The Simplest Way To Create A Bilingual Site Using WordPress and WPML

When our clients require a multilingual solution for their website Walnut St. Labs turns to WPML plugin for WordPress. Simply put, WPML extends the functionality of the basic WordPress CMS in a clean and simple way.

Ease of Setup

WPML allows for more than 40 different languages. Although, you will probably not utilize all of them the ability to choose from a wide range of languages makes this a very robust solution with an ease of setup not seen in other translation options. Select which languages you are going to be translating the site to and instantly all the plumbing for each language is already in place — with no coding.

Ease of Use

The greatest feature is the integrated nature of the translation pages with core WordPress features you already know. On one dashboard you can see all translated versions of your pages or posts and their translation statuses. You can access any of the translated pages right from here (see below). Ordinary WordPress users can be made Translators. Translators can access only specific translation jobs which Translation Managers assign to them. And if actually doing the translations is a blocker, you can connect WPML’s powerful translation management with a translation service of your choice. This is very powerful and will keep all translations in sync by alerting your translation service to any changes made to the original language a page was translated from.

Fully Integrated Multilingual Website

For our client’s who service multilingual audiences WPML for WordPress has expanded their reach by providing communication options to engage users in their native language.

If your site is need of a multilingual solution get in touch with us and we will detail how WPML for WordPress and Walnut St Labs can help you broaden your reach and deepen your engagement across the language barrier.

Three Shopify Apps That Enterprise, High-SKU Stores, Need From Day One.

Managing and optimizing tens of thousands of SKUs while while maintaining agility is hard “af” as they say. We manage high-SKU stores mostly on Shopify these days — and we do it with the help of these three app. These apps allow merchants to bulk optimize your Google shopping feeds, optimize shipping options, and the ability to edit just about any product or subset in bulk.

Google Shopping Feed by Simprosys InfoMedia

Integrating your Shopify store with Google Merchant Center is a critical channel to optimize for sales. Having a properly optimized Google Shopping Feed makes your ad spend efficient. This app offers some one-of-a-kind features like being able to bulk set Custom Labels or Google Product Categories.

Google Shopping Feed by Simprosys InfoMedia

Bespoke Shipping by MZL Solutions

Shopify has great shipping functionality until you want to start mixing and matching calculated rates with weight-based rates — then throw in conditional rules and free shipping and you quickly find yourself searching for a tool… This tool allows you to build a decision tree based on rules you define to show what shipping options you want to show. This app is very powerful and MZL Solutions provides awesome support. There really is no more powerful way to handle all the shipping scenarios tens of thousands of SKUs from multiple suppliers bring to your desk to manage.

Bespoke Shipping by MZL Solutions

Bulk Product Edit by Hextom

Bulk Product Edit is Walnut St Labs’ go-to tool for making bulk changes to products in Shopify. Need to tag 4K SKUs with a vendor name? Done. Need to add disclaimer to the bottom of every product or just a sub set? Done. Need to changes prices on a vendor by a percentage? Done. This app provides so much utility and value that managing a store without it would be truly daunting, because 50K of anything is not fast.

Bulk Product Edit by Hextom

We believe these apps make managing a high-SKU Shopify store easy — so you can stay focused on sales! If you need help or want to talk through one of your problems, let us know.

Press Release: BVCS (Daily Local News)

Brandywine Valley College Specialists was featured in the Daily Local News this week for the recent launch of their online program which makes college admissions a breeze. Founded by two experts in the field of admissions, we were approached in the Summer of 2017 to help transform their previously face-to-face consultative approach into a digital experience for increased accessibility. Fast forward to Summer 2018 and we launched a fully produced platform experience with video and downloadable supplemental materials!

If you have someone in High School who is planning to go to college check out BVCS: https://bvcollegespecialists.com/

Press Release: https://www.dailylocal.com/business/new–part-video-on-demand-course-is-designed-to/article_6a83c580-f49d-589b-a0d6-f130e420294a.html

SeO What? Good Content vs. Good SEO Content

SeO What? There’s Great Content, and There’s Great Content for SEO.

It’s time to face the facts..Content without an SEO strategy just doesn’t keep up in the 2017 digital marketplace. Imagine new rims and tires without a motor, SEO without content gets attention that goes nowhere. Unfortunately, search engines are not handing out checklists for “high-quality content,” and they probably never will. For this to work, you need to think Early & Often when it comes to SEO.

Speak Their Language: Start with User Intent Research

Once you know what queries your audience is using, and what kind of content they are looking for, you can design a content strategy that answers their specific questions and helps move them through the funnel.

SEO Foundation: What Makes Good Content

Aside from building around information that users actually looking for, make sure it has a single focus. Readers need to feel like they’ve completed one specific task. To further the engagement include additional content they want or an opportunity to purchase if its adjacent to their journey.

Top Technical SEO Issues Worth Noting:

LOAD TIMES: Resize your images and media to ensure faster load times. People don’t like to wait more than three seconds.
MOBILE: Content looks good on mobile devices. Most sites use responsive design but it’s always important to make sure images are center-aligned, forms and CTAs are tappable in the content, and so on.
SHORT URLs: Top URLs average <60 characters. Also, it’s best if you can have one URL for both web and mobile.

5 Reasons to Run your Site on WordPress

1. The search engines love WordPress

Matt Cutts, software engineer for Google says, “WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues.” The WordPress platform is structured in a way that is search-engine friendly and there are many third-party plugins available that let site owners fine tune their message to be even more crawlable by Google.

Images – Google can’t “see” a picture or photo. WordPress allows text describing the image (tags) to be optimized so Google can find the images and know what they are about
Page load speed. Google knows that people will leave a website if they have to wait for pages to load. Out of the box, WordPress is a fast loading framework. The site owner still needs to make sure they are not overloading pages with tons of large images and bloated-code, but as long as best practices are followed the page will load quickly.
Social media – Google wants to know that a website has fresh content and regular visitors. Having social media accounts with frequent posts and many visitors sends traffic to the website is an important indicator for Google. WordPress has many options to integrate social media accounts with the website.

2. WordPress is free and open source.

When you build your website on WordPress, you are not locked in with a developer or third party. It is your choice where you host your website and you can use the platform however you choose. Because of this flexibility, WordPress is a very popular platform. 1 out of 4 websites on the internet is built on WordPress. This makes for a very large community of developers, site owners, and users. There are many opportunities to get answers to questions, share ideas, and even collaborate on projects. Also, there is no shortage of options to hire someone to help with site design, content writing, or even have a website completed from beginning to end.

Wordpress is open source and easy to use

3. WordPress has plugins. Many plugins.

A plugin is a piece of software that can be added to your WordPress site to add functionality. As of this writing, there are 49,285 plugins available in the WordPress directory. Many of these plugins are completely free, some are paid (either one-time fee or subscription model), and some follow the freemium model. A freemium plugin usually has a scaled-down free version that still offers much of the functionality you are looking for. You can test out the plugin and decide if you want to upgrade to the premium version. This may unlock additional features, automate functions, remove watermarks or plugin branding, and provide additional value. Here are some examples of the features that plugins can provide

Social Media – Integration with social networks, allowing users to share your content
Forms – Allow users to contact you, sign up for newsletters, make payments, and more.
Security – Provide higher levels of security for the website, users’ data, and assets.
SEO – Allow for fine tuning of content so that Google and other search engines find your site.
Advanced Functionality – Everything from membership sites to downloading ebooks to interactive calendars. If there is a need for it, there is most likely a plugin for it.

4. Themes

One of the key features of using WordPress is how it uses themes. WordPress installs “out of the box” with a default theme. A theme allows the website owner to make changes to the appearance of the site–colors, fonts, layout–without changing the core functionality of the site or needing to dive into the code. When the WordPress framework needs to be updated, it won’t write over the changes made to the theme. Think of it this way: if the WordPress system is a car, think of the theme as the paint job. While this is a simplistic analogy, it is a good example of how themes work. A more thorough explanation would also include how a framework can be installed onto wordpress, and why we would use parent and child themes. But we’ll leave that discussion for the next post.

5. Built for the mobile web

More than 50% of all searches are conducted on mobile devices. We’ve all gone to websites on our phone that were too small to read, hard to use, and loaded so slowly that we ended up leaving and going somewhere else. If your website doesn’t look good or work correctly on a mobile device, your visitors are going to leave. A responsive website means that the text, photos, and layout will automatically resize to look good on a desktop, tablet, or phone. And with so many responsive themes available for WordPress, it is easy for a website owner to build a website that looks and works great.

Wordpress is built for mobile

WordPress is the most popular content management system on the web. Its ease of use, countless options, and versatile design make it a compelling choice for any business owner. If you would like to discuss running your website on WordPress, give us a shout at (610) 541-2026 or send us an email.