Tag: Website

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. 🙂

 

Contact Forms Comparison

Contact form is an integral part of any website. It provides a medium for the customer to connect directly with the users. Traditional html forms always work but Wufoo, Google Forms, WordPress Contact Form, and so on are the latest contact forms taking over the website world. They are equipped with inbuilt functionalities which otherwise require hours of programming.

HTML and PHP

Traditional HTML Contact forms involve creating forms with ids and capturing them via php and storing in database. The values from the MySQL database could be later retrieved in to a Excel sheet or a web page. This version works fine even now. The developer needs to take care of SQL injection, blank values, naming the fields in the database, and so on. With HTML 5,  the inbuilt validations come in handy for developers. A lot of code needed to store and retrieve values from database. Further, the out put where the values are displayed or stored must also be taken care of. Sending the form values to an email via the mailto function is the safest and simplest way to achieve the goal. Adding recaptcha is another safety measure for added security. In addition, blocking spam bots at server side is good for securing your website and contact forms.

Wufoo

Wufoo is another way of adding contact form to your website. However, the entire data and control is with them. Wufoo has four pricing options. The basic version of the form lets you add the fields and put the code on your website. The form also comes with captcha so you don’t have to worry about any additional coding. The data is stored on Wufoo site which can be accessed via your Wufoo login. Wufoo lets you create three forms and three reports in the basic package. The reports are awesome too and you can customize any way you want. The report can further be downloaded in to a Excel file or as a CSV file for further processing. Wufoo forms are great for basic requirements. But, if you want the paid versions you can buy Wufoo membership depending upon your requirements. The basic version also leaves the big message about ‘Form created with Wufoo’ message on your website. You can remove that with paid version. Wufoo also has surveys and emails which can be added later with paid packages.

WordPress ContactForm Plugin

Another gem is the WordPress ContactForm plugin, which you need to set up to be used on your website or blog. The ContactForm plugin is free and can be set up by downloading the plugin from the WordPress Plugins. You can have multiple forms with this plugin and can set up the colors and fields based on your client’s requirements. It comes with captcha for added security. But, ContactForm 7 needs to be updated for latest bug fixes and releases. You can send emails with contact forms in them using this plugin. However, you need to be aware of how to set it up otherwise you will end up with lot of errors. This has to be tested in multiple browsers and devices as the form throws an error if you give invalid input names that are reserved in this plugin. I think this ContactForm is great again and the data can be import or export data from the WordPress admin tools.

Google Forms

If you are a big fan of Google and use Google Apps for most of your web business and data management, Google Forms are a great way. With your google login you can create the form and get the code in your website. Once you submit the form, thank you message from Google Forms remains on the screen. You can edit the colors and fields and set up is easy. You can limit the number of responses, include surveys, send confirmation messages,  and so on. The plugins available for Chrome make the set up even more efficient. If you want to send an attachment with the confirmation message, you have to set a trigger for the function on the form submit. First, save the document to be sent in your google drive, then get the id of the document by opening it in a new window. Set up the Google script to send the mail with subject, body, and attachment to the email specified in the Google Contact Form. You may need to test it out multiple times before you can successfully send the attachment. Spend some time to get a hang of the Google script and related errors. Google Forms Example shows that the data can be saved in an excel sheet on your drive or you can specify the format required. The beauty of the Google Forms is that the Contact Form data sheet on your drive is instantly updated. Sending confirmation messages and sending mail to self is also simple. You can set to send you daily or weekly reports as well.

Let me know how you incorporated Contact form in your website and which you think is the best! Here is one so you can contact me. 🙂

 

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!! 🙂

Tawk.to – live chat on your website

I recently came across this tool tawk.to that is used for incorporating live chat on your website. What’s amazing about this tool is that it is completely free and can be installed on your android or iPhone as well!

Tawk.to is a web tool that is free to signup. You need an email and a valid website where you want the live chat to be installed.

Once installed, you can manage the chats from your desktop or laptop. Users with valid email address can be configured as an agent. Many agents can be set up and the users can start chatting.




 

The web chat is a must for all websites who want to sell their products or services. The instant chat lets users get answers immediately. Their queries can be answered and any further sales leads can be developed.

Tawk.to application has inbuilt tracking and analytics of the chat and the website in general as well. It gives you the number of visits and pages where the users spent and so on.

All the chat history and communication between the agents is stored in the application. In addition, agents can answer the chats on the go by installing the mobile app. The chat sessions can be recorded on the phone and stored in the computer applications.

Agents are able to see what the user is typing in real time and it gives time to prepare for the answer. Time when the chat ended, when the user left the website, if the user liked or disliked this tool everything is recorded. The application lets you set the status message as available, away, or invisible.

I thought it is similar to any customer service web application but the answers are not customized or suggested.

Overall, tawk.to is a cool asset for your website and let’s you instantly connect to the user! Let me know your thoughts.

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.

YouTube Application Program Interface (API)

YouTube is the most popular video source for world wide web users. As a developer, if you would like to embed a YouTube application in your website or application, there are a number of tools available. However, there are some settings and customization required if you want to modify according to your requirements. Here are my insights.

YouTube API

To incorporate YouTube API into your website you will first need a security key or API Code. You can create one for your project by creating a google account if you don’t already have one.

  • After logging in to the Google Developers Console, create a new Project by giving title and description
  • Add corresponding API’s to your project by selecting YouTube Data API’s to start with
  • Create a security key for your project using the left menu for the domain
  • You can also create a OAuth key if required and add the domain and referrers




Connecting to YouTube

On the Google Developers YouTube page, there are scripts available in different programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and so on. You can follow the guidelines there to create the pages. If you are using JavaScript, you can create separate java script files and html file as given. However, you can include everything in one html page separating the scripts.

In the code replace the existing sample text with your security key that you generated earlier. Try running the code in a browser and everything must work fine. However, the console may show certain errors such as ‘cannot find property of undefined’ and so on. Start debugging the code and see where the error is occurring.

In most cases, the security key is incorrect or if you are trying to connect from a http to https websites. In other cases, the errors pop up due to the x-frame origin set to the sameorigin. If you check the response of the gapi, you can see the json response and all the resulting video lists.

Search.List

YouTube API has a function search.list which is used to search the youtube videos and get a response. You need to specify a search string and return type. Also, the maxResults or safeSearch options can be set based on your preferences.

Once you get the response json, the next step is to embed the video code of each video in to the iframe player on your html. You can use a player for web,ios, or andriod applications based on your device. Create an id to the iframe and set the source of the iframe to the youtube video code onclick of the video title. You can have a function to append code to the source url. In addition to displaying the video title, you can also display additional details about the video such as the thumbnail image from the json.

Other YouTube Functions

There are other functionalities that you can include in your website such as uploading a video, creating or modifying a playlist, searching a channel, downloading a video, getting the videos from users channel, and so on. The code is already there in the Google Developers, but the rel challenge lies in how you incorporate into your application. It also depends on how you customize the code and also taking care that your application does not crash due to the YouTube API. You also need to take care of the minimum units available per day and always upgrade more depending on the use.