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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
We hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year break. We have big plans for 2021 including some wonderful new features for our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme.
We'll also launch a brand new automated reviews platform focused on speed and it'll work with any WooCommerce store.
We're really excited to show you what we've made over the coming months.
Top of our list for 2021 on our own CommerceGurus site is to work on SEO - and it should be a priority for you too.
Brian Dean has an excellent article on SEO in 2021 including his renewed focus on core web vitals - which we've also written about.
This is a real detailed take on the exact steps he took to improve his site, including how to find featured snippet opportunities which is a brilliant way to super-charge web traffic if yours gets picked up by Google.
This post is an important one to reference again and again in the first quarter of 2021 for any eCommerce store.
See the Definitive Guide to SEO in 2021
As much of the world goes into further lockdowns in 2021 (In Ireland, the whole country is basically shut for January) it's worth revisiting Baymard's recommended UX improvements you can make to your store during the pandemic.
Much of this is relevant for any time of the year but having really clear and obvious links for delivery times and the returns policy is especially important for customers who are unsure about buying.
On supporting non-product search, we're delighted this is a feature of Shoptimizer now (as part of CommerceKit).
If you run a search on the live demo you can tab between product and content results in a similar fashion to the Ikea website. Check out an example.
Baymard is an important source of research for us in continuing to improve Shoptimizer based on best-in-class real research.
Take a look at 6 COVID-19 UX tweaks you can make
For anyone designing and building with CSS, I thought this was a fascinating (and pretty) one-page site on what design tools people were using in 2020.
Bootstrap has dropped off massively to be replaced by the new favorite, Tailwind CSS. I've been using Tailwind myself lately, building our new reviews app and it's a very interesting way to build websites, once you get your head around the utility class naming conventions.
Learn about the state of CSS in 2020
We met the author of this new book, Tom Greenwood, in Paris for WordCamp Europe in 2017 and he gave a talk on the topic which was really interesting.
To quote the book blurb:
In Sustainable Web Design, Tom Greenwood offers a practical path to faster, more carbon-efficient websites that are not only better for the planet, but better for our users.
There's an example of this on Tom's company website, Wholegrain Digital. Take a look at the footer and you'll see an interesting detail I don't recall seeing on any other site.
"This page loaded in 1.19 seconds and emitted just 0.18g of CO2"
Being able to create a more sustainable website for clients and users is a nice way to differentiate yourself. It's a way of adding further value to the products you build.
The eBook version is available on preorder for only $14.
Check out Sustainable Web Design
Finally this week, I came across this useful set of mini tools which could be useful for designers or developers.
It includes color shades and gradient generators, page dividers, HTML symbols, and a lorem ipsum creator when you need to quickly test some dummy content.
It's great to see such a collection of minimal, well focused tools.
Take a look at Omatsuri
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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