Buried Treasure Fossil achieves 2X revenues by focusing on Magento store Maintenance

“Having the site page and product opening performance restored is great news. Thanks to Sigma and the team. I received 4 orders in the past 4 hours.”

– Gary Greaser
Owner, BTF

Buried Treasure Fossil is the place for new and seasoned fossil collectors, providing a wide range of incredible fossils to choose from. As a purely online business, BTF strategy is to offer great fossils at great prices, and super service for customers across the USA. The relatively young company is owned by Gary Greaser, an avid enthusiast, and collector of the fossils. Having realized that migrating to Magento Opensource from Magento 1.7 could enable him to boost his sales while delivering an excellent customer experience, Gary chose Sigma to migrate their site to Magento Opensource which was completed and went live in 4 months.

The team worked hard to ensure that all features and functionally made it easier for customers to navigate through the site. Some of the enhancements like Featured Category on the homepage and filtration of the fossils by species enabled customers to find what they need in half the time that was required earlier. By using landing pages for product categories, customers could see all relevant information about a specific fossil on the product page, and add it directly to their cart.

Present Business Need

Launching an e-commerce site takes a lot of work, and so does effectively supporting, maintaining, and evolving it. Proactive maintenance, site updates and applying security patches are a critical part of managing an e-commerce site.

As with many companies, Buried Treasure Fossil does not have the in-house tech team to keep a modern e-commerce site running effectively and securely while the business is growing. To bridge this gap, Sigma is responsible for keeping their site running optimally – both from a technology and a marketing perspective.

Support and Maintenance

The team defines and prioritizes the site updates, functional improvements, patches and site issues when they arise. For every task, we have a turn around time of 4 to 8 hrs. We track these changes and issues within our issue tracking tool – JIRA, assign a unique tracking number to each task and get them done. We have regular status calls and generate weekly reports in order to track the progress of all support issues and to ensure the process is being followed and most importantly, expectations are being met.

Sigma’s client support activities include a combination of the following activities:

• Ongoing website maintenance
• Troubleshooting for technical issues
• Magento training to clients hold of their Magento store
• Performance improvement
• Website speed optimization
• Feature up gradation and installations
• Security patch updates
• Suggestions and solutions for improved search engine ranking
• Solution to the server or hosting related problems
• Daily status reports and weekly progress reports

Sigma Magento Experts are always ready for any kind of Magento support and maintenance. We work as the client’s go-to experts and help them with up-gradation of software and improved functionality with new and updated features in the E-commerce website.

Based on customer requirements and hourly support they need, we offer customized Magento maintenance and support monthly packages. We discuss clients’ requirements and agree with them for a particular number of hours per month and make a schedule as per their suitability to catch up during business hours through telephonic, email, chat, video chat and face to face support.

Ecommerce Web Design Trends for 2018

An e-commerce business is not successful for just the products or services it sells or how well it markets them, but by the way, it designs its websites for user’s ease of access, functionality, and features. When you are starting out as an e-commerce business or one that is already set up shop in the World Wide Web, then you need to remember that you are right away competing with the well-established businesses that preceded you. You cannot just be famous by being the new kid on the block, the first things that users of your website will look for are how you have aesthetically designed it, how you connect with them, and ultimately how your e-commerce website appeals to them. To drive that appeal to the user, you need to ensure that your website is not simply a page with tools, but has the required administrative features that are embedded naturally into your business process. Customers enjoy innovation and creativity, and these are driving factors that can increase their affluence towards your business. Some of the top trends that are key to driving customer satisfaction and influencing sales are:

Guided selling

There is the no bigger joy for a customer than a website that has an interactive website that perks up the interest and picks out the right list of items they are looking for based on their selected preference. Guided selling makes it all the more interesting as it is more than a filter option and a shorter more attractive form of a form where a customer is asked to choose and navigate through the website with ease. A good example of guided selling is found on Victoria’s secret page for selecting a sports bra.

Micro-interactions

The best examples of micro-interactions are the like button that pops up when clicked on in Facebook, and the payment success symbol that opens up when your payment has fallen through on the modern day payment portals. Having plenty of apt micro interaction features in an e-commerce website definitely encourages the user to be more interactive and actively participate in adding items to a shopping cart, subscribe to a service, or provide feedback. According to the author Dan Saffer, Microinteractions, there are four main parts to a micro interaction:

• A trigger that initiates or begins the micro-interaction.
• Rules that define or determine what happens in the interaction.
• Feedback communicates what is happening or what just happened.
• Loops and modes which govern, if you will, the content.

Using product pages as landing pages

The reason Apple Store’s landing page designs are mystically beautiful is that its web pages are designed with simple yet catchy descriptions to products, enhanced levels of photography, and the compelling placement of the call to action. Websites today are more focused on linking the landing pages to the product sale page as they have become an essential element of CRO. The best way to capture a customer’s attention is to set up cluster free landing pages that have relevant and concise content on a clean landing page design with an inviting and intriguing call to action feature. There is no better tool to drive sales when you can give the customer a mystical experience of shopping online.

Full-screen Search, Forms

Modals that are controlled typically with a script and overlaid as a cover over the page’s elements has been an effective user interface medium for quite some time. The only change that has modified the trend is that these models are now full-screen so that both the mobile and computer web design are similar for the search and forms features, and this seemingly captures the full attention of the user.

Material design and Card UI layouts

These two features are forming the face of most e-commerce web design and development is due to the seamless and engaging user experience that this layout provides. One of the best ways to improve brand recall and awareness is by adapting material designs that have a smooth and easy to access grid layout with customized transitions, shadow effects, and animations. More importantly, the material design is integral to increasing store level activity and engaging customers efficiently. Card UI layout is a sub-feature of material design and is the success factor of Pinterest’s appeal to visitors. The three key factors that drive the success of Card UI layouts are readability, responsive web design, and development to create the perfect fit for social media dominant store layouts.

When you build your web design to improve user experience, the end result is better site visits and a drive in overall sales. The change of a user to an active buyer depends on how far you can engage them onto your site and improve brand recall.

Key Tools used in SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is highly dependent on the employment of an effective strategy to ensure that a businesses’ website is crawled on and ranked for by search engines in order to enable maximum visibility to users and potential clientele. One of the primary requirements of SEO success is to employ effective tools that are updated in real time because otherwise, not only the tool, the effect of the business website starts to tend towards a negative spiral.

Some of the best tools that have proven to be assets are:

1) Research and analytics tools: The main purpose of these tools is to provide keyword ranking and content alerts. Ahrefs and SEMrush are tools that have been rocking the SEO strata because they

• Provide the most effective keyword research in the market
• Provide comparative competitive intelligence
• Analyze and strategize both traffic and content
• Identify new keyword opportunities
• Track both past and current rankings
• Enables effective traffic management
• Suggest available advertising opportunities
• Help create an effective guest blogging strategy
• Handle timely panda updates, and
• Perform real-time backlink analysis. The Google Keyword Planner is an operative keyword research tool that exclusively generates daily search volumes and price estimates.

2) Monitoring tools: Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an effective analysis tool equipped to analyze several on-site elements, such as page titles, meta descriptions, URL structure, response codes, images, etc. This tool is a must-have for any web designer/marketer as it helps to not only optimize a website but also boost its performance in search result pages. Google page speed insights is another handy tool which evaluates a businesses’ front-end performance as well as offer page performance optimization suggestions. It offers a more thorough analysis of server configuration and checks the HTML structure of a page and the use of external resources such as images, Javascript and CSS. The use of these tools helps understand the gaping holes in technical architecture which may have otherwise been ignored.

3) Webmaster tools: Both Google and Bing webmaster tools are designed for constant web analysis and the generation of error reports to spot out any anomalies on the page. The main benefits of employing these tools help with the disavowal of spam links, filter out negative SEO, evaluate sitemap and URL parameters, explore Geo targets and inbound links, and run crawl information. Google Analytics helps to study statistics of search insights by providing customer related interests towards the path of the business website, frequent choice in the business webpage, and visitor segmentation that will help to fine tune the business needs. Similar Web is another application that details out website domain information. SEO site checkup is an audit and score checker tool that helps keep tabs on the functionality of the businesses’’ website on the search engines.

4) Important extras: Copyscape is a plagiarism checker tool that checks and ensures the originality of the content as well as help avoid unwarranted repetition and such. Schema Creator is a structured tool to enable pass effectively through crawling’s semantic intelligence.

The tactical employment of these tools in any operative combination enables the success of any SEO strategy as they rely heavily on real-time updates given the fast expiration of data on the internet.

Why Kentico is a Preferred CMS Platform

Kentico is an all-in-one CMS, E-commerce, and Online Marketing platform developed with ASP.NET and MS SQL. From developers to content editors, it’s easy to use and allows users to make edits and update the system quickly, enabling companies to operate both more efficiently and effectively. The beauty of Kentico is that it’s loaded with features such as WYSIWYG editor, workflow, permissions, multilingual support, full-text search, online forms, newsletters, e-commerce, blogs, polls, web analytics and other modules.

There are three basic development models provided by Kentico.

1. Portal Engine: Provides you with a browser-based interface using web parts components to create websites. Coding with the Visual studio is only required while creating custom components.
2. ASPX templates: The developers can find varied templates to suit the website needs and this can be further customized using standard ASP.NET architecture and standard development tools, such as Visual Studio. This model requires you to be familiar with ASP.NET web form development and have at least basic programming knowledge of C# or VB.NET.
3. MVC: Kentico allows you to create websites using the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern (based on the ASP.NET MVC framework). Note that, not all features are supported for MVC development; see Supported and unsupported Kentico features on MVC sites for more details.

Why Kentico?

1. Ease of Use

Kentico CMS is out of the box one of the easiest CMS systems to use. Anyone who has ever used the Internet has all the skills required to add and update pages, add dynamic content, and create stunning, feature-rich websites. Kentico administration system comes with plenty of tips and descriptions to guide users through nearly every process. Additionally, Kentico provides step-by-step guides and tutorials directly on their site along with videos, blogs, and forums.

2. UI Personalization

The Kentico Administration site provides the feature of UI personalization. The UI personalization application enables you to provide certain users of the website with a simplified user interface. This is useful for business users who don’t need to see all the applications, tabs, menu items, or parts of UI pages which they do not use. Setting up a personalized UI can significantly decrease the learning time for users, new to the system and makes the system generally easier to use and understand.

Note:

1. UI personalization does not apply to users who have the Administrator Global administrator privilege level. Administrators always have access to all UI elements, regardless of the system’s UI personalization settings.
2. Do not confuse UI personalization with the permission system in Kentico. Permissions control what users can do, such as create or modify objects, while UI personalization controls what users can see. A user may be able to see a part of the UI but still not have permissions to perform any actions.

3. Content Staging / Continuous Integration

One of the challenges of updating content on a site is the repeated effort to migrate changes from one platform to the next. Often companies will have different environments for their staging (QA) content and their production (live) content. With Kentico, publishing data from one environment to the next is accomplished easily through the use of “content staging”. With a few clicks, a user can migrate content between the systems and quickly synchronize all environments. With the use of the “Scheduled Tasks” feature, this process can even be accomplished on a daily or hourly basis to increase productivity even further. This minimizes administrative time and easily allows a company to define a concise process for updates and deployments.

4. Workflows

Workflows in Kentico allow content to be moved through a set of predefined steps. These steps are easily created and configured in the Kentico system and can be quickly applied to any or all content. An editor can make changes to a page, and then submit it for approval. The approving manager gets notified automatically by the Kentico system of the change. The managers can then view the edits, submit them back to the editor for correction, publish the changes, or even edit the edited content. Workflows can also be configured to have several steps that must be completed before content is published to the site.

5. Smart Search

Smart Search in Kentico is a Lucene-based search functionality that quickly analyzes and locates content. Through the use of this module, defined content is indexed and stored in the system to allow searches to be completed much quicker than traditional database-based methods. Search results can be customized to only return relevant content and images. The Kentico system constantly updates the search results as new website content changes to keep the results accurate.

6. Feature-rich CMS

Off the shelf, the Kentico CMS system allows for eCommerce, blogging, forums, messaging, and a number of other critical functions. With the Ultimate license, companies have full access to every feature and can quickly add new functionality to their sites. Many other CMS systems require a series of add-ons to obtain the functionality readily available in Kentico. Even if a company decides to add modules, later on, all that is required is a simple update of the license and the features for the module are unlocked. Having such a wide range of features allows a company to focus on their business, not piecing together functionality.

7. Smooth Updates

Kentico provides step-by-step guides for every product update. Their installation packages are professionally written and provide a solid, concise process for applying the updated content. Any special requirements are clearly defined and easy to follow. Updates come complete with documentation and files targeted at a number of environments (.NET 2.0,3.5,etc.) so that all clients can benefit from their improvements.

8. Customer Recognition

Kentico is constantly gaining market share and quickly becoming a premier CMS software company. Kentico constantly communicates upcoming changes with their clients and values their input. Kentico listens to its partners and strives to deliver a product that meets their needs. For the training program, Kentico reached out to several of their “Gold” level partners to create the training material and guidelines. This type of customer involvement demonstrates Kentico’s commitment to their clients and their success.

9. Constantly Evolving

As each day passes, new technologies and functionality are being created. The folks at Kentico embrace these changes and are constantly incorporating them into their product. They test their code using the latest development environments and servers (Visual Studio 2010/Windows Server 2008) to ensure compliance. Kentico integrates a number of third-party components (CKEditor, Lucene, AJAX, etc.) and utilizes the latest source code that is available. All of these efforts allow Kentico to deliver the latest technologies and functionality that drive dynamic, interactive websites.

10. New Documentation

With the release of each new version of Kentico, it keeps on adding a lot of developer-centric functionality. With this, there comes a lot of questions from the community on how to utilize them and best practices. With the release of each new version of Kentico, they also keep updating their documentation to provide the information to get developers heading in the right direction. It really helps the developers to understand the new features and help them implement within the applications.

References

1. https://docs.kentico.com/k9tutorial/site-development-overview
2. https://docs.kentico.com/k9/managing-users/ui-personalization
3. https://devnet.kentico.com/articles/five-things-developers-should-be-excited-about-in-kentico-9
4. https://bitwizards.com/Thought-Leadership/Blog/2010/May-2010/Top-10-reasons-to-use-Kentico-CMS