Ecomm Challenge Day 10 — Site build & integrations
Today was a very long day. I am almost too tired to write this article, but as I said in the Intro article no excuses and no hiding! I’ve spend the vast majority of today setting up and building the website. So, forgive me if this post is quite short.
At the beginning of the day I set myself the task of creating the following pages as well as installing and integrating all the services that I need for my marketing phase:
Key Pages
- Home — Example home page with live products
- About
- Contact-Including setting up points of contact
- Shop Home Page
- Shopping pages — basket, checkout, my account, product
- Product pages
- Features page for curated products
- Coming Soon holding page
Integrations
- Woocommerce
- Facebook tracking pixel
- JS sitemap
- Set push notifications
- Set up Amazon affiliate & Skimlinks
- Investigate UX tracking possibly
- Install SEO tools maybe Yoast
- Install GA tracking including event trackin
- Set up akismet for spam filtering
- Find email solution
This is how I got on:
Services & Plugins
At lot of the services I wanted to use took quite a bit of setting up. Especially services that I haven’t used before. In the end I had to remove OneSignal — Free Web Push Notifications. It took around an hour to set up and some time after I noticed the site wasn’t secure anymore. In developers console it appeared that the site was calling http services and had image links served from http.
I didn’t know what was causing this, so I had to deactivate all the plugins that I had just installed and then reactivate them one by one. This still didn’t seem to make the site secure, but I did notice that lots of third parties cookies were being dropped including Radium 1 and CDN services like Taboola. If you ever want to see which cookies are being dropped on a particular site on Chrome just click the secure/not secure word:
I managed to pinpoint Onesignal as the service that was setting most of these third party advertising cookies, and Skimlinks was setting a Taboola cookie. In the case of Skimlinks I logged into my account and in settings disabled audience, which seemed to resolved the issue. With Onesignal, there were so many advertising services being called that I just deactivated and deleted the plugin.
This is a list of the final services I’m using on the site:
I’m really proud to say that by being careful with my selecting my theme, images copy and services, on the first attempt my site came up as mobile friendly on their mobile friendly test site:
This was just reward for around 10 hours of work all told. I didn’t achieve everything I set out to do today, I didn’t manage to upload products to the shop which was a major task, but I’m happy that I achieved most of what I set out to do. Check out the coming soon page.
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