Wheaton Website Services Blog

Top Reason to Use Microdata on Your Website

February 22, 2017 by Jim King Leave a Comment

Never heard of microdata? You’re not alone but knowing what it is and using microdata on your website will improve page rankings, click-through rates and user experience.

Microdata is an HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_%28HTML%29

Microdata is not intended for the user to see. It’s there to help search engines better understand the content on your page. Some examples of the hundred’s of elements are:

Product Price
Product Image
Product Name
Reviews
Availability, i.e. in stock.

Yelp uses microdata to tag star ratings, number of reviews and price range on their website. This lets Google understand what those elements are and allows them to display that data specifically in the search results. This data makes it easy for a searcher to understand quickly.

What is Microdata

People don’t read websites (you’re the exception reading this), they scan them looking for what they want and where to click next. If you can provide information in an easy to read/scan format, more people will notice and take action.

Microdata elements for anything

No matter what you are selling or offering on your website, there’s a good chance there is a microdata element for it. The hundreds of elements are broken out into groups, such as:

People
Recipes
Products
Place
Organization
and even Thing

As searchers get better at searching and more precise in their search terms, providing more precise data to the search engines will only help those people find you more often.

Zen Cart and WordPress and most other platforms all allow microdata in one way or another. If you are not using it, at least some of your competitors are. As the saying goes, if your standing still, someone is passing you by.

Zen Cart 1.5.5d Released

January 2, 2017 by Jim King Leave a Comment

Zen Cart Version 1.5.5 The Zen Cart team has released a new version of Zen Cart, version 1.5.5d. This new version includes all the bug fixes and patches since the first version in the 1.5.5 series was released in March of 2016. Many of the highlights are listed below, but this is not a complete list. Our recommendation is always to be on the current version so you can benefit from the improvements and avoid any issues these now fixed bugs might cause. For further details on why, see our post why to apply patches and updates.

To upgrade, please contact us for a quote.

Version d includes a few minor fixes to version c. Version c was primarily the fix to the security vulnerability with the embedded PHPMailer software but also included a few other items since they were completed and ready as well. Versions a and b included a number of fixes and patches. Depending on your current version, your could get some or all of these improvements.

Fix several upgrade-related problems caused by zero-dates in the customers table data/history
Revamp admin sanitization code to work better with various plugins such as Edit Orders, etc
Admin orders page had some incorrect CSS classes specified
Admin customers page had some incorrect HTML tags for span and bold markup
Admin “Support” link restored to navigation menu
Admin – fix privilege escalation vulnerability
Fix missing SEARCH_DEFAULT_TEXT, ERROR_GV_CREATE_ACCOUNT and TEXT_PRICED_BY_ATTRIBUTES language defines
The zc_install test for availability of SSL and .htaccess could fail due to timeouts when offline
The zc_install “configure.php file update” was not always handling conversion of old SSL URLs properly
Fix “uninitialized string offset” error in zen_random_name()
Fix sort-order of shipping/payment modules when sort-orders are multiple digits
Responsive Classic: Fix alignment/display of State Dropdown element on address pages
Fix to inability to choose from address-book during checkout, and fix double “continue” buttons on same page
Order comments flag was showing incorrectly on PayPal EC transactions
Restore define for DIR_WS_HTTPS_ADMIN for legacy plugin purposes
Added several .gitignore files in various folders, to help site developers avoid committing unnecessary files to version control
For language-specific currency overrides, fix the default
Fix bindvars to honor string entries that contain ‘null’
add safety to fmod_round
Fix extra breadcrumb that was appearing when always-open-with-category is enabled
Update BOC currency parsing to cope with their data changes and division-by-zero errors as a result
Fix a test-mode bug in Authorizenet AIM module
Fix Chrome browser javascript incompatibility
Several fixes to the Admin Sanitizer rules, to stop translating special characters to html entities unexpectedly
Fixes from Known bugs and fixes with v1.5.5
Fix some HTML markup “strict” errors, and CSS alignments in various admin pages
Relocate shipping-calculation logic in checkout page, to be consistent with other checkout calculations and prevent some shipping rate errors
Template fix to Responsive Classic to change postal-code to no longer be numeric-only
Change authorize.net module to use Akamai servers
Fix Payeezy payment module tokenization problem, and fix sandbox mode problem
Fix some javascript on checkout pages related to form submission
Fix out-of-stock alert inconsistency
Trigger E_USER_ERROR when wrong bindVars rule set
Update gv_faq language file with community contributions
Change use of PHP_SELF to SCRIPT_NAME for consistency and to avoid legacy-related problems
Fix false-positives in error-reporting logic
Fix leftover indirection variables for PHP7 compatibility
Fixes to AJAX handlers: reject fake requests; persist session data more effectively
Change CKEditor trigger to use jQuery CDN instead of Google CDN, for broader global access
Upgrade PHPMailer to accommodate broader TLS compatibility
Accommodate MasterCard’s recent BIN 2 addition
Include responsive-classic template layout-boxes in upgrades, even if not using it, for sake of cloning simplicity
Template fix: fax field was showing even if disabled
Template fix: fix “back” button on address-book edit screens during checkout
Multilanguage: make hreflang tag appear for all languages, instead of only for “other than current” language
Fix admin link to whois resource
Fix checkout_shipping: No method chosen after cart goes from virtual to mixed
Handle mysql strict typing issue with legacy PayPal IPN insert
Fix Free Shipping tax calculation with ot_coupon
Added several helper functions to shopping_cart class for calculating in-cart properties related to categories
Fixes a critical bug in PHPMailer

To upgrade, please contact us for a quote.

One Page Checkout for Zen Cart

December 10, 2016 by Jim King Leave a Comment

A new One Page Checkout for Zen Cart makes checkout faster. Website businesses are always looking to make things easier for our visitors. That is most true during the checkout process. Once a visitor has found something they want to purchase, the checkout should be as quick and painless as possible.

Reducing clutter and distractions, such as hiding the left and right columns during checkout help. Amazon, the king of e-commerce has done this for years. Fewer distractions for the shopper means they are focused only on completing the checkout steps, just as we want them to do.

One Page Checkout for Zen Cart helps improve conversion rates.

By combining the billing and shipping options into one page, there are fewer steps to checkout. Fewer steps = high conversion rates. All order option appear on one page (see below) making the process simpler and faster for shoppers.

Simpler and faster means higher conversion rates.

There is another plugin that offers combined checkout pages but I’ve never recommended it. It is bloated and overly complex for what it does. This One Page Checkout for Zen Cart is simple and light weight. It is also responsive, i.e. mobile friendly. This makes is a great option if you are still using the default Zen Cart checkout process of four pages.

For more information or to have us install this One Page Checkout for Zen Cart, contact us!