Build your e-commerce solution with SnipcartDec 10, 2013
On changing the worldNov 21, 2013
Marvellous idea.
Fast forward to Day Two. Real life starts kicking in, stuff gets serious. You'll soon discover that it's a journey full of routine and burden of responsibility governed by the one and only God. The Cash Flow. And there's far too little Cash to keep the juices flowing. Not many will buy your stuff. Only your team, family and friends really understand how important your work is and how nice a guy you are. How great products you make. How much superior your product is to your competition.
Turns out that everyone else is busy manning their own holes to push their own products in exactly the same crappy situation. Competition is enormous, oxygen is scarce.
But hey — this will most probably change. You'll survive. If you really are good at what you are doing you can run but you can't hide. They'll discover you. You'll be drawn out from your little hole. Your products will be bought. Your passion and craftsmanship will be loved. You'll make at least a mid-sized dent in the universe.
You don't need to change the whole world. Change it for as many as you can. No one ever will reach each and everyone in the universe.
But do consider the marvellous idea of starting a new business diligently. Maybe switching your lousy job to a great one instead will do the trick.
Tell your friends about Edicy, get our premium service for free and a prettier internet in returnNov 18, 2013
If you don’t use our premium service yet, this lets you use your own domain, create more sub pages and use our other pro features.
You can call it just a promotion, or a way to thank our users that recommend Edicy to others. But it’s also a bit of a mission – this way we can make sure that more websites created in the coming months will be beautiful, easy to use and optimized for mobile. And who wouldn’t want that?
E-commerce with EdicyOct 07, 2013
What's an online store?
You need to have a way to
- show the products
- place an order
- pay it up.
Odds are though that you don't run a million dollar business looking for a new e-commerce platform. It's more likely you are someone like ourselves — running passionately a small business and getting started with your online success.
So let's see how you can do it with us.
1. Show me the products
The easiest way to show your products — if you only have a handful of them — is to create a normal content page for each of them under "Products" section. Add pictures, galleries and videos for visitors to get an overview. Write texts, include tables, add PDF-s with product overviews to specify the details. Link to reviews, add testimonials to build trust.If you have a large number of different stuff on sale though, you ought to have more than that — new products should be listed first, best selling items need a place on the front page. Visitors should be able to group and filter them both by category or price or other characteristics. You need a product catalogue. There's an early beta version of such tool already available for a number of Edicy Plus users. So if you want to try it out just contact us and we help you set it up.
2. Let me order it
Most often people only buy one item at a time. A pair of boots. A picture. A house. Sometimes you manage to sell more though. Two different pictures? A house AND a pair of boots? Could be.Single-item-selling is rather easy to be set up with Edicy. Just set up a link for placing an order for every product separately.
Allowing user to order more than one product at a time is a bit more difficult — you'd have to provide visitors with a "shopping cart" for that. Visitor adds anythig to the cart first and then places the order for the whole pack. There's one great free component that you can either set up yourself or ask our support team to do it for you. It's called simpleCart — just go on and check out how conveniently it works.
3. Let me pay for it
There are many options to choose from — a half-online method with money transfer in the end (works well with local businesses) or full online experience — paying with PayPal or credit card.5 tools to help you ditch inefficiency with no timeSep 15, 2013
Call to Japan for free.
Forget Microsoft Office (on desktop).
Track how much time you waste every day.
Enlighten your project managers.
User testimonial: George Zhordania from GLOG homeJun 19, 2013
Face it – whatever business you’re in, having a home page is inevitable. Having a good home page, however, can be a nightmare if you don’t know what to do. GLOG home designs and sells house-building plans for non-builders - house plans so easy to understand, anyone can use them. An article published in USA described our services as “making home-building about as easy as putting together an IKEA bed frame”.
But for all of this to work properly, you can’t get pass a decent home page. Your product or service can be the best there is, but if your homepage is not easy to navigate, doesn’t look good or has some other fundamental flaws (in short: your homepage stinks), you can forget about any kind of business.
The reason we turned to Edicy is quite simple: they know, what they are doing. Obviously, you could always hire someone to manage your home page for you, but then again – how often do you actually need to modify your homepage? Once a week at best? Outsourcing is also an option, but seeing as different company’s like to charge the service to the max, that was out of the question for us.
Building the homepage from scratch was also not an option - we have some knowledge of HTML and CSS, but not nearly enough to build a new website.
Edicy, if I may, has done most of the dirty work for you, so all the coding, design, and structure is up there for the taking. And you need not worry – in my opinion, it is all top of the line and your only concern is creating content and adding photos. In addition, as Edicy offers several templates to choose from, the variety of choices is more than enough.
The most important thing for us is that once the site is up and running, the management of it is remarkably easy. Adding photos or changing content can be done with only a few clicks. So in short, Edicy has given us a way to focus on our products and sales, not on our website management.
George Zhordania works at GLOG home, a customer of Edicy.
Weekend reading list vol. 5Jun 07, 2013
Tools you need
- BigWebStats – all the stat about your webpage.
- Designmodo responsive tool – are you responsive?
- uiFaces – get your sample avatars for interface design.
- Moot – easy-to-add forum for your site.
- ubooq – let your user book with an ease.
- TowTruck – allow easy collaboration on your website.
- BitTorrent Sync – sync your files like never before.
- Litmus – test your e-mails in real-time.
- Site44 – Dropbox folders into websites, just like that.
Inspire yourself
- Rey Bango blog – testing IE with no pain.
- Sidr – get your side menus and turn menus responsive.
- Drublic blog – tips on how to make your site more printable.
- Riak – open source clouding, private or public.
- overAPI.com – all the cheat sheets in one place.
- Responsiveness – 8 guidelines and 1 rule.
- LivIcons – animated icons that amaze.
- Shapes of CSS – insane css wizardry.
- Screensiz.es – how big is your screen?
- What The Key Code – do you know?
How to remove your website or web page from GoogleMay 29, 2013
Almost four years ago, we wrote a very popular post on how to make your website show up on Google. Not surprisingly, several users often ask us the opposite question too — how can I remove my site or part of it from Google?
There are many reasons why one might want to remove her content from Google:
- Some information has leaked to the search engine too
early — e.g. details about a new service or product.
- The page itself is actually deleted, but the
information from it is still available (e.g. mistakenly published information);
- Information has been updated on the website, but search
engine still displays the old version (e.g. old contacts or mistakenly
published information).
How to remove stuff from Google?
- Make sure you've removed the unwanted page
- Set up your site with Webmaster Tools
- Find the address of the page in Google
- Remove the page with Google Webmaster Tools
As a matter of fact, you can speed up the process of removal yourself. It works just like adding your website to Google — by using Google Webmaster Tools, a website management tool provided by Google and it works like a charm with Edicy as well.
You can find more information on how to use it for your site in Edicy from our FAQ: How to get my site to show up on search engines?
All in all, there are two preconditions for removing any data from Google:
- The page indexed by Google is deleted or its address (URL) is changed, and
- The website on which the problematic page is (was) located is verified with Google Webmaster Tools.
Removing your brand new website from Google
Building content of a new website takes considerable amount of time. You want to be certain that it will remain off the radars of search engines until you are ready to launch it. But with just a single misstep, info about the existence of your half baked website can easily leak to Google. It would result in Google indexing your unfinished site and making it public.
When creating a new website, such a "leak" might appear when you share a link to your unfinished website in Facebook, e.g. sharing it with a group of friends. Also, such links might end up in Google when you share the link by e-mail or via Skype when it gets reshared to some third person and posted by him to any web-based channel which is monitored by Google.
Before you request the removal of the website from Google Webmaster Tools, you need to remove or rename the problematic site or page. When you rename it, make sure it won’t get into Google’s sight too soon again. To ensure your secrecy, we recommend protecting the pages with a password.
Now track down the page or site address mistakenly seen by Google. You'll find it very easily — just click on the unwanted Google search result.
Next, got to your Google Webmaster Tools account and choose "Optimization" > "Remove URLs". In the next view, choose "Create a new removal request" and enter the exact address of the page you wish to removed. Google then asks you to choose the reason for removal. Pick "Remove page from search results and cache". It can take up to a couple of days before your request is fulfilled by Google. You can follow the status of your request from the very same place.
Same method can be used when an old page (e.g. page with an out-dated information about your products) is removed from the website, but search engines still show it in their results.
Leaked information on updating your site
Premature information might slip into Google’s sight also when you are just updating some part of your website. Say your site is already indexed by Google. Now you are about to launch a new section. As a reasonable guy, you've hidden it from the menus. However, once you add just a single link to the new section in some older, indexed part of your site Google will jump in and index the new section prematurely too.
Again, you need to make sure that your content is not publicly available. In addition to renaming and protecting the page with a password, you should take one additional step. Remove premature content from your page, publish it and before you re-enter the information, disable automatic publishing.
Also, steps explained in the previous sections should be taken as well. Find the problematic address and request the removal of it by Google Webmaster Tools.
Cached content and search engines
But what if the search engine results already display correct information, but the cached page they provide still has outdated data — or even worse should be private? First, you should invite Google to index your updated website (submit a sitemap to them).
Google provides you with an option to speed up the process of updating the cached version of your website. For that, navigate to your Google Webmaster Tools account and choose "Optimization" > "Remove URLs". In the next view, choose "Create a new removal request" and enter the exact address of the page you wish to be removed. This time, choose "Remove page from cache only" to be the reason for removal.
How do I cancel the request of removal?
After Google has confirmed your request of removal, the site or page removed won’t appear in search results at least for 90 days. However, if the very same page or site is still accessible after those 90 days, then Google might index it again. But in case you want your page to show up in search engines before 90 days have passed by (e.g. you have finished adding content to it), you can get it back to listing by removing the removal request in Webmaster Tools.
Navigate to your Google Webmaster Tools account and choose "Optimization" > "Remove URLs". Now choose "Show: Removed" from the menu given on your right hand above the table ("Pending" in default). Find the page you wish to reindex and click on "Reinclude". Based on Google’s information, your page will be reindexed within 3-5 working-days.
When NOT to use the URL removal tool
Google has listed some unique cases when using the removal tool is not recommended:
- When search displays results which link to pages that are
already deleted. Google removes these results by itself upon regular update;
- When you want "a fresh start" (e.g. if the domain was
previously held by another company). You can submit a separate request for that
purpose;
- When you wish to see "correct" results. E.g. you wish to see results only without "www" (mysite.com) and wish to remove those with "www" (www.mysite.com). This results into removing everything, including those without "www".
Good to know
If your website uses several domains (e.g. mywebsite.com, mybrand.eu etc), then it would be wise to check search results with all your addresses and, if needed, repeat the removal process with other addresses as well.
And don’t forget that there are other search engines besides Google as well and removing a page from Google search results doesn’t remove indexed information from others.
- Page removal from Bing and Yahoo;
- Page removal from Yandex;
- Then there’s also Baidu, a Chinese search engine. There’s
no documented process to remove search results from there. But there’s an
unofficial, proven method — write "Free Tibet" in your blog and Baidu switches
you off quickly. Oh, wait — we just... Oops.
Website Structure Cheat SheetMay 17, 2013
The most important part of any company's web presence is — of course — their website. Content is in turn the most important component of those sites. The reason why so many websites are left behind (or even worse, never made) is always the same. People don't know what to write there, how to lay it all out.
We've created Edicy design templates so that you'll have this tough part — initial site structure and default content — in place right away. On the basic level most of the websites are very similar.
Here's our universal cheat sheet for your website's structure that's reflected also in any of our designs.
Main landing page.
- This is company name or logo.
- Headline or slogan (describing what you are, do or sell).
- A short paragraph introducing the business model or proposal of your company. A good guide to think about reasonable length is: "Does it all fit on a smartphone screen?"
- Key illustration. It is a very good idea to put an image to the first page that describes what you do. You can find a suitable one from iStockPhoto or some other image stock for a small fee. You might even find a logo icon from there.
- Menu with links to all second level sub pages and alternative language versions of the website.
- Footer or sidebar with contact information.
Products or portfolio.
In case you have more than one case study presented or product sold, you should start with a separate page for product or case study listing. Each product or case should then have a separate page so visitors can share a direct link to it. It should feature the name, description, some images and a call to action — e.g order the product or get a quote for a similar product.Contacts.
Blog or news.
Edicy blog
Life behind the simplest web creation tool