The Payment Express plugin for WooCommerce requires the PxPay option (contact Payment Express support to get yours – there is no charge), and is available for purchase from the WooCommerce Extension store, here: http://www.woothemes.com/extension/payment-express/

Our office will be closed from Friday 23rd December 4PM, reopening on 9 January 2012 at 9AM.

Please note that we will have limited access to e-mail and phone until 9th January 2012 and may not be able to respond promptly.

If you have any urgent enquiries during this time, please contact urgent@opmc.biz, and one of our team will attend to it as soon as possible.

Check out the site here: www.shoppinglive.com.au

While no design time has been put into this site yet, it displays quite neatly without doing anything.

Over at WooThemes you can buy ready made designs for your WooCommerce store. It’s just a case of buying the option you want. Note if you buy what is called a “Child” theme, you need to buy the Parent theme too. So for example a $20 child theme might require a $70 parent theme to run.

Jargon aside these are just files you download once you pay for them, and installing them into Woocommerce in WordPress will activate them.

You can see all the designs available here: http://www.woothemes.com/themes/woocommerce-themes/

At the time of writing there was 15 themes. But I’m sure there were about 10 not so long ago, so the options are quickly growing with the popularity of the solution. $100-odd USD for a ready made online store design saves you thousands of dollars up front, so it’s worth the investment. This can then be modified by yourself or with expert help from a web developer, to take into consideration your branding and individual needs.

We’ve heard about WooCommerce, so wanted to find out what it was and how it worked.

The mission

Set up an online store with WooCommerce, cross fingers it works.

The outcome

An online store set up and working, that can actually sell something, in 45 minutes. While it wasn’t beautiful looking at that point, it was definitely good enough given the effort that went into it. Here’s what it looks like:

With some TLC this could be turned into a successful online store.

The details

We found the set up process very easy. If you already have WordPress set up, you can install Woocommerce via Plugins > Add new and search for it.

The people over at Woo obviously thought about what they were doing before they made an online store solution for WordPress, and this shows in the outcome. After activating the plugin, you come to a nice and easy to understand page that shows you all the settings you can have.

Simply go through and set everything up with the settings you want. There’s some technical options to choose in there, but you can gloss over them and still get the job done easily.

Coupons

One thing we thought was great was how easy it is to make coupons.

It’s so easy to make discount coupons and they work so well. Coupons shouldn’t be rocket science, and WooCommerce treats them as an easy to use marketing tool. They are a pleasure at the payment page.

If you’d like to see how can help you create a store like this, please get in touch. Otherwise, watch this space for more information on WooCommerce and how it could help you sell online!

Has your WordPress website been hacked? Or, do you think it might have been hacked but you’re not sure? How do you tell?

The truth is, you can’t really tell unless you know what you’re looking for.

Sometimes it’s easier to tell, with things like:

1. You visit your website and it redirects to some other website that it’s not supposed to.
2. All sorts of strange things appear on your website – usually lots of text.
3. Things don’t display properly.
4. Your website homepage is replaced by “HACKED BY h8rl33t”

But sometimes it’s not obvious at all. Your website could be hacked, and someone can monitor every move and change you make, but you’ll be blissfully unaware.

WordPress has made it easy for anyone to set a website, but it can be difficult for the novice to diagnose problems. We’d recommend if you are concerned about hacking, to get a professional to take a look. Sometimes the effects of hacking can linger long after the supposed problem is fixed.

I realised how much I had taken this for granted when I recently needed to use Windows. The first 5 minutes there were 10 errors I got told about, none of which I needed to know about. It’s one of those things that is just plain annoying more than anything else.

This is where Apple’s Lion operating system tries a bit harder than last time, but is also not such a good thing. For example, rather than it necessarily telling me it’s searching through my e-mails for something I’m looking for, it seems as if it’s doing nothing. I think the idea is that the results will just instantly appear. But as my computer isn’t the latest and greatest (but by no means aged), it seems like it’s doing a whole lot of nothing when it’s actually doing something.

So how do you know if it’s doing anything? You don’t. If it’s thinking for a minute, and comes up with no results, how do you know whether it’s actually doing anything? You probably can’t easily tell.

So, I like the idea, but when these computers aren’t fast enough to figure out the answer in what one would think is a reasonable amount of time, most people will assume there isn’t an answer. And they’ll never know.

I’d prefer a computer that tells me what it’s doing, so I know if it’s doing something and just thinking slowly, or not doing anything at all.

But earlier this week I took the plunge, and everything seems to be working well so far. And, it’s much better than I thought it would be.

One of the issues with being a power user, is I find things start to go downhill after awhile, and a restart is necessary. But when you have 100 things open, in the middle of a work day, closing everything down and restarting is a major inconvenience.

But with the mighty Lion, it actually lets you restart without changing a thing:

Now, restarting doesn’t mean a major inconvenience, because you can start out where you left off.

But equally, you don’t really want to have to try and figure out all the technical setup yourself, as you may not know where to start.

We’ve got a solution for you. If you take our advice about the Storefrontthemes.com online store solution we’ve mentioned before here, then for a fraction of the cost of having the store professionally setup, we can offer our install only service.

With this, we will provide an install only service for WordPress, Getshopped.org shopping cart, and a Storefrontthemes.com design you’ve chosen. We won’t do anything else, just the technical setup of everything so you don’t need to figure out those initial steps yourself.

You get your own login with full access to change whatever you wish. Then, once you’ve spent some time with it, you can then start selling without any reliance on us. Or, if you need some help, we can assist on an hourly basis as and when required.

If this sounds like what you’re after, use the form below to get in touch, or call us on 02 9955 2237.

We would love to hear from you. Make your enquiry below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

*(denotes required field)

Name: *

E-Mail Address: *

Subject: *

Message: *

CAPTCHA Code: *

Powered by Fast Secure Contact Form

We would like to offer our services to help you get your website and other services up and running again. We can:

-Transfer the management of your domain name.

-Set up web hosting and e-mail services for you.

-Set up a temporary website for you if you wish.

Feel free to click here to make an enquiry about transferring away from Distribute.IT if you wish, and we can advise accordingly.

We understand for a lot of people this is a challenging time, and especially people who are not IT experts – which is the majority – you may be unsure what you need to do next.

We specialise in difficult transfers and situations like this with web hosting services, so if you need some guidance we are here to help you get up and running again. While we can’t recover your old data, we can assist you in taking the next step forward.

It is possible in some cases, and has been reported on the internet, that you can use Google cache to retrieve your website. This is certainly possible to a certain extent and we can provide services and advice for clients wanting to know if this is possible. It may be possible to reconstruct some or all of your old website from Google’s records.

We are a web solutions business providing web hosting, web development, domain name registration and other web based services. There are many businesses like ours in Australia. We recommend you do your research and consider several providers before settling on one.

As you have seen recently with Playstation and the CIA, nothing is un-hackable. But having a good process in place moving forward means that data recovery in future could be easier. Lots of advice has been posted online today about this, but one very salient point is:

1) Have a backup of your website that you have possession of, in your office or home.

Benefit of hindsight is a powerful (and very frustrating) thing. But putting in place some best practices for your website moving forward means that you are not 100% reliant on others.

Spring is an initiative designed to get people moving, demonstrate the impact this has on their mood and raise over $500,000 for the Black Dog Institute.

So, sign up today and help raise awareness and much needed funds for the Black Dog Institute with the Spring Fitness program – it’s a tiny $30 for a whole month of training exercises and advice!