Summer Is In Full Swing

School is out, kids are out, summer projects and summer trips have begun. Is your website full of helpful ideas? We are past the spring cleaning phase and now onto the summer building phase.  Put your best foot forward by offering your customers helpful tips, guidelines and products to make their summer easier, more fun, or just plain more enjoyable.  If you sell clothing, highlight your hot trends.  If you sell outdoors gear, suggest places to go, things to see, and products to use.  If you sell jewelry, highlight this seasons trends. Nearly all online stores have something that they can offer their customers for the summer season.

If you have an opt-in email list for your customers, now is the time to send out those quarterly newsletters.

5 Easily-Overlooked Final To-Do's For A Website

These 5 easily overlooked final to-dos for a website are things that only take a few moments, but will make a noticeable difference for you and your customers.

• Check Browser Compatibility. Often times you create, add, and make changes to your website using the same browser that you use for your regular web search, shopping, etc. However, just because it is your go-to browser doesn't mean that it is your customers' go-to browser.  You will want to check your website in all the major browsers to make sure that it looks and works correctly in all of them. The main ones I check when I am creating a website are FireFox, Chrome, Opera and Safari (all of those can be on Mac and PC), as well as Internet Explorer on a PC.  If you really want to over-achieve, you should also check your website on a few different tablets and mobile devices.
   
• Enable Google Analytics. This one is purely for you as a merchant.  Google has many tools that merchants can use to track visitors, sales, and to submit your website to search engines or to clean up your code.  Google Analytics along with Google Sitemap are two of my favorites.
  http://www.google.com/analytics/
   
• Add a Favicon. When you go to a website, and on the tab of your browser there is a tiny little square logo, that is a favicon.  It is a nice finishing touch that customers will notice when they come to your website.
  http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Favicon
   
• Validate Your HTML and Speed Check Your Site. I talk about these two a lot.  The two sites below allow you to enter the URL for a page on your website, and they will check for errors and speed, and will tell you how to clean up your code so your page is fast and smooth.
  https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
  http://validator.w3.org/
   
• Keyword Target Your Meta Tags. Each one of your store pages should have a title tag, meta keyword tag and meta description tag that is specific to that page.  Don't include words that are not found on the page, even if they are found on the rest of your website.  Do highlight your top keywords in the meta and title tags, as well as heading tags, strong tags, and anchors.

Are You Summer Ready?

Summer is just around the corner and the excitement for the warm weather and fresh season changes is growing.  Now is the time to help your customers with their summer projects and vacations.  Build a newsletter to send out to your customers with discounts, or helpful tips for this new season.

If you do not currently ask customers to opt into an email checklist when they checkout in your store, now is the time to turn that on.  If you have a ShopSite store, simply go to Commerce Setup > Order System > Checkout, and check the checkbox to add an email opt-in to your checkout.  This will help you gather a list of customers to send email blasts to on occasion.