UseTheForceLuc.com

Coffee, CSS and WordPress Administration

Welcome!

My name is Luc Arnold. I am a father of 3, husband of 1 who lives in Ilderton, Ontario (Just outside of London). I created UseTheForceLuc.com is a blog I created to showcase various WordPress Administration tips and tricks. Enjoy!

WordPress Gutenberg is here but what does it mean to you?

CMS Platform Reviews

I’ve got to say that the first time I saw WordPress 5.0 (also known as “Gutenberg”) I thought to myself “wow, this is different” and to be completely honest, I wasn’t sure I even liked it.  For those of you who haven’t updated your version of WordPress you’re probably used to this view…

From its comfy box layout, buttons to help you style and format your content to the text/visual views that you can quickly toggle between.  See, now do you remember how comfy that user interface was?  Now, with the Gutenberg interface, the first thing you will notice is that the interface relies on what they call “blocks” which are in this case are content blocks, even the title section is a block in essence.

When you start developing content in WordPress Gutenberg you’ll notice that the blocks you develop can be styled and formatted in various ways.  You can use blocks to do a ton of things including (but NOT limited to)…

  • Headings
  • Paragraphs
  • Lists
  • Images
  • Galleries
  • Audio/Files/Videos/Covers
  • Quotes
  • Layout Elements (Buttons/Columns/Media/Page Breaks/ Tables and more)
  • Widgets
  • Embeds (Various Social Media)

If you haven’t upgraded to Gutenberg (aka WordPress 5.0) I’d suggest testing it out first either through a demo or reviews (just like this one).  Another thing you are going to want to do is check to make sure that the WordPress theme you are running currently doesn’t go crazy after you upgrade by testing it first.

Shopify Review

Ecommerce Platform Review

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that uses a subscription (SaaS) model that allows merchants to sign up for ecommerce functionality right out of the box.  Here are a few quick stats on Shopify…

  • Shopify powers 600,000 businesses
  • Shopify has over 1,000,000 active users
  • Over $82 Billion is sold on Shopify

In my review of Shopify we will cover a number of questions to help you make the best decision in selecting an ecommerce platform that suits your needs.

How Can Shopify Help My Business Sell?

The interesting this is that Shopify is an ecommerce platform but with that said they’ve positioned themselves in such a way that they offer solutions to fit a wide variety of business models including…

  • Online aka traditional ecommerce
  • Point of Sale (POS)
  • Buy Button
  • Facebook Shops
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Amazon
  • Ebay
  • Enterprise aka “Shopify Plus”

What Shopify seems to understand is that not everyone is going to have a need to have a full ecommerce site on Shopify and that is where the options that they provide business owners really help expand the way that people are doing business these days from adding Buy Buttons on a traditional CMS site or blog, through a Facebook Shop, selling on Amazon or having a POS option for a physical brick and mortar store or a mobile specialist like consulting agencies, delivery companies, self employed business owners and the list goes on.

How much is Shopify going to cost me?

Shopify is setup for beginners all the way up to enterprise businesses and offers a number of price points to suite each level of user including

Basic Shopify – Price: $29/month –  This package offers a whole host of features that beginner merchants will find to be a very robust ecommerce platform including ability to sell unlimited products, 24 x 7 support, Sales channels, abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, manual order creation, fraud analysis, Shopify POS app,

Shopify* – Price: $79/month – This package offers all the one’s that Basic Shopify offers and more including gift cards, professional reports, up to 37% shipping discounts, online Canadian credit card processing rates of 2.7% + 30 cents, Online international/ AMEX credit card rates 3.4% + 30 cents, in person credit processing rate = 2.6% + $0, register shifts, hardware peripheral support

Advanced Shopify* – Price: $299/month – This package offers all the features of Basic Shopify and Shopify plus an advanced report building, Third Party Calculated Shipping rates, a shipping discount up to 40%,  online Canadian credit card processing rates of 2.4% + 30 cents, Online international/ AMEX credit card rates 3.3% + 30 cents, in person credit processing rate = 2.4% + $0, register shifts, hardware peripheral support

If none of those options sound like you there is also a Shopify Lite for $9/month is a option that is targeted website owners and bloggers looking for a quick and easy payment processing option.  And finally, Shopify Plus is their enterprise business package that scale to larger businesses.

What is Shopify’s support like?

Shopify is one of those companies that focuses not so much just a customer support experience but a customer success experience.  Outside of resources being available around the clock to answer your questions they also have a great deal of self service options from guides, free tools, podcasts, success stories, an App Store, a Theme Store to the Shopify Academy, a kind of offering focused on setting up their customers for success that includes everything from live workshops, on-demand training, business tools and a community.

Does Shopify Offer Free Tools to Help Me Run My Business?

In a word, yes they do.  But let’s dig a little bit deeper and define what Shopify offers in the way of free tools.  The truth is that they are constantly working on building out their ecommerce platform capabilities so much so that they offer an option for people interested to stay up to date on the latest free tool offerings the ability to receive an email when something new is released. Cool!  In terms of what exists today here is a list as of November 6, 2018:

  • Logo Maker
  • Business Name Generator
  • Slogan Maker
  • Pay stub generator
  • QR Code Generator
  • Terms and Conditions Generator
  • Business Card Maker
  • Gift certificate template
  • Invoice Generator
  • Purchase Order template
  • Privacy Policy Generator
  • Shipping label template
  • Refund Policy Generator
  • Bill of lading template
  • Barcode Generator
  • Image Resizer
  • Business loan Calculator
  • CPM Calculator
  • Profit Margin Calculator
  • Exchange Marketplace

How Easy Or Hard Is It To Design a Site for My Business in Shopify?

This is the million dollar question with any ecommerce or CMS.  If you don’t have the ability to hire a web designer or developer to help you create a truly awesome ecommerce site naturally this becomes the next question.  There are a few options available to you including…

  • Buying a Shopify Theme and customizing it yourself
  • Sticking to standard templates that Shopify offers its customer base
  • Rolling up your sleeves that learning to design, code and develop with the best of them

If you have some technical ability and time (of course) to learn the basic ins and outs of Shopify I’d say learn how to develop an ecommerce site yourself.  You’ll learn how to run your online business and fix potential issues.  If that doesn’t work for you and you have the money to hire someone, Shopify is a pretty established platform that seasoned developers and designers should be able to help you configure to your business’ needs.  With all that said, I’m still a fan of prebuilt and ready to go themes that require minimal setup to start using, you can usually get one for relatively little money when you compare to hiring a web designer or developer.

Does Shopify Integrate with Third Party Apps?

Shopify has a lot of integration partners so that you can focus on running your business.  Some companies have built functionality that allows you to extend the functionality of their ecommerce platform thanks to Shopify’s App Store.

The Shopify App Store boasts a number of categories of apps for finding products, places to sell, store design, marketing, sales and conversions, orders and shipping, inventory management, customer support, trust and security, finances, productivity and reporting

What Does Shopify’s Backend UI Look and Feel Like?

As you can see below, the user interface that Shopify has in place is very clean and easy to understand at first glance.  The left hand column has sections for order management, products, customers, analytics, marketing discounts and Apps and even dives into various Sales Channels you can have in Shopify.  The right side navigation on the hand is more of a snapshot view of the health of your business including metrics on Total Sales, Total Sales Breakdown, Total Sales by Channel, Top Product, Activity. Another area to note as you see this for the first time is that in the middle section has a wizard for doing some of those key things that most store owners want to do including adding products, customizing your theme and adding a domain so you can personalize your Shopify store to suit your business.

What Are Shopify’s Customers Saying About Shopify?

The proof is in the pudding which is why if you can get your customers talking about you and evangelizing your product your gold. Shopify has produced a number of success stories built around various ecommerce stores including clothing, books, art & photography, pets, electronics, food and more. Here are a few stories that really stuck out but you can read any you’re interested here.

Managed vs Unmanaged Website Hosting

Product Reviews, Tech Reviews

Hosting a website is one of those topics that can be obscure like talking about insurance, everybody needs it but few really understand it.  Its so customizable, so extendable, so easy to use and host but do you really understand your options.  This brings me to the topic of whether you want to have your website hosted using a managed hosting service or an unmanaged (aka “shared hosted”) for your site.  Sure you may have the technical chops to host a website yourself but if you’d rather focus on building your business and having a service to take care of the nitpicky details of keeping your site safe, up to date and supported.  In this article I’m going talk about what each are, some pricing comparisons to help give the land of the land in terms of costs, features related to both and pros and cons of each option and some of the top picks if you are looking at managed or unmanaged hosting.

What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

Managed hosting is not your mom and dad’s hosting package.  Outside of access to a server, the server’s operating system and software to help you run a website what managed hosting usually includes are services like automated backups, malware scanning and removal, status monitoring, globally distributed data centers, 24/7 support, a team monitoring performance,

What is Unmanaged WordPress Hosting?

Unmanaged hosting is really your traditional hosting package where you get access to a server to install applications such as WordPress.  It doesn’t include any services that the hosting company will use to “manage” the server for you.

What is the price difference on managed vs unmanaged hosting?

Naturally when you are thinking of unmanaged vs managed hosting, unmanaged is going to cost you a lot less.  Some pricing I’ve pulled from a few industry leaders in the area of hosting include…

GoDaddy

Managed Hosting Option – WP Premium Support starts from $63.99 per month for 1 site

Unmanaged Hosting Option – Website hosting starts from $4.99 per month for 1 site

1&1 IONOS

Managed Hosting Option – Managed Cloud (PaaS) starting from $10 per month (they have a number of packages up to $355 per month)

Unmanaged Hosting Option – Business hosting for 1 website starts from $1 per month (for the first year and then $8 per month after that)

BlueHost

Managed Hosting Option – Managed WordPress hosting Build plan starts at $19.95 per month (normally $29.99 per month)

Unmanaged Hosting Option – Shared Hosting Basic plan starts at $2.95 per month (normally $7.99 per month)

DreamHost

Managed Hosting Option – DreamPress hosting plan starts at $16.95 per month

Unmanaged Hosting Option – Shared Hosting Basic plan starts at $2.59 per month

As you can see, the cost is significantly more when you start to consider managed hosting over unmanaged hosting.  Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of managed vs unmanaged website hosting.

What are the Pros and Cons of Managed Hosting?

Pros

  • Managed hosting means fewer headaches of running a website yourself
  • protection from malware attacks and security issues – these are things you will have to fix yourself or hire someone to fix when they happen if you go the unmanaged route
  • scalability – your site has room to grow and your traffic increases
  • Help available when you need it – Most managed hosting plans boast 24×7 support and managed data centers

Cons

  • Cost – its going to cost you significantly more
  • Too much too soon – Its important to understand what you are buying – some of the features if you are just starting a blog or website might not benefit you the same way if you run an established website

What are the Pros and Cons of Unmanaged Hosting?

Pros

  • Price – Definitely the cheapest option if you just want to get a website running

Cons

  • Limited Support – usually its not going to be as easy to get someone to help when you need it
  • Site backups not standard – could be an option but it might be a more manual process should something happen
  • performance is not as scalable – shared hosting means “shared” for a reason and can affect page loads when your sharing resources with more people
  • Steep learning curve – If you are new to hosting a website you are going to have to learn the basics or hire someone to help you get setup should you have malware or performance issues on your site

 

Product Review – Divi 3.0 WordPress Theme and Visual Page Builder

Product Reviews

Elegant Themes has created this excellent WordPress Theme called Divi and I must admit that when I was first taking a look at this theme I thought to myself “This is probably going to be like most other WordPress themes out there” but I was wrong.  With most WordPress Theme developers on the net today they usually charge you by the theme so when a new theme comes out you have to buy another theme.  The first thing I noticed with Elegant themes is that they charge a yearly fee for access to all their themes starting at $69 a year which is down right affordable.  I’ve long been a lover of StudioPress but after reviewing Elegant themes I am seriously questioning a switch to a different theme provider.

Now if that wasn’t reason enough to look at Elegant Themes, Divi provides an excellent value proposition because most people complain about having to code websites.  Its a hazard of this technology because it allows for such great customization.  Lately there has been a shift in the web design community to focus on giving greater control of the user interface (the visual design of your web pages) and removing complexity.  Now does Divi deliver on that?  Let’s take a look…

A Deeper Dive…

While the video they provide is great, I personally wanted to take a deeper dive and look at the functionality up close while reviewing this product.  In doing so I focused in looking at the following

Caching/Performance – does it seem slow or clunky? – The first thing that I was surprised about was how quick it is to make changes on the fly.  It didn’t buffer at all as it loaded or as I used it.

Navigation – How easy is it to understand and use? – Its pretty intuitive to use Divi.  When you hover over a specific area on the theme one of the first things I noticed was that a menu pops up and the area you are editing is highlighted.  The menu is fairly robust allowing you to do everything from editing the layout of an element on your website to customizing rows and other CSS options.

Ease of Customization – How easily could you use this? – Its very easy to customize the text, fonts and what I like about it is that it doesn’t just appeal to the novice or newbie web designers out there.  If you’ve written custom CSS classes you can reference them as well as you customize.  You can also “templatize” items you are developing for later use in Divi making it quicker and easier to customize even the more advanced sites.


Divi 3.0 has a base price of $89 per year and not only includes access to Divi 3.0 but all of Elegant Themes catalog for a year which is an awesome value. Its hard to go wrong with looking at Divi as a serious WordPress Theme that you could use to setup a website, run your online business and be able to do it yourself.  For professional web designers Elegant Themes is a solid choice to inject your own style with a solid theme framework that is very versatile. Couple that with the fact that you’ve got a very neat interface to build it in real time without a lot of coder (for you newbies out there) and the fact that you can “templatize” certain elements on your web pages for later use makes Divi a great choice for your next WordPress theme.

Shopify Introduces Ping for Merchants who want to build a stronger ecommerce experience

Product Reviews, Tech Reviews

Shopify continues to innovate the somewhat traditional space of ecommerce.  Recently they released an app called “Ping” which does two key things.  It gives you a way to stay engaged with all your customers by keeping all their messages in one place.  It integrates with Facebook Messenger, Chatkit and Rep.ai (they are working adding more soon) to pull down all messages so you can spend less time having to switch between apps.

What it also does is using Kit, an existing Shopify feature that is like a virtual employee that helps you boost sales, and helps you handle your marketing.  It does this by helping you automate…

  • Facebook and Instagram Ads
  • Retargeting Campaigns
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Email Marketing
  • Sourcing Inventory
  • Social Media Posts

Here’s a brief video about how Kit works…

The only real downside using Ping currently is that it’s only available for iOS so no android version just yet but from the sounds of it this is something that might already be in development as Shopify is collecting email addresses so they can notify interested people once its ready.  It will be interesting to see how Ping is adopted and enhanced by merchants but it definitely helps merchants run their businesses more effectively.

Product Review – Pretty Links

Product Reviews, Website Tips

Pretty Links is a plugin that I’ve personally used for years now in managing WordPress sites.  Because I do a lot of affiliate marketing on my sites I like the plugin for its ability to cloak links and take a very verbose link structures with something that is clean, professional and short.  It also offers the ability to track clicks, sources, etc with respect to each pretty link you create and group them in any way you want.

Pretty Links in available in a free version with the base functionality that allows you to do a lot.  For those of you looking for a little more power Pretty Links offers 3 versions depending on your needs.  If you own 1 WordPress site then chances are the “Beginner” option for $57/year will probably work for you as there is a lot available under the hood.  The “Marketer” option for $97/year will work if you manage up to 10 WordPress sites that you want to use Pretty Links on.  It has the same functionality and features as the “Beginner” option but it gives you the option to use REST API’s (coming soon) and Social Sharing Plugin Integrations (also coming soon) if you need these features the “Marketer” and “Executive” packages will be providing this however the “Beginner” package will NOT.  Finally the Executive package has the same features as the “Marketer” package but it allows you to use Pretty Links on up to 25 WordPress sites at a cost of $197/year.  For a full list of the features of each package click here to read more.

Now that you know a little bit about Pretty Links let me show you how you can create your first Pretty Link on your WordPress site.  To do this you will need to install Pretty Links on your WordPress site.  Once its installed it should show on your left side nav when you are logged into your WordPress site and called “Pretty Links”.  When you click the link you’ll see that you have the option to look at your Pretty Links, Add New Links, Groups, Tracking, Tools, Options and Upgrade to Pro.  For the purposes of what I am showing you click “Add New Link” and it will take you to a page that resembles this…

What you will notice is that you’ve got the options to set what type of redirection you want the link to take when clicked (307, 302 (both temporary redirects) and 301 (permanent)) your target URL which is the link you want to drive your audience to whether its an affiliate link, a landing page or a downloadable PDF, it should work.  Then you can name your Pretty Link (Pretty Links will add characters in there by default but I like to personalize mine especially if I am tracking something to make it easier to understand when I am analyzing the results later. Next, you can give your link a Title and Description which again makes it easier to figure out what the link is in the first place and from their you can click and create your first Pretty Link.  If you want to use the Advanced Options section you will notice that you can Group your links which helps when you want to analyze traffic through those links, you can also “No Follow” the link so that search engines don’t follow it and try to index, Parameter forwarding which passes extra parameters of a link (say an affiliate link) to the source allowing you to get credit for referrals and tracking so you can track the clicks.  If you haven’t done so you can click the “Create” button and you will have your first Pretty link ready to go.

In terms of inserting the link into your WordPress site’s pages and posts you can either copy and paste the link from the Pretty Links section into the content you want or use the “Insert Pretty Link” button available when you are editing your pages or posts.  As you can see its pretty easy to find as its denoted with the “Star” icon in the editor.

What I really like most about this plugin is that its super easy to use, even if your a beginner and the fact that you can use some of the features in a free version makes it a great tool for all even if you don’t have a need for the functionality that the paid plugin versions offer.  In terms of website management and link management, being able to manage your links and understand where your traffic goes, what the people on your website like and don’t like is important and I find that Pretty Link gives me the ability to understand some of these patterns.

 

 

 

 

Read My Blog

WordPress Gutenberg is here but what does it mean to you?

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I’ve got to say that the first time I saw WordPress 5.0 (also known as “Gutenberg”) I thought to myself “wow, this is different” and to be completely honest, I wasn’t sure I even liked it.  For those of you who haven’t updated your version of WordPress you’re probably used to this view… From its […]

Shopify Review

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What is Shopify? Shopify is an ecommerce platform that uses a subscription (SaaS) model that allows merchants to sign up for ecommerce functionality right out of the box.  Here are a few quick stats on Shopify… Shopify powers 600,000 businesses Shopify has over 1,000,000 active users Over $82 Billion is sold on Shopify In my […]

Managed vs Unmanaged Website Hosting

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Hosting a website is one of those topics that can be obscure like talking about insurance, everybody needs it but few really understand it.  Its so customizable, so extendable, so easy to use and host but do you really understand your options.  This brings me to the topic of whether you want to have your […]

Product Review – Pretty Links

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Pretty Links is a plugin that I’ve personally used for years now in managing WordPress sites.  Because I do a lot of affiliate marketing on my sites I like the plugin for its ability to cloak links and take a very verbose link structures with something that is clean, professional and short.  It also offers […]

Website Tip – How to Fix Broken Links in WordPress

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In terms of website administration, broken links just happen over time.  If you’ve got a site that is 6 months to a year old I’d guarantee its got at least a few broken links. Unfortunately you can’t rely on your visitors to tell you about them, I mean how many times have you emailed a […]

3 things WP Engine’s Acquisition of StudioPress means

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I’ve long been a fan of StudioPress and over the years its really become my go-to platform for WordPress development, not to mention that their WordPress themes are awesome, solidly built for use and can scale to meet even the most beginner WordPress user out there.  I was surprised to hear about this acquisition today […]

How to Exclude Your Traffic from Google Analytics

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If you are running a website today then chances are you are in there tracking traffic to your website.  Google Analytics is a tool I’ve personally come to know and use over the years.  While tracking traffic to your website is great, if you aren’t excluding your own personal traffic you are inflating the numbers […]