This can be achieved by using an experienced and proven Jacksonville web design and web development company.  With countless number of options for web design, a professional yet cost effective path can be achieved by choosing Coding Capital. for your Florida WordPress web development.

One of the best things about the WordPress open source content management system is that it is free! Not only will you make cost savings using this framework but you will also have full control over your website even if you are not a technical guru. With the help of thousands of WordPress themes, plug-ins and widgets, a fully operational website can be created according to your desired specifications in a matter of minutes.

Contrary to the conventional belief, WordPress is not limited to creating only blogs. With a creative mind and the right Florida WordPress web design company, you can have a fully functional website for your business created quickly. There are a number of reasons why WordPress web design has become a popular option for many online businesses:

Ease of use

No technical background is required for using a WordPress website. The user interface is very simple. With an intuitive dashboard, there is easy navigation and guidance available to create and manage what you want.

SEO friendly

Search engine optimization is very important for the success of any website, and search engines simply love WordPress. There are a number of WordPress plug-ins that can actually make your website rank high on search engines. WordPress now also comes with an all-in-one SEO pack that allows better control over titles, meta tags and meta description.

This will make it easier for your website to be found by the right users as well as search engines. Your wordPress web design company will help you choose the right keywords and key phrases to be incorporated in the content you put on your website.

Wide range of plug-ins and themes

Whether you want to use an interactive map, add a contact form, or have a backup for your website files, free plug-ins are available. You can make your website look more presentable and appealing by using any of the WordPress themes available for free. Once you have selected a few options, your web developer will suggest variations to make your website appealing for your target customers.

WordPress is perhaps the most flexible content management system that is not only secure but offers a wide range of features for creating a functional website for both personal and business use. It is extremely user-friendly making it easy to develop and manage. For these reasons, it is being widely used by many Jacksonville web design companies to create successful websites for their clients.

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 This kind of spending inspires small businesses to offer online purchases. Fueling this movement to e-commerce is software that is easy to use and allows small businesses to add e-commerce to their websites.

At a price which is usually less than $100 / month, an e-commerce shopping cart can be added to your site and you can reach more customers thus allowing your small business to grow.

 One option that favors most small businesses and entrepreneurs is hosted e-commerce software. Hosted solutions will provide you with everything you will need to build an e-commerce website.  These include often domain name registration, admin tools, and the front-end shopping cart to get you up and running.   And you are not required to have a technical knowledge on website design and development.  The top 5 hosted e-commerce solutions for small businesses are:

1.  Vendio

Vendio focuses on automation.  It helps you put your products on eBay,  Amazon and Facebook, and your very own online store. Other features offered by Vendio are inventory control,  email marketing, sales and order management, shopping cart, and analytics reporting.  Pricing by Vendio starts at $99.95/month for 2GB storage and 200 products.

2.  Shopify

With this e-commerce platform you can do various things from just one administration dashboard, like pick a template, add a product catalog, optimize the design, create blog posts, and organize your products. Other features include mobile commerce with a mobile storefront and an iPhone app.  Also available are coupon codes and marketing tools for SEO to help market your items.  With a price that starts at $29/month you can have unlimited bandwidth, 1GB storage, 100 products listing, and 2% transaction fee.

3.  Intuit

With Intuit, you can create and publish a store easily and can be updated anytime because of its interface that is simple point and click design. What you get with Intuit are domain name, hosting, a site builder tool, the Simple Store e-commerce software, online payments via Intuit Merchant Account.  The e-commerce also has Facebook extension.  Intuit e-commerce website prices start at $19.99/month with 5GB storage, one domain, 5 email accounts, and 100-page site.

4.  Big Commerce

Big Commerce offers store design, hosting, SEO,  marketing and inventory, mobile commerce, and integration with eBay.  The lowest pricing plan is at $24.95/month that includes 100 product listing. As in all e-commerce platforms, the higher the price plan gets, the more features will be added.

5.  Ability

Features offered by Ability include the store’s mobile-optimized version,  plus tools to help you integrate your accounting and order management systems. It also has the SmartSite Content Manager that allows users to change product prices, images, store  promotions even without programming knowledge.  The Channel Feed service gives you the ability to manage your products on Amazon.  Pricing for Ability is based on specific requirements of your business, so it is customized.

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If you want to receive payments for the goods and services that your website sells on your site, one of the most popular ways to do this is with PayPal. PayPal offers free service for your site integration. 

PayPal has website integration tools that you can try such as setting up purchase buttons on your site.  From these tools, you will be provided with some HTML code that you can put int your web pages. 

If you are not familiar with basic code or html, you can hire a web designer or developer to assist with PayPal code integration on your site.

PayPal is the web’s most popular and most used payment service, so if you integrate your website with Instant Payment Notification (IPN) service by Paypal, you can generate more revenue from your website.  There are many ways to integrate PayPal with your website.  Some of them include the following.

 1.  Simple Integration

As in all integration processes, you need to sign up to a PayPal account if you do not have one already. You need to provide your email address, your name, your address, your date of birth and your phone number.

When you log in to your PayPal account, you will find the Merchant Service tab.  Click this tab and you can access the Website Payments Standard screen. This method is the simplest way to integrate Paypal with your website.

 2.  API (Application Programming Interface) Integration

PayPal’s Direct Payment APIs allow you to experience your own online check out.  And this is in addition to having a gateway and a merchant account.  You have control on what your customer sees – from brand, colors, layout and page and language sequences.  API also works with other shopping carts.

But this integration is more complex and will require you to hire a web development company like Coding Capital so that you can get the customized checkout process your business needs to generate higher revenue and appear more professionally and trustworthy to potential customers.

3.  Gateway Integration

You can use gateway integration through Payflow Pro with any Internet Merchant Account.  Credit card transactions can be processed online and it has everything you need to connect with the aforementioned account.

There are other ways to integrate PayPal to your website like in single item purchases.  One recommendation for this type of purchase is the Buy Now Button.  With this button by PayPal, there will be no need for a shopping cart, and integrating it with your website is a simple process.  Your customers can pay you much faster than by money orders or checks.

Lastly …

Paypal is the most trusted of all payment gateways, so considering accepting payments through PayPal to your website is highly recommended.  You will not be charged any set up fee, and you can easily integrate it with your website. PayPal manages hundreds of million accounts and operate in 17 currencies and in more than 90 markets. 

Payments through PayPal are very secure and it accepts all major credit cards.  PayPal payment buttons just need a little configuration in your account (just like plug-n-play) and paste the HTML code in the web pages.  In cases of refunds, you won’t have any issues with PayPal.  If you refund your client, PayPal will refund also the transaction fee.

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Some of these ideas are shared with you so you can contemplate and explore what might be a fit for you. If you find something that appeals to you, spend the time, research it, and if you can still see yourself working with it a month from now, it might mean you need to pursue it!

1.  Affiliate Marketing

This is performance-based marketing where you get compensated for each visit you send to another company’s website.  This visitor is driven to the site by the marketing done by you, the affiliate marketer.  You can create , for example, micros sites that are entirely designed to get that user to click and be redirected to another site. The more you can do this, the more money you make.

 2.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of your website by naturally inserting keywords or phrases into the contents of your website.  This is one of the most sought after techniques of bringing more visitors to your website, because it can generate more traffic and more traffic is more money. 

Good SEO practice contemplates what a potential buyer might want to find and how the various search engines work and merging the two together through the website html and content.

SEO however, requires more than just randomly sticking keywords on the content.  It takes practice and training to get the technical abilities down along with the art of it to really gain an advantage.

3.  Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing can achieve traffic and attention  to your website through different social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter.  You need to develop content that will engage the readers to post it on their own social media networks or pages, to make it viral.

4.  Freelance Writing

If you love to write, this is a wonderful opportunity for you as most people don’t, and you can take advantage of that fact.  You can express your opinions and knowledge on various products and get paid. With freelance writing, here’s a list of what you can do:

•  own a blog
•  be a journalist
•  develop business plans
•  ghostwrite articles or a novel
•  academic writing

5.  Website Server Administrator (SA)

Basically, this field is all about being in control of a server, operating system, or computers of a business.  The SA’s role, typically, is to insure top performance by developing,  installing, optimizing and administering a company’s servers. It is important to keep these servers running smoothly, especially in big organizations who are trying to stay current with communication, production, sales, and the overall operation of their  company.

6.  Virtual Assistant

With the current technology of today’s world, you can do anything while working from home.  Being a virtual assistant is a possible idea if you want to become a website entrepreneur.  Moms can have the time to spend with their kids, as well as able to contribute to family finances.

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These process steps include: gathering of information, planning, designing, development, and testing and delivery.

The exact process may slightly vary from one project to the next; however, here are the general guidelines. 

 1.  Gathering Information

This is the first step in creating a website, and the most important one.  Many things should be considered for the look and feel of your site. The information should provide a solid understanding of your goals and purposes for building the website and its target user.  If you are hiring a web designer, it is important that he/she start off with relevant questions to help understand what your company does and what is the focus of your site and content.

 2.  Planning

Planning involves creating a site map. It can be a visual when necessary or simply a bullet list.  A site map is a listing of the main topics and sub topic areas of the site.  This will guide you as to what your site will have for its pages and content.  Planning is also essential in building an easy to understand and easy to navigate site. During this phase, you should discuss with your web designer elements like e-commerce, interactive forms, visual transitions, and the other elements important to your business so they can be reviewed and discussed.

 3.  Designing

Your customers and target audience should be kept in mind during this phase of designing your website.  The target users are the people who will be reviewing your services, buying your items for sale, researching your company, etc.  If your site targets teenagers, for example, it should not look like the site of a banking institution or corporation. Design matters.  This phase also should include incorporation of company logo or colors, and other things that will strengthen the identity of your company.

 You should be allowed by your web designer to view the project throughout this stage, so you can express what you like and do not like in the design so that it can be revised.

 4.  Development

This is actual creation of your website.  Your web designer will first develop the home page, and then the interior pages.  This includes content blocks, graphics, transitions, rotating banners, ads, contact forms, and e-commerce shopping carts.  As in the designing phase, you should continue to view your in-progress website, to allow you to make corrections or suggestions along the way.

 5.  Testing And Delivery

After the final details have been attended to, your web designer will test the site for complete functionality and correctness of forms and scripts and navigation. You need to be assured that your website is ready for viewing in the most recent browser versions. Once you approve, your site will be made “live.”

 Many web designers include in their service domain name registration and web hosting. 

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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  It is the process of improving the web traffic of your site through keywords that are likely to be searched by consumers seeking the goods and services you sell. 

Even if your website is beautifully designed, but yet does not attract traffic, it is not going to help your business as much as it could without some basic SEO tips for small business.

Your small business can do the following  simple SEO techniques to improve its ranking on the search engines:

1.  Determine your target audience.

This is the first step in your SEO campaign – always identify the intended target audience of your website.  Select a certain product or service to be the keyword of your SEO campaign your site can attract more traffic. Then focus content and pages and redirect links based on this keyword to give it a heavy presence and what is called “density”.

2.  Produce unique content for your website constantly.

You can write articles, blogs, community or business or product activities, reviews, etc.  Original and interesting content will give online visitors a reason to stay on your site, and if they continue interacting with your site, a sale can ultimately be made. Providing value to the visitor will result in a higher ROI for your business via your website.

3.  Have your business listed in Google Local Business Listing. 

This is a free feature offered by Google where you can create additional links so people can easily find your site, therefore your web traffic will be  increased.  Signing up is easy and quick – you only need to provide your business name, address, contact information, etc. You also can get linked by listing with other online directories like Chamber of Commerce and local business directories.

4.  Arrange for social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to link back to your website. 

Inbound links are very important in the SEO world.  If you have as many links as possible that direct to your site, your ranking on search engines will be enhanced.  Using the most common social networks sites that are familiar to everyone, is a free and quick way to start with creating back links to your site.

5.  Don’t forget to make sure that the html set up of your website is SEO friendly.

This is an important consideration.  You or your web designer should ascertain that your site is HTML readable, meaning it is able to  read text from keywords and if the proper keywords, url structure and content have good ratios and will be favorable to search engines.

Get a website SEO analysis review if you’re not sure of good ratios and what technical items need to be address (which are beyond the scope of this article).  For example: there are sites that are primarily images;  the text in an image usually isnt read or indexed by search engines and is not helping your site rank as well as it could. The text in an image cannot be read either by Google or Yahoo or other search engines.

Finally …

All businesses, especially the small ones, should explore and utilize the Search engine optimization   If your site is optimized for the search engine, you can attract more traffic, your business can easily be found by consumers, and you can have more sales to give more profit to your company. 

There are many SEO companies that you can hire to improve the site’s visibility and obtain visitors that can convert to potential clients. You just need to make a thorough research on each of these companies to know which of them will serve your needs better.

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It’s an important decision as your business will need at least the basic features, and probably a few more, and to best sell and manage your products and orders. 

Since we’re talking about small business, our aim is to provide rock-solid proven solutions that out-of-the-box will provide all or just about all the basic features you will need to start selling online.

Our eCommerce solution web firm, Coding Capital, has worked with all the below ecommerce solutions as well as many others that didn’t make the list.

But these are the best and one in particular, which we define at end of article, is our favorite and what we put most of our clients on these days.

Top 3 Open Source Ecommerce Solutions 

(in no particular order)

• OpenCart
• Prestashop
• ZenCart

A Quick Note …

They all start to sound the same, and some kind of look similar which isn’t a bad thing as a familiar eCommerce layout is best for your customers, but there are other similarities which we recommend. 

We’ve installed, configured, designed and customized most of the carts and we have whittled down these carts because:

• they have proven records
• their popularity is a testament to their functionality
• the have solid software frameworks which is very important because a complicated cart, like Magento, will create more headaches for you and cost more to maintain

OpenCart – 9 out of 10

The code structure is very clean and logical and makes customizations much more easily than many other platforms. This is crucial to your business as it will allow for easier and more reliable site maintenance. 

Might seem mysterious if your not technical but this is one of the most important aspects of your online store. It’s like knowing that under the hood, you’ve got a solid engine…even if you don’t know how to change the oil.

The administration module is clean and attractive and simple to use. So many other carts have terrible admin back-ends, like osCommerce. Everything is ready and available in such a way that is familiar to anyone with any admin experience. And if not, you’ll learn it quickly. 

Some important OpenCart features:

• unlimited categories
• unlimited products
• unlimited manufacturers
• templatable
• multi-language and currency
• product reviews
• product ratings
• SEO friendly urls
• auto image resizing

Prestashop - 8 out of 10

Prestashop is a solid and very popular platform that has quickly grown over the last 3 years. It has an impressive list of features and a straightforward GUI for the front and the back-end, although the back end takes a day to get used to. 

The install and configuration for this one-stop shop is doable even for the web novice.  

Some important Prestashop features: 

• Unlimited categories, subcategories and products
• Product customers’ evaluations and comments
• Quantity discounts
• Wish list
• Featured products on homepage
• Top sellers on homepage
• Product image zoom
• Customer referral program
• Loyalty system (points)

ZenCart - 7 out of 10

ZenCart is a good cart to beginner and small business and those who want to keep their online presence relatively simple. It’s basic framework allows to make minimal changes to design and layout without too much fuss but if you want a very different look or require much more customization in features and / or design, a more sophisticated cart, you’d be better off with one of the others above.

Some important ZenCart features: 

• Quantity discounts
• Easy to install
• Advanced template system
• Merchandise Pricing options
• Products can be marked as free or Call for Price
• Featured products
• Minimum or maximum quantities
• Product attributes

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Specifically, there are basic hard and fast principles that you don’t want to break because they’ve proven to be the best route to a clear and meaningful successful logo that identifies your company and serves as its own marketing tool and branding. 

Principle #1 – Clear & Simple

Great logo design starts a simple logo as well as easily readable company name. It’s the K.I.S.S stategy that like most things in life obvious in thought but a little difficult in practice.

The above logo uses a simple clear font and two different font colors to distinguish itself. These same colors are used in the logo design providing clear continuity. the logo matches the sky in a simple geometric shape that is altered to add character.

Principle #2 – Uniqueness

Uniqueness is a must as your logo needs to make its own impression compared to meaningless and trite logos.  The uniqueness is combination of all logo traits: font, colors used, design graphic … but if the logo gives off its own impression, it’s own uniqueness, it will separate your company apart from others which is a must considering all the tough markets there are today. 

Principle #3 – Market Relevance

Above is a perfect example of a logo that has such market relevance, that if the name of the company was spelled backwards, or if it was in Russian, the logo with the 3 circular graphics will tell a story of a company involved in the fitness industry.

There’s no guessing what market this company is in, it’s straight-forward and to the point what relative types of services or products this company serves. A good designer will always find a new relevant design for your company for your market.

Principle #4 – Memorable

Target’s logo is incredibly memorable and fits in with all the above principles.  Sure they have a lot of marketing dollars for us to see ubiquitously all over the place to assist in making memorable by sheer force but who can deny the target logo is simple yet bold with bold red and white and its simpleness and relevance and character, succeed in making it memorable as as result of following the above principles.

Good principles lead to good practices which lead to results.

Remember these principles as get a team like Coding Capital’s logo team to give your company a logo and branding that is memorable.

The post What makes a great logo appeared first on Webpreneur's How-To's, Tips and Secrets.

If the entire site involves different application frameworks, this usually means that these applications have different code bases and different databases which warrants signing into each application..

If true, you will soon see the need to have a single sign-on capability for the entire site. Meaning simply, you sign on one time and don’t need to sign in again to access different parts of the site.

We are currently working on a PHP custom web development application for a client. Since this is a social networking application, the client requested a forum to be added and integrated seamlessly with the custom application.

We are a frequent user of WordPress and now that since a recent review of bbPress, are very confident that the basic forum functionality of bbPress will be a great fit for our clients needs.

Maybe someday we will have the time to wrap this functionality as a plugin, but for now, we kept our bbPress login integration as simple as possible by straight-up coding in the changes.  We assume you have already installed bbPress onto your site.

#1 Create bbPress user account with db Insert

What to do:  First thing to do is to create a bbPress user in the bbPress database. Unlike other application that need numerous inserts and settings making registering complex, with bbPress, we can take the short cut of creating a bbPress user by inserting a record into the bb_users table that bbPress creates upon install.  

You just need a screen name, email and a md5 password, usually from your registration form from the custom application.  

You need to take the password and change into a md5 string using md5 function like this:

$pwd = md5($_POST["password"]);

After the user submits the new registration in the custom application and your code creates a new user in your application, you then would take same info and insert into db like:

$sql = "INSERT INTO bb_users (                                          custom_account_id,                                        user_login,                                          user_pass,                                         user_nicename,                                         user_email,                                         user_url,                                         user_registered,                                         user_status,                                         display_name                                    )                                     VALUES (                                        '$account_id',                                        '$screen_name',                                        '$m5_password',                                        '$screen_name',                                        '$account_email',                                        '',                                        '$now',                                        '0',                                        '$screen_name'                                    )";

to tie the bb_users table to the custom account table we have for the custom application, we have added a new column to the bb_users table: 

custom_account_id  int  11

… this way we can perform updates on bb_users with our own account_id. 

#2 Create custom bbPress user login page

What to do:  There are different ways to accomplish this, but again we went for a simple way since bbPress is on the same server. We created a new file at the forum root and called it login.controller.php. We looked at the bb-login.php at same root to analyze what the code does and what includes and functions it uses to login a user. 

This file includes bb-load.php which is a base php file that sets up a lot of includes and global variables needed for the two bbPress function calls we need:

1) bb_login($user_login, $password, $remember_user) and …

2) bb_logout()

We create a header redirect with the user login (our screen name) and password and a mode for login or logout.  We send our variables via a GET call.  While my example does not encrypt any variables, you can add some extra security measures like encrypting/decrypting and checking referring url, etc.

Download sql and custom php login page:   bbpress-new-login.zip

Send comments if you have any questions and I will try to help!

Happy Coding!

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PHP

Since our goal for this how-to is to display latest posts as a list in php, I’ll assume you know how to add html where you need it:

<?php
$recent_posts = wp_get_recent_posts(10);

foreach($recent_posts as $post){
    if($post["post_status"] != “draft”) {
       echo “do your output here”;
    }
}
?>

This code will get the 10 latest posts (which is default) into your array for looping.

I also added a condition to make sure the post is not a draft, as I’m using this code as the posts loop on the home page of this blog.

That’s it for now … more to come later.

Happy coding!

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