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A lot of people have been asking me about the code for my digital fireworks recently. Just how do I do those cool spinning and flipping and leaping things? Is is magic? Is it some special language?

No. Most of it is dead easy.

Today we’re going to look at a dead easy CSS3 spin animation which is triggered by the mouse :hover. Like this:

Wow! So how do we do that? Easy. Firstly you want to add a class to your image you want to rotate. I call this class “rotate”. For those of you who are newbies this is the html I am using:

<img alt="liquid logo drop with text iq" style=";height:auto;;position:inherit !important;" indx="57982382" rank="1" irank="463080048" atitle="CSS3 Spin Animation" data-src="//IMAGEFILE.png" data-srcset="" class="rs-article-img-src do-lazy">

Once that is done you want to copy the following CSS code and drop it into your CSS file:

.rotate{
    -webkit-transition-duration: 0.8s;
    -moz-transition-duration: 0.8s;
    -o-transition-duration: 0.8s;
    transition-duration: 0.8s;
     
    -webkit-transition-property: -webkit-transform;
    -moz-transition-property: -moz-transform;
    -o-transition-property: -o-transform;
    transition-property: transform;
     
    overflow:hidden;
 
    }  
 
.rotate:hover  
{
    -webkit-transform:rotate(360deg);
    -moz-transform:rotate(360deg);
    -o-transform:rotate(360deg);
}  

Save and reload your page and you will now find that your image rotates 360 degrees when you hover over it. Pretty cool and dead easy! Just give the image a class and copy the code! And in the future if you ever want any other images to rotate, just add class=”rotate”!

Slowmo Style

For those who want to get creative you can change the transition duration to a higher number so that is rotates slowmo style…

Ninja Style

And if you want to go nuts you can change it so that it spins mega fast lots of times by lowering the transition duration and then setting a much higher degree of rotation. Ninja style…

The post CSS3 Spin Animation appeared first on Liquid Web Design Company London.

Today we’re going to talk about what makes a good SEO – this article will be useful for hiring managers and aspiring SEO’s.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that SEO is a very technical job requiring all sorts of digital skills and advanced technical capabilities. People hire the boffin because it feels right. He knows how to code really complicated stuff so he can do SEO right?

No. The truth is that the boffin is totally the wrong choice for most businesses. In my opinion: the more technical the person, the less likely they are to actually be good at 95% of what I would consider high quality SEO.

To my mind there are four main elements to SEO. In a perfect world an SEO will have the following profile:

SEO Writing Skills – 30%

Your SEO needs to be a solid writer. If they cannot sit down and write a high quality article about any subject matter within a couple of hours then don’t hire them. They need to be able to create tight content to a tight deadline. They need to be able to target content to particular keywords and phrases and the language needs to be natural.

They do not need to be a particularly creative writer. They just need to be able to write solid articles on just about anything and they need to be able to do it to a deadline. The text needs to be simple and it needs to read well. Ideally this experience was gained writing for the web but it’s not essential. What’s important is that they can write clear, well-formed sentences which appeal to all readers.

Writing is a skill that most people can learn. But it takes a long time. Most people think they can write because they can form a sentence. I would say that it’s rare to find someone who is good at writing who is under the age of 30. By “good” I mean they can write clear, unpretentious copy on any subject matter to a deadline. It is even rarer to find someone who is interested enough in your product or service to write about it regularly in an interesting way.

Before even interviewing someone I would be asking them to research and write an article on a particular set of business related keywords and I would be giving them two hours to do it. If they couldn’t come up with the goods I wouldn’t bring them to interview.

For bonus points they would be giving me ideas for inbound links and would have some evidence of interest in the market.

Selling Skills – 40% of SEO

A lot of people are surprised when I say selling is an essential part of SEO. To my mind it’s the most valuable skill. It is almost half of the job.

Why are selling skills important for SEO?

High quality links are the key to high positions in Google. I don’t care what Google tell you or what you’ve read on some blog about content. Yes, content is important. Of course you need a reason for people to link to you. But without links from high quality websites you’ll never achieve top positions. When creating new content I always spend more time researching and obtaining the links for the content than actually researching and writing the content.

Have you ever wondered why that rubbish article is on page one and that high quality article is on page three? The reason is two things: quality links and Google News. These two things are the key to page one presence. Most websites will never qualify for Google News so they must focus on links.

There are a number of ways to obtain high quality links. The best way I know of is to come up with a really good reason for people to link to you – some link bait. Then for someone with selling skills to reach out to get links. They need to do it in a target driven way. Some form of performance related pay makes sense. The easiest and quickest way to do that is to get on the phone and sell it. Emails are slow and you can get done for SPAM. The phone is perfect. It’s quick and simple and you’ll know within seconds if you are talking to the right person or if you’re wasting your time.

Your SEO needs to spend a lot of time on the phone trying to convince people to link to the great content he or she has created. Then they need to follow up those phone calls with emails and more phone calls. They need to be ruthless, charming, determined and totally unperturbed by having to make hundreds of phone calls to obtain a couple of links. That’s a big part of SEO. If they can’t do it then forget them.

My perfect SEO has worked for a couple of years in a telephone sales role on a commission basis. He or she is goals orientated and loves an old school sales bonus challenge.

Networking Skills – 25%

My perfect SEO will be very good at networking. I want their contact book to be full of telephone numbers and their desk to be littered with business cards. Why? Because HIGH QUALITY CONTACTS = HIGH QUALITY LINKS. If you know the right people then you only need to ask nicely. A lot of people do not know the value of links.

Your SEO needs to be able to hunt down those select few people who can deliver high quality links. It doesn’t matter whether it’s through LinkedIn, personal contacts, industry events or down at the golf club. Your SEO needs to always be on the lookout for links. If you already have an SEO and he or she isn’t I would be very, very worried.

Technical Skills 5% (HTML, CSS & JAVASCRIPT)

I would happily hire someone to do SEO without technical skills since it is only 5% of the job.

In an ideal world, the perfect SEO will be able to write rock solid HTML, CSS and Javascript for on-site optimisation. But we don’t live in a perfect world. I would happily hire someone to do SEO without those skills since it is only 5% of the job. It’s a much better idea to hire someone who has 95% of the skills base and then either send them on a course or simply outsource the on-site optimisation if you have nobody in your team who can deliver.

Conclusion: The Perfect SEO

So there we have it ladies and gentlemen. SEO is not a technical job for 95% of the time. Yes you need a fast website and yes you need some quality, original content. But more than anything you need followed LINKS and only people with sales and people skills will get you those.

So before deciding on hiring an SEO, ask yourself these questions:

• How many people do you know who are good both at writing code and copy?
• How many people do you know who are good both at writing code and selling?
• How many people do you know who are good both at writing code and networking?

Most technical people are totally rubbish at selling and networking and will be the first to admit it. Occasionally you will find someone with very strong coding and writing skills but those people are few and far between.

A common complaint is that SEO’s are all strategy and no results. It’s because they lack 95% of the skills to deliver.

Hire wisely…

The post How to Hire a World Class SEO appeared first on Liquid Web Design Company London.

So today we’re going to take a second lesson in CSS3 and learn how to animate some stuff on the screen. Why? 1) Because we can 2) Because is you want to be a rockstar designer one day people will ask you to do some animations and 3) right now CSS3 is the best thing around for it.

So let’s begin. This may not work in IE but who cares? We’re too cool for that junk right? Anybody who uses IE deserves to have a pitiful online experience in my opinion.

Ok, so we’re going to be using the @keyframes rule:

Here’s the Animation

Here’s the HTML

Basically it’s a div with an id called “blockmotion”. We have placed an image inside. The image is a png with the background colour to alpha making it transparent.

<div id="blockmotion"><img alt="design is our job alpha" style=";height:auto;;position:inherit !important;" indx="57982382" rank="3" irank="619692347" atitle="CSS3 Animations" data-src="//liquid.gallery/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/design-is-our-job-alpha.png" data-srcset="" class="rs-article-img-src do-lazy"></div>

Here’s the CSS3

Simply drop this in your CCS file hit save and there you have it. Job done!

#blockmotion {
background:#479ccf;
width:200px;
height:200px;
border-radius: 50px;
position:relative;
-webkit-animation-name:myfirst;
-webkit-animation-duration:10s;
-webkit-animation-timing-function:linear;
-webkit-animation-delay:2s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count:infinite;
-webkit-animation-direction:alternate;
-webkit-animation-play-state:running;
animation-name:myfirst;
animation-duration:10s;
animation-timing-function:linear;
animation-delay:2s;
animation-iteration-count:infinite;
animation-direction:alternate;
animation-play-state:running;
}

 @-webkit-keyframes myfirst{
0%   {background:#479ccf; left:0px; top:0px;}
25%  {background:yellow; left:200px; top:0px;}
50%  {background:#479ccf; left:200px; top:200px;}
75%  {background:yellow; left:0px; top:200px;}
100% {background:#479ccf; left:0px; top:0px;}
}


@keyframes myfirst
  {
0%   {background:#479ccf; left:0px; top:0px;}
25%  {background:yellow; left:200px; top:0px;}
50%  {background:#479ccf; left:200px; top:200px;}
75%  {background:yellow; left:0px; top:200px;}
100% {background:#479ccf; left:0px; top:0px;}
}

Most of the CSS is self-explanatory when you look at it. If it’s not then look at it some more. I’m not going to spend an hour explaining it. Just copy the code and play around. That’s the best way to learn. You’ll soon understand how much fun you can have with this!

You can nest animations so that one is inside another and combine all sorts of other effects which we’ll move onto in later lessons.

This is just 15 minutes of fun…

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So today we’re once again visiting the @keyframes rule to animate some fun stuff on the screen – today a sale parachute. Why? Well, why not!

Here is the CSS3 animation We’ll be covering.

For those who are new to this blog and CSS3 animations in general I suggest you start with the CSS3 Animations article for a basic grounding of what’s going on here.

As usual I won’t be going into great detail with the code – I’ll let you take a look at each line to see what’s going on. Basically we’ve got a div with an image in it and come css controlling the animation through a series of position and angle transitions.

Here’s the HTML

<div id="motion3"><img alt="png 24 para" style=";height:auto;;position:inherit !important;" indx="57982382" rank="5" irank="261294697" atitle="CSS3 Animations – Part 3" data-src="//liquid.gallery/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/png-24-para.png" data-srcset="" class="rs-article-img-src do-lazy">
</div>

Here’s the CCS

#motion3 {
  width:249px;
height:329px;
position:relative;
-webkit-animation-name:myfirst4;
-webkit-animation-duration:20s;
-webkit-animation-timing-function:linear;
-webkit-animation-fill-mode: forwards;
  -webkit-animation-delay:2s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count:1;
-webkit-animation-direction:normal;
-webkit-animation-play-state:running;
  -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; 
  -webkit-perspective: 1000;
animation-name:myfirst4;
animation-duration:20s;
animation-timing-function:linear;
animation-delay:2s;
animation-iteration-count:1;
animation-direction:alternate;
animation-play-state:running;
}

  @-webkit-keyframes myfirst4{
0%   {left:10px; top:5px; width: 5px; height: 20px;  -webkit-transform: rotate(0deg); -moz-transform: rotate(0deg); -o-transform: rotate(0deg); -ms-transform: rotate(0deg); transform: rotate(0deg);}
10% { -webkit-transform: rotate(20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(20deg); -o-transform: rotate(20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(20deg); transform: rotate(20deg);}
20% { -webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-20deg); -o-transform: rotate(-20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-20deg); transform: rotate-2(0deg);}
30% { -webkit-transform: rotate(20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(20deg); -o-transform: rotate(20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(20deg); transform: rotate(20deg);}
40% { -webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-20deg); -o-transform: rotate(-20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-20deg); transform: rotate-2(0deg);}
50% { -webkit-transform: rotate(20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(20deg); -o-transform: rotate(20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(20deg); transform: rotate(20deg);}
60% { -webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-20deg); -o-transform: rotate(-20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-20deg); transform: rotate-2(0deg);}
70% { -webkit-transform: rotate(20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(20deg); -o-transform: rotate(20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(20deg); transform: rotate(20deg);}
80% { -webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-20deg); -o-transform: rotate(-20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-20deg); transform: rotate-2(0deg);}
100% {left:450px; top:200px; width: 300px; height: 300px; -webkit-transform: rotate(10deg); -moz-transform: rotate(10deg); -o-transform: rotate(10deg); -ms-transform: rotate(10deg); transform: rotate(10deg);}
}

 @keyframes myfirs4{
0%   {left:10px; top:5px; width: 5px; height: 20px;  -webkit-transform: rotate(0deg); -moz-transform: rotate(0deg); -o-transform: rotate(0deg); -ms-transform: rotate(0deg); transform: rotate(0deg);}
10% { -webkit-transform: rotate(20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(20deg); -o-transform: rotate(20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(20deg); transform: rotate(20deg);}
20% { -webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-20deg); -o-transform: rotate(-20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-20deg); transform: rotate-2(0deg);}
30% { -webkit-transform: rotate(20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(20deg); -o-transform: rotate(20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(20deg); transform: rotate(20deg);}
40% { -webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-20deg); -o-transform: rotate(-20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-20deg); transform: rotate-2(0deg);}
50% { -webkit-transform: rotate(20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(20deg); -o-transform: rotate(20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(20deg); transform: rotate(20deg);}
60% { -webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-20deg); -o-transform: rotate(-20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-20deg); transform: rotate-2(0deg);}
70% { -webkit-transform: rotate(20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(20deg); -o-transform: rotate(20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(20deg); transform: rotate(20deg);}
80% { -webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-20deg); -o-transform: rotate(-20deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-20deg); transform: rotate-2(0deg);}
100% {left:450px; top:200px; width: 300px; height: 300px; -webkit-transform: rotate(10deg); -moz-transform: rotate(10deg); -o-transform: rotate(10deg); -ms-transform: rotate(10deg); transform: rotate(10deg);}
}

What does that all mean?

In short the image goes through a transition from the top left of the page (where it is only a few pixels wide and high) to the middle of the page where it is full-size. Every 10% of the full transition there is a rotation of 20 degrees either side – giving it the swinging effect. Pretty cool!

The animation is set to run over 20 seconds and only to run once (-webkit-animation-iteration-count:1;). Since we want the parachute to stay in the end position I added this (-webkit-animation-fill-mode: forwards;).

Whilst this is only a quick demo with CSS3 animations you can immediately see the opportunities for strong CTA’s and attention grabbing special offers for your website. All we need now is for all browsers and devices to be able to handle it! Almost there…

The post CSS3 Animations – Part 3 appeared first on Liquid Web Design Company London.

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New to eCommerce? Need to choose which platform to use for your store? Or perhaps you already have a web shop that’s in desperate need of a redesign? A bit confused about where to start? You’re not the only one. That’s why we’ve written this simple guide to help you decide which eCommerce platform is the right one for your business.

We’re Liquid – a small web design company in London. We have plenty of experience in building eCommerce stores and web shops for clients all around the world. We’ve also spent years perfecting the art of making complicated things really easy to understand for people like you.

Do I need an eCommerce platform?

If you plan on selling more than one product on your website you need an eCommerce platform. Don’t get confused by the lingo here. Shopping carts, eCommerce platforms, shopping baskets, eCommerce software etc all mean the same thing.

The bottom line is that if you need to sell products on your website you need (what we call) an eCommerce platform.

What does an eCommerce platform do?

An eCommerce platform is a piece of software. It allows you to sell products. These could be physical products (like jars of nice sweets for instance) or they could be digital products (like apps or downloadable courses).

In the olden days when the web was called the information super highway, people used to have an eCommerce stores built from scratch. It was seriously expensive and a bit silly to do things that way, since most stores share a lot of the same functionality.

An eCommerce platform solves this problem. It provides the common functionality required to run an online shop. It will allow you to do things like: create products with prices, manage inventory or stock levels, print and send invoices, etc. It will allow the customer to do things like: add products to the basket and (most importantly) make a purchase. All this functionality is there, ready and waiting to be used.

Which eCommerce platform should I choose?

Deciding which eCommerce platform to use for your online store is a seriously big decision. Make the wrong one and you’ll be setting yourself up to fail from the very start. Make the right decision though and you’ll set yourself ahead of the pack and save yourself a heap of money into the bargain.

Any modern, experienced eCommerce web designer will tell you that there are three, and only three, eCommerce solutions which are worth considering for 2016 and beyond. There are lots of rubbish eCommerce platforms out there. Some of them are legacy platforms which haven’t changed in years and some newer ones which show a bit of promise but don’t yet have the community around them to make them a sensible choice. We won’t be talking about them. There’s no point. We’ll be talking about THE BIG THREE. These three eCommerce solutions offer:

✅ Maximum Flexibility (because your needs will change)

✅ A Great Designer/Development Community (very important because you will almost certainly need the help of some pro’s at some point)

✅ Minimum fuss (for you). You’ll need that. Trust me.

So what are THE BIG THREE eCommerce platforms?

They are (in no particular order):

✅ Shopify

✅ Magento

✅ WordPress (.org) with the Woocommerce Plugin

The other (lesser) one’s you might read about include: Bigcommerce, Sana Commerce, Jigoshop, LemonStand, Drupal Commerce, osCommerce, Prestashop, Opencart, Zen Cart, Supadupa, Volusion. Forget these. Some of them are okay. But they are not the best. To run a successful business you need to demand the absolute best.

The good news is that most people will only need to decide between two of the big three eCommerce platforms. And the even better news is that it will be so bloody obvious which is the right solution for you after we’ve compared them that you won’t really need to make a decision at all.

If you have a budget of more than $10k for your eCommerce store – please skip here.

I have a budget of less that $10k/I have no budget and plan on doing most of the work for my eCommerce site myself.

We’ve narrowed it down to two eCommerce solutions for your store. They are called Shopify and WordPress + Woocommerce (or just “Woo”). If you’ve got any sense at all and your budget is under $10k your store should be built on either Shopify or WordPress and Woo.

Below I’m going to give an overview of each of these eCommerce platforms along with a small analysis of the ongoing costs of running a store on each of them.

Shopify

Most Suitable eCommerce Solution For…

Those who plan on doing most of the work themselves (it’s a really simple platform for beginners)
Those who want an easy store to manage (any idiot could manage a web shop with Shopify)
Those who want a very fast loading website (Shopify provide some excellent hosting)
Those who want a nice selection of modern themes (pre-designed stores which you can tweak and fill with products)
Those who want to scale effortlessly
Those who want to accept credit and debit cards easily and quickly (Shopify make this very simple because they take care of PCI compliance.)

Not the Best eCommmerce Solution For…

Those who want the absolute cheapest ongoing costs (in our opinion however you get better value because of the quality of hosting – see below for comparison of ongoing costs)
Those businesses that require advanced integrations (Shopify does integrate seamlessly with many other popular platforms such as Quickbooks and Mailchimp. But if you require integration with a 3rd party piece of software you really need to check first that Shopify supports this integration with an app. Developing a custom app can be expensive.)
Those who want to do some serious blogging (WordPress rocks as a blogging platform, Shopify is just okay).
Those who are already familiar with WordPress (although this shouldn’t be a deal maker).

Ongoing costs for Shopify

It costs money to keep a website going – regardless of the platform. Here is a breakdown of the ongoing costs associated with running a small to medium sized Shopify store.

$29/Month – Basic plan with Shopify (this plan is suitable for most businesses starting out – it makes sense to upgrade later at a certain point)

2.9% + 30¢ per transaction – If you are based in the UK, US or Canada and are using Shopify Payments as the credit/debit card processor.

or

4.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are based elsewhere in the world (you cannot use Shopify Payments as your gateway) Costs vary between gateways but we’ve used Stripe as a guide because they are one of the best and most competitive. Here’s the maths: 2.9% + 30¢ (Stripe fee) + 2% Shopify Fee = 4.9% + 30¢

Hosting is included in Shopify plan fees and is excellent.

WordPress with the Woocommerce Plugin

You might have heard of WordPress. It’s a very popular blogging platform used by millions of people all around the world.

There’s lots of confusion about WordPress.org and WordPress.com so before we start – let us be clear – we are ONLY talking about WordPress.org. The difference between the two is simple: WordPress.com is for babies and WordPress.org is for grownups – like us.

WordPress is no longer just a blogging platform but rather a content management system (CMS). We use it to power some seriously cool websites (like this one). Because it’s become so popular as a CMS – some bright developers have come up with a way for people to also sell products on their WordPress websites.

So WordPress is the CMS (content management system). To give the functionality of an eCommerce store – people install a plugin called Woocommerce. Then end result is something like a digital Frankenstein…but it works and is the best solution for some stores.

So when should WordPress with Woocommerce be used instead of Shopify?

That’s a very simple question to answer. WordPress and Woocommerce is what you use when you absolutely cannot do what you need to do with Shopify. Examples might include:

✅ When you need to integrate the store with another application and Shopify doesn’t have an integration.

✅ When you need a multilingual store (you need to look into WPML plugin for WordPress for this).

✅ You need customers to be able to checkout with multiple-currencies (again, you need to look into the WPML plugin for this).

✅ You need to do some serious blogging (although you could always run a WP blog as a subdomain with Shopify quite easily).

✅ You are very tight fisted and cannot but help going for the absolute cheapest (even if it’s not the best value).

Ongoing costs WordPress/Woocommerce

It costs money to keep a website going – regardless of the platform. Here is a breakdown of the ongoing costs associated with running a small to medium sized WordPress/Woocommerce store that you host yourself.

$5-50/Month – Hosting. Cheap hosting is always rubbish. A decent cloud host with a CDN would cost around $20-45/Month – that would be around the same quality that Shopify provide. If you plan on selling worldwide you need that.

2.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are using Stripe as the payment gateway (there are plenty to choose from, few are cheaper or better than Stripe though).

Whilst it does appear to be cheaper to manage a store with WordPress/Woocommerce – you also need to consider that you are responsible for everything to do with the hosting account. Hosting is boring and complex and there may be times when you need to hire a developer to help you (cheap hosting providers will only help resolve certain issues).

Conclusion

Hopefully the above information will be able to help you make a decision about which eCommerce platform to choose. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave them in the comments. And if you’d like to get a quote for eCommerce web design – just fill in this form. The following information applies to those who have a budget of over $10k.

I have a budget of more than $10k for my eCommerce store.

Ok, so you’ve got a sensible budget and you want to spend it wisely. You should limit yourself to considering the following platforms: Shopify and Magento.

Which platform you choose will very much depend on your needs as a business. To help in this process you’ll need to work with your web designer/developer to get a clearly defined list of functionality along with integrations. Your designer/developer will then need to look into the options available to see which is the most suitable platform for you. Here a very short overview of the two eCommerce platforms along with major strengths and weaknesses.

Why Choose Magento

Magento is a big, complex platform. You can do just about anything with Magento and it’s more suitable for seriously big eCommerce stores or stores which require complex integrations.

The chief benefit of Magento is that it’s flexible. If your needs change dramatically – a solution on Magento may be easier than on Shopify (not always though – just generally speaking).

Magento would be the eCommerce platform of choice if you needed a muti-lingual store or a checkout with multiple currencies (with Shopify you can display a currency picker to display prices in other currencies – but all customers can only checkout with one currency).

The big downside to Magento is that it’s complex and ugly and clunky on the inside. Many clients complain that Magento is too complex, buggy and requires constant work from a developer. Lots of store owners find it frustrating. Since it’s self hosted you’ll need to ensure you’re PCI compliant (if accepting credit/debit cards on the server) and be responsible for your own hosting.

Given our experience – we think that if you are going to be running a Magento store you need to either have a very technical person on your team (who can read/write code) or you need to have a reliable developer/eCommerce web design company always on standby. That’s just the way things are.

Ongoing Costs Magento

$25 – $500/Month – Hosting & SSL

2.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are using Stripe as the payment gateway (there are plenty to choose from, foe cheaper or better though than Stripe). Transaction fees with Stripe may also be lower if you have high volumes.

Why Choose Shopify?

Shopify is an elegant and simple to use platform. A rough guess would be that it’s suitable for 80% of new eCommerce stores. There are plenty of apps which extend the core functionality of the platform.

The chief benefit of Shopify is that most store owners find it a dream to use. It’s perfect for eCommerce shops of all sizes and comes with a wide range of integrations in the apps store. If you are a mac user you will probably love Shopify (and hate Magento).

It’s not an ideal eCommerce solution for everyone though. The platform itself becomes limited for stores which require complex, custom integrations or multi-lingual functionality. Everything is possible with Shopify but it will be more expensive to get custom apps developed on Shopify than on Magento. There are also some small limitations to the customisations you can make to the checkout pages. This is to do with security and the fact that Shopify take responsibility for the security of the checkout – not you.

Since Shopify is a hosted solution – you do not need to worry about hosting, SSL, PCI compliance. That is all taken care of. And trust us, PCI compliance can be a total headache for some store owners and cost a lot of money!

Ongoing Costs Shopify

$79/Month – Shopify Pro Plan

2.9% + 30¢ per transaction – If you are based in the UK, US or Canada and are using Shopify Payments as the credit/debit card processor.

or

3.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are based elsewhere in the world (you cannot use Shopify Payments as your gateway). Costs vary between gateways but we’ve used Stripe as a guide because they are one of the best and most competitive. Here’s the maths: 2.9% + 30¢ (Stripe fee) + 1% Shopify Fee = 3.9% + 30¢

Hosting is included in your Shopify plan and is excellent.

Conclusion

Hopefully the above information will be able to help you make a decision about which eCommerce platform to choose. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave them in the comments. And if you’d like to get a quote for eCommerce web design – just fill in this form. We’re always here to help and give advice.

All done, have fun.

The post Which is the Best eCommerce Platform for your Store for 2016 and Beyond appeared first on Liquid Web Design Company London.

We’ve just completed a web design and development project which required a simple and responsive savings/investments calculator and thought we’d share the code.

This responsive calculator can be embedded on any website – just copy and paste the code from Codepen and you’re away (you can find a shortcode for WordPress on Codepen if you’re not so tech savvy).

Feel free to adjust the design to your needs but please leave the credits in place.

We’ll be providing more amazing embeddable tools early next year featuring some seriously fancy HTML5 features so watch this space…

See the Pen savings calculator by joe dempsey (@bright-digital) on CodePen.

The post Responsive Embeddable Savings and Investments Calculator – For Your Website appeared first on Liquid Web Design Company London.

Okay so you’ve got that killer idea that’s going to net you a fortune and enable you to work a three hour week. Great. So how are you going to get that idea in front of your target market? And just as importantly, how are you going to sell that idea to your target market?

This is where most small businesses I meet with fall flat on their faces. They come up with a great idea and think that’s enough to blast them into the hall of digital fame and fortune or land them a whopping big cheque from Mr Venture Capital.

Young entrepreneurs put so much focus the big idea and on finding funding. I never understand this mindset.

Most of the great startups have started with next to nothing in capital. And most of the people involved had no qualifications into the bargain. What they’ve focussed on is three things:

• Great people
• Great products or services
• Selling

Many of the world’s most successful business people will happily admit that they’ve worked that list in reverse order. Selling first and creating and hiring after.

Why? Because it is customers and sales that will make or break your business. Just think about it this way for a moment. Any form of funding is a form of debt. Those VC guys ain’t in the funding game for fun. They aren’t in it because they want you to succeed. They aren’t in it because they are nice. They are in it because they want a return on their investment. And they want it yesterday.

Customers on the other hand bring in profit. They come to you with money and expect things done tomorrow or next week or next month. And they’re usually quite nice and pleasant. Remember that.

So if you’ve got a startup idea it’s time to take a reality check. Forget funding and venture capital and debt. What you need is customers and lots of them. Without them your business is going nowhere.

You need to aggressively pursue your customers from the very first second of your venture or there simply is no business.

So the big question of the day is how to go about it when you are a small startup with very little money? How to get customers on a shoestring?

My speciality is online marketing. I help businesses connect with their customers online. This is quite a complicated job requiring a lot of different skills. But a lot of what I do is actually just common sense stuff which most people can do for themselves.

Today I’m going to share with you an overview of my strategy for aggressively pursuing customers online so that you can do it too if you want.

This is totally a budget operation in the true spirit of startups. All you need is £25 (about €30) and a load of time. That’s it.

So let’s begin.

#1 Identify your Target Market

Who are they? Where are they hanging out online? How many of them are there? How much money do they have? How much can they realistically afford to spend on your product or service? What are their habits? What else is cool right now amongst that crowd? What are they complaining about? What are they searching for in Google? (Use Google keyword planner for this)

Have a very, very clear idea of your target market. You should be able to spot them walking down the street.

#2 Identify your Competitors

You can be pretty sure that you are up against some stiff competition no matter what line of business you are in. Who are your competitors? What are they doing? What are they offering? How much are they charging? What do their accounts look like for the last few years? What do their employees say about them on Glassdoor? Are they recruiting or getting rid of staff right now? What do customers say about them online? What sort of culture do they have? Where do they advertise? How are you going to differentiate yourself from them?

#3 What Digital Contact Points can you Identify for your Target Market?

So you’ve identified your target market and your competitors. Great. Now how are you going to use that information?

Firstly you are going to look at what your competitors are doing. Start with the big 4:

Social Media Marketing – Twitter, Facebook and Google+

PPC Advertising – have a look in Google to see what sorts of adverts they are running (if any)

SEO – have a look at their website. What content do they have there? Which pages are appearing high in the search engines?

Youtube – are your competitors creating videos? What are they doing?

Then What?

Then you are going to come up with a way to do everything they are doing only much, much better. Better advertisements, better articles, more friends and likes and follows, more special offers, better videos etc. That’s the best digital marketing strategy I can give you.

Social Media Sites (Facebook, Twitter and Google+)

Once you have identified your target market you need to start socialising with them. This does not mean you need to start spamming them with rubbish. No. You need to become sociable with them and share things with them they might be genuinely interested in. Cool things. Things that will generate a bit of excitement or buzz. Things they will also want to share with their friends. You are not selling. You are socialising. You are making friends with your customers. You are looking to entertain them or inform them or show them how cool and in tune with them you are. At most you share a special offer or competition with them.

You can also run paid advertisements in most major social media sites on a pay-per-click basis if you want. You will need expert help in setting up an effective paid marketing campaign as this is not as simple as it seems. If you’re just starting out on a low budget I would forget that one.

Whatever you do socially it needs to be bigger, better and fresher than what the competition are doing. You need to really push the limits and come up with fresh ideas. Knowing your target market will help guide you on how best to do this because every audience is different. Think viral. If you don’t think you can come up with the goods then forget social media marketing and focus your efforts elsewhere.

Search Engines

Search engines like Google can drive your perfect customers to your website. When I am looking to acquire traffic (people) I always start with Google. Why? Because most other forms of traffic are lazy. The commercial intent isn’t really there. In Google you can drill down and connect with people you know have a commercial intent because of what they type.

There are two main forms of search marketing:

Pay-per-Click Marketing

Pay per click marketing can be a very effective way to connect with your target market both in the short term and the long term. The idea is really simple. You display adverts and if people click on them then you pay. If people don’t click then you don’t pay.

Many young businesses struggle with the idea of paying for adverts on Google. They say” Why pay when you can get there on the first page for free, right?” Wrong. People who say things like that do not know how Google works. I promise you it will take a long time and a lot of effort to achieve a top position in the organic Google search results. We are talking a time-frame of years in most markets worth entering. Can you afford to wait years for customers?

For this reason I always advise businesses to start a PPC campaign on day one of trading. It is the quickest and easiest form of digital marketing.

How much you pay to display adverts will depend on a number of factors including how much you bid and the competition. I run all my campaigns from UK accounts and there is always a free Adwords promotion code available. If you spend £25 in the first month you get £75 free credit from Google. Great.

So here’s the startup challenge. Use that £100 to make a small advertising campaign in the search network. Focus every neuron in your brain into turning a profit with that small budget. Run it for a week, ten days, whatever.

If you create a profit with that advertising budget you’re a winner. You’ve totally got what it takes to succeed online.

If you don’t then you’ve got to take a long hard intelligent look at why your campaign failed? Then you’ve got to come up with a new strategy and start again with another £100. Keep going like this until you’re in profit. You shouldn’t raise the budget until you can cut a profit.

You need to get to the point where Adwords is not expensive. It can actually pay for itself and give a fantastic return on investment! But you need to get certain things right and that isn’t easy.

I could write a whole book on Adwords marketing. But I’ll leave that for another day. In short, my advice is to focus initial advertisements on the most profitable customers and create a really tight campaign. That means [exact match keywords] only, using geotargeting and timing your adverts to maximise conversions! Don’t bid for position one or two.

You might be interested in reading my article on the top ten Google Adwords mistakes before starting with PPC advertising for the first time.

I always recommend people start in Adwords like this with a really small budget. It is not a very clever idea to start advertising in with a large budget if you do not know what you are doing. I’ve seen £50 bids instead of £0.5 before. Those kinds of mistakes will kill you!

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is a long term marketing strategy for increasing your website’s presence in Google’s organic results. SEO can range from simple alterations in the code and text on your webpage to complex content creation strategies and quality link building campaigns.

The objective is to rank organically for relevant searches your customers might make. These top positions in Google are highly sought after because they get most of the sales. You can bet that all your competitors are fighting for them also. It can be mega frustrating for new businesses when they first learn just how tough those positions are to get.

Here is my top simple SEO strategy for 2014 and beyond. It’s totally free and simple and does not require any amazing skills. All you need is a bit of common sense. You need to Write killer Content. That means, you need to write fantastic, unique, engaging articles that your customers will find genuinely useful. If you just do that and keep doing that every week and share them on the major social media sites (including G+), your customers and Google will love you.

Video Marketing on Youtube

People spend a lot of time on video content sites like Youtube and Vimeo. I routinely see rubbish videos with millions of hits. Wow. Anyone who doesn’t see the marketing potential there needs shooting.

So what can you contribute to these sites in order to drive your target market to your website? What sorts of videos are your target market watching? What sort of content are they searching for? Are your competitors making videos? How can you make better videos than those already there? How can you give an existing content video a new twist? Can you review products? Can you give a tutorial? Can you do something outrageous that will go viral?

Video is a great, low cost way to connect with a large audience. All you need is a webcam and some ideas. Short on ideas? Why not do a video blog? Use the killer content you are writing for your blog to make a video version of it. It’s so simple and yet so few people bother doing it.

Make sure that what you create appeals to your target audience in both style and execution. Make sure it is original, simple, to the point and totally amazing. You need to blow the competition away and show your customers that you really understand them.

Conclusions

The digital marketing strategy that is right for your startup will very much depend on your business. Successful businesses are implementing PPC campaigns, long term SEO strategy, social media and video marketing campaigns from the very first day. Most of this stuff is not hard, big, clever or technical. But it is time consuming.

Even those on the smallest of budgets can begin doing all of these things tomorrow. All you need is Google, a bit of grey matter, a lot of time and £25.

Expect a steep learning curve to begin with. Adwords will probably be your biggest challenge. You’ll soon learn though and if you’re struggling there are always experts like me who are more than happy to help you.

The post Digital Marketing Strategy for Startups – How to Launch your First Business Online and Get Selling appeared first on Liquify Web Design London.

A lot of people think SEO is a very technical marketing strategy involving digital wizardry and advanced coding skills which only boffins are capable of doing.

I say this is complete nonsense. People who read my blog articles on SEO on a regular basis or who have worked with me in person will know this already. For the rest of you welcome…

There is so much mumbo jumbo flying about the SEO world it’s untrue. I want everyone to know that SEO isn’t that hard or technical most of the time. And I also want my clients to know that what I am doing is totally white-hat and transparent and doesn’t involve a team of guys in India who build junk links.

Whilst an excellent search marketing whizz certainly has a very strong technical background and level of ability, I’ve found that really simple, common sense stuff often gets the best results. You’ll find that a really good digital marketing consultant will spend a great deal of his or her time doing really simple non-technical work. #Ready?

So what is my Killer Offline SEO Strategy for Startups? How can a Bunch of Guys & Gals with a Big Idea and Very Little Cash Begin to Move their Website up the Search Results by Doing a bit of Offline Work?

I’m assuming that you’ve already got a website which has a load of useful articles and pages (what I call killer content) relevant to your target market. For those who don’t have that yet then I suggest you begin there and come back to this guide when you’re ready because without that you’re wasting everybody’s time including mine.

Offline SEO – A Really Simple Strategy

So today we are going to talk about two very effective ways you can improve your search presence without using a computer really very much at all. It’s time to turn your head away from the screen and enter the world of alternative and totally effective offline SEO which some people pay a lot of money for.

1 Get on the Phone

Okay so you might need to turn back to the screen to do a bit of research for this one and if you really are a startup you’re definitely using Viber or something. But the main activity is most definitely offline. You are not writing code and you are not making digital sparks fly around the room or doing anything remotely technical. You are using common sense and some old-skool (with a k) sales tactics.

The aim of the game is this: you identify a bunch of people who might actually be genuinely interested in reading your killer content or perhaps knowing about your fantastic new product or service.

You are particularly trying to find people who will possibly share this via a small local publication and a website. Think clubs. Think village and town websites. Think local news. Think societies. Also think about local businesses and organisations that are not direct competitors to you but perhaps are related to your business somehow.

They need to have a website whoever they are. It doesn’t really matter if it hasn’t been updated since 1998. In fact, I would say that might well even be a really good thing. So long as it’s a website and it’s local and relevant in a vague way to what you do: it’s a target.

Make a list. It needn’t be a long list. Start with ten people/businesses/organisations/groups. Focus on quality over quantity. Keep it local. You need a contact name and a phone number and a bit of background so you can have a nice chat.

Pro tip: you can often find domain name owner telephone numbers by doing a whois lookup.

Here’s a Simple Real Life Example

I did this for a tree surgeon. I came up with a list of fifteen targets. It took me half an hour in Google to do that. A few on my list were local garden centres. One was a private allotment group. Another was a local student newspaper. There rest were village websites owned by well-to-do individuals who like to blog about things like dog mess and speeding cars and other such fascinating subject matters.

All were local. All were well established. All had websites. All were perfect targets. I could get a lot more targets but this was enough to begin having some fun.

The objective is to get a link from their website to yours. Be creative in how you go about it. By this I mean do just about anything. I always say that when it comes to launching a new business it’s no holds barred. The easiest way is to give them a reason to link to you. Give them some bait. Sometimes just phoning up and having a nice chat and taking an interest and then asking is enough. But it’s much better if you have a really good motivation for calling. Have something to share with them. I don’t care what you say or do or decide to share with them. Just come up with some bait.

Pro Tip: If in doubt, do something good.

With the tree surgeon it was a petition to save an old tree. There really was an old tree which needed saving. It’s just nobody had yet thought to save it yet. I didn’t grovel at all for those links. I gave those website owners all a really good reason to link to particular pages on the tree surgeon’s website. It turned out everyone who answered the phone wanted to save the old tree. In total it took two hours of work. Four links! You’d never get four quality links like that in the same time working online!

So that’s it boys and girls! Lesson over. Time for lunch. That’s killer offline SEO on a budget. People pay a lot of money for this stuff. And it ain’t technical or complicated but it sure works!

So get ten targets, come up with some link bait and get on the phone. Do it today. If not today, tomorrow. Do it every week. Even if you score one out of ten it is totally worth it. Trust me. If you are a local business and you keep doing this you will toast the competition in Google.

So there’s another middle finger to those who say you need a large budget to get your startup business off the ground.

Pro Tip: Once they’ve agreed to publish a link then email them the link to use on their website. Give them the HTML if possible. Include keywords in the anchor text which align with the title and content of your page. Try to use a slight variation for each one and not make them all the same. I will write another article soon on anchor text to help with this.

Do that a few times and be clever about the landing pages and keywords and you will be soaring up the Google love charts. Trust me. That is a killer tactic. But it can only really work if you have Killer Content.

2 Get on the Stage

Giving a talk is another killer way to score some high quality links. It’s not for everyone but if there’s someone in your team who just loves to talk, let them!

You need to think about who might be interested in listening to begin with because not everybody finds your business that interesting (sorry). But there might be some really cool industry talks coming up where people would be genuinely interested in what you have to share. Why not contribute? Why not give a talk to university students?

You need to make sure that the event organisers have a decent website which is ranking well for something vaguely related to what you are doing.

Then you need to come up with a good idea for your talk and pitch it to them. Sell it to them. If they say “no” then ask them politely to put you on the list for next year and try someone else. There’s a serious shortage of people in the world who are willing to go up on stage and share their knowledge. Doing so is not only great for PR but if you’re smart it can be great for SEO.

How?

Well, to start, ask the organisers if they will put a profile and a link on their website so that people can get to know your business before the event. Give them the HTML and make life dead easy for them.

The next thing you need to do is come up with a good talk which is both interesting and relevant. I don’t care what you talk about or what your subject matter is. They are your audience. You will know what they like. Engage them.

The aim of the game is to get people in the audience to link to your website. If it’s a big event you can be sure that a few people are blogging it. And probably quite a few more in the audience have some involvement in a website somewhere.

So you need to give these guys a reason to link to you. You need to come up with some more link bait on your website before the event. It doesn’t need to rock the room but it needs to be very good to attract links. Then you need to prompt people to link to it. Ask if anyone’s blogging in the room. Find out who the publishers are. Make friends with them and get their telephone numbers to follow up!

Ideas for link bait include: new research, new products, new tools, new ideas, something for charity or something that’s just funny!

Are you seeing a pattern here in this offline SEO strategy?

It’s dead easy. You create killer content. Then you tell people about it! It’s free and totally the best SEO strategy for those startups on a budget moving on into 2015.

The big question will always be: can you be bothered to do it? Most people can’t.

Until next time…

The post A Killer Offline 2015 SEO Strategy for Startups who can’t Afford to Hire a Top SEO appeared first on Liquify Web Design London.

Wow, what a great question for 2014 and beyond. Should I hire an SEO? Should I pay some bloke with a beard and an iPhone that I’ve not even seen in the shops to do a load of stuff I don’t really understand to help push me up the search results?

Blimey, what a question.

I’m going to answer this question in two parts: yes and no. What it all comes down to is time. In particular: Do you have any?

Yes – I’ve got loads of time

If you’ve got loads and loads of time to work on your website and you are comfortable creating web pages then I suggest you do not hire an SEO. Instead I suggest you learn to do it yourself. Most of it isn’t that hard, actually. It’s just time consuming. I reckon most small, local businesses with the time and inclination can learn to do their own SEO and save some cash.

There are loads of useful resources online for those looking to optimise their website for search. I’m very much a fan of no-nonsense jargon-free guides. Are you? If so I would highly recommend starting with Do you Need an SEO by Google and the Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz. Those are both really good, useful resources.

No – I don’t have Much Time

For those who are pushed for time and want results sooner, then yes, you should definitely hire an SEO. But you should be very careful in who you choose to hire. Not all SEO’s have your best interests at heart unfortunately. Some are in it for the short-haul and the cash.

A short-haul SEO is not as easy to spot as you might think. They look and dress very much ordinary SEO’s. They often have beards and iphones you haven’t seen in the shops yet. They differ from high quality SEO’s only in the way that they behave. So you need to study your SEO a little before hiring.

A short-term SEO will usually give you no transparency as to what they are doing. They will probably give you guarantees for page one results in Google. They will generally create no new articles or pages. At best they might create some poor quality, unoriginal content. They will use strategies like automated link-building to push your website up the search engines.

Often these aggressive strategies do actually work on a timeframe of weeks and months. Good? No. Bad, bad, bad. Why? Because, one happy day, Google will notice what is happening and totally crush you. By that I mean you will get a ban.

What does a Google ban mean in reality? In plain and simple English it means you’re fucked. If you get a full on ban from big old Mr Google you can forget your website, domain name and server ever even existed. That’s not a joke. You might be able to recover the website’s reputation eventually but it would be a lot quicker, cheaper and easier to build a new one.

If you hire an SEO you need a long-term SEO for your website which is totally transparent. You need to know what you SEO is doing to optimise your website.

What is an effective long term SEO strategy?

Usually an effective long-term SEO strategy is very simple and will involve the creation of high quality content (pages and articles relevant to what you do). It will involve a social media strategy for sharing that content. And it will involve some high quality link building, on a steady, regular basis. For most small businesses that is a very good long-term SEO strategy in itself. An SEO might also suggest some changes to your website design to make it load faster and navigate in a way which makes life easy for people and search engines.

You should ask your SEO exactly what he or she will be doing to optimise your website for search engines before you hire them. If they do not answer you in plain and simple English then you should not get involved with them. If they do not mention high quality content then run. That’s the best advice I can give you.

Until next time…

The post Should I Hire an SEO for my Website? appeared first on Liquify Web Design London.

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Today we’re going to talk about what makes a good SEO – this article will be useful for hiring managers and aspiring SEO’s.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that SEO is a very technical job requiring all sorts of digital skills and advanced technical capabilities. People hire the boffin because it feels right. He knows how to code really complicated stuff so he can do SEO right?

No. The truth is that the boffin is totally the wrong choice for most businesses. In my opinion: the more technical the person, the less likely they are to actually be good at 95% of what I would consider high quality SEO.

To my mind there are four main elements to SEO. In a perfect world an SEO will have the following profile:

SEO Writing Skills – 30%

Your SEO needs to be a solid writer. If they cannot sit down and write a high quality article about any subject matter within a couple of hours then don’t hire them. They need to be able to create tight content to a tight deadline. They need to be able to target content to particular keywords and phrases and the language needs to be natural.

They do not need to be a particularly creative writer. They just need to be able to write solid articles on just about anything and they need to be able to do it to a deadline. The text needs to be simple and it needs to read well. Ideally this experience was gained writing for the web but it’s not essential. What’s important is that they can write clear, well-formed sentences which appeal to all readers.

Writing is a skill that most people can learn. But it takes a long time. Most people think they can write because they can form a sentence. I would say that it’s rare to find someone who is good at writing who is under the age of 30. By “good” I mean they can write clear, unpretentious copy on any subject matter to a deadline. It is even rarer to find someone who is interested enough in your product or service to write about it regularly in an interesting way.

Before even interviewing someone I would be asking them to research and write an article on a particular set of business related keywords and I would be giving them two hours to do it. If they couldn’t come up with the goods I wouldn’t bring them to interview.

For bonus points they would be giving me ideas for inbound links and would have some evidence of interest in the market.

Selling Skills – 40% of SEO

A lot of people are surprised when I say selling is an essential part of any SEO strategy. To my mind it’s the most valuable skill. It is almost half of the job.

Why are selling skills important for SEO?

High quality links are the key to high positions in Google. I don’t care what Google tell you or what you’ve read on some blog about content. Yes, content is important. Of course you need a reason for people to link to you. But without links from high quality websites you’ll never achieve top positions. When creating new content I always spend more time researching and obtaining the links for the content than actually researching and writing the content.

Have you ever wondered why that rubbish article is on page one and that high quality article is on page three? The reason is two things: quality links and Google News. These two things are the key to page one presence. Most websites will never qualify for Google News so they must focus on links.

There are a number of ways to obtain high quality links. The best way I know of is to come up with a really good reason for people to link to you – some link bait. Then for someone with selling skills to reach out to get links. They need to do it in a target driven way. Some form of performance related pay makes sense. The easiest and quickest way to do that is to get on the phone and sell it. Emails are slow and you can get done for SPAM. The phone is perfect. It’s quick and simple and you’ll know within seconds if you are talking to the right person or if you’re wasting your time.

Your SEO needs to spend a lot of time on the phone trying to convince people to link to the great content he or she has created. Then they need to follow up those phone calls with emails and more phone calls. They need to be ruthless, charming, determined and totally unperturbed by having to make hundreds of phone calls to obtain a couple of links. That’s a big part of SEO. If they can’t do it then forget them.

My perfect SEO has worked for a couple of years in a telephone sales role on a commission basis. He or she is goals orientated and loves an old school sales bonus challenge.

Networking Skills – 25%

My perfect SEO will be very good at networking. I want their contact book to be full of telephone numbers and their desk to be littered with business cards. Why? Because HIGH QUALITY CONTACTS = HIGH QUALITY LINKS. If you know the right people then you only need to ask nicely. A lot of people do not know the value of links.

Your SEO needs to be able to hunt down those select few people who can deliver high quality links. It doesn’t matter whether it’s through LinkedIn, personal contacts, industry events or down at the golf club. Your SEO needs to always be on the lookout for links. If you already have an SEO and he or she isn’t I would be very, very worried.

Technical Skills 5% (HTML, CSS & JAVASCRIPT)

I would happily hire someone to do SEO without technical skills since it is only 5% of the job.

In an ideal world, the perfect SEO will be able to write rock solid HTML, CSS and Javascript for on-site optimisation. But we don’t live in a perfect world. I would happily hire someone to do SEO without those skills since it is only 5% of the job. It’s a much better idea to hire someone who has 95% of the skills base and then either send them on a course or simply outsource the on-site optimisation if you have nobody in your team who can deliver.

Conclusion: The Perfect SEO

So there we have it ladies and gentlemen. SEO is not a technical job for 95% of the time. Yes you need a fast website and yes you need some quality, original content. But more than anything you need followed LINKS and only people with sales and people skills will get you those.

So before deciding on hiring an SEO, ask yourself these questions:

• How many people do you know who are good both at writing code and copy?
• How many people do you know who are good both at writing code and selling?
• How many people do you know who are good both at writing code and networking?

Most technical people are totally rubbish at selling and networking and will be the first to admit it. Occasionally you will find someone with very strong coding and writing skills but those people are few and far between.

A common complaint is that SEO’s are all strategy and no results. It’s because they lack 95% of the skills to deliver.

Hire wisely…

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New to eCommerce? Need to choose which platform to use for your store? Or perhaps you already have a web shop that’s in desperate need of a redesign? A bit confused about where to start? You’re not the only one. That’s why we’ve written this simple guide to help you decide which eCommerce platform is the right one for your business.

We’re Liquify – a small web design company in London. We have plenty of experience in building eCommerce stores and web shops for clients all around the world. We’ve also spent years perfecting the art of making complicated things really easy to understand for people like you.

Do I need an eCommerce platform?

If you plan on selling more than one product on your website you need an eCommerce platform. Don’t get confused by the lingo here. Shopping carts, eCommerce platforms, shopping baskets, eCommerce software etc all mean the same thing.

The bottom line is that if you need to sell products on your website you need (what we call) an eCommerce platform.

What does an eCommerce platform do?

An eCommerce platform is a piece of software. It allows you to sell products. These could be physical products (like jars of nice sweets for instance) or they could be digital products (like apps or downloadable courses).

In the olden days when the web was called the information super highway, people used to have an eCommerce stores built from scratch. It was seriously expensive and a bit silly to do things that way, since most stores share a lot of the same functionality.

An eCommerce platform solves this problem. It provides the common functionality required to run an online shop. It will allow you to do things like: create products with prices, manage inventory or stock levels, print and send invoices, etc. It will allow the customer to do things like: add products to the basket and (most importantly) make a purchase. All this functionality is there, ready and waiting to be used.

Which eCommerce platform should I choose?

Deciding which eCommerce platform to use for your online store is a seriously big decision. Make the wrong one and you’ll be setting yourself up to fail from the very start. Make the right decision though and you’ll set yourself ahead of the pack and save yourself a heap of money into the bargain.

Any modern, experienced eCommerce web designer will tell you that there are three, and only three, eCommerce solutions which are worth considering for 2016 and beyond. There are lots of rubbish eCommerce platforms out there. Some of them are legacy platforms which haven’t changed in years and some newer ones which show a bit of promise but don’t yet have the community around them to make them a sensible choice. We won’t be talking about them. There’s no point. We’ll be talking about THE BIG THREE. These three eCommerce solutions offer:

✅ Maximum Flexibility (because your needs will change)

✅ A Great Designer/Development Community (very important because you will almost certainly need the help of some pro’s at some point)

✅ Minimum fuss (for you). You’ll need that. Trust me.

So what are THE BIG THREE eCommerce platforms?

They are (in no particular order):

✅ Shopify

✅ Magento

✅ WordPress with the Woocommerce Plugin

The other (lesser) one’s you might read about include: Bigcommerce, Sana Commerce, Jigoshop, LemonStand, Drupal Commerce, osCommerce, Prestashop, Opencart, Zen Cart, Supadupa, Volusion. Forget these. Some of them are okay. But they are not the best. To run a successful business you need to demand the absolute best.

The good news is that most people will only need to decide between two of the big three eCommerce platforms. And the even better news is that it will be so bloody obvious which is the right solution for you after we’ve compared them that you won’t really need to make a decision at all.

If you have a budget of more than $10k for your eCommerce store – please skip here.

I have a budget of less that $10k/I have no budget and plan on doing most of the work for my eCommerce site myself.

We’ve narrowed it down to two eCommerce solutions for your store. They are called Shopify and WordPress + Woocommerce (or just “Woo”). If you’ve got any sense at all and your budget is under $10k your store should be built on either Shopify or WordPress and Woocommerce.

Below I’m going to give an overview of each of these eCommerce platforms along with a small analysis of the ongoing costs of running a store on each of them.

Shopify

Most Suitable eCommerce Solution For…

• Those who plan on doing most of the work themselves (it’s a really simple platform for beginners)
• Those who want an easy store to manage (any idiot could manage a web shop with Shopify)
• Those who want a very fast loading website (Shopify provide some excellent hosting)
• Those who want a nice selection of modern themes (pre-designed stores which you can tweak and fill with products)
• Those who want to scale effortlessly
• Those who want to accept credit and debit cards easily and quickly (Shopify make this very simple because they take care of PCI compliance.)

Not the Best eCommmerce Solution For…

• Those who want a multi-lingual website (it is possible to create a multilingual website with Shopify but the solution available is not great for SEO)
• Those who want the absolute cheapest ongoing costs (in our opinion however you get better value because of the quality of hosting – see below for comparison of ongoing costs)
• Those businesses that require advanced integrations (Shopify does integrate seamlessly with many other popular platforms such as Quickbooks and Mailchimp. But if you require integration with a 3rd party piece of software you really need to check first that Shopify supports this integration with an app. Developing a custom app can be expensive.)
• Those who want to do some serious blogging (WordPress rocks as a blogging platform, Shopify is just okay).
• Those who are already familiar with the WordPress cms (although this shouldn’t be a deal maker).

Ongoing costs for Shopify

It costs money to keep a website going – regardless of the platform. Here is a breakdown of the ongoing costs associated with running a small to medium sized Shopify store.

$29/Month – Basic plan with Shopify (this plan is suitable for most businesses starting out – it makes sense to upgrade later at a certain point)

Most competitive: 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction – If you are based in the UK, US or Canada and are using Shopify Payments as the credit/debit card processor.

Gateway fees vary and you will need to research which is the most cost effective gateway for you. It will cost more if you don’t use Shopify Payments – since you will need to pay both a gateway and Shopify fee.

WordPress with the Woocommerce Plugin

You might have heard of WordPress. It’s a very popular blogging platform used by millions of people all around the world. We love WordPress and build websites (like this) with it all the time.

There’s lots of confusion about WordPress.org and WordPress.com so before we start – let us be clear – we are ONLY talking about WordPress.org. The difference between the two is simple: WordPress.com is for babies and WordPress.org is for grownups. With WordPress.org you install WordPress on your own server and manage everything.

WordPress is no longer just a blogging platform but rather a content management system (CMS). We use it to power some pretty big and complex websites. Because it’s become so popular as a CMS – some bright developers have come up with a way for people to also sell products on their WordPress websites.

So WordPress is the CMS (content management system). To give the functionality of an eCommerce store – people install a plugin called Woocommerce. Then end result is something like a digital Frankenstein…but it works and is the best solution for some stores.

So when should WordPress with Woocommerce be used instead of Shopify?

That’s a very simple question to answer. WordPress and Woocommerce is what you use when you absolutely cannot do what you need to do with Shopify. Examples might include:

✅ When you need to integrate the store with another application and Shopify doesn’t have an integration.

✅ When you need a multilingual store (you need to look into WPML plugin for WordPress for this).

✅ You need customers to be able to checkout with multiple-currencies (again, you need to look into the WPML plugin for this).

✅ You need to do some serious blogging (although you could always run a WP blog as a subdomain with Shopify quite easily).

✅ You are very tight fisted and cannot but help going for the absolute cheapest (even if it’s not the best value).

Ongoing costs WordPress/Woocommerce

It costs money to keep a website going – regardless of the platform. Here is a breakdown of the ongoing costs associated with running a small to medium sized WordPress/Woocommerce store that you host yourself.

$5-50/Month – Hosting. Cheap hosting is always rubbish. A decent cloud host with a CDN would cost around $20-45/Month – that would be around the same quality that Shopify provide. If you plan on selling worldwide you need that.

2.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are using Stripe as the payment gateway (there are plenty to choose from, few are cheaper or better than Stripe though).

Whilst it does appear to be cheaper to manage a store with WordPress/Woocommerce – you also need to consider that you are responsible for everything to do with the hosting account. Hosting is boring and complex and there may be times when you need to hire a developer to help you (cheap hosting providers will only help resolve certain issues).

Conclusion

Hopefully the above information will be able to help you make a decision about which eCommerce platform to choose. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave them in the comments. And if you’d like to get a quote for eCommerce web design – just fill in this form. The following information applies to those who have a budget of over $10k.

I have a budget of more than $10k for my eCommerce store.

Ok, so you’ve got a sensible budget and you want to spend it wisely. You should limit yourself to considering the following platforms: Shopify and Magento.

Which platform you choose will very much depend on your needs as a business. To help in this process you’ll need to work with your web designer/developer to get a clearly defined list of functionality along with integrations. Your designer/developer will then need to look into the options available to see which is the most suitable platform for you. Here a very short overview of the two eCommerce platforms along with major strengths and weaknesses.

Why Choose Magento

Magento is a big, complex platform. A great Magento developer can do just about anything with the platform and it’s more suitable for seriously big eCommerce stores or stores which require complex integrations.

The chief benefit of Magento is that it’s flexible. If your needs change dramatically – a solution on Magento may be easier than on Shopify (not always though – just generally speaking).

Magento would be the eCommerce platform of choice if you needed a muti-lingual store or a checkout with multiple currencies (with Shopify you can display a currency picker to display prices in other currencies – but all customers can only checkout with one currency).

The big downside to Magento is that it’s complex and ugly and clunky on the inside. Many clients complain that Magento is too complex, buggy and requires constant work from a developer. Lots of store owners find it frustrating. Since it’s self hosted you’ll need to ensure you’re PCI compliant (if accepting credit/debit cards on the server) and be responsible for your own hosting.

Given our experience – we think that if you are going to be running a Magento store you need to either have a very technical person on your team (who can read/write code) or you need to have a reliable developer/eCommerce web design company always on standby. That’s just the way things are.

Ongoing Costs Magento

$25 – $500/Month – Hosting & SSL

2.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are using Stripe as the payment gateway (there are plenty to choose from, foe cheaper or better though than Stripe). Transaction fees with Stripe may also be lower if you have high volumes.

Why Choose Shopify?

Shopify is an elegant and simple to use eCommerce platform. A rough guess would be that it’s suitable for 80% of new eCommerce stores. There are plenty of apps which extend the core functionality of the platform.

The chief benefit of Shopify is that most store owners find it a dream to use. It’s perfect for eCommerce shops of all sizes and comes with a wide range of integrations in the apps store. If you are a mac user you will probably love Shopify (and hate Magento).

It’s not an ideal eCommerce solution for everyone though. The platform itself becomes limited for stores which require complex, custom integrations or multi-lingual functionality. Everything is possible with Shopify but it will be more expensive to get custom apps developed on Shopify than on Magento. There are also some small limitations to the customisations you can make to the checkout pages. This is to do with security and the fact that Shopify take responsibility for the security of the checkout – not you.

Since Shopify is a hosted solution – you do not need to worry about hosting, SSL, PCI compliance. That is all taken care of. And trust us, PCI compliance can be a total headache for some store owners and cost a lot of money!

Ongoing Costs Shopify

$79/Month – Shopify Pro Plan

2.9% + 30¢ per transaction – If you are based in the UK, US or Canada and are using Shopify Payments as the credit/debit card processor.

or

3.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are based elsewhere in the world (you cannot use Shopify Payments as your gateway). Costs vary between gateways but we’ve used Stripe as a guide because they are one of the best and most competitive. Here’s the maths: 2.9% + 30¢ (Stripe fee) + 1% Shopify Fee = 3.9% + 30¢

Hosting is included in your Shopify plan and is excellent.

Conclusion

Hopefully the above information will be able to help you make a decision about which eCommerce platform to choose. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave them in the comments. And if you’d like to get a quote for eCommerce web design – just fill in this form. We’re always here to help and give advice.

All done, have fun.

The post Which is the Best eCommerce Platform for 2016 (and Beyond) appeared first on Liquify Web Design London.

We’ve just completed a web design and development project which required a simple and responsive savings/investments calculator and thought we’d share the code.

This responsive calculator can be embedded on any website – just copy and paste the code from Codepen and you’re away (you can find a shortcode for WordPress on Codepen if you’re not so tech savvy).

Feel free to adjust the design to your needs but please leave the credits in place.

We’ll be providing more amazing embeddable tools early next year featuring some seriously fancy HTML5 features so watch this space…

See the Pen savings calculator by joe dempsey (@bright-digital) on CodePen.

The post Responsive Embeddable Savings and Investments Calculator – For Your Website appeared first on Liquify Web Design London.