Tag: Twitter

Why do Small Businesses Need a Website?

Yes, small businesses do need a website to promote their business. Many argue that the Facebook page they have will suffice to give out the basic information. But, that information may not always enough to convince your customers to choose your business. A complete website is required to improve the web presence of a business. A website will give customers a chance to know more information about your business, services, FAQs, and also about the owners. Even if you are the only provider in the area and the customer has no choice, they will have hard time trusting you. A website can improve the trust with the customer by giving complete information about your established products and services.

Small businesses are leveraging Information Technology to improve their sales. A website is a precious asset which can be used to market your services and products. A website can give detailed description about your processes, vision, mission, goals, social responsibility, and any other information. A website also can improve your business in the search engine crawling as there will be relevant tags such as location, hours, contact information highlighted in the Search Console of the Google while setting up a website.

If your business is a family owned business and is passed down from earlier generations, you can include all the information in the website. If one of your products or services is exclusive in your area, you can highlight that aspect. People who move new to your area, which is quite common, are less likely to know about your business. If they google your business, they might find only sample information from Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and so on. This will give a brief introduction about your business. However, if you own a website, new comers can get a complete picture about your business including your history, goals, and overall services or product information. The social media act as additional resources to know the latest happenings, coupons, promotions, and so on. If you want people to call you, you can make that happen with the website. If you wish more customers could walk in your store, you can make that happen. The opportunities are endless in terms of generating new sales using a website.

A website also can be treated as an asset which you can transfer any time when you sell or transfer your business. A website with proper SEO and content can show you first to the customers who are searching for similar products in the area. Another advantage of a website is that you can include marketing campaigns such as Adwords. A basic contact form can get you sales leads directly to your inbox. Another advantage of a website is that you can include your product/service gallery with images and videos. Small businesses can publish blogs relevant to their business and increase the customer retention. Every day, businesses are encountering unique opportunities and challenges which can be very well captured in the blogs. All this can be accomplished in Facebook or Twitter but those are limited. Moreover, if you have useful content on your blog, you can link this to the Social media accounts that you have. All the social media have widgets which you can showcase on your website as well.

If you decide to have a website, make sure you have a mobile friendly one. Google started penalizing the websites which are not responsive to multiple screen sizes. That means, even if you have a website, if it is not mobile friendly, google will not show your website on the top searches. The cost of owning a website is considerably become cheaper which I think is wonderful. The hosting providers are having mobile templates which you can customize according to your needs. If you do not like the monthly fees, you can buy hosting and develop a website according to your choices.

Contact the website experts at sales[at]kuulstuff[dot]com if you decide to set up a website for your small business. The investment proves to be a great asset for your business. We are experienced with multiple hosting providers and business domains. In addition, a website for small business can be seen as a first step towards integrating Information Technology to improve your business domain and stay ahead of the competition. 🙂

 

Integrate a WordPress Blog to Your Bootstrap Website

So, you built a great website in bootstrap. Your site is live and great, works fine in all devices and browsers, everything is perfect. Now, your customer wants to add a blog to your website. WordPress has great themes for blogs but none of them are going to look like your custom website. Here is how you can integrate the WordPress blog into your website and make the blog look same as the rest of your website. You can create your own WordPress theme!

WordPress Blog

WordPress blog is great as it is perfect for content management, backend, and frontend. You can add multiple users, media, plugins, comments, and so on. Backups and versioning is great with WordPress blogs. Corporates have been building full fledged websites using WordPress Divi themes. Inorder to integrate a WordPress blog to your HTML site built using bootstrap, you can follow certain steps and achieve same functionality.

Settings in the cpanel

  1. First install WordPress in your root folder and give the folder name blog.
  2. Download bootstrap and save in the wp-content-themes folder.
  3. Save additional css such as font-awesome and other css you used in your Bootstrap website in the same folder as bootstrap css
  4. Create new index.php, home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, functions.php, page.php, single.php, style.css. Each of the files have their significance in creating your theme in WordPress.
    • index.php: Loads your blog
    • home.php: Loads the blog posts from the database
    • header.php: Loads the header in every post when the get_header() function is called
    • footer.php: Loads the footer in every post when the get_footer() function is called
    • sidebar.php: Loads the sidebar contents when the get_sidebar() function is called
    • functions.php: Needed to load the jQuery in wordpress package to this website and also the sidebar contents
    • page.php: Loads the page you create and can act as a template for every page in your WordPress blog or Website
    • single.php: Loads the individual post which the user clicks in a page with comments function
    • style.css: Loads the styles for this blog
  5. Edit header.php and copy paste the content including the navbar from your existing website template. Edit the css href to php function bloginfo. Load the stylesheet_url using the function. Add wp_head and wp_enqueue_script to load jquery in this page. Save header.php. In the navbar list, add wp_list_pages function to get the additional blog page you created in the WordPress admin login. This way, your WordPress blog will be at the end of the menu items in your website. After the blog is setup, go ahead and edit all the pages of your website and add menu item blog to link it to the blog page.
  6. Edit footer.php and copy paste the footer section of your website template. Remove all the javascript functions at the end and add wp_footer() function. Save footer.php.
  7. Edit sidebar.php and add the function dynamic sidebar to get the sidebar content on all pages and make the sidebars widget friendly. It will load the sidebar contents if there are any existing. Save sidebar.php
  8. Edit index.php and load the get_header() function first. Next, in a loop check the posts and load the posts and the title and content using the the_title and the_content functions. If there are no posts display a message, saying there are no posts. At the ends, load the get_footer() function.Save index.php
  9. Edit page.php. Load the header and footer contents. Divide the page into two columns and load the posts in the left column and the sidebar in the right column. Save page.php
  10. Edit functions.php. Add function to register the scripts such as bootstrap.min.js and script.js in the page. Then enqueue the scripts of your page. Add another function to register the sidebar contents and the before_widget, after_widget, before_title, and after_title style of the sidebar contents. Save functions.php. You can override the default jQuery that comes with the WordPress install with a latest version in the functions.php.
  11. Edit home.php and load the header, footer and sidebar. In a if condition, check if there are any existing posts. For every post, get the post title, links, content, and date, using respective functions. If there are no posts, display a message. Save home.php. WordPress uses home.php to load the blog posts. Save home.php
  12. Edit single.php and and load the header, footer and sidebar. Get the contents of the post and get comments section. This page will be loaded if a single post is clicked. Save single.php
  13. Edit style.css and import the bootstrap, font-awesome, and other css used in your website. Edit the navbar and footer styles to load exactly the same way as the rest of your website. WordPress uses style.css to load the style for your blog. Save style.css.
  14. If you have multiplepages in your blog, you can have a front-page.php and load the header, footer, and sidebar there.

Settings in the WordPress login

Login to your website and blog using the WordPress credentials. Delete the existing page and create a new page called Blog. In the Settings, go to Readings and set the page to load the latest posts. In the appearance settings select the new them you have created. Go to Live Preview and test the site if it is loading properly. Make your current theme as the default theme for your WordPress and start writing blogs. Voila! you are almost done.

Keep checking for the WordPress updates and backups. Test it in all devices and browsers for responsiveness. Maintain your site and the WordPress blog at the same time with minimal distraction to the user. Add some ads to your blog to make some dollars!! 🙂

How Social Media Can Improve Your Business

With the age of instant messaging and social media marketing, it is a clear fact that social media can improve your business. It is also proven that the success of your business largely depends on the reviews on all the social media websites. Here are a few suggestions to leverage social media.

Reviews, that can Make or Break
People in modern days have been relying more on the internet to preview a business before placing an order with them. Be it an online business or local business, customers are more and more relying on the reviews online. Word-of-mouth suggestions and opinions are always being considered before spending a dollar. Signing up for a new activity for your child, buying a new software or phone, eating out at a restaurant, all these chores are heavily being done based on the reviews!

Professional Organizations
There are certain professional organizations that provide reviews an ratings of businesses exclusively. These include Yelp, Angie’s List, Better Business Bureau, and so on. Customers look up a business on these websites before approaching a new business. The review providers are charging a heavy amount but you are not assured of the results! Professional associations with other local businesses is also a good way to improve your reach.




Social Media Reviews
Social media such as facebook, twitter, pinterest, instagram, dribble, youtube, google plus, and so on are also other great platforms to create a specific page for your businesses and making contacts through them. You can also leverage Linkedin to create a social presence. It is always better to have your own website to promote your business. The advantage of the social media marketing is that you can track the people and increase your marketing efforts based on the population. Here are some important tips to keep in mind about social media marketing:

  1. You can link your twitter and facebook accounts with the email address. Once you post on twitter, it will be automatically updated on facebook.
  2. In the same way, if you post on facebook, your post will automatically roll on twitter. How cool is that!
  3. Similarly, you can link your YouTube channel with facebook and twitter so once you post a video on YouTube, your other channels are automatically updated.
  4. It is very important to create a Google Business account and add your local address on the Google Business site. Its inbuilt tracking and insights will let you know the number of unique visitors and the type of visitors.
  5. You must create a public page on Google Plus account and link other social media accounts to it. Make contacts with other local businesses in Google Plus. Thus, Google will automatically send traffic to your website based on your local settings.
  6. You can link your WordPress account to facebook and twitter so that your posts automatically appear on all your social media networks.
  7. Also, create separate pages for each of your locations so that when users search for your business in that location, your name will appear.

Social Media also lets you to track the visitors so you can acquire their email addresses and make a email campaign to promote your business. It is important that the reviews on these websites and media are also a deciding factor whether a customer is likely to choose your business or not. With more users heavily relying on the reviews, you can leverage the available tools to improve your business reach.

Forget Everything: Just Learn AngularJS!

Angular or AngularJS is the next most powerful Javascript framework out there which is becoming increasingly popular among the tech world. Angular JS along with CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap coupled with the REST services is redefining Website development.

AngularJS

AngularJS was developed by Google and is the most important Javascript framework which makes easier for the developer to maintain the code and achieve the same and better functionality achieved with Javascript. The best part of AngularJS is that it is open source and is having the largest support available of all the frameworks available. The current stable version is 1.4.7 and Angular 2.0 is on the way!

Advantages of AngularJS

AngularJS is similar to Javascript and it can enhance the HTML which will enable it to achieve client side programming. It has inbuilt JQuery support called JQLite which helps us in utilizing almost eighty percent of functions in JQuery library.

Browsers

AngularJS has inbuilt multi-browser support and it works on any browser such as Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. You can access your website from any device, tablet, computer, or desktop. Large-scale Enterprise applications can be developed using AngularJS. AngularJS is widely used for developing Single Page Applications (SPA) which are super light and super fast at the same time delivering unbelievable amount of data to the user.

Design

AngularJS facilitates rapidly changing user requirements and business needs at the same time leveraging the skill sets of Front end web developers. Separation of concerns that is defining the model, view, and controller-makes it easier for modular programming and keeping any changes manageable. Dependency injection and use of patterns is simple with AngularJS. Angular supports the very popular Model View Controller pattern(MVC), Model View View Model (MVVM) pattern, and Model View Whatever (MVW) pattern. AngularJS also supports responsive design which is way more important for modern day websites.

Testing

AngularJS is also super good for testing as it allows testing of Model and Controllers in isolation. AngularJS is designed to run unit testing with Karma, Jasmine and Angular mocks. The interactions between View and other components requires mocking framework to unit test. This can be achieved with AngularJS.

Prerequisites

To learn AngularJS, you must be familiar with Javascript, HTML, CSS, and website development. You also need basics of Java, PHP, and MySQL. You can download the latest version from the Angular website or include the CDN in the script tag of your web page.