2016 | JM Online

November 17, 2016 JM Online Website and SEO Tips

Website Holiday Tip, Optimize Ecommerce Settings for Holiday Shoppers

Paying attention to even the smallest details on your ecommerce website will drive traffic, increase sales, and keep your customers happy this holiday season. The care that goes into each aspect of your store, marketing and support are important in gaining and closing website sales. So, before the holiday rush arrives, let’s make sure your website settings are set up for success.

Don’t be caught off-guard when your stock levels are low. You can set low and out-of-stock thresholds, and set up notifications if inventory is running low. During the busy shopping season, and depending on how quickly your products sell, you may want to increase the low stock threshold. Consider increasing to give shoppers an earlier warning that inventory is getting low.

Checkout settings should allow for efficiency and ease for customers. If possible, ensure guest checkout is available for users who do not want to create an account. Also, review the checkout settings for coupons. If you’re going to be offering coupon codes this year, you’ll want to make sure that setting is checked – or you may have some unhappy customers.

Make sure customer email notifications are in place. WooCommerce offers many email notifications that go directly to the customer – including on-hold orders, completed orders, refunded orders and customer notes. These emails can also be customized to fit branding. Keeping customers informed about your progress will create long-term, happy customers.

Implement store notices for effective communication. These notices can include holiday shipping cutoffs; sales, discounts, or other special offers; deadlines for redeeming coupons; or unexpected delays and issues. There are also cart notice extensions that allow in-cart messages for shoppers.

Call us at 402.292.7500 ext 102 for assistance in optimizing your ecommerce settings for the holiday season.

November 10, 2016 JM Online Website and SEO Tips

Website Holiday Tip, Maximize Ecommerce Website Revenue with Simple Checkout Updates

Maximizing revenue with an optimal checkout process during the winter season is critical for your holiday sales. Shopping cart abandonment occurs when checkout is confusing, when users are forced to create an account and there are payment security concerns.

When shopping cart abandonment does occur, there is a WooCommerce plugin that can help recover 30% of revenue lost by abandoned carts. By sending email reminders to customers and guests, the plugin helps go for the close. However – why even get to cart abandonment? Let’s focus on some key ways you can improve your ecommerce website’s payment process and convert prospects into customers quickly and effectively.

Build trust with your customers for an effective online sale. Make sure your website makes clear your shipping and return policies – instead of leaving customers guessing. In the event that customers have questions, easy access to customer service is vital. Live Chat is an affordable and simple way to make sure customers can have their questions answered quickly so you don’t lose the sale.

Checkout obstacles are also detrimental to closing your online sales. We know you want to collect customer data. It’s helpful for marketing, support and research… but forcing customers to create accounts will cause lost sales this holiday season. Offer a guest checkout option to ensure completed sales.

Investing in mobile-friendly, responsive website technology is also going to help close online sales. If customers need to zoom in/enlarge the browser to click on the appropriate product, can’t read the text, cannot easily enter info in checkout fields or are waiting for pages to load… you’ve likely lost that sale. Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer optional – it’s a must-have, make-or-break, you-better-get-it-now decision for your business.

Lastly, offering more payment options may help close your online sales. WooCommerce offers a deposit extension which allows for monthly payment options, and PayPal offers a credit solution to merchants that comes at no risk to merchants. And during the holidays, everyone knows that monetary flexibility can be critical to closing a sale.

Having trouble closing online sales? Give us a call at 402.292.7500 ext. 102 to find out how we can optimize your website’s checkout process.

October 13, 2016 JM Online Completed Projects

New Website Launch: 7 Day Furniture

7 Day Furniture is a cornerstone Omaha company that provides affordable, quality furniture to the Omaha and Lincoln metro areas. After many years of a website that was not easy to update, nor reflective of their products and quality, 7 Day worked with our Omaha web design team to design and build a new website.

7 Day Furniture uses their website as a showcase for products. And the best way to accomplish this goal was to select a pre-built WooCommerce website template and customize it to fit their branding and to remove the purchase functionality. By doing this, 7 Day has a simple Content Management System (CMS) through which they can easily add, edit and reorganize products. This website also increases ease and usability for users – as this new website is mobile-friendly.

We are thrilled and honored to work with such a revered Omaha business. We wish 7 Day Furniture success with their new website and look forward to working with them in the years to come.

Visit 7 Day Furniture

June 6, 2016 JM Online News & Education

Omaha Web Hosting Company Sees Success with Spam Filter Service

Recently, JM made a huge switch that has proven to benefit our internal communication, as well as that of our email clients. In light of our previous spam filter company discontinuing service, our Omaha tech team decided to make the switch to MX Guard Dog for spam prevention. And boy, are we glad we did!Recently, JM made a huge switch that has proven to benefit our internal communication, as well as that of our email clients. In light of our previous spam filter company discontinuing service, our Omaha tech team decided to make the switch to MX Guard Dog for spam prevention. And boy, are we glad we did!Recently, JM made a huge switch that has proven to benefit our internal communication, as well as that of our email clients. In light of our previous spam filter company discontinuing service, our Omaha tech team decided to make the switch to MX Guard Dog for spam prevention. And boy, are we glad we did!

May 24, 2016 JM Online News & Education

JM Web Designs Speak at Omaha’s Creative Center

JM Web Design’s CEO Jonathan Patton and Creative Director John Campisi were recently invited to Omaha’s Creative Center to speak on the benefits and versatility of WordPress. As the web design and development industry continues to change, WordPress has been a crucial part of providing beautiful design and function in websites. It’s a platform we use for most of our websites and is a proven asset to web designers and developers all over the world.

JM has employed several graduates of the Creative Center, including our former designer Dan Svoboda. While Dan still works closely with our web design team, he’s now a UI Engineer at Werner Enterprises; and was also invited to speak last month at the Creative Center – sharing his job and skills with the students.

Our team values the quality of graduates from the Creative Center and appreciates the opportunity to meet students and share our experiences. Sending a special thank you to the Creative Center for this opportunity and a heart-felt congratulations to this years’ graduates.

April 21, 2016 JM Online Website and SEO Tips

Integrating LiveChat for Increased Efficiency and Sales

Live chat has been around for years, but it’s something Omaha business owners rarely consider implementing into their website. Why? It’s likely they think there’s a high cost associated with set up, and/or they think it’ll take too many resources to manage. And while this may have been the case many years ago, website live chat is easier than ever to add to your website.

Our Omaha web design firm has used LiveChat for years and it’s proven to increase efficiency and assist in making an initial quick connection with sale prospects. The nature of our business requires us to be in front of and away from our computers – so while we’re gone LiveChat delivers a message directly to our email when users leave a message. (You’d be surprised how many users would rather leave a quick message on LiveChat rather than fill out a contact form).

JM was recently added to LiveChat’s list of industry experts. LiveChat is customizable, provides reports and analytics, integrates easily with WordPress and is secure. We believe this can help increase our customer’s prospects, revenue and efficiency – as we’ve seen it work for us – and for only $299 we are offering LiveChat integration on your website. All you need to do is signup for LiveChat, provide JM with the login details, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Interested in setting up LiveChat on your website? Call 402.292.7500 ext 102.

April 1, 2016 JM Online Website and SEO Tips

Protecting Your Website Against Vulnerabilities

Our Omaha web design and development team builds most websites on a WordPress platform. And while WordPress is widely known for its usability, ease for developers and security – there are security risks associated with websites, no matter the platform. For this reason, JM has recently started offering security packages for our WordPress customers.

Our security packages include plugin and WordPress core system upgrades whenever available, additional monitoring for suspicious activity and, should a hacker or virus enter your site, free cleanup from hackers and viruses. But we often hear, “I don’t think I need to be protected from this since we don’t store any sensitive information on our website.” This makes no difference to a hacker.

A recent article by Wordfence (a WordPress security plugin which JM uses to help protect our WordPress websites), indicates that in a recent survey over 60% of respondents didn’t know how attackers compromised their website. For those who did figure out how the attackers entered their website, plugins were the biggest vulnerability. As part of our security package we update plugins when available because of the associated security risks. WordPress core and plugin updates are often available because of new security patches that will help protect your website.

Our Omaha web hosting team has seen an increase in security threats over just the last several months. JM’s security package will not only prevent against vulnerabilities to your website for a small monthly fee, but will also save you many hundreds of dollars in website recovery if your website is hacked or infected. Call us at 402.292.7500 ext 102 for more information.