More and more consumers use mobile devices for shopping. This rise in online transactions being processed via smartphones and tablets means that both store owners and consumers are finding mobile devices to be more convenient and trustworthy. While this shopping change opens wider opportunities and advantages for business owners wanting to improve their presence on the web, it also presents some issues that business owners should be aware of before they go online and which they should address as early as possible.

Pros, Cons and Opportunities

The increased adoption of mobile devices has given birth to a more web-savvy generation. Thanks to the advances in communications technology coupled with the bursting industry of internet-capable devices worldwide, consumers today can access online stores more easily than ever via their mobile devices.

Purchasing goods and services from the comfort of your home is more convenient now than driving to actual physical stores. Not only does it saves time, but the mobile shopping experience is more engaging allows one to select merchandise quickly from multiple sites with just a few mouse clicks.

However, despite the fact that online transactions have come a long way, there are still pain points that can significantly affect buyers’ enthusiasm to visit some sites, and this reluctance can in turn reduce a business’ sales.

Slow mobile loading time

Page load time matters for the online shopper. Page engagement requires fast loading time since the average user lacks patience. If a page is slow to open, a user will leave a site. This behavior is confirmed in a Kissmetrics survey that says a typical user will only wait 6 to 10 seconds before leaving a page if it does not load within this time frame. Some consumers might forgive slow load time because of great web design or other functionality, but slow mobile loading can seriously discourage potential customers.

This challenge can be mitigated by employing usable and functional designs like: serving reduced image sizes specifically tailored for mobile devices, limiting fonts and backend scripts, and even reducing third party plugins which can be resource-heavy.

Unresponsive web design

The era of mobile browsing resulted in new sets of problems for web design since sites were originally designed for the wider screens of desktops and laptops. Many sites designed for desktop and laptop viewing become too difficult to browse when viewed on smaller mobile screens. The contents (texts and images) are either too small, do not fit the screen, or become distorted. Imagine a potential customer who visits a non-mobile-friendly website, and then leaves, just because the site looks bad on her tablet or phone. Now, imagine this being repeated hundreds and thousands of times by other users.

Unlike when desktop and laptop websites were the only way to connect to the internet, designers now have recognize and design sites for the continuously growing mobile devices market. Websites now need to be “mobile-friendly” and “responsive.” Being responsive means the website adjusts its look and layout automatically based on the device it is being viewed on whether on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. The look doesn’t need to be exactly the same across all platforms, but it should look nice and not be distorted wherever it is viewed. This means that all the design elements (the screen widths, menus and navigations, images, forms, text sizes, videos…) should adjust their size and placement on the screen across most, if not all, devices. Making a site responsive also means the user’s need to constantly zoom in or out or pinch to adjust the size of the images and texts is eliminated.

Complex Web Structure

What works well with desktop browsers is not always true for mobile browsers. Because of the narrow screens on mobile devices, web pages meant for mobile viewing should have structures that are direct and simple. The key is to lead the user into converting a page visit into a sale. Removing unnecessary elements that clutter the page and highlighting the more important contents will lead to mobile sales. Short and sweet is the mobile way.

Hire Us

Behla Design has a long history of creating websites that look good on all devices. We recognize the de facto importance of mobile browsing, thus we ensure that the mobile experience is well integrated into our web designs. Our team is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell clients’ stories while keeping an engaging and exciting experience for our clients’ valued customers. Contact us if you have questions or if you need our help.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

There are certain niches in the eCommerce community that sell products or services released regularly on a periodic basis. These could be prints such as magazines, digital or virtual products like eBooks, audios, videos, podcasts, or online memberships offering exclusive access to digital products.

Anybody who’s into these similar lines of businesses would know the challenges of managing products and collecting recurring payments on a regular basis. Which, if not implemented correctly, could mean potential losses in profits.

The WooCommerce Subscription Extension

The WooCommerce Subscription is a plugin that makes it easy to create and manage subscription products with recurring payments.

Subscription, in an eCommerce context, is simple. Customers sign up for a defined recurring period of payment before they are given the product. These are either physical goods or virtual/digital products. WooCommerce Subscription handles all the intricacies from creating the product, defining the parameters of subscriptions including the interval periods and the corresponding fees, and payment collection.

The features below are just some of the numerous benefits and advantages you may have when using WooCommerce Subscription. You can mix and match all these flexible features to suit your specific needs.

1. Support for Simple and Variable Subscription Types of Products

Simple subscriptions are single products with single options, ex: Monthly Membership, Quarterly Magazine Subscription, and Annual Membership.

This extension also supports variable subscriptions, which allows you to setup a single product with variable or multiple options (ex: magazine subscription with options for monthly, quarterly, bi-annual or annual subscription) where each option has its own pricing and billing schedule.

Variable subscription makes it easy for you to manage your products by grouping similar subscription items with varying billing options into one, therefore eliminating the need to setup several simple subscriptions.

2. Support for Virtual and Downloadable Products

Aside from physical products, this extension also supports virtual products like membership, and downloadable products like videos, audios and eBooks to name a few.

3. Multiple Billing Schedules

You can set it to daily, weekly, monthly, annually, with additional options for setting intervals like every month, every 2 months, every 3 months, etc.

4. Sign-Up Fees and Free Trials

You can add an optional one-time sign-up fees which will be charged at the outset of the subscription. This is a common practice on services that are offered for members only.

Free Trials can also be set optionally, allowing your customers some period before they are charged for the first recurring payment. This can also be used optionally with Sign-Up Fee where the fee is charged at the outset of the subscription.

5. Subscription Coupons

Installing this plugin also adds four additional coupon types you can choose from. These are: Sign Up Fee Discount, Sign Up Fee % Discount, Recurring Discount, and Recurring % Discount. These allows you to give fixed amount or percentage discount to either the sign-up fee (one time, on the outset) or the recurring fees.

6. Support for Automatic and Manual Renewal of Payments

Manual renewal of payment allows your customer to renew the subscription beyond the lapsed time. Manual renewal by a customer is done after logging into your website. This is great for customers who don’t want to be bound by contract and want more control of their subscriptions.

To those who want to skip the hassle of doing manual renewals, this plugin also supports automatic renewal of payments. This is the most convenient method of payment for both for those customers who are okay with continuous subscriptions and store owners as it does not require any involvement from either party. All payments are automatically charged. However, take note that this method of payment only works on gateways supporting automatic renewal (among these are Stripe, BrainTree, Paypal and Authorize.Net to name a few). This plugin currently supports more than 25 payment gateways. WooCommerce extensions for these payment gateways are bought and installed separately.

The above mentioned are just few of the features of the WooCommerce Subscription plugin. It can also be used in conjunction with other WooCommerce extensions like the Membership plugin which allows you to share specific parts and contents of your website to certain groups of users (ex: silver members, gold members, platinum members) for varying fees.

Need Help?

For a complete list of features and detailed documentations, visit the official WooCommerce Subscription product page.

There are other 3rd party subscription plugins out there and we’ve actually tried some. But in the end, we find ourselves wanting more when using these 3rd party extensions so we go back to the WooCommerce Subscriptions. Some 3rd party plugins simply can’t deliver enough.

We have handled several website projects that offer subscriptions-based products. We have assisted a client migrate his subscription website from a different eCommerce platform to a WordPress-WooCommerce-Subscriptions platform. We’ve also done custom development with subscription websites to meet very specific needs where customers want to add additional features that are not present in the Subscriptions plugin.

If you have any questions, please contact us. We are here to help.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

The Golden Cabinet is an integrative medical center in Santa Monica, California that brings together eastern and western medical systems to provide patients with the best of both worlds. They offer onsite health evaluations and consultations as well as services such as acupuncture and wellness protocols. They also sell a variety of proprietary dietary supplements.

But it’s 2020.  Onsite health consultations have dissolved in a time of pandemic. Potential patients are less inclined to make in person visits to health professionals, even for general physicals. How does an in-person and service-oriented company continue to function when patients can’t, or don’t want to, leave their homes to receive services or to buy supplements?

Solution: they learned how to setup a WooCommerce store to outpace their competition

The Golden Cabinet was able to shift with the marketplace. And they did so quickly. They already had a WordPress website before the spring of 2020, but they quickly pivoted to include WooCommerce integration.

Despite being unable to come into The Golden Cabinet’s physical location as easily as they used to, clients can still access all dietary supplements online.

The need for The Golden Cabinet’s services and products never went away so discovering how to supply supplements to individuals allowed The Golden Cabinet not only to weather the potentially disastrous stay at home order, but also to develop alternative revenue streams and new skills. Now they are set up for online sales which has increased their flexibility.

The Golden Cabinet’s short-term adjustments will help them in the long run.

Business owners need to know how to pivot when challenges arise.

There is no doubt that having an online presence is essential in today’s economy. If you have a brick and mortar store, but you don’t have a website with eCommerce, you are not planning ahead, protecting your business and you are not taking advantage of potential revenue streams.

Some business owners may be overwhelmed by the steps involved in building a website and may be concerned about both the time and money involved in the site’s development and maintenance.

But what are the costs of not having an online presence?

It takes creativity, time, and money to figure out how to best represent your business online.  And it takes creativity, time, and sometimes money, to keep a website current and interesting. A website is an extension of a brick and mortar store not a replacement for one. A website is part of the cost of doing business.

So, let’s review some of steps to consider when taking a business online:

• Choose a platform – We recommend WordPress, but there are other platforms available like Squarespace and Shopify The advantage of WordPress with WooCommerce is that it gives a business owner the greatest flexibility to customize their website environment and allows a user to incorporate plugins that accomplish specific tasks in specific ways. There are also official WooCommerce plugins that have been tested and come with full subscription support.
• Domain name – Select your site’s name. What will the URL (web address) be? If your first choice is already taken, get creative to find another that meets your needs. Google Domainsis a great place to shop for a domain and includes privacy as well.
• Hosting – All hosts are not created equal. With the added plugins of WooCommerce, you need to have a hosting company that is fine tuned for performance. For WooCommerce managed hosting, we recommend Liquid Web Powered by Nexcess. Their secret sauce is the ability to auto scale hosting resources to always make sure your customers have a fast experience on your site regardless of traffic spikes and concurrent users. They also offer free migrations, heroic support and a 14-day free trial period.
• eCommerce – If you are selling anything – services or products – incorporate eCommerce, like WooCommerce, to allow a safe way for customers to pay you. The eCommerce solution you choose will walk you through how to set up a merchant account as well as payment gateways like PayPal, Visa and Apple Pay.
• Add security – Ensure your site has a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate. A SSL certificate encrypts users’ data and will create a more secure shopping experience for visitors.  A site with a SSL certificate also ranks higher with Google.  If you have SSL, your website URL will begin with HTTPS and will likely have a green padlock symbol before the web address.  For more information, see this Behla Design article.
• Add additional security by using Sucuri or Wordfence to protect your site from hackers.
• Design – This is a crucial step. Your website is your virtual calling card.  It should represent who you are or what your business is. It is a form of advertising and represents your brand.  Think about the fonts you use and their point size, the color palette and the navigation (where one must click to get to information). Ensure that your content is readable and informative.  What is your message and does your overall design and content support that message? We love the Astra theme for its speed and flexibility with endless design possibilities.
• Content – “Content is king.” The information you add to your site should be well written, interesting to read, and informative. Google search bots will analyze the content on your site pages and increase or decrease your site’s rank (where your site comes up in searches) based on your content. Use a SEO plugin like Yoast.  Yoast will optimize your site to increase your rankings.  The higher your rankings, the greater your chances for increased traffic to your site.
• Services – Do you offer any? Do you want to include a page on your site for video tutorials? Do you want to include an e-book?  Do you want these to be free or paid services? Services should be part of your content layout and design if applicable. You can also offer online video consultations for your customers to stay connected during this challenging time.
• Member Site – You may want part of your site content to be in a “members only” section. Or you may want all of your site content to be private (which means you would want a “member site”). Having a member section or site means content is restricted to those who have subscribed to gain access. A member section or site allows a member to log in and access paid or free content.  This content could be eBooks, tutorials, videos, classes, or blogs.   A plugin that can help with member sites is and WooCommerce is Memberships.
• If you sell a product that your customer purchases repeatedly you can offer a subscription to the product using the WooCommerce Subscriptions You can see how popular repeat buying is on Amazon as they offer subscriptions for many of the personal and health care products they offer.
• Add images! Images affect the look and feel of a website. But they can also slow a website down.  Use high quality images which you can take yourself or which you can get for free from image repositories like Unsplash, Pixabay or FreeImages. If you are selling products, be sure to include photos of images taken from all sides.  Optimize your images by compressing them.  Compressed images allow you to keep the quality of an image while reducing the size of the file.  You can take the labor out of optimizing images by using a solution such as Imagify.
  • Store – Add products, images and descriptions to your store in WooCommerce. This is where you’ll want to be helpful and creative to guide your customers to the value of your products and services. You can also include videos to help demonstrate the product you are selling with the WooCommerce Product Video
• Shipping – If you are selling products that need to be shipped, you may want to keep inventory and shipping materials onsite. WooCommerce will easily integrate real time shipping with UPS, USPS and FedEx. But you can also use drop shipping which allows you to ship to customers directly from suppliers.  Drop shipping allows you to reduce having stock on hand or to pay storage fees for inventory. For ease of use and integration consider Shipstation. Read our article for more details on setting up your shipping.
• Tax collection – Taxes are part of doing online sales, and having a reliable and easy solution for charging, collecting and submitting taxes correctly is very important. We recommend using a plugin like Taxjar that is a cloud based paid solution with reporting tools. You can also use a free plugin service offered by WooCommerce called Jetpack.
• Communication – Having a way to collect website visitors’ emails is a key component of a useful website. Newsletter sign up fields should be clearly placed on pages and/or in the website footer and they should not be hidden or difficult to find.  Then, when you are ready to send out a newsletter, announcement, or perhaps a product sale, communication plugins like MailChimp or Jilt make contacting your followers, clients and curious visitors that much easier.
• Social Media – Doubtless you’ve seen the icons in the headers or footers of websites that lead one to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Do you need to set up all these social media accounts? No.  It’s unrealistic for most businesses to maintain an active presence on all these platforms, and an inactive social media account that only has the rare post is not inspiring to visitors.  Instead of spreading yourself too thin, select one or two social media accounts that work well with your business.  If you want to present videos or teach something, Instagram and YouTube might be best.  If you are selling products, Facebook and Instagram might be the best fits.  Your goal is to capture new visitors and inspire interest. Pick a social media platform that you can actively update.  Otherwise, leave social media icons and links off your site.
• Speed – Check your speed! A website should load quickly. According to Google, people will move off of a web page if it does not load in less than 5 seconds. Speed can be enhanced in many ways like by reducing image size (see above) or by changing where and how your site is hosted. You can check your current website speed here.
• Mobile – It’s expected that by 2021, 54% of eCommerce sales will be accomplished via mobile devices. Ensure your site is mobile friendly and responsive.  Do the images on the site resize when you review your site on mobile or tablet devices?  If not, you are not putting your best foot forward. Also, check your mobile site speed using Google’s mobile speed test.
• Accessibility – Last, but certainly not least, consider accessibility testing to ensure your site meets the needs of those with special needs. Wave offers a free site test that will give you feedback about possible accessibility issues.
• Test – Test, test and retest. Make sure everything looks and responds the way you want. Check desktop and mobile variations. Click on all the links to ensure they are going to the correct places.  Sign up for your own newsletter. Buy a product.  Have a friend or family member test the site. Make changes.
• Publish! You’re ready to go live!

A website is a messaging vehicle for your brand that should load quickly, be informative and easy to navigate, be private, public or member restricted as needed, and provide a safe and smooth way to engage in eCommerce. A website can supply client needs 24/7 and its reach is worldwide (even though a business owner may choose to ship to only specific locations). Clients can buy what they want when they want because a business’ doors are always open.

Especially now, a website can be a lifeline to connection, communication and maybe most importantly, remuneration. And with physical distancing making most of us more web engaged than ever, one must consider this a perfect time to review the importance of having a web presence and investing in an online infrastructure.

If you’d like help getting started with your website, or if you would like to take an existing site to the next level, we’re happy to help. You can reach the team of experts at Behla Design by calling 818-340-6088 or use the contact form below.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

Does your website have SSL?  Do you know where to look to see if you have, or don’t have, SSL?  Do you even know what SSL is?

Likely as not if you answered no to any one of the questions listed above your site probably does not have SSL.

But why does SSL matter anyway and why should you have it on your site?   To have SSL or not to have SSL, that is the question.

So, let’s begin at the beginning.  What is SSL?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer.  SSL is a standard security technology that establishes an encrypted link between a web server and a web browser. Online businesses use SSL to increase the security of sensitive personal information (like credit card numbers, usernames and passwords…) from being stolen by hackers.  SSL is a security bridge that provides a safe way for individuals to communicate with the websites they visit.

How can you tell if your website currently has SSL?

If your site has SSL (also referred to as having an SSL certificate), one or more of these clues will be visible:

• There is small, usually green, padlock to the left of the URL in the browser window on every page of the site (a red exclamation point in this place, or a lower case “i” with a circle around it, could signify that SSL is missing)
• The URL prefix starts with HTTPS instead of HTTP
• All or part of the URL address bar is green (or, if it is red, SSL could be missing)
• You can also follow this link to see if your site has SSL: https://www.whynopadlock.com/

What happens if your website does not have SSL?

If your site does not have a SSL certificate, users may receive a warning message when they attempt to go to your site.  Browsers could alert users with messages like: “This Connection is Untrusted” or “There is a problem with this website’s security certificate.” No web user wants to see a warning message when they try to go to a site.  What’s the first thing users do when they see warning messages like these? They close their browser window or hit “back” to return to “safety”.  And in all likelihood that user will never attempt to go to or load your site again.  The seeds of mistrust have been planted.  What is the end result?  You’ve just lost a potential new visitor, subscriber, or customer.

What else can happen if SSL is missing?

If you do not have SSL, Google, and other search engines, may penalize and flag your site thereby reducing your rankings with organic (non-paid) searches. Google has said it considers having SSL (meaning the URL prefix begins with HTTPS) to be a ranking signal. What is the end result if Google or other search engines reduce your organic search ranking? Users will not be able to find your company when they search on key words because your listing will be ranked lower than other sites.

What’s the worst-case scenario if you don’t have SSL?

Google lowers your site rankings, you prevent individuals from joining your email lists and newsletters and/or becoming followers, your new business flow is reduced, and you lose revenue. Just what you wanted to have happen when you built your site and launched your online presence. Not!

Security is a rare and needed commodity on the web and having a SSL certificate makes logical sense. It’s a no-brainer.  SSL allows users to feel secure about your site.  It’s a logical next step to implement if you do not already have it in place and it is good web protocol. SSL is good for business.

We recommend all out clients have a SSL certificate in place.  The site URL and all media, scripts and assets on the site need to be delivered through a SSL URL, and all pages of the site will need to have the https:// as the site URL.

If you are unsure if your site has SSL set up and you would like us to do a review and add SSL, contact us today at projects@behladesign.com.  You can also follow this link to see if your site has SSL: https://www.whynopadlock.com/

We look forward to hearing from you and help ensure your users have positive and safe experiences on and with your website.

Thanks to Rob King and Unsplash for the image.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

Recently, a website platform seemed to claim responsibility for a celebrity’s online success (web traffic, voluminous sales and market domination).  But what made that celebrity’s site successful?  Was it the platform they chose?  Or was the site’s success being driven by the celebrity themselves and the brand they represent?  In all likelihood that celebrity could have used any platform and still have had a successful site. They were responsible for their own online success, and the platform had little to do with it.

Your website is an extension of who you are.  It is an expression of your vision.  It is a result of hard work and creativity. And if you have an ecommerce site, then it is also a revenue source.  If you are selling something, the website platform you choose has to have your back because you have a lot invested in, and a lot riding on, the virtual space you’ve created.  You can’t choose a platform based on what a celebrity, or any successful site, uses.  You have to dig deeper.

There are two kinds of people in the ecommerce world: those who need a website and those who already have a website.

If you need an ecommerce site, the first questions you should ask are: What is my website’s intent? What am I trying say, do, express, and accomplish?  The second questions are: What am I selling and will the platform I’m looking at support the sale of my product or service?

If you already have an ecommerce site, then you are (hopefully) regularly evaluating the platform you are using to ensure your site is being taken care of in the best possible way.  You should always be asking: Is the platform I’m using reliable and are my content and business safe?

When choosing a platform, you have many decisions to make.  Will you need ongoing support, or can you be independent?  Do you need a highly customized site, or can you use one straight “out of the box”?  Do you anticipate having high volume sales, or will your site be more specialized with less traffic?

The answers to these questions will guide you through the pros and cons of many platforms. No platform is perfect, and many might meet your needs.  But if you are selling something, whether you are new to ecommerce or have an active store, there is one overriding question that must be addressed: What are you selling?

Not all platforms are ideal for all types of ecommerce.

Platforms can be tied to specific payment gateways.  If a payment gateway decides that it does not want to support the sale of a specific product or service, then your ability to sell could be denied and your store could be closed. If you plan to do, or already doing, online sales, it is in your best interest to choose a platform whose payment gateway is reliable and flexible.

Let’s get specific.

In Shopify’s Payments Terms of Service, prohibited businesses are listed in section B5.  That’s right: prohibited businesses.  If you sell or offer anything on this list, your store will likely be closed in the near future.  And remember – this list can change at any time, which means your ecommerce venture may not be safe if you use this platform.

Here is a partial list of businesses that are currently prohibited on Shopify:

• All cannabis related businesses and products
• Any business selling products that claim to have health benefits
• Travel reservation businesses
• Timeshare services
• Flea markets

So, what’s the alternative?  Using an open source platform like WordPress with WooCommerce.

WordPress allows users to choose from any number of payment gateways and WordPress is not held hostage by the whims and demands of those gateways. Unlike Shopify, a publicly traded company that is required to meet certain criteria from its financial partners, WordPress has no such financial obligations; WordPress clients are free to choose whatever payment gateway fits their needs.

So, if you have a cannabis business with products to sell, WordPress with WooCommerce is a platform that will support you.  If you sell vitamins or health improving products, WordPress with WooCommerce is the platform for you. Whatever your business is, WordPress will support it. This is the beauty of using an open source platform.

It’s hard work to prepare, create, and maintain a virtual business. Be sure you select a platform that offers you choice and does not limit your vision.  WordPress with WooCommerce is a platform you can trust.  It has your back.

Contact us today for more information.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

PHP is the software backbone that runs on the hosting server and allows for the execution of code, like a steam locomotive rolling down the tracks. We want to make sure your site continues to run smoothly and efficiently.

What is this update and why should you care?

The official security support for PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 officially ended on January 1, 2019.  This means that older versions of PHP software have reached their “end of life” so new patches and security fixes will no longer be available.

Some hosting companies, such as WP Engine, will automatically upgrade the PHP version potentially causing issues with your site if there are plugins or code that are incompatible with the latest version of PHP 7.2. WP Engine will update all accounts to PHP 7.2 by March 31, 2019. WordPress recommends PHP 7.3 if your host supports it.

What do you need to do?

We recommend setting up a development environment and processing the upgrade there, this way any issues that are encountered will not affect your live site’s traffic. The live site will be copied to the new development environment where we will update the plugins, theme and WordPress install. Any issues with plugins or code incompatibilities will be addressed, and then the upgraded site will be tested for functionality.

Once we have your approval, we will then update the live site’s version to PHP 7.2 and apply all of the plugin, theme and WordPress core updates to the live site.

What kind of conflicts might arise?

Site plugins may or may not be compatible with PHP 7.2, and fixes for these plugins may depend on whether the plugin author has updated their code to work with PHP 7.2. If the plugin is active on the site and there are compatibility issues with PHP 7.2 we will need to figure out an alternative solution, either by replacing an existing plugin with one that is PHP 7.2 compatible or by finding another way to execute the plugin functionality or code. If there are errors with plugins that are not in use, the fix is simple: the plugin will be removed.

If your hosting company updates to PHP 7.2 and there are active plugins that are not compatible with the latest version, your entire site could be taken down.

Is there any benefit to the upgrade?

The most important benefit to upgrading is having support for the software. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized. Older versions of PHP will cease to have security support and plugins that are not compatible may prevent parts of your site from working.

Additionally, there is a 40 – 60% performance gain with this PHP update.  The way assets are threaded and loaded has completely changed and these have been optimized. PHP 7.2 also has increased security along with having greater memory efficiency.

Where can I read more about this?

WP Engine has a PHP 7.2 Upgrade Guide to help explain the upgrade process. You can also view PHP 7.2 FAQs for the most commonly asked questions.

What if I don’t use WP Engine for hosting?

You can check with your hosting provider to see when and if they will update your hosting plan to PHP 7.2. Regardless of your hosting company, we recommend updating to PHP 7.2 to insure speed, security and the integrity of your site.

Contact Us Today to Upgrade Your Site to PHP 7.2

We’re here to support you and your website.  Please don’t wait to upgrade as delays in upgrading might impact your site. Keeping your site healthy and strong is our number
one priority. CONTACT US

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

Join us for two exciting and important Meetups for WordPress and WooCommerce in January and February.

West Valley WordPress Meetup Group

Compliance Traps & Trolls

We’ll be focusing on multiple topics of compliance, including: PCI, GDPR, Accessibility and what it could cost you to ignore these.

Our speaker, Sumner Davenport of Sumner Davenport & Associates, LLC,
creates, manages & protects the online brand & reputation of her clients. Compliance is her specific area of expertise.

With the updates and changes in online privacy laws, ADA Accessibility, Federal, State and local industry rules it has become essential to make sure your website is compliant and what you post everywhere else is also compliant.

Sumner will cover these specifics and also provide handouts with recommended resources that may help you with your compliance issues.

Location, Date & Time:

Wednesday, January 23, 2019
6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Total Wine
The Village at Topanga 6232 Topanga Canyon Blvd #1380 · Woodland Hills, CA

Total Wine is inside Westfield Village mall, within the parking garage corridor on the South end. Meeting room is to the right when entering the store.

And yes, there will be a free wine tasting for all attendees courtesy of Total Wine.

Click here for more information and to register.

WooCommerce Los Angeles Meetup Group

Code Snippets Plugin, DevOps, and Store Hosting Panel Discussion

Join us for the first WooCommerce Meetup of the new year in Santa Monica at WeWork.

Interested in brushing up on the best practices for customizing WooCommerce stores? Sean Conklin from Coded Commerce will give a presentation on the Code Snippets plugin as an officially recommended alternative to child theme bloat or template file forking. Sean will also cover some DevOps topics for making your agile development workflows more efficient, also reviewing your version control and deployment options so you can improve launch confidence.

Following that talk we will have an informal panel discussion on WooCommerce store hosting types, costs, features, and tips. You’ll come away with a better understanding about choosing the best hosting for your WooCommerce store.

Special thanks to John Goss for helping us to organize the Meetup at WeWork Santa Monica.

Location, Date & Time:

Thursday, February 7, 2019
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

WeWork
520 Broadway, Santa Monica, CA

We will meet in suite 210 on the second floor. Check in is required on the first floor lobby. Please bring a valid photo ID.

Click here for more information and to register

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

Shopify has notified CBD related store owners who use their service that if their stores are found to be selling items that are high-risk, Shopify will close them.

Due to the complicated legalities and disparate state and county regulations inherent with CBD related products, all CBD related products sold online are considered high-risk.

So, what will Shopify do if you have a CBD related store?  Your store will be closed.

How can Shopify do this?  Shopify partnered with a payment processor that has strong ties to national banks.  Because federal banks won’t work with CBD related products, the processor Shopify uses won’t work with them, which means Shopify, in turn, cannot work with CBD products either.

Additionally, Shopify is a closed system; you must use their default processor or get charged an extra 1-3% in order to use the third-party processors Shopify works with.  However, if these processors find an issue during their underwriting vetting they may add your company to the TFM (Terminated Merchant Account) list, which is a public record of invalid accounts.

If you have a website on Shopify, and if you have high-risk CBD items for sale, you don’t have a lot of choices if you want to protect, sustain and grow your business…if you stay with Shopify.

What choices do you have?  Many!  The first step is to back up your ecommerce files. The second step is to move to another ecommerce software ASAP.  Choosing an open source solution like WordPress with WooCommerce shopping cart software is our recommended solution.  With an open source environment, you can choose from a variety of payment gateways that specialize in high-risk product sales. You can also have the freedom to host the site wherever you choose.

Zodaka is an example of a payment gateway that is willing to take the risk with online CBD retailers.    Carson O’Connell of Zodaka explains how their product works:

“Zodaka does not utilize credit cards at any point in our process. Users sign up by connecting their bank account to our system, then our software prompts a direct payment from the user’s bank account to the merchant’s bank account. Our system uses a streamlined version of a transfer solution, which is regulated exactly like cash.”

Zodaka is similar to PayPal, but Zodaka does not require reserves, even though the CBD industry is high-risk by nature, unlike most comparable solutions. And unlike most other processors that offer high-risk services, Zodaka is not located overseas.   O’Connell explains this point and other benefits:

“We are entirely domestic and your money never leaves the U.S. during a Zodaka transaction, which is something that most of our competitors (and anyone offering a high-risk credit card solution) cannot say. We charge fair rates (between 3% and 5%) for our services while many high-risk payment systems can charge as high as 10% or more. We also have virtually no chargebacks, and maintain a highly secure system with bank-level encryption/cybersecurity.”

If you want to grow your online CBD retail business, make a move to protect your store and ensure your revenue stream.  Our team at Behla Design can help move your store from Shopify to Word Press with WooCommerce and help find the best payment gateway to meet your needs.

Keep your online store doors open before Shopify closes them.  Support your business and be pro-active. Contact us today.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

Thank you to the organizers, volunteers and sponsors of WordCamp LA. Andrew presented on how to Turbo Charge WooCommerce Sales. Please download the PDF presentation here.

Download Now

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

If you’ve been a victim of malware, you know how frustrating it is to remove. Unless you’re an expert, you may lose valuable time and money trying to figure out how to fix the damage done. This blog will explain what malware is, and how to prevent it from happening.

What is Malware?

Malware stands for malicious hardware. As you can probably figure out, is not something you want on your WordPress website. “The most common types of malware are viruses, trojans, worms, spyware and zombies,” states Website Defender.

This website explains different types of malware, stating that the most common type of malware comes in the shape of a virus. Viruses are very tricky to detect because they can live on your site for different periods of time without you knowing about them. Your WordPress site may act strange all of a sudden but it doesn’t always mean it has just been infected. The virus could have been implemented days, weeks, months, or even years ago before manifesting itself. The trick is, it acts like your own site for some time, which helps the site’s owner not realize that an infection has occurred.

A worm is a more extreme case of a virus. Viruses spread on one computer, while worms have the capability to travel between computers, thus making them much more aggressive when spreading.

A trojan is an attack that is masked as something else, like a photo or a video. For example, if you get an e-mail from an unknown address asking you to open a photo, the photo can actually contain malware in the form of a trojan. The trojan will then leave a virus on your computer.

Spyware is malware that people use to get information from people’s computers. First, the spyware gathers info. Then the info is sent back to the person who infected the computer.

Zombies are probably the most unpleasant form of malware for those that witness its effects. Once a zombie has been implemented on a computer, the controller can send commands that your computer will follow. Therefore, it can greatly affect your WordPress site, making it do whatever the controller wants. If you’ve ever operated your computer, only to be shocked to see it having a mind of its own, it most likely has been infected with a zombie.

Good Hosting Companies to Prevent Malware

From our experience, we have found that most types of malware affect WordPress sites through hosting companies. Hosting companies sell you space on the Internet where your WordPress site will exist. The best malware removal tip is to prevent malware from getting on your site. Two good hosting companies we can recommend are WP Engine and Siteground.

WP Engine

Although this hosting is very tech-heavy, it is also great for novices as they have very helpful customer service. Every single member of their staff is a hosting expert, and they will take the time to answer all your questions about what is malware and also steps to prevent malware. They offer time machine based backups for easy rollback or restores, and if your site does ever get hacked, they will take full responsibility and restore it at no cost. One great feature is that they offer a clone button of your live site that copies your WordPress site to staging environment. This is great for development as it create a “sandbox” site for development and testing without effecting your current, live site. The first level of hosting is $29/mo per site risk-free for 60 days.

NOTE: WP Engine doesn’t offer an email solution so this would have to be setup independently. Rackspace has dedicated email ($2/mo per user) or Google Apps for Business ($50/year per user).

SiteGround

For more affordable hosting, we like SiteGround, which offers competitive rates for hosting and is WordPress friendly. SiteGround claims that they create custom hosting for each WordPress site, making it faster and better. They often run promotions so you can check the site for their latest offers. Their first package starts at $3.95/mo for 1-3 years and then switches to $9.95/mo. For added security, we recommend adding CloudFlare and security plugins such as Login Lockdown, Sucuri’s one click hardening, BulletProof Security, Sitelock, or Wordfence. The best thing about CloudFlare is its capability of expediting and safeguarding practically anything online. This includes the great mass of websites, APIs, and other properties connected to the Internet. SiteGround has a built-in one-click integration with cPanel and a lower rate on the Plus plan. It can also help speed up the site.

Plugins to Keep Your Site Secure

Login Lockdown is a security plugin that has the capability of limiting the number of login attempts from a given IP range within a certain time period. Every failed attempt is recorded then the login function is disabled. It currently defaults to an hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed attempts within 5 minutes.

Sucuri is a globally recognized authority in all matters related to website security, with specialization in WordPress Security. The Sucuri Security WordPress Security plugin is free to all WordPress users.

Bulletproof Security protects against known and unknown attacks like brute force login attack. It also features database backup and protection, and firewall security and protection.

Sitelock protects more than six million websites all over the world.  It has all the technology to do regular scanning, auto-removal of malware, and web app firewall to ensure the safety of sites.

Wordfence is a security plugin that provides the best protection suited to a particular website. This is also powered by the constantly updated Threat Defense Feed, which allows WordFence Firewall to stop websites from getting hacked. Wordfence Scan leverages the same proprietary feed, alerting website users quickly in the event the site is compromised.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

A developer recently asked us about the benefits of creating a WordPress child theme for websites. This was such a great question, after all, many people do not know or would not think of how to create two different versions of their site. However, creating a parent and a child theme is actually very important for a particular website.

While many people who have a WordPress blog or site will choose to use the default themes that WordPress offers, this may not be always the best option. Even some of the best WordPress themes are already set up, so it can be minimal in terms of functionality and features, and customization is limited. Therefore, we usually say that the best WordPress themes are custom, with the help of frameworks such as WooThemes. However, you should decide what works best for you depending on your skill level and needs.

What is a WordPress Theme Framework?

A parent theme, also known as a WordPress theme framework is “the term WordPress theme framework often refer to a code library that is used to facilitate development of a theme,” according to WP Beginner. Various theme frameworks exist, some are paid, others are free. Some allow you to just implement design if you’re a beginner and don’t really know how to set up a WordPress blog or site, and others offer the bare minimum and allow you to code the site to your specifications.

Among the recent best choice when it comes to building WordPress websites is BeaverBuilder.  It became popular for a number of reasons. Images and texts can be positioned with precision, and column-based layouts can be built in a matter of minutes. It also comes with a number of gorgeous page templates to choose from.

There are many advantages to using a theme, for example, it speeds up development time because you don’t need to build your website or WordPress blog from scratch. Also, some of the best WordPress themes are popular, so if you have any questions, there are forums where you can get help from others.

What is a WordPress Child Theme?

A WordPress child theme is a theme that you create for your WordPress blog or site. The most important thing to know is that a child theme is a secondary theme. The first and main theme that you create is called a parent theme. This is the framework where you control all the functions.

“A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme,” states WordPress. “Child theme allows you to modify, or add to the functionality of that parent theme. A child theme is the safest and easiest way to modify an existing theme, whether you want to make a few tiny changes or extensive changes. Instead of modifying the theme files directly, you can create a child theme and override within.”

WordPress theme

What are the Benefits of Creating a WordPress Child Theme?

1. Development – Creating a child theme will speed up the time it takes to develop your WordPress blog or site. It’s also pretty easy to learn as many of the best WordPress themes allow even beginners to easily set up a theme.

2. Not Losing Changes – Many times, when you update a WordPress theme, any changes or customization you have made to your website will be lost. Creating a WordPress child theme prevents that from happening. You can customize the child theme, and then update the parent theme. All the updates and new features will automatically be applied to the child theme, but none of the customization will be affected.

3. Allows for Mistakes – “When you are creating a complete theme, you need to think about all the possible scenarios and code for them,” says WP Beginner. “However, when you are working on a child theme and you forgot to code for something, then there is always the parent theme’s functionality available as the fallback option.”

How to Create a WordPress Child Theme

WordPress.org gives a great summary of how to create a child theme:

• Create a directory in your themes directory to hold the child theme. The theme directory is wp-content/themes. You should name the directory without any space as part of the name, and it is common practice to use the name of the parent theme folder with “-child” appended to it. For example, if you are making a child of the twentythirteen theme, your folder name would be twentythirteen-child.

• In the child theme directory, create a file called style.css. This is the only file required to make a child theme. The style sheet must start with the following lines:

/*
 Theme Name:     Twenty Thirteen Child
 Theme URI:      http://example.com/twenty-thirteen-child/
 Description:    Twenty Thirteen Child Theme
 Author:         John Doe
 Author URI:     http://example.com
 Template:       twentythirteen
 Version:        1.0.0
*/

@import url("../twentythirteen/style.css");

/* =Theme customization starts here
-------------------------------------------------------------- */

You can change each of these lines to suit your theme. The only required lines are the Theme Name, and the Template. The Template is the directory name of the parent theme. In this case, the parent theme is the TwentyThirteen theme, so the Template is twentythirteen, which is the name of the directory where the TwentyThirteen theme resides. If you want to make a child of a theme with the directory name example-theme-name, then you would use Template: example-theme-name.

• The child theme’s stylesheet is included after the parent theme’s and styles will therefore override those in the parent theme’s stylesheet.
• Activate the child theme. Log in to your site’s dashboard, and go to Administration Panels > Appearance > Themes. You will see your child theme listed there. Click Activate.

In conclusion, remember that creating a WordPress child theme can have many great benefits to your WordPress blog or site. However, if you don’t make too many changes to your original site, you may not need one. So do your research and figure out the best way to go for your website.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

More and more people and companies are turning to the Internet to sell merchandise or services. E-commerce stores have become so popular that in just three months in 2005, sales from e-commerce stores totaled $22.3 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

With an e-commerce site, you can sell practically anything from clothes to food, vitamins to art, even services, such as translating or writing. All you need to do is to make a great, easy-to-use and functional website.

For our clients, we always turn to WordPress – a great option for both novice and seasoned web designers. WordPress is very customizable to all your needs and has thousands of forums with discussions on how to navigate the site.

Read this blog for our advice or reasons why WordPress is the best solution for your e-commerce store and find out why Mashable said that “today, e-commerce on WordPress is ready for prime time.”

Three Reasons Why WordPress is the Best Solution for Your E-commerce Store

WooCommerce

One of the best reasons why WordPress should be your first choice when it comes to e-commerce is “WooCommerce.” It’s a free, popular toolkit for your WordPress site.

WooCommerce is a platform that’s perfect for e-commerce startups because it can expand in many ways. With its huge flexibility, WooCommerce can be capable of selling downloads, physical products, virtual products, subscriptions, and more. Additionally, your products can be categorized and given sale prices. All these can help you grow your business sans the trouble of having a number of plugins and solutions to maintain.

This plugin also works seamlessly with PayPal, the number one way to accept payments online, as well as UPS, USPS, FedEx, etc. Even though you may be just one person packing and sending out your merchandise, you can be as efficient and trustworthy as a big retail giant, such as Amazon, with all the tools that WooCommerce provides.

WooCommerce also lets you run great promotions on your WordPress e-commerce site with specials, coupons, sales, promotional codes, and even gift certificates. Furthermore, the plugin keeps track of all your visitors, sales, turn around, etc. to provide you with an accurate picture of how your business is doing. You can see what your most popular products are, how many people come to your site and leave without buying anything, and how promotions affect your sales.

Digital Downloads

If you are selling photographs, music, books, or other digital downloads, WordPress is a great solution. WordPress has various plugins to sell your downloads without your customers ever having to leave your store. For example, Easy Digital Downloads lets you sell e-books and other downloads free of charge. The best part is that as long as you have an active WordPress e-commerce site, you can set up this plugin and start selling in minutes. They have over 190 extensions to truly set up your website to your needs and preferences.

PayPal for Digital Goods is another reason why WordPress is the best solution for your e-commerce store. PayPal makes it just as easy to sell music as it is to sell shoes. The best part about using PayPal is its top of the line security. Clients feel safe entering their bank and credit card information, and you, the seller, feel safe knowing that PayPal will protect you from fraudulent attempts.

Affiliates

If you want to start an e-commerce site, you can start to make money without having any merchandize to sell. The way you can do that is through affiliate networking. Read our blog about the best WordPress affiliate plugins for more information. This is how an affiliate program works. Say you want to sell products from Amazon. You sign up to Amazon’s affiliate program, which gives you the right to sell their merchandise on your e-commerce website. When you make a sale, Amazon ships the item for you, and pays you a commission of the proceeds. This is a great way to make money online, as you don’t need to invest in any items to sell; you simply make money every time someone buys something from Amazon from your site.

The team at Behla Design, Graphic Design & Web Development, is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of top web design, web development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals that had worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. 

Contact us today to find out how we can help your next project.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

We are always on the hunt for great plugins, and we love to share our findings in order to save others time with research. Last month, we needed to find affiliate plugins for a client we were working with, and after a lengthy search of reading reviews, and trying the plugins out, here are our top three choices. But first, let’s define what an affiliate plugin is.

What is an Affiliate Program?

Have you ever noticed when visiting a website that they have Amazon ads at the bottom? Those are called affiliates. An affiliate program allows other websites to post a link to your site, and then the other sites pay you commission for each time someone clicks on their site, or buys one of their products. In the example above, if you choose to run Amazon ads on your website, Amazon will pay you commission if a person coming from your site buys something on Amazon.

Affiliate programs can work for virtually anything. If you have a website for dentist reviews, dentists can pay you for referring them on your website. If you have a blog about home improvement, you can link contractor websites on your own site, and they will have to pay you every time someone clicks on their ad.

Benefits of an Affiliate Program

There are various benefits to joining an affiliate program. Tipsandtricks-hq.com lists the following:

Increased sales
Drive traffic to your site
Generate qualified leads
Extend the reach of your brand
Better search engine rankings
The ultimate viral marketing strategy

Three Top WordPress Affiliate Plugins

WordPress Affiliate Platform Plugin

If you have read our other blogs, you know that we are a huge proponent of using WordPress. Their affiliate platform plugin is an easy way to start an affiliate program. You can use the plugin to recruit affiliates, pay them commission, and then manage and track the progress. The plugin is pretty easy to use; you basically create banners and links which are posted on others’ websites, and then you can see how each website is doing, and how much traffic each site is bringing to you. The program will even figure out and pay commission for you.

These are the features that are listed on their site:

• Launch your affiliate campaign in a short time.
• Monitor clicks and conversions of visitors sent by your affiliates.
• Maintain your brand with your own product Ad Banners and Links.
• Drive more traffic to your landing/sales page from your Affiliate’s site.
• Significantly BOOST revenue with more sales.

Magic Affiliate

This is a great plugin that is integrated with WooCommerce. It claims to make your website a fully-automated membership site for affiliates. The developers claim that it’s very easy to use; the only thing you’d need to do is activate the plugin through WordPress and be using the plugin in minutes. It’s not hard for novices to figure out, as there are no codes involved. Probably their best sales push is that you can try them out for free. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.

It’s easy to integrate with WooCommerce, WP e-commerce, as well as AWeber, GetResponse, Constant Contact, iContact and MailChimp, and is compatible with Magic Members WordPress Membership Plugin.

While the affiliate above allows you to make manual payments, Magic affiliate lets you make PayPal Mass payments automatically, which is a huge time saver.

WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates – WordPress Plugin

Everyone knows that Amazon is the biggest deal in online retail. If you have a working site, you may want to consider partnering up with Amazon to earn commission from them. This plugin allows you to do so safely and easily. You can actually create your own store on your e-commerce site, and sell products directly from Amazon. You can earn up to 10% commission from Amazon’s million affiliate program items. And during special promotions, you can even earn up to 25% in commissions.

Here are some other great features, as listed on their support page:

• Choose from any Amazon Location – Worldwide, Amazon Germany, Amazon United Kingdom, Amazon Canada, Amazon France, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Italy, Amazon China, Amazon Spain.
• 90 days cookies feature – With this feature, when a user is redirected to amazon, the product is automatically added to cart and kept there for 90 days (this boosts your conversions also!).
• On Site Cart feature! This option will allow your customers to add multiple Amazon Products into Cart and checkout trough Amazon’s system with all at once!
• Prices setup – Select if you want to import prices only from Seller Amazon, or from other sellers as well (get lowest price)
• Products Variations – Get product variations. Be careful about Yes All variations as one product can have a lot of variation. With this, execution time is dramatically increased!
• Great SEO content for your products, our WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates – WordPress Plugin takes all data available for all Amazon products: Title, Prices (regular prices, sales prices and all prices variations), all products attributes, product reviews and full products descriptions.

Contact Behla Design

Our team at Behla Design, Graphic Design & Web Development, is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of top web design, web development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals and has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. Contact us today to find out how we can help your next project.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

Do you know the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words?” A good image is the number one reason your product will sell online, or the best way you can share your experience of a beautiful sunset on your blog. Uploading photos to WordPress is typically simple. All you need to do is upload from a website or your computer via the Media Uploader. You can choose files already in your media library, or add new ones.

Although this process is usually problem-free, one of the most common questions we get from clients is why images on their sites don’t load. Why do they come out looking fuzzy or blurry? There are various reasons why you may be getting an error message or a photo that is not clear. Large image, for instance, when not sized properly may appear indistinguishable and can slow down your website as visitors start to view the pictures.

Read below for some helpful tips about uploading the best quality images to WordPress.

#1 – Error

The best words of advice that we can offer when it comes to uploading photos on WordPress are “try” and then “try again.” Sometimes an error message has nothing to do with your image, but a simple online glitch. Before doing anything else, save your work and close WordPress. Open it again, login, and then try to load your image again. Chances are, it will load with no issues.

#2 – File Uploading

Remember to prepare and edit image files ahead of time before uploading to WordPress. This can be done using Apple Image Preview to make sure the size is right. Preview makes it easy to view and edit Portable Document Files (PDFs) and popular image files like JPEG and PNG. Another option for online image editing is Pixlr which enables you to fix, adjust, and filter images in a browser. Of course, the industry standard is Adobe Photoshop. Keep in mind that all images for the web use a resolution of 72 pixels per inch.

#3 – File Size

Not uploading a file image in the right size is one problem that our clients encounter while using WordPress. There are instances when you are attempting to upload a giant photo of a product you’re selling, but you actually want it to show up as a small thumbnail. You have a potential problem in this case. Or, if you have a small screenshot of a photo that you are trying to show off, your image may end up being blurry. The first thing you want to do to troubleshoot is to check your WordPress settings. Usually WordPress themes allow you to specify the size for the single product image.

Blogmistress recommends checking the settings. In your Dashboard go to Settings, Media and look in the Uploading Files section, the Store uploads in this folder. WordPress tells you that the default is wp-content/uploads and if you have something different to this, change it.” If you follow the recommended file sizes, your images should look correct.

Large image size can be trimmed down in order to optimize it. A webpage usually has a content area of at least 960px and thus sizing large images to around 960px wide should be sufficient for a normal website, says OM4.

#4 – File Type

WordPress has a list of image file types that you are allowed to upload. WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress, lists the accepted files as follows:

• .jpg
• .jpeg
• .png
• .gif

Make sure that you are using one of these file names as part of the name of your image. Also, please remember that if you are finding images online, you need to have the owner’s permission before you can use it on your WordPress site. If you can’t buy the rights and don’t have permission, do not use that image.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

If you’d like to discuss the best image options for your website, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

Do you have unique items to sell, found a great wholesale deal on terrific products, or simply wish to make an extra income? Have you considered opening up an e-commerce store? Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to make money online. We help clients every day by explaining how to start an online business. By reading this blog, you can partake in some of our knowledge and how we’ve helped our clients achieve the success they desire.

Benefits of an Online Business

There are so many great benefits to starting an online business. The first advantage is saving money. A physical store entails many processes like signing a multi-year lease, paying rent and utilities, and hiring salespeople, etc. On top of that, you need to invest money into furniture and decor for the store or business and other expenses. With an online business, you don’t need any of that. You can work from anywhere while you start out, even in your own garage.

The second benefit to starting an online business is that you get to work from home. This means you get to spend more time with your family members and have time to pick up your kids from school, if you prefer. You can even make money online while in your pajamas! Furthermore, you don’t have to spend money on gas driving to and from work, lunch at work, and so on.

But perhaps the biggest benefit to starting an online business is that your items will be available to people all over the world. With a physical location, only people in that neighborhood or city will come to shop or use your services. With an online store, there are no boundaries to where your clients can live.

How to Start an Online Business with WordPress

So you want to work from home and make money online? Follow these five steps that will teach you how to start an online business.

WordPress theme

1. Create a Website – We are huge fans of WordPress. This free web software allows anyone, whether novice or expert, to create a site for their needs. All you need to do is first find a host that is compatible with WordPress. That is not hard to do, as there are thousands of options to choose from. Then, you can download and sign up for a WordPress account. This will take no more than five minutes.

WordPress has numerous support forums online and countless YouTube videos that explain different features to help you customize your online business website. Thousands of plugins are also compatible with WordPress, some free and some paid, and these are very easy to upload and edit. Read some of our other posts to find out what other steps you can take to customize and improve your site with content writing, search options, shipping options, etc.

2. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is probably the most important thing you can do apart from building a great, easy-to-use website, and offering great products or services, according to Entrepreneur. SEO means doing research to optimize your website to register and come up in Google searches. Say you sell clothes online. How are you going to compete with thousands of other e-commerce stores that sell clothes? You will do so by researching which keywords or terms potential clients are searching for.

Keyword planner from Google Adwords is a great, free tool at your disposal. You need to enter a term that you think your buyers would search for, such as True Religion jeans, and you will see how many monthly searches that term has, and what the competition for that term is. Competition just means how many other sites are optimizing for that same keyword; Google will tell you if the competition is low, medium, or high. You want to pick keywords with the most searches and the least amount of competition.

3. Register your business – Many people don’t know about this crucial step, but if you want to make money online, you need to get a license. The U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) is a great resource on the laws and regulations in each state. Remember that there are federal, state and local regulations for businesses, even if you work from home to make money online.  “If you are operating your online business in a state that charges a sales tax; or levies a gross receipts or excise tax on businesses you may have to apply for a tax permit or otherwise register with your state revenue agency,” according to the SBA. “Online businesses are responsible for collecting state and local sales taxes from their customers when applicable, and paying these taxes to state and local revenue agencies.”

4. Make a Business Plan – You may just start out selling, say, your collection of baseball memorabilia, but what if your online business truly takes off? What if you run of out merchandise, but have a high demand? What if you need to expand quickly, hire staff, or rent warehouse space? Even though you make money online, you need to have a solid business plan for your website. Small Business BC will guide you how to setup a successful plan.

5. Become an Expert – You may sell products that are available on other websites, or services that others may find elsewhere, but what can set you apart is your expertise. Setting yourself up as an expert is not difficult on your website. Write blogs or articles that have relevance to what you’re offering. If you’re selling green products for example, share important news about alternatives to common products that can promote a green lifestyle. Share your own stories about your experiences and post pictures. Chances are, someone on your website will like what they read, and they will start to follow you. Then, they will be a client for life.

Need Help in Your Online Business?

The Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. For more information about how to start an online business, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

I recently worked with a school administrator to set up a school website. Upon outlining all the needs of the site, I recommended that they choose WordPress because I believe that it would be the best choice for setting up and managing the site. WordPress is easy to understand and learn, and it has thousands of free and paid plugins to customize the site to each school’s needs. Below is an outline of what a complete school website would require, and explanations of how WordPress meets those needs.

Outline of a School Website’s Needs

1. User Groups

One thing that is unique about a school’s website is that it will have different user groups. While an online store, for example, targets one user group (clients), a school has numerous ones. There are parents, students, teachers, and administrators. You want all of them to be able to access the site. However, not all of them can have equal access to all of the information. WordPress can take care of all of this for you. WordPress has a great plugin named Groups, which provides management for an unlimited number of groups. The plugin claims to provide “group-based user membership management, group-based capabilities and access control for content, built on solid principles.” 

2. Calendar

A good school website will have a functioning calendar which will encompass school holidays, vacations, field trips, short days, fundraisers, school activities, etc. I wrote another blog about the best WordPress calendar plugins, which can be viewed here. There are four options which you can read about, and pick one that is best for you. We have had good success using the All in One Calendar plugin as it has many integrations and premium features as well.

3. Media

School website administrators will surely want to share photos and videos of students during school field trips, athletic events, etc. on the site. Furthermore, uploading files with report cards, letters to parents and school requirements will be necessary. WordPress is great at allowing users to upload and share media. There is a media uploader, which makes it easy to show off files in a post or page. Once uploaded, the Media Library “allows you to edit, view, and delete Media previously uploaded to your blog. Multiple Media objects can be selected for deletion. Search and filtering ability is also provided to allow you to find the desired Media,” according to WordPress’ Codex.

4. Directory

It’s necessary to create a directory of students, parents, volunteers, etc. to run a school. WordPress has several plugins for you to do so. The Connections Business Directory plugin lets you create an address book, a staff directory, or any other directory that you need. It has an integrated dashboard, which keeps you up-to-date with school holidays, student birthdays, and any other pertinent contact news. The plugin gives control to what individual or group sees what entries.

5. Newsletters

Newsletters to students’ families are a must to keep them caught up with school news. WordPress has tons of newsletter plugins, such as MailPoet Newsletters, Newsletter, and E-mail Newsletter. These plugins lets you create a customized newsletter with your school’s colors, photos, and unlimited subscribers.

6. Social Media

Nowadays, everything is about social media. WordPress integrates automatically with Facebook and Twitter, updating these sites with the latest blogs and posts from your school’s website. You can also configure other social media platforms to connect to your school sites.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing the customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

If you’d like to discuss setting up a website for your school, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

There are many reasons why you may want to set up a website, but before you do, you need to decide on a hosting solution for that site. Hosting gives your website a place to exist on the web. Here’s a great explanation for what website hosting is, according to HostGator.com: “The web-hosting or server is much like the space that you rent out to have your business in. It’s merely the space itself. It does not include furnishings like shelves for your products, just as the web-hosting account doesn’t include a site for you to sell your products…Without the hosting services, you won’t have a place for your files to reside, so your domain would then become like a disconnected phone number in the phone directory, and your site files would have nowhere to stay.”

Picking a hosting company might seem like a minor choice, but to me, it is one of the most important decisions you can make with your company. To some extent it is your entire presence as your site is the gateway to the business. I always recommend WP Engine to my clients who work with WordPress sites, and there are many reasons why.

What is WP Engine?

WP Engine is a hosting platform for WordPress sites. They only work with WordPress, so that means that all their software and hardware is designed specifically for these sites. They offer managed hosting, which means that they are involved in the back end of your hosting, protecting you from hacks, offering high speed for your site, as well as backing up your site daily, just in case.

Reasons Why WP Engine is the Best WordPress Hosting Solution

1. Security – One of the most important things a hosting company needs to offer is security from hacks. I have spent days restoring and fixing the websites of clients who chose to go with a cheaper hosting company. The best part is they will handle all security issues for you if a security issue occurs, so you don’t have to do anything. At no cost to you, they will work on restoring your site.

2. Speed – WP Engine claims that their new WordPress architecture, EverCache, will allow thousands of users to visit your site at the same time without your website experiencing slow speed or being taken offline. If you know that your site will experience heavy traffic, you can contact them to provide temporary measures to accommodate the traffic. Furthermore, Google tracks site speed with WP Engine. Google will penalize sites that can’t handle many visitors, and will not always recommend that website high in its search results. If your speed is fast, that’s much better for your search engine optimization (SEO), and will allow more visitors to find your site.

3. Backups – You don’t have to pay extra to backup your site in case a hack or a malfunction occurs. WP Engine offers time machine based backups so you can easily restore a previous version in case hacking occurs, and they have one click restore points. And the best part is that they backup your site every single day with a backup formula that they create nightly.

4. Development – Whether you will do this yourself, or turn to a professional, WP Engine is great for development. WP Engine has all of their sites on SSD drives (no moving parts) and is very tech heavy.  One great feature is that they offer a clone button of your live site that copies your site to staging environment. This is great for development as it create a “sandbox” site for development and testing without effecting your current, live site. They also have a staging environment (temp URL) to test the site before going live. These are some of the options they offer to developers, according to the WP Engine site:

“Having trouble running down a performance problem? We’ll do code-level PHP profiling to identify the issue and suggest code changes to address it, especially if there’s something inside our own architecture that you can take advantage of.

A PHP bug causing the white screen of death? We provide error logs to help you out.

Use direct SFTP access to your blog’s wp-content directory, so you can use your favorite HTML, CSS, and PHP editor on your laptop to customize your blog. No more editing code in little web fields!”

5. Support – The best part of a managed hosting company is the support they offer! Every single person who works at WP Engine is a WordPress expert, so if you’re having problems with a plugin, or have a question about updating a theme, you just need to contact them to hear their free, expert opinions!

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

If you’d like to discuss the best hosting options for your WordPress site, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

We recently helped a client who complained that her WordPress site speed was very slow. She said that she had a big dip in online sales since clients did not want to wait around for her site to load. There are many reasons why your website speed may be slow. Below are five tips to improve website speed that are quick, easy and free.

Five Tips to Improve Website Speed

1. Use Website Speed Test – If you feel that your WordPress site is acting very slow, do an Internet Speed Test. Webpagetest.org is run by Google, and offers a free test of your site. It will give you a detailed summary with a website speed test score out of 100. It will also give details about the errors, load times, how long your site takes to fully load, etc. The site claims to “ run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more.” It will provide “rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.” Doing the Internet speed test is important so you can see what the exact issue is that is preventing your website from operating at normal speed. Also, if you are planning to contact your website host, it will help to pinpoint the exact data about your website in the ticket request.

2. Compress Images – Dream Host recommends that you don’t just upload images to your site, but take the time to optimize each image. Big files slow down site speed, so resizing the photo to smaller dimensions will be optimal. Google developers recommend compressing images. They state that “image files are often created with extra information embedded in the file. For example, JPEG files written by many image programs include the name of the program that wrote them. PNG images can often be made smaller by changing the way the image is encoded. These transformations are lossless. That is, the compressed image looks identical to the uncompressed image, but uses fewer bytes.”

3. Reduce Files Sizes – Just like JPEGs and PDFS, other files also slow down website speed. The speed of your page loads often come down to reducing the size of the images on the page. Make sure to set your images to 72 pixels per inch and ideally size the image BEFORE you add it to WordPress. If you don’t have a native image editing application you can use an onilne one such as Pixlr. You might want to install WP Smush.it plugin which will reduce the size of the images of your site without having to edit them one by one. Check your CSS and JS files. CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) refers to text file formats that define things like the color and size of the text, as well as spaces and borders of information on the website. JS files are JavaScript, which control things like automatically changing the date, causing a linked-to page to pop up and allowing images or text to change when a mouse is rolled over them, according to Whatis.com. Obviously you need these files, so you cannot delete them from your WordPress site, but you can minify them. The plugin Better WordPress Minify will combine and compress your CSS and JS files, which will speed up your website. Another plugin called Lazy Load will only allow images to load when a visitor can see them.

4. Install W3 Total Cache – We’ve found that this plugin gives the most flexibility and levels of control to help improve your page loads. A web cache is a mechanism for the temporary storage (caching) of web documents, such as HTML pages and images, to reduce bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived lag. W3 Total Cache can address various way to reduce the page load with settings for browser cache, minify and even CDN integration.

5. Get better hosting or a CDN – Page speed is often reliant on your hosting. If your site is on a shared servers for instance, your resources are pooled together and a site with a lot of traffic will demand more resources. We like to use WP Engine for dedicated WordPress hosting as they have advanced caching built into their servers and a high level of security. SiteGround is a great hosting company that is WordPress friendly and has their own caching plugin that is included with their shared hosting plans. You might also consider using a CDN or Content Delivery Network such as MaxCDN which serves your site’s data from a location closer to where the user’s browser request is being made. W3 Total Cache is also compatible with MaxCDN and has an option to easily configure it in the settings for the plugin. These five simple tips will help you significantly alter the speed of your website and allow your visitors to visit and shop on your site in the manner they were supposed to.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

If you still have questions about the slow speed of your website, , contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

If you have a website, you may have created it for many reasons, some of which are to write a blog with your opinions, post interesting photos, educate others, promote a business, have a social cause, or trying to make money through an online store. Either way, you want to attract as many people as possible to your site so they can read your blogs, shop at your e-commerce store or contact your company to engage in new business. While you may have created a great, easy-to-use site, and offered great insight or top-of-the-line products, one piece of advice I offer to my clients is to have relevant content. Content is very important for your online site, and I will give three reasons why in this blog.

Three Ways Content Writing Can Help Your Site

1. Keywords, keywords, keywords – Many website owners spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars every month on advertising. There are various ways to do so, with ads running on other sites, or with pay-per-click advertising. However, there is a great way to see more traffic come to your site without spending any money, just some time on writing. Content writing is an underused, but very good way to help your website. All it means is that you create regular, quality, relevant content in the form of blogs or articles, and update them on your website.  If you use WordPress, it is very easy to maintain your blogs as WordPress is a content management solution with a system to publish blogs in an organized way.

The most effective way to incorporate content writing in your website is to do keyword research first. There are various ways to do keyword research, with paid and free programs. The most popular is Google Adwords, which will give you statistics for how often each keyword, or term, is searched for every month, and whether the competition for each term is low, medium, or high. You want to try and pick terms that have the lowest competition and the most possible people searching for them. This way, whether you advertise as well, you will have many keywords right on your site that will help new visitors find you.

Another great aspect about using content writing is that you can tailor the blog and the keywords to your city or neighborhood, if you have a local business. Say you sell bicycles in Chicago. To attract local clients to come into your store, you can write articles about different types of bicycles, and include keywords, such as purchasing bicycles in Chicago, or Chicago bike store. You can also write blogs about local events for bike riders, which will definitely get you some new visitors that may be searching for those same events. Those visitors can turn into potential new customers.

2. Relevance – So you have a website, but how do you compete with other sites and help people find you online? Before, all you needed were keywords and links throughout your site, which was pretty easy to do. But times have changed, and Google has gotten smarter. Now, for your website to have a chance to come out and beat the competition, and come up in the first few pages of the Google search, you need to have current and relevant content. That means that you need to spend the time to update your blogs and articles regularly, so that Google can sense that you have the latest news about your particular product. So spend time writing, and see your website gain more and more popularity with each month.

3. Expertise – “Demonstrate your expertise through content,” says LunaMetrics. ” A pizzeria near my house in Pittsburgh has an alternative menu on their site for people seeking gluten free pizza and Italian food and they’ve received press/links because of this. What’s your specialty? Blog about it, include it on your site and tell others.”

What sets you apart from all the other pizza places in your city? Through content writing, you can let potential customers know what your niche, or specialty is. You can write that you make your own sauce, or offer gluten-free pizza varieties, or even import cheese from Italy. Just having a regular site with your menu and address will not let individuals searching for a new pizza joint truly get to know you, but with some articles, you can make them feel like they’ve been to your spot already.

Are you selling vitamins online? It’s crucial for you to write credible blogs and link them to other expert sites. Write about the latest health news and breakthroughs, and include keywords and links to the products you sell. Chances are someone that is searching for an answer to their health question can come upon your article, and then may purchase one of your products. Wouldn’t that be great, without you spending a single dollar on advertising? Remember, the more in-depth and relevant your articles are, the more probability that someone will trust that you’re an expert in your field, and will come back to your online website again and again.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

If you’d like to discuss creating content writing for your website, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

If you have a local business, such as a hair salon or restaurant, chances are you have created a website for it. Nowadays, most customers find businesses online, even if they don’t sell any merchandise on the Web. Google states that 97% of people search for businesses online. People will use the Internet to find a local business or service that they need, and a functional website will play a major role in helping to promote your business. However, just creating a site is not enough to play a crucial role in increasing business, there are several other steps you need to do, and keep doing, to increase your local business’s visibility online so it gets picked up by search engines. In previous articles, I wrote about the importance of good, quality content and social media. In this blog, I will discuss how to go the extra mile for your local business to increase traffic to your site.

Here are a couple of steps that will help promote your website’s visibility.

1. ShareThis – This is what the creators of ShareThis say: “Whether you want the simplest, most robust tools to turn your media social, or to find the right audience for your advertising message, ShareThis puts sharing to work for you. Use the most innovative social media and sharing platform for the Web, ShareThis.” Simply put, this is a widget that you can customize for your blog.

ShareThis

When visitors read your content, they can click on the button, and choose which social media forum they’d like to share your blog on. The options are Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, Myspace, etc.

Additionally, ShareThis provides you with analytics of your site. The analytics allow you to:

• Unlock the social value of your website with SQI (social quality of a website)
• Discover your most shared content
• Evaluate the top outbound and inbound social channels

By checking your analytics, ShareThis allows you to see activity that is happening on your site, find what content is the most popular, view which social media sites and other referrals direct traffic to your site the most, etc. This will allow you to see what sites help your business’s visibility the most.

2. Yelp – Yelp is quickly becoming one of the main ways people find businesses, events, and lists. It was founded in 2004, and since then, has seen about 108 million unique visits per month (stats from the second quarter of 2013, according to Yelp.)

Yelp

The way it works is that that visitors can search for a local business by name or category, and then read information about the business, write a review, or check in. Yelp claims that the site boasts over 42 million reviews. Yelp’s premise is simple, the more good reviews your business gets, the more clients it should attract, increasing your site’s visibility online.

Yelp is crucially important in attracting people to your website, and ultimately, your business. You can create a free account, or you can pay for advertising to promote your business in searches and attract greater visibility. You can also offer deals, coupons, and sell gift certificates.

If your business has various locations, you can create a Yelp page for each location. This way, search engines can point to a specific location if someone is looking for a dentist in Santa Monica, or one in Sherman Oaks, CA.

3. Facebook for Business – While having visitors share your site with their friends on social media sites is great, having your own presence on Facebook is also very important. You probably already have a personal Facebook account, but did you know that you can create one for your business? Facebook states that “over one billion people like and comment an average of 3.2 billion times every day. Over one billion people like and comment an average of 3.2 billion times every day. When you have a strong presence on Facebook, your business is part of these conversations and has access to the most powerful kind of word-of-mouth marketing — recommendations between friends.”

Facebook for business

Facebook allows you to create a page for your business, add photos, relevant information, and any coupons or specials you would like to offer to promote it. Then, you can have individuals check into your business, or post on your wall. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to connect with your clients. As long as people have clicked Like on your page, they will get your updates. So, you can use Facebook as a channel to promote upcoming sales and specials, new products, or just mention a topic important to you. And you don’t even have to use the page to just discuss your business, specifically. Engage visitors with unique content, interesting stories and photos, or just events in your local neighborhood.

4. Twitter – Twitter is another great social media site to help you connect with people and increase visibility of your site. The website has over 200 million active users. This is what Twitter states that it can do for your business.

Connect in context

On Twitter, people talk about what they care about and what’s happening around them right now, including your business. This gives you powerful context to connect your message to what’s most meaningful to your customers in real time.

Engaging with real-time Tweets can influence conversations in a way that can help build your business.

Twitter

Listen and learn

See what your competitors are tweeting about or search for industry keywords to listen and gather market intelligence. It’s an easy way to get insights that you can use to inform your strategy.

Grow and succeed

Want to grow your business, run exciting promotions, strengthen your brand and engage with your customers? Twitter Ads can amplify your efforts in these areas and more.

Learn from others.

See how these businesses used Twitter to drive transactions, connect with customers and grow.

5. Google Places for Business – Registering here allows your business to be found in search engines through Google Search, Maps, Google+, and mobile devices. You need to sign in with your Google account, and then set up Google Places for free. By setting up a free account, you can allow clients to not only search for your business, but make sure they have the correct information about it, such as contact information hours, etc. You can connect with customers by responding to Google+ reviews.

Google Places For Business

If you set up a premium account, you can promote your products or services through AdWords Express and Google offers. AdWords Express allows clients to click on your ad, call you and get directions to your business. “Google Offers connects you with customers who are nearby. Create an offer (i.e., 20% off a pepperoni pizza) to highlight your business across Google properties, including Google+, the Google Offers website, and mobile apps for Offers and Wallet.”

6. Google Analytics – One of the most important things you can do for your site is to check its analytics. Google Analytics analyzes your site’s engagement and reports back to you. First, Google Analytics helps familiarize you with their plugin by offering a setup checklist and a getting started guide. This way, even if you’re never analyzed your website’s traffic, with Google Analytics, you will

Google Analytics

easily be able to learn how to start. Second, if you still have questions, you can visit the help center to read articles that can help you along the way. Furthermore, you can visit the Google Analytics YouTube Channel to watch helpful videos.

“Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back,” according to their site. What that means is that Google Analytics will show you how many people visited your site, how they found your site – through keywords, or through another source, and if they clicked on any links on your WordPress blog. This way, you can see what content on your site is the most popular, and which social media sites are bringing the most traffic to you. Having this knowledge will help you get even more visitors, because you can see which topics are most interesting to your readers, and focus on writing about them. Or, when you see which social media sites, for example Facebook, direct the most people to your site, you can focus on promoting your content on that site through paid advertisements or giveaways and promotions.

7. Directory websites – Below are directories that are free and also help with search engines and getting more traffic. These are beneficial for all local businesses.

http://merchantcircle.com
http://manta.com
http://citysquares.com/

In summary, there are many ways to promote your business’s visibility online. Some are paid, and others are free, but overall, the more time you spend helping visitors find your site, the more business you are likely to get. Behla Design can help you set up any of the plugins or options discussed in this blog.

The team at Behla Design, Graphic Design & Web Development, is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of top web design, web development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals and has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. Contact us today to find out how we can help your next project.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

If you have a WordPress website, you will want to have a well-functioning search field. Whether you have an online store and want your visitors to be able to find a product easily, or have a blog, and want your readers to quickly access articles about topics that interest them, a good search field is vital to a site.

Many WordPress themes have their own search options. It’s important to remember that the themes offer different WordPress templates, and not actual search pages. WordPress templates are “the files which control how your WordPress site will be displayed on the Web. These files draw information from your WordPressMySQL database and generate the HTML code which is sent to the web browser. Through its powerful Theme system, WordPress allows you to define as few or as many Templates as you like all under one Theme,” according to WordPress.

Many people have criticized the WordPress search option as having too many downfalls. For example, it doesn’t give as much value to articles that are older versus newer. WordPress gives results based on date and not relevance. Also, the keyword search isn’t ideal as it mostly looks for direct matches, so if you typed in “blue jeans,” chances are you are not going to find any products with just the term “jeans.”

If your theme does not offer a search template at all, or if you would like to create your own WordPress search page, you can search for various WordPress search templates. We will provide a few of our favorites below.

WordPress Search Templates

1. Google Custom Search – If you are a fan of searching on Google, chances are you will like it as a WordPress search template for your site. You can install it, and it will rewrite the general WordPress search template to a Google search. Google offers free and paid WordPress templates for search fields.

According to Google, if you pick Google as your WordPress search template, you can:

Google Custom Search

• Create a CSE at any time and Google will give you a landing page with a unique URL. You also have the option of applying your own site’s look and feel.
• Invite friends and colleagues to collaborate and contribute to your search engine, enhancing its usefulness to your community.
• Provide your own search refinements within results pages so it’s easier for your users to find the information they’re looking for.
• Easily add more sites to your search engine’s index as you surf the web.
• New! You can create a CSE on the fly simply by cutting and pasting a few lines of code into your website’s HTML. Your new automatically generated CSE will let people search the websites you’ve linked to, as well as the sites they link to. For instance, if you’ve created a directory, a blog roll, or a list of online resources, your CSE will enable your users to search across these sites and the sites they reference.<

The paid version starts at $100 per year, and allows customization. You can specify which sites you want Google to search; if you have multiple websites, you can set up Google to search through all your websites, instead of just the one.

Check out this video to learn more.

2. Relevanssi – Relevanssi is another option for a WordPress search engine. It replaces the standard WordPress search with a custom option that allows the user to customize its look and feel. Since many WordPress search users complain that the standard search doesn’t show the best results first, Relevanssi claim that they have the best search template, which not only brings up the most relevant results, but also shows which part of the site the results are from. Here is a link for a full list of features.

Relevanssi

When we contacted the developer to ask why he believes his WordPress template is better than others, this is what he said:

– The ability to give taxonomies and custom fields keyword weights not only per custom post type, but per taxonomy/meta_name per custom post type
– Keyword weight attribution
– Supplemental Search Engines
– PDF indexing built in
– Index is managed in real time, no need to manually reindex
– Lots of Extensions (more coming all the time!) https://searchwp.com/extensions/­­

There is a free version, which has over 250,000 downloads, and a premium version, which starts at $40 per year (see prices here). According to the site, the benefits of the premium version include:

• Guaranteed support. Free version users get support if I have enough time available.
• Additional features. Relevanssi is developed actively and new features are added. Free version users won’t get the new features, or get them long after Premium users have enjoyed them.
• Future development. More users for Relevanssi Premium means I can spend more time developing the plugin.

Better Search

3. Better Search – Aptly named, Better Search is a third option for a custom WordPress search template. It claims to give relevant weight to the title and content of a post to match a search query, making it a better option than the standard WordPress search, which searches by date. It even gives site owners the option to assign more weight to the title or the content in searches.

Here are the features that the site lists:

• Automatic: Once activated, Better Search will automatic replace your default WordPress search with more relevant search results
• Relevance: Search results sorted by relevance automatically sorted by relevance. You can also turn off relevancy based searching, in which results are sorted by date
• Control the results: Fine tune results by changing the weighting of post title and post content. Turn on BOOLEAN search to override the default NATURAL LANGUAGE search of mySQL
• Popular searches: Find out what visitors are searching for on your blog. Display a list of popular search terms (daily and overall) on your blog in the form of a heatmap. Widget support for easy integration in your theme
• Customisation: Support for a template file for perfect integration into your blog template. Alternatively, just input your own CSS styles in the Custom Styles tab in the Settings Page. Check the FAQ for more information
• Supports cache plugins: Works with caching plugins like WP-Super-Cache and W3 Total Cache

Basically, you have the option to use the default WordPress search template in your site, or pick one of the above templates to customize your search to your preference. Some of the options are paid, and others are free; I recommend reading the features and figuring out what would work best for your site.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

I was recently asked by a friend how she can sell a copy of her e-book online as a PDF. If you have a similar question, and would like to sell digital goods, such as videos, photos, games, software, etc. online, read this blog to find solutions on how to do so.

Solutions for Selling Digital Goods Online

1. PayPal for Digital Goods – If you’ve ever purchased anything from an e-commerce site, such as ebay, you’ve likely had to use PayPal to pay for the item you bought. PayPal for Digital Goods works in the same way, but instead of getting an item via mail, your buyers would be able to download your digital file right from your website. All you need to do would be to add the PayPal button right on your website, and individuals would be able to pay you for your item.

PayPal has a few advantages:
* Visitors pay right on your site and do not have to go to another site to pay
* Visitors have the option to make a one-time payment or purchase a subscription, if you offer one
* Excellent fraud protection
* Opportunity to sell to clients all over the world

To get started, you need to create a PayPal business account and choose either Express Checkout or Adaptive Payments products for your website. “Express Checkout allows you to sell your digital downloads to consumers with flexible payment plans, while Adaptive Payments gives you all of the benefits… {and lets you} set up various payment scenarios within your application, such as chained or parallel payments. For example, if a music producer wants to sell a playlist of songs by various musicians online, its developer can enable payment distribution to the entire set of musicians upon point of purchase,” according to PayPal.

2. Easy Digital Downloads – Easy Digital Downloads works with PayPal to allow you to sell e-books and other digital downloads on WordPress. The plugin developer claims that this is “the world’s easiest way to sell digital downloads through WordPress for free.” Within minutes, you can set up a default configuration to sell your items on your WordPress site. For example, if you are selling music, you have the option to sell it per song, or the entire album. If you’d like, you can customize this plugin for your specific needs; they are developer friendly, and make it easy to make changes to the code. They have 190 extensions that allow you to set up your site in any way you want, from different payment gateways to uploading to different gallery options to display your digital downloads. Furthermore, Easy Digital Downloads provides ways for you to analyze your selling and earnings data, and even to export that information to Excel or Google Docs.

3. Shopify – Shopify has teamed up with Fetch Softworks to allow you to create an online store to sell your digital goods. On your site, you can also sell tangible things, like actual books and CDs, along with the items that are available for download. The two services let you to host files on their servers, and they also work with PayPal to accept payments. Shopify provides many ways to easily set up a site, with different looks to choose from. And for beginners who have questions, they have a 24-7 Support Guru who help.

Shopify offers a free 14-day trial to anyone who is interested. They charge $14.95 a month. (Insider tip: I actually had a friend call Shopify and ask for a reduction in the monthly fee, and Shopify waived it completely.)

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

There are various ways  to attract clients to an e-commerce site. One of the best ways is to sell gift certificates for visitors to purchase and give to their family, friends and co-wokers. Gift certificates are great because not only do you make money off the sale whether the gift certificate is then used or not, the certificate itself is a good promotion for your site. Have you ever received a certificate as a gift to a store or restaurant you’ve never heard of? Having the certificate makes it almost certain that you will use it, and familiarize yourself with the new business. The same applies to selling gift certificates for your e-commerce site. The certificates can expose your business to new customers who may have not heard about you before. Most of the biggest retail websites, such as Amazon and Nordstrom, offer customers to buy gift cards online, so why don’t you?

If you have a WordPress e-commerce site, there are a variety of plugins you can choose from if you have WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free plugin that allows users to customize their selling and shipping options. As I explained in my previous blog, “WooCommerce – The Best WordPress E commerce  Plugin,” WooCommerce is a payment gateway that allows your visitors to purchase and pay for items from your site. It also works with mail carriers to allow buyers to pick what shipping options they want, and pay for shipping right on your site.

Below is a list of various gift certificate plugins for your WordPress site:

1. WooCommerce Gift Certificates Pro: This is a great plugin for creating a gift certificate template online for your site. The latest version offers many convenient features. Here are some of the best features the site lists:

• Use a template to customize your gift certificate.
• Allow users to buy gift cards online to use as an e-voucher, or print them.
• Let customers chose the amount for the certificate, or provide predetermined amounts that they can choose from.
• The voucher codes are unique, so individuals cannot use them more than once.
• You can offer a free gift certificate with the purchase of a product.
• Give people the option to buy gift cards online and e-mail them to themselves, or send them directly to someone else’s e-mail.
• Allow the amount for the gift card to be used only in a single purchase, or spread out over numerous purchases.
• Set expiration dates.
• Set prefixes on the gift certificate template that allows you to figure out the product sales related to the codes.
• Access report data that “includes code, buyer, order number, date of purchase, type of voucher, amount of voucher, and recipient information. And, you can easily search within a report to find exactly what you’re looking for. Plus, you can export your reports to CSV, Excel, PDF, clipboard, or print – all with one click of a button!”

This plugin starts at $89 and can be easily purchased and uploaded to your WordPress site.

2. WooCommerce Smart Coupons – Smart Coupons is another great source that allows individuals to buy gift cards online from your site. According to the WooCommerce site, this plugin lets customers send the gift card to multiple people in various ways, such as manually sending e-mails with store credits. Some of the features of this plugin are:

• “Let customers enter coupon receiver details / custom messages during checkout
• Automatic credit balance maintenance
• Set expiry date in days, weeks, months & years after coupon generation”
• tight security”

However, what’s really great about Smart Coupons is that it helps you not only with creating a gift certificate template, but also helps you set sale strategies. For example, “find out your average order size – let’s say $175. Create a Store Credit / Gift Certificate coupon for higher amount – $250. Create a new product and price it at a value slightly above average order size. In this case, the new product can be priced at $200. Ensure the discount is lucrative enough. What you’ve just done is attracted your customers with a good discount, made them pay in advance, and continue spending in future to deplete their credit balance,” the site explains. Or, “Create a discount / credit coupon that is valid between a particular time range. Smartly price the coupon. Promote the offer in advance, you can even keep raising the offer price as coupon start time comes closer. This will create scarcity and prompt people to buy more and buy earlier.”

This plugin retails for $99 for a single license.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

Selling items online has significantly increased in the last decade. “E-commerce B2C product sales totaled $142.5 billion, representing about 8% of retail product sales in the United States,” according to Wikipedia. Fielding the expense of having a retail store, employees, and other costs associated with a physical location makes having an online store very inexpensive. If you have a WordPress online store, consider using WooCommerce as your e-commerce toolkit. In a previous blog, WooCommerce Payment Gateways and Shipping Options, you can read more about how to use this plugin as a payment gateway, and, now, I will go into detail about working with WooCommerce to set up your shipping options.

Here are the steps to set up WooCommerce shipping options:

1. Pick a shipping provider – WooCommerce works with USPS, UPS or FedEx to ship your items. You can sign up with your preferred shipping provider online and create a login and password.

* UPS –  You can use WooCommerce to set up a UPS shipping calculator based on shipping location and weight.

IgniteWoo offers a UPS Shipping Pro extension for purchase. Once you figure out which shipping methods you want to offer clients, the prices will be shown to customers, and they can choose the option that works best for them. The price starts at $40.

WooThemes also offers a UPS Shipping Method extension that you can purchase. The price starts at $49.

*Tip: You can offer free shipping through the UPS shipping plugin for customers who purchase a certain amount on your e-commerce site. This can be a huge incentive for buyers and drives up sales (look at Amazon.com, for instance).

* USPS – The United States Postal Service is the largest delivery network in the United States. They offer both domestic and international shipping options. This method will only work if your site accepts US dollars, and the package sizes are quoted in inches and pounds, although sometimes other measurements will work. By using USPS delivery as your preferred shipping method, you have the option to ship packages first class, priority, or even parcel post. Here’s a link to USPS prices. You can purchase the USPS Shipping Method extension on WooThemes for $49.

* FedEx – FedEx is another great choice among shipping options for small businesses. The company claims to save you money and satisfy more customers if you use their services, along with providing you discounts with their alliances.

WooCommerce offers a plugin called Fedex Shipping Pro for a starting price of $40. The site claims that “you control which shipping options to offer shoppers will easy-to-use configuration settings.”

2. Figure out weight and dimensions of each item – Once you have picked your preferred shipping provider, and registered online for an account, you need to decide how you want to set up your shipping options. “The fact is the cost of shipping has for a long time been one of the leading causes of shopping cart abandonment as buyers realize that the cost of the shipping has made the item too expensive…72% of website visitors abandon their shopping cart because shipping charges were higher than expected,” reports Proimpact7. Do you want to offer a flat rate shipping rate, like the website, Overstock.com? Although their promotions sometimes change, this giant e-commerce site often offers a flat rate shipping fee of $2.95 with any purchase. Other sites, such as Amazon.com, offer free shipping with a minimum purchase. Their “Prime-eligible” items are shipped free of charge with a purchase of at least $25. This incites customers to purchase more items so that they don’t have to pay for shipping. While sites like Nordstrom.com offer free shipping with any purchase, this is usually impossible for small WooCommerce shopping sites to offer as paying for shipping items to customers takes a big chunk out of the profit.

This is why most small e-commerce sites charge for shipping depending on the size or price of items using a shipping calculator. To do so, you need to figure out the weight and dimension for each item that you offer for sale.

3. Figure out box sizes  – Do you want to purchase boxes to ship your items, order customized boxes with your store name or logo, or use flat rate shipping boxes from UPS, USPS or FedEx? You need to make these decisions and write down the sizes of the boxes you will use. This is so that you can combine products into one box so that WooCommerce will use the shipping calculator to add up the dimensions of each item and add it to the box. You will need the inner and outer dimension plus the box or package weight.

4. Fine tune the shipping options – Once you know the dimensions of the items you are offering, and know the sizes of the boxes you have to ship your items in, you need to fine tune the shipping options. For example, do you want to use the shipping calculator and offer your customers to pay the exact fee that your shipping provider will charge? Keep in mind, that on top of the shipping fees, you will also need to pay for boxes and packing materials, such as bubble wrap, tissue paper, etc. to keep your items from getting wrinkled or damaged during the shipment. Additionally, consider the time it will take to prepare the items for shipping, wrapping them, putting them into boxes, and either getting them ready for pick-up by the shipping provider (which often requires an additional fee) or using gas and time for dropping the packages off at a shipping location. Will you do this yourself, or will you pay an employee to do this for you? This will either cost additional time or money to get done.

Once you figure all those options out, you can set up a shipping calculator to add any possible shipping and handling fees that can be applied as either a flat rate or percentage of the total. For example, you can add $10 to the shipping price of each order, or add 15% to each order to account for all work of shipping out orders. Also, you can add special promotions and shipping discounts, if you so prefer. As discussed above, you can offer discounted or free shipping with a minimum order, which can incite your customers to purchase more items. If your site offers items that clients frequently use, such as food, vitamins, or diapers, for example, you can offer a special subscribe and save program, such as Amazon.com does, where you offer free shipping as long as clients sign up to receive the items on a regular basis, such as every month, or every few months. Although you will have to pay for shipping each time, you will sell more inventory than through a single sale.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

More and more people are using their mobile devices to access the Internet. “In 2013, mobile users spent 63% more time on their devices accessing mobile websites and apps and this is set to increase,” states the Social Media Examiner. It’s often frustrating to try to visit a site on a phone, only to have the site not be user friendly with mobile devices. Different issues, such as a mobile website taking too long to upload, too much scrolling, or a font being too small to see on a phone screen, may affect people’s desire to visit your site. Some features, such as clicking like or sharing via social media may not be available on your mobile device unless you have customized it through a WordPress plugin. Many people don’t know that creating a mobile website for their site or blog will make it easier for individuals accessing that site from their mobile device to interact with it. And the good news is that creating a mobile website will not alter your original blog in any way.

Obox Mobile is a great WordPress plugin for making a blog mobile-friendly. The first version of this plugin came out in 2010, and allowed blog owners to convert their WordPress sites to mobile format. Obox works with any mobile system: Apple, Windows, Android or Blackberry. It retails for $79 for a single pack, which will allow you to work with five websites, or $139 for the developer option, which gives you access to work with unlimited mobile websites.

In March 2014, Obox Mobile 3.0 came out with new and improved features, which are:

* Complete Redesign: “The plugin has undergone a complete design overhaul, both the theme, the admin options panel and the features have been upgraded and improved. We’ve updated the layout to make it more usable with a sleek widgetized side-bar, improved slider and a massive amount of visual customization,” says Obox.

Obox Visual Customizer

*Visual Customizer: The new version of this WordPress plugin features a Visual Customizer which allows you to set up how you want your mobile website to look by changing different aspects of the design.

*Widgetized Homepage: The new Obox Mobile also features a Widgetized Homepage, which allows users to modify the content on their homepage by choosing different layouts, columns and categories.

*Popout Sidebar: A new Popout Sidebar “is the first WordPress mobile plugin with a sidebar for all your favorite widgets as well as search, categories, latest posts and more,” says Obox.

Obox also lists some other updates that came with version 3.0:

• Advert manager
  Sell advertising space on your mobile site with the built-in Obox Advert Manager.
• Author blocks
  Display all the details of your post authors, perfect for blogger networks.
• Automatic image resizing
  Obox uses the safe and secure WordPress image resizer to do away with manual resizing, saving time and ensuring better results.
• Control comments
  Elect whether to display or hide comments in posts, pages or both.
• Control menus
  Enjoy ultimate control of how your menu items show up on your website.
• Control thumbnails
  Choose whether to display or hide post images in post lists, pages or both.
• Display post meta
  Decide what ‘meta’ items you’d like to display such as author name, categories, date of post and post tags.
• Documentation
  Easy-to-understand and in-depth, our plugin docs are constantly kept updated to help you with your theme.
• Embed functionality
  Enabling your theme to automatically create video thumbnails and display statistics like views and plays.
• Feature slider
  All our themes offer a slick homepage feature slider to showcase your latest work, posts or products.
• Flexible homepage
  Use the simple drag-and-drop widget system to control your homepage layout, giving you endless design possibilities
• Footer text
  Add your own footer copyright text.
• Force excerpts
  Select whether to automatically display a summary of your post on the home and list pages.
• Force mobile activation
  Switch on this feature to force your site to display in mobile mode regardless of the device your visitor is using.
• Logo uploading
  Maintain your site’s branding with a logo uploader that allows for multiple logos to be stored for various uses.
• Multi language support
  Translate themes into your preferred language.
• Social linking
  Share on Facebook, Twitter or Google+, available in each post.
• Site analytics
  Track visitors who view your site via their mobile devices by inserting your Google Analytics code through a simple form in the settings panel.
• Threaded commenting
  All themes come with built-in threaded commenting, meaning better conversations for your visitors.
• Visual customizer
  Determine the look and feel of your mobile site using the built-in visual color customizer.
• Widgetized sidebar
  Include a pop-out sidebar with all your favourite widgets, including search, categories, latest posts and more.
• Works on all smartphones
  Obox Mobile works on iPhones, Androids, Nokia smartphones, Blackberry and Opera Mobile-based browsers.

Obox Mobile 3.0 will also provide you with tracking data, which will allow you to see how many people visit your mobile website during a day, month, quarter or year. This is very useful information so you can compare how many individuals go to your mobile vs. your regular site. Also, it provides additional information, such as how people found your site, through a keyword search, or from a link from another site. This information will help you to target additional visitors, and possibly guide you as to where and how to advertise to increase traffic to your site.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

In the last few weeks, I have had some clients call me in a panic over news of the Google Checkout shutdown. Google recently announced that Google Checkout will be retired on November 20, 2013. While this is certainly inconvenient for some online e-commerce sites, there are solutions to implement to keep an online store running. One easy alternative is using WooCommerce as a payment gateway for your WordPress site to continue to sell merchandise.

What is Google Checkout?

Google Checkout is an online process that Google created for paying for goods or services purchased online. Individuals enter their credit card information, as well a shipping address, into their Google account, which enables them to easily purchase items on e-commerce sites. Google Checkout also provides fraud protection, and allows buyers to track their online purchases.

Google Checkout

On November 16, 2011, Google Checkout was renamed to Google Wallet. This service allows users to store their credit, debit, and even gift card, information on their mobile phone to pay for purchases made on the web or in stores where contactless payments are accepted. Google Wallet also allows users to use special store promotions; all one has to do is have the barcode on the phone be scanned at checkout for the discount or promotion to be applied.

How Does the Google Checkout Closure Affect You?

The Google Checkout closure will affect many online e-commerce sites as of November 20, 2013. Here is what Google has to say:

• Merchants selling digital goods may transition to Google Wallet for digital goods
• Merchants selling through Google-hosted marketplaces (e.g. Google Play) will be unaffected
• Merchants selling physical goods will need to switch to third-party alternatives

WooCommerce – a Google Checkout Alternative

WooCommerce

If you have a WordPress site where you sell physical goods and you have used Google Checkout as your online processing center, you will need to replace that method this November. A great alternative is WooCommerce, which is a free plugin that allows users to customize their selling and shipping options for an additional fee.

As I explained in my previous blog, “WooCommerce – The Best WordPress E commerce  Plugin,” WooCommerce works by allowing customers to pick the items they want, add them to a cart, and then click purchase. Once they do that, they will be transferred to PayPal, which will take their credit or bank account information, process it, and then notify you once payment has been made. Once you know that payment has been secured, you can set up account updates for clients, so they can be alerted when their product ships, etc. WooCommerce has offsite checkout built-in, so you don’t need an extension to connect to PayPal. It also allows for built-in shipping options, with national, international, and even local delivery options.

WooCommerce lets visitors easily scroll through your site and view photos and detailed information about products and their different attributes, such as sizes and colors. It also integrates with social media, therefore allowing customers to leave reviews and share the products you offer on sites like Facebook. WooCommerce allows owners to set up promotional discounts and coupon codes, even rewarding buyers with discounts for sharing your products on social media forums.

WooCommerce makes it easy for business owners to keep track of sales. You can view and edit order details, get update statuses, and add notes to orders. You get access to built-in reports, and can even manage your inventory with this plugin.”

To replace Google Checkout, you will need to uninstall it from your WordPress site, and then install the WooCommerce plugin. I always recommend WooCommerce to my clients, and believe it is one of the easiest plugins in to integrate into a WordPress site.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information, visit Behla Design.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

So you decided to start a blog. You signed up for WordPress, built a pretty decent site, and started blogging regularly. A week passed, then a month, and you don’t see much change in terms of comments or followers? That is a common problem that most “newbies” face when deciding to set up a WordPress blog. This is why I want to share how going the extra mile will truly make a difference in attracting more visibility for your WordPress blog. And the best part is that the recommendations below are completely free, that’s right gratis! So, by spending a couple of hours integrating these plugins into your site, you should see a big improvement in your WordPress site’s popularity.

Top Two Social Media Plugins for Your WordPress Blog

1. ShareThis – This is what the creators of ShareThis say: “Whether you want the simplest, most robust tools to turn your media social, or to find the right audience for your advertising message, ShareThis puts sharing to work for you. Use the most innovative social media and sharing platform for the Web, ShareThis.” Simply put, this is a widget that you can customize for your blog. When visitors read your content, they can click on the button, and choose which social media forum they’d like to share your blog on. The options are Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, Myspace, etc.

Additionally, ShareThis provides you with analytics of your site. The analytics allow you to:

• Unlock the social value of your website with SQI (social quality of a website)
• Discover your most shared content
• Evaluate the top outbound and inbound social channels

By checking your analytics, ShareThis allows you to see activity that is happening on your site, find what content is the most popular, view which social media sites and other referrals direct traffic to your site the most, etc.

ShareThis was ranked #35 in Forbes’ America’s Most Promising Companies List for the second year in a row.
2. Livefyre –  This is what the site says about Livefyre: “Livefyre helps companies engage consumers through a combination of real-time conversation, social curation and social advertising.” Basically, Livefyre is a plugin that allows visitors to not only comment on your site, but to share their comments and the actual post on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, all comments that are created from that share to Facebook or Twitter will publish back to the WordPress blog post. In other words, even though the commenter might not comment on the blog itself, they can comment on Facebook, Twitter, and then Livefyre publishes it back to the the original blog post. The idea is that your site becomes the hub for all social commenting/discussion.

If this sounds pretty cool, you’re not the only one who thinks so. Their network powers real-time experiences across one billion page views each month. They reach 15 million registered users and 130 million unique visitors per month across 50,000 installations. Also, users see an increase of up to 10 times in user engagement after installing Livefyre.

Top Two Analytics Plugins for Your WordPress Blog

1. Google Analytics – One of the most important things you can do for your WordPress blog is to check its analytics. Google Analytics analyzes your site’s engagement and reports back to you. First, Google Analytics helps familiarize you with their plugin by offering a setup checklist and a getting started guide. This way, even if you’re never analyzed your WordPress blog with Google Analytics, you will easily be able to learn how to start. Second, if you still have questions, you can visit the help center to read articles that can help you along the way. Furthermore, you can visit the Google Analytics YouTube Channel to watch helpful videos.

“Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back,” according to their site. What that means is that Google Analytics will show you how many people visited your site, how they found your site – through keywords, or through another source, and if they clicked on any links on your WordPress blog. This way, you can see what content on your site is the most popular, and which social media sites are bringing the most traffic to you. Having this knowledge will help you get even more visitors, because you can see which topics are most interesting to your readers, and focus on writing about them. Or, when you see which social media sites, for example Facebook, direct the most people to your site, you can focus on promoting your content on that site through paid advertisements or giveaways and promotions.

2. Google FeedBurner – This is a top website for feeds. What are feeds? The site explains that “feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into “widgets,” “gadgets,” mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere.”

Have you seen this button on a website recently? Surely, you have. This button lets you subscribe and then read, watch or listen to content in any format, text, audio or video. This lets users keep up with their favorite websites without having to visit each one. And this is good news for you, because your WordPress blog updates will be automatically sent to those that sign up for them. So you don’t have to worry about visitors remembering to come back and read your content. The great news, is that your WordPress blog likely generates its own feed, so you don’t have to do anything to get it started!

FeedBurner offers Feedburner Stats, which allows you to get a good overview of your audience. This is what FeedBurner states that it provides:

• “Subscription data (e.g. number of subscribers by day, previous week, last 30 days and all time) and Reach data (the estimated number of individuals clicking or viewing your feed content in a given day)
• Breakdown of feed readers and aggregators, email services, web browsers and bots by which subscribers are accessing your content
• Clickthrough tracking
• Uncommon uses — sites where your content has been resyndicated including other blogs, directories and even spam sites
• Item enclosure downloads (podcasts)
• Live hits, conveniently translated to your local time zone”

While it takes some effort to connect the dots, if you want to have a successful blog with a large following, doing a few, easy steps that don’t cost any money can help you go the extra mile!

The team at Behla Design, Graphic Design & Web Development, is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of top web design, web development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals and has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

Contact us today to find out how we can help your next project.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

We have updates the Topanga WordPress Meetup schedule with the details for the upcoming meeting held July 18th at the Topanga Library. All users are invited to attend this meeting to share, collaborate and discuss all things WordPress.

TOPICS AND SPEAKERS

6:30 – 7pm – Pizza / Social Time
Enjoy pizza and refreshments prior to the meetup. This is a great time to connect with the group and catch up. Please bring $5 to contribute for pizza. Feel free to bring any food or beverage to share (non-alcoholic).

7pm – 7:30pm – WP Super Cache Plugin Overview
Learn how to turbo charge your site using the WP Super Cache Plugin.
Suzette Franck – (mt) Media Temple WordPress Evangelist, CSS Developer and speaker extraordinaire will present. Don’t miss it!

7:30 – 8:20 Super Slider Summit
There are a myriad of WordPress sliders (those slideshows that are on almost every home page these days) and in this presentation we will round up some of the best solutions so you can decide what is the right one to use for your next project. Join Lucy Beer, Jim Krenz and Andrew Behla as they share sliders that they have been using and why they like them.

8:20-8:30 Wrap up and Room Clearing
Time to gather your belongings and prepare to leave the library.

8:30-9:30 Social Time/Decompression at Canyon Bistro
The meetup continues at the Canyon Bistro (walking distance) for some time to socialize and continue our discussions. The Canyon Bistro is located south of the library. NOTE: if you plan to stay for the Canyon Bistro you might consider parking at Pine Tree Circle as the Library closes it’s parking garage at 9pm.

The Topanga WordPress Meetup Group meets on the third Thursday of every month at theTopanga Canyon Library. Please join us as we start our first official meeting!

***Please note that you can only use the Library WIFI with a County Library Card. You can apply for a card at the Library and you will then receive a code that can be used to use the WIFI.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

WordPress plugins are sometimes the fastest and easiest way to add functionality to your site. They can range from free to premium (paid) and can help reduce development time drastically. Finding the right plugin for the right job is often time consuming and can be a process of trial and error, especially when digging through the WordPress plugin repository of over 23,000 offerings! Plugins can be a blessing and also a curse when developers don’t update them or even pose security issues and vulnerabilities. Choosing the right plugin for the right job is often based on experience, but with this list of the 30 most popular WordPress plugins you will be in good company.

WP Template

Contact us today for more information.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.

If you are a musician in the new millennium the ways in which you market and sell your music is much different than it was in the 80s and 90s. Of course you can thank the internet for this. Napster seemed to pioneer and pave the way for music downloads.  Then  MySpace.com  cornered the market and paved the way for social media giving unsigned musicians and their fans an easy way to connect.

There are now many ways in which musicians can connect and communicate with their fans and find new fans.  Social Media has made viral marketing virtually free online and it is possible to reach a whole lot of people at once. However, unsigned artists are still having trouble competing with the big names on i-Tunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, and other sources that allow single downloads.

Here are a few factors to look at:

1)    Branding- a bio on Reverb Nation  is not enough anymore. Having a website with your logo, bio, songs, photos, and press will help you get worldwide recognition. This in addition to connecting through all of the social media sites will definitely help you reach a much larger audience.

2)    Price- most pay sources charge 20-30% or more for their cut of your profit. What if you could pay just 2 to 3%? You could market and sell all of your songs, chat with fans, and more all in one place!

Technology has made this possible and Andrew Behla of Behla Design has taken it one step further.

Read the interview with Andrew :

Q) Why should musicians have a wordpress site and how will they benefit from it?

A) Musicians need to have their presence in many media properties now. Facebook, Instagram, Bands in Town and their own site can all help drive traffic and interest for their music. At the center of all of these properties is the artists own site that can sell their music, give schedule updates and help promote their music, acting as a portal to their personalized pages on social media sites.

Q) What makes your product unique compared to others that are offering similar services?

A) I worked closely with a music manager who has over 20 years of experience in the music industry, managing bands, tours, promotions and music sales. We took a thorough inventory of the music industry to decide what is the best solution for his artist. We decided on a combination of using wordpress with the woo unsigned theme. This integrates with bandcamp as the music player to sell the music digitally. You can see the site for Makana to see this integration.

Another method is to use Amazon for CD sales and to also be an affiliate for Amazon so that the musician can receive a percentage of any sales through their site.

I’ve developed and design several sites for professional musicians with unique solutions based on the project’s individual needs. Andy Summers is the guitarist for The Police, and many other projects including solo work. Behla Design was responsible for a complete redesign and development for his site. I have integrated custom post types for his album geared towards Amazon affiliate sales, as well as a custom video player.

Makana is an internationally touring Hawaiian slack key guitarist. I worked closely with his manager to develop a strategy for online music sales and designed and developed his site. I’ve integrated Bandcamp, Nimbit and the Unsigned Woo theme for direct to fan music sales. The goal is to sell direct to the fans, letting the artist keep more of the profit. With this solution the artist can keep 85% of the sale, vs. 60% from iTunes or Amazon. http://www.makanamusic.com/

For the EDM artist, Downlink, I’ve integrated Soundcloud, Bands in Town and social media in a PSD (Photoshop) to child theme conversion using Woo Canvas.

All of the above sites are html5 compliant and responsive and I want to discuss the importance of that as well.

Q)  How is it possible to sell songs without going through paypal, etc. and for a lesser fee?

A) There are many solutions for online music sales. Bandcamp, Topspin, Nimbit and ReverbNation are all sites geared towards selling music directly to fans. The benefits of these sites is that they take a lower percentage of the sale and allow the artist to keep more of the profit when compared to the more traditional distribution methods such as iTunes or Amazon. I think there is a trend more and more to support an artist directly and to buy music from that artist. The other benefit is that an artist can quickly and easily offer premium or exclusive content from their site. This could be in the form of outtakes, video, or previously unreleased content.

Q) Will your services also help promote the songs?

A) We don’t help promote the songs, but can help in creating the site and solution using wordpress. We can also setup all of the accounts that are needed for an effective strategy to sell music online, as well as promote upcoming concerts, social media, fan interaction and news updates.

Q) Do you believe this technology is changing or will change the way artists do business online?

A) I do think that it’s getting easier and easier for a musician to take a DIY to music and host their own content. With the introduction of the Woo Unsigned theme, there are even themes that are using custom post types in side of WordPress to help publish and manage their content. This means that the content can be more easily organized based on type of content it is. For example, there are post types for albums, videos, band members, and upcoming shows.

Q) Are you a musician? Can you give us a little taste of your music?

A) My first passion in life is music. I play the trumpet, guitar, drums and percussion. I am a singer/songwriter as well as a sound engineer and producer. I have produced 3 albums for artists, have managed a recording studio and currently have my own studio. I’m more excited than ever to share the solutions that I’ve developed for my clients with the wordpress community.

The team at Behla Design, Graphic Design & Web Development, is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of top web design, web development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals and our founder, Andrew Behla, who has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. Contact us today to find out how we can help your next project.

Visit http://behladesign.com for more information. All Rights Reserved Behla Design ©2006-2026.