Cloudflare is by far the most popular service for this, and their free plan is very generous so can be utilised very cost effectively.

Their operation is slightly different to a regular CDN, in that they act as a proxy for the main site domain. This means the cached files are available on your main domain name, e.g www.domain.com rather than on a subdomain, such as cdn.domain.com. This also means that if for any reason your site goes offline, Cloudflare can take over and show a cached version of your site to anybody that visits during your downtime.

One slight issue we discovered is that because Cloudflare operates on your main domain, it can be tricky to tell if it is actually working! Any images will still have the same URL as they did before you started using it.

Using your browser inspector, usually under the ‘Network’ tab, you can take a look at each of your file’s headers and look for the header item ‘cf-cache-status’. However, this can be time consuming and somewhat fiddly.

Thankfully, we have discovered a very handy tool created by Jay Holtslander at https://cf-cache-status.net that allows you to enter a file URL and will instantly tell you if Cloudflare is serving the cached version.

The post Is Cloudflare caching my site? appeared first on q internet.

Prominently displaying the pages that make a website a legitimate business – shopping cart, privacy policy and other ecommerce necessities – on the homepage is one way to ease any concerns. Also, either maintaining a page dedicated to positive reviews from customers or linking to other people’s reviews – both positive and negative – will help browsers become buyers.

Don’t display overly negative reviews, but an older one that was used to make progress will make customers feel good about who they’re shopping with. Another way to do that is to put contact information for a company all over the website. If consumers know who they’re buying from, then the whole process will be smoother.

For the people still hesitant to shop online, it’s up to the ecommerce company to bring them over at this point. There aren’t many people out there, though, who will not spend any money online; Forrester Research reported that ecommerce will be a GBP170 billion per year business by 2014.

The post Gaining trust with your online shop appeared first on q internet.

Some listings were impressive; they had plenty of high quality images of the product combined with well-written descriptions. Others, however, looked less than professional. Poorly lit or blurred images, mis-spelt or factually inaccurate product descriptions all amounted to shoddy presentation of the product.

When you list a product on your web site from Q Internet, the following may seem like no-brainers but you may like to bear in mind:

The product description

1. Is the description factually accurate and correctly spelt? It can be disconcerting to potential buyers to read a product listing littered with grammatical, factual and/or spelling errors. Confidence in a product or seller can easily be dented by typos and inaccuracies, so if you’re unsure use a spell checker
2. Is the text of a reasonable size for viewers to read? If a viewer can’t easily read your description they will likely use this as an excuse to move on to another site
3. Does the product’s title accurately reflect the nature of the goods? For example, are you advertising a “Dunlop Golf Umbrella” or a “Dunlope Golf Brolly”? This is a critical stage of the product listing process for shop owners wishing to make use of Google Shopping! Remember the old rule…garbage in = garbage out.

Image size and clarity

1. Does the image display the product in its best light? If you are unable to take a decent photo can you obtain stock images from the manufacturer? Manufacturers are often happy to offer access to high resolution images of their products for their dealers to use
2. Is the image of a reasonable size and clarity so visitors can see it? Images can at times be too large for the screen and, when selected by the user, go off the end of the page! As a rule of thumb, images of 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high is a sensible size for product images
3. Do you have permission to use the image? Or have you “borrowed” it from another online store? We shall leave the sermon on the use of copyrighted images for another day…

If you are competing with a major store for the customer’s business, how does the major store display and describe the same product you are selling? There is no reason why your listing shouldn’t look as good and offer as much information as that of the major store.

Make use of the tools your site offers you in terms of formatting text. A nicely formatted product description contributes to the overall listing.

The same principle can be applied to use of your blog. Blogging allows the site owner to generate their own content e.g. product reviews, news, how to find us etc. Well presented articles speak volumes about a company, but not nearly as much as bad ones.

The post Words and pictures – promoting your products and your business appeared first on q internet.

The power of a successful blog is well documented and the promise of more traffic and brand engagement draws in countless webmasters every year.

Content is king

What you say, how much you say and how you say it should all be constructed with your target audience in mind. The two big questions to ask are – Why should anyone read the blog? and Why would they want to come back and read it again? Corporate press releases or staff hires are fine in moderation, but not if that is all the blog is about, people simply won’t read it. To gain traction with a reader a blog post has to be informative, interesting, amusing, original or shocking. Committing yourself to this long term takes a lot of time and effort. If you approach the blog something to be done when you get a spare minute, it will fail.

On the flip side, It is just as easy to fall in to the trap of sacrificing quality for quantity under the misconception the more posts published the better, regardless of what they say. Jakob Neilson’s site www.useit.com has a relatively small number of articles published each month but each of them brings some useful insight in to usability for webmasters to apply and as result is a respected source of information. Popular topics to try include top X lists, Interviews with known industry figures site owners, competitions, How to… guides, free resources and biting industry commentary.

Gaining and keeping your readers

Writing a blog no one is reading is a depressing affair. You spend hours writing an insightful article that you are genuinely proud of and your analytics shows a big fat zero for page views. If your blog is part of a larger site, prominently linking to the blog from the home page will deliver instant results and you should also consider adding a feed to the home page to show the latest posts. If you send out newsletters, link to stories from your blog to help drive traffic and avoid duplicating work. If you have a standalone blog, attempt to capture your reader’s contact details through any means at your disposal e.g. user registration, competitions, twitter followers etc. and then use this data to send alerts or monthly emails/ newsletters listing your blog’s new posts to proactively pull in traffic.

Rather than attempting to build your own community from scratch consider engaging with existing communities, be it forums, niche networks or leaving post comments on popular blogs. If you are confident in your writing skills and knowledge, approaching sites to write for them is a great way to gain exposure, position yourself as an expert and get a high quality link to your site. For example, if your blog was about search engine marketing www.searchengineland.com would be a logical site to approach with an idea.

When you get started out it is vital you treat every reader like gold dust replying to every comment they leave, and just as importantly, replying as yourself and not ‘The Website’. Personalisation shows your readers the human side of your blog and using author photos, comments from other team members, and your name rather than a generic name (e.g. Admin) encourages further engagement with you personally rather than a faceless website. www.seomoz.org is a great example of using personalisation to create a community based around their blog.

The post Blogging – Whats the point? appeared first on q internet.