'Net Features : 2012

E-Commerce’s 2012 Shake-Up

Allison Howen — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 20:30:00 GMT

As merchants gather their bearings from 2012’s busiest shopping season, they must also get prepared for the new trends, technologies and channels that will undoubtedly impact their digital stores in 2013.

In 2012, for example, merchants not only had to revamp their Facebook profiles due to the Timeline layout, but many also built a social presence on emerging networks like Google+ and Pinterest. Moreover, mobile, localization and targeting consumers based on their behaviors were also among 2012's top e-commerce trends. Discover more about these topics and other important events that impacted e-commerce this year below:

January – Social Advertising Gains Momentum

At the very beginning of 2012, a comScore study revealed that social networking sites reach 82 percent of the world’s online population, which means that these sites have become more than just a way to communicate with customers. In fact, the study named Facebook as the largest publisher of U.S. display ad impressions. This is most likely because Facebook advertising is not only easy to use, but also affordable for all sizes of businesses.

February – Commerce Gets Personal

Data made a huge impact in 2012 and is expected to continue gaining momentum in 2013. This is because merchants can use customer data to better target and segment consumers. For example, Hats in the Belfry's e-commerce site leveraged behavioral commerce platform Steelhouse to target customers browsing on their site in real time, and saw average order values increase 95 percent. Additionally, email solutions provider Listrak also launched a Post Purchase Solution, which helps merchants create behavioral targeted email campaigns based on customer purchase history data.

March – Facebook Timeline Launches

Although most of the general public was not thrilled about Facebook’s Timeline design, the change proved fruitful for businesses. In fact, the new layout increased fan engagement by an average of 46 percent, according to Simply Measured. The new design required Business Pages to add a cover photo to their profile, as well as gave Page managers the options of customizing their app section, pinning posts and highlighting content.

April – Magento Merchants Go Mobile

The Imagine eCommerce Conference brought a host of new updates to Magento merchants that focused on improving the mobile shopping experience. One of the biggest updates was the integration of HTML5 into Magento Mobile, which includes gesture-based controls, multi-touch and image scaling, as well as device-specific audio and video capabilities. Other features, such as improved search functionality and the ability for consumers to drag and drop products into the shopping cart, also help merchants build a user-friendly mobile shopping experience.

May – Google+ Goes Local

Google not only made waves in 2012 by launching a massive redesign of Google+ in April, but by also integrating local features into the social network the following month. The local update allows users to discover information about nearby places, including scores and reviews from Zagat. Furthermore, the update makes is easier for businesses on Google+ to gain additional visibility on the Web.

June – Google Launches Product Listing Ads

In 2012, Google was busy not only revamping its social network but also dabbling in the commerce industry. In fact, the search engine giant launched a beta version of Google Shopping, which allows merchants to pay to list products within the search engine results pages. These Product Listing Ads (PLA) include a photo and description of an item and are only featured when someone conducts a specific product-related search.

July – Pinterest Proves its Profitability

Pinterest has remained controversial in regards to how much it actually influences consumers and their purchasing decisions, however, a study from Shareaholic shows that Pinterest directs more referral traffic than Twitter, Google, StumbleUpon and Bing. This proves that merchants can gain traffic by maintaining a presence and promoting their products on this visually driven social network. Moreover, Pinterest proved its commitment to merchants in late November, when it finally launched verified Business Pages.

August – Consumers Ask for Social Login

Social login was a hot topic in 2012 because many consumers suffer from Password Fatigue, meaning they have too many passwords to remember daily. Password Fatigue can result in consumers choosing to not become a member of a site because of the simple fact that they will need to remember an additional username and password. In fact, a Janrain and Harris Interactive study revealed that 38 percent of respondents would rather undertake household chores than have to create another online identity. Luckily, merchants can integrate social login functionality, which enables consumers to login with existing social profile credentials, into their sites from providers like Janrain, AddThis or Gigya.

September – Facebook Offers Opens to Everyone

Facebook took aim at the daily deals industry earlier this year with the test launch of Facebook Offers, which the world’s largest social network made available to all Facebook Pages in September. This feature enables merchants to create and promote a limited-time sale that fans can redeem online or at brick-and-mortar stores. It is important to note that merchants have the ability to customize their Offers with details like headlines, images and bar codes.

October – eBay's Redesign is Picture Perfect

One of the Web’s most popular marketplaces, eBay, launched a robust redesign along with a few other updates to help improve user-engagement metrics on the site. The most noticeable update was the eBay Feed, which provides users with a personalized page of items displayed in a Pinterest-style layout of image tiles. Additionally, the company also launched a new daily deal section, called Lifestyle Deal, which offers service-based deals to customers.

November – Merchants Get Found with Amazon Business Pages

The ’Net’s largest retailer unveiled Amazon Pages last month, which is a self-serve, brand-specific Web page at Amazon.com that functions as a custom landing page. This service could prove to be very profitable for merchants, because it promotes their products to millions of Amazon viewers and buyers.

December – Facebook Jumps into Local Search

Facebook updated its “Nearby” feature right before Christmas, which makes it easier for iOS and Android users to discover places while on the go. This feature should prove to be very valuable to merchants because it can help them gain visibility and increase foot traffic in local brick-and-mortar locations.

The 25 Best WordPress Plugins Ever

Michael Garrity — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:40:00 GMT

The year is coming to a close, and if 2012 has taught us anything, it’s that WordPress is still the most widely used free, open source content management system (CMS) out there.

While the extensive adoption of the platform obviously benefits users, as it means there are going to be more developers creating plugins and designing themes that WordPress users can employ to spruce up their blogs or websites (in both appearance and functionality), it also presents a bit of a nagging problem. The issue is that there are so many options to select from, which makes it very difficult to differentiate the good from the bad.

Luckily for you, Website Magazine editors recently compiled a list of the 25 best WordPress plugins for websites of all shapes and sizes, just in time for the new year. However, if there's a plugin we may have missed, or you disagree with a selection, feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Jetpack
If you want to get your hands on one of the best WordPress plugins around, why wouldn’t you want one developed by the creators of the platform? Well, Jetpack is just that, a plugin that is meant to expand the capabilities of your site by harnessing the cloud power of WordPress.com. There are a number of great features you can utilize, including displaying site analytics, creating photo galleries and even spell checking your copy, among many others.

Disqus
Don’t let the punny title fool you, Disqus is one of the best comment systems available. The tool allows users to add comment functionality to their site/pages, giving visitors an opportunity to engage with the content (and the brand). Those interested in building a community of users on their sites should get Disqus ASAP.

Social Toolbar
Social media has become a necessity for most Web professionals, so it’s more likely than not that you’re on at least one (and probably more) social networks. Why not show off your social prowess with Social Toolbar, a plugin that places a toolbar at the bottom of your blog/site to display links to all of your social network profiles. But that’s not all it does; additional features including sharing buttons, a full display of your latest tweets and more.

WP Google Fonts
A big part of having a sleek design for your blog or website means utilizing cool, appropriate fonts that really invoke the spirit of your brand. Unfortunately, most generic font packs are limited in what they offer. That’s why you should download WP Google Fonts, which allows users to easily incorporate a slew of new fonts from the Google Font Directory into your WordPress theme.

WPtouch
Mobile is hot, and any successful Web strategy must include a mobile-optimized site. For WordPress users, the fastest and simplest way to accomplish this is by using the WPtouch plugin, which will serve up mobile visitors a different theme. This comes complete with a new device-optimized and user-friendly version of your content.

Gravity Forms
One of the most important aspects of working on the Web is gathering consumer data to use in the future, and the best way to go about doing that is by using forms. The Gravity Forms plugin is able to create any kind of form you may need in a flash, regardless of its complexity. This can include email signup forms or extensive applications.

WordPress SEO
Look, even with all of this social media hullabaloo, SEO is still one of the most important practices that a site owner can conduct to increase his or her audience and generate more revenue. WordPress SEO from Yoast is one of the better plugins for search engine optimization, featuring XML sitemaps, customizable title and meta description options, RSS optimization and social media optimization – and that’s just for starters!

W3 Total Cache
Want to make your WordPress site run up to 10 times faster? Check out W3 Total Cache, a powerful plugin that caches every single element of your site, so readers can read your post in no time. Use this plugin to reduce download times and provide transparent CDN integration.

NextGEN Gallery
Everyone loves images, and the more you can (appropriately) add to your site or blog, the more likely you are to drive traffic and interest users. So why not add this fully integrated image gallery plugin? It is absolutely chock-full of features, which offer a lot of flexibility in creating gallery content, such as the ability to add watermarks to images, create slideshows, use different display themes and organize pictures into albums, among many others.

Digg Digg
As aforementioned, social media plays a big role in Web success these days, and accruing Likes or +1s (or other social seals of approval) on your content is a great way to get it (and your brand) noticed. Use the Digg Digg plugin to integrate the most popular social buttons into your WordPress site, which can be configured to display in various locations.

All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack is the most comprehensive search engine optimization plugin available for WordPress users and remains one of the platforms most downloaded plugins ever for a good reason. It’s especially useful for new users or those who aren’t terribly familiar with coding. In includes Google Analytics support, as well as other features like custom post types, canonical URLs, automatically generated meta tags and much more.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator for WordPress
Create a fully customizable sitemap for your WordPress website with this plugin from Dagon Design, which gives users multilevel categories, pages and permalinks support. You’ll be able to choose which links you want to display, the order their shown in, comment counts and post dates to make your site more searchable for, uh, search engines.

WP e-Commerce
This is one of the most popular and easy-to-use e-commerce platforms available for WordPress sites. WP e-Commerce offers a 100 percent customizable experience with easily modified templates, in addition to community support, integration with multiple payment gateways (including PayPal, Authorize.net and Google Checkout), various marketing and SEO features, checkout capabilities with SSL security and the ability to manage orders and shipping from within the plugin. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. To say this plugin is “feature rich” is a massive understatement.

Sociable
Make your content more social with Sociable, which will automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and RSS feeds.

Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics is the widely adopted, fully featured analytics platform from one of the Web’s leading companies, so it makes sense that it would eventually be turned into a plugin for WordPress users. With this plugin, you can easily track your WordPress site or blog and use a lot of fancy custom variables to track the metadata on your pages, such as author, single or multiple categories, post type, publication year, tags and more.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
Have a bunch of different RSS subscribers that you don’t know how to manage? Never fear! Just use FeedBurner FeedSmith to detect all of the possible methods through which users can access your original WordPress RSS feeds, and then redirect them back to your FeedBurner FeedSmith feed to track every single subscriber.

Akismet
If building a community is an important part of your Web strategy, you no doubt allow your visitors to comment on and discuss your content. Unfortunately, as your traffic increases, so will the amount of comment and trackback spam you receive. Luckily, this popular plugin from Automattic checks comments and trackbacks against the Akismet Web service, and if they’re found to be spam, they’ll automatically be moved into your WordPress installation’s spam folder. You’ll never have to get your hands dirty.

Google XML Sitemaps
Google just does it all, doesn’t it? With this plugin, you can generate an XML sitemap that will help search engines – and not just Google, but Bing, Yahoo and others – better index your WordPress website, which means crawlers can see all of your site and retrieve data from it much more quickly and efficiently.

WP-DBManager
You’re probably well aware of the delicate nature of working with digital content, likely because some mishap or other in the past has led you to lose a substantial amount of work before you were able to back it up. Don’t let that happen with your website or blog; instead, download the WP-DPManager plugin that allows you to optimize, repair, backup and restore your database. You can also delete backed up content, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. WP-DPManager even supports automated backups, optimization and repairs.

Contact Form 7
This simple, yet flexible contact form plugin allows users to manage multiple contact forms. Also, they can customize their forms and mail content by using some simple markup. Contact Form 7 also supports various security enhancements, including Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering.

Editorial Calendar
Managing a blog can be a hassle, but never again with the Editorial Calendar plugin that lets users see all of their scheduled posts and when they’ll be posted and offers drag-and-drop functionality to change post dates, draft management, quick edits of post titles, content and times and the ability to manage posts from multiple authors.

All in One Favicon
Website owners and bloggers can easily add a favicon (the small icons next to the URL in the address bar, the page name in a browser tab and/or the page’s name in a bookmark list) to their websites and WordPress admin pages. The All in One Favicon plugin offers complete upload functionality and supports all three favicon types, ico, .png and .gif, which can even be animated.

WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the best e-commerce platforms for WordPress users, allowing users to turn their websites into fully functional, highly customizable online stores that deliver enterprise-level quality and feature. This includes a PayPal standard gateway, Mijireh checkout, free and flat rate shipping functionality, Google Analytics and international and local shipping and local pickup, among many others.

ShareThis
This social media plugin enables WordPress users to seamlessly allow visitors to share the site or blog’s content on up to 120 different social channels, including email, Facebok, Twitter, Google+ and more. With ShareThis, users can do more to engage their audiences and increase traffic. Plus, the plugin features customization functionality that means it can be seamlessly integrated into a user’s site.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
YARPP may be just "another related posts plugin," but its also the best. It provides a site or blog’s visitors with a list of posts and/or pages that are related to the entry they’re currently reading. Site owners can use this plugin to introduce their readers to other interesting, relevant content on their site.

'Net Features : 2012

E-Commerce’s 2012 Shake-Up

Top Ecommerce Posts of 2012

Top E-Commerce Related Articles Of 2012 at Website Magazine

The 25 Best WordPress Plugins Ever