E-commerce websites designed using WordPress & WP e-commerce work!

E-creation has historically designed & built e-commerce websites using off the shelf shopping cart packages or custom written code. However, over the past year, we have noticed a web 2.0 trend towards using WordPress as a CMS platform with variety of e-commerce engines plugins to build e-commerce websites ... that work!

For 80% of businesses creating an e-commerce website, price is a primary motivator and there is no question that WordPress and plugins such as WP e-commerce can be a cost-effective way to put an e-commerce website together. However, low cost is not necessarily good value. E-creation is often asked to 'clean up' or replace e-commerce websites that have been badly developed (usually with bespoke e-commerce engines created by a small website design agency) for customers who thought they were getting a good deal.

So, priding ourselves on being at the forefront of technology, we spent the summer working through both Blogger and WordPress, to compare the two platforms before starting research into the best e-commerce plug-in for designing and developing commercial e-commerce websites.

E-creation continues to use Blogger as a useful & rapid way to drive traffic to a website (it's incredibly quick and easy to add automatically formatted content to a website using Blogger) BUT a key weakness we have discovered is Blogger's lack of e-commerce support. So to commercialise a website once it has achieve high traffic amounts, creates a problem for Blogger.

So for our e-commerce driven requirements, the team at E-creation got its hands dirty with Word Press. It was an interesting transition, as there had generally been a feeling that WordPress was a 'small scale' solution used by amateurs to put together their home websites or small scale e-commerce website but rarely used by larger corporations or even SMEs. We were therefore surprised to find that many large companies, such as SAP, CBS, MTV, Blackberry and Xerox were using WordPress for, at the very least, parts of their websites.

With that in mind, we have been pushing WordPress to the limits and seeing what it's really capable of in the context of the demanding multimedia / interactive requests that are typically made by our clients, particularly when in the context of e-commerce. Often clients already have existing e-commerce sites which are not delivering required functionality or most often, under performing in search engines.

The top five new functionality requests for e-commerce websites E-creation has seen in 2010:

• Automatic product export into Google Base for display in Google Shopping
• Ability to deliver digital content automatically after purchase
• CSV uploads to update to large volumes of product information
• Better optimisation of content for SEO purposes
• Order forms (literally) - long lists of products with a field at end of each product for volumes

We can cover the results for each of the requests based on the two strongest (in our opinion) shopping cart / e-commerce plugins for WordPress - WP e-commerce & Shopp.

WP e-commerce has been around for a while and has a mixed reputation. Its strength appears to have been the support provided by its NZ based development team, although the core robustness and flexibility has been questioned by many developers online. Used in anger, we have found that WP e-commerce was quick to install and to set up basic websites. Integrating functionality improvements is possible but creates some issues when updating the core e-commerce code as the updates can override the changes made.

What does this mean in non techie terms? It means that you can have pretty much whatever you want in terms of functionality but the website development agency building your e-commerce website had better be keeping damn good notes of the changes they make to the functionality in order to be able to keep the site up to date as new versions of WP e-commerce are installed (which happens often when using autoupdate!)

So what about some of the specific functionality requirements? One of our test e-commerce sites has been the www.sexycooking.co.uk website. This site began life as a cookery blog site but has grown into a complete online e-commerce website for ordering corporate and private catering in Bournemouth.

The site had no e-commerce functionality to start with, so this was very much a test of how quickly WP e-commerce could be integrated into a WordPress website and what would be the functional stumbling blocks.

I was intrigued by a video I'd seen online that demonstrated setup of an e-commerce website in 5 minutes using WP e-commerce. In the video everything went very smoothly and indeed, an e-commerce website was up and running in 5 minutes. But from experience, nothing is ever that simple ... and it turns out the video was produced by the company who wrote WP e-commerce. Right, that explains how they were able to navigation and configure the site so quickly. So what is the real story? Well, for a simple e-commerce website, setup takes around a day BUT then more tricky configuration and customisation starts, because out of the box, WP e-commerce looks and feels cheap.

Luckily, we had spend a few days initially producing a simple yet effective design with clear grid (if your design team is not working to 960 grid system for ALL websites I hang my head in despair). This invisible geometry that makes sites feel right and easy to work with rapidly pulled the WP e-commerce pages together and within a further day, most of the pages were looking and feeling 'right'.

So two days to design, one day converting to WordPress and two days integrating WP e-commerce and we have a basic functioning e-commerce website ... so next comes home page animations in your WordPress e-commerce website. 

Click here for part two of our review of WordPress & WP e-commerce - WordPress E-commerce Website Animation Design

Virtual digital marketing director for growing SMEs

E-creation's Virtual Digital Marketing Director service for SMEs is low-cost, low-risk

Digital design agency E-creation is providing a 'virtual digital marketing director' service as a practical, pragmatic answer to in-house digital marketing requirements with measurable business results across traditional and digital marketing. With a minimum commitment 3 months, the 'virtual digital marketing director' is a low-cost, low-commitment answer to in-house professional digital marketing for your business without risk.

Why use a 'virtual digital marketing director' rather than permanent digital marketing or sales director?

Because E-creation has unique marketing (especially digital) experience. We have worked with hundreds of different businesses, providing both digital marketing strategy and digital products ranging from brand to website development, online customer research to SWAT analysis, social media marketing to search engine optimisation.

Because a 'virtual digital marketing director' is more cost effective than a marketing (digital or otherwise) team for 80% of SME businesses. You don't pay National Insurance, holiday pay, recruitment costs or other office expenses ... in fact, a basic 3 month contract is likely to cost less than a recruitment company's fees for a marketing director in Bournemouth, Poole or Christchurch.

Because Dorset businesses are unique - but sometimes geographically blinded. It is possible to create a successful business through word of mouth and local networking but if your aspirations go beyond 'local', a 'virtual digital marketing director' provides the experience of providing digital marketing to top international businesses like BP, Unisys, IBM, City & Guilds, Royal Bank of Scotland, the NHS and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.

We realise a client list of this calibre may scare some companies who think that they won't be able to afford our services, but with prices starting at £900 per month with a minimum term of 3 months, if you need professional digital marketing to grow your business, you can't afford not to give us a try.

And to demonstrate our believe in what we can achieve for 90% of Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch based businesses, we are happy to do a free meeting and digital marketing health check followed up by a sure-fire, practical digital marketing solution that is unique to your business.

Example of rapid, hands activities performed by the 'virtual digital marketing director'

1. Twitter management - regular updates to Twitter account with links to website

2. Facebook management - regular updates to Facebook business page and status updates

3. Blog management - updates to company blog with focus on high traffic content (with results showing within 5 minutes in Google!)

4. Website content management - regular updates to content with SEO optimisation

5. Online PR - research and preparation of news stories for distribution online and for local press

By working as part of your business, our 'virtual digital marketing director' learns the unique characteristics of your business, always acting in your interests at all times whether producing marketing materials internally or using a 3rd party design agency, PR company, marketing agency or website company. As you company grows to the stage of requiring a full time marketing or sales director, our 'virtual digital marketing director' will help manage the recruitment and transition process, continuing to work as part of your growing marketing and sales team if required.

Professional website redesign for improved search engine performance and enquiry levels.

Starting the business journey - professional website redesign to improve search engine performance & enquiry levels.

For many businesses, their website has not delivered the business results promised by web agencies, who focus on design or development. Whilst we can't promise to save your online business, we can promise to improve it!

As a professional web agency with a focus online marketing, time and time again, companies come to us with a website that has been built, looks amazing but simply doesn't deliver business results. A complete redesign of a website requires time and budget, but here you can get some insight into the various steps (a little free professional check list) that E-creation goes through to build a successful website addressing SEO issues & enquiry performance from ground level up.

Whilst numerous technical elements make a site successful on an SEO level, the heart of good enquiry performance consists of:

• clear definition of who your potential clients are
• high ranking, diverse online visibility to potential clients
• engaging visiual & navigation experience in website
• content that addresses the questions asked

Take stock, understand the lay of the land and then plan your journey

The first stage of any website migration or redesign is to implement Google Analytics in the existing website to establish a marker of current performance and provide insight into visitor sources / behaviour. The same code will then be used to measure subsequent website performance improvements.

There are many ‘tricks’ both during and after design / development that are key to search engine performance.

Creating a branded Twitter page during development

This enables E-creation to start ‘seeding’ by Tweeting about the design / development process, making small descrete comments on specific pages, animated elements and key content milestones.

Using Blogger early in design / development to build content momentum

Blogger outperforms other CMS applications, due to its relationship with Google (which is likely to account for 70% to 80% of your search engine traffic). Content can be created during the rebuild process and measured to refine the redesign which in progress.

For E-creation, a typical website redevelopment would consist of:

Consultancy & scoping phase

• Detailed documentation & scoping agreement
• Setup of Google Analytics, FTP access to current site and application of reporting code
• Creation of feedback document to research existing customers understandings
• Keyword research, consultancy & key phrase definition
• Creation of website structure and page by page key phrase definition
• Writing of an example page of best practice as a template for subsequent pages
• SEO copywriting training / consultancy / revisions to draft content

This initial consultancy and scoping would typically take 2 weeks to complete.

Design phase

• Brand analysis, design briefing & research
• Research into stock library images
• Creation of three design options
• Revisions to the selected design direction before art working individual pages
• Art working of individual content pages (based on 10 page layout types)
• Design for branded Twitter page, creation of account and implementation of design

The design phase of a project would typically take 4 to 6 weeks to complete.

Coding phase

• Creation of CSS, page framework and navigation structure
• Creation of Blogger account for news / blog pages, application of design framework & integration into site
• Coding content pages
• Tuning page content / code (application of alt-tags to images, meta-tags, word cloud refinement & page links)
• Art working of individual content pages (based on 10 page layout types)
• Creation of back-links tracking account and basic seeding to start back-link strategy

The development process again typically takes 4 to 6 weeks to complete but depends very much on the number of pages required by the specific website.

A you might imagine, this forms the basis of any website redesign that is focused on search engine performance and getting business from the web.