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Gaming is a billion dollar industry and has been for years. If you are a gamer, you have probably thought of getting into game development before. As the video gaming market continues to grow, so does the demand for game developers. You need to have the broadest skill set possible to get one of those […]
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When Android was first introduced in 2007, it was ranked 5th among the mobile platforms available. Since then, Android’s popularity has increased exponentially. In fact, it is now considered as the world most popular mobile platform. In fact, Android devices account for 50% of the global smartphone market. We are in the age where almost […]
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In recent years, the biggest change to the search landscape happened when Google chose to withhold keyword data from webmasters. At SEOBook, Aaron noticed and wrote about the change, as evermore keyword data disappeared.
The motivation to withold this data, according to Google, was privacy concerns:
SSL encryption on the web has been growing by leaps and bounds. As part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience, today we announced that SSL Search on https://www.google.com will become the default experience for signed in users on google.com.
At first, Google suggested it would only affect a single-digit percentage of search referral data:
Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com
…which didn’t turn out to be the case. It now affects almost all keyword referral data from Google.
Was it all about privacy? Another rocket over the SEO bows? Bit of both? Probably. In any case, the search landscape was irrevocably changed. Instead of being shown the keyword term the searcher had used to find a page, webmasters were given the less than helpful “not provided”. This change rocked SEO. The SEO world, up until that point, had been built on keywords. SEOs choose a keyword. They rank for the keyword. They track click-thrus against this keyword. This is how many SEOs proved their worth to clients.
These days, very little keyword data is available from Google. There certainly isn’t enough to keyword data to use as a primary form of measurement.
This change forced a rethink about measurement, and SEO in general. Whilst there is still some keyword data available from the likes of Webmaster Tools & the AdWords paid versus organic report, keyword-based SEO tracking approaches are unlikely to align with Google’s future plans. As we saw with the Hummingbird algorithm, Google is moving towards searcher-intent based search, as opposed to keyword-matched results.
Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words
The search bar is still keyword based, but Google is also trying to figure out what user intent lays behind the keyword. To do this, they’re relying on context data. For example, they look at what previous searches has the user made, their location, they are breaking down the query itself, and so on, all of which can change the search results the user sees.
When SEO started, it was in an environment where the keyword the user typed into a search bar was exact matching that with a keyword that appears on a page. This is what relevance meant. SEO continued with this model, but it’s fast becoming redundant, because Google is increasingly relying on context in order to determine searcher intent & while filtering many results which were too aligned with the old strategy. Much SEO has shifted from keywords to wider digital marketing considerations, such as what the visitor does next, as a result.
Okay, if SEO’s don’t have keywords, what can they use?
If we step back a bit, what we’re really trying to do with measurement is demonstrate value. Value of search vs other channels, and value of specific search campaigns. Did our search campaigns meet our marketing goals and thus provide value?
Do we have enough data to demonstrate value? Yes, we do. Here are a few ideas SEOs have devised to look at the organic search data they are getting, and they use it to demonstrate value.
1. Organic Search VS Other Activity
If our organic search tracking well when compared with other digital marketing channels, such as social or email? About the same? Falling?
In many ways, the withholding of keyword data can be a blessing, especially to those SEOs who have a few ranking-obsessed clients. A ranking, in itself is worthless, especially if it’s generating no traffic.
Instead, if we look at the total amount of organic traffic, and see that it is rising, then we shouldn’t really care too much about what keywords it is coming from. We can also track organic searches across device, such as desktop vs mobile, and get some insight into how best to optimize those channels for search as a whole, rather than by keyword. It’s important that the traffic came from organic search, rather than from other campaigns. It’s important that the visitors saw your site. And it’s important what that traffic does next.
2. Bounce Rate
If a visitor comes in, doesn’t like what is on offer, and clicks back, then that won’t help rankings. Google have been a little oblique on this point, saying they aren’t measuring bounce rate, but I suspect it’s a little more nuanced, in practice. If people are failing to engage, then anecdotal evidence suggests this does affect rankings.
Look at the behavioral metrics in GA; if your content has 50% of people spending less than 10 seconds, that may be a problem or that may be normal. The key is to look below that top graph and see if you have a bell curve or if the next largest segment is the 11-30 second crowd.
Either way, we must encourage visitor engagement. Even small improvements in terms of engagement can mean big changes in the bottom line. Getting visitors to a site was only ever the first step in a long chain. It’s what they do next that really makes or breaks a web business, unless the entire goal was that the visitor should only view the landing page. Few sites, these days, would get much return on non-engagement.
PPCers are naturally obsessed with this metric, because each click is costing them money, but when you think about it, it’s costing SEOs money, too. Clicks are getting harder and harder to get, and each click does have a cost associated with it i.e. the total cost of the SEO campaign divided by the number of clicks, so each click needs to be treated as a cost.
3. Landing Pages
We can still do landing page analysis. We can see the pages where visitors are entering the website. We can also see which pages are most popular, and we can tell from the topic of the page what type of keywords people are using to find it.
We could add more related keyword to these pages and see how they do, or create more pages on similar themes, using different keyword terms, and then monitor the response. Similarly, we can look at poorly performing pages and make the assumption these are not ranking against intended keywords, and mark these for improvement or deletion.
We can see how old pages vs new pages are performing in organic search. How quickly do new pages get traffic?
We’re still getting a lot of actionable data, and still not one keyword in sight.
4. Visitor And Customer Acquisition Value
We can still calculate the value to the business of an organic visitor.
We can also look at what step in the process are organic visitors converting. Early? Late? Why? Is there some content on the site that is leading them to convert better than other content? We can still determine if organic search provided a last click-conversion, or a conversion as the result of a mix of channels, where organic played a part. We can do all of this from aggregated organic search data, with no need to look at keywords.
5. Contrast With PPC
We can contrast Adwords data back against organic search. Trends we see in PPC might also be working in organic search.
For AdWords our life is made infinitesimally easier because by linking your AdWords account to your Analytics account rich AdWords data shows up automagically allowing you to have an end-to-end view of campaign performance.
Even PPC-ers are having to change their game around keywords:
The silver lining in all this? With voice an mobile search, you’ll likely catch those conversions that you hadn’t before. While you may think that you have everything figured out and that your campaigns are optimal, this matching will force you into deeper dives that hopefully uncover profitable PPC pockets.
6. Benchmark Against Everything
In the above section I highlighted comparing organic search to AdWords performance, but you can benchmark against almost any form of data.
Is 90% of your keyword data (not provided)? Then you can look at the 10% which is provided to estimate performance on the other 90% of the traffic. If you get 1,000 monthly keyword visits for [widgets], then as a rough rule of thumb you might get roughly 9,000 monthly visits for that same keyword shown as (not provided).
Has your search traffic gone up or down over the past few years? Are there seasonal patterns that drive user behavior? How important is the mobile shift in your market? What landing pages have performed the best over time and which have fallen hardest?
How is your site’s aggregate keyword ranking profile compared to top competitors? Even if you don’t have all the individual keyword referral data from search engines, seeing the aggregate footprints, and how they change over time, indicates who is doing better and who gaining exposure vs losing it.
Numerous competitive research tools like SEM Rush, SpyFu & SearchMetrics provide access to that type of data.
You can also go further with other competitive research tools which look beyond the search channel. Is most of your traffic driven from organic search? Do your competitors do more with other channels? A number of sites like Compete.com and Alexa have provided estimates for this sort of data. Another newer entrant into this market is SimilarWeb.
And, finally, rank checking still has some value. While rank tracking may seem futile in the age of search personalization and Hummingbird, it can still help you isolate performance issues during algorithm updates. There are a wide variety of options from browser plugins to desktop software to hosted solutions.
By now, I hope I’ve convinced you that specific keyword data isn’t necessary and, in some case, may have only served to distract some SEOs from seeing other valuable marketing metrics, such as what happens after the click and where do they go next.
So long as the organic search traffic is doing what we want it to, we know which pages it is coming in on, and can track what it does next, there is plenty of data there to keep us busy. Lack of keyword data is a pain, but in response, many SEOs are optimizing for a lot more than keywords, and focusing more on broader marketing concerns.
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When Google acquired DoubleClick Larry Page wanted to keep the Performics division offering SEM & SEO services just to see what would happen. Other Google executives realized the absurd conflict of interest and potential anti trust issues, so they overrode ambitious Larry: “He wanted to see how those things work. He wanted to experiment.”
Webmasters have grown tired of Google’s duplicity as the search ecosystem shifts to pay to play, or go away.
@davidiwanow I understand the problem, just not the complaints. Google won. Find another oppty, or pay Google. Simple.— john andrews (@searchsleuth999) November 5, 2014
Google’s webmaster guidelines can be viewed as reasonable and consistent or as an anti-competitive tool. As Google eats the ecosystem, those thrown under the bus shift their perspective.
Scraping? AOG (unless we do it) Affiliate? Fucking scumbags mainly AOG (unless we get into the space) Thin content? AOG (unless we do it)— Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) November 5, 2014
Within some sectors larger players can repeatedly get scrutiny for the same offense with essentially no response, whereas smaller players operating in that same market are slaughtered because they are small.
At this point, Google should just come out and be blunt, “any form of promotion that does not involve paying us is against our guidelines.”— Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) November 5, 2014
Access to lawyers, politicians & media outlets = access to benefit of the doubt.
Lack those & BEST OF LUCK TO YOU 😉
And most of all, I’m tired of having to tell SMBs that Google gives zero fucks when it comes to them— Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) November 5, 2014
Google’s page asking “Do you need an SEO?” uses terms like: scam, illicit and deceptive to help frame the broader market perception of SEO.
If ranking movements appear random & non-linear then it is hard to make sense of continued ongoing investment. The less stable Google makes the search ecosystem, the worse they make SEOs look, as…
Matt Cutts stated it is a waste of resources for him to be a personal lightning rod for criticism from black hat SEOs. When Matt mentioned he might not go back to his old role at Google some members of the SEO industry were glad. In response some other SEOs mentioned black hats have nobody to blame but themselves & it is their fault for automating things.
After all, it is not like Google arbitrarily shifts their guidelines overnight and drastically penalizes websites to a disproportionate degree ex-post-facto for the work of former employees, former contractors, mistaken/incorrect presumed intent, third party negative SEO efforts, etc.
Oh … wait … let me take that back.
Indeed Google DOES do that, which is where much of the negative sentiment Matt complained about comes from.
Recall when Google went after guest posts, a site which had a single useful guest post on it got a sitewide penalty.
Around that time it was noted Auction.com had thousands of search results for text which was in some of their guest posts.
Enjoying Aaron murdering http://t.co/UadnmwekM7 RT @aaronwall: “about 9,730 results” http://t.co/Sms5L2BFGY— Brian Provost (@brianprovost) April 9, 2014
About a month before the guest post crack down, Auction.com received a $50 million investment from Google Capital.
The point of highlighting that sort of disconnect was not to “out” someone, but rather to highlight the (il)legitimacy of the selective enforcement. After all, …
@mvandemar @brianprovost if anyone should have the capital needed to “do things the right way, as per G” it should be G & those G invests in— aaron wall (@aaronwall) April 9, 2014
But perhaps Google has decided to change their practices and have a more reasonable approach to the SEO industry.
An encouraging development on this front was when Auction.com was once again covered in Bloomberg. They not only benefited from leveraging Google’s data and money, but Google also offered them another assist:
Closely held Auction.com, which is valued at $1.2 billion, based on Google’s stake, also is working with the Internet company to develop mobile and Web applications and improve its search-engine optimization for marketing, Sharga said.
“In a capitalist system, [Larry Page] suggests, the elimination of inefficiency through technology has to be pursued to its logical conclusion.” ― Richard Waters
With that in mind, one can be certain Google didn’t “miss” the guest posts by Auction.com. Enforcement is selective, as always.
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” ― Vladimir Lenin
Whether you turn left or right, the road leads to the same goal.
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Yesterday Google shared they see greater mobile than desktop search volumes in 10 countries including Japan and the United States.
3 years ago RKG shared CTR data which highlighted how mobile search ads were getting over double the CTR as desktop search ads.
The basic formula: less screen real estate = higher proportion of user clicks on ads.
Google made a big deal of their “mobilepocalypse” update to scare other webmasters into making their sites mobile friendly. Part of the goal of making sites “mobile friendly” is to ensure it isn’t too ad dense (which in turn lowers accidental ad clicks & lowers monetization). Not only does Google have an “ad heavy” relevancy algorithm which demotes ad heavy sites, but they also explicitly claim even using a moderate sized ad unit on mobile devices above the fold is against their policy guidelines:
Is placing a 300×250 ad unit on top of a high-end mobile optimized page considered a policy violation?
Yes, this would be considered a policy violation as it falls under our ad placement policies for site layout that pushes content below the fold. This implementation would take up too much space on a mobile optimized site’s first view screen with ads and provides a poor experience to users. Always try to think of the users experience on your site – this will help ensure that users continue to visit.
So if you make your site mobile friendly you can’t run Google ads above the fold unless you are a large enough publisher that the guidelines don’t actually matter.
If you spend the extra money to make your site mobile friendly, you then must also go out of your way to lower your income.
What is the goal of the above sort of scenario? Defunding content publishers to ensure most the ad revenues flow to Google.
If you think otherwise, consider the layout of the auto ads & hotel ads Google announced yesterday. Top of the search results, larger than 300×250.
If you do X, you are a spammer. If Google does X, they are improving the user experience.
@aaronwall they will personally do everything they penalize others for doing; penalties are just another way to weaken the market.— Cygnus SEO (@CygnusSEO) May 5, 2015
The above sort of contrast is something noticed by non-SEOs. The WSJ article about Google’s new ad units had a user response stating:
With this strategy, Google has made the mistake of an egregious use of precious mobile screen space in search results. This entails much extra fingering/scrolling to acquire useful results and bypass often not-needed coincident advertising. Perhaps a moneymaker by brute force; not a good idea for utility’s sake.
That content displacement with ads is both against Google’s guidelines and algorithmically targeted for demotion – unless you are Google.
How is that working for Google partners?
According to eMarketer, by 2019 mobile will account for 72% of US digital ad spend. Almost all that growth in ad spend flows into the big ad networks while other online publishers struggle to monetize their audiences:
Facebook and Google accounted for a majority of mobile ad market growth worldwide last year. Combined, the two companies saw net mobile ad revenues increase by $6.92 billion, claiming 75.2% of the additional $9.2 billion that went toward mobile in 2013.
Back to the data RKG shared. Mobile is where the growth is…
…and the smaller the screen size the more partners are squeezed out of the ecosystem…
The high-intent, high-value search traffic is siphoned off by ads.
What does that leave for the rest of the ecosystem?
It is hard to build a sustainable business when you have to rely almost exclusively on traffic with no commercial intent.
One of the few areas that works well is perhaps with evergreen content which has little cost of maintenance, but even many of those pockets of opportunity are disappearing due to the combination of the Panda algorithm and Google’s scrape-n-displace knowledge graph.
.@mattcutts I think I have spotted one, Matt. Note the similarities in the content text: pic.twitter.com/uHux3rK57f— dan barker (@danbarker) February 27, 2014
Even companies with direct ad sales teams struggle to monetize mobile:
At The New York Times, for instance, more than half its digital audience comes from mobile, yet just 10% of its digital-ad revenue is attributed to these devices.
Other news websites also get the majority of their search traffic from mobile.
Why do news sites get so much mobile search traffic? A lot of it is navigational & beyond that most of it is on informational search queries which are hard to monetize (and thus have few search ads) and hard to structure into the knowledge graph (because they are about news items which only just recently happened).
If you look at the organic search traffic breakdown in your analytics account & you run a site which isn’t a news site you will likely see a far lower share of search traffic from mobile. Websites outside of the news vertical typically see far less mobile traffic. This goes back to Google dominating the mobile search interface with ads.
Mobile search ecosystem breakdown
Not only is Google monetizing a far higher share of mobile search traffic, but they are also aggressively increasing minimum bids.
As Google continues to gut the broader web publishing ecosystem, they can afford to throw a few hundred million in “innovation” bribery kickback slush funds. That will earn them some praise in the short term with some of the bigger publishers, but it will make those publishers more beholden to Google. And it is even worse for smaller publishers. It means the smaller publishers are not only competing against algorithmic brand bias, confirmation bias expressed in the remote rater documents, & wholesale result set displacement, but some of their bigger publishing competitors are also subsidized directly by Google.
Ignore the broader ecosystem shifts.
Ignore the hypocrisy.
Focus on the user.
Until you are eating cat food.
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Once upon a time, I was sitting in my office looking over data for one our new clients and reviewing the conversion project roadmap. The phone rang and on the other end was the VP of marketing for a multi-billion-dollar company. It is very unusual to get an unannounced call from someone at his level, but he had an urgent problem to solve. A good number of his website visitors were not converting.
His problem did not surprise me. We deal with conversion rates optimization every day.
He invited me to meet with his team to discuss the problem further. The account would be a huge win for Invesp, so we agreed on a time that worked for both us. When the day came, our team went to the company’s location.
We started the discussion, and things did NOT go as I expected. The VP, who led the meeting, said, “we have a conversion problem.”
“First-time visitors to our website convert at a rate of 48%. Repeat visitors convert at 80%!”
I was puzzled.
Not sure what exactly puzzled me. Was it the high conversion numbers or was it the fact that the VP was not happy with them. He wanted more.
I thought he had his conversion numbers wrong. But nope. We looked at his analytics, and he was correct. The numbers were simply amazing by all standards. The VP, however, had a different mindset. The company runs thousands of stores around the US. When someone picks up the phone and calls them, they convert callers at a 90% rate. He was expecting the same conversion rate for his online store.
Let’s face it. A typical e-commerce store converts at an average of 3%. Few websites are able to get to anywhere from 10 to 18%. These are considered the stars of the world of conversion rates.
The sad truth about a website with 15% conversion rate is that 85% of the visitors simply leave without converting. Money left on the table, cash the store will not be able to capture. Whatever way you think about it, we can agree that there is a huge opportunity, but it is also a very difficult one to conquer.
Most companies jump into conversion optimization with a lot of excitement. As you talk to teams conducting conversion optimization, you notice a common thread. They take different pages of the website and run tests on them. Some tests produce results; others do not. After a while, the teams run out of ideas. The managers run out of excitement.
The approach of randomly running tests on different pages sees conversion rate optimization in a linear fashion. The real problem is that no one shops online in a linear fashion. We do not follow a linear path when we navigate from one area of the website to the next. Humans most of the time are random, or, at least, they appear random.
The right approach to increase conversion rates needs to be systematical, because it deals with irrational and random human behavior.
So, how do you do this?
After ten years of doing conversion optimization at Invesp, I can claim that we have a process that works for many online businesses. The truth is that it continues to be a work in progress.
These are the four steps you should follow to achieve your desired conversion rate:
I could never stop talking about personas and the impact they have on your website. While most companies talk about their target market, personas help you translate your generalized and somewhat abstract target market data into a personalized experience that impacts your website design, copy and layout.
Let’s take the example of a consulting company that targets “e-commerce companies with a revenue of 10 million dollars or more.” There are two problems with this statement:
You should first think about the actual person who would hire the services of this consulting company. Most likely, the sales take place to:
Now, translate each of these three different cases into a persona.
So, instead of talking about a business owner for a company that is generating annual revenue from 10 to 20 million dollars, we will talk about:
John Riley, 43 years old, completed his B.A. in physics from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is a happy father of three. He started the company in 2007 and financed it from his own pocket. His company generated 13.5 million dollars of revenue in 2014 and expects to see a modest 7% increase in sales in 2015. John is highly competitive, but he also cares about his customers and thinks of them as an extended family. He would like to find a way to increase this year’s revenue by 18%, but he is not sure how to do so. He is conservative when it comes to using new marketing techniques. In general, John does not trust consultants and thinks of them as overpaid.
This is an oversimplification of the persona creation process and its final product. But you get the picture. If you are the consulting company that targets John, then what type of website design, copy and visitor flow would you use to persuade him to do business with you?
What data points do you use to create personas for your website? I would start with this:
A website or a business should typically target four to seven personas.
So, you have the personas. These personas should impact your design, copy and visitor flow.
But how?
Let’s start by looking at analytics data. Look for a period of six months to one year and see the top traffic sources/mediums. If your website has been online for a while, then you will probably have hundreds of different sources. Start with your top 10 traffic sources/medium and create a matrix for each of the personas/traffic source/landing pages:
Now, your job is to evaluate each top landing page for each traffic source through the eyes of your website personas. For each page, you will answer eight questions.
As you answer these questions for each of the personas, you will end up with a large set of answers and actions. The challenge and the art will be to combine all these and make the same landing page work for all different personas. This is not a small task, but this is where the fun begins.
You thought the previous work was complex? Well, you haven’t seen anything just yet!
Not every visitor who lands on your website is ready to buy. Visitors come to your website in different buying stages, and only 15-20% are in the action stage. The sequential buying stages of a visitor are:
A typical buying funnel looks like this:
How does that translate into actionable items on your website?
In the previous exercise, we created a list of changes on different screens or sections of your website based on the different personas. Now, we are going to think about each persona landing on the website in one of the first four buying stages.
Instead of thinking of how to adjust a particular screen for John Riley, now you think of a new scenario:
Persona “x” is in the “evaluating alternatives” stage of the buying funnel. He lands on a particular landing page. What do I need to adjust in the website design and copy to persuade persona “x” to convert?
Our previous table looks like this now:
Next, answer all eight persona-questions again, based on the different buying stages.
This goes without saying; you should NEVER introduce changes to your website without actually testing them. You can find plenty of blogs and books out there on how to conduct testing correctly if you are interested in learning more about AB testing and multivariate testing.
For a start, keep the five No’s of AB testing in mind:
Your goal is NOT to conduct large AB or multivariate tests. Your goal is to discover what elements on the page cause visitors to act a specific way. Break complex tests into smaller ones. The more you can isolate the changes to one or two elements, the easier it will be to understand the impact of different design and copy elements on visitors’ actions.
I can never say it enough. A test without a good hypothesis is a gambling exercise. A hypothesis is a predictive statement about a problem or set of problems on your page and the impact of solving these problems on visitor behavior.
Do not run tests for less than seven days or longer than four weeks. In both scenarios, you are leaving yourself open to the chance of inconsistent and polluted data. When you run a test for less than seven days, website data inconsistencies you are not aware of may affect your results. So, give the test results a chance to stabilize. If you run a test for more than four weeks, you are allowing external factors to have a larger impact on your results.
Human psychology is complex. Conversion optimization is about understanding visitor behavior and adjusting website design, copy and process to persuade these visitors to convert. Conversion optimization is not a light switch you turn on and off. It is a long-term commitment. Some tests will produce results and some will not. Increases in conversion rates are great but what you are looking for is a window to visitor behavior.
Call it whatever you like: forensic analysis, posttest analysis, test results assessment. You should learn actionable marketing insights from the test to deploy across channels and verticals. The real power of any testing program lays beyond the results.
If you follow the steps outlined in this blog, you will have a lot to do.
So, happy testing!
About the author: This guide was written by Khalid Saleh. He is the CEO of Invesp, a conversion optimization software and services firm with clients in 11 different countries.
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Creating a website may sound complicated and tedious, but there are a lot of tools out there that can make your task a lot easier. It’s important to have a good presence online both for businesses and organizations or causes, this is why all the tools and services available for helping you create a website are top-notch. We’ve rounded up a few of the best we could find and here’s the list.
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Looking for beautifully designed themes and templates that are also fully responsive? Then head over to Gridgum, a niche market place where you will find stunning themes and templates created by passionate authors who will even help you out if you need any help. Gridgum emphasizes quality rather than quantity and this is why both sellers and buyers are encouraged to use it. The marketplace offers WordPress and Bootstrap themes and also Admin Panels for people who are shopping for their new website. Gridgum accepts themes created with Bootstrap, Gumby and Skeleton frameworks. As a buyer on Gridgum you will receive points with each purchase that can be redeemed as discounts on future orders and when paying through PayPal you won’t have the surcharge other markets take. You can also reach out to the theme or template’s author if you need help with anything. If you’re looking to publish your themes on Gridgum here’s what you should know: all themes must be responsive, have an unique name and be compatible cross-browser. Gridgum will also encourage you to offer support to clients who download your theme. Money-wise, Gridgum offers a 70% commission for all exclusive themes and a 45% one for non-exclusive themes.
Managing your website’s content has never been easier with the new ExpressionEngine tool created by EllisLab. ExpressionEngine is one of the most flexible content management tools you’ll find. You can break down tour website’s content and display it the way you want, without having to worry about some pre-established notion of how it should be stored and accessed. The tool is very easy to install and will fit any sort of website from real-estate and tourism to eCommerce or personal blog, without having to make any modifications to it. Besides, you can integrate it with several apps and services and you don’t have to be a professional for that, as it’s easy to be done. On the other hand, if you’re a programmer you’ll immediately appreciate the quality of this tool and recognize it as one of the most extensible content management tools there are. To find out more about ExpressionEngine and how it works, check out the website.
One of the most popular trends on the Internet is animations. If you want to create your own animations HTML5Maker is one of the best online services that can help you do that. Whether you’re planning an ad campaign or maybe you just want to attract more viewers on your personal blog, HTML5Maker is the right tool for this job. The tool is very easy to use so you don’t have to have any design skills or know-how. There are many great ready-to-use templates you can choose from. You can create your animations with the help of the Online Animation Editor and the Online Image Editor and then embed them from the cloud into your website or share them as a Template with your friends. Plus, with the Photo Editor and the Transition Effects your creativity will have no boundaries, whether you want to create banners or sliders or any other type of animated multimedia content.
Argentotheme.com offers one of the best Magento templates there are. Argento theme was designed based on the best eCommerce store practices and in accordance with Magento developers’ guidelines, therefore you’re assured to have a highly functional and flexible template when choosing Argento. It’s also SEO optimized and responsive. The template works on any kind of device, even with iOS, Android or BlackBerry because it scales to fit any screen resolution, so you don’t have to create a separate mobile application for your website. One of the best parts is that you won’t have to worry about the installation process, because the team of professional developers will take care of installing your template in less than 24 hours. Since the theme was created with SEO in mind, it will provide your store with improved HTML structure and SEO tags and HTML attributes. Argento also features lots of popular extensions that will make your website more user-friendly.
BugMuncher is a smart tool that will help you receive feedback and bug reports on a live site from your users. If you are fed up with receiving emails from your users that only tell you your website is not working, then you need BugMuncher in your life. Not everybody is familiar with technical information, so it may be difficult for some users to describe their issue. BugMuncher will allow your users to highlight the issue, take a snapshot and send it straight to your mailbox. Along with the snapshot you will also receive essential data about your users; just at a glance you will be able to see what path they took through your website, what operating system they use, what browser they have and even what plugins they have installed. By passing custom information about your users into BugMuncher you’ll be able to use it to recreate the conditions under which the feedback report was sent to you.
Handling big or small events can be stressful and time consuming. Tickera is a WordPress plugin that will help you stay better organized when planning your events. With Tickera you can design and create custom made tickets and sell them directly on your web site. Tickera is very user friendly, it’s incredibly simple to install and has no commission fees. Designing your own ticket couldn’t be easier. You can arrange the elements after your heart’s desire, choose your favorite color palette and even add your own background image for a personal touch. You can even have different kinds of tickets (Standard, Premium, VIP) for the same event. Tickera offers support for integration with a barcode reader, which will improve your check in process significantly. You can check in your attendees on your iPhone or Android to make sure less people are left waiting outside your venue. This WordPress plugin includes many popular payment gateways out there like PayPal, 2Checkout, Stripe, and Paymill.
Studies have shown that recruitment agents spend an estimated 3 seconds looking over the CVs they recieve for a job offering. Due to this fact you always have to make sure that your resume can really stand out from the cround and ensure that your application recieves the attention it truly deserves. A good resume content-wise is not enough, you need an attractive, professional template to go with it in order to be sure that you’ll really get the recruitment manager’s interest. Kukook is the place to go in search for the template you need. Kukook offers a selected gallery of unique resume templates that are sure to fit your needs perfectly. You can choose to go with a modern resume template, a graphic design resume or even an artistic resume template and the best part about all of these is that they can easily be altered in Word as soon as you download them to your computer.
Themify.me offers a great variety of responsive, beautifully designed themes that are also very functional. With the help of features such as the Drag&Drop Builder, custom widgets and shortcodes, you can easily customize your template without the need to have any programming skills. In addition to these great themes, Themify.me has recently developed a new set of tools called the Builder Addons. These tools extend the Themify Builder and can be used with any Themify theme and the Builder Plugin. The Pointers tool helps you attract the attention of the viewer towards certain parts of your website by placing different pointers. The Audio feature allows you to upload and audio file and place it in any column within the Builder. With the ProgressBar module you can display the progress of an ongoing project in an animated way. The A/B image module allows you to compare two images placed side by side.
If you’re on the market for the best Magento templates then you have to check out what the team over at Templates Master is doing. They offer a variety of highly functional Magento templates and extensions that are developed based on improved HTML. Besides, they always pay great attention to SEO. They recently developed a new tool called the Magento Page Cache. This tool was created as a solution for saving time and money. It will make your online store run faster and it will help you pay less for your hosting packages. Page Cache is based on core Magento architecture that supports both static and dynamic blocks and it also has some additional extension settings that allow you to set flexible cache rules. The team provides installation instructions and manual as well as 1 year of free support so you don’t have to worry about installing and managing it, it’s going to be very easy.
FreeIconMaker.com allows you to create an unlimited number of icon sets and customize them just how you want it. Free Icon Maker is incredibly easy to use, it has an intuitive interface and will make you feel like a designer even though you don’t have any designing skills. It’s easy to get started. You can either upload your own vector (SVG) icons or browse through the gallery at Free Icon Maker where you can choose from over 1000 icon sets. Next on, play with colors, gradients, shadows and size until your icon looks ready to be used on your website. When you are done, you can share your icon sets as a template with the other users. Free Icon Maker is completely free both for personal and commercial use and will help you create amazing iOS 8, Flat and 3D icon sets for mobile applications and websites in the blink of an eye.
GoJS is a feature rich JavaScript library that will help you implement interactive diagrams across modern browsers. GoJS supports graphical templates and data-binding of graphical object properties to model data. Only the model, consisting of simple JavaScript objects, needs to be saved and restored. If you need a hand in the beginning to get things started, take a look at more than 90 sample apps that show different diagrams with their full source code. Also, be sure to check out the useful step-by-step instructions on building apps with GoJS diagram and model data which will surely come in handy. GoJS features plenty of highly advanced tools that will make user interactivity more fun: you can pan, scroll, select, delete, undo, drag and drop, copy and paste elements and you can even experiment with GoJS’ extensible tool system for custom operations, event handlers and overviews. GoJS has you covered with all you might want to construct: Tree diagrams and Family trees, Network diagrams, Mind maps, Smart grid diagrams, Social network diagrams and Organization Charts.
XStudio will handle the complete life cycle of your QA/testing projects from beginning to middle to end: products, releases, requirements, specifications, agile projects, tests, test campaigns, test reports and defects. This simple to use test management solution includes an open source (LGPL) SDK offering you the possibility to interface with all types of automated tests. For storing data XStudio uses MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server, which means it can be used from Windows, Linux or Mac. What is more, thanks to its particularly flexible and easy to use Java SDK, XStudio is the only test management tool that can be interfaced with proprietary tests. This cool management solution will also get rid of bugs, slippages and regressions for you. What sets XStudio apart from the crowd, making it ideal for your customer, is that it offers outstanding tools to measure the coverage of your testing, like the traceability matrix, the execution progress and the quality index of your web site.
VirtueMart is a smart Open Source E-Commerce solution for the Joomla! Content Management System. This user-friendly tool will help you manage your store and keep an unlimited number of clients, orders, categories and products. VirtueMart has an intuitive interface and has many built in features that will allow you to start your own store within minutes. You don’t have to worry about templates, design or layouts. By adding plugins, components and modules, everything will look smooth and polished in no time. VirtueMart’s Dynamical Calculator will make sure all your prices are correctly displayed according to time zone and shopper group. It will even calculate discounts and tax, taking into consideration the geographical location of your customers. The inventory tool is also extremely useful. It will let you know when you are running out of a certain product and it will even send alerts to your clients informing them how many products are left. What’s more, VirtueMart is free to download and the latest release has just come out and it is full of first-rate enhancements that will make developers giddy. Checkout their release notes right now and see how much better VirtueMart has become with VM3.
If you need to build beautiful mobile friendly web sites fast and you don’t have programming or coding skills, then MotoCMS is exactly what you need. This powerful website builder will help you create sites from scratch: you will be able to build multilingual sites, you will have an Image Editor and a useful Media Library. Adding new elements to your site is a piece of cake: a subscription button, a search field, a photo gallery or a “buy now” button can be up and running in just a few minutes. With MotoCMS SEO friendly websites are just a click away. MotoCMS offers an intuitive Admin Panel that makes customizing the look of your site easier. MotoCMS for Flash sites provides a set of highly advanced tools and widgets for creating video and image galleries, for embedding video and MP3 player, mobile version creation, custom widgets integration, custom fonts, image editing, and many more.
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If you need to gather feedback from your users or attract new viewers to your web site, the best way to do this is by creating your own custom made poll. Opinion Stage will even help you monetize your poll by displaying commercials or promoting other polls from across the network within it. You can customize your poll by choosing what to display: the number of votes or voters. You can also choose what type of answers you want to receive from your users: multiple choice or head to head. Once your poll is done, you can share it on your Facebook page with just one click. Opinion Stage will keep you posted on your polls’ performance: check how many times they have been shared and even see on what social platforms they are trending. The useful Opinion Stage platform will even let you filter your results by time span, geographical region or gender.
Webflow was created in order to make designing your very own website as easy as possible. With the simple drag and drop editor Webflow provides you can create your website visually and let it worry about generating all the HTML5 and CSS3 code it requires. The best thing about Webflow is that all the code it generates will respect all W3S rules and it will make your site ready to be put straight into production.
Uptime Robot’s motto is ’Downtime Happens. Get Notified!’ and they provide the best service to help you achieve just that. Uptime Robot allows you to define up to 50 monitors for your websites or servers and have them checked every 5 minutes to see if they’re still working properly. In case an issue arises, Uptime Robot will let you know via email, SMS, push messages, RSS, Twitter and more, depending on how you’ve set up your preferences. With Uptime Robot you will be able to monitor HTTP(s), Ping, Port as well as check Keywords. What’s more Uptime Robot has a modern, easy to use dashboard that helps you do this whole setup and view statistics about your uptime, downtime and response times. And there’s more, Uptime Robot offers you a fully documented API that allows you to integrate this tool straight into your apps and benefit from its full potential.
Adverts is the plugin to turn to when you’re looking to either create your very own classifieds website or just add this section to your already existing page. Adverts is easy to install and allows you to set up your own shortcodes in order for you to be able to run your site smoothly. What’s more, Adverts was created with the WordPress development guidelines in mind which means it has clean code, full documentation, can be extended with hooks and filters and is compatible with any properly coded WordPress theme. Adverts has a modular build that will offer you the option to add or remove extra features as you see fit, all the while benefiting from its core functionality. In addition to all of this the team behind Adverts really cares about offering customer support. Therefore were you to encounter any issues while using their plugin, feel free to email them with your problem and you’re guaranteed to receive a response within 24h.
Having a website for your business is vital nowadays and it can’t be just any website, you have to make sure that it is both responsive and content driven. CoffeeCup is the tool to help you achieve just that. Using this tool you will have access to a drag and drop editor that will help you define your website’s layout as well as all the design elements it contains. What’s more, you’ll also have access to a first rate form builder and a website analysis tool.
If you are ready to step up your game and invest in a reliable web hosting solution but you don’t know what to choose, then DailyHosting.net will provide you all the information you may need and dozens of examples to make things even easier for you. Daily Hosting offers several web hosting guides explaining the concepts of web hosting for those who are not familiar with them yet. These guides are completely free of charge and they are very helpful. The reviews on Daily Hosting are also extremely useful since they show you exactly what hosting solution suits every type of sites. Before committing to a web hosting solution you should bear in mind several important factors. Always take into consideration how much traffic your site brings in daily and try to think ahead: will your traffic volumes decrease or increase in the near future? Most importantly, set yourself a budget and make sure you don’t exceed it.