A scarily high proportion of our clients approach us to fix the havoc other developers have caused.  Stories of broken sites, horribly overblown budgets, promises not delivered, sites riddled with bugs, previously functioning sites destroyed. Devastating.

Not only does this hurt business owners bank balances, it costs sales and hurts the brand. Devastatingly, often expensive systems are rendered so useless and they need to be completely rebuilt – costing more time, money and heartache. Ouch. Yes we’ve heard it all.

We recommend that you have a read of Smart Company’s recently published tips for engaging a  self-professed professional’ to build a successful, functioning  website for your business.

And please heed the warnings – there are a lot of web development cowboys operating out there! Developing your online presence is far too much of an important investment to risk.

Watch this space! We will be posting more tips and advice to ensure you get your web systems built right.

The future of online shopping is going mobile as e-commerce continues to broaden its reach beyond desktop users.

The commercial potential for consumers to spend using their smart phones and tablets – increasingly the lifeblood of modern society – cannot be ignored.

Entrepreneurs must implement platforms which enable customers to experience, interact with and purchase their brand wherever they are and however they chose to connect.

E-commerce platform Magento has released an exciting range of mobile offerings as a part of new features added to its Magento Enterprise and Magento Community software packages.

The latest releases build upon the platforms’ existing mobile e-commerce capabilities and aim to make it easier to create compelling and elegant mobile shopping experiences.

According to Magento, the new Mobile HTML5 features include: gesture-based controls, multi touch and image scaling and the utilisation of device specific audio and video capabilities. Additional features include user-friendly search and results display, drag and drop of products to the shopping cart, easy swiping between product images, zooming capabilities as well as the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell products. All of the new features are highly customisable and the HTML5 theme supports iPhone, Android and Mobile Opera browsers.

You can read more about the latest releases of Magento Enterprise here.

This is on top of the already existing ‘Magento Mobile’ product which allows you to create branded native storefront apps for iPhone, iPad and Android that integrate with your online store.

What all this amounts to is the ability to create a stellar, highly mobile-optimised business that is so crucial in today’s online commerce environment.

Magento is Design Industries’ preferred e-commerce platform; we look forward to strategically integrating applying the latest releases of Magento your online enterprise. Contact us

Google Webmaster Tools lets web managers control their Sitelinks which are being displayed on Google results, it also alerts us to error pages or pages not being properly indexed by Google, and a displays info on how Google picks up the incoming links to our sites.
Bing Webmaster tools provides users with a range of graphs displaying info such as pages crawled, traffic summaries over the past six months.

Yahoo Site Explorer gives similar information with clearly indentified sections such as feeds, crawl errors, stats on their own indexing of your site.

The information provided by these three tools are essential in understanding how your web is being displayed to these search engines and will help identify areas which need to be improved or analysed to help scale the heights of search engine ranking.

Setting them up is relatively easy and if you don’t have the time, or don’t want to play around with a ftp program, just ask your web developer to set it up for you.

Are you or your web manager tracking your site on the major search engines? We are big supporters of using Google Webmaster Tools, Bing’s Webmasters Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer to upload XML Sitemaps and track the ways the different search engines are indexing our own and our client’s sites.

Google Webmaster Tools lets web managers control their Sitelinks which are being displayed on Google results, it also alerts us to error pages or pages not being properly indexed by Google, and a displays info on how Google picks up the incoming links to our sites.

Bing Webmaster tools provides users with a range of graphs displaying info such as pages crawled, traffic summaries over the past six months.

Yahoo Site Explorer gives similar information with clearly indentified sections such as feeds, crawl errors, stats on their own indexing of your site.

The information provided by these three tools are essential in understanding how your web is being displayed to these search engines and will help identify areas which need to be improved or analysed to help scale the heights of search engine ranking.

Setting them up is relatively easy and if you don’t have the time, or don’t want to play around with a ftp program, just ask your web developer to set it up for you.