Posts tagged “Varia”.
Edicy is suitable for everyone – whether it's a small business, big multinational enterprise, NGO or even a state agency. Once an organisation has found Edicy to fit its needs, it's not that rare that one goes for more than one website. And this is exactly what Leinonen Group did. 

Today, Leinonen has 12 websites running on Edicy. To find out how did they find and what made them to choose Edicy, we contacted Leinonen Marketing Manager Mika Pyhamaki.

Leinonen group – Obviously Finnish brand. Yet what it is that your company does?
 

Yes, we are a fully family owned Finnish company. We provide professional accounting and business advisory services in the Baltic states, Nordic Countries, Russia, and Central Europe. We help companies enter and succeed in new international markets. 

Outsourcing accounting and financial management allows companies to better concentrate on their core business. 

The Leinonen Group Headquarters is in Tallinn, Estonia, and our presence in the Baltics is strong after operating here for over 20 years. 


Reason you started to look for a new website?

Our main target group are international companies that operate in our service region. Digital marketing is the most effective way to reach prospects across the borders. Website is often the first contact point for our company, and thus in the core of our digital communications. We simply wanted to make sure it is fresh and up-to-date. 


We also wanted to move closer to our markets and give freedom for individual offices to manage their marketing and communications. Instead of one website translated to many languages, we wanted to have a new Group level website and several country level websites. 

What where the key requirements towards designers while starting off with the development of your new site?

Well, we wanted to work with a professional service provider who can deliver a credible and fresh solution and is easy to communicate with. Designers' previous works always reveal the capabilities and unique style. 



We wanted the website builder (or — content management system or CMS for short) to be as easy to use as possible. In addition it needed to cover all the technical requirements related to different content formats, mobile usage, and SEO.

Where there any hesitations when your design bureau Fraktal offered Edicy as a CMS for your new site - relatively unknown tool next to giants like WordPress, Joomla, Squerspace etc.

After scanning 6-7 service providers and the most common CMS systems from Estonia and Finland, it just became clear that Fraktal and Edicy provided the best solution for us. 

We thought that the big content management systems are too big and complicated to use. We would rather concentrate on good content than technical work. 

Tajo Oja (Fraktal) made the web design for us, and Rait Parts (Edicy) trained us to use it. Thanks to them everything looks cool and works very well now! We took Edicy in to use in Autumn 2012 and launched the new website in February 2013. 

What where the first impressions while being introduced to your new site and tool to manage it all? Most difficult and the most joyful moments? 

Already the first design from Fraktal was impressive. All Leinonen management was surprised by the change. 

However, the most difficult part was creating the structure for the sites and to create all the content needed. This was an internal job and took a lot of time. 

My personal highlight was the moment when all the 12 webpages were finally up and running with the new content. It was like washing the company's face with a super soap. 

Your company has branches all over Europe. Meaning that your clients and team speak over 10 different languages. Does Edicy cope with that? 

No problems. All the relevant languages are available. Each of our country decides about their languages and translating the page structure is easy in Edicy. 

You have lived with your new site and Edicy for more than a year now. What are your comments? Willing to recommend it to others? 

I am very satisfied with the results and cooperation. The price quality ratio is excellent in Edicy. 

I would recommend Edicy especially for small and medium sized companies and corporations. 

Edicy allows multiple users. It is easy and fun to use. Also, the Edicy team seems committed, helpful and technically capable to find solutions to customer needs.
Just recently, we published an overview on how to build your e-commerce solution with Edicy. In the very same post a shopping cart solution was also brought out. However, there are plenty of other shopping cart solutions available as well and now we would like to introduce yet another one which can easily be added to your Edicy website, just like any other widget.

Snipcart – Effortless shopping cart

Snipcart's shopping cart is a perfect tool if you are looking to build your e-store with Edicy product catalogue. And to make it even better, Snipcart's team took their time to really work it through and share their Edicy experience with others. 


How to use Snipcart with Edicy is given in details in their blog. Take your time and read more about Snipcart's effortless shopping cart from their website.
You are thinking about quitting your job. Launching your own business. Gathering a great team. Doing something meaningful. Changing the world.

Marvellous idea.

Fast forward to Day Two. Real life starts kicking in, stuff gets serious. You'll soon discover that it's a journey full of routine and burden of responsibility governed by the one and only God. The Cash Flow. And there's far too little Cash to keep the juices flowing. Not many will buy your stuff. Only your team, family and friends really understand how important your work is and how nice a guy you are. How great products you make. How much superior your product is to your competition.
 
Turns out that everyone else is busy manning their own holes to push their own products in exactly the same crappy situation. Competition is enormous, oxygen is scarce.

But hey — this will most probably change. You'll survive. If you really are good at what you are doing you can run but you can't hide. They'll discover you. You'll be drawn out from your little hole. Your products will be bought. Your passion and craftsmanship will be loved. You'll make at least a mid-sized dent in the universe.

You don't need to change the whole world. Change it for as many as you can. No one ever will reach each and everyone in the universe.

But do consider the marvellous idea of starting a new business diligently. Maybe switching your lousy job to a great one instead will do the trick. 
We’ve just added a friendly little feature to Edicy which makes it very easy to send invites friends, colleagues and even distant relatives. If your friend clicks on your invite and signs up to one of our paid plans, they get a 50% discount and we give you 6 months of our premium service for free. The free months will be added to your account automatically.

Sharing with friends

If you don’t use our premium service yet, this lets you use your own domain, create more sub pages and use our other pro features.

You can call it just a promotion, or a way to thank our users that recommend Edicy to others. But it’s also a bit of a mission – this way we can make sure that more websites created in the coming months will be beautiful, easy to use and optimized for mobile. And who wouldn’t want that?

"I'd like to start selling stuff on my Edicy website. How can I?" -- a question I hear at least once a day. Good news is that there already are some online stores on Edicy. If your vision isn't too specific, it's fairly simple to build one too. Here's one of the most popular stores on Edicy — Mileedi, a flowers-by-mail service.

Mileedi — send flowers over internet

What's an online store?

An online store differs from an "ordinary" website by having little bit more technical complexity.

You need to have a way to

  1. show the products
  2. place an order
  3. pay it up.
All of this is readily available for you in Edicy. 

Larger, more established online businesses of course need more than that. There are some special components that are not available for such simple and convenient webstores — integrations with enterprise systems (inventory, CRM, logistics, book keeping) or user-specific options and purchase history.

Odds are though that you don't run a million dollar business looking for a new e-commerce platform. It's more likely you are someone like ourselves — running passionately a small business and getting started with your online success.

So let's see how you can do it with us.

1. Show me the products

The easiest way to show your products — if you only have a handful of them — is to create a normal content page for each of them under "Products" section. Add pictures, galleries and videos for visitors to get an overview. Write texts, include tables, add PDF-s with product overviews to specify the details. Link to reviews, add testimonials to build trust.

If you have a large number of different stuff on sale though, you ought to have more than that — new products should be listed first, best selling items need a place on the front page. Visitors should be able to group and filter them both by category or price or other characteristics. You need a product catalogue. There's an early beta version of such tool already available for a number of Edicy Plus users. So if you want to try it out just contact us and we help you set it up.

Another great option is to combine Edicy with Ecwid, a separate e-commerce tool that takes care for everything — provides you with a product catalogue and lets you manage prices, payment mechanisms and shopping carts.

2. Let me order it

Most often people only buy one item at a time. A pair of boots. A picture. A house. Sometimes you manage to sell more though. Two different pictures? A house AND a pair of boots? Could be.

Single-item-selling is rather easy to be set up with Edicy. Just set up a link for placing an order for every product separately.

Allowing user to order more than one product at a time is a bit more difficult — you'd have to provide visitors with a "shopping cart" for that. Visitor adds anythig to the cart first and then places the order for the whole pack. There's one great free component that you can either set up yourself or ask our support team to do it for you. It's called simpleCart — just go on and check out how conveniently it works.

If you decided to use Ecwid in the previous paragraph, you already have a shopping cart out of the box with them.

3. Let me pay for it

There are many options to choose from — a half-online method with money transfer in the end (works well with local businesses) or full online experience — paying with PayPal or credit card.

Credit card payments provided by PayPal — and Paypal wallet itself — work well with Edicy, you don't need any additional service. Just add a Paypal checkout link to each product or use simpleCart shopping cart in-between and done you are.

If you have more specific needs — for example direct payments through online banks are pretty popular around Europe — you can set up basically any payment mechanism with Ecwid.

Again — we are eager to help each and everyone of you get started with e-commerce just go on, contact us and we'll quickly help you out!
These are some happy days we live in. A decade ago businesses spent thousands of dollars per year to buy and upgrade sloppy box software. Now you can try out and subscribe to any kind of wonderfully crafted web service that not only cover all the box software tasks but invent completely new kinds of collaboration tools on top of them.

Here are our five favorite collaboration tools which have helped our team to become significantly more productive over the last few years.

Call to Japan for free.

SkypeYou're guessed it, we're talking about Skype. Almost everyone has a Skype user, almost everyone has used it for once. At least. So why aren't you using it for your business? It's a perfect tool whether you're communicating with your co-workers, talking to your clients, partners or even making conference calls across the world. You can keep your beloved smartphone but use Skype whenever you can. No need to waste your profit, or what?

Forget Microsoft Office (on desktop).

Office 365Back in 90's, you must have loved MS Office. But, hey, it's 2013! Google Drive (Apps)
Google Drive
 — and MS Office online — are here for you now. Of course, you can write a doc in MS Word, save it on your hard drive, then send it to your colleague, let him download it, edit, send back and so on. Sounds a bit pointless, when you can edit it online inside a browser window and get it done right there (on-site management, just like Edicy) — together with your whole team.

Track how much time you waste every day.

TogglNow, when you got 8 working-hours, then how much of it is spent on each task you have? Well, you can either take a wild guess OR you can track your time. Our developers have gone with Toggl, a tool developed by fellow-Estonians who run their business in California. Thanks to Toggle, we now know exactly on which project our time was spent. Besides, tracking time will help you a lot when it comes to reporting your big boss-man.

Enlighten your project managers.

BasecampOkay, you can keep your precious project managers. But you can make their and your life much easier by using the right tools. In Edicy, we use two different tools to manage our tasks. Developers, coders and designers have grouped their tasks into PivotalTracker, allowing all the members to add new and modify already existing tasks. On the other hand, our non-development team has chosen Basecamp. But in the end, they both serve the same goal — keeping your business on track.

In conclusion, stop wasting your money, time and nerves by using ancient tools just because you didn't know any better. Ditch inefficiency and take your business to another level.

Face it – whatever business you’re in, having a home page is inevitable. Having a good home page, however, can be a nightmare if you don’t know what to do. GLOG home designs and sells house-building plans for non-builders - house plans so easy to understand, anyone can use them. An article published in USA described our services as “making home-building about as easy as putting together an IKEA bed frame”. 

GLOG home webpage

As our plans do not require specialized printers or programs, we sell our products via our homepage. All you need is a PayPal account to pay for the plans and a printer to print out the downloaded documents. That’s it!  After getting the plans, you can start building your own home. 
 
But for all of this to work properly, you can’t get pass a decent home page. Your product or service can be the best there is, but if your homepage is not easy to navigate, doesn’t look good or has some other fundamental flaws (in short: your homepage stinks), you can forget about any kind of business. 

The reason we turned to Edicy is quite simple: they know, what they are doing. Obviously, you could always hire someone to manage your home page for you, but then again – how often do you actually need to modify your homepage? Once a week at best? Outsourcing is also an option, but seeing as different company’s like to charge the service to the max, that was out of the question for us. 

Building the homepage from scratch was also not an option - we have some knowledge of HTML and CSS, but not nearly enough to build a new website.
Edicy, if I may, has done most of the dirty work for you, so all the coding, design, and structure is up there for the taking. And you need not worry – in my opinion, it is all top of the line and your only concern is creating content and adding photos. In addition, as Edicy offers several templates to choose from, the variety of choices is more than enough.  

The most important thing for us is that once the site is up and running, the management of it is remarkably easy. Adding photos or changing content can be done with only a few clicks. So in short, Edicy has given us a way to focus on our products and sales, not on our website management.

George Zhordania works at GLOG home, a customer of Edicy.
Yes, it's been a while from our last reading list as summer has taken over more or less. Still, we have dug some noteworthy stuff to cheer about.



Tools you need

  • uiFaces – get your sample avatars for interface design.
  • Moot – easy-to-add forum for your site.
  • ubooq – let your user book with an ease.
  • TowTruck  – allow easy collaboration on your website.
  • Litmus – test your e-mails in real-time.
  • Site44 – Dropbox folders into websites, just like that.

Inspire yourself

  • Sidr – get your side menus and turn menus responsive.
  • Drublic blog – tips on how to make your site more printable.
  • Riak – open source clouding, private or public.
  • LivIcons – animated icons that amaze.

Your shredded Google linksAlmost four years ago, we wrote a very popular post on how to make your website show up on Google. Not surprisingly, several users often ask us the opposite question too — how can I remove my site or part of it from Google?

There are many reasons why one might want to remove her content from Google:

  • Some information has leaked to the search engine too early — e.g. details about a new service or product.
  • The page itself is actually deleted, but the information from it is still available (e.g. mistakenly published information);
  • Information has been updated on the website, but search engine still displays the old version (e.g. old contacts or mistakenly published information).

How to remove stuff from Google?

  1. Make sure you've removed the unwanted page
  2. Set up your site with Webmaster Tools
  3. Find the address of the page in Google
  4. Remove the page with Google Webmaster Tools

As a matter of fact, you can speed up the process of removal yourself. It works just like adding your website to Google — by using Google Webmaster Tools, a website management tool provided by Google and it works like a charm with Edicy as well.

You can find more information on how to use it for your site in Edicy from our FAQ: How to get my site to show up on search engines?

All in all, there are two preconditions for removing any data from Google:

  • The page indexed by Google is deleted or its address (URL) is changed, and
  • The website on which the problematic page is (was) located is verified with Google Webmaster Tools.

Removing your brand new website from Google

Building content of a new website takes considerable amount of time. You want to be certain that it will remain off the radars of search engines until you are ready to launch it. But with just a single misstep, info about the existence of your half baked website can easily leak to Google. It would result in Google indexing your unfinished site and making it public.

When creating a new website, such a "leak" might appear when you share a link to your unfinished website in Facebook, e.g. sharing it with a group of friends. Also, such links might end up in Google when you share the link by e-mail or via Skype when it gets reshared to some third person and posted by him to any web-based channel which is monitored by Google.

Before you request the removal of the website from Google Webmaster Tools, you need to remove or rename the problematic site or page. When you rename it, make sure it won’t get into Google’s sight too soon again. To ensure your secrecy, we recommend protecting the pages with a password

Now track down the page or site address mistakenly seen by Google. You'll find it very easily — just click on the unwanted Google search result.

Next, got to your Google Webmaster Tools account and choose "Optimization" > "Remove URLs".  In the next view, choose "Create a new removal request" and enter the exact address of the page you wish to removed. Google then asks you to choose the reason for removal. Pick "Remove page from search results and cache". It can take up to a couple of days before your request is fulfilled by Google. You can follow the status of your request from the very same place.

Reason of Google url removel request

Same method can be used when an old page (e.g. page with an out-dated information about your products) is removed from the website, but search engines still show it in their results.

Leaked information on updating your site

Premature information might slip into Google’s sight also when you are just updating some part of your website. Say your site is already indexed by Google. Now you are about to launch a new section. As a reasonable guy, you've hidden it from the menus. However, once you add just a single link to the new section in some older, indexed part of your site Google will jump in and index the new section prematurely too.

Again, you need to make sure that your content is not publicly available. In addition to renaming and protecting the page with a password, you should take one additional step. Remove premature content from your page, publish it and before you re-enter the information, disable automatic publishing.

Also, steps explained in the previous sections should be taken as well. Find the problematic address and request the removal of it by Google Webmaster Tools.

Cached content and search engines

But what if the search engine results already display correct information, but the cached page they provide still has outdated data — or even worse should be private? First, you should invite Google to index your updated website (submit a sitemap to them).

Google provides you with an option to speed up the process of updating the cached version of your website. For that, navigate to your Google Webmaster Tools account and choose "Optimization" > "Remove URLs". In the next view, choose "Create a new removal request" and enter the exact address of the page you wish to be removed. This time, choose "Remove page from cache only" to be the reason for removal.

How do I cancel the request of removal?

After Google has confirmed your request of removal, the site or page removed won’t appear in search results at least for 90 days. However, if the very same page or site is still accessible after those 90 days, then Google might index it again. But in case you want your page to show up in search engines before 90 days have passed by (e.g. you have finished adding content to it), you can get it back to listing by removing the removal request in Webmaster Tools.

Navigate to your Google Webmaster Tools account and choose "Optimization" > "Remove URLs". Now choose "Show: Removed" from the menu given on your right hand above the table ("Pending" in default). Find the page you wish to reindex and click on "Reinclude". Based on Google’s information, your page will be reindexed within 3-5 working-days.

Reincluding removed url in Google

When NOT to use the URL removal tool

Google has listed some unique cases when using the removal tool is not recommended:

  • When search displays results which link to pages that are already deleted. Google removes these results by itself upon regular update;
  • When you want "a fresh start" (e.g. if the domain was previously held by another company). You can submit a separate request for that purpose;
  • When you wish to see "correct" results. E.g. you wish to see results only without "www" (mysite.com) and wish to remove those with "www" (www.mysite.com). This results into removing everything, including those without "www".

Good to know

If your website uses several domains (e.g. mywebsite.com, mybrand.eu etc), then it would be wise to check search results with all your addresses and, if needed, repeat the removal process with other addresses as well.

And don’t forget that there are other search engines besides Google as well and removing a page from Google search results doesn’t remove indexed information from others.

  • Page removal from Bing and Yahoo;
  • Page removal from Yandex;
  • Then there’s also Baidu, a Chinese search engine. There’s no documented process to remove search results from there. But there’s an unofficial, proven method — write "Free Tibet" in your blog and Baidu switches you off quickly. Oh, wait — we just... Oops.

The most important part of any company's web presence is — of course — their website. Content is in turn the most important component of those sites. The reason why so many websites are left behind (or even worse, never made) is always the same. People don't know what to write there, how to lay it all out.


We've created Edicy design templates so that you'll have this tough part — initial site structure and default content — in place right away. On the basic level most of the websites are very similar.

Here's our universal cheat sheet for your website's structure that's reflected also in any of our designs.

Main landing page.


  • This is company name or logo.
  • Headline or slogan (describing what you are, do or sell).
  • A short paragraph introducing the business model or proposal of your company. A good guide to think about reasonable length is: "Does it all fit on a smartphone screen?"
  • Key illustration. It is a very good idea to put an image to the first page that describes what you do. You can find a suitable one from iStockPhoto or some other image stock for a small fee. You might even find a logo icon from there.
  • Menu with links to all second level sub pages and alternative language versions of the website.
  • Footer or sidebar with contact information.

Products or portfolio.

In case you have more than one case study presented or product sold, you should start with a separate page for product or case study listing. Each product or case should then have a separate page so visitors can share a direct link to it. It should feature the name, description, some images and a call to action — e.g order the product or get a quote for a similar product.

Contacts.

Separate contacts page will probably show up in search results if someone Googles you, making you easier to find. You should also keep a short version of your contacts on the footer of every page. Edicy standard themes have a footer with shared content among pages. Enter it on a page and it will be automatically on every page.

Blog or news.

Another important thing besides contacts, that web viewers are looking about you, is how active you are. Inactive websites bring less leads because visitors think the same inactivity might be true for the whole business.

Best way to avoid this perception is to run a news or blog page which you'd update at least monthly. No need to write long novels, your customers just need to know you are doing well. Linking to relevant news pieces in mainstream media spiced with short comments from your behalf will make a good blog post too.

So all you'll have to do now is sign up for Edicy and it will automatically guide you through the process of making your first website in a matter of minutes.
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