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There are two ways to get a free SSL certificate–you can get one when you sign up for hosting or download one and install it on your website yourself. The first option is the easiest and best way to go if you don’t yet have a website. The latter is […]
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Do you want to create a beautiful coming soon page for your WordPress site?
All websites need a pre-launch coming soon page. It allows you to build anticipation, create hype, and spread the word even before the launch of your main website.
In this article, we will show you how to quickly and easily create beautiful coming soon pages in WordPress.
Coming soon pages are not just a placeholder for your website. They can be an effective lead generation tool for your business even before the site launch.
Here are a few ways that we have used coming soon pages:
To create a coming soon page in WordPress, you would need to get the best WordPress hosting and install WordPress.
For more detailed instructions, you can also follow our step by step guide on how to make a website.
Following are a few examples of effective coming soon page designs.
First, you need to install and activate the SeedProd plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
SeedProd is the best WordPress page builder plugin on the market. It allows you to build any type of landing page including Coming Soon page to limit access to your site and turn the pre-launch page into a lead magnet.
Note: There is a free version of SeedProd available as well that you can use, but for this tutorial we’ll show the Pro version since it has more features.
Upon activation, you need to visit SeedProd » Settings page to enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on the SeedProd website.
Next, you need to visit SeedProd » Pages page and then click on the ‘Set up a Coming Soon Page’ button.
On the next screen, you will be asked to choose a template. SeedProd comes with several professionally designed coming soon page templates to choose from. Simply click on a template to select it.
This will launch the SeedProd page builder interface. You’ll see a live preview of your selected template where you can simply point and click to select and edit any item.
You can also add new blocks to your page from the left column. Let’s add a countdown timer that tells users when your site will be launched.
Simply drag the ‘Countdown’ block and drop it on the page preview where you want it to be displayed.
After that, point and click on the countdown block, and you will see its properties in the left column.
Feel free to edit the page as much as you need. Try adding different blocks, changing text colors, add your business logo, and more.
Connect Your Email Marketing Service
Once you are finished with the design, you can switch to the ‘Connect’ tab. This is where you can connect your email sign up form to your email marketing service provider.
SeedProd supports all top email marketing platforms. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll be connecting our coming soon page to Constant Contact. Simply click to select it and then click on the ‘Connect New Account’ button.
Next, you’ll need to provide an API Key and a name for this connection. Simply click on the ‘Connect to Constant Contact’ button to continue.
This will open up a popup where you’ll need to log into your Constant Contact account. After that, click on the Allow button to give SeedProd access to your Contact Contact account.
Next, it will show you the API key which you need to copy and paste into SeedProd and click ‘Connect’ button.
SeedProd will then fetch your email lists. You’ll need to choose the email list you want to use and then click on the ‘Save Integration Details’ button.
Once you are finished with the page design and integrations, you are now ready to publish your coming soon page.
First, you need to click on the Save button and then select ‘Publish’ to save your coming soon page and make it publicly available.
SeedProd will now publish your page, and you can exit the page builder by clicking on the close button.
Next, you need to turn on the ‘Coming Soon’ mode to make sure that people visiting your website see the coming soon page only.
Simply go to SeedProd » Pages page and then switch the toggle under ‘Coming Soon Mode’ to active.
SeedProd will now turn on the coming soon mode for all your website. You can still login and work on your website but other non-logged in users will only see the coming soon page you created.
SeedProd allows you control how your coming soon page is displayed. You can access those advanced settings by visiting the SeedProd » Pages page and clicking on the ‘Edit Page’ button under the Coming Soon Mode box.
This will launch the page builder interface where you need to switch to the ‘Page Settings’ tab. Under the General settings you can provide a title for your page, select isolation mode, or change the page template start with a new one.
By default, the plugin will start showing your coming soon page to all non-logged in users. However, SeedProd gives you full control on who can access your website while it is under coming soon mode.
This comes in handy in certain situations. For instance:
For advanced access rules, click on the ‘Access Control’ menu to select who can access your website when its under coming soon mode.
You can also switch to the SEO tab to provide an SEO title, description, a featured image to be used when your link is shared on social media websites, and more. You can also choose to tell search engines not to index that page.
If you have popular SEO plugins like All in One SEO installed, then SeedProd works seamlessly with them as well.
Lastly, you can switch to the Scripts tab where you can add any third-party scripts that you may need to add. For instance, you may want to add Google Analytics code, Facebook pixel, or other tracking code here.
Don’t forget to click on the Save button at the top to save your advanced page settings.
Once you are ready to publish your website, SeedProd makes it super easy to turn off the coming soon mode.
Simply visit SeedProd » Pages page and switch off the ‘Active’ toggle under the Coming Soon Mode box.
Some site owners may want to display a maintenance mode page instead of a coming soon page. A maintenance mode page is helpful if your site is undergoing maintenance, and you want to let your users know that you will be back soon.
SeedProd’s Coming Soon Pro plugin also lets you create beautiful maintenance pages in WordPress.
Simply go to SeedProd » Pages page and click on the ‘Set up a Maintenance Mode Page’ button.
The rest of the process is the same as creating a coming soon page. You will get full access control and you can easily turn off maintenance mode when you are done.
We hope this article helped you learn how to create beautiful coming soon pages in WordPress. You may also want to see our ultimate guide on how to increase your blog traffic, and our comparison of the best business phone services to improve your workflow.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
The post How to Create Beautiful Coming Soon Pages in WordPress with SeedProd appeared first on WPBeginner.
I enjoy creating and implementing new marketing strategies as well as utilizing digital media. Apart from that, I love to spend time with children and books, thats what makes me feel alive.
Chrome Canary, the browser’s nightly build for developers, has been testing a new Follow button, as spotted on Android by the publishers of Chrome Story. The button appears on the homepage of a site, as well as in the browser menu:
Chrome Story speculates that it may be integrated with Google’s Discover feature, allowing sites to be easily added to that feed. Others speculated more broadly that Google may be building a replacement for Google Reader.
Any whisper of Google Reader being resurrected always causes a bit of a stir, as many loyal users are still in mourning for the beloved RSS reader, which was discontinued in 2013. Linking this new Follow feature with Discover may be the closest Google gets to bringing it back. A full-featured RSS reader will likely still be a better option to have full control of your feeds and how they display. However, it may be possible for developers to build tools that fetch and aggregate feeds captured by the Follow button.
Before the explosion of social media sites, RSS buttons were prominently featured on WordPress blogs. Having the ability to follow a site for new updates, without having to check back manually, was an important feature if you wanted to be found in the nascent blogosphere. RSS is still alive and well, even if following a curated list of sites isn’t the primary way people get their news today. Many internet users don’t know the first thing about subscribing to feeds but Google’s new Follow feature might make the idea more approachable.
Canary is unstable, but if want to check out features on the bleeding edge of Chrome development, you can install Canary for Android alongside your regular browser and choose when you launch it. At the time of publishing, the Follow button was not in the latest build but Google sometimes puts features in and pulls them out while they are in development. We will be following to see how this takes shape.
Hi there,
I am trying to get images onto an HTML5 canvas. The images are on the same page in a sidebar panel getting loaded in through php.
If you click on an image on the sidebar, I want it to appear on the canvas. I am learning jquery, but I do not understand it yet....
Can anyone help out? Here is a part of the html code:
<button class="panel">Section 1</button>
<div class="inhoud">
<?php
global $ConnectingDB;
$sql = "SELECT * FROM decorations ORDER BY id desc";
$stmt = $ConnectingDB->query($sql);
$Sr = 0;
while ($DataRows = $stmt->fetch()) {
$Image = $DataRows["image"];
?>
<img src="uploads/<?php echo htmlentities($Image); ?>" class="deco">
<?php } ?>
</div>
<button class="panel">Section 2</button>
<div class="inhoud">
<p> </p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- canvas area -->
<canvas width="1000px" height="500px"></canvas>
Basic jquery:
function draw() {
var image = document.getElementsByClassName("deco");
var canvas = document.querySelector("canvas");
var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
ctx.drawImage(image, 0, 0)
}Sleep tracking is an increasingly popular health trend that mobile app developers have been building applications to support. To simplify this endeavor and improve device performance, Google has added a new Android Sleep API that operates as an extension of its existing Activity Recognition API.
At this point, many of us have some experience working while at home, either pandemic-induced or by choice for some time prior. Whether you are a student, developer, designer, parent, artist, currently looking for work, or something else entirely, 2020...
The post How to Not Be at Work All the Time When You Live at Work appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
Ideally, you want to pick a reliable web hosting provider, so you don’t have to move your website. But it’s …
How to Move WordPress to a New Host or Server in 6 Simple Steps Read More »
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In this week’s roundup, we highlight a proposal for a new <popup> element, check the use of prefers-reduced-motion on award-winning sites, learn how to opt into cross-origin isolation, see how WhiteHouse.gov approaches accessibility, and warn the dangers of 100vh.
Let’s get into the news!
<popup> element is in developmentOn January 21, Melanie Richards from the Microsoft Edge web platform team posted an explainer for a proposed HTML <popup> element (the name is not final). A few hours later, Mason Freed from Google announced an intent to prototype this element in the Blink browser engine. Work on the implementation is taking place in Chromium issue #1168738.
A popup is a temporary (transient) and “light-dismissable” UI element that is displayed on the the “top layer” of all other elements. The goal for the <popup> element is to be fully stylable and accessible by default. A <popup> can be anchored to an activating element, such as a button, but it can also be a standalone element that is displayed on page load (e.g., a teaching UI).
A <popup> is automatically hidden when the user presses the Esc key or moves focus to a different element (this is called a light dismissal). Unlike the <dialog> element, only one <popup> can be shown at a time, and unlike the deprecated <menu> element, a <popup> can contain arbitrary content, including interactive elements:
We imagine
<popup>as being useful for various different types of popover UI. We’ve chosen to use an action menu as a primary example, but folks use popup-esque patterns for many different types of content.
Earlier this week, AWWWARDS announced the winners of their annual awards for the best websites of 2020. The following websites were awarded:
All these websites are highly dynamic and show full-screen motion on load and during scroll. Unfortunately, such animations can cause dizziness and nausea in people with vestibular disorders. Websites are therefore advised to reduce or turn off non-essential animations via the prefers-reduced-motion media query, which evaluates to true for people who have expressed their preference for reduced motion (e.g., the “Reduce motion” option on Apple’s platforms). None of the winning websites do this.
/* (code from animal-crossing.com) */
@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
.main-header__scene {
animation: none;
}
}An example of a website that does this correctly is the official site of last year’s Animal Crossing game. Not only does the website honor the user’s preference via prefers-reduced-motion, but it also provides its own “Reduce motion” toggle button at the very top of the page.
Cross-origin isolation is part of a “long-term security improvement.” Websites can opt into cross-origin isolation by adding the following two HTTP response headers, which are already supported in Chrome and Firefox:
Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp
Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-originA cross-origin-isolated page relinquishes its ability to load content from other origins without their explicit opt-in (via CORS headers), and in return, the page gains access to some powerful APIs, such as SharedArrayBuffer.
if (crossOriginIsolated) {
// post SharedArrayBuffer
} else {
// do something else
}The new WhiteHouse.gov website of the Biden administration was built from scratch in just six weeks with accessibility as a top priority (“accessibility was top of mind”). Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer reviewed the site and gave it the thumbs up.
The website’s accessibility statement (linked from the site’s footer) declares a “commitment to accessibility” and directly references the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG 2.1 (2018). This is notable because federal agencies in the USA are only required to comply with WCAG 2.0 (2008).
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the most widely accepted standards for internet accessibility. … By referencing WCAG 2.1 (the latest version of the guidelines), the Biden administration may be indicating a broader acceptance of the WCAG model.
100vw value can cause a useless horizontal scrollbarOn Windows, when a web page has a vertical scrollbar, that scrollbar consumes space and reduces the width of the page’s <html> element; this is called a classic scrollbar. The same is not the case on macOS, which uses overlay scrollbars instead of classic scrollbars; a vertical overlay scrollbar does not affect the width of the <html> element.
macOS users can switch from overlay scrollbars to classic scrollbars by setting “Show scroll bars” to ”Always” in System preferences > General.
The CSS length value 100vw is equal to the width of the <html> element. However, if a classic vertical scrollbar is added to the page, the <html> element becomes narrower (as explained above), but 100vw stays the same. In other words, 100vw is wider than the page when a classic vertical scrollbar is present.
This can be a problem for web developers on macOS who use 100vw but are unaware of its peculiarity. For example, a website might set width: 100vw on its article header to make it full-width, but this will cause a useless horizontal scrollbar on Windows that some of the site’s visitors may find annoying.
Web developers on macOS can switch to classic scrollbars to make sure that overflow bugs caused by 100vw don’t slip under their radar. In the meantime, I have asked the CSS Working Group for comment.
The post Weekly Platform News: Reduced Motion, CORS, WhiteHouse.gov, popups, and 100vw appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
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I’m a developer that has started developing with Gutenberg recently. There are a bunch of amazing benefits and features, but there are also a ton of drawbacks, inconsistencies, as well as absolutely awful and outdated documentation.
One of the worst aspects of Gutenberg from a developer perspective has been block validation. Consider the following scenario. I build a custom (non-dynamic) JavaScript-based block, and a CMS editor adds the block to thousands of pages. What happens when or if I need to update the markup of the block?
By default, all of the blocks will enter a state of invalidation and not reflect on the front-end of the site. The CMS editor would have to go into thousands of pages and manually click the button which allows the block to be recovered.
Block deprecations have been suggested as a way to resolve this, but the API is poorly documented, confusing, and seems like it would become unmaintainable in the long term with more than a few deprecations.
Shouldn’t there either be a way for block developers to opt-out of the validation process or a global way to recover blocks?
PJ
You are certainly not holding anything back, PJ. While much of this is a bit more technical than I typically like to cover here at the Tavern, I decided to reach out to Riad Benguella, one of the lead Gutenberg developers, for more insight into the situation.
Before diving into his response, I have given one aspect of your question some thought. There are times when developers need to deprecate old markup and move onto something new. However, this should not happen often. Generally, it is a sign of poor architecture if the HTML needs to be overhauled regularly. This also leads to other issues, such as a third party not being able to maintain stylistic changes.
When developing blocks or any type of application that outputs front-end code, you need to think about what that should look like today and in 10 years. What happens if a user adds some custom CSS to style your block and the block’s HTML structure has changed? From their perspective, your block update has broken their site. The same could be said for another plugin that extends your plugin in some way.
Ask any theme author how frustrating it is any time Gutenberg/WordPress changes its block output. While it has improved in the last couple of years, styling blocks for the editor and front-end has often been a maintenance nightmare.
As a developer, I have always tried to think through any real-world consequences of making these changes from a user’s perspective. That should happen from Day #1, not after you have released your project.
Doing this adds time to the early project when you are just trying to get it out the door and into users’ hands. This is where taking a pre-release step back helps. Get away from the computer. Go on a walk. Think about the architecture of your project and whether it is ideal for the long term.
“For the block versioning/updates, it’s indeed one of the areas of the Gutenberg APIs where we needed to make architectural tradeoffs, and we decided to favor the user experience over the developer’s,” said Benguella.
Regardless of your development method, following the project’s approach of a user-first experience will help in the long term.
“To understand the problem properly, one needs to understand how blocks work and are edited,” said Benguella. “Block instances are a JSON object, and the editor UI manipulate that JSON, but in order to stay backward compatible, to ensure the preservation of user’s content in the most readable format, and to embrace web standards as much as possible, the block editor doesn’t store the JSON object but an HTML serialization of it in post_content.”
That serialization is parsed and converted to JSON when the editor reloads the content to edit again. In the final stages of parsing, it is up to the block author to decide how to save and parse the object.
“Now, imagine if a user altered the saved HTML (serialization) and just put any random content there,” said Benguella. “The block might not be able to parse the HTML properly because it doesn’t match its expectations (what has been defined by the block author), which means recreating that JSON object in order to be manipulated won’t be possible at this point.”
When this happens, the block editor provides the user with an interface to make an informed decision. They can attempt to “force parse” the block JSON or convert it to an HTML or Classic block.
This same type of invalidation can happen when a plugin developer updates their block. However, instead of the saved HTML changing, the developer changed the “expectations” of the block — altering how it gets saved and parsed.
“Which is why we ask block developers to provide block deprecations representing the old markup of the same block,” said Benguella. “Deprecations can also be thought of as valid, alternate sources for the same block. This allows the editor to parse the old markup when loaded and save the new markup back if an update is made to the block.”
WordPress has block deprecation documentation. However, it is not thorough. The best source of seeing real-world deprecations is looking through Gutenberg’s block library. Deprecated blocks have a deprecated.js file.
Benguella said that this system can be frustrating for block authors. This is especially evident in a development environment when making changes. This has lead developers to ask for a method of disabling the validation algorithm.
“It’s something we don’t want to provide at the moment because, as explained above, the validation is also important when markup changes for another reason (external edit, another editor, etc.),” he said. “So it may cause content loss for users without them being aware of anything. The preference right now is given to user awareness.”
The team has improved the validation system over time, allowing for small changes that do not break the block state. There is also an open ticket for improvements in the future.
In every project where I use Tailwind CSS, I end up adding something to it. Some of these things I add in every single project. I’ll share these with you, but I’m also curious what y’all are adding to your tailwind.css files.
I’ll start with myself. In each project:
-webkit-tap-highlight-color.env(safe-area-inset-bottom).Allow me to elaborate on all three.
-webkit-tap-highlight-colorAndroid highlights taps on links. I’m not a fan because it obscures the element, so I turn it off for a nicer experience.
@layer base {
html {
-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;
}
}@layer is a Tailwind directive. It helps avoid specificity issues by telling Tailwind which “bucket” contains a set of custom styles. It’s like pretending the cascade doesn’t exist, so there’s less to worry about when it comes to ordering CSS.
Simply removing the tap highlight color might trigger an accessibility issue since that hides an interactive cue. So, if you go this route, it’s probably a good idea (and I’m still looking for research on this if you have it) to enable :active to define provide some response to those actions. Chris has a snippet for that.
env(safe-area-inset-bottom)This utility class handles the bottom bar on newer iPhones without the “Home” button. Without it, some elements can fall under the bar, making them unreadable and tough to tap.
@layer utilities {
.pb-safe {
padding-bottom: env(safe-area-inset-bottom);
}
}I love using interpuncts with unordered lists. I won’t penalize you for looking that up. We’re basically talking about the bullet points in unordered lists. Tailwind removes them by default via Normalize. I smuggle interpuncts into each and every one of my projects.
Here’s how I go about it:
@layer utilities {
.list-interpunct > li::before {
content: '・';
display: inline-block;
float: left;
margin: 0 0 0 -0.9em;
width: 0.9em;
}
@media (min-width: 992px) {
.list-interpunct > li::before {
margin: 0 0 0 -1.5em;
width: 1.5em;
}
}
}We also now have ::marker to do the same thing and it’s a little easier to work with. I’m not using it, because of the limited support in Safari.
Alright, I shared what I add to all of my Tailwind projects, so now it’s your turn. What do you add to Tailwind in your projects? Is there something you can’t do without? Let me know in the comments! I’d love ideas to start incorporating into other projects.
The post The Things I Add to Tailwind CSS Right Out of the Box appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
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Building trust is one of the central goals of user experience design. And yet trust is a concept that’s very hard to define in a precise manner. We all know it when we feel it but often fall short of putting it in words. Being able to turn the elusive and intangible into actionable and concrete steps, however, is exactly what makes UX so crucial in the modern business ecosystem.
Although a product experience that is useful and coherent is what fundamentally builds a sense of security and satisfaction, there’s a lot more nuance that goes building it. That’s what this article is about. We’ll take a deeper dive into users’ trust and how we can use UX to build a lasting relationship with your clientele.
Instilling trust goes beyond the bare visuals of a product. Ideally, a UX designer’s work starts well before the first lines are drawn and long after designs are deployed.
Being more present allows us to achieve a comprehensive view of the whole customer lifecycle, which also encourages us to borrow tools and approaches from marketers, product managers and developers. Being well-rounded in the product development activities is yet another aspect that we’ll advocate for throughout the piece. As a result of dabbling in non-design activities, we can gather an in-depth understanding of all areas where trust is vital.
A central competency of UX design is a good understanding of your users’ needs, preferences, and emotions. Therefore, overtime we, designers, need to develop a wide array of skills to improve our understanding of our users and their interaction with our products.
One such way entails using qualitative data and detailed analytics, which is vital in allowing us to outline a user’s persona’s most important qualities. Analytics can be used to create hypotheses and validate or discard them. As a result, you’ll be able to create experiences that will foster customer loyalty and a sustained sense of trust.
Let’s look into the stages of a customer journey and explore how UX designers can bring value to the table. You might also notice the way we suggest to structure the customer journey map is marketing-oriented. Such marketing-orientedness speaks to the purpose of this article: to give designers a broader perspective.
Below, we can see one such example of a customer journey that’s structured around the so-called “funnel” marketers and sales-people use:
Below is the classic visualization of a sales/marketing funnel. You may have come across different wordings for the stages but this doesn’t change their essence. The reason this visualization is shaped like a funnel is simple: only a small portion of people who come across your product will end up becoming a paying customer. We’ve also combined the intent and action into one stage, since in the context of building trust through good UX they’re fairly similar.
We’ve also combined the intent and action into one stage, since in the context of building trust through good UX they’re fairly similar.
Now we need to apply this funnel thinking to a customer journey. That’s exactly what we did with the customer journey map (CJM) below. This map was created for one of our projects a while ago, and was tweaked significantly to respect the client’s privacy. By focusing on the whole funnel, we were able to go beyond the product UI, and audit the whole UX from the very first users’ interaction with the product in question.
Now that we’ve talked briefly about how we can map users’ journey to pinpoint trust-sensitive areas, let’s move on to the first stage of the funnel: Awareness.
Awareness is the stage where we should analyze how customers learn about a product or service. When devising a strategy for this step, we need to start from our users' problems and their most common pain points. Being user-centric enables us to think about the best ways to approach potential customers while they are trying to tackle a certain pain point. The goal here is to have a reserved and more educational tone.
Sounding too corporate or salesy can have an adverse effect on a person that isn’t familiar with the product. The way we should approach the awareness stage depends on whether your product is launched or not.
In order to map a journey that is representative of real users we need real data. The ways of collecting this data will depend on whether the product in question is launched or not. Let’s go through both of these scenarios separately.
A product or service that has already hit the market can learn a lot about the people it attracts. Both qualitative and quantitative methods can provide us with a wealth of valuable insight.
There are plenty of tools and techniques in the market that will help get to know your users better. Here are the ones that are used the most often:
Let’s break down the three in more detail.
Google Analytics is a popular tool that is predominantly used by marketers, but it has gradually been adopted by UX specialists as well. It’s an excellent way to learn about the types of audiences you need to design for and create hypotheses about their preferences. More importantly, Google Analytics gives us insights on how people find you. Conversely, it allows you to learn how people do not find you.
A launched product can dive into a variety of values to better their understanding of their clientele. Here are a few of them:
Here’s how Google Analytics present data on where your users come from:
Here’s how Google Analytics visualizes the data on the users’ location:
The second approach is gauging the data from SEO tools like ahrefs or SEMrush to see how people phrase their search query when they face a problem your product solves.
Once you have an understanding of the keywords that your potential customers use, put them in Google. What do you find there? A competitor product? An aggregator website like Capterra or Clutch? Perhaps nothing that suits the query? Answers to these questions will be invaluable in informing your decisions about optimizing the very first stages of your custom journey.
Here’s how Google Search console shows which keywords users use that end up visiting to your website:
There is now a great variety of UX tools when it comes to analytics engines. They help translate complex data into actionable insights on how to improve your online presence. The tool that we use, and see other designers use very often is FullStory. Such tools are a great solution when you’re looking to reduce UI friction, find ways to enhance funnel completion, and so forth.
By using such tools, businesses can learn a lot about user behavior and how they can calibrate products to their needs. Do your users read the product description you write? Do they skim it? What part of the page seems to grab their attention? Does that validate or refute your initial assumptions?
Interviewing your user base has a broad spectrum of benefits when it comes to understanding their motivations, values, and experiences. There are many kinds of interviews, i.e. structured, unstructured, ones that feature closed or leading questions, and so on. They all have their benefits and can be tailored specifically to your service or user base to extract maximum insight.
For the purposes of creating a customer journey map that visualizes real data, consider asking questions like:
“How would you go about looking for an X service or product?”
“What information is/was the most important while making a purchasing decision?”
“What are some of the red flags for you when searching for our service/product?”
There’s plenty of valuable insight that can be gathered without having a launched product. Designs that instill trust from day one are bound to maximize an organization’s success in the long run.
Here are the tools and techniques you should use:
Let’s go through each of those.
One of the most straightforward ways to establish whether a product is fit for its market is keyword research. Often, looking for keywords is associated with SEM and SEO practices, but there’s a catch. This kind of research will reveal a lot about the most prominent needs on the market as well.
There are a few methods of keyword research can be used to establish market fitness:
To some, conducting user interviews before product launch may seem pointless, but it’s far from being true.
By understanding who your potential customers are and learning about their needs and preferences is a valuable vehicle for building trust.
Here are a few important things you can learn from potential users:
Thorough and well-planned user interviews are instrumental in making intelligent business decisions. They provide you with invaluable insight rooted in feedback directly from your potential users.
Understanding your competitors’ products is vital when it comes to market differentiation. It enables us to learn what customers are lacking and fill in those gaps.
Here are a few things that’ll help you conduct a simple competitor research with trust in mind:
Studying your competition will provide you with a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data that will guide your business decisions. As a result, you’ll create a product that fits your users’ needs and instills trust and satisfaction.
Users that have made it to the consideration stage are interested in your product but aren’t prepared to become paying customers. At this point, they’re evaluating the options offered by your competition and assessing whether they’ll get the value they’re looking for.
There is a wide array of things businesses can do to motivate users to transition into a paying relationship through building trust. Here are a few of them:
If your product revolves around AI/ML algorithms, to enhance customer experience, it’s important to explain how it works.
We’re typically very sensitive about our data. Respectively, there’s no reason to think that users will blindly trust a product’s AI. It’s our responsibility to counteract the distrust by explaining how it works and what kind of data it will use.
Here are a few great ways you can outline the AI’s functionality while also encouraging them to make their own informed decisions:
A well-executed UI is at the crux of user trust. Satisfying visuals, consistency, and ethical design will make your product appear trustworthy. Lacking the above will dissuade people from purchasing your product or services.
Here’s an older design example. Would you willingly use such service, especially when the competitors’ design isn’t stuck in 2003?
No offense to Gmail’s former self, by the way. There’s a reason it doesn’t look like that anymore though.
The same could also be said about your product’s UX. Confusing user flows, poor feature discoverability, and other other usability issues are a surefire way to scare away a good chunk of new users. A good remedy to such pitfall is making sure your design adheres to the usability heuristics. If you’re dealing with legacy design, conducting a heuristic evaluation would also serve you well.
Also, stuff like fake buttons, dark patterns, and a wonky interface are guaranteed to seriously hinder your growth.
Customer reviews are essential when it comes to building trust. There’s a significant body of research indicating that positive feedback can boost your sales and conversions.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Here’s what researchers in Spiegel Research Center have to say about the importance of review:
Based on data from the high-end gift retailer, we found that as products begin displaying reviews, conversion rates escalate rapidly. The purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews is 270% greater than the purchase likelihood of a product with no reviews.
Plus, studies have shown that people use testimonials to assess how trustworthy a product is.
It’s also worth noting that people who have negative experiences are a lot more likely to write a review, rather than the ones who had a good one. That’s why you should be creative in asking people to leave reviews. Here’s how Upwork approaches soliciting feedback.
Notice that Upwork allows you to see what review a customer left only after you’ve left one. It’s fascinating how they leverage curiosity to encourage users to leave feedback.
Over 90 percent of internet users read online reviews, and almost 85 percent of them trust them as much as a recommendation from a friend. Reviews are an important part of a trustworthy online presence.
That being said, it’s important not to create fake reviews that glorify your product. Please don’t buy reviews or mislead users in any different way. People can generally sense when praise is excessive and disingenuous. Furthermore, users appreciate a few negative reviews as well.
A study conducted by the North Western University and Power Reviews concluded the following:
“As it turns out, perfect reviews aren’t the best for businesses, either. Our research with Northwestern University found that purchase probability peaks when a product’s average star rating is between 4.2 – 4.5, because a perfect 5-star rating is perceived by consumers as too good to be true.”
Trust badges are icons that inform your users about the security of your product/service. Badges are especially important if your site has a payment page.
Providing your credit card information on a website is a sign of trust. Therefore it’s essential that we not only abide by security standards but also convey the fact that we do.
Badges are also invaluable when it comes to showcasing important partnerships or rewards. For example, b2b companies often display awards from websites like Clutch or GoodFirms.
A poorly written copy is a simple way to ruin your online credibility. A few typos will certainly dissuade some people from using your product by losing their trust in it.
Think of it this way: How can you trust a service that can even get their text right? Would you trust their online security? Would you be willing to provide your card information to them?
The pitfall of poor grammar and spelling might seem obvious, but oftentimes the UX copy is written in a rush. And we designers are prone to glazing over the copy without giving it too much consideration.
You’d be surprised how many error notifications and other system messages are written in a hurry never to be reviewed again.
Blunders like on the screenshot below, in our experience, happen way too often:
Considering that a customer has made it to the retention stage, it’s fair to say that you’ve earned their trust. However, it’s essential to mention that this trust needs to be retained, to ensure that they’ll continue using your product. Moreover, whenever there are people involved screw-ups are bound to happen. That means that you need to have a plan for fixing mistakes and getting the trust back.
Here are a few things you can do to elevate user experience and maintain a high trust level:
Effective email communication is paramount to customer retention. A whitepaper done by Emarsys indicates that about 4/5 of the businesses they surveyed use e-mails to retain their customers.
As a communication medium, email is among the most expressive. It can convey emotions through text and media while also addressing customers’ needs.
A user-centric approach to email marketing is bound to keep your customers happy, informed, and engaged. That implies not spamming and providing actual value or entertainment. Preferably, both.
Consistent and well-thought-out push notifications are also a great way to keep your customers intrigued.
First off, it’s always a good idea to welcome your users. They’ve just made an important step — they’ve bought your product or purchased a membership. It’s a simple and elegant way of thanking your customer for their choice.
Secondly, consider notifying them about exclusive offers. Sharing information on special deals allows you to provide them with extra value for merely being a customer of yours.
Finally, consider personalizing your notifications. Using users’ name or recent activity to notify them about relevant stuff will also skyrocket their engagement. However, it’s worth mentioning that being explicit about having users’ information too often or using sensitive data to personalize notifications can come across creepy.
Whether the notification above is creepy is up for you to decide :)
There are a variety of bonuses you can offer to build trust in the retention stage. They nudge our customers to use your product actively. These are especially potent in making up for any screw-ups.
Here are a few popular ones you can look into:
Phew, reading this article must have been quite a journey. We’ve almost reached the end. In order to help you consolidate everything in this article, let us try to recap its contents.
Creating a successful product is all about building trust. Luckily, there are so many ways to improve a product’s trustworthiness through UX. However, it’s essential to make these practices consistent. Customers seek to interact with brands that can deliver great experience throughout all interactions and touchpoints.
One of the ways to account for each touch point is reconciling two journey mapping techniques — marketing & sales funnel and customer journey map. The funnel allows us to go beyond the in-app experience that designers often are reluctant to do while a customer journey map provides empathy, structure and the depth of analysis.
Listing all of the ways to boost trustworthiness for each funnel stage would take another couple of pages, so a simple advice would do. Empathy is the key for getting in your users’ shoes and tackling their trust concerns. For a more concrete list of guidelines, scroll up and skim through the headers. That should jog your memory.
The bottom line is that we encourage you, dear reader, to shortlist the stages your users go through before actually becoming your users. Is there anything that might undermine your product’s trustworthiness? Is there anything you could improve and nudge a soon-to-be user in the right direction? Giving definitive answers to these questions and addressing them is a surefire for a better designed product.
This post is originally published on Designmodo: How to Get Response with Follow-up Emails
It happens to everyone: Your email message elicits no response. But everything is not lost. You still have an opportunity ahead of you with a follow-up email. Believe it or not, the sixth email in the sequence may receive more …
For more information please contact Designmodo
This is the 10th article documenting what I’ve learned from a series of 13 Trailhead Live video sessions on Modern App Development on Salesforce and Heroku. In these articles, we’re focusing on how to combine Salesforce with Heroku to build an “eCars” app—a sales and service application for a fictitious electric car company (“Pulsar”) that allows users to customize and buy cars, service techs to view live diagnostic info from the car, and more. In case you missed my previous article, you can find the link here.
Just as a quick reminder: I’ve been following this Trailhead Live video series to brush up and stay current on the latest app development trends on these platforms that are key for my career and business. I’ll be sharing each step for building the app, what I’ve learned, and my thoughts from each session. These series reviews are both for my own edification as well as for others who might benefit from this content.
Looking for the best WordPress themes for writers? In today’s post, we will look at some of the best WordPress themes on offer all aim at passionate writers. Part of the criteria I looked at...
The post 25 Best Writers WordPress Themes For Writers, Authors & Bloggers appeared first on 85ideas.com.
This article will discuss about what are the different operational and API management capabilities provided by the MuleSoft and those can be leverage depending on the client requirements and expectations and that includes Cloudhub (With VPC and Without VPC), Runtime Fabric Manager and Customer Hosted Mule Runtime.
We will be discussing all the operational and API management capabilities with various use cases.
Are you looking for the best alternatives to the Jetpack plugin?
Jetpack is a powerful WordPress plugin suite that adds various features to your WordPress website. Recently one of our readers asked us to share possible Jetpack alternatives for WordPress.
In this article, we’ll show you the best alternatives to the WordPress Jetpack plugin.
Jetpack is a plugin suite which combines essential WordPress features into one large plugin. It allows you to manage the features you want to use, and you can turn off the features you don’t need.
The core focus of the plugin is security, performance, and marketing.
However, as your website grows, you may want to expand beyond Jetpack. You might need advanced functionalities that are offered in other third-party WordPress plugins.
In these cases, it makes sense to look at Jetpack alternatives for specific features that you need.
Like all things in life, Jetpack plugin comes with its own advantages and disadvantages that you need to keep in mind when choosing Jetpack alternatives.
Pros of Using Jetpack Plugin
These are the advantages of using Jetpack plugin on your WordPress website.
Cons of Using Jetpack Plugin
Following are the disadvantages of using WordPress Jetpack plugin on your website.
That being said, let’s take a look at the best Jetpack alternatives that you can install on your website.
WPForms is the best alternative to Jetpack’s form functionality. It’s the best WordPress contact form plugin and is used by over 4 million websites.
The free version of the plugin, WPForms Lite, lets you easily add contact forms to your WordPress website.
WPForms comes with a beautiful drag and drop form builder and ready-made form templates. Adding forms to your blog posts and pages is simple with the included shortcode or using the WPForms content block.
There’s also a premium version of the plugin available that gives you additional features like conditional logic forms, file uploads, additional form templates, user registration and management, and more.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to create a contact form in WordPress.
Jetpack offers limited SEO functionality, even for users on paid plans. You will need one of the paid plans to access all of Jetpack’s search engine optimization features.
AIOSEO is the perfect alternative to Jetpack’s SEO features. It’s the best SEO plugin and toolkit in the market and is trusted by over 2 million WordPress users.
The free All in One SEO plugin gives you complete WordPress SEO tools, including XML sitemaps, rich snippets, SEO preview, content analysis, and more.
The premium version of AIOSEO gives you access to more advanced SEO tools, image SEO, local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, and more.
For complete step by step setup instructions, see our guide on how to install and set up the AIOSEO plugin.
Jetpack comes with a built-in stats module. However, it’s nowhere near as powerful as Google Analytics.
If you want Google Analytics integration in Jetpack you have to upgrade to the Security or Complete plans.
The best alternative to Jetpack’s site statistics functionality is MonsterInsights.
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and has more than 2 million active installs. It gives you real-time website analytics data, detailed page level data, eCommerce tracking, easy A/B testing, and more.
There’s also a free version of the plugin available that lets you effortlessly add Google Analytics data to WordPress.
The included reporting tools remove the fluff and only show you the stats that matter, so you can see exactly what’s working for your WordPress blog.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to add Google Analytics to WordPress.
Jetpack offers automated daily backups, but they are only available for paid plans. UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress backup plugins in the market and a great alternative to Jetpack’s backup feature.
Over 3 million WordPress websites currently use the plugin.
UpdraftPlus lets you quickly set up automatic backups for your entire WordPress website. The plugin supports regularly scheduled backups and on-demand backups. You can even backup specific site files.
You can automatically store your backups in several cloud locations including, Google Drive, Dropbox, Rackspace, S3, and more. It also lets you restore your website backups directly from your WordPress dashboard.
The free version of the plugin lets you create site backups with a single click.
For more details, see our guide on how to backup and restore your WordPress site with UpdraftPlus.
Jetpack has an anti-spam feature for premium plans, but you’ll need to upgrade to the Security or Complete plans. Otherwise, you’ll have to add on spam protection for $9.95 per month.
The best alternative for spam filtering is the free Akismet plugin. It’s the best spam filtering plugin in the market and should come pre-installed with WordPress.
It automatically filters all your WordPress comments to catch spam. Which significantly reduces the number of spam comments that you’ll have to moderate.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to combat comment spam in WordPress.
Jetpack offers code-free site customization features that let you build your homepage, blog posts, sidebars, and more. However, the customization options are limited.
You’ll probably want to use a WordPress page builder plugin for creating custom pages.
The free SeedProd Lite plugin replaces the no-code customization feature and lets you build out custom pages with the drag and drop page builder.
It has unique features like page-specific blocks, pre-built sections to speed up the page building process, and works with any WordPress theme.
There’s also a premium version of the plugin that offers premium templates, integrations, additional content blocks, and more.
For step by step instructions, see our guide on how to create custom pages in WordPress.
Jetpack only scans for malware if you have the Security or Complete plans. Otherwise, you have to add security scanning for an additional $7.95 per month.
The best alternative is the Sucuri Security plugin. Sucuri is the industry leader in WordPress security, and it’s one of the best WordPress security plugins.
It also offers the best WordPress firewall, which blocks suspicious activity even before it reaches your website.
We’ve used Sucuri to help block over 450,000 attacks in just 3 months.
For more details, see our step by step ultimate guide on improving WordPress security.
Jetpack recently added a CRM extension for users of the Jetpack plugin. This lets users both collect and manage leads. To get access to the most useful features, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan.
If you require CRM functionality, the best option is to use an existing CRM provider along with a lead generation tool.
OptinMonster is one of the best lead generation plugins for WordPress.
It lets you create high-converting popups and email signup forms to turn visitors into subscribers and customers.
You’ll find professionally designed templates, along with unique spin the wheel and Yes/No popups to further improve conversions.
There’s also a free OptinMonster plugin available. You can create a free account if you sign up through the plugin. It’s equipped with features that let you add high-converting pop-ups to your site.
For more details, see our guide on how to build your email list in WordPress with OptinMonster.
Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to market your business and stay in touch with your customers. If you haven’t started yet, see our guide on why building an email list is so important.
Jetpack offers limited email functionality. The only way to send emails is to notify subscribers you’ve published a new blog post. Compare this to a real email list where you can email your subscribers whenever you’d like.
The best alternative to Jetpack’s email functionality is Constant Contact. It’s one of the best email marketing services in the market today.
It lets you easily manage your email list. The plugin has built-in tracking, reporting, and segmenting features, and can even integrate with your Facebook ads campaign.
For more details, see our guide on how to build an email list in WordPress.
Alternative: SendinBlue is a good alternative if you want something more advanced, but it’s more pricey.
Jetpack has a subscription feature that notifies users when a new post is published. PushEngage is the best alternative to Jetpack’s site subscribe feature.
The free version of PushEngage allows you to set up a push notification that’ll automatically notify users when you publish a new post. Your visitors will receive the notification, even when they’re not on your website.
There’s also a premium version of the plugin designed to help you generate more revenue and get higher conversions from your push notifications.
For step by step setup instructions, see our guide on how to add push notifications to WordPress.
Jetpack has a few different extensions for adding social media functionality to your site.
The best alternative for this feature is Smash Balloon. It’s the best social media feeds plugin for WordPress and easily lets you add your social media feeds to WordPress.
Smash Balloon is a combination of four plugins that let you display Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube feeds on your WordPress site.
You’ll find mobile-responsive layouts you can use to match your existing brand. Plus, you can use different display options to help boost engagement and show off your social proof.
The plugin also fixes the Facebook and Instagram oEmed issue, so you can contune embedding content by pasting your post URLs into your editor. The only other way to do this is by using Jetpack.
The free versions of Smash Balloon let you add custom Facebook feeds, Instagram feeds, Twitter feeds, and YouTube feeds to your site.
This makes it easy to choose which specific social feeds you want to display.
The premium versions of each of the free plugins let you add social media feeds with additional customization options, templates, and more.
Jetpack has a scheduling feature called Publicize that lets you schedule your social media posts in advance. It’s a nice feature, but you have to be a premium user to get it.
The best alternative to this scheduling feature is the WP to Buffer plugin. It lets you connect your WordPress site to Buffer and automatically schedule your WordPress posts to share on your social media profiles.
Buffer is a social media management platform that allows you to schedule your social media posts throughout the day. This saves you the time you would otherwise spend on sharing your articles manually on social media.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to schedule WordPress posts for social media with Buffer.
Jetpack offers a few different social media extensions for adding social sharing buttons to your posts and widget areas.
The best alternative is the Shared Counts plugin. It’s one of the best social media plugins for WordPress and won’t negatively impact your site’s loading speeds or performance.
It supports the most popular social networks, including Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yummly. You can even display the total share counts the post has received for social proof.
For more details, see our guide on how to add social share buttons in WordPress.
The Yet Another Related Posts plugin is the best WordPress related posts plugin in the market and the perfect alternative to Jetpack’s related posts feature.
It’s used by over 100,000 WordPress sites and supports both thumbnail and text display of related posts. You can increase your page views by 10% just by using this plugin.
It offers you full control over how and where you display related posts in WordPress. It even supports custom post types and can add related posts in RSS feeds as well.
WordPress lets users embed images and create image galleries. However, the default gallery options are quite limited.
Jetpack upgrades the native functionality by letting users create tiled galleries, image carousels, and more.
Envira Gallery is the best alternative to Jetpack’s responsive galleries and is one of the best WordPress gallery plugins.
It’s very beginner-friendly and uses a drag and drop builder to help you quickly create responsive photo galleries.
The plugin is also equipped with a template library and unique features like lightbox popups and lazy loading.
For those on a budget, there’s a free version of the plugin that lets you add responsive image galleries to your site.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to create an image gallery in WordPress.
UptimeRobot isn’t a plugin, but a website monitoring tool that you can use as an alternative to Jetpack’s monitoring tool.
There’s a free plan that will check your website uptime every 5 minutes, and the paid plan will check your site every 60 seconds. The advanced plan can also give you alerts via SMS, email, voice call, and more.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to monitor your WordPress server uptime.
The Jetpack CDN serves website images through their CDN server to optimize website performance. Cloudflare is the perfect replacement for Jetpack’s CDN service.
It improves your website’s speed and performance by serving static content through their global CDN.
It’s one of the best WordPress CDN services that offers a free CDN and basic protection against DDOS attacks. It also provides a great free alternative to Jetpack’s brute force attack protection.
Premium plans are available for users who want improved security, image optimization, and 100% uptime.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to set up free Cloudflare CDN in WordPress.
Easy Updates Manager allows you to replace Jetpack’s automatic plugin update feature. It helps you easily manage all WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates.
From a single dashboard, you can enable or disable automatic updates. You can also update themes automatically and choose which plugins you want to automatically update.
For more details, see our guide on how to better manage automatic WordPress updates.
The Catch Infinite Scroll plugin was inspired by Jetpack’s infinite scroll feature, making it the perfect alternative.
The plugin will automatically load content as users scroll down the page, or you can add a “load more” button. You can also choose whether you want users to click or scroll to load content, add a custom loading image or text, and more.
For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to add infinite scroll to your WordPress site.
Jetpack has an advertising program that lets you automatically include ads in your content if you’re using the Security or Complete plans. You can choose where you want the ads to display from the pre-defined set of options.
The best alternative to this functionality is the Adsanity plugin. It’s one of the best ad management plugins for WordPress.
This beginner-friendly plugin lets you insert ads into your website and widgets and manage them easily. It supports ads sold directly by you and external ad networks like Google Adsense.
For more details, see our article on how to manage ads in WordPress with AdSanity.
WordPress has built-in functionality that lets you edit your site CSS via the Customizer. Jetpack takes this feature and adds more functionality.
The best alternative for adding CSS to your site is the Simple Custom CSS plugin. This plugin will keep your CSS changes and apply them to whatever theme you’re using.
To learn more, see our guide on how to add custom CSS to your WordPress site.
Jetpack has a premium search addon feature that gives users a more powerful search option for finding content on your site. The pricing is based on the size of your site and starts at $5 per month.
The best alternative to this is the SearchWP plugin. It’s one of the best WordPress search plugins in the market.
It’s very easy to use and makes virtually all of your content searchable. You’ll have full control over the search algorithm and assign weight to which content types are the most valuable.
The plugin also gives you access to your search data, so you can see what visitors are finding and not finding, then use this data to improve your content.
We hope this article helped you find the best alternatives for the Jetpack plugin on your WordPress site. You may also want to see our list of must have WordPress plugins for small businesses, and the best WooCommerce plugins for online stores.
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The post 21+ Best Alternatives to the WordPress Jetpack Plugin appeared first on WPBeginner.