For example, you may make a list of your best customers in order to reward them or to include them in a special offer, or spend time reviewing past orders to see whether they’ve ordered specific products. You better check your stock levels regularly in order to see if anything is running out and may need to reorder. And then of course you need to email your vendors to reorder, or hide products from your site if they’re out of stock, and bring them back on when they get back in stock.

We know you do all that, because we’ve spent a lot of time building custom solutions for Shopify that integrate with our clients’ systems in order to automate those things! The issue here is that it takes a lot of time, and money, and planning, to achieve automation, so while it’s nicely documented it’s not like you can simply plug and play with the Shopify API on a moment’s notice.

Well, meet Shopify Flow – an ecommerce automation platform that comes with Shopify Plus. Flow basically gives you a user friendly interface through which you can choose “triggers” and “actions”. Check out the video below!

With it, you can essentially create automation using a logic of IF This THEN That. And the possibilities are endless! IF a certain product’s stock gets down to 10 THEN notify the marketing team to stop promoting it. IF it’s down to 5 THEN email the vendor and reorder. IF a new wholesale client from a certain region places an order THEN notify that region’s representative to reach out. It’s almost like having a personalized sales person, inventory manager, and/or assistant, working 24/7 and 365 days a year… and you don’t even pay extra for it!  

We’ve already been strategizing with our clients on how to use it and several ideas are coming up such as tagging customers based on their yearly spend in order to show them special offers, or have VIP reps reach out to them. Another client is planning to use it to automate their order fulfillment which is tied to several processes that previously had to be done manually!

My favorite thing about it is that the available triggers and actions are actually helping merchants brainstorm and consider how they could use them to better their stores – before, you first had to think about it, then you had to spend money and time to do it, and then you got to see whether it paid off. Now, you pull up a list of triggers and get inspired… and then you can try out a bunch at a fraction of the investment, and see what works best to keep or even improve upon! Learn more about Shopify Flow by clicking here.

How do you plan to use Shopify Flow?

The post Meet Shopify Flow – Shopify Plus Built In Automation appeared first on Weberous | Los Angeles Web Design Agency.

A few years ago, my toilet would not stop running. I went to Youtube and found a video of a plumber who fixed a running toilet in 3.5 minutes. Being the sort of DIY person I am, I gathered my tools and got ready for the quick fix. I dried it up, scraped some stuff, tightened some other stuff, and it got better, but it was still running. A bunch of other Youtube videos and a visit to the store later, I nailed it – it was working like new!  I felt so proud of myself that I did it all for free and didn’t have to pay a plumber! That feeling lasted for a few more minutes until it hit me—this was far from free. Between videos, work, and a trip to the store, I had literally spent about 6 hours—6 hours to do what a professional plumber did in 3.5 minutes, and I didn’t even feel 100% confident that my solution would last. Go me!

The Temptation of DIY

When it comes to building a website, it’s very easy to get caught up in the same idea. Many online businesses—WIX, Squarespace, Godaddy, etc.—offer professional-looking templates and easy-to-use tools that allow users of just about any skill level to create a working site. We’ve worked with many clients who started out using those tools but eventually decided against them because “it looked DIY”—and that is where one of the biggest DIY website issues comes in.

Inexperience Rarely Makes a Good Impression

Unless you have a great eye for design and actually know how to put fonts and pictures together the same way a designer would, then your website will likely not look professional. If you’re pretty good at it and somewhat technical, then it can look fine, but “fine” could mean you are wasting an opportunity to make an impact or close a sale. Customers have so many options these days that they are looking for great. If design is not your forte, you could even make a bad impression, regardless of how solid your product or service is.

Just like you would judge a brick and mortar store on how clean and organized it is, visitors will judge your product or company based on what your website looks like—that is a proven fact.

DIY Can Actually Cost You

Too often we only associate “cost” with money—and only directly: e.g., it costs money to purchase something. We tend to forget that things like DIY projects also cost us time and indirect money (lost sales/revenue). Let’s say you’ve researched how much it costs to pay a professional to make a website, and even the lower end “feels” like too big of a number for something you could “easily do yourself.” So you do just that. You start doing more research, watching YouTube videos, reading blogs, and learning more than you ever wanted to know about building a website, website design, user flow, etc.

Eventually, you have a finished website that you are content with, and it only took you 3 hours a day . . . for a month. 3 things to consider here:

a) What are those 90 hours worth?

b) How much ROI (return on investment) will this website give you?

c) Will this website give your business the boost it needs to succeed?

More often than not, and you can ask your fellow colleagues, the answers to those 3 questions all make it obvious that you should hire a third party that specializes in doing what you’re trying to do – websites or otherwise. Furthermore, when it’s just about a toilet and a few hours then you can afford to make a mistake and laugh about it, but when it comes down to the success of your business the stakes are much higher.

Investing in a Professional is Worth Your While

The vast majority of business have seen dramatic increases in conversions and sales following a solid website redesign which goes to show that it’s an investment that comes back multifold. You want do your research, pick the best partners, and never look back. That doesn’t mean that you should hire the biggest and most expensive if you’re not there yet—maybe it just means hiring a freelancer to help out, but make sure that they have enough experience and talent to get the job done right, because more often than not, a mistake costs much more than the original investment.

The post Do It Yourself Websites Will Hurt You appeared first on Weberous | Los Angeles Web Design Agency.

With that in mind, let’s start with what WordPress is not, and knock out some misconceptions. WordPress is not a website template. There is no WordPress “look” because just about any site on the entire internet could potentially be a WordPress site, regardless of how it looks. There are no special WP functions or characteristics —like being mobile friendly or dynamic—because those features have nothing to do with “Wordpress”. Anyone who tells you differently, well, just point them to this article and smile because you’ll know better.

WordPress is a CMS—a Content Management System. Basically, when set up and properly integrated into a website, it can allow non-technical users to edit their websites via a visual editor, like Word. Back in the dark ages of the Internet (prior to the late nineties), only people who knew how to read and write code could edit and update websites. If you hired Winkle’s Design to build you a great website, then whenever you wanted to change something about it (maybe update text or images), you would have to go back to Winkle’s and have the company edit the site’s code. The introduction of CMSes changed all that.

A CMS (like WordPress) doesn’t even really enter the picture until a site has already been built—you can’t manage the content of something that doesn’t exist yet. So, while the easy-to-understand visual interface makes editing a site easy, it doesn’t have to have anything to do with the creation of the site itself. When building a custom site, the first steps are to design it in Photoshop (as a picture) and then code it in HTML and CSS (as code) – and that is when we create a website’s look or make it mobile-friendly and responsive.

After the design and (frontend) code is done – that’s when we introduce WordPress to the equation, for the purposes of making the site editable. The editing interface can look at lot like Microsoft Word—and allows our clients to edit content without having to learn how to code. They click and type, or hit a simple Upload Image button and drag and drop to add a picture. And while we wish we could claim WordPress as our personal secret Weberous weapon, it’s obviously no secret!

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS; twenty-five percent of all websites use it—that’s nine times more than the next most popular CMS, Joomla. It’s extremely flexible, and a good agency that specializes in it can make it do just about anything they want. We’ve built informational websites, membership sites, directories, crowdsourcing platforms, and media contests all made editable and controllable through WP, so we can certain attest to that!

The post WordPress Is Not What You Think appeared first on Weberous | Los Angeles Web Design Agency.

A template is basically a website built for the purpose of being resold several times over, and branded by different companies with their content. If your goal is just to get something out there so that you have a web presence—and you are not offering a unique product or service—then a template can probably provide you all that you need. Templates are created with the average business in mind and focus on average business needs. They’ll offer some bells and whistles, and some of them can look and function beautifully, but the key is that they are premade for the “average”. No web designer would spend time creating a template for a very specific niche, because that would defeat the whole purpose, which is to make as many sales as possible by selling your template to the masses.

The most important thing to remember when browsing through templates is that you are looking at “demos.” Think of a fashion magazine or a TV ad; picture a stunning model wearing a dress that looks like it was made just for her. In a way it was, just backwards a bit. The stylist had a gorgeous dress and then searched for a model who could show it off perfectly. In a similar fashion, if we could choose our business (or content) based on a template, then there would be absolutely no reason not to take advantage—we would be getting tailored results. However, unlike stylists who have access to models of every look and body type, we have to make a website for our business rather than a business for a template.

Don’t get me wrong – with good planning and proper expectations templates WILL get you a cheaper website that looks good too. In fact, some templates look amazing and are of the highest quality! Their demos look perfectly tailored, so if you can repurpose your content to fit just right into every spot—just like the demo placeholder text and pictures do—then you’ll get a great looking site quickly and for much less than a comparable custom-designed website. On the flipside, if you try to tailor those templates by customizing them more than simply updating their content, then often you run the risk of taking away from what you liked about them in the first place.

If you require more control concerning creative or strategic decisions—like creating an experience tailored to your target group or launching a new, unique brand—then going the custom route is a no-brainer. At a professional agency, a custom website includes more than just a made-to-order visual design and layout. Most professional agencies will spend time thinking and strategizing – trying to get into the mindset of your visitors. They’ll consider things such as what visitors are trying to find and how quickly they should be able to find it, or how much information they need before they take action. Perhaps best of all, at the end of the day you get to make every single decision about what goes on your page and what every part of that page does with the help of professionals—something a template is just not made to do.

One of the most important things we do here at Weberous is consider the website’s flow. We discuss how (and why) visitors would go from page one to page two and that is how we create an optimal flow to convert visitors to paying customers or subscribers. That is also why the vast majority of our projects are designed from scratch.

In summary, both a template and a custom site can be excellent options depending on your needs. A custom site definitely offers you a lot more control over defining the look and feel of your brand as well as the flow of your visitors, but a template will save you time and money as long as you can play by its rules, and adjust your content and vision to fit within an already established setup.

The post Custom Website or Template? It Depends. appeared first on Weberous | Los Angeles Web Design Agency.

Web architecture involves studying your target user so you can optimize your website for them, in terms of user flow and structure. An architect will plan the size of each room, how the rooms flow together, and what your visitors will see come through the front door of your house. A web architect will do the same, but for your website. You’ll work together to decide what pages are needed, how they will link to each other, and how the visitors will navigate to them. You’ll start by defining your goals, then consider what it takes to achieve them, and the result will be a blueprint of the website – the wireframe.

Website Goals

What do you need your website to do in order to be considered a success? Is it more sales? A more accurate depiction of your company’s offerings? All of the above? Start with the high level goal and then move back from it and trace the steps that need to be taken in order to get there. With Weberous – we want your business. How do we get it? We make a website that starts by taking you through a presentation of our company, and then give you great content and advice in order to keep you on it – see that Contact and phone number at the very top? That’s really the reason we do most of what we do. What’s your reason?

Killer Content

Imagine a yearbook with no pictures, or a newspaper with only pictures. Content—whether it’s in a text, picture, video or audio form (don’t use audio, please) — is an important component of web architecture. Think about what content you need to have each page, and how it relates to other content on the site. You have just about 10 seconds to make an impression on a new visitor. Focus on a content strategy that will help you make a lasting first impression. If you manage to hook people to your website, they’ll keep coming back, and they’ll refer you their friends and colleagues as well.

Uber Usability

A house without a roof, doors, or windows, is useless. Likewise, usability is an essential component of your web architecture. How are people going to access your homepage? How fast will your website load? How will they get to other pages? These are just a few of the questions you should answer when it comes to usability. Think about how the navigation of your website is going to guide visitors, and how it’ll lead them to the content that they’re looking for, or what you want them to find. Leave nothing to chance. The more thorough it is, the better!

Your Blueprint: The Wireframe

Goals + Content + Usability = a wireframe. The outcome of web architecture is a wireframe for every page of the website. A wireframe specifies where each piece of content will go, and how it will be laid out. It also details the flow of users based on the existing navigation, and how the various elements on the website help you move toward your goal. The wireframe is comprised of lines and boxes indicating the placement and structure of content on all pages—just like a blueprint. This is what the web architect will hand over to the web designers so that they can turn it into a beautiful website design.

The post Web Architecture That Gets Results appeared first on Weberous | Los Angeles Web Design Agency.

You have less than 10 seconds to make an impression on a new visitor — 5 for them to know what you’re all about. If you aren’t making the most of those first few seconds, you can bet that it’ll show up in your conversion rates and overall performance. Here are six web design mistakes that you should do everything in your power to avoid.

1. “Logocentricity”

Your logo is important; it’s there to help create a professional and memorable brand. But it’s not even close to being a top priority. Focus on generating and increasing sales instead by highlighting your products or services and making purchases hassle-free. Newsflash; “The ultimate goal of your business is not for your customers to remember your logo, but to make money”.

2. Content Bloat

In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), “Content is king.” But content can also be the court jester if it’s used injudiciously. Stuffing pages with thousands of words and inessential filler looks dated and is a major turn-off (read: bad for business).

Your motivation for adding content should be to bring real value to your customers and prospects, not just to increase SEO. People have short attention spans, so you need to get to the point. Once they’re hooked, you can always offer the option of navigating to a longer buying guide or article.

3. Thumbs-Down Navigation

Do visitors need a map to get around your website? Navigation is a crucial element of usability. Users shouldn’t have to shift through junk pages to hunt for what they want. If getting around is too difficult, trust me: They’ll go somewhere else. Make key resources obvious and buttons and labels clear. Spend time and money designing a site that is easy to navigate, and it will pay off big-time.

4. Time Bandits

You don’t have time to waste, and neither do your clients. Unnecessary steps, such as “Click to enter the main site,” should be avoided at all costs. Focus on ease of use and speed. Some beautifully designed websites take ages to load. Ensure that your website is optimized to load as fast as possible. Google will notice, too, if you do!

5. Blog Clog

A blog can be a powerful tool, but only if you have a goal and maintain it regularly. Statistics suggest that 8 out of 10 companies’ blogs have been dormant for at least six months. Such companies look “dead” to customers and prospects. If you can stick to a consistent posting schedule (at least once a month), then by all means, blog away. If not, don’t bother, because your site will just look constipated. Hold off until you can attend to blogging or pay someone else to do it for you.

6. Self-Gratification

Your website must be designed for the end user—not anyone else. For example, I hate cilantro. But if I were managing a taco stand, you bet I’d have loads of cilantro, because taco lovers just have to have it. Likewise, when you’re building a website, you have to make every decision with the target audience in mind. What do they like? How do they like it? Focus on making the entire experience better for your users, because if they like your website, they’re one step closer to buying from you!

All great websites are optimized to serve the customer better, so keep it simple, easy, and concise, and accent it with some attention-grabbing elements. That’s the rule of thumb for web design.

The post 6 Web Design Mistakes That Will Kill Your Business appeared first on Weberous | Los Angeles Web Design Agency.