Webmaster Tips : Web Development, Design & Marketing

How A/B Split Testing Helps Your E-Commerce Website and Business

Identifying Changes in Web Pages and Effect on Customer Experience – How do we measure customer experience, and how do we know what is effective in our e-commerce design and implementation? These are questions that can be answered with statistics produced from A/B split testing experiments. For example, if you currently have a web page design and see high bounce rates and low click-through rates, you may want to identify why users are either not staying on your site or are not buying from your product or service selection. By changing everything in your design, you’ll never know what works and what doesn’t work – what is attracting users and what is shunning them away. Therefore, A/B split testing expresses statistical evidence created from incremental changes in your design or website’s effectiveness.

Understanding Your Purchase Funnel – With e-commerce website checkout pages, many internet marketers will look at the purchase funnel effectiveness using A/B split testing for different designs and routing patterns. The highest conversions will result in the implementation of either scenario A or B. The beauty of A/B split testing is that you are able to see what the change in design style or buying experience does to your click-through rates, overall sales, and bounce rates over the course of a couple of weeks. Design two different versions of your purchasing experience, make incremental changes along the way and measure the results of the action taken. Over the course of three to six months, you will fully understand the best strategy that creates the most interest.

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Now, Google offers the so called Page Speed Service, and it is said to be something that “automatically speeds up the loading speed of your web-site”. With this service, Google asks you to send them the entire web project, and they will “have it optimized” for you. Namely, they modify it in various ways, and, in the end, the version of the web-site that they make does load faster. The service is free, but there is a rumour that this will not last forever. You can say that it is only logical that, after some time passes, Google will be able to charge for their optimizing services, again, due to the constant development of this company.

First of all, it is important to state that the load time of any page is dependent on many factors. However, the most important ones are connected to images, animations, and other web-design experiments. So, here is a list of some tools where you can check your site speed:

Pingdom Tools

On this web-site, you can test the load time of every object that you have on your web page (like, for example, HTML, CSS, every image, Javascript, and so on) individually, so you can see which object loads the slowest. That way, you know what to work on.

GTmetrix

This web-site can be used as a tool to analyze the performance of your page. It combines Firefox performance add-ons like Yslow with Google Page Speed. The site also gives suggestions on how to improve your site both in terms of speed and some other things.

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1. Create Dynamic iOS 7 Style Background Blur

2. Create an Instagram Style Photo Filter

3. Design an iOS 7-inspired iPhone App Screen

4. Create a detailed audio rotary knob control

5. Create texture patterns

6. Create an embossed metal tag

7. Create an iOS7 Email App

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1. iOS 7 GUI PSD

Full iOS 7 graphical user interface (GUI) PSD based on the Beta 1 release will help you create an app prototype and pitch it to stakeholders.

2. Tab Bar Icons iOS 7

A nice collection of iOS 7 inspired icons in two different styles: full color and stroke. Initially designed to be used for the tab bars, suitable in any other context.

3. iPad iOS 7 Keyboard Portrait

Daniel Crystal has designed iOS 7 iPad keyboards, both light and dark versions. Useful for creating app previews or showing the interaction of the app.

4. Start making iOS 7 Icons with the App Icon Template 3.0

The new iOS 7 came out with slightly different icon dimensions and requirements. This free app icon template will serve you in the process of updating your current icon or creating a new one.

5. Template for iOS 7 App Icons

Another app icon template includes some time-saving features like slices for fast png export, a new vector grid, smart objects for easy preview of different sizes and a vector mask of the icon body with new rounded corners.

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VPS hosting refers to a Virtual Private Server that’s sold as a service to customers by a hosting service company. It imitates a dedicated server in a shared hosting environment and is technically considered both dedicated and shared hosting.

A VPS kind of hosting is just one of many types of web hosting accounts to choose from in order to get your website up and running online. To get a website online, you need to store the files for your website on an actual web server. But, setting up and subsequently managing a web server can be very costly as well as difficult. On the other hand, purchasing web hosting enables a person to rent adequate space on a web server, which makes it much easier since the only thing that’s required is to simply upload their website files. Today, there are three main types of available web hosting accounts, including the following:

• VPS Hosting
• Shared Hosting
• Dedicated Server Hosting

Each one of these different types of hosting accounts varies, everything from their setup to the level of customization and various features each one offers.

What’s the Difference Between VPS, Shared, and Dedicated Hosting?

With a dedicated server, the customer rents the whole server. Usually, this is for individuals that have incredibly high volumes of traffic to their sites and require that their server be setup in a certain way. However, most people don’t need an entire server to themselves. By renting just a small part of the server, you can save a great deal of money if you’re just starting out. Shared hosting refers to sharing a part of the server with other people rather than renting a whole server alone.

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iWebTool Web Tools

iWebTool showcases the top Web tools, which also include useful webmaster tools. There are Search Engine tools to help you check for important things like backlinks, cloaking, PageRank, keyword density, URL redirects, etc. The Domain Checkups tools will help you check your traffic rank, server status, website speed, broken links, reciprocal links, and more.

Plus, there are HTML and Miscellaneous tools that include generators, optimizers, viewers, extractors, cleaners, calculators, and testers.

Search Engine Optimization Webmaster Tools

Are you clueless about SEO and would rather try to figure it out yourself instead of hiring a professional? Submit Express offers you a wide range of free SEO tools that can be used to help boost your search engine rankings and website traffic.

You’ll have access to the following tools: meta tag and keyword analyzer, link popularity checker, XML sitemap submitter, keyword suggester, keyword traffic estimator, SEO dictionary, meta tags generator, PageRank checker, page snooper, broken link checker, link counter and reciprocal link checker.

Webmaster Toolkit

Just as the name implies, the Webmaster Toolkit is the ultimate stop for free webmaster tools and resources. This suite of tools includes SEO tools, Web utilities, domain tools, HTML tools, and resources. The large selection of SEO tools includes keyword research, keyword analysis, a search position checker, a search engine simulator, a meta tag generator and a Web page analyzer.

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If you are looking for a great tool to help you audit your website’s cookies and check if the website complies with the cookie directive, then check out Attacat. Some of the advantages of using this tool are the fact that it does not require any registration, it is simple, and, furthermore, it is free.

What this tool does is: find and identify cookies on your site, check if there are any cookies from third parties (that you might not know about) and help you comply with the cookie regulations.

After you have installed the extension in your Google Chrome, all you need to do is to make a few simple steps to generate the report.

First, open only one window and tab and clear the cookie history from your Chrome. Then open the extension in the browser and click on the “Start Recording” button. As you have activated the recording, go to your website and do everything an average user would do (browse, buy, register etc.). After you are finished, click on the “Stop Recording” button and then “View Report”. Easy as that.

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Although WordPress is one of the most ubiquitous platforms that is available for blogging and other Internet functions, it is not universally compatible with all web hosts. They are not all created equal! Here are a few of the biggest mistakes that webmasters make when choosing a WordPress host for a blog.

1. First, you must understand your own needs when it comes to hosting.

Different kinds of WordPress blog websites require different types of hosting solutions. What kind of blog are you building? Do you need to incorporate third-party applications into your site in order to make it work? Most importantly, what do you expect the size of your audience to be now and in the future?

Answering these questions will allow you to understand the resource allocation that you will need. In turn, this will determine the kind of web host that you take on.

2. Choosing a hosting platform based on price is a huge mistake.

Many people will pick the wrong type of website based solely on the price of the service. If your budget is your bottleneck, then you need to hold back your selection of a web host until you have enough money to afford any package. Your main concern should be a customer acquisition strategy and research and development for your product.

If you pick a plan that does not have the resource allocation that you need, you will obviously lose customers. These customers will never come back. When a server gets overloaded, a host will find a way to bottleneck your information flow. Because people come to the Internet for information primarily, they will simply go somewhere else. You will lose the respect of your audience. This does not take long to do if your potential customers see a 404 screen when they come to your page.

3. WordPress does not have proper internal security; do not rely on it.

Many people believe that the WordPress platform itself is somehow protected from outside malicious threats. This is not true. Most of the protection that you receive will come from the web host that you choose. There are some basic things that you should know about different web hosting packages and the security that they offer.

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Blogging may have once been a great way to share your passions with the world or expel some excess thoughts in your free time, but these days having a corner of the Internet to call your own has become closer to a necessity than ever.

Of course, merely having a blog is no longer quite the status symbol that it used to be in the professional world. Instead, you need a blog that will stand out. One that represents both you and your qualifications in the best way possible.

In short, you need to master the use of plug-ins.

The trade-off to a higher level of expectations regarding blog design quality is that even the most user-friendly websites can produce incredible results if they are used to their full potential. Oftentimes, that full potential will only be realized by those that master the use of website plug-ins to increase both the effectiveness and visual appeal of their site.

So if you’re just starting to dip your toes into online waters and are looking for blog advice – or if you’d like a refresher on what is hot right now in the plug-in world – consider this 10 factors when choosing your next plug-in.

1. Start With Necessity

Comb over your web host features briefly and really consider what is – and, more importantly, what isn’t – available to you. Should there be any feature that is missing from our backend that is either of necessity to your particular website model or generally needed, these will be your first plugin downloads. Everything else that will come afterwards will be built around these features design-wise, so you want to have them in place ASAP.

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