Articles - Page 80

Agentic AI Is Coming. Is Your DXP Ready?

dsfaltudo

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/tie-690084_1280-3-1-e1467309523237.jpg" alt="tie-690084_1280 (3)" />
As Oscar Wilde once said, “there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.” 
If he were alive today, he would probably rephrase that as “there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is your website going down so that nobody can see why they were talking about you in the first place.” 
Many things can cause sudden spikes in traffic, including breaking world news or new releases of hotly-anticipated products. Any of these scenarios can cause your steady stream of website traffic to morph into an unmanageable torrent that can slow your site down to a crawl, or even worse, cause it to stop functioning altogether. 
What kind of measures can you take to prevent this situation from occurring? What are the important factors you should consider to prevent this embarrassing scenario from scuppering your marketing plans?
<h2>Clouding the Issue Is Good!</h2>
Today, with the availability of cloud technology, it is no longer something that only technical people understand – the cloud is something that is a normal part of how most businesses deploy their sites. With the cloud, you can configure the cloud hosting environment that if there are more than X number of people looking at your site, or more than X concurrent users submitting forms, if the CPU utilization on the server is more than X%, or the application is eating more than X GBs of RAM, then these metrics and the conditions you set cause the system automatically to expand – scale. 
Also, when the spike goes down, the cloud shrinks the environment to remove that extra server so that you are no longer paying for it. So the best way for people to prepare for this is to take advantage of the cloud’s elastic infrastructure and, based on simple rules, it is able to expand or shrink the number of servers that are running your application accordingly.
In the past, there was resistance to the cloud in general, towards the privacy or insecurity of the data, when exposing sensitive data to a third party. That is why most cloud providers reacted to this by introducing the concept of a private cloud, where you keep sensitive data in-house behind a firewall, meaning it is safe from a third party. Instead, you are running your applications in the cloud, and they are consuming the data from your private data center, as a hybrid. But it is important that the application you want to run supports auto scaling.
<h2>Web Farm Support – What Is it and Why Should I have It?</h2>
The web farm concept is based on the fact that you have multiple servers running separate instances of the same application. 
If the nature of the application requires those separate instances to be synchronized, you have to have a way to keep them in sync. Kentico, as an app, stores some of the data in memory on the server. So if you have three servers all running Kentico, you have three separate memory spaces on each server that have their local copy of the form of data. 
If you change the data on one of the servers, you need to make sure that all those other servers know that the data changed there, and as all servers are supposed to display the same content and provide the same experience, the other servers need to refresh their data to reflect whatever is there. So you have to consider how you are going to synchronize the memory of the application that is distributed in the web farm environment, and how to synchronize whatever is stored on the file system on those separate servers.
<h2>A Step-by-step Guide to Setting Up a Scalable Environment</h2>
<h3>1. Key Metrics</h3>
You need to consider what the key metrics you should use to understand what is going on in your environment are. You have to know what the red flags are. Noticing that the site is not responding is too late! You need to know what precedes that breakdown of the system. Typically it is: constantly high CPU utilization, the servers disks are too busy, or too much operating memory is being consumed. It could also be the length of the queue of page requests sitting idle waiting for processing, and if the queue is getting longer, it means that something is going wrong. It could be that the server is too slow to handle all those requests. So you need to know how to identify that there is a problem with your environment.
<h3>2. Expectations</h3>
Estimate what your realistic expectations are. Do you usually have 100,000 users a day? Based on historical performance, as soon as you run a campaign through a certain channel, you can expect two or three times more traffic. What triggers those spikes? What is typically the highest amount you need to be able to handle? You need to load test that this environment, based on your estimation, would be able to handle this peak scenario you know happened in the past. Online tools like the Load Impact can help with distributed load testing. You need to set up a baseline, which is what your environment is able to handle under normal circumstances, and your new web farm environment needs to able to handle it.
<h3>3. Calculate</h3>
Now you are almost ready to implement your new web farm environment, but first you need to make some calculations. 
Based on the fact that you are currently running on two servers, and they can handle 50,000 page views/hour, using simple mathematics, you can work out that one server = 25,000 page views/hour. So if you need to handle 100,000 page views/hour, you need four servers. Be aware, though, the relation between the number of servers and number of page views, in this case, is not always linear. If the weakest part of the infrastructure is the SQL DB, adding web servers to the environment will not really help. 
According to this, you set up what you estimate as being sufficient to handle the expected peak and you load test and stress test the environment. This means that you do not have to reach the highest peak only, you need to go above it. You need to keep pushing the architecture and extending it until you can handle whatever expected level you have set, plus, a certain buffer zone.  15 – 20 % more than what is expected can be considered safe. And if it is not sufficient, you need to add another server and test it again until you get to the point where you know it can handle it. 
Of course, the process of setting up the environment is either easy, or it may become more complicated if the application does not contain built-in support to enable you to do this.
After that, all that's left is to roll it out.
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by Kentico. Find out more at <a href="http://kentico.com/">Kentico.com</a>.

Dealing With Traffic Spikes: How to Avoid Being a Victim of Your Own Success

mike-johnston

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sackcloth-1280539_1280-1-e1467294497959.jpg" alt="sackcloth-1280539_1280" />
When building a website, it’s obviously important to create an easy and enjoyable experience for the end-user. Often forgotten however, but just as important, is the content editor’s user experience.
Content editors will be logging into the backend of a site regularly – everyday even – for as long as the site lasts (which can be years). So, you have to create an interface that they won’t dread working with every time they have to create a new page, edit an article or moderate user content.
Since a project’s success depends on the content editor’s happiness just as much as the end-user’s, we have tips on where to start and what to consider in making their job easy.
<h2>Know Your Content Editor (Or Editors)</h2>
Who exactly are you building for? Before any planning or building begins, get to know your content editor's level of expertise and experience. The user-interface should reflect a content editor's skill and comfort working within a content management system. For example, if they're totally new to managing online content, the user-interface should be configured to be as simple as possible to accommodate their beginner mentality.
Getting to know your content editors will help you make decisions like choosing to use rich text areas versus a module with properties that lays out the content depending on its associated logic. While one option is more flexible, the other is easier to update.
If you find out that your editor will be consistently updating content that is shared across the site, you should make that task as easy as you can; a module that lays out the content differently in each area makes the most sense.
The more you can gather about an editor’s experience, abilities, their learning-curve and habits, the easier you can make their job.
<h2>Create Use Cases</h2>
Once you understand who you’re building for, the next step is to create use cases for your editors – and then make them part of your development plans.
For example, editor use cases include:
<ul>
<li>Creating and placing a poll question in an article to get reader feedback</li>
<li>Creating an image slider and placing it on a page</li>
<li>Creating a new font class in CSS and applying to specific parts of the site</li>
<li>Updating the homepage with links to new content</li>
</ul>
<h2>Define Content Structure &amp; Proposed Setup Before Development</h2>
Now it’s time to set up a workflow for the use cases that you came up with. As an example, let’s use placing an Image Slider on a page and then linking photos and thumbnails. A basic workflow is as follows:
<ol>
<li>Navigate to the page that you want to drop the Image Slider.</li>
<li>Click the “+ADD” button within the Main Content Zone and find the Image Slider Module from the list provided.</li>
<li>Within the module, hit “New” to add the first image in your slider. Once the main image is linked, you can follow the same process for the thumbnail image.</li>
<li>Hit “Save &amp; New” to link the second photo in the slider.</li>
<li>Once all images have been linked, hit “Save &amp; Close”. Then “Publish”.</li>
</ol>
The workflow for each use case should be intuitive for your content editor, and each one should be planned out before any development begins.
<h2>On-going Best Practices &amp; Planning</h2>
Content organization is key at this stage. Within a couple of years into a site’s life cycle, files and folders can start to get messy, which can be very frustrating for anyone trying to navigate through it or manage it. By setting content editors up with an organization structure (uniform naming conventions, folder structures, etc.) it will be hard for them to deviate in the future.
<h2>Plan for the Future, Now</h2>
Build modules that are reusable to make future expandability easy. Your content editors will definitely thank you when it’s time to expand and grow their site. It lessens the learning curve of having to adapt to a completely new functionality.
Examples of ways to make a module reusable include:
<ul>
<li>Include fields for properties so that content editors can easily input text, HTML, Date, URLs, images or linked content</li>
<li>If you are creating a module that will be used for a short campaign that will only be on the site temporarily, make it generic so that the same module can be reused for another campaign without needing to get a developer involved</li>
<li>If you're building a module that displays a menu for a micro-site, make it reusable so that you can drop it on any page, and it will display a menu for all the pages beneath that current page in the page tree</li>
<li>For a page that need lots of different UI elements, such as Tabs, Sliders, Rich text, Ads – create each of these UI elements as modules so that they can easily be added separately to other pages in the future</li>
</ul>
It’s also important to plan for new people that will join the online content team down the road. Whether it’s adding new content editors to a growing team or replacing ones that have left, new hires should be able to pick up the workflow easily.
A great way to prepare for new hires is to create a training guide that is easy to follow. The training guide should be very detailed, and it should outline how to use different modules and functionality step-by-step.
Content editors should also be able to quickly reference it on-the-go as they’re using the CMS and get stuck. A training guide is a great resource to have in every content editor’s arsenal.
<h2>Automate As Much As Possible</h2>
To make your content editor’s experience as streamlined as possible, automate whatever you can.
This includes things like URL generation and thumbnail generation. Implementing automation for small tasks like this will save your editors a lot of time down the road.
<h2>Train Your Editors</h2>
The final step in ensuring your content editor’s happiness is to give them plenty of time – during development – to get familiar with the new interface.
Getting your editors to enter content during the development stage is important because it allows them to get comfortable with the system well before the site goes live. It also allows time to get their feedback and to make adjustments accordingly. This will help avoid hiccups or frustration after launch.
<hr />
[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”auto” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]Agility is a cloud-based, agile and powerful content management system equipped with tools and features that make building and managing your online properties easy and stress-free. To learn more, visit <a href="http://agilitycms.com/?utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_medium=blog">agilitycms.com</a>.[/dropshadowbox]
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by AgilityCMS. Find out more at <a href="http://www.agilitycms.com/">agilitycms.com</a>.

How to Build a Website that Content Editors Will Love

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/website-content-migration-why-going-away-parties-get-troublesome.png" alt="WEBSITE CONTENT MIGRATION WHY GOING-AWAY PARTIES GET TROUBLESOME" />
While any website’s design is constantly being revamped according to the latest trends, the information it contains most commonly has to be preserved intact. And with this contradiction, lots of challenges of content migration emerge. 
Moving existing content to a redesigned site isn't as easy as it may sound, and in some cases can appear even a more intricate task than a <a href="https://www.scnsoft.com/website-development">website development</a> project done completely from scratch. 
It’s essential to separate “content”-term out of “data”, when we speak about website migration. Moving data can more or less easily be performed automatically, while content is drastically vulnerable to any change of surroundings and should be relocated and adjusted manually. This is only natural, since content is created manually. 
<h2>Benefits of WYSIWYG Editors</h2>
Content consists of all kinds of information: words, graphics and media – all mainly embedded and published in articles by site administrators or content managers. And as experience shows, 85-90% of the articles’ in the whole batch do not have a proper mark up and have all their formatting done with the help of a WYSIWYG editor. Unfortunately, these articles are the biggest part of the migration problem.
WYSIWYG editors are indeed handier in comparison to the direct use of HTML or BB-codes that are usually involved in the text formatting process. But while presenting a convenient interface and allowing users to add styling to the text and media with no fussing over all the angle brackets syntax, these editors create a huge mess of inline formatting.  
If you switch to the code mode of an article formatted with the help of a WYSIWYG editor, you will be confused by the amount of unnecessary and repeating code tags that may even outdo the number of characters of the actual text. If migrated, such article will either become a plain text without any formatting at all or will display parts of HTML code inside the sentences and paragraphs.
That’s why this kind of articles definitely needs reformatting and, depending on the length of an article, it may take from 20 minutes to an hour to edit only one article. For instance, to migrate 548 articles of <a href="https://www.scnsoft.com/">ScienceSoft’s</a> company website it took the developers nearly 400 working hours of monotonous formatting.
<h2>The Problem of Images</h2>
Articles edited in the WYSIWYG mode that need proper reformatting are not the only challenge of the migration process. Some parts of content – like tables and pictures – can’t be moved unedited to a redesigned site, even if there is absolutely nothing technically wrong with them. With their unique dimensional information, these types of media are highly dependent on website’s layout and, since they are initially created according to the existing design’s limitations, the way they appear on a new design isn’t always nice and smooth. 
You can’t make a picture have a better resolution than it already has and the odds are your web designers will have to search for another one that will replace it. It’s not like they choose the pictures themselves – they usually need approval of the marketing specialist or a senior content manager. Who, of course, will then be partially distracted from their course of work and slow down their own important ongoing processes.
<h2>When Conversion is the Only Way Out</h2>
Nobody likes to deal with conversion. It’s always about searching the right software and desperate attempts to preserve the quality without losses. But with migration of audio and video files there is often no other way out than conversion. These content parts have much more unique properties, thus more requirements for the new website’s system to meet in order to display them correctly. If audio / video isn’t in the universal MP3 / MP4 formats, there’s a high chance you will have to convert them, so that they would definitely be supported by any device. 
PDF format is also a tricky one. Normally it needs Adobe Reader to be opened, but despite being very popular, this application still isn’t commonplace and is often absent on many mobile devices. And since there’s hardly any website development company that doesn’t reasonably strive to provide easy mobile access to the content, PDFs have to be either converted into another document extension or embedded with the help of certain plugins.
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Content migration isn’t something you can easily complete as a one-at-a-time task. Instead, it’s an elaborate process of adapting the website’s “stuffing” to new surroundings that requires lots of resources, time and scrutiny. And taking into account all the above mentioned challenges, it’s clearly indispensable to analyze the existing content and its condition beforehand, so that you could have a realistic list of incompatibilities and be ready to deal with them.
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by ScienceSoft. Find out more at <a href="http://www.scnsoft.com/">scnsoft.com</a>.

Website Content Migration: Why Going-away Parties Get Troublesome

<a href="http://www.crownpeak.com/">CrownPeak</a>, the Digital Experience and Digital Quality Management platform, has unveiled enhancements for Search G2, its enterprise-grade indexing and query platform, called ‘Realtime Indexing.’
At the same time, CrownPeak also named Dave Gully as COO and Javier Muniz as EVP of Engineering.
<img alt="crownpeak logo" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/large_detail_1432767033.png" />
CrownPeak is a Digital Experience Management platform that’s designed to help enterprise-grade companies successfully manage hundreds of digital experiences across multiple touch-points.
Their re-launch was announced earlier in 2016, when they merged with <a href="https://www.activestandards.com/">ActiveStandards</a>. There's no concrete date as of yet, nor do we know precisely what that re-launch will bring – but it's coming.
<h2>An Update to CrownPeak's Search G2 Feature</h2>
CrownPeak's Search G2 platform, released in 2015, is a highly-scalable, high-performance, enterprise-grade indexing and query platform, that enables rapid searching, sorting &amp; filtering of data across all customer touch-points.
Realtime Indexing enables content managed within the CrownPeak CMS to be delivered immediately to the search platform, upon publication. Further, Realtime Indexing allows time-critical publication of content, easy use of geospatial searching capabilities, as well as searching across protected content that, for security purposes, cannot be deployed to live website.
<a href="https://www.lightmaker.com/">Lightmaker</a>, a key CrownPeak partner, was a beta participate of the search new feature.
Together, CrownPeak and Lightmaker worked with one of the world’s largest investment management firms as well as one of the most prominent energy companies to expedite the publication of content from the cloud-first and purpose built CMS for multi-purpose deployment – a process that is nearly impossible when relying on search crawling to index content.
In the client’s respective industry, the Realtime Indexing enhancement makes time-sensitive information such as press releases, share prices and critical public service announcements like the location of distribution centers and secured areas in the event of natural disasters to be disseminated quickly and accurately to customers.
Further, through use of the only cloud-first DXM platform that features built-in DQM, CrownPeak creates super-fast, multi-site, enterprise deployments that create exceptional, high-quality customer experience moments, across all digital touchpoints.
<h2>“Seamless”</h2>
Following the beta testing, Lightmaker's CCO Ben Philyaw was full of praise for CrownPeak's newest feature:
<blockquote>
“With CrownPeak’s Realtime Indexing, we are able to adapt to our customer's demanding and critically time-sensitive content publication needs.
The Realtime Indexing enhancement, coupled with CrownPeak's easy-to-use CMS platform, provides a seamless content creation, approval and publication process for our customers. This is a unique industry development and we look forward to continuing to partner with CrownPeak to provide our clients with quality and reliable results.”
</blockquote>
For more information on the re-launch, the search G2 platform, and the new executive additions, visit the <a href="http://www.crownpeak.com/">CrownPeak website</a>.

CrownPeak Introduces New Features Ahead of Upcoming Re-Launch

Small businesses are using one resource that maximizes the value of their human capital, and it has put them on the shoulders of giants in their respective industries. Better yet, these small businesses are doing it against these giants’ will.
This resource isn’t technology. It’s the time that one technology provides, and this technology is document management software (DMS). Given the economic uncertainty of the dollar’s value, a strong case can be made for time being the most valuable yet underutilized currencies in not just the world of small business, but the world of work, too.
Here’s how DMS is freeing up this resource through DMS, and why it’s leveling the playing field in industries like insurance, accounting, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing across America.
<h2>1. DMS Overthrows the Time Lost in Poor Decisions</h2>
Have you ever wasted time and realized you can’t have it back? You’re not alone: Even bright employees in small, paper-dependent organizations do, and without even knowing it: At $30 per hour, the typical knowledge worker <a href="https://www.tonerbuzz.com/facts-about-paper/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wastes $4,500 annually</a> just by working with paper. Given that DMS helps small businesses go paperless in a highly collaborative and efficient way, working with paper and not relying on DMS is any small business’s fast track to losing time through poor decisions at the operational level.
This is an example of what economists call ‘opportunity cost’ at its worst. Some opportunity costs are easier to point out and avoid than others; however, paper-dependency isn’t one of them.  Alternatives to paper-dependency and the time they save are rarely explored because paper is all that business has known since the Industrial Revolution.
When it comes to document management software, opportunity costs are reduced not only once organizations go paperless, but particularly for workers who rely on billable hours and commission to earn income – accounting, legal, insurance, and—in some cases—financial advisory. The more time you spend solving problems other people can’t, the more value you add to the hours you spend at work, and this will be reflected in your paycheck if you work in a paperless office (even if you don’t rely on billable hours and commission): Money follows value, and organizational leaders will not only be able to see the value a paperless DMS brings to their organization, they will be more ready, willing, and able to pay employees for increased performance with the savings found in the bottom line.
However, if you haven’t gone paperless and are boggled down by the administrative overhead and costs of misfiling, finding, and keeping track of information –the value of your hours on the job decreases no matter how skilled, educated, or practiced you are in your line of work, but DMS overthrows this issue, and prevents workers from using their time unwisely.
<h2>2. DMS Sheds Light on Temporal Discounting</h2>
This is a fancy way of saying that in the workplace, and in microeconomics in general, people tend to discount only rewards that occur in or near the ‘now’ as valuable. For instance, a CFO, despite his or her aptitude for numbers, may perceive a smaller financial reward for their organization, which is received in 6 minutes or fewer, to be more valuable than a larger reward received in 6 months.
However, mathematically speaking, the larger reward obtained 6 months later is irrefutably more valuable. DMS optimizes the business value of time by exposing how although upfront implementation costs can scare organizations away from going paperless through DMS, there isn’t a single organization who went paperless through DMS intelligently, and 6 months later regretted the decision. Larger organizations are more susceptible to temporal discounting than their small business counterparts, bringing competitive edge to smaller organizations while the larger organizations flounder at the thought of implementing new technology.
The miniscule tasks of paper-dependent processes are what most organizations still depend on despite the degree to which these processes prevent them from profiting, growing professionally, and using their time efficiently. However, the short-term ‘reward’ larger organizations receive for not going paperless (which is not putting in the effort to go paperless), is miniscule compared to the rewards it can reap over not just 6 months—but much longer periods of time as cost savings and output are only compounded, resulting in organizational growth and profitability.
<h2>3. DMS Reduces ‘Multitasking’</h2>
As a central repository for roughly everything that a small business or department in a larger organization needs to run more efficiently, DMS centralizes integration with industry-specific software (accounting, for instance), a <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/efilecabinet-sidekick/">transubstantiation of the typical shared drive</a>, workflow, file versioning (which prevents renaming of the same files and confusion over where these files are stored), and bank-grade file sharing encryption for sensitive customer and client information.
Without DMS, small businesses must jump back and forth from software to software, from repository to repository, increasing the likelihood that concentration on the task at hand will be broken: This is where DMS has a profoundly positive psychological impact on productivity, and, therefore, the value of time. However, this ‘jumping back and forth’ from task to task is more likely to impede larger organizations, who are less likely to have cohesive information technology.
What’s more, research in cognitive psychology has revealed that multitasking is only possible in ‘super-taskers,’ who make up less than 1% of the population. Therefore, although most workers in larger organizations may feel like they are multitasking when jumping from software to software or filing cabinet to filing cabinet, 99% of these workers are merely switching back and forth from each of these respective tasks, subtracting from their immersion and productivity in each respective task.
However, DMS bridges the cognitive distance between the multifaceted tasks we face in the workplace by placing nearly all important business functions in one software—maximizing workers’ time and reducing the negative impact of ‘multitasking.’
See how you can go paperless, stand on the shoulders of industry giants against their will, and <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/efilecabinet-online/">outperform your larger competitors</a> through document management software today.

How Small Businesses Out-perform Industry Giants

To wrap up this featured week with Ecwid, we’re focusing on the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ecwid.com/apps/Featured">Ecwid App Market</a>.Coming back to today’s topic, it’s my view that no platform is truly complete without at least a basic app store to provide optional functionality boosts. And Ecwid has that – and more.Let’s take a look at Ecwid’s App Store.<h2>Keep Your Store Growing</h2><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-3-1-1024x489.png" alt="sshot-3" />Adding functionality to the front-end and back-end of your store will help keep its growth on track. And Ecwid recognized that by making weekly additions to its App Store.Some of the categories found within the store include:<ul><li>Marketing</li><li>Shipping</li><li>Store Management</li><li>Theme customization</li><li>Accounting</li></ul>And what’s more is, many of the apps are totally free.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ecwid-apps.png" /><h2>Developer Friendly</h2>I could tell you that Ecwid is developer-friendly, but I think it sounds better coming from an actual developer:<blockquote>“Most eCommerce platforms only partially support 360º views. Crazy, I know, but there is good news…Many eCommerce platforms are catching up, albeit slowly. We've built 360º view Apps for other eCommerce platforms, but most platforms are hesitant to let us build a deeply integrated App that works perfect.And then, there's Ecwid.Ecwid is the first eCommerce platform that decided to have 100% compatibility with our 360º viewer at Imajize. In fact, we worked directly with the software engineers at Ecwid.The result? Together, we built one the most polished 360º view Apps yet. With this App installed, you can easily add our 360º viewer into your Ecwid product page. It's almost too easy.The team at Ecwid played a huge role at making this happen (so thanks, Ecwid!).”</blockquote>All that praise for Ecwid came recently from Imajize, an app developer that was happy about Ecwid’s support for its 360 degree view image producing application. Support that, they say, has been hard to come by elsewhere in the eCommerce industry.If that’s not developer friendliness, I don’t know what is.To check out the Ecwid App Market for yourself, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ecwid.com/">head over to their website</a>.And with that, we tie up the last entry of Ecwid’s featured week here on CMS Critic.

The Ecwid App Market: A Hub of Growth & Customization

Weglot - The easiest way to translate a website

The easiest way to translate a website

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To continue with this Ecwid-focused featured week, we’re taking a look at how the product helps keep its users effective – even when they’re away from their desks.
Previously, we discussed the <a href="/retail-app-ecwid-shopapp/">Ecwid ShopApp feature</a>, <a href="/ecwids-automated-tax-feature/">tax automation</a>, and the <a href="/ecwid-for-wordpress-an-easy-secure-ecommerce-plugin/">Ecwid WordPress plugin</a>.
Now, let’s take a closer look at how it caters to merchants who like to get out and about as they handle their business.
<h2>Manage Your Store, Wherever You Are</h2>
There’s nothing quite like the freedom that comes with running an online business. But that freedom is expanded upon when you can cope with your daily routine from just about anywhere with internet coverage.
Ecwid has mobile-specific features that make it supremely easy to manage your entire store whilst on the move.
This is done through the Ecwid App, which allows all users to log in and get to work.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/products-main-min.jpg" alt="products-main-min" />
Here’s a breakdown of the Ecwid App features:
<ul>
<li>Manage orders on your mobile device: Ecwid merchants can see their new and existing orders and begin taking the necessary actions to get them shipped or delivered.</li>
<li>Photograph and upload your products: Shoot, upload, and sell, all from a mobile device.</li>
<li>Modify inventory, you can update product names, prices, and descriptions from within your Ecwid App.</li>
<li>Get notified: The app will send you push notifications about new orders.</li>
<li>Share your products: You can share products from the app to Instagram and Facebook, or via text messaging and email.</li>
<li>Sell on the go: At a trade show? No problem. The Ecwid App lets you accept payments directly, like a makeshift POS system with a credit card swiper.</li>
</ul>
Furthermore, Ecwid deploys an extremely simple and standardized checkout procedure, which streamlines the checkout process for customers using mobile devices.
When customers access an Ecwid on their mobile phone the store utilizes responsive design to the store automatically matches the size of the screen. So combining responsive design with a standardized checkout process and having this all automatically part of the product means higher conversion rates on mobile for the merchant.
<h2>The Ecwid ShopApp</h2>
<a href="/retail-app-ecwid-shopapp/">Ecwid’s ShopApp</a>, which we discussed previously, is yet another example of the focus Ecwid has given to the world of mobile.
The ShopApp enables (Ecwid Unlimited) users to launch their very own retail app, personalized for their specific Ecwid store. An excitingly awesome feature, by all means.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ios-img.jpg" alt="ios-img" />
This helps merchants reach their audience not just through responsive design that works well with mobile web browsers, but through the medium of an app, which are far easier to access – and give off a heightened sense of professionalism.
To find out more about the Ecwid App, check out the dedicated page on their website.

How Ecwid Puts Mobile First

<img alt="sshot-1" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-1-2.png" /> WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world – for many good reasons. One of those reasons, is the flexibility it offers through third-party plugins like the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/ecwid-shopping-cart">Ecwid WordPress Plugin</a>, which makes for an impressive eCommerce extension. 
<blockquote>
“Ecwid is the best e-commerce solution for WordPress applications. Ecwid offers a solution that easily integrates with a responsive WordPress platform and is much easier and more cost effective [when] compared to most other e-commerce solutions.” 
— Mikel Bruce, CEO and Founder at tinyfrog.com.
</blockquote>
Let’s take a closer look at what Ecwid’s WordPress plugin brings to the table.
<h2>Ecwid WordPress Plugin Features</h2>
<img alt="sshot-2" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-2-1.png" />
The Ecwid WordPress plugin boasts all the native features of Ecwid that can be integrated across a number of platforms.
Those features include:
<ul>
<li>Install Ecwid in minutes</li>
<li>Sleek interfaces and product catalogs</li>
<li>Responsive design</li>
<li>Personalised customer accounts</li>
<li>Product favoriting </li>
<li>Automatic language detection</li>
<li>Smart shipping calculator</li>
<li>Multiple POS system integrations (including Clover, Vend, and Square POS)</li>
<li>Detailed tax automation</li>
<li>Personalised retail apps for iOS and Android via the Ecwid ShopApp feature (for Ecwid Unlimited users only)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Free for WordPress.org </h2>
Ecwid also offers a totally free plan that doesn’t require any further modules or plugins to function. And the Ecwid control panel is now accessed from inside your WordPress dashboard so you don’t need to log in to separate locations.
At the time of writing, the plugin boasts over 20,000 downloads and a 4.6/5 star rating on the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/ecwid-shopping-cart">WordPress plugin repository</a>.
<h2>Smart &amp; Secure</h2>
Furthermore, Ecwid’s WordPress shopping cart offers seamless and automatic upgrades, hosted on powerful and secure Amazon EC2 servers for free.
Ecwid is also PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider certified, which ensures a robust level of digital security and makes transactions with your payment gateway and bank airtight.
From a personal standpoint, I’m beginning to see Ecwid as one of the most helpful eCommerce solutions on the market. It lets you launch your own retail app, configure taxes in one click, and integrate with WordPress and WordPress.com via a simple plugin.
To find out more about the Ecwid WordPress plugin, <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/ecwid-shopping-cart/">check out the WordPress plugin repository</a>.

Ecwid for WordPress: An Easy & Secure Ecommerce Plugin

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ecwid-shopping-cart-logo-1024x269.png" alt="Ecwid-Shopping-Cart-Logo" />
After covering <a href="https://www.ecwid.com/" target="_blank">Ecwid’s</a> awesome ShopApp feature – which allows merchants to launch their own native iOS and Android retail app – it’s time to take a look at another Ecwid feature; automated taxes.
On a personal level, taxes make my brain hurt. In fact, I deem it as one of eCommerce’s scariest hurdles – and I’m sure I’m not alone.
To make life easier for merchants though, Ecwid recently partnered with TaxJar to automate the entire process. What more is, that automation is available for free for all paid Ecwid users.
<h2>Tax Is No Longer Taxing</h2>
The alliance between Ecwid and TaxJar means something very significant; merchants from the U.S., Canada, EU, and Australia can set up tax rates in their store with just one click. Seriously.
Once enabled, the automatic tax rate will determine a precise tax rate at checkout depending on where you and your customer are located. All the technical stuff is done behind the scenes.
How? Well, the tool knows the tax rules in your country, state, and even your county – which is the hardest part, really. It then simply applies them properly to each order as and when they come in.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ecwid-tax-feature-1-1024x459.png" alt="Ecwid Tax Feature" />
If you’re worrying about its level of tax knowledge, don’t. Here’s why:
The TaxJar integration knows whether you’re located in a region with origin-based or destination-based tax schema, whether shipping cost or discounts are taxable, whether you should charge tax in another state or country not, whether the tax rate is calculated with a zip code accuracy. If your customer provide zip+4, it will be calculated with even higher precision. In some U.S. states the tax is calculated with a street address level precision!
The real beauty of this automated tax feature is that it will stay up to date with all new tax laws that get implemented in your country. So you never have to worry about updating your tax configurations – it’s all automatic.
<h2>More To Come</h2>
But that’s not all, because Ecwid has already unveiled some of its plans to expand their automated tax feature with the help of TaxJar.
By the end of 2016, they hope to introduce:
<ul>
<li>Multiple nexuses for US sellers, which allows for accurate rates to be calculated if your store operates in several states.</li>
<li>Automated reporting &amp; filing to fully automate sales tax management, and more.</li>
</ul>
Essentially, Ecwid is taking that scary tax hurdle and throwing it off the track, so you can focus on running your business.
To find out more about Ecwid’s tax automation feature, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/ecwids-automated-tax-feature/">check out their blog</a>.

A Closer Look at Ecwid’s Automated Tax Feature

Welcome to yet another featured week here on CMS Critic! For the next five days, our focus will be on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ecwid.com/">Ecwid</a>, the cloud-hosted shopping cart that integrates with your existing website or social media page. Impressively, over 900,000 merchants make use of Ecwid to power their online stores.According to Internet Retailer, 42% of all mobile sales generated by the world’s leading 500 retailers came from mobile apps during 2014.Furthermore, the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/">number of smartphone users is forecast to surpass 2 billion</a> by the end of 2016 – meaning that the demand for mobile shopping experiences is only increasing.With these statistics in mind, Ecwid recognized that they couldn’t rest on their laurels as just an eCommerce solution. They needed to be an eCommerce solution that give merchants the power of the app.<h2>App Power</h2>Thanks to Ecwid’s recently released ShopApp feature, Ecwid users can now launch their very own native iOS and Android retail app.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ios-img.jpg" alt="ios-img" />ShopApp’s store content, such as inventory, prices and product descriptions, is fully synchronized and integrated with a retailer’s online store and includes one-touch checkout with Apple Pay, providing a seamless omnichannel ecommerce solution.And perhaps best of all – the ShopApp is available for free to all Ecwid Unlimited users.<h2>Your Store In Your Customer’s Pocket</h2>This goes beyond simply adopting responsive design to meet the needs of mobile device users. By having a native app, you give your online store a whole new shiny layer of professionalism.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sync-img-1024x684.jpg" alt="sync-img" />With your store in your customer’s pocket – a mere finger tap away – sales are bound to increase.Ecwid’s President, Jim O’Hara, called the release of ShopApp a “huge leap”:<blockquote>“With ShopApp, Ecwid is making a huge leap in how native ecommerce mobile apps are created and operate for smaller retailers globally.Similar to how the dramatic innovation in web development introduced by DIY sitebuilders like Wix, WordPress and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.weebly.com/">Weebly</a> democratized website creation, Ecwid now allows our merchants to create their own ecommerce apps instantly.”</blockquote>For me, this release is nothing less than exciting. In fact, I almost want to start a brand new store with Ecwid just so I can launch my own app.But for now, I’ll be keeping tabs on it to see just how much of an impact it has on the bottom lines of Ecwid’s merchants.To find out more about Ecwid’s ShopApp, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ecwid.com/">check out their website</a>.

Launch Your Own Retail App With Ecwid’s ShopApp

<img alt="Inbound-Marketing-Report_465x475-thumbnails" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/inbound-marketing-report_465x475-thumbnails.png" />
A joint study between Act-On Software and Demand Metric has shown that 84% of marketers are moving away from inbound marketing.
Instead, what we're seeing is a merge between inbound and outbound marketing – forming something that Act-On and Demand Metric are calling ‘Allbound Marketing'.
<h2>The Emergence of Allbound Marketing?</h2>
According to Act-On and Demand Metric, marketing across the buyer's journey now requires an “Allbound” strategy to be effective. 
Their finding indicate that a campaign should be tailored to a persona or account, and needs to go beyond attracting a visitor to the site. Marketers must engage buyers to help them come to an educated decision. 
A balanced approach puts the right content in front of the right person at precisely the right time. Survey respondents underscored the value of an “Allbound” marketing strategy, with 84 percent agreeing that it’s the combination of inbound and outbound that drives their business.
Their study also debunked the notion that marketers perceive inbound marketing as more valuable than outbound. 
In fact, most surveyed marketers assigned near-equal numerical values to each approach. On a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 = very unimportant and 10 = very important, they gave outbound a score of 7.3 and inbound 7.4.
<a href="http://mktg.actonsoftware.com/acton/fs/blocks/showLandingPage/a/248/p/p-0860/t/page/fm/0">The study</a> also covers:
<ul>
<li>Which tactics are driving business, leads, and revenue</li>
<li>Average annual percentages of inbound and outbound spend</li>
<li>Top inbound and outbound marketing tactics</li>
<li>Where marketers plan to invest their marketing spend in the near future</li>
<li>Benchmarks so you can compare approaches</li>
</ul>
<h2>Inbound for Buzz, Outbound for Results</h2>
Act-On Software's CMO, Kevin Bobowski, also chimed in with some insights:
<blockquote>
“While Inbound Marketing generates buzz, combining Inbound and Outbound Marketing produce real business results.
And as more marketers adopt Account-Based Marketing and the outbound tactics that support it, it will be time to rethink the role of Inbound Marketing.”
It’s time to rethink Inbound Marketing and understand that a balanced approach to marketing drives the business.”
</blockquote>
Get your hands on the study <a href="http://mktg.actonsoftware.com/acton/fs/blocks/showLandingPage/a/248/p/p-0860/t/page/fm/0">here</a>.

Allbound Marketing: Study Shows Inbound & Outbound Marketing Merging

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-7.png" alt="sshot-7" /> Website security is a concern for one and all. Content management systems are fighting a constantly evolving battle against hackers and malware producers by releasing regular security patches to keep our data as safe as possible.
Still, for further protection, we install plugins and rely on third party applications to build a secure digital perimeter around our websites as a first line as defence – and rightly so.
But what about your last line of defence; the worst case scenario of total data loss?
Backing up your data is supremely important, as anybody who has endured the pain of having their website hacked or compromised will testify to.
Let’s take a look at how <a href="https://mithra62.com/projects/view/backup-pro">Backup Pro</a> can help.
<h2>CMS Agnostic Backups</h2>
Backup Pro is the first – and so far the only – CMS agnostic data backup tool that will save your skin in the worst case scenario.
At the time of writing, it supports the following five content management systems:
<ol>
<li>WordPress</li>
<li><a href="/concrete5-marketplace-gets-backup-pro/">Concrete5</a></li>
<li>Prestashop</li>
<li>Craft</li>
<li>ExpressEngine (2 &amp; 3)</li>
</ol>
Although, further support for other content management systems is in the works.
Launched in 2011 by <a href="http://blog.ericlamb.net/">Eric Lamb</a>, Backup Pro has built a reputation for being feature-rich and flexible in the face of disaster recovery.
<h2>Backup Pro: The Solution to the Risks of SaaS Backup Platforms</h2>
SaaS backup platforms are popular because they handle all the heavy lifting in a remote location. But such solutions come bundled with risk.
What happens if you change FTP or database credentials? What happens to your data should you cancel or miss a payment? What about losing access to the account? What about the general security of those backups?
The point is; SaaS solutions are a relatively hands-off way of handling the data that is most vital to your business but isn’t without very real risks. The questions above easily illustrate that.
Alternatively, Backup Pro provides a solution that eradicates all of the risks outlined above.
How? I’m glad you asked.
Backup Pro allows for abstract and redundant storage of your backups through any combination of Local Storage, Amazon S3, Rackspace, Google Cloud Storage, Dropbox, FTP (with SSL), SFTP, and even an Email Inbox
Furthermore, you can create your own Storage Engines for complete control over your backups. Talk about flexible.
What’s more, Backup Pro further outdoes SaaS solutions by offering itself as a product that only requires one initial purchase, with no extra running costs, and no expiry date. Install Backup Pro, set it up, and walk away.
On top of ALL that, Backup Pro will even let you know if there are issues in missed backups (missed scheduling, for example), or worst case, even if a backup archive file is corrupted and not usable in disaster recovery. All automated.
<h2>Customizable &amp; Developer Friendly</h2>
Backup Pro is also a highly customizable tool. It comes with over 70 configurations out of the box, allowing you to configure things like:
<ul>
<li>Exactly what you want to backup, and what you don’t want to backup</li>
<li>Notifications and alerts</li>
<li>File size limits</li>
<li>Backup frequency/amount limits</li>
</ul>
As for catering to developers, Backup Pro is scriptable through console commands, has online database restoration, and allows for  configurations to be overridden in a file for VCS (git, svn, mercurial, etc) love.
Plus, thanks to the new REST API support (added in 3.3), administrators don’t just have total access to their data, they have absolute control over it, too.
To find out more about Backup Pro <a href="https://mithra62.com/projects/view/backup-pro">visit their website</a>.
Also, be sure to check out the <a href="/backup-pro/">Backup Pro hub</a> here on CMS Critic.
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by Backup Pro. Find out more on <a href="https://mithra62.com/projects/view/backup-pro">their website</a>.

Backup Pro: CMS Agnostic Backups

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ipad-820272_1280-1-2-e1466076927587-1024x538.jpg" alt="ipad-820272_1280 (1)" />
Why do organisations need to consider a digital transformation?
Organisations need to do more than just consider a digital transformation. It is a vital step when you need to kick start your company’s digital strategies overlooked during its evolution.
Being left behind and forced to play catch-up is an expensive gamble that will allow your competitors to gain a significant advantage over you. Digital transformation is not just an empty phrase, it is a true philosophy for defining a content strategy that charts the needs of your target audience by establishing the kind of content they should find engaging, by identifying the channels and schemes for reaching them and formulating the KPIs necessary to measure it effectively.
Only by defining the touch points you want to track across all channels, both online and offline, and then optimising the customer journey accordingly, can you determine the tools essential for you to capture and gather the data required for optimising your content strategies. In this way, you can achieve a marketing performance that goes way beyond just satisfactory.
Also, segmenting your customers using their behaviour or character traits and making sure you are integrating your e-commerce strategy with your multi-channel strategy, makes it possible for you to achieve customer delight and boost your sales revenue.
By delivering a consistent user experience that exceeds customers’ expectations across all devices and channels through things such as having a responsive web design, your digital presence can achieve a true single customer view.
These tools are vital parts of your digital brand marketing strategy, as well as ensuring that the client data you gather fully integrates with your email data through your CRM. Plus, when you are keeping your corporate vision in line with a thorough understanding of both your customers and current digital trends, you can help your company resonate as a brand-leading multi-channel business. This in turn will assist you in achieving your strategic objectives.
<h3>Can you point to examples of large organisations with traditional business models that embraced digital transformation, as well as the results they’ve seen?</h3>
Groundforce (part of the Vibroplant group) have been offering total solutions to the construction industry for the last 30 years in the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe. They had an obsolete CMS and it was crucial to improve the speed, functionality and usability by incorporating all websites into a one-domain strategy on a fully-responsive website. The challenge was to import products, users and technical documents to the new site and unify them into a consistent user experience.
As Claire Locker, Account Director at NetConstruct explains, “Our client, Groundforce, was very forward thinking… Rather than the website branding being born out of the existing marketing requirements, the website has been the driver for their branding and marketing. These aspects are now found in all their communications, from brochures to presentation formats.” Since that digital transformation, there has been a rapid upturn in results. Several large orders were placed on the UK and German sites shortly after launch and there is now a drastic reduction in page load time. These are precisely the ways in which digital transformation can improve the customer experience, promote brand advocacy and boost ROI.
By keeping an eye on how your customers relate digitally to their interaction with your company, you can actively continue to enhance and refine the customer journey, garnering favourable responses from your users.
<h3>What are the consequences for companies that don’t embrace digital transformation?</h3>
Ignoring digital transformation can be perceived by customers as you having a lack of interest in them. Clunky and awkward customer experiences quickly result in customers looking elsewhere. Users are no longer limited to where they can access online content, and they know it. With mobile phones, tablets and laptops affording consumers access on the go, it is necessary to keep your site fast and efficient, regardless of the device on which it is viewed. It is essential to understand the way in which your website is accessed as it is a defining factor in understanding your customers.
Claire Locker goes further to illustrate users’ perceptions of a bad digital experience. “Any obstacles in their way such as poor usability, poor navigation, links which don’t work or poor design are held against the company.  The website is possibly the first point of call for a potential client – if they do not like what they see, the chances are that they never contact the company at all – a missed opportunity.” It is then a tough, if not impossible, task to try and win that visitor over again. So, consider this when implementing digital transformation without a proper understanding of whom you are attempting to engage with.
<h3>What is the value of approaching digital transformation as a coordinated strategic programme as opposed to through separate digital initiatives when individual needs arise?</h3>
Coordinated strategic plans must be based on an understanding throughout all areas of the organisation. This means knowing what the goals and expected outcomes are, and what they mean to the people involved. They should have an clear understanding of the transformation process, and how their roles fit into it. Creating measures that in turn unify the look, the feel and the perceived identity of the company is an essential part of making sure that digital transformation has a consistent and homogenous quality.
Welcome the constructive input of all staff in the process, and gain an understanding of how the customer will relate to your changes – determine whether this reaction is favourable for your digital business model and your users’ needs. Implementing digital transformation based on deliverables and a realistic schedule means regular departmental meetings to assess the process, the project’s progress, measuring the real-time effect and checking that the vision is still relevant and being implemented correctly.
Claire Locker has done a lot of work with clients performing such transformations. In her experience, having a, “holistic and recognisable approach to all the marketing channels – website, social media, advertising campaigns, brochures and development internationally – serves to strengthen the design aesthetics and build customer loyalty and recognition.”
Making sure all processes are fully supported through the correct structure and tools will ensure the transformation promotes the digital maturity of your company.
After all, businesses need to grow and develop. A badly implemented digital transformation that generates a misaligned digital experience and loses customer loyalty will result in a King Midas in reverse effect, and nobody wants that.
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by Kentico. Find out more at <a href="http://www.kentico.com/">Kentico.com</a>

The Importance of Digital Transformation for Large Organisations

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