WordPress design

Ecommerce on WordPress

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Ecommerce on WordPressBuilding an effective website for your business is difficult enough, but setting up an ecommerce site can be overwhelming for many aspiring entrepreneurs. It doesn’t have to be, especially when if you build your website with WordPress.

Originally created for blogging, WordPress has become an open-source platform for all kinds of websites. Through the years, developers created plugins and themes that make it possible to turn a WordPress site into an online store. Ecommerce on WordPress offers many benefits.

What’s E-commerce?

Ecommerce (or e-commerce, as it’s sometimes written) is defined as buying or selling products or services through the internet. You can use a computer or a mobile device to conduct your transaction. Buying online requires entry of credit card information or processing the payment through a third party, such as PayPal.

When most people think about e-commerce, they may think of the megastores that sell physical products to retail customers. But e-commerce can also include B2B transactions, services and digital downloads. And e-commerce gets more complex every year.

Ecommerce vs. Traditional Retail

Starting a traditional retail business requires a lot of set-up and investment before you can make a dime. But if you set up an e-commerce website, your store can start selling your goods almost immediately. The costs associated with ecommerce are lower, too. Other advantages of selling through e-commerce include:

• E-commerce overcomes geographical limitations. You can sell to anyone, anywhere. And as you market your website, you expand your customer reach!

• Since customers shop on their devices, you eliminate their travel time and costs. In fact, since everyone’s online, you’re where your customers are spending their time.

• You gain new customers as your search engine visibility increases, which also builds brand awareness. You can even serve niche markets with less hassle.

• It’s easier for your customers to find what they’re looking for on a website. You can provide as much information as you want on your products and even allow comparison shopping.

• You can enable special deals, periodic bargains, coupon codes and group buying opportunities.

Set Up Shop the Easy Way

You can build a WordPress website yourself and configure WordPress with ecommerce, or you can do the smart thing and bring in an expert to help you. Lone Bird Studio specializes in building successful e-commerce sites. When you go with Lone Bird, the benefits include:

• A lot fewer headaches — in fact, your website’s cheaper and performs better in the long run

• Better-looking, custom website design, built by professionals, that reinforces your brand

• Faster-loading web pages that encourages commerce

• A website that’s compatible with all of the latest mobile technologies — and your site needs to be mobile-friendly

• Having a pro set up your payment and shipping capabilities

• The added advantage of getting increased visibility in search engine results

• Superlative support that minimizes any potential downtime

What are you selling? If you want to start your own web store, get WordPress with ecommerce website set up quickly. You can do it yourself, but if you need help, contact Lone Bird Studio.

Has Google Mobile Indexing Killed Your Business?

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Google Mobile Indexing You may have spent thousands of dollars designing, building and marketing your business website. How do you know if it’s working? You can track traffic to and leads from your site. You can search for your keywords to see how you rank. But it may change day-to-day, not just month-to-month.
Trust Lone Bird Studio to keep your website ranking high, as we know what to look for. Google continually changes its algorithms in ways that directly impact how it ranks your website. So what is Google mobile indexing and why does it matter to you? Let’s begin by tackling the first part of that question, so you get an inkling of whether it’s killing your business or boosting it.

What Is Google Mobile Indexing?

Sometime in 2014, the number of people using mobile devices to search the internet passed the number of people using desktops and laptops. And all of a sudden, mobile users became vital to your business. Actually, mobile users have been trending up almost since smart phones were invented.
Google has acknowledged the trend and made mobile-friendly websites rank higher than those that don’t have a mobile website design. It makes sense, as more and more people access the internet on mobile devices. Google mobile indexing means that Google looks at your mobile site first. If it’s unresponsive or incomplete, you’re ranked lower.

So if you haven’t given your site a mobile web design, your site is going to suffer in Google searches. Since Google accounts for more than 90 percent of all internet searches (in October 2018), you can’t afford to rank lower. You’ve worked hard at SEO and design. If you neglected to include a mobile web design, then Google mobile indexing will kill your business!

How Can You Implement Mobile Website Design?

To be compliant with the Google mobile indexing, your website simply has to work — it has load quickly, work perfectly and look great — on a device as small as a smartphone. Lone Bird Studio knows that mobile sites need to do certain things to save space (which is at a premium) and time (ditto), such as:

• Choose a mobile-friendly design template, not just a mobile-responsive design.
• Confine your web design, graphics and content to the screen size, not to an arbitrary frame or page width.
• Optimize all your images for fast loading.
• Resize the graphics and the copy so both are readable and not overwhelming.
• Make sure your mobile version has all the information your full site offers.
• Remove hovering elements, which don’t render on a mobile device.
• Delete any Flash and pop-up elements. They don’t work on mobile devices either.

If you ignore Google mobile indexing, your search ranking will suffer, which directly translates into business-killing lost sales. To get and implement a mobile website design and restore your website to its place on Page 1 of Google searches, contact Lone Bird Studio.

WordPress 101

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WordPress Content Management System

WordPress powers 1 of every 6 websites on the Internet
WordPress represents

25.6% of all websites representing small, medium and big business use WordPress.
72.4 million websites host a WordPress blog.
22% of active domains created in the USA run on WordPress.

WordPress Explained

Investing money into a company website is like investing money in any other company asset. You want to get the most out of your money right from the start. Picking the right WordPress website with the right options the first time is important. We strive to ensure maximum ROI and satisfaction with minimum maintenance.

There are three main differences to be aware of when comparing WordPress options. The choices are a pre-built template, a Child Theme, or a custom-built WordPress website.

WordPress Templates

Templates are where many of you will start. It is a very cost effective and flexible way to begin.

When choosing a theme, look for the overall feel or style you want. Check what features in the design can be edited. There are thousands available, both free and purchased.

Many of the cool and specialty templates like restaurants or apartment rentals, for example, are generally paid templates. Don’t let that scare you. The costs are generally less than $100. We can do some beautiful customized work to tailor these templates to your needs.

Child Themes

We can create some pretty cool web designs with this method. Actually, this is where we do most of our work. Creating child themes allows very distinctive customization of WordPress templates to make them truly yours. A child theme is a cross between template and full custom WordPress. It is our most popular choice with businesses that “get it” and realize they need the web to grow.

You can save quite a bit of money starting with a child theme. Let Lone Bird tailor it especially for you!

Custom-built WordPress

A custom-built WordPress website means that we design and build a custom theme that will be unique to you and your branding. It is unique for your business, yet retains the WordPress functionality. We build and customize your website exactly as way you want.