Touch Screen Technology Friendly Is a Must

There are more people using touch screen devices than ever before. People shop from their tablet computers, their smart phones and now many laptops and desktops are using touch screen technology. Having a website that is touch screen friendly is a must. It makes the shopping experience quicker for buyers so they will come back again in the future.

Add Video to Help Sell Your Products

Images only show the basics but they are not always clear. With so many scam artists working online, shoppers are worried about the type of product that they will buy. Help them with their decision by offering a video. Avoid making it a clear sales pitch; offer the details of the product, the benefits of buying it and show all the different views and uses. Video will also help your website rank higher in search engines since more people like to watch them.

Are you worried about the videos slowing down your website? Internet speeds are much quicker now. Adding it to YouTube and other similar video sharing sites will also be beneficial as more people watch from their smart phone or mobile device.

Social Media Dictates the Need

Knowing consumer need is important. Before 2013, it meant searching the internet for the number of competitors and previous years’ stats. It meant checking with experts about the need for products. Social media became popular in 2008 and in 2012 businesses found a way to use it to help promote and monitor the need for products. Companies can watch the number of ‘likes’ products and services gain, which will dictate the current trend in the market. This is important for all business owners to look out for.

Social media is also important to add a personal touch. It is easier to keep in touch with previous customers and offer discounts for loyalty. Social media makes it easier for fans to share their finds with friends, which increases the fan base. It is important to offer something worthwhile and always engage with the people on the social media pages.

Increase the Methods of Payment

People have become wary about giving their credit card details online. No matter how much you assure them that the website is secure, there will always be the thought of details being hacked at the time or a later date. It is also difficult to pay by credit card with mobile devices. This has led to the growing trend of using other payment methods, including PayPal and Square.

Improve Your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This is more for promoting your e-commerce business and is important in 2013. 2011 and 2012 saw the introduction of Google Panda and Penguin. Many websites were hit hard and found their rank dropping considerably. The problem is too many websites were using methods to trick the search engines instead of optimising their content.

As more people use search engines to find the products they want, it has become more important to use good SEO tactics. This helps pages rank highly on the search results so more people see you and buy from you. More traffic does not necessarily mean more sales but it helps to increase the chances.

Having a website is the most important thing when selling products and services. More people are turning to the internet for their shopping, whether they are looking for a service to help their own business or looking for new clothes. Work with this trend and make sure you offer everything that people need when shopping online. E-commerce trends change on a regular basis, so keep checking and change your website accordinly.

The post Five E-Commerce Trends of 2013 appeared first on Ion Digital.

The post Yellow Pages, Does it work? appeared first on Ion Digital.

I hurried to my meeting and to my utter stupidity left my device on the back seat of the cab not realising for over 4 hours that I was missing my vital communication tool, I was frantically trying to find it in pockets and my bag, nothing, gone, vanished.

I was reminded by Liz at Steel City Marketing that I could track it, eureka! I’d forgot that too!, a quick check on iCloud revealed it’s location, darting around the city from one place to the next, We tried to call it a few times, no answer surely it’s gone forever but the quick thinking cab driver who happened to find it on the back seat of his cab quickly called back and hand delivered it back to me.

Had it not been for iCloud and the honest cab driver from Sheffield Station, I may never have got my device back. The take home story from this is, if you havn’t already got iCloud enabled on your device, you probably should do as soon as possible, you never know when you’re going to need it next.

The post Find my iPhone appeared first on Ion Digital.

Last week Matt Cutts from the Google Webspam Team announced a new tool for webmasters called the Disavow Links Tool.

What the tool does is allows you to submit to Google a text file containing links to your site that you would like to drop from it’s index or disavow. This could be because in the past you have contributed to link spam such as search engine manipulation by paid links, forum / comment spam etc and you now want to clear up your incoming link profile, Matt stresses that this tool isn’t necessary for all users, it’s a power user tool and should only really be used if you know what you’re doing and shouldn’t be used by your average Joe.

You can read more about the disavow tool over on the Google Blog

The post Google Disavow Links appeared first on Ion Digital.

In this short article, I want to talk about the importance of not blocking  whole IP Ranges unless you really have to. Like many we use CloudFlare to serve as our CDN and our web filter, a kind of firewall I guess at DNS lev.  Recently we were experiencing a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) from a whole host of IP ranges within the United States, our server suffered downtime on a scale you couldn’t imagine.

We attempted to block individual IP addresses but as the addresses of the attack were too random this just just wasn’t effective, as soon as we blocked one, several more opened up the attack. Knowing we had CloudFlare and had knowledge that the system could block IP ranges from countries we decided temporarily to block the ENTIRE United States IP Block from accessing our site, cool the attack stopped within a few minutes and normal service was resumed, or so we thought. We had been removed from the index entirely, all pages, all content, everything!

What we forgot about was Google, as we don’t really sell in the US it wasn’t a huge issue to us to block persons or companies in the US from accessing our site, but a few short days later we performed a search on the Google UK index where we do rather well for our Magento related services and………. nothing………. zip……… We had been removed from the index entirely, all pages, all content, everything!

It was really perplexing as we had totally forgot we have blocked the US IP range and couldn’t fathom out what we had done wrong, had we been hit with some form of penalty and banned? Immediately we submitted a reconsideration request to Google in the hope we has only been mis-flagged by Google’s Penguin Update, and then the penny dropped, upon checking within Google Webmaster Tools we noticed that Google Bot was returning “403 Forbidden” a quick crawl with Google’s little tool confirmed this.  After we were sure that the DDoS Attack had subsided, we unblocked the IP Range and resubmitted our site back to Google and voilà within a few days we were back in the index with our rankings in tact.

The Moral of the Story

Never block Google Bot from accessing your site, a quick fix to prevent something bad from happening sure gave us more concern,  being dropped from the place we acquire our business from!

Have you had a similar experience? Let us know in the comments box below. 

The post Never Block The USA appeared first on Ion Digital.

But power users – including those who are currently using Twitter for eCommerce – know there is more to it than that.

Each tweet is an attempt to break free from the gravity of your own profile and spiral off into the deep space of viral marketing – and there are plenty of functions you can use to help give you a boost.

Knowing which deliver a more targeted message and which offer a broader-reaching but less specific route to your audience could be the key to success or failure.

The infographic above gives an idea of how the different methods of tweeting vary in terms of reach and relevance – and where the compromise can be struck.

But what do the captions above mean?

The Modes of Tweeting

We begin with the most direct forms of tweeting.

DMs are direct messages, sent to another user and impossible for anyone else to see. They are fundamentally well targeted, but with inherently limited reach.

@s represent mentions – publicly visible tweets that are directed at another individual on Twitter. Their potential reach is slightly higher, but often they will go unnoticed by all but their intended recipient.

From these one-to-one modes of tweeting, we move on to the more mass-audience options.

#e relates to existing hashtags – not necessarily trends, but hashtags that are commonly used on Twitter. Add one to your tweet and there’s a good chance that a small but specific audience will see what you have to say.

Tw is a general tweet to your own follower base. It might be retweeted to increase its reach, or you might include a hyperlink to drive traffic elsewhere - the two satellite options illustrated. This is about knowing your followers and making sure your tweets are relevant to their interests.

#n is the option of starting your own hashtag. This has the potential to achieve a good level of reach but, even if not, also allows you to mark out groups of your own tweets as relating to a particular topic.

Twt refers to a general tweet about a popular topic – not a trending topic, but something that’s making headlines elsewhere. There’s a good chance people will be searching for tweets relating to any big story.

Tt is for trending topics – interests, news stories or simply distractions that are popular on Twitter right now. Tweet about one of these and you’re reaching a large audience, but remember yours will be one voice among many.

RTc is gold dust in some topic areas – we’re talking here about being retweeted by a celebrity. It’s the Twitter equivalent of a big-name endorsement and could help you to reach thousands of their followers, many of whom will do anything to live the celeb lifestyle.

Finally, we’re back to your own tweets. This time, though, your tweet goes viral – retweet after retweet helps spread the word, while your follower count rises exponentially.

It only takes good planning or good fortune to tap into a truly viral-worthy topic – and create a follower base who will see every subsequent message you tweet.

The take-home message: Tweets can be wide-ranging or highly targeted. Find the right topic and you can reach thousands of people in one go.

The post How To Go Orbital in the Twitterverse appeared first on Ion Digital.

We have been offering support for a number of years to our clients from within our dedicated  client area, clients there have an individual support portal that is tied to their specific project, while this worked great for us when We first started our company, the rapid growth of projects has made it impossible to keep up with all tickets received, around 80% of support queries are generic in nature and have already been answered by our support staff at some point in time.

We have decided to create a dedicated support portal and knowledge base for all products supplied by Ion, this will serve as the first port of call for all support related queries where you will be able to find answers to the most common questions such as how to add a product to eCommerce Lite for example.

Please head over there now, register an account  and you can also submit tickets to our team if your question is not contained in the knowledge base, at present the KB is empty but as support queries roll in we will write up specific articles to help other users, you will also find our latest system status on the KB home page.

Access the support system now

The post Ion Support Online! appeared first on Ion Digital.

The idea is pretty simple, for £29.99 per month, we give you a rock solid open source eCommerce platform, a whole range of themes to choose from (in fact we pretty much have one to fit any industry) a free domain name, hosting and we’ll even throw in a £50 Google Adwords credit for good measure.

It’s been out in the wild now for a few  weeks and the response has been pretty awesome already we have 45 signups to the package and some of those retailers are already enjoying the benefits of selling their own products online.

We’ll upload a portfolio of lite sites  in the near future to show you just how the system is being utilised.

Regards

Wayne Austin

The post eCommerce Lite Launched appeared first on Ion Digital.

They say that:

The Lost Type Co-op is a collaboration between Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran. It was founded with the intention of providing unique and quality fonts based on a pay-what-you-want model. All designers get 100% of the donations their font receives.

We think that the collection both Tyler and Riley have amassed is worthy of note and well worth a look, remember that whilst you can download for free, it always well worth donating a few £’s to the cause

Blanch

Blanch is a display face, designed for the ‘Fruita Blanch’ brand, a family-run company. A traditional font with a contemporary feel, The Blanch typeface family is comprised of 6 weights; 3 condensed weights and 3 caps weights.

Download Blanch

DESIGNED BY ATIPUS  www.atipus.com

Cubano

Cubano’s personality is defined by its rounded corners, wide strokes, and semi-condensed letterforms. Featuring 167 glyphs, Cubano is available in all caps with numerals, punctuation, symbols and most accent marks. And with webfonts included, you can easily solidify your next site with Cubano!

Download Cubano

DESIGNED BY C. VAN DE WATER  chandlervdw.com

Bender

A chunky face for display type in two weights: inline and solid.

Download Bender

DESIGNED BY JIM DORE  jimdore.com

Avril Sans

Arvil has strong lines with rounded, soft terminals, to produce a strong, yet friendly letterform. Available in all caps with numerals, punctuation and also a wide range of symbols, Arvil is versatile and sure to deliver your next message with style.’

Download Avril Sans

DESIGNED BY BEN DALRYMPLE  bendalrymple.com

Atreyu

Atreyu is a contemporary textura blackletter inspired from Gothic Illuminated Manuscripts of 14th century Germany. I’ve always had an affinity for blackletter since I grew up drawing calligraphy. And lets face it nothing can say Heavy Metal to Happy Holidays like a good old fashion blackletter.

Download Atreyu

DESIGNED BY GREG ECKLER theviciouscircus.com

Lavanderia

Based on lettering found on Laundromat windows of San Francisco’s Mission District, Lavanderia features numerous opentype features and three weights.

Download Lavanderia

DESIGNED BY JAMES T. EDMONDSON work.jamestedmondson.com/

Carton

A strong yet sensitive slab-serif inspired by letterpress.

Download Carton

The post Best Fonts for 2012 appeared first on Ion Digital.

Sheffield is at the core of the project, which aims to deliver superfast broadband internet access at speeds of 25 Mbps on average to both businesses and residential customers throughout South Yorkshire.

For companies with an online presence, that means it is the perfect time to look into more modern web design as Sheffield residents gain the kind of bandwidth needed to deliver graphical, integrated eCommerce sites more quickly.

Jeremy Sheehan, sales and marketing manager at Digital Region, reveals that some firms are already capitalising on the potential of the project – including some new to the region.

“The Digital Region network is increasing business competitiveness within South Yorkshire and providing a platform which allows businesses to grow, as well as attracting new and existing businesses to base themselves within the region.”

However, it is not only online retailers who stand to gain from the possibilities unlocked by the scheme, as all businesses should find enhanced flexibility in their day-to-day operations.

“Not only will businesses be able to take advantage of the superfast broadband network to allow employees to work from home to increase productivity, but they will also be able to take advantage of the latest interactive audio-visual technology.”

With this in mind, companies have until the end of the year to enlist a Sheffield web design specialist and get their online product portfolios and shopping cart software up to scratch, if they are to beat the rollout of Digital Region.

Mr Sheehan notes that many local firms have already signed up to use an approved Digital Region ISP, putting the scheme well on track for the end of 2011.

“We already have a large number of businesses connected to the network via our internet service providers, and the first phase of the network build is on schedule to be completed in January 2012.”

Ion Digital can help deliver expert web design for Sheffield businesses, whether you have a clear brand identity in place or need ideas on colour schemes, logos and so on.

We are based in The Electric Works at the heart of the city’s Digital Campus, a stone’s throw from Sheffield station – to talk through your needs, pay us a visit or give us a call.

The post High Time for Sheffield appeared first on Ion Digital.