The hottest aheadWorks news is the fact that 37 new Magento themes with various color schemes are now available at our site. Till September 15, 2010 you can get any our template with 30% off discount having used the following coupon code:

THEME30OFF

Apply the coupon code below while purchasing 3 aheadWorks extensions and get 1 Magento theme as a gift:

BUY3GET1

With our templates you get:

• a price range between $139 and $169
• Magento Community Edition 1.3.3.0 and 1.4* compatibility
• PSD source
• step-by-step installation guide

To view a complete list of aheadWorks templates, please visit the Magento Themes page.

News Themes

Today we released the new version of the Advanced Reports extension – 2.1.1 – and glad to announce that some minor bugs have been fixed making this module more stable.

In the Sales by Coupon Code and Sales by ZIP Code units, the “Shipping” column has been added. Now you can find out not only the amount of taxes, discounts, and refunded sums, but view the shipping total as well.

We are also happy to notify you that the updated versions of the following Advanced Reports additional units have been released:

Customers by Country 1.0.2

Sales by Payment Type 1.0.2

Sales Statistics 1.0.3

New vs. Returning 1.0.3

Sales by Manufacturer 1.0.3

You can find more information on the Advanced Reports and Advanced Reports Units page.

News, Updates Advanced Reports, Unit

The most significant event of the last month is our website redesign. Besides the template renewal, the improvements were applied to the store functionality as well:

• Top products navigation
  On the home page of our website you can browse Top Sellers, Most Reviewed, and Recently Added products.
• Newsletter segments
  When signing up for the newsletter, you can select the segments of your interest – new product alerts, product updates, monthly newsletter, promotions.
• My Downloadable Products tab enhancement
  To prevent cluttering up the page, we made three latest versions of each product available.
• Shopping process simplification
  Free products can be downloaded eliminating the checkout step.
• Advanced search
  By the extension name (or its part only), you can get to the sought-for product page exactly from the search result list.

Now we invite you to visit our store and appreciate all the changes performed.

Promotion of the Month

If you aim to have your website page rankings high, then Ultimate SEO Suite is your lucky ticket! This new aheadWorks extension adds canonical links to the head of each product page, uses these URLs in sitemap, and possesses more other significant features!

Only during 10 days you can get this powerful extension at a reduced price and save 30% either on Community or Enterprise Edition. To get the discount, just add the Ultimate SEO Suite extension to the cart and use the following coupon code:

USS30OFF

The Ultimate SEO Suite cost (for CE): $104.00 (Original price: $149.00, you save $45.00)

The Ultimate SEO Suite cost (for EE): $384.00 (Original price: $549.00, you save $165.00)

Hurry up! You have only 10 days to save 30% — the offer lasts till August 26, 2010!

Updated Extensions

Blog 1.0.21 – with Ultimate SEO Suite compatibility

The Blog extension from aheadWorks is reckoned among the best buzz and word of mouth marketing tips. It not only provides your regular customers with up-to-date information but brings additional visitors to your site, builds relevant SEO-friendly text links, and serves as assistance in building sales strategy.

If you want to learn more about Blog, visit the extension page.

Product Questions 1.3.3 – with improved URL rewrite option

Product Questions lets your potential customers ask you product-related questions on the product page itself. Answer them right there – and resolve their doubts.

You can find more information about this aheadWorks extension on the Product Questions page.

Booking and Reservations 1.2.1 – with ability to duplicate booking product

Booking and Reservations allows you to offer and manage all kinds of bookable products efficiently and with ease. Whether you are a travel operator, run a cinema hall or organize events, this extension will make your job an absolute breeze.

Find more on the Booking and Reservations page.

That was a brief review of our new and updated extensions. We are always happy to get all kinds of feedback. If you need a new feature in our product or some extension — just let us know — it has good chances to be implemented.

Thank you for being with us and good luck to your business,
Sincerely yours,
aheadWorks Magento department

News, Newsletter Extensions

The new minor version of the Z-Blocks extension we have released today is now compatible with Magento Enterprise Edition 1.9. Besides, the WYSIWYG editor is added to backend for Magento Community Edition 1.4* what allows you to create rich HTML content without extra efforts and extensive knowledge.

One more new feature implemented will save your time and greatly ease your work. Since version 2.2.2 you can define classes for Z-Blocks’ HTML element in the aw_zblocks.css file and specify there the name of a class for an element or its attributes.

You can find more information about this aheadWorks extension on the Z-Blocks page.

News, Updates Extensions, Z-Blocks

The key element of a website design, which relates directly to its success, is navigation. Over complicated and over designed menu (especially changing its placement, typography, or colors from page to page) doesn’t raise clickability. Website visitors get frustrated and won’t hang around such a site very long – they are more likely to go to your competitors.

We are ready to share the secrets of effective website navigation with all Magento-based store owners. Three basic principles are the following:

1. Make the navigation easier
Proper menu style is a fundamental pillar while creating accessible and usable websites. So the critical importance of intuitive, easy to find and use navigation cannot be overestimated. If the links are not obvious, your store visitors will click away never to return. Select the menu style suitable for your store design and allow your visitors flow through your site and find the required information as quickly as possible.

2. The less clicks the better
A website must respond instantly to its visitors’ instincts. While travelling around your site, users should get to the required pages quick enough. A necessity to come back to the category page each time to visit the next product page is rather time consuming and really annoying. Make your store content reachable within fewer clicks and your visitors will surely stay longer on your website.

3. Provide convenient search
The advanced search through the site is not just a useful tool but essential component of website navigation. According to Double Jump Media research, the percentage of website visitors who purchase after using on-site search is a significant 37%. It’s rather convincing to ignore the search functionality as an important factor for web users when making a purchase. Set up the advanced search for your site and achieve the same or even better results!

We hope that these tips will help you make your website navigation really efficient and be ahead of your competitors.

News Advanced Menu, Extensions, Previous/Next, Search Autocomplete and Suggest

We are glad to announce the release of two new extensions versions – Ultimate SEO Suite 1.1 and Blog 1.0.21. The point here is that now URLs from Blog will get in the sitemap and Google sitemap. Moreover, since version 1.1 the Ultimate SEO Suite extension counts the quantity and size not only of product and CMS pages but the Blog URLs as well.

You can find the updated versions of the extensions on the Ultimate SEO Suite, Blog – Community Edition and Blog – Enterprise Edition pages.

News, Updates Blog, Ultimate SEO Suite

SEO is the ongoing process of structuring web pages so that they are found, read, and indexed by various search engines in the most effective manner possible. The better optimized the page is, the higher ranking it will obtain in major search engine results. To be on the first pages and, thereby, get the highest traffic – isn’t that you are aiming at?

URL rewriting is one of the ways how you can optimize your site for search engines. As you know, the feature of SEO-friendly URLs has been already implemented in our Product Questions v.1.3, but it was greatly improved in the just released minor version.

Now, if you enable the URL rewrite option, the “-question” will be added to the product page link, e.g. http:// example.com/cell-phones/nokia-questions.html. It looks more friendly for search engines and memorable for your store visitors, isn’t it?

You can look how this new option works in our demo on the Product Questions page.

News, Updates Extensions, Product Questions

If your site has similar or even identical content accessible through multiple URLs, it can be defined as duplicate content. Search engines penalize such websites by clearing them up. To avoid such unwanted problem, use the Ultimate SEO Suite extension which adds a small piece of code (i.e. canonical links) to the head of each product page. Thus search engines will know the preferred URL that the duplicate content refers to.

Duplicate content is one of the biggest headaches for every SEO expert. Even if there are two different URLs for one page, the search engine is never definite which page to show on this or that keyword, which page to give the PageRank to, and which page to consider as the main. Eventually, it divides the authority and page rank on its own what makes the page you are trying to promote far enough in the search listings.

Identical content can seriously hurt your website page rankings, but using the Ultimate SEO Suite extension you can reduce the amount of duplication. When crawling and indexing your site, search engines adopt canonical URLs and single out the main among the duplicate pages. In other words, if there are two different URLs for one page, a canonical tag implemented by the extension tells the robots which page it should promote. This gives you more control over the URL returned in search results.

You don’t have to optimize the functionality of your website, eliminate self-created duplicate content, or change the code – just use the power of canonization.

With the Ultimate SEO Suite extension you get:

• Canonical URL at the head section of the product page
  The extension adds rel=”canonical” URL’s to the head of your product pages what allows search engines to avoid crawling the same page more than once.
• Canonical URLs in sitemap
  The usage of canonical URLs in your sitemap is the best insurance that the pages you want will be found and indexed by search engines bots.
• Canonical URLs in Google sitemap
  Submit automatically generated canonical URLs to Google – allow this search engine to crawl and index your site more intelligently.

 



 

• Ability to split Google sitemap
  Google accepts only up to 50’000 URLs per sitemap or a file size of 10MB – rather inconvenient for large websites. The Ultimate SEO Suite extension allows you to split your sitemap into smaller more manageable files that get approved by Google.
• Google sitemap images support
  If you allow including images in your sitemap, Google indexes these images and adds them to the image search attracting more traffic to your site.

 



 

• Auto-change to canonical URLs
  The extension automatically replaces short product URLs with canonical URLs all over the store. You can either leave default categories used in the canonical URL or easily change them for every product.

 



 

• Complete multi-store support
  Don’t worry if you are running a multistore – with this aheadWorks extension you can easily set different canonical links for every product for each store view.

Please, find more information on the Ultimate SEO Suite page.

Note: the extension is compatible with Enterprise Edition 1.8 and Community Edition 1.4.1.0

News Extensions, Ultimate SEO Suite

On June 13, Magento have released the 1.4.1.0 version of the Community Edition. As we always try to keep our extensions up-to-date, we worked strenuously and have finally managed to make all of them compatible with this version. Moreover, we released new extensions packages compatible with Magento Enterprise Edition 1.8.

In general, during the last month there were tens of releases – minor and major, bug-fixing and feature-added. Every our extension has been improved, but today we’d like to concentrate your attention on the most meaningful updates and new extensions only.

Promotion of the Month

Only during this week you have a chance to get our new extension – Video Testimonials – with 35% off! Besides the discount, you get the opportunity to upload your service/product demonstrations, allow your customers to post their own video, and promote your site in YouTube.

Just add Video Testimonials to cart (either Community or Enterprise Edition) and use the following coupon code:

VIDT35OFF

The Video Testimonials cost (for CE): $83.85 (Original price: $129.00, you save $45.15)

The Video Testimonials cost (for EE): $317.85 (Original price: $489.00, you save $171.15)

Hurry up! You have only 7 days to save 35% — the offer lasts till July 20, 2010!

Updated Extensions

Subscriptions and Recurring Payments v.1.4 – configurable products support

The Subscriptions and Recurring Payments extension from aheadWorks Co. adds a host of features to native Magento capabilities so that you can accept recurring payments and sell subscription products more easily and efficiently.

You can find more about this aheadWorks extension on the Subscriptions and Recurring Payments page.

Search Autocomplete and Suggest v.2.0.1 – core enhancement

Search Autocomplete and Suggest makes it simple for your customers to find exactly what they need. With customizable search item layout, product thumbnail dimension, search delay, header & footer of the search result list, etc. you can make searching more convenient, quick, and easy.

View the complete list of new features on the Search Autocomplete and Suggest page.

AJAX Cart Pro v.2.1.1 – with Subscriptions and Recurring Payments support

The AJAX Cart Pro extension effectively removes those annoying page reloads that frequently occur when users click “add to cart” and “delete from cart” options from category, product Compare Products or Wishlist pages. Instead of reloading, items are added instantly with appealing animation effects, and the confirm dialog box is automatically closed after defined time.

You can find all new features added on the AJAX Cart Pro page.

Product Questions v.1.3.1 – with Advanced Newsletter integration

Product Questions lets your potential customers ask you product-related questions on the product page itself. And moreover, the Advanced Newsletter extension support allows them to subscribe to newsletter segments exactly from the “Ask a question” form.

You can view the complete changelog on the Product Questions page.

That was a brief review of our new and updated extensions. We are always happy to get all kinds of feedback. If you need a new feature in our product or some extension — just let us know — it has good chances to be implemented.

Thank you for being with us and good luck to your business,
Sincerely yours,
aheadWorks Magento department

Newsletter, Updates Extensions

In search of effective ways of product advertising and introduction, you can come across various ideas – either outdated and hackneyed or new and progressive. It has been already said and written a lot about time-proved, popular methods. So let’s consider the spin-ups, namely video testimonials – short video clips demonstrating products’ features, your services provided, and whatever else.

We have found this idea really valuable and decided to give Magento-based store owners an opportunity to use it on their sites. We have thoroughly learnt this way of information presentation and come to the conclusion that video testimonials should serve several purposes at once:

1. Product demonstration
Item introductions bring items to life. It is the key element while selling your products as it demonstrates their capabilities and the best features. One video can easily replace or supplement the many-lines description as it possesses the strong effect of visualization clarity.

2. Service demonstration
A video is an effective way of demonstrating the service your company provides. A creative, vivid, truly absorbing promo video influences watchers’ emotions (and – as consequence – decisions) much stronger than verbal description. It has been well said, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

3. Express customers’ impressions
Testimonials are quotations from satisfied customers and clients. Let people tell of their experience with your products and post their own video testimonials for the others to see. Potential customers are really interested about already-triers’ experience.

4. Promote your store in YouTube
YouTube is one of the biggest and most popular video-sharing sites on the web. A possibility to make video from your site available on YouTube as well means the constant flow of new-comers to your store – people will search video clips and come across you and your site.

5. Increase sales
Whether you upload video introductions by yourself or allow your customers to do it, the “WOW” factor produces an indelible impression on prospective customers, makes your site memorable and sets you apart from the competition.

Having analyzed the information collected and singled out the key features required, we implemented them in the newly released Video Testimonials extension.

If you want to know how all the above-mentioned goals can be achieved with this aheadWorks module, please visit the Video Testimonials page where you can read detailed description, watch screenshots and try how the extension works as if it had been installed on your store.

News Extensions, Video Testimonials