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 | Nov 7, 2014 | Updates
Digital Strategy Works, an Asheville web design and web development company building websites for our clients exclusively on the open source WordPress content management system, is pleased to announce the launch of legendary house music DJ, Tony Humphries website and social media strategy. We worked with Tony’s U.S. booking agent, Kelly Cooke of KC Management to plan, develop, and launch Tony’s new website located at the URL: https://tonyhumphries.com (screenshot below).
We also worked to developed a comprehensive SEO and Social Media strategy, which included installing and configuring All In One SEO Pro, the best WordPress SEO plugin. All In One now comes with a Social Meta panel that allows the site admin to manage what images or text Facebook’s Open Graph protocol pulls from the home page or any post or page. In addition to WordPress stats, we also connected Tony’s site to Google Analytics and linked the site map generated by All In One SEO to Google Webmaster Tools. Of course, we set up Tony on Google Business Apps with hosted “tonyhumphries.com” email
Given all the changes to Facebook over the years to move musicians and bands from personal profiles into Business Pages, Tony’s Facebook world was awash in duplicate personal profiles and managed business pages. We worked directly with our colleagues at Facebook Music to collapse Tony’s Facebook presence in one “verified” Musician/Band page: https://www.facebook.com/tonyhumphriesofficial. And, in doing so, we were able to merge Likes from various Pages into the primary page, while also collapsing two personal profiles into one, and moving Followers to Likes on the new primary Musician/Band page (screenshot below)
Tony Humphries Official Verified Facebook Page
Tony’s visibility on Twitter was low, so we worked to build Follows and bring that presence (@tonyhumphries) in line with his Facebook persona. We also learned that someone registered a Tony Humphries profile on MixCloud. We worked directly with MixCloud to ensure that Tony could control that profile. His new, official MixCloud profile is now: https://www.mixcloud.com/tonyhumphries.
Tony Humphries Mixcloud Profile Page
To ensure that domain squatters wouldn’t sit on his domain in the UK and Italy, we registered domains in those territories and additional domains here in the USA, then redirected all to his primary website address.
Powered by WordPress, the most open source content management system, the website is connected to WordPress.com through JetPack, which includes options for social sharing and other important tools . We selected WP Engine, one of the top WordPress managed hosting services, to host the website and take advantage of native caching, as well as benefit from their complete staging and production management system and daily snapshot backups.
In addition, we submitted a Wikipedia entry on Tony’s behalf currently being as a draft. For those interested in contributing to Tony’s Wikiepedia entry, please follow this link.
We are proud to have worked on this project with Tony and Kelly, as music and DJ culture has been a focus of DSW founder, Tony Zeoli’s life for over three decades. To assist a legend work out his online presence has been a gift and we are grateful. We hope the new TonyHumphries.com continues to educate new DJs and dance music performers worldwide on the power and gospel of house music through the eyes and ears of Tony Humphries.
Are you a DJ, musician, or band looking to build a WordPress website? Do you have a need to develop a sound social media strategy? If so, Digital Strategy Works can help. Contact us today for a free, 1-hour consultation over the phone or by Google Hangout or Skype.
by Tony Zeoli | May 28, 2014 | Updates
Digital Strategy Works recently completed a fully responsive website for OneBeat.tv, a popular online EDM channel. The site renders in both web and mobile browsers, making it easily readable for site visitors.
OneBeat requested a grid like layout that relies on images, titles and categories to lead all posts. Generally, these types of themes hide the title behind a rollover in the center of the image over a transparent graphic. However, the task was to build the layout and functionality, so that the post title fit into respective blocks on the page. To do so required the addition of a two tiered titling system, because it’s difficult to limit WordPress (or the web producer publishing the content) from displaying multiple categories on any given post.
We wrote a text entry field for the post title on its single post page and gave the post author the ability to write a secondary title for the homepage or category landing page. A social media bar is present across the top of the site to link site visitors to the company’s social profiles. We also provided the ability to limit the post category on the homepage to a single category, as WordPress usually prints all selected categories resulting in multiple categories stacked in a very small post box. It was a complex mission that we solved with a solution to tag a post with one of multiple categories, making the selected category primary.
As you can see, the posts fall into a layout that mimics a wall of bricks, each with a different width. We employed masonry.js, a popular javascript library to accomplish this layout and it generally works nicely with some minor caveats, which will be resolved in the next version.
Home Page – OneBeat.tv with grid layout
On the post page, the requirement was to have the lead be either an image, a video, a gallery or…nothing at all. We built a tool to allow the post author to insert a media type above the post at a fixed width. However, this image could not be “Featured” in the sense that WordPress takes a featured image from the Featured widget in the post admin and displays that image in the home page box, a category landing page or other areas. OneBeat wanted to be able to have 2 featured images – one for the post and one for everywhere else. And, the featured area needed to be a fixed size, so that the post author did not publish something out of scale with the rest of the site. Consistency of brand and message is critical for a blog or website, so that the reader always knows what layout to expect. The decision to make this area fixed width and height would keep a site wide consistency that is required in professional publishing.
In addition, we pulled in the OneBeat Twitter feed, set up a MailChimp email harvesting tool in the sidebar and gave them the ability to customize the sidebar with recent, relevant posts.
OneBeat.TV post page
by Tony Zeoli | Jun 14, 2010 | Updates
The National Museum of Hip-Hop
The crew at the National Museum of Hip Hop faced a dilemna with their web site. A web development company had donated design and development to the non-profit, but a key employee driving the project left the company and the site went unfinished. NMoH turned to DSW to complete the site. We found that the underlying code was based on tables and not standards compliant CSS. Not only could this affect page load times, but it would also take a toll on SEO, and it created issues with the layout of the blog, which was severely broken.
DSW took over development and recoded the WordPress theme from scratch, adding a background under the white text to make the site more readable. And, we fixed the blog, leaving it 100% better than we found it. We installed Wordtube, NextGen Gallery and Podcasting to prepare the site to receive media from is contributors. And, we connected the site to social media through plug-ins like TwitterTools, TweetMeme, Facebook Like, and ShareThis.
Today, the site is directly connected to the museum’s Facebook page and Twitter page. When publishing on the site, both Facebook and Twitter are updated with notifications of new blog posts. We also connected the site to Constant Contact to collect email addresses for the organizations newsletter.
We’re proud to be a part of the movement. DSW founder, Tony Zeoli, has volunteered as acting Director of Interactive on the project and consults to the museum on digital strategy, including social media and search engine optimization.
See HipHopMuseum.org here…
