What is the Best Content Management System for Building Websites?

image of WordPress Joomla Drupal logos, Which content management system?Whether you are developing a standard blog, corporate website, e-commerce store or just making your presence known on the Web, the days of hand-coding HTML-based pages and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have passed. To setup a website, you will need to purchase a domain name, set up web hosting and install a content management system (CMS) to the server. Within minutes, you can have a simple website that can display your content. Of course, your new website can be used a number of ways from displaying images, to your latest insights on your special niche, to operating a technical support page or advertising services. Due to their flexibility at being able to manage all of these tasks, the use of CMS platforms will only get bigger.

There are over 1200 content management systems out there. Three of the biggest CMS platforms for building websites are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal. We’ll also take a look at Magento, an e-commerce CMS. These CMS offer the versatility needed to appeal to a range of requirements. The biggest advantage of these four CMS platforms is their ease of use. A newcomer to creating pages can have a basic website created in only a few minutes. Continue reading

5 Questions for a More Effective Website

When you begin planning your new website, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself to be sure that your website truly reflects your brand image and is getting the job done.  Unfortunately, when it comes time to begin the process this doesn’t always happen.  Often, an organization will rush through the process without asking the proper questions only doing the minimum of the steps below Continue reading

How to Submit Your Ecommerce Products to Google Merchant Center

What is Google Product Search?

Google Merchant CenterTaken from the Google Product Merchant Center Help Page:

“Google Merchant Center is a tool which helps you upload your product listings to be used for Google Product Search, Google Product Ads, and Google Commerce Search.”

Google Product Search allows shoppers to quickly and easily find your product listings on Google. As a seller, Google Product Search offers you the following advantages:

  • Attract more potential buyers. Google Product Search helps you to reach shoppers while they are searching for items to buy on Google.
  • Submit your product listings for free. Google Product Search is a free service to sellers.
  • Control your product information. With Google Product Search, you can maintain the accuracy and freshness of your product information, so your customers find the relevant, current items they’re looking for. Continue reading

Why E-Commerce Stores Have to Work Harder in the Search Engines

If you have an E-commerce store, or were thinking about creating one at some point, you should know that if you are planning on using internet marketing services to boost your online sales, then you should be aware that you have to put in a little more work with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts than a non E-commerceE-commerce shopping carts and internet marketing website. This requires an E-commerce SEO focus, which takes a little more effort than SEO for other types of websites because online shopping carts come into the mix in the search engine result pages. Sometimes SEO for E-commerce isn’t the only form of internet marketing that has to be used in order to get people to buy your products online. You may have to use pay per click advertising, or a combination of each to see results.

Each of the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, Bing,  have merchant centers where people with e-commerce stores can add their product feed to each. Google and Bing are free, whereas Yahoo requires a small monthly fee to manage shopping cart information. Continue reading