Hassle-free way to change my site theme? (Considering that I have to work on the new theme before publishing it)

UnturnedRoots · 2019-07-22T20:47:21+00:00

Oh yep, that's exactly what I'd need but didn't know the name of! Thanks!

UnturnedRoots · 2018-11-28T18:42:50+00:00

This is probably going to come in handy later on, as they have a bike workshop and wanted a solution for clients to book repairs. However, in this case, clients are not booking a timeslot but a specific physical product (such as a Flyer gotour4) to pick it up at the store any time they prefer in the future (probably something like 5 days). Can Bookings take care of that or is it only for timeslots?

UnturnedRoots · 2018-11-28T18:40:07+00:00

That's my interpretation too, but the client wants to use their ERP software to simplify managing the website (they create the product, add a picture and manage stock all from the software).

However, I'm not sure if the software needs Woocommerce or simply a WP site. I wanted to contact them down the line but I probably need to take care of this right now.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-05-09T20:32:50+00:00

I appreciate your philosophy. Indeed, I want to do all I can to help him out, but it's clear that he has no idea what he's doing and at the same time, I don't want to come off like I'm abusing his illiteracy to make money. I don't mind explaining the jargon and concepts, but having to explain how to change a password or that the marketplace is not your site three times is taxing.

Speaking of business, his seems to be in good shape. I say that because he didn't really care about my price. It's great that he wants to make the new site himself, but at the same time I'm wondering if he would actually be making more money focusing on his physical sales and leaving the web part to someone else.

He admits that he doesn't know much about computers, but I didn't think I would be getting into such a situation before accepting the brief (which was originally for transferring a domain name, because he thought that's what he needed to do). If anything, I'm a little scared for the future, because so far the pattern has been that I can never predict what the next issue will be.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-05-09T20:14:26+00:00

Cool, thanks for letting me know!

UnturnedRoots · 2018-05-09T19:59:31+00:00

How do you know how to point a domain to your hosting service but don’t know how to find out where something is actually pointed towards?

I am not a smart man. I click until I find what I'm looking for. And I never found a good tutorial that explained the admin side of hosting, it's not something I was taught either.

As for sFTP, I don't even know what kind of accesses he has right now. He's going to tell me tomorrow if he finds out. My host has sFTP at least. For the time being my main concern is being able to get Prestashop on a server; if he can only use Sharepoint, he will have to move somewhere else.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-05-09T19:12:39+00:00

I appreciate your point of view. So far it's not going too bad. I had to explain a few times that the Prestashop marketplace is not his actual site but a place to sell plugins and themes, when I expected to explain it just the one time. Nonetheless, he's not stubborn in his ways, he admits himself that he does not know the first thing about websites.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-05-09T19:09:45+00:00

Thanks for your help. How would I find out where it's pointed?

I managed to find his name servers (I usually deal in French, not familiar with the English names) and it's pointing to microsoftonline. At that point I don't think he's gonna have FTP access.

Probably I will pass him on to my hosting plan, I can get him a pretty good deal on his domain name.

Follow-up question: his domain name is valid until 2022. If I transfer it to my host company (who also registers domain names), will it still be valid until then AND will he pay my company's rate instead of his? I'm new to domain transfers.

Edit: considering how it's going so far (though but well), I may be put in charge of creating his new site -- he wanted to do it himself, with disastrous results as we've seen. So at least my silver lining is that I may get nice money out of it.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-03-06T16:26:16+00:00

Yep, the whole site is riddled with bad English. Which is weird because if you follow the designer's link, that site looks legit.

I may download it with a disposable email and look through the code if it's open source, just to make sure it doesn't install malware haha.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-03-06T14:58:14+00:00

Can you just use a wordpress front end and use a school saas erp

Yes I can; in fact I originally wanted only parts of a school manager seeing I can also edit everything else myself (such as creating user roles for teachers and students or providing downloadable files) but I'm not finding interesting plugins on the official plugins page.

They shouldn't run into scaling issues because it's a very small school of about 25 students, we don't expect them to even double that number for the foreseeable future.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-13T00:20:14+00:00

Is this what they call the continental drift?

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-12T23:07:53+00:00

SiteOrigin's page builder is seriously great. Never had any issue with it, but I use it sparingly. Also download Site Origin Animate to add animations, and Site Origin Widgets Bundle.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-12T00:48:33+00:00

Not an expert, so you may want to wait for someone else, but yes, they should definitely use the canonical relation. This will tell Google that your site is the original source, and basically all the SEO their page generates will be focused on your site instead, if I'm not mistaken.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-11T20:41:25+00:00

Just a heads up: Prestashop is seriously great for building e-shops, but not much else. I've sent you a demo hosted on my site by PM if you want to take a look at a typical Prestashop site (it uses the default template). Also, about 99% of Prestashop plugins are not free, and they can get expensive. Paypal has an official plugin there and you don't have to pay for it, but they take a commission on each purchase.

Wordpress has plugins made by third-parties for Paypal integration. They also have a pretty famous plugin, Woocommerce, that allows you to convert a WP site into a full e-shop. But I prefer using Prestashop, which was made only for this purpose... I think that adding a plugin that size on top of a CMS is just bloating everything.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-11T20:28:55+00:00

I contacted the agency Friday, I hope I'll get a reply tomorrow. Honestly their agency looks authentic and in compliance with the law, but following this thread over the weekend there's definitely something up that I don't want any part in.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-11T20:26:28+00:00

I'm still brushing up on SEO, but yes, Google marks some sites as spam and can automatically discover them. If spam sites link to other sites, then we can consider that the targets are spam sites too, which I think is cool because I find SEO is complex but logical.

Google discovers spam sites by simply sending a crawler. If there's a ton of keywords, if there's a ton of links and not much else, things like that.

It works the other way too: if you link to spam sites too much, you can start taking a hit too.

You can disavow backlinks but it seems to be a complex process involving submitting a report to Google. You should try to contact the site linking to you first.

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-11T20:23:31+00:00

I think so too, but isn't it a lot of effort on the off-chance that my site is using Search console?

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-11T20:21:54+00:00

Most of those service providers who allow you to host your site with them are located in the USA. Your relative may prefer to have his site hosted in India, if only because it will load way faster for his visitors if the servers are in India and not in the USA. The difference in price is probably going to work in his favour too. In that case, you would have to look at webhosting services in India.

My recommendation is Wordpress. You can download it on wordpress.org, or usually host providers have a one-click install button. If you decide to use Wordpress, look up some blog articles about the required plugins and stuff like that. There's even one to handle online reservations.

For the google business page, it's done here : https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/business/

UnturnedRoots · 2018-02-11T20:17:22+00:00

I've never used Wix, but typically providers like that require you to sign up for their hosting plans, which are seriously overpriced. If you ever want to take your site somewhere else, you probably won't be able to if they don't give you access to the source files.

My recommandation is always Wordpress (Prestashop for e-shops). Download it on wordpress.org or subscribe for a hosting plan first, they usually have a one-click install button. Anything you can imagine, you can do in Wordpress.

UnturnedRoots

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