(323) 863 - 2896

Archive for the ‘Shopify’ Category

Explosive growth of Shopify or Death of Drupal?

December 19th, 2017

Today, 73% of all online stores just run on three platforms: Magento, Woocommerce, and Shopify. No matter, Drupal being the second most-used open source website content management system. But still, the analysis shows that Drupal appears nowhere even once.

Shopify is the leading e-commerce solution – an amazing tool that helps you build high-performance E-Commerce websites within hours. When we look back at past few years we realize that Shopify has enjoyed the explosive growth, which is a vivid sign of assurance that Shopify isn’t going anywhere. Shopify saves our clients with simpler needs time and money and speeds up their time-to-market by orders of magnitude over traditional commerce systems. Interestingly, Shopify recently launched a new enterprise platform called Shopify Plus targeted at high-traffic enterprise stores. They clearly aspire to break out of the low-end market.

Differences between Drupal and Shopify

General Description:

Shopify is a complete e-commerce solution that allows you to set up an online store to sell your goods. It lets you organize your products, customize your storefront, accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders — all with a few clicks of the mouse. It is a cost-effective, compelling commerce platform for clients with modest annual revenue or for teams that don’t need custom integrations with other systems.

Drupal has emerged as a powerful PHP-based open source content management system. This user-friendly platform has millions of worldwide user base across many industry verticals. It helps better publish, manage and update website content. Whether you want a personal blog or an enterprise-grade website, Drupal delivers!

Drupal is a highly secure and scalable framework that is easy to use. It has numerous features and add-ons that further improve its functionality. This open source framework does not require any license and you can simply plug-in and get started. Drupal has the right combination of power, flexibility and is great as a development platform. Also, it offers the best custom theme development features in the industry.

User Experience: When it comes to user experience Shopify is ahead of the game as for Shopify it is 2% to 3 % more than that of Drupal.

Serving needs of a low-end market: Here, also Shopify earns more points as It’s in heavy growth and market adoption phase.

Overall Comparison Score for Drupal and Shopify: If we give Shopify and Drupal overall Score out of 10 then for Shopify it will be 9.8 and Drupal it will be 8.0.

Some of the Challenges that one faces with Drupal:

Abandoned Modules: The major problem with Drupal is that modules that get replaced by an entirely different approach which really sucks. In the early days of Drupal, most site buildings were done by people programming custom modules on top of the Form API and the various other parts of the Drupal internals. Enough of these were generalized and shared back to the community that the next phase was characterized by thousands of single-purpose modules — install exactly what you need for each feature you want to provide, and perhaps need over a hundred on your site.

Now the number of modules you need is getting far less — we have a more general purpose, extremely powerful modules like Views, Rules, Display Suite, Features, and Context. As a result, the single-purpose modules are becoming obsolete, and developers pretty much abandon them.

Media Management and Modules: The most obvious problem Drupal face is the lack of Media management in Drupal’s core. Media Manager is absent, so mastering videos, pictures and other media files in poor to say the least. Because of that, many users prefer WordPress and other E-Commerce platforms, because they are tired of uploading the same image again and again.

Drupal Community: One of the main problems is that Drupal users are not as active in the community as they should be. This in activeness slow downs the problem-solving process for the Drupal experts.

Efficiency: The major reason for Drupal’s inefficiency is Caching. Caching is how it gets around the memory hogging problem and lets your site load quickly but it also means that sometimes things don’t get refreshed when they should be.

What charms Shopify?

  • Everything works great together for Shopify. Here, is where all the beauty lies
  • N-number of Payment Gateways
  • User-friendly and simple to use as you can get your website ready few clicks of mouse
  • For Shopify, there is good amount of Professional Support and Easy Backend Administration
  • There is option of lot many built-in tools like a blog, coupon codes, upsells, cross-sells, analytics and many more

Conclusion

SaaS is the Future!

Drupal is still alive but SaaS platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce are built in an orderly fashion that caters to the needs of the majority of the users. They define a generalized structure for their system. One way it is good, we can have a stable and robust system.

From all the above points maximum votes are in favor of Shopify as it caters the needs of the low-end market.

Tags: , , ,
Categories: Ecommerce, Shopify

Qualities a Good Shopify Web Designer Should Possess

October 23rd, 2017

With Shopify being the go-to platform for designing an e-commerce website, choosing the right Shopify web designer is really important. With so much competition and so many web designers out there that claim to be the best, finalizing on a designer can be tougher than it sounds. After all, the success of your online business depends upon it.

That is why I have devised a list of qualities that you must seek when you select that perfect Shopify web designer for your online store.

  1. Relevant Experience

Web designers create all kinds of different websites using various platforms. What really matters to you is whether the designer has relevant experience. By relevant experience, I mean experience creating e-commerce websites using Shopify. Since the platform and technology used is different from a WordPress site, good knowledge of Shopify features and customization is needed.

  1. A Good Track Record

A good track record can be a very broad term. What I specifically mean by it is whether that designer has a good record of meeting his client’s expectations. This is not something that you can learn by interviewing the designer, but their past clients. Get some feedback and learn what kind of experience the prior clients have had with them.

  1. A Diverse Portfolio

A good Shopify designer must have a diverse and impressive portfolio. Your Shopify website is important and you should not give it in the hands of an amateur. A strong portfolio lets you check what kind of websites the designer has created and how well they match the design expectations that you have for your own e-commerce site. Through the portfolio, you can check out the style of the designer’s work, check the quality of their work across multiple and know that the designer can deliver in a timely manner.

  1. Good Communication Skills

During the entire Shopify web design process, it is important that the designer maintains open communication with you to ensure you both are on the same page. They should be able to express their vision as clearly as possible. Also, exchange of ideas and information is a critical component of any web design process.

  1. Basic SEO Knowledge

Search Engine Optimization is very important for an e-commerce site as it helps increase the visibility of the site in search engines. It helps your website get traffic and customers as well. If the designer has SEO knowledge, it can be implemented while creating a website. Load time of the site can be reduced to give visitors a positive experience. Images can be compressed to make sure the site is not too heavy. Use of videos and animations can be limited as well to reduce load time.

  1. Have a Proactive Approach

A proactive web designer is one that identifies a challenge early on and addresses it rather than waiting for things to go from bad to worse. This is a positive approach that can truly save important time for you and let your team figure out just what the issue is and what is the best way to overcome it. A proactive approach is one the most desirable qualities for anyone in the field of web designing and development.

  1. Expertise in Responsive Designs

The very first demand that clients make from web designers these days is to ensure that their website is responsive. This means that the website will function equally well on all devices, no matter the screen size and resolution. Since approximately 50% of online shoppers use their mobile devices to go online, it is important for your Shopify website to be responsive, hence experience and knowledge of creating responsive websites is an important quality.

Clap Creative offers experienced and certified Shopify web designers

Clap Creative has a team of well experienced and certified Shopify web designers that have a proven record of creating attractive and interactive Shopify websites. We create responsive designs that make your online store run perfectly on all devices. Our deep understanding of SEO principles helps us create websites that are optimized for search engines. To know more about our Shopify web design services, contact us today.

Tags: , , , ,
Categories: Ecommerce, Shopify

Best Plugins of 2017 for WordPress SEO Optimization

October 14th, 2017

Search engine optimization is essential today for boosting the traffic of your website and gaining organic leads. The principles of SEO have been around for a long time and SEO professionals have spent their entire careers trying to crack the magic code of Google to increase their keyword rankings. But, you do not need to make everything about SEO complicated. WordPress SEO optimization can be simplified for your website if you use some Plugins that have been created with the very intention of helping users optimize their website as per SEO guidelines.

In this post, I will let you know about the best SEO Plugins of 2021 that users like yourselves have used this year to help their on-page SEO efforts. Here is the list –

  • SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate is a plugin that covers all the basics of SEO. It lets you add the title as well as the meta-description of the content and it highlights the author’s Google+ profile as well. This tool also has some deep linking features that allow you to save a link in the draft which gets activated when it gets published.

Check it out here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-ultimate/

  • SEOPressor

This plugin helps you optimize your blog posts and improve organic traffic. What sets this plugin apart is its keyword analysis feature. Its built-in keyword research tool helps you find long tail keywords that you can use in your blog creation. Once you are done creating your blog post, this plugin will give you a score on how SEO friendly your content is. This plugin also helps you optimize the images by checking whether all images have the proper ALT tags or not.

Check it out here: https://seopressor.com/

  • Squirrly SEO

This plugin not only optimizes your website for the search engines but also for the visitors. This is perfect plugin for those users that have very little SEO knowledge. While creating blog posts, you will get real-time SEO coverage with a green light indicating that your content is as per SEO guidelines. You also get weekly analytics report of your pages.

Check it out here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/squirrly-seo/

  • WP Meta SEO

This plugin offers a dashboard that keeps you updated about the status of your website and all its pages. The user interface and settings of this plugin are extremely user-friendly. WP Meta SEO has bulk SEO processing features which what attracts most users to it. Instead of the time taking the procedure of editing each data of every post and optimizing every image manually, you can simply select the content and the image size, the rest is done by this plugin.

Check it out here: https://www.joomunited.com/wordpress-products/wp-meta-seo?atid=101

  • Smart Crawl

This premium WordPress plugin offers four main features to the users. These are – MOZ integrations, Sitemaps, Meta-tag customization and automatic links. This extremely user-friendly plugin has caught the attention of many WordPress users and they integrate it with their site at the time of WordPress development and WordPress web design process.

Check it out here: https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/smartcrawl-wordpress-seo/

Honorary mention:

Here I would like to give a special mention to the evergreen WordPress SEO plugin – Yoast. Yoast plugin remains the first choice of all WordPress users and I do not know any website that does not have this plugin integrated with their site. Its features and simplicity are the reasons it is one of our favorites.

 

Conclusion: Good on-page SEO is the key to boosting traffic and keyword rankings. These Plugins and tools make it easier for you to take care of all on-page activities and help you get the results that are wanted.

Tags: , , , ,
Categories: CMS, Shopify

4 Tips for Shopify Theme Customization

October 5th, 2017

Shopify allows users to choose from hundreds of available themes to use for their e-commerce store. These choices let you truly find a theme that matches your vision for your Shopify store. If you still are not satisfied and want a truly customized experience when it comes to your Shopify theme, then you should follow these four tips that will help you with your Shopify theme customization.

1)    Understanding Liquid

Shopify platform allows you to take an existing theme and make modifications to it to create your own customized theme. Whether that is the route you want to take or you want to create a new theme simply from scratch, you need the knowledge of Liquid. Even the most basic themes require Liquid, which is a Ruby-based coding language that is extremely customizable. If you have a ton of experience with Liquid, the sky is the limit for what you can do with your Shopify store. If you are unfamiliar with Liquid, you can study some online tutorials before getting started.

2)    Matching SCSS with templates

Shopify has a very flexible templating that allows users to have a very modular approach to CSS and markup. It is always better to match your CSS structure with the template structure of the online store. This helps not just with the Shopify development but also help with Shopify maintenance to keep the webstore running in an optimized manner.

3)    Familiarize yourself with Timber

Don’t know how to set up a Shopify framework from scratch but want something unique and original? In that case, knowledge of Timber might be just the thing you need. Timber is a bare-bones code that can be edited using Liquid. This way, you do not have to start all the way from zero.

The best way to explain Timber is constructing a house but you can only put up four walls. The outer construct is already provided for you. Timber allows you to put your room wherever in the house you like.  With Timber, the process of creating a new theme becomes simplified and you can take care of more complex customizations at a later time.

4)    Re-using styles for Check-out page

In Shopify, you do not have any control over the markup however you do have control over the CSS. You have to keep in mind to over-write the default styles that are there from the beginning. The best method is always to use code-re-use. Have a checkout style sheet prepared in your CSS folder. It also gets the output to your theme’s asset folder.

Above are just a few tips that can help you with the customization of your website and its theme. If you want professional assistance in creating a truly unique and remarkable theme for your Shopify website, Clap Creative is your perfect partner for this endeavor. At Clap Creative, we offer Shopify theme customization service that will make your Shopify store truly pop up and look unique. Our team of designers takes your vision and turns it into reality.

Apart from this, Clap Creative also offers services like Shopify web design, Shopify development, and Shopify maintenance and support services. To know more about our services or to get a quote, Contact us today.

Tags: , , ,
Categories: Ecommerce, Shopify

Is Shopify the Right Platform for Your E-Commerce Webstore?

September 21st, 2017

Once you have made the decision to start your online store, the next decision they are faced with is which platform is the right one for them to develop their webstores? If it is your first e-commerce store, then it only adds to your confusion. You can go online and visit various forums and ask other users of their experiences. There are loyal defenders of each e-commerce platform all over the internet and that might make it even more difficult for you to decide. If you want to go in depth to know what Shopify has to offer and decide if Shopify Development is the right path for your webstore, read on below.

Shopify is an easy to use the platform and if you are someone that wants to start selling immediately, it may seem like the perfect option. There are certain aspects of Shopify web design and development that you need to take a closer look at to understand what they offer for you. Each one of these features of Shopify makes it different gives some value addition to the users.

Let us discuss them in detail –

Store Management

Shopify makes store management a breeze, especially for first-time webstore owners. It creates accounts and stores the information of your customers that you can later use for the purpose of remarketing for various promotional offers.  However, you may need to use external tools like Google Analytics for more in-depth reporting of your website’s performance as the Shopify’s own user behavior reporting does not match up to the detailed reporting of GA.

Shopify also has features that aid in order fulfillment. It has pre-set plugs Amazon, Super Logistics etc. With Shopify, you can set-up an entire communication protocol that starts from sending thank you email to your customers to tracking the dispatch and shipping details. Your customers even get the emails that their products have been delivered.

Shopping Cart Features

When you use Shopify for your webstore, you get a free SSL certificate that makes users trust your webstore and feel more confident about entering their card information there. You have the option to integrate over 50 payment gateways on your checkout page including all-time popular PayPal. You can automatically control shipping costs or offer free shipping by integrating with carriers like FedEx, UPS etc. If that was not enough, Shopify supports 50+ languages too. Shopify has the abandoned cart recovery feature too that reminds those prospective customers of the items that they added to cart but did not buy.

Shopify Storefront

Shopify gives you hundreds of themes to choose from to customize your webstore. Although you can select these themes yourself, if you want to stand apart from other Shopify sites, you can avail the services of a Shopify web design company to help create that perfect tailor-made theme especially for you. Blogging is an important way of getting traffic and engaging your customers with content. Shopify offers a ready to go blogging platform too.

Your webstore will be mobile ready without much effort from you. Shopify sites are responsive and work perfectly on all kinds of devices.

Online Marketing Tools

Shopify helps your online marketing efforts as well. You get a ready to submit the sitemap.XML file that once submitted into the search console will get your website indexed faster. You can set customer H1 tags, Title tags, and meta-tags. This makes your SEO for Shopify that much more effective. Through Shopify, you can also offer discount coupons to your customers that will help you entice them to buy from you.

Shopify will aid you in converting your website visitors with the help of email marketing. Using email marketing all those users to signed up on your site but left without purchasing anything can be sent emails with promotional offers. Some other features include the option for customers to leave product reviews and integration with several popular social media platforms.

 

Now that you know a bit more details about Shopify, you can make a more informed decision as to whether it is the platform you want to use for your webstore. Remember, if you choose Shopify to start your e-commerce store, you need to periodically keep it optimized by availing Shopify maintenance and support services. This will ensure your webstore works as good as new.

Tags: , , ,
Categories: Ecommerce, Shopify

Common Mistakes Every Shopify E-commerce Store Must Avoid

September 16th, 2017

With Shopify becoming a very popular e-commerce platform, there are several online stores exist as a result of Shopify development. There are also many e-commerce business owners who are migrating their online stores to Shopify. However, there are a few pitfalls that some people fall into while creating their online site using Shopify. Whether you are a Shopify expert or a novice, you need to avoid these mistakes the same.

Here are some of common Shopify mistakes that every Shopify store owner must avoid –

  • Not Filling Meta Information

There are many e-commerce websites that leave their meta information section empty. This can be a big mistake. The homepage title also needs to be filled meticulously as this title is what shows up in online searches. You can go to Online Store>Preferences and then enter this information. Updating this information will help your SEO efforts a great deal.

  • Forgetting to Optimize Images

Larger image sizes lead to slow loading time for websites. E-Commerce sites generally do contain many images and if they are not optimized for the web, they can have a counter-productive effect on your website. Using ImageOptim, you can optimize your images easily. Always remember to compress images before adding them to your website.

  • High Shipping Costs

A very popular policy that some e-commerce sites use is that they offer free shipping to customers who make purchases over a certain dollar amount. The fact is that no one really likes to pay extra for shipping. Customer psychology will dictate that if they believe that shipping cost can be avoided, they would add more items to the cart. But do not use a rigid business model where you use a flat shipping cost for any amount of sale, websites that do so end up losing a lot of customers.

  • Not Setting up Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that lets you study and analyze the traffic on their websites. I see many questions in Shopify forums where people ask “why my traffic is not converting?” The answer lies in the Google Analytics report. If you don’t integrate your Shopify website with GA, you will miss out important insights about your website’s traffic. Where they come from, which pages they visit, how much time they spend there, where they exit is all the valuable information you will miss out on.

  • Not Valuing Mobile

As per many surveys conducted, e-commerce websites are getting close 50% of traffic from mobile phones. This traffic consists primarily of youngsters that prefer using their smartphones for online purchases. If your Shopify web design was not created keeping mobile experience in mind as a priority, you may end up giving a large chunk of your visitors a less than par experience on your site.

 

If you really want to capitalize on your Shopify E-Commerce store, avoid these common mistakes. They are easy to sidestep and don’t really cost anything. If you have made these mistakes already, take corrective action and you will start to notice a lot of change in your website’s performance and conversion rate.

Tags: ,
Categories: Ecommerce, Shopify

How to Choose the Perfect Theme for Your Shopify Store

September 15th, 2017

Shopify is an extremely popular platform when it comes to designing e-commerce stores. It offers you so many themes to choose from and the options of adding your own customizations to these themes. With hundreds of themes to choose from, how do decide which theme is the best for your Shopify web design? Below are some of the things you should definitely look for when deciding on the perfect theme for your Shopify e-commerce site.

  1. It Must Be Responsive

Every design available in the Shopify theme store is mobile friendly. It is a prerequisite when it comes to Shopify accepting any theme on its store. However, there are some developers that choose to hide a few features on devices with smaller screen resolutions like smartphones and tablets.

Mobile traffic consists of almost 50% of all the visitors on e-commerce websites. Not showing all the features and functionalities of your website to such a large part of your audience can be a mistake for you.

You must also find a perfect balance so that you do not overload your website with too many images and extensions that decrease the page load speed which can lead to a degraded user experience.

  1. Don’t Overcomplicate the Navigation

Many e-commerce store owners have the complaint that they get a lot of traffic on their website but it does not convert into customers. One of the major problems that visitors on your website may face is navigating through the different levels of menus to get to the products they are looking for.

During your Shopify development and design process, make your menu and navigation as simple as possible and try to reduce as many steps as you can between your homepage and the product page. Using a mega menu would be suggested if you have too many categories, brands or products that you sell on your website.

  1. Beautiful Blog

Blogs are extremely important for getting your visitors engaged with your website and for generating organic traffic to your website. A blog is a very effective tool for SEO for Shopify. However, some designers and developers can over look this importance during their Shopify design and development process.

Your blog should have beautiful banner images that make it look appealing. There should also be certain features that make it SEO friendly like the option to add tags. As per Shopify guidelines, a featured blog image along with a feature image is displayed on the homepage so your designers need to make sure it goes well with the overall website theme.

  1. Option to add Videos

Adding videos to your e-commerce site can make it look that much more appealing. Apart from the aesthetics, adding videos about your company and the products can help engage your customers even more with your website.

You must choose a theme that allows your designers to add videos on any page and in any section of the online store as and when needed. You can add videos on specific product pages and a company introduction video on the about us page.

  1. Use of Large Images

The usage of large beautiful images makes your website stand out. Using high-quality images of your products is the perfect window dressing needed to appeal to online customers that are more enticed by visuals rather than the written word. The theme you choose must have large imagery to achieve this desired effect.

As stated in one of the points before, using too many high-quality images on your website can result in the reduction of your website speed. While using images on your site, it is important to maintain a healthy balance and to not go overboard with every product image available.

 

Conclusion:

I will leave you with these words. You must choose a theme keeping in mind which products you are selling and which industry or category you belong to. Even if a theme meets all the above criteria, it still may not be right for the kind of Shopify store you want to be developed. Know your business and target audience and then pick Shopify theme customization that is needed.

 

Tags: , , , ,
Categories: Ecommerce, Shopify
MENU