Staging Module Significance in Kentico

So you are all set with the content updates for the web page. Great! But are you sure on how the content will be appearing live? That’s where the staging module will come into the picture. Staging module allows you to easily transfer changes made to pages or objects in a Kentico instance on one server to a different instance on another server. You can also perform complete synchronization of all pages and objects. All connected instances must use the same version of Kentico. Staging is particularly useful if you need to synchronize multiple environments during development, for example:

Development  > Testing/Staging  >  Live (production)

WHAT IS CONTENT STAGING

Content staging is the practice of deploying changes to one or more servers outside of the development environment, such as content review, quality assurance, security validation or performance testing, before deploying to production. Despite the name, content staging is not just about staging visible content.

Why stage content? Organizations have many reasons for wanting to stage changes prior to deploying to production:

• Does the content adhere to organizational compliance policies and standards?
• Is the content grammatically correct?
• Have accessibility requirements been taken into account?
• Has a custom component/code been tested?
• Does a new template or layout adhere to organizational or departmental design guidelines?
• Does the content duplicate existing content?

KEY ADVANTAGES OF STAGING MODULE

● Review All Content Before It Gets Published

The Staging module synchronizes content from your authoring environment to the live server. You can review all changes made to the site on your local server before showing them to the visitors.

● Separate Authoring and Live Environments

Content staging not only adds extra approval and QA steps to your publishing process, but it also separates the authoring and lives environment. It means you can disable the administration interface on the live site and make all changes on your local server to increase security.

Having an internal authoring server also improves the user experience for your content administrators as they access their internal server, instead of making changes on the live server.

● Publish Content to Geographically Distant Servers

Since you can synchronize content to multiple servers at the same time, you can run multiple geographically distant Kentico CMS servers around the world and keep their content synchronized with your authoring server. It’s useful when you need to run servers in Europe, North America, Australia, and China at the same time while providing site visitors with a highly responsive website.

● Deploy New Templates and Other Code Across Servers

As with content, you can also synchronize development objects, such as page templates, CSS stylesheets, transformations, and others, across servers. This makes incremental updates of the website possible with only a few clicks.

References:

https://docs.kentico.com/k9/deploying-websites/content-staging

https://www.kentico.com/product/all-features/development/staging-and-synchronization

How Magento Makes you Festival Ready

The last quarter is undeniably the busiest season of the year for every e-commerce retailer as the beginning of festival sales opens the channel for growth and surplus sales to ramp up revenues and build up your customer base. Letting your website exist as it is, hoping that your e-commerce site gets all the needed attention by itself will not allow you to be a part of the festival league. Having a pre-planned and tested strategy is the only fool-proof method that can tide you through the season with customers having seamless and hassle-free shopping experience to choose you over your competitors and return back for more without any second thoughts.

After all, the first impression is indeed the best impression. According to Statista and the National Retail Federation, the holiday season accounts for around 20% of the retail industry’s annual sales and can account for as much as 30% of an individual retailer’s total sales. The shopping days beginning from Black Friday through Christmas pulls in almost 50-100% more revenues than any other shopping periods during the normal course of the year. E-commerce retailers can enhance their website’s presence and visibility by getting into the following practices for ramping up their sales this season:

• Integrating the rating module using Magento’s development tools can aid with building a trust factor with the customers by enabling them to view the previous reviews. Trusting a 100% online portal depends purely on the feedback of its regular users.
• Hiring a Magento developer to take care of all your social media promotions. Today world is highly driven by the opinions and promotions on social media. Cashing in on this platform to regulate one’s business requires proper integration of sources and captivating marketing.
• Keeping the e-commerce site’s social pages buzzing with the season’s celebrations by promoting contests, offering freebies, etc, will definitely drive the traffic of the website and definitely regulate sales if the expectations of the customers are visually appealing and fairly priced.
• Customizing using Magento themes and installing google analytics into the e-commerce platform will the business to thrive by building upon sales via promotion of these commonly sought after products which are advertised extensively through the internet.
• Build the brand by displaying all laurels won by the e-commerce platform. This helps the customer to know that your e-commerce platform is also free from scams and establish yourself as a genuine customer portal.
• Keep the promotional offers interesting. One size does not fit all, and there should be good incentives that will drive your customer for more purchases rather than being bored with just a few promotional offers on repeat. Getting creative and enabling these promotions through Magento’s tools will prove effective.
• Integrating SMS API will enable text promotion which will be driving factors for sales in last-minute shoppers looking for sales at the closing. Last minute offers are always tempting to the customer and this method of promotion is the fastest since most of the population is hooked to the phone.
• Having an in-house Magento developer will be beneficial, especially during the festive season, because the developer will be able to constantly update and keep track of the website’s progress for zero-downtime sales.

While these pointers are sales boosters, some of the other preparatory steps to take note of to boost the holiday performance include; theme modifications, working payment portals, responsive customer service team, upgraded server capacity, device compatibility for apps, customization offers portal, including accurate product descriptions with product videos, and a interactive homepage with top brand lists based on customer trends.