If You Run A Facebook Page, Expect The Like Count To Drop Soon

Do you run a Facebook Page? Heads up: your page’s “Like” count is probably going to drop a bit soon, and it’s totally not your fault.

The short version: Facebook is changing the way it’s counting likes, subtracting any accounts that have been either manually deactivated or “memorialized” after its owner passed. It’s something that probably should have been done since the beginning — but since it wasn’t, it’d be easy to think your Likes had dropped because of something you’d done.

One thing that’s important to note: it seems that this only accounts for profiles that have been manually deactivated. Likes from profiles that could be considered “inactive” because the user just hasn’t logged in for a while will continue to count.

The shift won’t happen immediately; Facebook says it’ll roll out in “the coming weeks.”

So how many Likes might you lose? It’s tough to say. While Facebook says to expect a “slight dip,” it’s all relative to how many Likes you have to begin with. If your page only has a few dozen likes, you might not even lose one; if it has a few million, that slight dip will feel a bit bigger.

If you run your company’s Facebook page and your boss gauges your performance based on whether that “like” counter keeps climbing, it’s probably a good idea to let them know what’s coming.

-Techcrunch

5 Mobile App Ecommerce Strategies for 2015

Online retailers that pinpoint the attention of a mobile app strategy may be struggling to decide how to get an app working and what that app should do.

Mobile marketing and mobile apps are becoming increasingly important for online and multichannel stores. Analyze that in the US, customers pay about 15 hrs a week researching products on a mobile device, and about 93% of owners that research a product from a mobile device will ultimately make a purchase.

With the rise of mobile, commerce businesses may be receiving calls and emails from firms offering to design and create apps. Some of these leads will, no doubt, be from well-known companies that provide services that may really help an ecommerce business raise. But some of these leads will come from people just trying to turn a fast buck with a shoddy product.

The bottom line is that retailers, jointly online and multichannel, have three primary plans to employ for producing and distributing a mobile app. They can create formal native apps, use HTML5 and JavaScript with a package or select not to have an app and focus on the mobile web instead.

1. Build a Native App

In the mobile app setting, the label native app normally describes an application that is written in the operating system’s native programming language. For sampling, an Androidapp would be build in the Java programming language and a native iPhone or iPad app would normally build in the Objective-C language. There are some differences, but generally this is true of native mobile apps.

From the retail and marketing point of view this system, that if you select to generative native mobile applications, you will need to have the app written more than once. The objects and features of your Android, Windows, or iOS app strength be the same, but the guidelines that the mobile device follows (the computer code) will be different — perhaps vastly different.

Native apps, however, may work better, process faster, and have better connection to phone features like cameras, speakers, Os updating or similar. Many native applications also do a better job of following OS conventions, such as attitude and actions that the user expects.

2. Use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript

Together HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript are the web stack — i.e., the markup and languages that are behind almost everything done in a web browser. And, it points out, they can also be used to develop mobile applications that may be included in native application stores and loaded on mobile devices just like native applications.

Working with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript for developing mobile applications offers two basic advantages over producing native applications.

First, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript developers are more generic and usually economical. Put another way, many more peoples know how to program HTML5 than know how to write Objective-C.

Second HTML5 mobile apps may be delivered to nearly any mobile device, in any case of OS, with only minor changes to the program significations that the app only really needs to be written once.

3. Focus on the Mobile Web

A few ecommerce businesses may select not to have a mobile applications at all, focusing instead on a mobile optimized website.Google, as an example, reported that about 74 percent of American shoppers using mobile devices start with search. That is they open Google or Yahoo in a mobile web browser and look for mobile sites, shopping, banking etc.

Actually the usual mobile-device using shopper visits six retail sites a week.

With this in mind, for all online sellers (E-commerce store) having a mobile optimized website should come before worrying about a mobile app.Remember making a conscience selection not to do a bit right now is still a mobile app strategy.

4. mobile-friendly websites in search results

Starting April 21, we will be raising our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This modification will involve mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a major impact in our search results. Therefore, users will find it easier to get related, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.

To create a mobile-friendly site, check out Google webmaster mobile-friendly guide toturials.

1. Check Mobile-Friendly Test to all your site inner pages.

2. Check your Webmaster Tools to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site using the Mobile Usability Report.

5. Mobile Site URLs

Google bots may also need a hand if you use separate URLs for your mobile site (i.e. http://m.site.com/). To make sure search engines can distinguish between the mobile and desktop versions of a particular page, add the following tags to the <head> section of your web pages.

1. Insert canonical tags to mobile URLs that point out the desktop version of the URL as the canonical.

Ex:  Insert the following tag to the <head> section of http://m.example1sitename.com/store-locator:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example1sitename.com/store-locator”>

2. Insert alternate tags to desktop URLs that specify the mobile version of the URL as the alternate.

Ex:  Insert the following tag to the <head> section of http://www.example1sitename.com/store-locator:

<link rel=”alternate” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)” href=”http://m.example1sitename.com/store-locator”>

At Ascenteq we are experienced in creating Mobile friendly website design at affordable price. We are created more then 45 mobile friendly site to know more pls visit www.acenteq.com

Top 5 Ecommerce Software for Business Owners

Here are five options if you plan to invest in hosted ecommerce software to grow your small business or start a new online venture.

1. Ability Commerce: Amazon Channel Feed

The Ability Commerce feature set includes mobile-optimized versions of stores and tools to integrate your order management system (OMS) and accounting system. This ecommerce platform also includes the SmartSite content manager; this lets users without any programming knowledge change store promotions, prices, images and products in the Web store.

A key Ability Commerce feature is the Channel Feed service to manage products on Amazon. Once you provide the inventory to sell on Amazon, Ability Commerce Amazon experts will monitor your products daily to help you position products better, motivate buyers and, ultimately, boost sales.

Pricing for Ability Commerce is customized based on specific business requirements.

2. Big Commerce: Real-Time eBay Integration

The Big Commerce platform is a good choice for any small business that wants to start an online store and maintain an eBay business.

Big Commerce offers ample features for hosting, store design, SEO, mobile commerce, marketing and inventory—plus you can integrate your online Web stores with eBay listings from within the Big Commerce platform. Simply choose which products to push to eBay, create an eBay listing template and set custom eBay shipping. Now inventory is always synced between your online store and eBay.

Big Commerce offers five pricing plans, starting at $24.95 per month for 100 product listings. The Silver Plan, which is suitable for most small businesses looking to invest in ecommerce and which Big Commerce deems the "best value," costs $39.95 per month for 500 products, 10 staff logins, 3 GB bandwidth and 300 MB storage.

3. Intuit Ecommerce: The Merchant Account

Intuit's ecommerce offering offers a simple point and click interface that makes it easy to create and publish a store that you can update at any time.

With Intuit Websites, you'll get everything needed to design and launch an online store, including the domain name,

hosting, the Simple store ecommercesoftware, a site builder tool and online payments via Intuit merchant accounts. The merchant account is a big feature, as it enables small businesses to move beyond offering basic PayPal payments at checkout. Another nice feature of Intuit websites is the Facebook extension with which you can create a store a Facebook Business Page that automatically syncs with current store inventory.

Intuit websites with ecommerce start at $19.99 per month for a 100-page website, 5 GB storage, one domain and five email accounts. A Business Plus plan offers additional features and storage for a $59.99 per month subscription fee. Intuit provides free phone support and assistance with all subscriptions.

4. Shopify: Advanced SEO and Analytics

Shopify hosted ecommerce lets you pick a template, optimize the design, add a product catalog, organize your products and create blog posts from a single administration dashboard. Shopify feature built-in mobile commerce that includes an iPhone app and mobile storefront. Marketing tools for SEO and coupon codes to help sell items are also available.

Shopify integrates with Google Analytics this lets you automatically track customer purchases and shopping cart transactions connected to Google Analytics data. It also features built-in analytics to benchmark your online store's performance to help you track ecommerce over time.

Shopify starts at $29 per month and includes unlimited bandwidth, 100 products, 1 GB of storage and a 2 percent transaction fee. For $50 per month, the basic business account is good for up to 2,500 product listings, a 1 percent transaction fee and 5 GB of storage.

5. Vendio: Automated Selling on Amazon and EBay

With a focus on automation, Vendio ecommerce software saves you time with tools to easily put products on eBay, Amazon, Facebook and your own online Web store. List products once and they'll be published simultaneously on the supported marketplaces.

Other Vendio features include inventory control, sales and order management, email marketing, the shopping cart with drag-and-drop features and analytics reporting. Vendio Online Stores provides business owners with marketing features, including Google Analytics and built-in options, while a Vendio-powered Web store is optimized for mobile Apple iOS devices.

Vendio pricing starts at $99.95 per month and includes 200 products, 2-GB of storage, Vendio Applications and your own Web Store plus the aforementioned Amazon, eBay and Facebook marketplace integration.

 At Ascenteq Inc our team works with you to create a site tailored to the unique needs of your customers and business. Every aspect of our development is informed by behavioral and sales data, driving high-quality traffic to every product in your store. And with intuitive navigation and a lightning-fast ordering process, your site will push conversions well past your existing goals.

We've worked on hundreds of eCommerce projects and know what it takes to generate sales. Utilizing responsive web design, our eCommerce websites are optimized for desktop, mobile and tablet shopping. With platform features like unlimited products and categories, to a secure one-page checkout, we make online shopping easy for customers and easy to manage for website owners. To know more pls visit www.ascenteq.com

Google Code closes down

After nine years, Google’s open-source code repository, Google Code, started closing shop today by disabling new projects and announcing the permanent shut down of the service by January 26, 2016.

Google Code started as Google’s answer to SourceForge, the predominant code repository back in 2006. The reliability of SourceForge was brought into question that year when SourceForge.net’s database was hacked and user data was compromised. Problems continued the following summer in 2007 with a temporary service outage in August. The appeal of a repository backed by Google only increased as a result.

Google Code proved to developers a better solution was possible, and it was that mindset that eventually undermined the service. In the years since then, other project hosting services sprang up, including the now almost ubiquitous GitHub. With an interface that made version-control as well as public/private options easy, GitHub surpassed Google in truly adhering to its open-source philosophy. Developers took notice, and the service has grown exponentially in the last few years.

In Google’s farewell letter, they cited one reason for closing the service was that “lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management,” and that an increasing amount of projects were abusive or spam. Without the critical volume of programmers to report malignant code, the majority of the maintenance workload rests on the back end, and Google decided the investment required for upkeep exceeded its value to them.

Google set out timeframes for the closure, and provided a guide for transferring code projects out of Google Code. It will allow tarballs of projects to be downloaded through the end of 2016, but after that the service will be completely shut down.

For a long time now, many of Google’s own open-source projects have also resided on GitHub, including Android updates that are often directly released to it.

-sdtimes

Guest Lecturer - Anishjai

About Anishjai

India's Leading Motivational Speaker on Leadership, Guest Lecturer, Sales, Branding, Innovation & Peak Performance, Educational Revolution, “Make in India” Promoter.

Anish Jai, an entrepreneur and professional corporate trainer and guest lecturer who stands for innovation studies. His company facilitates the business sector by providing practical, interactive and fun filled activity based trainings to the corporate sector and Technical students through workshops, seminars and guest lecturer. He stands for innovation studies. Anish Jai tops the list among the best motivational speakers and guest lecturer in India. As a keynote speaker he conducts corporate training sessions in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Goa, & pan Asia on leadership, sales, innovation, change management, customer service, Educational Revolution and peak performance.

What is Guest Lecturer ?

A guest lecturer is an individual who possesses advanced knowledge of a particular subject area, and who speaks about that subject area to a group or organization with which he is normally not involved. Beyond this basic definition, the exact nature of guest lecturing can vary widely. In the university context, a guest lecturer is often a faculty member who is invited to speak to a class he does not normally teach. Guest lecturers are also commonly invited to address professional and social organizations as well as elementary and secondary school groups.

Generally, the purpose of this arrangement is to enrich a course through the inclusion of relevant, specialized knowledge which that course’s normal lecturer does not possess. For instance, a professor teaching a course in modernist literature may invite a colleague from the university’s architecture department to deliver a guest lecture on early 20th century urban landscapes. By adding context, the information contained in the guest lecture may then broaden students’ understanding of literary texts from this period.

For example, asking a research librarian to discuss effective literature search strategies before assigning a research project gives students not only the “just in time” information but also some long-term skills. But a word of caution if you have students who are new to higher education make sure students understand that they are just as responsible for mastering content from guest lecturers as they are for mastering the content you provide.

It is also common for professional organizations, social clubs, and elementary and secondary school groups to invite a guest lecturer to speak to them on some relevant topic. A hiking club, for instance, may ask an ecologist to deliver a lecture on minimizing environmental impact during hiking trips. Elementary or secondary schools often invite local municipal figures such as police officers and firefighters to give lectures on educational topics, like how to behave around strangers or how to minimize the chance of fire in one’s home.

Some guest lecturers of this type may be working professionals who are simply taking a break from their normal jobs, while others may be retired professionals or may even work full time on a guest lecture circuit.

Tips for Creating a Responsive WordPress Site

In this blog we are going to see eight different ways of building a responsive WordPress site. For some of you, nothing is more appealing than to build a site from scratch, but that’s not necessary unless you’re a hard-core programmer. Instead, we’ll look at tools and methods to make the process easier.  

1. Brainstorming: A great way to begin is to make use of a mind map and write out the    various components you want to put into your site. This process only takes a few minutes. You can switch to using a storyboard or a flow chart and plan out the look and feel of your site. Once that’s done, you can start building your site.  

2. Mobile First: One option is to consider building the mobile interface first, partly because it will have many layout restrictions. By building the mobile interface first, you’ll get a sense of what will work for all devices.  

3.  Photoshop: Use Photoshop or other image design programs (such as Illustrator or CorelDRAW) to mock up the layout so you can see the finished result for desktop, tablet and mobile. With the new functionality in both Photoshop CC and Reflow CC, you can quickly export the Photoshop design to be used in Reflow, where it can then be cleaned up and refined. After that, you can transfer the CSS to another program, such as Dreamweaver, to complete the design.  

4. Ready-Made Design and Themes: A simple way of meeting your needs is to take advantage of themes that are already built for you. If one closely matches your design concept, it could be a simple matter to modify the design, which will save you a lot of time. As mentioned earlier, you can also use Adobe Dreamweaver, which has some useful site layout tools.  

5. Plugins: Plugins can add quite a bit to your design and some of these will allow you to build layouts for your site. Two examples are the OptimizePress plugin and WordPress Landing Pages.

6. Navigation is Key: A crucial part of your design is considering the navigation; it’s placement on your pages and whether you have a simple navigation bar or drop down menus. The navigation is important to the look and feel of your site and it’s especially important with mobile, because of the size and making it easy to select items with your fingertip. Too large and the design will seem clunky; too small and it will be difficult to make selections.   

7.  Building a Mobile Site: One solution to building a mobile site is to make use of either a plugin or a standalone product that will produce a mobile site. For a plugin, have a look at WPTouch. For a mobile CMS (content management system), I recommend goMobi, which you can purchase from resellers such as OpenSRS or HostPapa. I like thegoMobi interface because it’s simple to use and you can build a mobile site within a few hours or less, depending on the amount of content you want to use.   

8.  SEO Friendly Design: When you have a SEO friendly structure, you are increasing your chances of ranking higher in search engines such as Google and others. Which by default are the largest source of new visitors to any website. In our experience with SEO, we have seen that Google gives extra weight to the URL structure. I recommended to all Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin it is more user-friendly comparing to others.  

Conclusion As you can see, there are many different ways of building a responsive WordPress site. It’s also important to note that there’s no such thing as a design standard for these themes and programs. Each is different and you might have to experiment with one or more to find what works for you. At Ascenteq Inc we are familiar in creating customized wordpress development with lowest price comparing to all. 

To know more pls contact : +91 (805) 608 7385 or mail us to info@ascenteq.com     

Why Pinterest Is Banning Affiliate Links

Pinterest has lowered the hammer on affiliate links—a way for social-media users to make a small commission in return for recommending a product. Ostensibly, the move helps keep the site tidy. But unsurprisingly, money is also involved.

According to an email many pinners received Thursday, Pinterest is removing all affiliate links on "pins," the Pinterest term for a image-centric post. The pins themselves will remain live, but Pinterest is officially encouraging users to find other means of making money on the visually oriented social network.

Pinterest has been removing affiliate links for some time. But as the email outlines, it had made an exception for two fashion affiliate programs, RewardStyle and HelloSociety. Pinners enrolled in these programs would make a small cut when people clicked on pin links that included the pinner’s affiliate ID and made a purchase. It's probable that these two programs were permitted longer than others were because they deal chiefly with fashion and design related links—two of Pinterest's most popular subjects—and exclusively limit who can sign up to join, which likely reduced spam. 

"We’re making this change for a few reasons: removing redirects and affiliates will keep Pinterest running quickly, smoothly, and prevent Rich Pins from breaking,” the email said.

Rich pins, a type of pinned image that automatically features relevant information—say, a map, address and phone number for a "place pin"—depend on an accurate link in order to fill in metadata. According to Pinterest, an affiliate ID tagged onto a link could mess with that instant process.

This isn’t the first time Pinterest has restricted organic behavior on its platform in an effort to improve performance. Last year, the company heavily restricted “Pin It To Win It” contests held by brands. While the site originally allowed brands to encourage pinners to repin the same picture of a prize over and over in order to raffle it off, Pinterest later changed its mind.

From the Pinterest guidelines for brands: “Don’t… Require people to add Pins from a selection—let them add what they like.” From the site's perspective, hundreds of people repinning a picture of, say, a purse can mislead Pinterest’s algorithms, potentially assigning that pin undeserved importance in its relevance score. Affiliate linking can likewise lead to spam and bad algorithmic inferences. 

While some Pinterest users are upset that they will no longer enjoy small commissions, this isn’t a move likely to bother power pinners. Many of Pinterest’s most popular users opt for approved brand partnerships, in which they guest-pin items on a brand’s pinboard, and encourage their millions of followers to check it out. 

Furthermore, with news that Pinterest is working to implement a “Buy” button in mere months, as Recode reports, it’s hard not to draw a connection. By retiring user commissions, Pinterest is paving a path to potentially draw commissions for itself on every product recommendation made. 

Pinterest has told that its primary motive is to make it easy for pinners to find useful, relevant images, but the company has got to be feeling the pressure from its many investors. Valuated at $5 billion last May, it’s about time for the company to indicate that it’s finally ready to make money on its own. 

Update: Pinterest said the affiliate link ban is purely about user experience. 

"This is not about monetization, this is 100% about the Pinner experience and ensuring relevant content on Pinterest," a spokesperson said.

- readwrite