Log onto your Business account on paypal and go to Merchant Tools> Gift Certificates>Create your button now.

You will need to enter your website, as the place where the recepient can redeem their gift.

You can add a customised gift certificate button image and also add your logo which will appear on top of the gift certificate. This is optional but is really worth the extra time and will make it look good.

You can set a fixed price or let the customer choose their price (goes from €5 up to €1000).They can then choose to print it themselves to give to someone or else email it (immediately or else they can choose a day within the next month).

Paypal will put a code on the certificate which the recepient will key in as they make their purchase on your site.

When you have all the information inputted then just click “create button” to access the code which you paste into your site.

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A good solution is to get a free plugin called “WP Simple Paypal Shopping cart”.

1. Set up your Paypal Business account.

2. Install and activate “Wp Simple Paypal Shopping Cart” from your plugins page in your wordpress dashboard.

3. Go to Settings>WP Shopping Cart and configure the information. (Once configured, you will add a shortcode to make the button show up. )

• Put in your Paypal Business email address.
• Set currency and currency symbol
• Shipping: if you want to charge shipping for some items you can put the base shipping cost here, eg 10 for  €10. To trigger this shipping charge you must put  shipping:0.001 in the shortcode later. Only items with shipping in their shortcode will get charged shipping. You can also add a price over which the customer is entitled to free shipping, eg add “100″ here and everything over €100 will not be charged shipping, even when they have shipping activated from the shortcode.
• “Add to Cart button text or Image”: upload your button image into your media folder and then copy the link (get the image link when you open the image in the media library) and paste it in here.
• Return URL:  make a page in your site (and don’t add it to the menu) that says something like  “thank you for your order”.

4. Simple version: add the shortcode [wp_cart:PRODUCT-NAME:price:PRODUCT-PRICE:end]  to your page, replacing the capitalised words with your own information.

If you want to add shipping and variables, add: [wp_cart:PRODUCT-NAME:price:PRODUCT-PRICE:shipping:SHIPPING-COST:var1[VARIATION-NAME|VARIATION1|VARIATION2|VARIATION3]:end]

If you are using a base shipping price for all your products then this is where you put shipping as 0.001 to trigger the base cost.

5. Example of this plug in at work can be seen here: katebetts.eu.

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2. Go to “Merchant Tools” and select “buy now buttons”.

It’s a good idea to make your own button design first and upload it to your site. This way the button design can match in with your site. But if you are happy with just the yellow paypal “buy now” button then you are ready to go. You need to fill in the button information: name of item, price, and you can add variables such as size or colour here with the “add drop down menu” option.

3. Create button and paste the code into your site. If you already have an image on your site that you want to link to the paypal page then the email code option will work better.

4. Your customer will be able to purchase your items and you will become rich beyond your wildest dreams.

Firstly create the image you want. It must be square, and will be resized to 6 x 6 pixels so keep it as simple as possible. Upload the image to a Favicon generator site and you can download the converted image, which will be named “favicon.ico”.

Next upload your favicon.ico image into the root directory of your site (through your host file manager page or through FTP) and also upload it into your wordpress theme folder.

Now your favicon will appear with your webpage (you may have to empty your browser’s cache first and restart your browser).

Put the most important parts at the top of the page. Keep written content as concise and clear as possible. Be consistent across your site if you have similar information about yourself on different pages, for example class times in a fitness website.

Organise with headers and paragraphs

Write small paragraphs under meaningful headings. If you want to publish a lot of information then divided it over pages so as not to overwhelm the reader (or put them off entirely).

Link to more info

Instead of explaining everything, you can use put links within your sentences to further information or definitions.

Design and navigation

A clean and consistent design with simple navigation will help the user to get the information they need from your site.

Images

Break up big chunks of text with images if possible. Think about the size of the screen when choosing images. If you have detailed drawings (for example an architect’s plans) then it is better to simplify them to be easily read.

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Headings are important so that the user can gain an understanding of what the content is about by doing a quick scan. It gives a structure to your content. So we need to make the headings describe the content that follows. Different sizes of headings are indicators of levels of importance. For example a H1 header is the biggest, and it might be used for the title of the page (just use it once). Use H2, H3 headers titles as subheadings of H1.

SEO

Headings are also an essential building block of your SEO. Search engines use headers as an indicator of the importance of the content that follows.

Accessibility

They are also used in helping making your site accessible for  Screenreader software. The user can scan the page by select the headings, and then choose which part to read.

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You need to analyse your website so that you can see what parts are getting the most attention, and what parts are being ignored. Then you can adapt your site to ensure that the most important parts are getting the most attention. That’s at the most basic level – how long are users spending on your site, how are they moving through your site, and how often do they return?

You might need to gather really specific information depending on your site: for example if you have a site with many contributors it might be good to see which authors are getting read most, or what topics; what countries do your readers live in and what are their age groups. Simple site statistics won’t tell you much – they only read how many visitors you get, not if these visitors actually take a look for longer than 2 seconds.

Set up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an essential tool for your site. It’s really easy to set up Google Analytics for your WordPress site once you do everything in the right order!

Step 1. New Google Analytics Account

Go to the Google Analytics page and set up a new account with the name of your website. (Use your regular gmail account details to log in.) Google Analytics page >”Access Analytics”> My Analytics Account> Create new Account> then follow the steps.

Step 2. Paste code or enable plug-in

In non WordPress site you need to paste the code they give you on the Analytics page into your site (usually in the header) but if you have a WordPress site (self-hosted) then you skip this part (click “finish”) and install a plug-in called Google Analytics for WordPress.

Step 3. Connect your site to Analytics

WordPress site: Go to the plug-in configuration page and select your site’s name and “authenticate with Google” – this is where you give permission.

Non WordPress: paste the code from step 2 into your header code (recommended).

Step 4. View Results

Go back to Google Analytics page and click on the “Access Analytics” button to see your results.

This takes five minutes to set up and will become invaluable for understanding how your website is used.

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Find a Group

A good place to start at the “groups” menu and select “groups you may like” – these are based on groups that your connections are already in.

There is also a search groups option. In the top panel of your LinkedIn home page there is a search box: select “groups” from the drop down menu and type in something relevant to you eg “architecture” or “digital media”. There is no filter for countries unfortunately, just language, and there is also one for categories, eg “professional group” which doesn’t narrow it down too much.

Join a Group

If you find a group you want then click on it and there will be a big “join group” button or else a “request to join group one”.

Leave a Group

When you join a group you there are some  default settings which you can view by selecting “more..” on the groups sub menu. Here you can set the regularity of emails from the group and whether or not their logo appears on your profile.

This is where you can choose to leave the group but selecting the button on the bottom right of the panel, coloured in a hard-to-see pale grey.

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Check your load speed by visiting Google labs and typing in your site name.

You will get a rating out of 100 and you will get suggestions on how to improve your speed and the culprits behind the slowness will be listed – for example large images.

Resize and Optimise Images

Everytime you add an image to your website make sure its optimised first. This makes the file size way smaller without losing the quality of the image. The smaller the files size the faster your site will load.

Open your image in Photoshop. Select Image> Image Size and resize your image so that it’s no more than 600px x 600px – if you know the exact size you’ll need them for your site then resize them to this.

Next select “save for web and devices” and check the “optimized” box. You can select to view “4-up” as in, four images in the screen, giving you previews to what the image will look like on the web. Select whatever is the lowest file size you can get away with whilst maintaining a good quality image, you will need a good pair of eyes for this bit. Your file size will be about 8-10 times smaller than a regularly saved jpeg so that will make you very happy, I know it.

All for the Cache

If your problem is to do with cache, and you have a WordPress site, there are some great plug-ins to help you improve your speed: W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache can help. Either way, what you really need to do is go your .htaccess file and add this code, which sets an expiry date for your bits and bobs:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 year”
ExpiresDefault “access 2 days”
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

I got that tip from this blog. Don’t ask me what cache is…

We all had a great day today launching Phase 2 of Fumbally Exchange, and got lots of media coverage.

Oh, the power of the internet, ’tis wild!