The full shop experience!

• You wish to fly utilize extended and advanced features of your online shop, such as combining products in cool ways to encourage more sales.  You also want to sell physical items, with virtual items such as downloads, promotional event tickets, resource bookings, appointments, and memberships with subscription renewals (automated).
• Consider our Managed WordPress Hosting, Pro Shop Set-up, and further training to fully exploit the possibilities of your online shop.

Your web site needs a place to exist, a computer (server) connected to the internet at high speed to your site visitors, members and customers.   Several levels of hosting are available.  We offer upgradeable hosting suitable for those starting out right up to enterprise scale.  Some web applications, such as Moodle, require special configuration of memory and hard disk space as well as server software settings.  We can ensure all is correct for your needs. Standard Hosting includes cPanel, which offers tools to manage files and email accounts as well to install a content management system such as WordPress.  This hosting is for those who can take it from there. Managed Hosting means you don’t have to worry about updates and backups.  We take care of that for your, for less than a dollar a day. If you give us domain management account details, we can take care of DNS (hosting re-direction) to point your registered domain to our servers.  If you need help with any of this, please let us know.  If you need extra storage space, that can be negotiated.

Sometimes all you need is a simple About Page and Contact details for your business, or perhaps you just want a space to blog.  You probably don’t need to invest valuable time learning how your web site works, delaying your launch and diverting you from other priorities. We can set up for you very quickly, so you can get on with things.

A combination of web site content management system (CMS) such as WordPress with a leading e-commerce plugin such as WooCommerce is sufficient for many businesses.  The core functions enable product listings and payment gateway for fixed and variable products, both physical and virtual.  This can be set up very quickly for you. Standard Shop provides you with a pre-installed WordPress CMS including all the e-commerce functions of an online shop to sell physical and virtual products.  If you give us all the necessary details, we can take care of initial configuration as well.  Else, if you wish, you can do this yourself. The real work is in entering and configuring the product listings, and also in tweaking the design, as well as the SEO (search engine optimisation) and external marketing.  It is very difficult to gauge how much time and effort is required for all these because they critically depend on many factors, and so the basic price we quote is for the functional set up. We are also happy to help you in these areas, but they are quoted separately.

Although the core functions of WordPress and WooCommerce are impressive, the greatest advantage of each of these are the hundreds of plugins and extensions which many talented people have added.  You might need a membership/subscription function, or a learning management system (read this), or you may need more flexibility in displaying and bundling your products and services.  For these we recommend the excellent array of Woocommerce extensions, many of which are premium but still represent excellent value for money if they help you make sales. Pro Shop offers pre-installation and testing the most common of these for you., including product bundling tools, membership, and subscriptions. We then offer advice as to which additional extensions might be useful and cost-effective.  As for Standard Shop, significant work is in entering and configuring the product listings, as well as the SEO (search engine optimization) and external marketing.  This is quoted separately, or you can do this yourself.

Although there are many learning management systems available, we generally offer two options: WordPress LMS (Sensei) and/or Moodle. Sensei is a Woocommerce plugin which integrates nicely with the shopping cart functions of this leader in e-commerce for WordPress.  Basically, you can offer course enrolment in combination with other products on your site but it also means that you can employ all the sales and marketing tools that have been developed with WordPress in mind.  The course management functions of Sensei are fine for simple courses but it lacks a sophisticated gradebook – which for many small business needs is not needed. However teaching or training, especially where assessment and record-keeping are required, does need a gradebook function. Moodle is a fully-fledged enterprise-strength learning management system used by many schools and universities.  It is a competitor for commercial products such as Blackboard.  However, since it is open-source and supported by a large volunteer community of teachers and academics, it is also suitable for very small scales.  A small school or RTO, or even an individual teacher or private tutor could use it.  The challenge (from a hosting perspective) is allocating appropriate system resources, and (from a user perspective) the relatively steep learning curve for teachers and unusual interface for students. Moodle has many strengths, such as its powerful gradebook, but it is a weak link in any marketing strategy.  It is difficult to theme and brand, and has basic payment gateway capabilities.  It was designed without marketing or sales as priorities. Integration between Moodle and WordPress.  It is possible to integrate these two web applications – meaning that user databases are shared and synchronised (to some extent).  A third-party bridge is installed from both ends.  We use Edwiser for this.  There is a free component for a simple integration, and there are premium extensions for more sophisticated integration with the Woocommerce shopping cart.  These enable you to bundle Moodle courses with other items in your shop such as saleable resources and event tickets, as well as employing useful marketing tools such as coupons. Proper integration between Moodle and WordPress gives you the best of both worlds at a very reasonable price outlay.  What is important, though is ensuring the underlying server hardware and software can support your needs.  This is important with Moodle, and especially when running quizzes with a lot of students logging on simultaneously.  We take care of this.

Face-to-face training on any aspect of your web site and hosting.   Everyone has different needs and starting points in their knowledge and experience.   Some things make sense for you to learn, while others may be more effective outsourced. Our training is adaptable for you.

Getting your web site up and running is no small effort, but there is still much to do.  Writing editorial content and blog posts may not be your strength.  Tweaking for search engines is a fine art.   Social marketing is a fast-moving field of expertise. We can provide specialist support in these areas so you can focus on running your business.