Best FREE WordPress Plugins for your E-commerce Website

When the first companies began to sell their products through the internet years ago, there was an initial competitive conflict that arose: who could market themselves in the best way possible, and who could create the best website to attract customers to their online “store”?

Since then, digital advancements have improved exponentially year over year, and more people that want to do business online opt for creating their own site rather than seeking the services of a developer, largely due to the many hosting and web building pages available. For any person hoping to DIY their website, there is no CMS more popular than WordPress, as the globe has heard of that brand in every corner of the world wide web.

WordPress is very intuitive and allows even those with limited or no business/development experience to not only create a beautiful site, but to grow that website to new heights of traffic and viewership. WordPress offers a marketplace of free (and premium) plugins to help your website do all kinds of things to support your business – including sell products. This marketplace is user-generated, so the market is ever-expanding and has a lot of customer feedback for you to review. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of plugins – some of which are fantastic and others which won’t benefit your site. There are many things you can download to grow and develop your online store, but in this article, we will review the best E-commerce plugins that you can install for absolutely free.

The Best E-Commerce Plugins of 2018

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is immensely popular amongst the plugins related to e-commerce, especially for smaller and medium-sized businesses. WooCommerce is very widely known and offers very effective tools which streamline not only your storefront but also the back-end operations of your E-commerce site. As are the rest of the plugins listed here, WooCommerce is absolutely free and makes it simpler for your store to convert visitors to your site into paying customers.

WooCommerce chief feature is that it prioritizes simplicity and organization, reducing the number of steps that your potential customer has to make to conduct a transaction with your store. WooCommerce is highly customizable and even integrates with Google Analytics. WooCommerce is a community within itself and develops a continuous stream of extensions for its eCommerce tools. WooCommerce makes your life easier by giving you the ability to sell both digital and physical goods directly on your page without needing a third party. WooCommerce also features shipping settings, a plethora of payment options, secure data policies and a design platform for your storefront.

Product Catalog    

The most important part of the store, of course, is the products themselves. No matter how glamorous your page is and how effective your marketing is delivered, you won’t sell very many products if those products aren’t easily accessible, navigable, and clear to see. Once you have chosen the products you would like to sell, you will need to position them in the most aesthetically pleasing and psychologically advantageous way to attract your prospective customer.

The Product Catalog plugin is a free WordPress plugin that prioritizes organization and customization. It is often overwhelming to position your products in the best way possible, especially once your store is offering a myriad of great items and you are focusing on increasing your sales and new product launches. The Product Catalog boasts an easy and completely free way to remove the guesswork from positioning your products by offering such features as customizable product displays, intuitive product organizer, the capability of quote requesting, simple integration on your site and SEO tools for all catalog entries.

Yoast SEO    

SEO, or search engine optimization, began officially when marketing professionals and business owners figured out that search engines, such as Google, have certain algorithms that are used to rank pages. Because it is not human, the algorithm needs to have a calculated way of returning the most optimal results when a user enters a search. Search engine developers quickly realized that marketers figured this out, so algorithms were adapt to change every few months so that no one single technique dominates the market. Once that occurred, professional SEO and marketing agencies made it one of their primary services as thousands of businesses require professional SEO work to consistently rank highly on Google, Amazon and other search engines.

This is where the Yoast SEO tool comes into play. Instead of needing to hire a professional, you can take the time to do it yourself and have an automated assistant at your disposal to help you choose the most relevant SEO techniques. Yoast has been designed by the developer to provide easy to understand analytic tools that make the most impact on your site. Yoast also helps to create meaningful and visible web content so that Google will detect and return your site to potential searchers.

Yoast SEO features sitemap functions, URL settings that ensure content is not duplicated, simple to use templates that provide consistent meta descriptions and titles, a linking feature which will streamline your internal structure, and chiefly, an SEO tool that measures optimization for your keywords.

Holler Box

Building on one of the above plugins, Holler Box is designed to be primarily compatible with the WooCommerce plugin. Holler Box takes the basic construction to one step forward, capturing the leads that have been drawn to your site by your marketing efforts.

If you have ever visited a site, you have probably encountered a pop-up box asking for your details. Many of them can be large and blocky, which can be a deterrent to your visitor. Holler Box dons a lightweight solution which is a stark contrast to the in-your-face style heavy duty popups that you might see on lesser trusted sites.

Holler Box features include unlimited pop-up for both entry on-site and exit, notifications and delay options for the pop-up, easy to integrate with most email marketing campaign platforms, template designs which are highly customizable, and analytical tools to track your conversion rate.

Holler Box is free to use, but as your business grows, you will have the option to upgrade your content and targeting filters which will help you exponentially increase your visitors and leads.

Find your own!

On top of what was mentioned above, the plugin marketplace is ever-changing and growing community with many customizable options for your growing e-commerce platform. It is good when just starting out to find a base amount of needed plugins, but only you as the business owner will know exactly what kind of tools you need to further your acumen and sales. We hope you have enjoyed and learned more about the Best E-Commerce Plugins.

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How to Build a Web Design Portfolio & Grow Your Freelance Business

What makes a good web design portfolio? That’s the question that each and every web design freelancer has asked herself at one point in her career – especially when just starting out in the business. You want to stand out among your competition, express your skills, and gain the attention of your ideal clientele but you don’t have a lot of experience yet. How can you show what you’re capable of before you’ve had the chance to secure your own clients or your first web design job?

If you’re working in web design now or just beginning your career you CAN actually begin to build your own web design portfolio before you get your first big job or big client, you just need to have a DIY spirit. In this post, we will walk you through how to grow that portfolio and make it the best it can be whether you’re brand new OR looking to revamp your existing portfolio of work.

Build Yourself a Website

Hello! Constructing your own website is a twofold win for your portfolio dilemma. In the first place, you’re showing potential clients or employers that you can build a great website by doing just that – building yourself a great site. Second, you now have a place to house and host all of your future best works AND blog about the process, to let everyone know that you know your stuff. While you shouldn’t go nuts putting every bell & whistle into this website, you can demonstrate excellent use of forms, nice widget functionality, intelligent visual design, clean code, optimized images, and so much more with one website. If your site looks great, and you’re using it to house other projects that also look great, you could be off the ground in no time.

Grow what you know – then show it
By taking some tutorials or teaching yourself different facets of web design and development, you can boast new skills and show those off. You don’t need to have a spiffy web design job or a ton of clients to start doing this – just get into those new tools or frameworks and start messing around. Once you’re getting really good, you’ve got a new gold star to show off to potential clients and add to your resume and your spiffy website. Anyone looking to hire a designer or developer with that special skill will see you as a stand-out partner.

Take some classes

Not all classes run cheap, we understand. However, if you do take a course – even just on Udemy or somewhere else online – you can use the sample assignment projects as great portfolio items. Remember: the website you build does NOT have to be a paid project in order to count for your portfolio and adequately demonstrate what you can do. The same is true if you took web design courses in college or in a more formal setting – capture and use those projects!

Give and take
Do you have any friends who would like to have their own website, and can trade you by providing a skill that they have in return? For example, do you have a social media whiz friend who is looking to start her social media side business and needs a website? If you build it for her, you’ve just added a client to your portfolio and in return, she might even be able to bring your brand to life on social media. That’s a win-win-win.

Volunteer
We know you’re probably super busy but a great way to add to your web design portfolio is to find an organization that you’re passionate about and provide website services. Chances are the animal shelter, veteran’s assistance group, or a local school could benefit from a better web presence. You can donate your time, build a simple site (they’re usually not very demanding), and add it to your portfolio. Better yet, they’ll be so thrilled that they will likely be happy to provide a testimonial or review for your work, too!

What do I do with my new portfolio?

Once your portfolio and your website look great and really express your story, your style, and your skills – it’s time to promote yourself. This can be really uncomfortable for people, especially when they’re just starting out, but if you want to have a successful side-hustle or freelance career – or even just get hired with a great company, your personal brand is everything. Here are 5 quick tips to growing your brand:

1. Impress every client and colleague
   I know this sounds pretty lofty but it is imperative that you do your best for every client, every employer, and every colleague – even those who never get to see you create a website, like your coworkers at the coffee shop where you work, or your boss at the restaurant where you wait tables. Those people will vouch for you and pass your name on more than anyone.
2. Get social and stay social
   You need to promote yourself by constantly putting out content, sharing your work, and staying active online. Consistency is key.
3. Start locally
   Why compete for the attention of the whole world when there are tons of businesses right in your own town? Reach out to the local plumbers, insurance companies, and restaurants and see if anyone needs a website. By doing some research, you’ll quickly be able to see whose website is outdated – start with them first. They’re going to appreciate that your rates are a whole lot lower than the big agencies in the city, and they make great long-term clients.
4. Get communal
   Join the right kinds of forums and spaces online where developers and designers talk to each other, where they meet clients, and where they collaborate with other digital creators. You might meet a photographer or marketing guru who recommends you to a few of their clients. You might get hired on by a senior designer who needs another team member. You never know what can happen when you network.
5. Find a mentor
   By reaching out to someone who has been in the industry for years, you can learn everything you’ll need to know about running your side hustle or full-time business, getting the jobs you want, and designing better websites. Plus, their network is probably 10 times the size of yours right now and they may be able to pull a few strings.

What are your best tips for promoting yourself as a budding freelance web designer? Comment below.

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Design your way

Startups in Los Angeles have a lot to celebrate: Silicon Valley’s tech monopoly has been broken.

The San Fernando Valley has made its mark and looks to be here to stay. Los Angeles is no longer just an endless sea of strip malls and single family homes, or at least not only that.

There are lots of cool restaurants and some great craft breweries. Parking is easy to find. L.A. is a great place to live and work. While often derided as having no culture, that’s not true.

Los Angeles has a feel and life all its own and very many people are happy to live and play there, including many startup employees.

Los Angeles is a leading global startup city, coming in ahead of Austin, Seattle, and Chicago.  The city of Angels has a very vibrant tech scene. In 2017 alone, tech startups in Southern California raised nearly $7 billion.

It has become incredibly easy for tech startups across industries to attract top talent and find funding in Los Angeles. Many very innovative startups call Los Angeles and Orange County their home. The future is looking very bright for startups in Los Angeles.

Let’s take a look at some of the best startup tech companies in Los Angeles. These companies have been climbing up in the world and you may have heard of many of them already. If you haven’t, you soon will!

Inspire

This company helps homeowner start using smart energy tech and cut down on pollution.

It comes out of Santa Monica and offers a subscription service that allows users to personalize energy plans, receive the latest smart energy products, and control it all from Inspire’s cutting-edge app. Inspire has a promising future, with total funding of $38 million.

GOAT

GOAT is all about sneakers. Millions of people across the globe buy, sell, and trade sneakers anywhere from under $100 to several thousand dollars. With all this money in the sneaker trade, there are a lot of counterfeits on the market.

GOAT seeks to authenticate, facilitate and fix the trade of valuable sneakers. They recently closed a $25 million round of funding that was used to move into a new headquarters office and grow its mobile sneaker marketplace.

Brainjolt

This Pasadena based company creates and distributes branded content that reaches about 300 million people a month. They specialize in addictive media.

They currently operate some of the most successful mobile sites on the web. 22 Words is their flagship site and get 18 million visitors every month. MagiQuiz, another one of their sites, can boast four minutes per visitor and has a 12 percent average share rate.

Earny

Earny is an online shopping assistant that connect to Amazon and tracks every purchase you make. It will automatically request refunds when the price you paid drops.

They have collected over $10 million in funding and look to keep making shopping easier for the modern digital consumer.

GameMine

This company both develops and publish mobile games. These games are offered in its subscription-based marketplace to users across the world in 135 countries.

They currently report more than 3.5 million active users. The company was founded in 2017 and promptly received $20 million in funding.

Gem

Enterprise blockchain data exchange and collaboration platform. Gem seeks to improve the level of transparency for an agile collaboration between businesses, especially for those who work in healthcare and supply chains.

Pex

Pex offers a tool for brands and content creators. It provides a complex analysis of videos posted online by crawling through the web, tracking traffic, and flow of the content.

In essence, it is a search engine for videos, allowing users to track the life of a video, seeing who is sharing it, and seeing where they are sharing it with.

Wag

Wag is a service that connects dog walkers with dog owners. It helps ease the mind of dog owners who are too busy to walk their pets or are on vacation and can’t walk them.

When the walk starts the owner receives a push notification and the route is tracked on GPS. At the end of the route, a short report with a photo and distance walked are sent. The app has been incredibly successful and the company is making big plans.

ESTIFY

This company helps automotive collision companies avoid wasting time and energy on translating information across mediums or estimating platforms by providing digitization technology designed just for the industry.

With a friendly atmosphere and access to the newest tech, Estify has a lot of promise going forward.

SENSAY

Sensay is a messaging company that connects people in need of specific advice or with specific questions to those with the knowledge and experience required to answer.

SOLABORATE

This communications platform helps bring people and tools to the same place to increase productivity.

ACORNS

This investment platform allows people to invest spare change from ordinary transactions into diversified investment portfolios.

WITHIN

Within crates virtual reality games that look to change the way video games tell stories.

Wondery

Wondery is brand-new media company specialized in mobile and on-demand audio storytelling. Wondery will create and curate podcasts to connect wonderers and brands to a world of entertainment and a world of knowledge.

Watch Gang

Watch Gang is a subscription-based curation and content company for watch lovers.

UpKeep Maintenance Management

UpKeep Maintenance Management Software is a task management tool startup for facility maintenance teams. UpKeep is targeting the 9.9 million maintenance workers in the US alone to make their work more productive and change the way facility maintenance requests are made and received.

Tuition.io

Tuition.io is the leading employee benefit platform empowering employers to retain talent who are saddled with stifling student debt by helping them pay it down. The first company to bring employer student loan contributions to market at scale, the platform has managed more than $2B in outstanding loans on its secure platform.

The Boring Company

To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won’t fall on your head. A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels). The key to making…

Seriously

They are building a global mobile entertainment company, with free to play games at the heart of their business. They believe that in the future the biggest entertainment brands will be built on mobile platforms and they want to be at the forefront of that.

PeerStreet

PeerStreet is an award-winning, Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform focused on democratizing access to real estate debt. The company provides investments in quality, short-term, real estate backed loans. PeerStreet’s unique marketplace allows investors to diversify their capital in an asset class that has been traditionally difficult to access.

Ozobot

Evollve Inc. is a company built around the idea that blends creative thinking with business disciplines to bring new ideas to market. Their business focus is on introducing new ways to combine social interaction with digital apps.

Ordermark

They help restaurants nationwide to simplify online ordering and grow profits. Their product consolidates online orders from different services and sends them to a single dashboard and printer. We’re based in sunny Santa Monica and partnered with Epson America.

ObEN

ObEN is an artificial intelligence (AI) company that creates complete virtual identities for consumers and celebrities in the emerging digital world. ObEN provides Personal AI that simulates a person’s voice, face and personality, enabling never before possible social and virtual interactions. Founded in 2014, ObEN is a Softbank Ventures Korea and…

82 Labs (Morning Recovery)

82 Labs, Inc. is a new kind of consumer goods startup. They develop breakthrough solutions to empower you to be at your best, so you can do more of what you love. They launched their first product, Morning Recovery, as a peach flavored beverage that helps you balance productivity and social life in 2017. Now we’re on to even bigger things!

Mobalytics

Mobalytics was started by a bunch of dudes who just really like to play video games. They particularly like to obsess about improvement and “growth hacking” their gameplay on competitive ladders. All of their lives, they have struggled with limited tools to acquire critical feedback. Although, most gamers still they could find an awesome mentor to talk to…

Local Roots Farms

Local Roots Farms is forging the food system of the future! We’re boldly developing technologies to feed the planet healthy and delicious food in an environmentally responsible way. Every day they innovate agriculture in ways that others think impossible, and we’re crafting a scalable business that delivers social impact on a mass scale.

Hutch

Hutch ((formerly HOMEE)) transforms your space from before to after, faster than ever. Hutch gives you the opportunity to try something new without the heavy lifting, expensive designer budgets, and the hit and miss of furniture shopping. Dress up your home in a variety of different styles- anything from boho to urban industrial- before buying…

Girlboss

Founded by serial entrepreneur and New York Times Bestselling author Sophia Amoruso, Girlboss was born from the book that inspired a generation of women to take action in their own lives. Today, they have a small but brilliant team of editors, creatives, and digital media professionals working to build something that’s never been built before.

Flo Technologies

Flo Technologies provides accessible technology solutions that enable and transform the control and conservation of water. It offers a proprietary water control system for homes and buildings that virtually eliminates all flooding caused by leaks, avoids property damage, and empowers conservation. Flo Technologies was founded in 2015 and is…

DroneBase

DroneBase provides aerial imagery & data to enterprise customers at a fraction of the cost and time. They are pioneering innovative technology in the commercial drone space. They are backed by Union Square Ventures, DJI (world’s largest drone company), Accel, SV Angel, Y Combinator, and other leading investors.

dosist

Formerly known as hmbldt, dosist is a health and wellness company dedicated to providing safe, targeted and effective cannabis-based solutions to millions of people. dosist helps patients receive the therapeutic benefits of the cannabis plant while mitigating the risk of intoxication.

Boundless Mind

Boundless Mind is a behavioral and persuasive technology company building the future of behavior. They use the latest in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Neuroscience to make apps and software more habit forming.

Clutter

Founded in 2014, Clutter serves Los Angeles County, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, New Jersey, Orange County and San Diego. Their innovative supply chain offers consumers 10x more convenience, disrupting the $33B/year self-storage industry and attracting $100M in financing from Sequoia Capital, Atomico, and GV (formerly Google Ventures).

AppOnboard

AppOnboard is an app demo platform whose technology allows users to instantly experience an app or game without a download. AppOnboard’s technology, tools, and insights empower developers by enabling the creation of the highest quality demos and unlocking insights that improve app experiences, discovery, and monetization.

ATTN:

ATTN: is a media company that gets people to care about the world around them. They exist at the intersection of context and entertainment to inform and inspire a young audience around their most passionate points of interest. Interested in opportunities? – attn.com/careers

Obsidian Security

Obsidian Security is a data-driven start-up living at the intersection of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and hybrid-cloud environments. Backed by Greylock Partners, Obsidian Security is focused on using applied mathematics and machine learning to bring insights to organizations using modern hybrid architectures.

Science 37

S37 is a mobile technology and clinical trials organization based in LA and SF that focuses on the development of networked patient-centric models for clinical research to rapidly accelerate biomedical discovery. Using partnerships across healthcare and tech, design-thinking and prototyping, S37 brings clinical trials right to patient’s homes.

Renew

Retirement shouldn’t be a full-time job. That’s why Renew creates innovative content & tools that simplify the complex decisions retirees face. Their ultimate goal? To be the premier destination for the 10,000+ people who retire each day. With a first-of-its-kind Medicare shopping engine and a rapidly growing online community, we’re well on their way.

Ending thoughts on these startups in Los Angeles

There are a number of startups in Los Angeles with fresh ideas and lots of funding. The city is on the rise and is serious competition with its northern cousin.

If you enjoyed reading this article about startups in Los Angeles, you should read these as well:

• Awesome Boston startups to watch in the upcoming years
• Amazing Australian startups that you can apply for a job at
• Innovative virtual reality companies and their neat presentation websites
• Startups in Amsterdam that you should keep an eye on (and their cool websites)

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