by Tony Zeoli | Oct 7, 2019 | WooCommerce
Clearly Better Days, a CBD oil company based in the New England area with CBD products for people and pets sold both in physical retail locations and online with WooCommerce (an e-commerce plugin for WordPress) are in a growth phase. The company needed to make immediate functional changes to their website for a variety of business and compliance reasons.
From website accessibility for customers with visual impairments to cookie acceptance and adherence to the framework of the General Data Protection Regulation that covers European citizens globally, Digital Strategy Works installed and configured plugins to ensure Clearly Better Days are compliant with both the American Disabilities Act and European Law, while also activating a new payment gateway servicer from Fortress Payments and NMI. Fortress Payments provides merchant services solutions to small businesses seeking to take payments online for CDB products.
WordPress Website Accessibility
Accessibility functions are now enabled on the Clearly Better Days website.
Digital Strategy Works installed and configured User Way’s free accessibility widget, which helps website owners comply with Section 508 of the Department of Justice’s ADA (American with Disabilities Act) Standards for Accessible Design and addresses the need for the elderly or those with physical, visual, mobility, or situational impairments to be able to access and shop the Clearly Bettery Days website.
WooCommerce Retail Locations Finder
Google Maps enabled Pins with Location data.
Clearly Better Days are both an online and brick-and-mortar retailer through a number of retail locations throughout the New England area. We added a Retail Locations page with a map view and a list view (not shown) of all retail locations that carry Clearly Better Days products. Customers can click on a location and view the store name and address on an embedded, mobile responsive Google Map.
WooCommerce Product & Batch Number Search
Sidebar search box with autocomplete and add to cart feature.
On the website’s Shop page, Customers can now use the search box with advanced functionality. The autocomplete function searches for the product as you type and it returns the product image, title, and allows you to add-to-cart directly in the search result. Customers who purchased products offline can search for COA’s by Batch Number, now located on the product sales page.
Product COAs
COA’s attached to a Product Sales Page
Customers who purchase CBD products at retail scan a QR code on the product’s label, which is hyperlinked to a corresponding WooCommerce Product Page complete with the COA download attachment.
WooCommerce Sidebar Filter by Category & Price
Sidebar displays product categories and the number of products in a category, as well as filter by price option.
Sidebar displays product categories and the number of products in a category, as well as filter by price option.
We added a sidebar to filter products by search, category, and price. The customer can use any option to filter the Product grid in WooCommerce.
Data Privacy & GDPR Compliance for WordPress & WooCommerce
Clearly Better Days GDPR Compliance Acceptance Button
WooCommerce Data privacy policy acceptance at checkout.
We added a sitewide cookie acceptance banner so Clearly Better Days would be in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a Europen law that applies to EU citizens globally. U.S. website owners must comply with this regulation because European citizens living in the US or abroad can purchase products from any stateside website, so the site should comply with EU privacy laws for that reason. We also added a data privacy acceptance selection at Checkout to ask customers to confirm the customer agrees with the company’s privacy policy.
WooCommerce Age Check Verification
Many states require CBD products are sold to customers over the age of 18. We implemented an age check verification at checkout to verify the customer is over the age of 18.
WooCommerce Wholesale Pricing
WooCommerce Wholesale Plugin Pricing Screen
Clearly Better Days wholesale customers with approved login access can view wholesale pricing and order from the same website as retail customers. We are working to make additional visual improvements and helping Clearly Better Days with an SEO and Digital Marketing strategy. But for now, we were so excited about this project, we wanted to share it with you!
If you or someone you know is setting up an online CBD oil Ecommerce business, please let them know how we helped Clearly Better Days ensure they were in compliance with regulations, implemented a new vendor for secure payment processing to take online orders in WooCommerce, and other improvements to grow their online business.
Call (828) 412-0990 or use our online form to send us a message.
by Tony Zeoli | Feb 5, 2019 | Custom Wordpress Development, Portfolio
Digital Strategy Works is pleased to announce the completion and launch of a major project we’ve had underway for some time now. Bookstr.com, a New York City-based authors and books blog needed to migrate from Drupal to WordPress for a host of reasons. The company was acquired and its Drupal site was a legacy aspect of prior ownership, but the Drupal site was much more difficult to maintain and upgrade for a small staff without an internal development team. Bookstr made the decision to move off of Drupal and onto WordPress, which would give them a bit more control over updates and maintenance, and provide additional tools for their writers and editors to publish content, create quizzes and polls, and cross post content into social media. And, the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress SEO would allow them to better control their on site SEO, as well as update their Google and Bing sitemaps.
Digital Strategy Works performed the migration from Drupal to WordPress of over 9,000 posts and 40,000 images. Drupal to WordPress migrations at this scale are not easy, because the migration cannot take place from web server to web server. Servers time out after trying to run long processes. The Drupal database must be downloaded and installed on a local machine (your computer). Using a premium plugin and other software, the Drupal content with its associated images could then be migrated into a fresh WordPress install.
The caveat to this migration comes when trying to then upload a heavy WordPress site with thousands of URLs and tens of thousands of images back up to a web sever when the hosting company (in this case, Pantheon) only allows for the client’s account to have a set amount of storage. In the migration process, we learned a great deal about how to migrate Drupal content into a WordPress shell, then move that WordPress site up to its hosting environment. It was no small task. After running the process a number of times, we were able to complete the migration successfully.
Bookstr.com New WordPress Home Page
For this project, we were also asked to take the pre-existing Drupal “theme” and rebuild into a WordPress theme template. In a Drupal to WordPress migration, the Drupal theme that was built for the Drupal platform will not work on the WordPress platform. A new theme had to be created and with additional options for advertising, as well as to fix issues that were broken in Drupal, like Most Popular Posts, a sidebar widget which displays the most popular posts on the site for a period of time. For the redesign, we used the Make Theme by Theme Foundry, which is an excellent theme for publishers, as the base “child theme,” for the site. Make comes with page-builder functionality for custom layouts of pages and posts, as well as the ability to create and distribute widget content in page, posts, and sidebars. We worked with our internal developer and our offshore development partner, Hashtag Systems Inc, to modify a “child theme” built alongside the Make theme framework. Hashtag contributed a great deal to getting the pop-up overlay in mobile and desktop to function properly. And, they helped style the hero post grid carousel for mobile devices, so that posts in the hero banner would look as good in mobile as on desktop.
The old Drupal site did not have an ad management software package, so we installed and configured Ad Sanity, a popular WordPress plugin to help Bookstr manage it’s Google Adsense placements, while also giving the company the opportunity to sell, manage, and track ads sold directly on their site.
In these Drupal to WordPress migrations, redirecting Drupal URLs to WordPress URLs is essential. We were able to export all prior Drupal URLs and match them with their corresponding WordPress URls, so that Google page rank was passed onto the new site.
The final piece of the project was to build a pop-up to help Bookstr capture email addresses for special promotions. And, we assisted the company by adding DMARC to their DNS manager, so that emails originating from the Bookstr.com domain are not seen as spam by companies that black list spammers.
We also armed the client with All in One SEO Pack, the most powerful SEO plugin for WordPress. It’s truly the most powerful professional SEO plugin for anyone who is serious about on-site search engine optimization for WordPress. Given the content mix of Bookstr, the plugin will allow their editorial team to not only plan their SEO strategy, but also manage social meta optimization, as well. Sitemaps were submitted to all the major search engines and we connected Google Analytics to Google Search Console for ease of tracking SEO performance.
Need us to migrate your Drupal site to WordPress? We can help. Just contact us today to discuss your project and get a quote.
by Tony Zeoli | Jan 24, 2019 | Updates
We are super excited to announce our Agency Member Partner status with WP Engine, the leading provider of WordPress Manage Hosting solutions for startups, small business, and entrepreneurs.
Digital Strategy Works partnered with WP Engine over 4-years ago to host all of our client websites. We couldn’t be happier WP Engine’s service and support. Prior to WP Engine, we worked with Media Temple and even tried our hand at running our own VPS on Linode, but things being as they were at the time, both solutions were simply not the right fit. We needed top-notch WordPress-trained support technicians and we also needed to get out from under being system administrators, because hosting and securing WordPress were two businesses that took away from our core focus serving our clients branding, web development, SEO, and social media needs.
As a WP Engine Member Agency partner, we can continue to do what we do best – build exceptional WordPress websites. And, we can feel confident as a WP Engine Agency Member Partner, that our clients are supported 100% by experts in WordPress hosting and security.
Download our WP Engine Member Agency Partner Guide to managed WordPress Managed Hosting with WP Engine: WP-BRO-AgencyEnable-v07-DSW
by Tony Zeoli | Mar 22, 2018 | PMPress, Videos
Digital Strategy Works founder, Tony Zeoli, talks about team communication. In our daily project management, there can be communication breakdowns that disrupt a project, causing delays and potentially additional costs. Decisions made today need to be thought through and communicated to the entire team, because there are future intangibles that need to be assessed and mitigated against. When team’s fail to communicate, bad things happen. Tony gives an example of a decision point made that has a lasting impact on a project and how to move forward from that decision. Or, whether to go back and do over. This is the challenge of project management, because when you and your team are working virtually, you don’t have the benefit of stopping by a desk for a chat to check in. Watch and let us know what you think.
Watch all PMPress Videos.
by Tony Zeoli | Mar 16, 2018 | PMPress, Videos
Hosted by Tony Zeoli, founder of Digital Strategy Works. Here is why we need to keep inline style and HTML out of the post editor. It can cause problems when others attempt to edit a page and delete styles and html, which then have be be reset. We should never use the post editor for page layout – that is what page builders are for or we should create custom page templates and call those into our themes and use post body or custom fields to insert content into content blocks. Using inline styles and div blocks also cause issues with future development, because then a common page template cannot be modified. Each page or post layout has to be modified and maintained as similar to others to keep a consistent layout sitewide. It just reintroduces all of the problems we had with inline styles in HTML before CSS was introduced later on.
What all PMPress videos.
