Head on over and give it a read!

1. Show shipping costs and options early in the checkout process

Obviously, the trade-off for shopping online is paying for shipping. Shoppers know this, so it's the first thing they'll look for (either before they start or once they've started adding items to their cart). Unfortunately, a lot of online retailers make the mistake of keeping this tucked away in a later step in the checkout process rather than making it available early on. If you make it clear what the shipping costs might be early on, the better completion rate you'll have.

2. Offer free or reduced shipping

Related to the previous point, shipping charges in and of themselves are a pain. But they're also a reality for many online stores, so it becomes a delicate balancing act. If you can, offer free shipping whenever possible. If not, keep your shipping as low as your business margins will allow. This might just give you an edge over competition in addition to keeping your customers from ditching your cart altogether.

3. Allow guest checkout

Stop and think about how many website accounts you have. Chances are it's more than 3-5 and each of those are probably for sites you access on a regular basis. Now, I hate to burst your bubble but as much as you'd like people to visit and shop on your site as much as they visit say, their bank website, it's not likely. So forcing them to register to checkout is forcing them to perform several extra steps for quite possibly a one-time purchase. Instead, make it easier on your customers. It's better for brand image/perception as well as shopping cart conversions.

4. Allow customers to save items for later shopping

Yes, the idea is to keep people form abandoning their carts altogether and instead, complete their purchases in one go. Unfortunately that's not always possible. Giving customers the ability to save items for later can be a great way to get them to come back and purchase from your store instead of someone else's!

5. Show inventory availability

It's incredibly frustrating for customers to find your store, add several items to their cart, get ready to checkout, only to then be told that one or more items in their cart are sold out. Keep that frustration at bay by showing some sort of inventory count. While you may not be comfortable showing an absolute count, the most common thing to do is show when inventory for that item has dropped below a certain number and if it's at zero, clearly mark it as out of stock. It seems obvious but even in 2012 some sites still make this mistake.

6. Show multiple large photos

Shopping online can be difficult because almost all the regular signals that help us make decisions are absent – we can't touch the product to get a feel for weight, texture and even quality. This is why showing large photos of your products on your online store are critical. But one photo is not enough anymore. Multiple photos to show different colors and/or angles help answer some questions about the product that would otherwise potentially cause a visitor to change their mind about purchasing.

7. Customer reviews = social proof

People love what's popular, whether we admit it or not. So in addition to having multiple photos, customer reviews on products are good to have as well – they're a good indicator for visitors on what they are purchasing. But there's also a bonus: the reviews will also give you an idea of what works and doesn't work for a given product. No one wants bad reviews, but those bad reviews can easily be turned into something positive.

Photo by Ronald Eikelenboom

Don't believe me? Read this blog post over at DaleTing.com about how a newspaper ad raked in returns much better than Google AdWords did and for the same monthly cost. Go on, I'll wait. Don't worry, it's a short blog post.

Back already? See, I told you it was a short blog post. :)

So you might be wondering why the print ad they ran worked so well for them but didn't for your business or product. Or your friend's business or product. Was it the copy in the ad? The headline? The photo?

The answer: None of the above.

It worked for them because the newspaper was highly targeted. In other words, the people who regularly read that publication are the exact kind of people that would buy the BBQ that Tremore is selling. Really, that's all there is to it. Of course, that's easier said than done.

I know how tempting it is to put an print ad campaign together and get it out to as many people as possible. The argument seems logical:

If I market to everyone, more people will buy!

Well, no. You see, not everyone is looking for what you're offering. Let's break it down into basic math.

We'll start by putting a number on a few things (all of which are arbitrary and round for example sake). Let's say the print ad you're putting out costs $1000 for one run and has a reach of 250,000 people (we'll pretend that it will actually be seen by 250,000 pairs of eyeballs).

Next, let's say that of those 250,000 people, 1% are the kind of people that would be interested in the widget. That's a pretty realistic percentage, so let's go with it. That would mean that out of 250,000 people, 25,000 are people interested.

Even within that 25,000 not everyone will be ready to buy. Let's say only 10% of those folks are ready to buy. That reduces the number to 2,500.

2,500 widgets sold at $1 a piece, means $2,500 revenue; still not bad. But we can't forget that not every single one will become a customer. Some will no doubt go to your competitor(s) for some reason or another. Let's say that half go to your competitors and/or just not buy. The new number is 1,250.

So out of 250,000 you might get 1,250 customers. That's 0.5%. So from a $1000 ad, you gained $1250 in revenue. Subtracting just the ad expense, that's a profit of $250. Meh.

Now let's say that you put an ad out that's targeted to just those 25,000 that would be interested in the widget in the first place (leaving out the 175,000 that couldn't care less). And let's say that ad, because it'll be in a smaller / less circulated publication, costs $250. Assuming you still end up with 1,250 customers, your ROI – return on investment – is higher. You get 50% of the audience at a profit of $1,000 – 75% higher than with the ad with a reach of 250,000 people.

In all fairness, the above example is very simplified, but it does serve to demonstrate how critical targeting your marketing efforts really are. The difference is like trying to catch fish in an ocean versus a small lake. You may have to figure out which lake the fish you want swim in, but once you've done that, you'll catch more fish.

So does this apply to just print advertising? No way! All successful advertising works on the premise that the better targeted the ad, the more you'll reap the rewards. Keep that in mind next time you're putting together a new ad campaign.

Duplicate Titles? Don't you mean duplicate content?

From an SEO standpoint, duplicate content can have a very negative effect on your site's rankings, whether it's getting stuck in a low ranking spot, not getting ranked at all, or getting dropped from search engines altogether (rare but it happens once in a while). Most people will address a page's content when discussing duplicate content. That is, the text on each page should be unique and not a duplicate anywhere else on the web. One thing that gets overlooked, however, is the title tag. This guy:

<title>Your page title here</title>

That powerful little tag is critical to any SEO efforts and having duplicates can potentially hurt your rankings. If you don't have duplicate titles on your site, good on ya. Carry on and skip this article. :)  We, on the other hand, found dozens of duplicate title tags on our site.

Finding Duplicate Titles

I'm a Pro member over at SEOmoz and using their tools I found the offending pages. You don't have to be an SEOmoz member though. Most SEO tools will have a way to find any duplicate titles within your site. If in doubt, use Google Webmaster Tools.

In any case, I found most of our duplicate titles were in two sections on our site: our design portfolio and the design blog.

In the case of the portfolio, it wasn't too bad. There were only a small handful of portfolio entries that had duplicate titles. This was a result of using the client name as the title only rather than being a bit more descriptive (which is good SEO anyway) and unique in the title tag. Since we use (and love) NSM Better Meta, this was an easy fix. After identifying which portfolio entries contained duplicate titles, I headed into each one and tweaked them in the NSM Better Meta tab.

The blog was a little bit more involved. The entries/posts themselves weren't the issue. The issue was in the pagination of each category. For instance, the URL to the "Around the Web" category looks like this: http://420creative.com/blog/category/web_development. We have several posts in that category, so depending on the page you're on within that category listing, you'll see "Next" and "Previous" links (i.e., pagination). So the issue came up with the subsequent pages within the category listings. On page two, for instance, the URL looks like this: http://420creative.com/blog/category/web_development/P6  (You may think that it should have "P2" at the end there but EE is a little odd in how it handles pagination in the URL.)

In both cases (and subsequent pages within the category), the title tag read like this:

Web Development Blog - 420 Creative

Both were the same. And that's a problem.

I determined that to make each one unique it would be best to add "Page n of y" (where n is the current page number and y is the total number of pages) so that we ended up with something like this:

Page 2 of 53 - Web Development Blog - 420 Creative

In ExpressionEngine, the only way to really get that text to show up is to use the Channel Entries tag. In the template that renders the category listing pages, we use an embed to call in everything from the opening <html> tag to the closing head tag. The embed, at its simplest, looks like this:

{embed="_global/_head"}

In that embedded template lies the NSM Better Meta tag and code.

I should note that we use one template to handle the main blog page and the category pages. We do this with conditionals:

{if segment_2 == ""}
  {embed="_global/_head" title="[our main blog page title]" description="[meta description here]"}
{/if}

{if segment_2 == "category" && segment_4 == ""}{embed="_global/_head" title="{segment_3_category_name} Blog"}{/if}

{if segment_2 == "category" && segment_4 != ""}{embed="_global/_head" title="
  {exp:channel:entries site="420" channel="blog" disable="member_data" limit="6" paginate="bottom"}
  {paginate}Page {current_page} of {total_pages} - {/paginate}
  {/exp:channel:entries}
  {segment_3_category_name} Blog"}
{/if}

Admittedly it's not the prettiest or most sophisticated solution, but it works well. I'm not a huge fan of using a ton of conditionals if it can be avoided due to their overhead. But our pages are still pretty speedy so this works fine for this site. We may end up changing this to use either Switchee or Ifelse – both really great add-ons by Mark Croxton – to improve performance a bit.

The second and third conditional you see in the code above is where the duplicate title issue is resolved:

{if segment_2 == "category" && segment_4 == ""}{embed="_global/_head" title="{segment_3_category_name} Blog"}{/if}

That conditional tells EE that if the URL is the main category page (i.e., there's no pagination number/ID in segment 4 of the URL), grab the code from the embedded template (_head in this case) and apply the category name – which is in segment 3 – for the title followed by "blog". (We use Low Seg2Cat to grab the category name from the segment.) Easy enough.

(The title variable in the embed is used in conjunction with NSM Better Meta.)

Next, we tell EE that if the URL is not the main category page (because there is a pagination number/ID in segment 4 of the URL), grab the code from the embedded template and modify the title:

{if segment_2 == "category" && segment_4 != ""}{embed="_global/_head" title="
  {exp:channel:entries site="420" channel="blog" disable="member_data" limit="6" paginate="bottom"}
    {paginate}Page {current_page} of {total_pages} - {/paginate}
  {/exp:channel:entries}
  {segment_3_category_name} Blog"}
{/if}

Within the title variable you can see I added a condensed version of the code that displays the entries and pagination on each category page. Here it is by itself:

{exp:channel:entries site="420" channel="blog" disable="member_data" limit="6" paginate="bottom"}
{paginate}Page {current_page} of {total_pages} - {/paginate}
{/exp:channel:entries}

Since the paginate tags are dynamic, each category page then automatically adds the correct current page number out of the total number of pages. I made sure that the parameters in the Channel Entries tag are identical as the ones where this code shows up later in the template. The reason for this is so that the pagination output (the numbering) is identical to the page itself, otherwise it may end up spitting out incorrect numbering.

Again, this isn't the most elegant solution since we've essentially added to the overhead of the page by adding yet another query by using the channel entries EE tag. It works, but it may not be a good solution for sites that are more complex or heavily trafficked.

Unique Titles FTW!

So what does this all work do in the end? Well, in terms of SEO efforts, it's mostly just being a perfectionist. In terms of search engine ranking, there is an impact. How much, I can't really say. But it is a basic premise of good SEO, so there's no reason to be lazy about it really.

In any case, I hope I've helped any EE devs out there with a penchant for good SEO with this post. Got any other ideas or solutions to this? Post them in the comments!

Not a secret, often overlooked:

"Keep your promises."

If you say you'll show up every day at 8 am, do so. Every day.

If you say your service is excellent, make it so.

If circumstances or priorities change, well then, invest to change them back. Or tell the truth, and mean it.

If traffic might be bad, plan for it.

Is there actually unusually heavy call volume? Really?

Want a bigger brand? Make bigger promises. And keep them.

I say seemingly obvious because for some of us, keeping promises is second nature. You say you're going to do something, then you do it. Plain and simple.

Sadly, however, there's a bad reputation in the web design industry surrounding this very premise. (Seems like especially when it comes to freelancers.) I don't know how many times I've spoken with a potential client only to hear some version of how their previous designer didn't do their job completely. Or they never returned a call. Or didn't communicate well despite specifically saying they would.

I do realize and believe that designers and developers aren't always to blame fully. Sometimes disgruntled, unhappy clients will say things like this, not so much out of malice, but out of being disgruntled and unhappy with their previous experience. It's a big of a help sign, if you will. And sure, there is the occasional client that is incredibly difficult to please or what have you.

Still, that doesn't completely take designers/developers off the hook. We as designers and developers call ourselves communicators and problem solvers, yet this is how many treat their clients? We expect our profession to get more respect as a whole and yet this kind of snooty attitude is exactly what's causing the disrespect.

It's real simple guys, keep your promises. Do good work. Appreciate your clients. Have patience.

Then again, don't do any of the above. We'll just take your clients once they've realized working with you was a bad idea. :)

Based on my industry reflection, I've come to the conclusion that there are two areas business owners really need to start paying more attention to this coming year.

Social media

You've probably heard about how popular social media has become over the past couple of years. Well, I've got news for you – it's not going to slow down. And if you're a business owner purposely ignoring social sooner or later, you're going to be left behind. I can practically guarantee it.

I've heard plenty of excuses from clients on why they don't want to get into Facebook or Twitter or whatever. And every single one is an excuse, not a reason.

I don't see the value. (Often combined with: I don't care what people had to eat/did over the weekend/or whatever.)
Then you're being shortsighted. Yes, some people use social media to declare their eating habits but not everyone does. A lot of news gets posted and passed around; people within the same industry connect and form good relationships; contests to win cool stuff are often held solely on one of the two most popular social networks (Twitter, Facebook); customer relations; branding; etc. In short, there are plenty of smart business uses for social media.

Teenagers aren't my target audience.
Perhaps not, but they aren't the only ones on social networks. In fact, 41% of Twitter users were age 36 and above in 2011. 50% (!) of Facebook users were age 36 and above (source). Don't write social media off as "something kids do" – it clearly isn't.

I don't "get" social media.
This is a weak excuse. Perhaps the weakest here. Social media isn't rocket science. There are plenty of resources out there to understand it, from websites dedicated to teaching the stuff to hiring social media strategists or a web studio.

I'm too busy.
Another weak excuse often disguised as a reason. As business owners we're all busy. Very busy. If you look at social media as part of your marketing strategy you'll make time. Because that's what it is: social media is part of your toolset in your marketing arsenal.

So instead of making excuses, get your business out there and start connecting! It won't bring you immediate ROI, but long-term? Oh yeah, it'll help.

Mobile devices

The statistics are out there: more and more people are using mobile devices to get their news, communicate with friends and colleagues, view videos, visit their favorite websites, and even to shop, among other things. That means your website had better be mobile friendly.

It doesn't have to be mobile-specific right away (that takes time and planning with a good web design team), but it should be accessible via the mobile web. That includes the iphone, the iPad, Android devices, Windows phones and more.

"Yeah, but my target audience doesn't really use their phone to visit our site." Really? Prove it. Don't assume that's the case, especially if your target audience tends to be made up of affluent and savvy people.

Stop assuming and instead look at the data. Your data. It will give you a clear indication of visitors' browsing habits, including via mobile devices. Even if you don't have a large number of visitors viewing your site on a mobile device, you can at least start to see a trend or pattern. That's something to pay attention to this coming year.

So there you have it, two areas that the small business owner should be paying attention to in 2012 (and beyond). What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments!

Limitations? Hand 'em over...

There are lots of constraints for any given project, but money is usually the most uncomfortable one to talk about. The negotiation and discovery process is much, much more efficient, smoother and less awkward when a potential client is as clear and upfront about their budget as they can be, even if that means just hearing a baseline price or range. We try our hardest to work with clients' budgets, so knowing as much as we can up front allows us to better serve your needs from a budgetary perspective.

You got questions? Come at us, yo!

We don't expect you to know anything (let alone everything) about design, just like you probably don't expect us to know everything about your business. So when you're putting even a small part of your business in the hands of design consultants, you had better ask questions and not just hope for the best. Ask about our process; ask about "what if" scenarios; ask why we made a particular decision; ask us to clarify something that you didn't fully understand. You may not always like what we have to say, but I can promise you this: we'll always, always be honest and courteous.

Share your goals, needs and priorities with us

There's no easy way around it. The more we know about a prospect's needs, goals, context, problems and ideas, the better we can put together not only a proposal but a project scope. Not knowing things early on in the process and instead getting blindsided by them midway could put a serious damper on what could potentially be a very, very good business relationship, not to mention cause delays and rushed work.

As for design constraints, bring it on. You see, when you hire a design studio, you're hiring problem solvers. Constraints are part of the problem. As long as you're as clear as you can be about the constraints and limitations you're aware of, tthe better off we'll all be from the get-go.

Keep Us in the Loop

We know we're not the only design studio you're talking to. And we know that talking to the two, three or however many other shops takes time, plus the time to properly review everything and make a decision. All we ask is for a little insight about your selection process so that we can give you what you need to make a decision on who to work with, even if that who isn't us. Just keep us in the loop – it'll keep us from wondering what we did wrong or worse, we won't think that an otherwise nice person isn't much of a professional.

Final thoughts…

There's not much else really. The key is that open, clear communication from the get-go are absolutely critical when deciding to work together. And frankly, it sets the tone for the project and quite possibly, the rest of our business relationship.

Note: We've used both CartThrob 1 and 2. While much of what is discussed here easily applies to both versions, it was written with CartThrob 2 in mind.

Installation & Set Up

If you've worked on even just a couple of ExpressionEngine sites, it's highly likely you've installed add-ons to your setup. CartThrob is no different in this regard. Move some folders and files to the right places, enable the module and extension in the CP and voilá – you're ready to go.

But before you dive in, I really recommend installing the sample templates and data. They provide the code and live previews of what CartThrob can do. They're great for learning. Big tip though: install the sample templates and data before you start any work on your own templates, code, etc., otherwise, you may end up losing some product data. Ouch.

Features: What CartThrob is Capable Of

CartThrob comes with a lot of features, but here are just a few highlights (with some obvious ones of course that would be a deal breaker for any cart solution if they weren't included).

• Shipping calculations.
• Tax calculations.
• Coupon codes – fully manageable by site admins and can be created for a group of products, single product, group of members, and more.
• Orders are stored in EE channels for easy look up and presentation on the front-end using EE's built-in templating power.
• Purchased items can also be stored in channels so store owners can see what's been purchased. This feature alone gives you a lot to go on if you need product-specific reports.
• Product options. Need to set specific options per product? No problem. Need to have those options added on the fly? No problem. Need something more complex? No problem – CartThrob's API and code hooks make adding non-native functionality a breeze for any capable back-end developer.
• Related products to keep people browing through your store.
• HTML email order confirmations for both customers and store owners.
• A ton of payment gateway options, including Authorize.net and PayPal. CartThrob's built-in developer gateway is a big plus here too, making it easy to test the transaction process before a payment gateway has even been chosen.

What It's Missing

• Gift card redemption. Bit of a bummer here, especially when you consider it's pretty easy to sell gift cards using CartThrob. But, on a recent project, our project-specific development team made it happen.
• USPS shipping rates. (Full disclosure: we hired Barrett-Newton, makers of CartThrob, to build one for one of our clients on a project earlier this year.)
• Ability to redeem more than one coupon code at a time.
• No Limited CP-side reporting.

Big note about these "cons" though: I list them because we ran into these limitations on a couple of site builds. That said, I have to mention their API and code hooks again. They're very powerful. Combine that with EE's extensibility via modules and extensions, you can pretty much do anything you want.

Final Thoughts

From a web design and development standpoint, CartThrob is incredibly fun and great to use. Our clients who are using it are loving it because it gets out of their way while still doing what it needs to make them money. A big part of that is because it's built on top of the awesomeness that is ExpressionEngine.

It does have a bit of a learning curve, but once you get rolling, it becomes a breeze to work with. I'd be remiss not to mention the incredible support you'll get from the CartThrob team; most notably Rob and Chris. Big thanks to them because they've certainly helped me and my team on more than a few occasions.

Of course you have to ask: Is CartThrob right for every project? No. Just like EE isn't the right CMS for every project. But it's incredibly robust, powerful and as I mentioned twice already, extensible. For most e-commerce sites it can do what you need it to and probably more. Unsure about it? Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments. Or better yet, buy a copy for yourself and give it a test drive.

At some point in every web design/dev project a Photoshop file needs to be handed over for slicing out the graphics that then get coded in by the developer. Whether you're the designer and the developer, or if the roles are played by two different people (or more) doesn't matter – the step is still there. 

Most designers experienced with Photoshop are well aware of good organization of layers and layer groups, and some may even color code layer groups. But having been on both sides of the fence on this one, I can tell you without hesitation, that is not enough. Especially when you're the developer receiving Photoshop files from a designer.

For starters, if the layers and layer groups aren't labeled properly (and I can't count how many times I've received PSDs with no labeling at all), it makes things much more difficult to figure out. That could easily translate into 20 minutes (or more depending on the design) figuring out the design details instead of coding them out.

Second, color-coding means nothing to me as a developer. Unless you've given me a key or legend of some kind. And guess how many times I've received that? Even as a designer I've tried color-coding my layers only to realize it's a waste of time and I can never remember what color means what.

So what's the answer? Layer Comps.

I'm still genuinely surprised when designers have never even heard of this feature in Photoshop. It's the one thing that, for me at least, kills the Photoshop vs Fireworks debate (wherein Photoshop wins; again, for me).

Now, here's the part where I'd normally write up a quick how-to. Instead, I'm going to point you to Alex Kendrick's blog post that does exactly that. If you're a designer (or developer for that matter) that regularly works with Photoshop for web design and have never heard of Layer Comps, go read the blog post. Then learn more about layer comps and start using them!

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately this happens more often than we care to admit. And it's one of the mistakes I see small businesses make quite often. But if you take your business seriously and expect it to grow and prosper, having an annual marketing strategy is critical in avoiding the Feast or Famine Syndrome.

You see, marketing is definitely not a one-time "event". It's (supposed to be) an on-going cycle of various tactics to keep leads, sales and revenue coming through your doors. At its very basic, it's the best prescription for preventing the well from drying up. And with 2011 coming to a close, now is the perfect time to get started. The problem is, most business owners don't know where to begin.

While hiring a professional is one of the best ways to get on track, there are some things you can do on your own, starting with putting together a very simple marketing calendar. Just start with making a list of every single piece of marketing or advertising you've done in 2011 so far – ideally organizing it by month or quarter – and make a note of what kind of results you got (you did keep track right?). Hint: that list better include your website and the strategies for it.

Go through the list and immediately ditch those items that brought you little to no results. Chances are, they won't get better next year.

Next, grab a calendar of some kind – digital, paper, spreadsheet, whatever – that you'll use just for your annual marketing strategy. Take the items from 2011 that worked and transfer them over. Now, do you have any gaps in the year? If so, do a brainstorming session and see what kinds of marketing "things" you can do.

What you should ideally end up with is 1-2 major marketing campaigns every quarter, whether it's direct mail, pay-per-click advertising, special events or something else. And there should be a couple of year-round items in there too that you check in on every month or every other month, such as your website.

Ah, but don't forget, just having a calendar alone isn't going to cut it. The key is to use that as a planning tool so that you're always a step – or three – ahead of the game and not having to wonder where next month's revenue is going to come from.

Still feeling a little lost? Give me a shout – I'll gladly help you out and provide a sample of a calendar we created for one of our clients.

Image © Doug Savage.