Get Square have a vacancy for an administrative assistant 2 / 3 days per week. The individual must be confident on the phone, happy to speak to clients and have experience of raising invoices, allocating payments and general office admin. Anyone interested should drop us an email or give us a call… contact details this way –>
Merry Christmas and a Happy Hogmanay from Get Square
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for making it such an enjoyable and successful 2012.
We have worked with some fantastic clients, forged valuable partnerships, have been shortlisted as one of Edinburgh’s Top 10 Aspiring Businesses and continue our impressive growth; we’ve recently moved to a larger suite of offices at Lady Victoria Colliery and are activitley looking to recruit.
Our offices are closed Friday 21st December through to Thursday 3rd January. Whilst we will enjoy our break we are looking forward to another bumper year in 2013. If you would like to chat on our return drop us an email - hi@getsquare.co.uk - or join our new Google+ Community.
Merry Christmas & Happy Hogmanay,
From Ross, Andy and the rest of the Get Square team.
P.S. We decided not to send out the traditional Corporate Christmas Card this year instead we’ve made a donation to the wonderful St Columba’s Hospice, a charity dear to our hearts.
For support issues during the holidays contact us via TeamWork orsupport@getsquare.co.uk
Disabling products within Magento
Prior to disabling a product within Magento you should consider the implications. A product which has been enabled with a visibility of ‘Catalog’, ‘Search’ or ‘Catalog, Search’ will potentially have an indexed link within the search engines, a link that may drive a significant amount of traffic! Disabling this product will result in a 404 which will tell Search Engines to remove this result from the index. If the reason you are disabling the product is that it will never again be available for sale on your website then this is the correct course of action. If however you are disabling the product as it is temporarily ‘Out Of Stock’ then having Google drop the link for the index is probably not what you want to do.
Instead you are likely to want to mark that product ‘Out Of Sock’. Using the Inventory tab drop the Manage Stock dropdown to Yes (you may have to uncheck ‘Use Config Settings’) and set the Stock Availability as ‘Out Of Sock’. That way the if a user searches for your product the link within the search engines will remain but should visit the product they are told the item is ‘Out Of Stock’. Obviously whilst this may annoy the user it is the only way to ensure you keep your valued position within the index.
Additionally if you are disabling a product but a new version is available you may wish to create a 301 so users visiting the URL of the ‘old version’. This ensures the user doesn’t receive a 404 but instead is taken directly to the new product (instructions on how to create a 301 redirect between products to follow) and whilst you may think that you could just create a 301 for all disabled products this is a bad idea as this practice is frowned upon by the Search Engines.
Get Square is an aspiring Edinburgh business
We’re delighted to have been selected as one of Edinburgh’s aspiring businesses… and congratulations to all who made it through to the top ten, especially our client Market Prepare who we recently launch MPAppliances.co.uk in association with.
Help with Support
To ensure tasks and support issues are logged and expedited we utilise a Support Desk. To submit a task / issue you can either use the tab at the top of this website or submit an email to support@getsquare.co.uk. Once received your task / issue will be claimed or assigned to a member of our team.
The benefit of using our Support Desk over sending a direct email is twofold. Firstly, sending an email to support@getsquare.co.uk ensures all members of our team are alerted. Secondly, if your request isn’t a priority it will promoted to our todo list instead of being overwhelmed by any individuals inbox.
Once we have received your task / issue and if required we will send you a response by email which in turn you can reply to. Your response will only be received by the team member who has been assigned / claimed responsibility for your task / issue. If therefore you want to submit another task or raise a further support issue we ask that you send a brand new email to support@getsquare.co.uk.
Timeouts and Bounce Rates
During a recent meetup which focussed on Google Analytics the subject of Bounce Rates came up. It was suggested that they were not applicable for sites that were only ever likely to have 1 page view per visit. This might be true by default but by editing the analytics script just a little you can set a time limit on what should be considered a bounce.
Lets say for example you only want to identify anyone who spends less than 20 seconds on a page a ‘bouncer’. All we have to do is include the following line in our analytics -
setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '20-seconds', 'read'])",20000);
so your full code would look like the following (insert you own UA code where appropriate).
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Longer than 20-seconds', 'read'])",20000);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
// ]]></script>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Longer than 20-seconds', 'read'])",20000);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
// ]]></script>
For more information see Google’s related blogpost.
And if you need any help applying to your website get in touch.
Being Cheap Might Cost
On occasion a client will ask us to use an existing hosting package or customise a pre purchased template. Generally this isn’t a problem but not always… especially if the hosting package or template was a ‘bargain’. Take for example a recent clients story, lets call him Joe Bloggs* …
Joe was technically knowledgeable and prior to approaching us he had undergone some initial development work. He had set up an account with a well know CMS, applied a low cost template and populated the site with content. He asked us to assist him finish the project by customising the design of the template – a template which he was already committed to using.
He had made the correct choice for the CMS so on face value the job looked quick, simple and inexpensive. Unfortunately however when we opened up the hood we found that the template was poorly written making it time consuming to alter. Whilst we made the changes they took twice as long as they would have taken on a well written template. This additional time obviously negated any initial saving. If Joe had approached us prior to selecting a template we would have been able to direct him to a source of well made templates which could be easily customised or for the amount he finally spent we could have produced a high quality bespoke design optimised for performance.
Similarly, many previous clients have found their ‘cheap’ hosting packages are not installed with the server components required to provide the necessary functionality and as such have had to purchase a second hosting package to complete their project.
So the moral of the story is do your homework or ask the experts… and don’t worry we don’t charge for a little advice.
*We received the clients permission before recounting their story. The clients name has been changed to protect their identity ;-)
Inventive Promotions
Special Offers can be great hooks. They can entice a user to your site and convert them into a customer. But making a Special Offer into a successful campaign requires more thought than ever. In the past retailers would have been able to reduce old stock to half price and someone, somewhere would have likely bought it, but not any longer. In this economic climate everything is on sale, all of the time, which means you may even struggle to give old stock away.
You have got to get inventive with your Special Offers, Promotions and Sales. It is no good to promoting a BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) offer when any normal person would only want a single item (i.e. 2 toasters for the price of 1) and although discounts can be effective you often have to slash the price to a point that there is little or no profit in a sale. Big discounts can work in the form of loss leaders, i.e. getting users to your site in the hope that they will buy additional items at full list price but there is no guarantee that the all important additional sales will materialise.
A potentially effective Special Offer to help you sell off old stock would be to group items into a set. Take for example the ‘old stock’ toaster, if you combine this item with a Kettle you then you have a Breakfast Set. The discount you were going to apply to the Toaster (say 50%) can now be spread across the two items (lets suggest 25% off the set). This still gives you an attractive selling price for the set but more importantly you are essentially selling a full price item (i.e. the Kettle) every time you give away a Toaster. Additionally the new ‘Breakfast Set’ is far more marketable than an old Toaster and as such would attract more attention and inevitably be more appealing.
So don’t just stick up a ‘Half Price Sale’ get inventive with your promotions and they in turn will be more successful.