Square lets you track all the sales channels uniformly, immediately and in one place!

How do you get these benefits? Have Woocommerce? Just go to Integration and Connect with Sqaure! You may check more here.

For troubles in applying the extension, you may logon with support.

Idea board for Square is an amazing space where you logon ideas you think may benefit this juncture!

Are you a businessman quite excited with the read? Happy serving you. For the estore creation using WordPress or for Woocommerce support or for the interesting & useful Square-Woocommerce integration or for any services online for ecommerce, ask us right now!

Should you use free WordPress theme?

Websites themes should be in such a way that they don’t hallucinate the audience rather impress them; not reduce the load time rather improve it. For blogging websites, every blog isn’t the same as the other. A photography blog requires different aesthetics compared to that of a wildlife blog site. The pioneer of blogging site, WordPress, the well-known content management software gives you both free and premium themes. Which website design suits you the best and why?

Broadening the online presence via content marketing requires a great content management platform (CMS) as in WordPress. Using a free WordPress theme in order to save a few bucks is like selling your own brand without the necessary ingredients in it. Don’t defame your brand with a free theme!

Free themes lack the features you may need to compete audaciously with the competitors. Spinners, different menu kinds, AJAX load for a great UX and many more good features aren’t available with the free theme. Widgets, sliders, whatsoever be it, there’s definitely a big difference between what the premium ones offer and what the free ones do.

When can you still go for free themes? To redirect a link to their site or to make use of certain widgets really adding some sense to the site or use it to go for paid themes later may be!

Professional classy looks given by the premium themes aren’t given by the free ones; how do you expect to impress the corporate audience then? Unless you really have a small goal for now and have future plans of revamping from scratch, don’t lose your customers; pay for what you get and you get better for a better pay!
Support from the WordPress professionals/agencies/any consultants is very meagre for the sites built on free themes. To make a change or to pick up bugs or to apply a fix or for anything, you require a support. All of us aren’t professionals in development and might not know everything on CSS/HTML/PHP or JavaScript. To deal with the themes in all technical terms you need the support. Vendors selling you the themes definitely offer a great support for you have paid them.
Responsive web design/responsive website/mobile friendly website/all device compatible website/user friendly website aren’t jargons anymore but every business knows the importance of having them; Not just business but even the customers know how a site should look on their phones & know why if it doesn’t look so. To go responsive and to provide the best results or the best user experience you definitely have to pay for it!
Premium themes aren’t costly enough to afford. A few dollars is all that takes to get some of the best selling themes!

Now that you have a good idea on why pay for themes, you might require the assistance to perform the design. Hiring a developer, checking with him what theme he uses, taking a look at his earlier designs, installing WordPress a good host, installing the theme, doing the right coding, launching the site on https, all of these require an expert service; looking for one? Ask us right now, at QeHTML!

Reasons Your Business Should Switch to WordPress

More than 10 posts are published per second, 5.5 million comments seen per month, around 30 million global searches monthly, a lot of languages are accommodated, and a lot other facts are put forth by latest statistics. How can you ascertain your business should have WordPress? What do you need to know about this content management software(CMS)? Read on,

Open source: WordPress is an open source content management platform hence absolutely free!
SEO optimized: For the website to be visible to the search engines, it is necessary you have the site SEO optimized. Extremely SEO friendly with numerous kinds of plug-ins (like the full fledged Yoast SEO), it is great for optimizing contents, managing canonicals, robot files, meta tags, XML and more, & the best suited for a great social media connect!
Security: Open source enables anyone to report the problem & fixes; a large support community on WordPress core enables us to have a robust platform aloof from most attacks!
Customizable: Free and premium plug-ins enable easy installation, configuration, and customise to tailor any need.
Documentation: WordPress ecosystems are highky developer-friendly where WordPress slack & forums render continuous support.
Management: Easy management is possible due to its simple built for any average user with a less knowledge in coding. Inbuilt security updates & notifications on other updates are worth mentioning!
Responsive Websites: Mobile friendly website/ responsive web designs/ responsive websites are the need of the hour today with time spent on desktops falls on the lower end compared to that spent on mobiles. Majority of digital consumption is in hand held devices; know more from your Google Analytics account! Ideal view and a great UX regardless of the device is possible in responsive designs. This is what WordPress helps you with, a user friendly website/ an all device compatible website!
Astute/dexterous CMS: Born as a just-blogging system, WordPress is now the highly recommended CMS with loads of themes and plug-ins for you to create the best ecommerce website quite effortlessly.
Multimedia support: It is not just the content display that’s expected in a website today, rather content share and media file implementation as well so as to reach more users and enable better communications. WordPress accommodates the needs too good to make a complaint! Third party content embedding is very much possible.
WooCommerce: Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress founder, as Automattic, acquired WooThemes that simply tells you all the wonderful & powerful ecommerce solutions of WooCommerce (that covers more than 1-4th of online stores) are easily made available from WordPress. All it takes is a simple extension to get a well built ecommerce site.
Flexible: WordPress is good on every server and makes website host changes quite easily possible.
Automated content: Writing new contents, grooming and publishing it is much easier with WordPress auto-scheduling!
All users absorbed: Admin, Super user, Editor, Writer, Commentator, and Subscriber in various levels of access for various needs in an ecommerce platform is easily accommodated by WordPress in-built roles!
Languages: Almost all the most-used world languages is supported by WordPress. WordPress.org account lets you do translation to any language.

WordPress professionals all over the world, WordPress agencies, WordPress hosting providers provide as much as the support you may need & keeps getting much better. If you require an assistance in web designing using WordPress or any service in ecommerce, ask us at QeHTML!

How to Improve WordPress Security?

Hacks on WordPress, reported last year, aren’t any less to be ignored and most of them are attributed to websites missing out on version upgrades. Core, plug-ins when not up-to-date or when insecure or when not rightly configured contributes to hacker attacks on the site. Don’t be surprised to know stats from the WPScan Vulnerability Database that says more than 50% of the vulnerabilities (1570 on 2407) are ‘just unique’ ones! How to improve the security for WordPress/ prevent hacks on WordPress? Read on.

Stop using the default admin account because most hackers guess it! Make sure to provide a different username during WordPress installation or make it unique if you already have a weak username.
Prevent comment spam by disabling comments after 30-60 days of the blog posted date. A huge number of WordPress sites get affected by comment spam and become irreversible losing a lot of information. To edit a WordPress post, disable “Allow comments” from the Discussion Meta Box. To disable comments for the entire site, get into Discussion settings and switch off the checkbox allowing people to add comments on new posts.
Remove the login link by getting into Appearance within which Editor followed by Footer.php and removing the link here where you have defined the Copyright.
Ensure WordPress is up-to-date because anyone can easily modify the source code, it being an open source tool. Every time vulnerability is reported, WordPress fixes it in its next version; no wonder you don’t update the version and then you get attacked! Getting the new features, higher speeds, better or newer compatibility with add-ons are other good things you crack by being updated.
Make sure to report the security issues or bugs on WordPress immediately. To prevent the damage spreading across more and to release a quicker fix, every security issue is ought to be reported to the WordPress core development team immediately.
Don’t leave the file permissions or write access open! Wp-admin/options.php should be owned by you and permissions set to 644.
WordPress security plug-in is highly necessary. Don’t miss to have it and limit the attempts of login! Certain attacks simply try username/passwords repeatedly and gets in somehow. Limit login set up blocks the IP temporarily and stops consecutive login tries. Extra protection by captcha and redirection to home page on abnormal requests are to be taken care inclusively.
2 step authentication is powerful than just a single step. 2 factor auth plug-in restricts anyone from having access to the site without being able to access user’s mobile phone or mail box. Generating OTPs using apps like Google Authenticator is highly recommended. For slow mail servers, go with HOTP; for better servers choose TOTP which is the better one.
Ensure the pc is not affected by any malware.
Ensure the site is on a secure hosting of WordPress.

Having the right CMS/content management software/ content management platform for content update on the website, having a responsive web design or a responsive website is highly important in terms of making more conversions. But then if you lack in the basic security checkpoints, what’s the point in having all the other features; you become the hacker food quite effortlessly! If you believe you require an enhancement to the WordPress Security or any assistance with regards to ecommerce services, contact us at QeHTML right now!

How Do WordPress Blogs Get Hacked?

Websites are hosted on cloud due to the ease it gives in deployment compared to having them on one’s own infrastructure. While there are a lot of positive aspects, security is one of the main & important limitations that are on the negative side of cloud hosting. Storage of vital information as in audit logs is one thing that is quoted as an example of a security attack.

The auditing methods we have in place for firewalls & intrusion detections may be configured but not monitored or analyzed at periodic intervals and the impact isn’t any easy to ignore! Just counting on the website access logs isn’t enough; in addition what’s the frequency of collection, since when is the collection made, is there an access to the logs are all things to be noted.

The below info-graphics covers gives you an edge on hacks on WordPress and security for WordPress,

Hosting contributes to more than 40% of the WordPress attacks, while themes do close to 30%, Plugins do close to 20% and loose passwords make it to the rest of the attacks. Websites not content-managed or those not managed using the right content management software are at the risk; these websites account to more than 80% of those being attacked. Web host servers left with no upgrade contribute to more than 10% of the attacks. Ask yourself if you are using the content management platform that suits your needs at the best!

A website is hacked every 5 seconds and 30,000 are attacked in a day! Out of 1000,000 websites, more than 40000 run on WordPress and of these 30000 of them are among the ones having versions of WordPress vulnerable to attacks. This means 73% of the most 40000 most known sites are extremely visible to the eyes of hackers!

WordPress plugins are the biggest contributors to WordPress attacks; 1305 of them are known today by way of vulnerability databases contributing to a huge 54%. Next comes the theme vulnerability that accounts for 344 attacks, which is 14% of the total while the rest 700s (31%) are WordPress core vulnerabilities! Cross-site scripting and injection of SQL form the base of these plug-in & theme attacks.

WordPress versions 3.0 and 3.0.1 occupy the top most position among easily attacked WordPress versions followed by 3.5, 3.5.1, 3.6. Among the most vulnerable plug-ins, 5 are commercial & they are downloaded around 20 million times; sadly one of them is a security plug-in from WordPress. Yithy, appius, infocus, shotzz, echelon are some of the highly attacked WordPress themes.

While you make a note of how important it is to have responsive web designs/responsive websites/content management, it’s necessary you know more on why there are attacks on websites and how to go about dealing with them!

To prevent hacks on WordPress, there aren’t any complex procedures but a few highly important check points when regularly taken care we are at no risk of our WordPress sites getting food for the hackers. Stay tuned with us to know on these check points or prevention measures to be sealed from malicious attacks! Ask us more at QeHTML.

Things to know about PSD to WordPress

PSD image form is the one we open with Adobe Photoshop or other image edit software but to run it online on WWW and even to do an optimized data maintenance with less time consumption, it is required we have it in a suitable format. A good looking user-friendly design and an efficient coding are the 2 basic needs of a great web design. Amateurs need to know the 2 basic phases of web development, web design and coding for which the knowledge of PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is necessary. Photoshop is used for designing due to its easy options post which PSD to HTML/CSS is made; however coding it is not easy and this is where WordPress, the best open source web build and user-friendly CMS tool helps to create a high-quality website!

Conversion of PSD to WordPress isn’t complicated but at the same time requires 5 steps to be followed for the ease of doing it,

Slicing PSD is the first and the foremost step which is to cut the design file into multiple image files so one doesn’t have to code the whole design in just one image. Each distinct component is woven into a single image post which the multiple images are combined seamlessly. Image editing using Ms Paint or Adobe Photoshop to get a pixel perfect image is recommended. Also note Features that can’t be dynamically created need to be cut in entirely while header, footer and others that are dynamic needn’t be cut in full.
Index.html and style.css: Coding the sliced images into HTML and styling using CSS comes next. Complete roll over effects along with placing pixel perfectly is the main aim. Responsiveness or non-responsiveness is decided here and CSS accordingly used. Name the CSS file as style.css and the html as index.html. W3Schools, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/learn/css, TutsPLus give a good learning of HTML/CSS
Index.html to WordPress theme: Creating the WordPress theme to upload into the WordPress software is the next; that is addition of functionality to the WordPress theme converted from PSD, using plugins as needed. Once the WordPress theme file structure is available, break the single html into multiple files based on the theme. Then break the index.html into the php files for index, header, footer, sidebar and the rest
Add WordPress tags: WordPress function tags inbuilt in the theme are the best over complex html files. Add WordPress PHP tags to the earlier created WordPress theme files (tags and functions here http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags and http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference). Store these WordPress files and place in the folder wp-content/themes from WordPress installation chunk. The custom theme is then activated with WordPress dashboard
Add the functionalities: More functionality is easily added with the relevant plugins or using the dashboard. Changing the core code is no more a pain. Installing a drop down (or any other functionality) is so easy with the plugin for it!

Implementing such nuances is very important when making the conversion from photoshop designs and a flawless coding expert is a must. To know more on each of these in web-trends or for services on WordPress Integration or PSD to WordPress or for CMS services or for anything in ecommerce services, don’t lose a chance to call us because you know you get the best from us always!

Which CMS is best for your needs?

The revolution, content management systems have caused today, has resulted in a non-technical or a nerd can equally update any website with this tool. While the basic necessities of an ecommerce website, as in having responsive websites/responsive web designs for web development and mobile friendly websites for the best conversions always hold good, it’s not to be missed that having a user friendly CMS is necessary to have the content managed quite independently.

WordPress, Drupal, Joomla are the most popular Content management systems worldwide; picking one of them to choose the specific business profile is the need of the hour.

CMS Comparison chart goes below:

Having seen the basics and goodness of each of the CMSs above, let’s talk a bit on features and stats related. WordPress holds the biggest of the 3 in market shares with 65%, while Drupal and Joomla hold the 3rd and the 2nd most popular CMS respectively worldwide. Free themes and free plug ins are available for all three of them. Frequency of updates is good for all of them being from 30-40 days whereas the choice should depend on the need as per the facts mentioned in the smart art above.

To talk on the skill level needed, Technical expertise is not a necessity and text paste from MS word to a WordPress site is easy while Drupal needs the highest expertise technically also it is the best to produce advanced sites and Joomla is in between WordPress and Drupal where there’s a less effort to understanding it and the best for fairly complex sites.

Having spoken a lot about the 3 highly prevailing CMSs, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, hope you must have a really fair idea of what your need is and what is the best for you. if you are looking for the best service provider to do this for you, just ask us.

Most Important Factors to be considered before choosing a CMS

The growth of hand held devices and the respective users today have necessitated businesses to use responsive websites or responsive web designs in web development because having a mobile friendly website is very important to broaden the customer base. In addition, having the content at par with the trends and technology is extremely important if you wish to stand apart, as an ecommerce service provider. Having a lot of Content management systems today, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, CMS Comparison to choose the best and the most user- friendly CMS has become a big challenge.

Eye-alluring CMS doesn’t mean the best-for-use one; let’s go through some of the factors to be considered in studying the systems and the top 5 CMS prevailing today.

What is an open source CMS? A content management tool built on a platform built on a code easy for anyone to use and distribute is termed an open source CMS. To mention on popular CMSs, it is WordPress for blog build and growing ecommerce sites; Joomla for appreciably established ecommerce companies; Drupal for big enterprises. To mention on the ease of learning, WordPress is the easiest of all and Drupal is the toughest while the rest are moderate.

To know which is the best for you, consider,

Functionality in crux: Managing a website, that’s creating it, adding, deleting, editing and maintaining the webpages should be accompanied by a few other functions that’s necessary for the core stability of an ecommerce website. Check if the CMS you choose suffices it.
Editor capabilities: Editor being one of the core elements of CMS, used by publishers for provision of heading and lists should let the editor have an access to handle images, files and whatsoever is required for the web design.
Asset management: A bad CMS design affects the usability. CMS providing for the images are preferred along with the capability of image editing, pdf uploads and more.
The best Search option: Users mostly look out for the search option in a website. Make sure your CMS does this at the utmost perfection.
Flexibility in customization: The CMS should be easy enough to retrieve and show the content customized for the device/pc. Make sure you check upon this.
User feedback: CMS enabling user communication via a chat or comments or ratings is a must, with the necessary plug in or 3rd party interfaces. Check it.
Role maintenance: CMS should be capable enough to let the blogger lend permissions of add/change/comment over the blogs or manage the functions/accesses as necessary.
Versioning: Having a CMS that controls versioning to get you the last saved state in case of an erroneous move, is an advantage though not a mandate need
Multi web support: Driving more than one website with a single CMS installation sounds attractive. Isn’t it? It is useful too.
Multilingual possibility: CMS supporting multiple languages is not something to be ignored, even if you are a domestic business today. It eases the future expansion, make sure to have it.

In short, to choose a CMS, consider the below: Adaptability, Manageability, Scalability, Security, User friendliness, Plug ins connected, HTML CSS support availability, Social media & SEO compliance, the ease to migrate and internationalization capability. To get the best of CMS services, don’t hesitate to give us a call or visit our website.

What do I expect from WordPress 4.5?

Where quite a few content management software and content management platforms exist, we enjoy WordPress as always. Today when a responsive web design or a responsive website is looked upon as a must to impress Google, we are in an urge to the best of responsive web designs for a great ranking and better businesses. Let’s see how WordPress supports us in its new avatar.

While most features in the Beta WordPress 4.5 released around Feb week 3 would make it to the final, expected in April, some may or may not but it’s definitely exciting to know on what’s new. Isn’t it?

To talk on features in WordPress 4.5, the upcoming WordPress version , it adds the long awaited theme from customizer to the WordPress core. Rather than uploading custom logos using the options panel, the core support lets us do it from the theme customizer. Support for logos happens with the size values in the respective commands. Themes not supporting this wouldn’t be showing up in the customizer.

An enhancement to the visual editor which is of a great writing experience to users comes up as a wonder in the new WordPress version. Of the time saving shortcuts, CTRL+K or Command+K on Mac makes your link insertion into posts much easier. Pressing CTRL+K, typing the url and continuing writing the post without removing the hand off insert the link inline.

Quick shortcuts for inline texts that came up in WordPress 4.3 are ameliorated with more in the new one. However if you don’t like them, very well you can disable them in the editor.

Moderating comments eats up the time of bloggers when there’s a new comment submitted. WordPress usually sends an email notification that takes us to the page of comments where we can approve but not formatting or so. WordPress 4.5 comes up with the edit link to do the formatting.

Responsive preview in customizer is the next wonder which lets you click the device icon to switch between devices. Desktop, mobile and tablet previews available would give you an idea how the site would show your devices.

Optimized image size generation is an enhancement to the one in WordPress 4.4 where smaller screen users saw smaller images as suited. Now it comes with saving costs on data plans too without any quality loss. Saving images optimised for web is still recommended.

Allowing users to login using their email address is the next new feature so no more the pain of having to keep your user name by-heart!

For developers, Selective refresh in customizer lets developers make changes without having to reload the whole page making the process faster to do things better with live previews. Customizable embed templates lets one use posts from other sites or WordPress blogs where the embed templates are customizable for the custom displays we simply want! WP_Site Class for multisite WordPress installs is a feature to run and manage multiple WordPress sites from a single WordPress installation.

Having said these, we assure you we are up to the trends in the web designs, CMS and the expectations of Google in a website with respect to the design and customer experience. If you are looking for the best in the web design with all the aspects taken care diligently to suffice your worth, feel free to contact us.

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