Happy Birthday to Woo(commerce)

Today is the 5th anniversary of the release of Woocommerce, the eCommerce platform the engine behind almost 40% of online stores and the one I recommend for artists, makers, and businesses selling products online. To celebrate five years of empowering people to start their own, independent online stores, I’m writing a 2016 in Woocommerce Review. Let’s take a look back at the highlights of past twelve months because age certainly isn’t slowing Woocommerce down!

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7 Ways to Get Traffic to Your New Website or Online Store

If your shop on Etsy lasts long enough and you see some success, there will inevitably come a time when you realize that you need to stop putting all their eggs in one basket. Maybe it’s a long period of slowing sales from changes behind the scenes, another payment processing outage, or ads for your competitors’ products showing up in your store. Whatever the reason, at some point you decide that it’s time to build your own store. The problem is, how do you get traffic to your new website?

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Moving Christopher Taylor Timberlake Fine Art Jewelry Upmarket and Beyond Etsy

When Christopher Taylor Timberlake Fine Art Jewelry first approached dbdc, they were experiencing what many artists and makers experience as their business matures into a full-time job: they had outgrown Etsy. dbdc worked with them to move from Etsy to Woocommerce and WordPress, and to update their packaging, signage, and store layout to support their move upmarket.
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SEO for Small Business Websites Part 2: Design for Better SEO

When people think of Search Engine Optimization, they tend to think of things like links, keywords, and meta tags. Those things are all very important, as you’ll know if you read part one of this series where we got into content optimization in detail. What some people don’t know, however, is that Google cares about design, too, and high-ranking websites use good design for better SEO. No, Google doesn’t judge you if you have too many pictures of cats on your site, but they do care about things that make your site easy for people to use and sites that make it simple for people to find the information they’re looking for. So right here in part 2 we’ll find out how design affects the SEO of your small business website.

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SEO for Small Business Websites Part 1: Content

Search Engine Optimization (“SEO” to its friends) has been around almost as long as Search Engines, and Search Engines have been around almost as long as there has been information to search for online. The World Wide Web as we know it is a quarter century old and the Internet itself is almost old enough to join the AARP. So why is SEO still seen as a cross between witchcraft and a pyramid scheme? And where is an entrepreneur to go for good information on implementing SEO for small business websites?

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