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Why Are Custom Fields Hidden in WordPress?

You are working on the most amazing blog post known to man, and you just need to adjust one last custom field before publishing.  But where in the world are your custom fields?  I just know they are supposed to be there – and my coworker who logged in yesterday could see them fine. Don’t worry, you didn’t just imagine that.

Welcome to the funky Screen Options feature.  In recent versions, WordPress introduced the little Screen Options tab in the top right corner.  If you select this tab, a series of options with check box fields will come up, and chances are your custom fields and some other options are not selected.  This means they are hidden, so just check the box.

These settings are configured per-user, so a different user logging into WordPress might or might not see the same fields that you do.

Website Project Management

I am one of the first to admit it, there is a lot of web design talent out there.  In fact there are a lot of talented web designers right here in Austin.  But even the most talented web designer can fail at providing a good solution to the client.  A large part of the problem is lack of project management.

Working Inside the Design Instead of With the Client

Some web design professionals run through the same mundane steps they are accustomed to in their own special way, and they never once inform the client about what they are planning to do and what they have or have not done.  So how does their client know what to expect?  How does the website owner know what stage of the process they are in?

Will the website ever actually get done?

The Web Design Process

To establish good project management you must start with a basic plan, a blue print of what is about to happen.  For our customers, we offer a flow chart of the general phases they can expect to occur during the project.  For example, the first phase is mock up designs.  Based on the scope and desires of the customer, we give them an idea of the timeline for that phase and when the next phase should begin.

This gives the customer some peace of mind in that early stage when they are not yet familiar with us, and it helps them to plan their own tasks as well, like when to deliver their next batch of content to us.

Good Tools

Not all customers are alike, so not every one of them will want to use my preferred tool.  But in most cases I invite them to our project management software system, so they can login to a special area to see notes, communication, and files related to their project.  I always have at least one customer who prefers basic email communication or even phone calls over the website system, but we still use the system for our internal staff.

With our project management software, all of our staff can track notes and progress for a project, create task lists and check off items when they are completed, track milestones, and share important files such as programming documentation and mock up designs.

Steamlining & Succeeding

It’s a shame to hear stories from website owners who are disenchanted with the web design industry because they had a poor experience previously.  A great deal of those stories could have been prevented with some basic project management.  Unfortunately, a great designer without quality project management might feel just as overwhelmed and lost as the customer who is wondering what the status of their website is and why it hasn’t launched months after they originally planned.

Compromising for Ecommerce: Order Request Forms

Not everyone is prepared for a large e-commerce website development project.  Done right, a shopping cart driven website can be rewarding for a business, but it is also an involved project and it requires some comfort with the idea of managing orders online.

In other cases, a company may produce too many special order kinds of products to be able to offer a predetermined, fixed price item on a website.  Or maybe there are a vast number of special questions they need to ask the customer to get their order just right.

Along comes the order request form.

What I mean by this is basically a simple online email form, but it is tailored with the shopper in mind.  It asks specific questions or pieces of criteria that will help the merchant streamline that order-building process.  What size do you prefer?  What day do you want to make an appointment to look at samples?  How many batches would you like?

A simple order request form does not accept any payment.  It is a preliminary step to gather enough information to allow someone at the business to put together an appropriate order and contact the customer to pay offline once the final balance has been determined (or through a separate system).

It is also possible to create more sophisticated forms that do accept payment.

Some website owners will insert a two-step process that is not directly attached to the form.  For example, after you fill out the initial form, you get a “thank you for your request” page with a PayPal button.  The disadvantage with this set up is that the PayPal button is not directly linked with that form, so the payment is not as easily tracked, and it does not affect the success of the order fulfillment since they are submitted completely independent of each other.

A step further from this is a truly integrated payment gateway, working together with the form code.  This requires a little more sophisticated programming assistance, but popular gateway services like Authorize.net make it fairly easy for a web developer to achieve these days.  With Authorize.net’s “hosted order form” option, using the SIM (simple integration method), you can create a very basic request form on your own site, followed by the payment form on the credit card service provider’s site.

Setting up a payment form in this way is usually helpful for service-based businesses, because it allows their customer to enter a custom order amount (for varied invoices), and the cost of the credit card gateway service and programming needed to integrate it is reasonably low.

Tips For Writing a Blog Worth Reading

Blogs can be a powerful tool both in business and personally. You don’t have to be the strongest writer or most eloquent expert on the subject at hand, because blogs are a learning process.  We write until we exhaust a topic and perhaps delve into new points, looking for feedback along the way.

Perhaps you never studied writing and you have never read a book from cover-to-cover since your school days; that does not mean you’re bound to struggle with writing. In fact, studies have shown that reading, albeit a book, article, or glimpsing at a blog can improve a writer’s style ever so slightly. However, after studying writing, there are a few techniques and stylistic choices that can improve your writing on and offline.

Show, Don’t Tell

There’s a golden rule that every writer has been told since they first put pen to page (or, more appropriately, fingertips to keys): “show don’t tell.” Many writers are plagued by this simple phrase because it can often be difficult to grasp the difference between “showing” and “telling”.
Telling means that you are simply writing in a matter-of-fact style (i.e. The ball is red; My business has a large sales and customer service department; We make and develop websites). All of these examples are fine grammatically and they accomplish just what a sentence should – to inform the reader. However, notice the weak nature of these sentences. They lie flat on the page and leave the reader feel nothing more than the movement of their eyes from left to right.

“Showing” is the ability to grasp and maintain the readers attention by giving apt details. A simple way to do this is to think about the subject at hand with all of your senses (i.e. The red rubber ball had a fine, protruding zigzag groove; WEBii’s staff includes a variety of experienced, helpful, and concerned individuals who take pride in their work; Our company develops contemporary, electrifying websites that will place your business at the forefront of the Internet). It’s adjustments like these that will change your sentences into statements, into something you can be proud of and the reader will have enjoyed reading.

Brevity

While “show don’t tell” is the golden rule for any strong piece of writing, brevity is still pivotal to any piece. Blogs, especially, need to be brief (more brief than a fictional story or a book). Some people spend all day sitting at a computer reading whatever’s in front of them for work or pleasure. This can cause bad posture and waning vision. This is the point where proofreading becomes a key component to writing. If you have a difficult time getting to the end of your own piece, then go back and make the necessary corrections. That said, even if you are passionate about your business or cause, you should never make the experience of reading your blog the equivalent to “pulling teeth.” Get to the point, expand with enough detail to either start a discussion or answer a question, and conclude.

3 Reasons to Add a Form On Your Website

1. Email forms cut down on spam.

Whenever you have an email address blatantly published on your web page, even if it is not linked, you are at risk for receiving a lot of spam. Often, automated programs crawl websites throughout the Internet grabbing up email addresses and adding them to spam mailing lists.  They may also use those email addresses to forge the “from” address when they send out their spam messages to thousands of annoyed people.

Spam is a problem that is difficult to completely snuff out but there are ways to minimize the amount of spam you receive, and help keep your sanity!  By using a quality web form, you can hide the email address from the public eye.  By going further and adding something like captcha to the form (those funny codes you have to type in), you narrow down the abuse activity coming from robots (automated programs).

2. You can track your web leads.

A solid analytics program is great if you want high quality tracking of your website traffic, but that won’t guarantee that you can track all the emails and phone calls you received from folks visiting your website.  By creating a form, you have a new way to track visitors’ interest.  You can set up special reports in Google Analytics to track a certain form confirmation page, or set up a unique email account that receives all the requests from that form.

3. You can build your mailing list.

A brief request form can ask a few simple questions, or even just Name and Email Address.  By gathering this info from the opt-in requester, you can build up your mailing list.  At minimum, you can do one good email follow up with that person, and maybe close the sale.  Even better, you can run a regular email marketing campaign to your list of opt-in contacts, reminding them each quarter or perhaps each month about your business and offering the latest promotion.

Entice Them With A Slideshow

Want a boring static website that no one ever revisits?  Of course not!  So how can you make your website more kinetic and engaging with just a little bit of effort?

A good slideshow is an effective feature that can bring new interest, updated information, and energy to your website.

I usually recommend including the slideshow on your homepage, while avoiding it on other interior web pages.  This keeps your front page fresh and intriguing, and as people start to delve into the rest of your content they are engaged enough to concentrate on the information rather than just bold visuals (or at least we hope so).

How Many Slides?

Think about the attention span of your visitors.  Most likely, you shouldn’t expect them to linger more than a few seconds before making a decision to click on something, call you, or some other action.  So how many slides can you really show them, effectively, in that time span.  Usually my answer is 3 or 4 maximum.  This may vary with your industry and the type of audience, as well as the type of content you will focus on.

Slideshow Content

Your slideshow can be ever-changing.  It is a good idea to revisit the content of your slides regularly to be sure they are focusing on the right products or services and the right message for the moment.  You can include things like:

• A new product
• A sale or special coupon
• Recent news about your company, like an award that you won
• Your company’s motto
• Your company’s success rate
• A key benefit that you offer to clients (how successful they will be)
• Customer testimonials (Let them sell your product for you.)
• Call-to-action (ex: download this or call us for a free demo)

Your slideshow is an ideal place for bold visuals – colorful photographs of your products, portraits of your customers using your product/service, humorous images, the cover of a publication or samples from marketing pieces.

How Big?

The dimensions of your slideshow can be big and bold, but ask yourself these questions first:

Will most of my audience be able to see the majority of my web page content?

If you know that 50% of your audience is using small mobile devices, your slideshow probably should not take up so much screen real estate that they can’t read it without scrolling, let alone the content below it.  If you know that a large chunk of your visitors use wide screen monitors and they are very visual and love graphics more than most, maybe your slideshow should be particularly large and in-your-face.

Is the slideshow more important than the content below it?

Your slideshow should highlight important factors about your business and the aim is to engage your visitor to convert them into a true prospect or customer.  But you might also require information below the slideshow area that highlights other aspects of your service, or maybe that offers online shopping tools.  You don’t want to completely hide these things, so be conscience about a slideshow that is too tall.  People don’t always mind scrolling, but it is a detour for immediate sales.

Here is an example of a large slideshow design; since this salon is very visual, it has a good impact on the customers.

Compatibility & Usability

Flash technology used to be the go-to for creating pretty slideshows, but that time has passed.  You can thank the rapid growth of iPad and iPhone for this, since neither supports Flash.  (As well as the fact that there are many more open technologies available these days.)  To ensure that 100% of your visitors can view your slideshow, it is best to use a more versatile technology like jQuery or HTML5 for the slideshow.  If you have a WordPress or other CMS website, many of the slideshow plugins support these accessible options.

5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Other Product

One of the most challenging aspects of web design planning is choosing your primary call to action.  If you sell more than one type of product, you find yourself having to choose a favorite product.  After you determine that primary product and the main target to drive your sales to, you still need to make sure not to ignore your other offers.

1. Design Clear Menu Tabs

If you bury your #2 selling product deep down in your website with the only accessible link being in a paragraph on your homepage, your customer will have a hard time finding it.  It’s a good idea to have a consistent link to that product or its category on your navigation menu, so your visitor can easily locate it from any interior page in the website.  Keep in mind that people might also reach your website through a specific page that was indexed on Google, and not necessarily the home page.

2. Create an Audience Page

Think about the type of customer who will buy your secondary product.  What size business are they? What industry?  What kind of features attract them?  Create a section in your website devoted to them and that speaks their language.  You can include helpful tips, highlights about features that will best help their business, and in several places make sure you are linking directly to the product’s purchase page.

3. Mention It On Sidebars

On another page that describes your primary product, think about including a side note that asks the visitor “Is this a better solution for you?” and suggests your alternative product.  This is probably best suited for a right sidebar or a subsidiary area that does not take too much attention from your biggest selling item, but it will get the attention of that certain customer who feel like the page he is on is not fitting his needs.  Include a good visual (like a photo of that “certain type of customer”) so it catches their eye when appropriate.

4. Blog About It

Think again about that certain customer who should buy your “other product”.  Write about something that is important to them – maybe it’s an issue they struggle with in their business.  Describe how this particular product can solve that problem for their business, and include links to the product’s dedicated web page.

You can practice this on your own website’s blog (hosted within your main website) or as a contributing writer for an outside website.  Either would be beneficial and create exposure for that product.

5. Create Landing Pages

In good SEO, you really do have to hone in on certain keywords so you don’t spread yourself too thin and get little to no results.  The more concentrated (and strategic) your keyword efforts, the better the rankings for those phrases will do in time.  With this in mind, you can’t choose one priority product for your website content and then suddenly change all of it to talk about the other product without losing some of those SEO results.  So, a good way to promote certain less priority keywords (less priority products) is to create specialized landing pages in your website that target that market.

This really goes hand in hand with the “audience page” suggestion, but  you can go even further by creating entire resource areas and multiple pages that describe every feature, every concern, every facet of that product and its value.  If you are also doing a pay-per-click campaign as a supplement to your SEO efforts, you can target some of those ad campaigns toward these specific pages to take the prospect to the exact right information.

Tales of Untracked PPC

To my dismay, I have heard several stories this year about companies who are regularly spending hundreds or thousands, or even $10,000′s every month on their Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) and they actually do not even know what their return on investment is.

Seriously, they have no idea. They might even have a person in the marketing department who handles that, or a professional company who manages it for them. And they still can’t tell me what their sales conversion rates are and if they are happy with their PPC campaigns.

I have nothing against Google Adwords and Remarketing technologies.  Some people really succeed with those strategies, and there are often good fits for using those methods of marketing.

But if you are participating in PPC and not getting any return, it is just money being thrown out the door and into the wind.

Instead, the business should consider channeling that marketing budget toward a quality SEO campaign that is a complete package, fully tracked, and with a long-term result.

SEO is different than PPC because it can keep working for you long term.  As soon as you turn off your PPC ads, they go offline.  That’s it.  No more visibility.  And when you turn them on – poof – there they are immediately again.

SEO strategies take more time to implement and get results, but the results are astounding organic results – results that stay on Google, Yahoo, and Bing over the course of weeks, months, and maybe even years after your campaign is over.

Is it important to keep an eye on your SEO after your campaign is over? Of course, because remember that your competitor can catch up to you.  They might wise up and hire a great SEO expert and go up in rankings after you stop your campaign.  But that takes time and must be done well to compete with your quality SEO results, once they are established.  For this reason, we do recommend evaluating your SEO rankings, your conversion and bounce rates, and search engine saturation regularly.

When WEBii manages an SEO campaign, we recognize that tracking component as well.  It is vital for us to regularly run a ranking report and regular analyze shift in traffic coming to the website from search engines, from referral websites and from direct visits.  We help the customer understand the data and track changes with month to month comparisons, large website content changes, or maybe an end of quarter review.

Have you talked to a business owner recently who mentioned their oblivious battle with Google Adwords?  Are they lost and uncertain if they should continue?  Please share your comments!

Stop Address Book Hijacking

Did you know that you could be “spamming” your business peers and friends and not even realize it?

It is ever so important to enlist the help of your reliable IT professional and make sure all of your systems are regularly scanned and cleaned of infections.  For one thing, a hidden virus (like a “Trojan virus”) could infect your Windows computer and crawl into your Microsoft Outlook email program’s address book – and grab all of your contacts!

From time to time we see some suspicious emails come in that appear to be “from” someone we know (like a customer).  But when you open the message, you realize there are some funny looking links and not much personalization to the message at all.  This is a common sign that that person’s computer was probably compromised, and the malicious culprit is now going through their contacts and sending messages that try to further infect other machines.

WEBii is not an IT network support company.  But we do recommend that you have a quality IT professional behind you – either in the form of an employee or a contract firm.  That professional will be responsible for ensuring the regular maintenance and health of your actual computers and office network, and they will help to prevent a situation like “email address book hijacking”.  By using those IT services and keeping your systems clean, you actually help us to keep our technical support inboxes clean, too.

Let’s Play, What’s That Error? Authorize.net Module Errors

Authorize.net is by far the most popular payment gateway supported today.  It is now a default option with most shopping carts, and every bank or merchant service company I know can offer it. But, as with anything else that is popular, there are many questions surrounding it.

While the module is usually “plug and play”, it does require some testing and fine tuning.  I usually recommend a good run of “test mode” tests followed by some “real world” (live production) tests.

Even when your module software is working great, your website can encounter errors.  Credit cards can be declined for a variety of reasons, some legitimate and some just a result of a technical glitch.  But the “response code” from Authorize.net during debugging are rather cryptic.

Here is a link to a resource table on Authorize.net that can help interpret the response codes.

Another helpful thing to know is that there are also “Authorize.net simulators”, usually offered by other merchant service processors who have a proprietary system but want to be easily compatible.  These simulator modules can also return the same kinds of response codes, but they may interpret them differently.

Recently, when I was dealing with an eProcessingNetwork integration (which uses a simulator), the response code returned was “2″ and it was declining every transaction.  It turns out that eProcessingNetwork had documentation pointing this code to a closed or improperly setup merchant account.  Upon further investigation, it turned out that the bank account had been temporary suspended (by mistake).