Tony Phelps | Winch Websites

Review: Sell online with Thrivecart

by Tony Phelps | 4 Jun 2021 | Uncategorised

When you have products or services that don't need the full power of an online shopping cart, Thrivecart can step in to provide a highly efficient, customer-friendly checkout that is both sophisticated and easy to use. Perfect for significant one-off purchases, and particularly good at recurring payments eg. subscriptions, and even split payments. All managed in the one place.

1. Why Thrivecart is a great solution for small businesses and non-profits

Installing, managing and updating a full e-commerce shopping system in your website may be over the top for you. If you’re offering a limited number of significant items or services that are generally purchased by themselves, a quick, smooth, easy checkout experience will boost your sales and reduce ‘abandoned carts’.

In many independent websites, WooCommerce is the software of choice to provide an online store and its checkout facilities. WooCommerce is sophisticated, adaptable, and a great tool - but it usually requires a number of additional components to be added to your website. This means a maintenance overhead & cost, and probably affects how your website is built too (in terms of navigation, layout, design).

But what if you’re aiming to sell one-off items eg. your own book? An online store with 1 product and all the steps required to get it just isn’t suitable. What if you offer services eg. a monthly fee for website management? Again, an online store with a ‘product’ and the associated checkout steps aren’t ideal.

This is the premise and the strength of Thrivecart. It’s a separate online service, and inside your Thrivecart account you define what it is you wish to sell (ie. title, description, price etc), fill out associated details (payment options etc) and end up with a dedicated checkout page. In other words, with one click on a button, or one click on an email link, your customer sees what they’re going to buy, how they can buy it, and the information you need from them to make it happen - a true 1-page checkout.

2. What is Thrivecart?

Thrivecart is “Software as a Service” (Saas) - an online service that you simply use, much like Facebook or Youtube. You purchase an account with Thrivecart, and then have access to its facilities.

It is a very well thought-out and designed system. Each time you create a ‘Product’, you step through a wizard guiding you through what’s needed and what options there are. You can customise the design, add your colours/logos/images, define discount coupons, add options (eg. pay monthly or yearly), add upsells (eg. “upgrade to Pro plan today for 10% discount”), set the payment processor (eg. Stripe, Paypal), and link the sale into other systems such as your email marketing (eg. Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign).

It’s a powerful, flexible system that makes it very easy to produce a 1-page checkout that your customers will find very convenient.

Thrivecart, in particular, has powerful options for creating ongoing subscriptions. This includes things like including an initial setup fee, or maybe an initial free trial period. It can also automatically follow up on failed repeat payments (ie. send emails), and it can automatically send warnings that a subscription is about to renew, and/or invoices after each renewal.

An example of a Thrivecart checkout page

3. How Thrivecart is an affordable software for small businesses?

Right now, Thrivecart is only available as a one-off purchase, for a lifetime deal. It’s not cheap, at US$495 - but then there are no ongoing costs, no commissions.

The key is how much time this service can save you, in terms of;

setting up items to sell, and the potential upsells
avoiding admin overhead dealing with payments
automating your processes
not having to maintain, manage or backup software
minimal changes to website
a quick & simple link to give potential customers

The downside risk is that the service could possibly close down, of course.

4. How to get started with Thrivecart?

To purchase Thrivecart, head over to thrivecart.com and follow the bouncing ball. If you’re that way inclined, feel free to go instead to my affiliate link which will give me a small commission (no effect on what you pay). Either way!

Once you’re in, it’s quite logically laid out. Click on “Products” in the top menu, and create your first product (they’re always in Test mode to start with).

The end result will be a link you can use in emails or in buttons, or an embed you can put into eg. a webpage. Then get selling 😀

Conclusion

It doesn't matter if you're a small or big business, Thrivecart is a good solution when you don't need a full shopping-cart system. It’s smooth, it’s effective, it’s easy. Recommended.

Why your website is a caravan

by Tony Phelps | 25 May 2021 | Websites

Let’s say you are the proud owner of a website. You may have done all the grunt-work yourself, or you may have asked someone else to do all the necessaries. One way or another, you’re online and the world can see your website.

Do you even need to know what underpins the website in terms of hosting and domain name and other stuff? It’s there and working, right? Well, like handing over responsibility for anything important, it’s always wise to have an idea of what’s going on. Then if there’s some change that impacts on your website, you’ll be a step ahead and ready to deal with it and keep things rolling along.

There are 3 pillars to any website - the website itself, its hosting, and its domain name. Let’s see how these equate to a caravan, to help understand how they relate to each other.

Your new caravan has finally arrived at the dealer, and you’ve rocked up to collect it. After a quick run-through of how to hitch and unhitch it, how to get it ready on-site for you to use, and how to find & use its various features, you’re ready to head out to the wide blue yonder.

Caravan = Website

Well, the look of the caravan (its design and paint-job), what it has inside (bunk beds, shower, TV), the extras that it includes (eg. slide-out barbeque)... these are all equivalent to your website.

A website may have one or more forms, perhaps an online store, it may ask for people to sign up for a newsletter, it will more than likely present information to visitors in an easy-to-absorb way with user-friendly navigation around the pages. In the same way as there is a wide variety of caravan designs, so there is a wide variety of website designs.

Caravan Park = Hosting

The caravan park that you’ve stopped at, that’s equivalent to your hosting. You are free to hitch up and move to another caravan park if you like, but while you’re settled in at one, you’re going to have to pay a fee for the privilege. Some parks provide more for your money eg. kitchen facilities, showers, bouncy castle, pool, where some provide less for your money eg. a stony bit of ground. But which park you choose is up to you, and if you don’t like one, you can move on to another.

RV caravan camping at the caravan park on a peaceful lake with mountains on the horizon. Camping vacation family travel concept — A beautiful caravan park

In just the same way, your website has to ‘live’ somewhere. Essentially, there is a computer out there (the webserver) which stores the data and processes the requests for webpages when visitors arrive. Fortunately these days, we don’t need to be concerned with the technology itself, we just need to know whether it’s a good neighbourhood and if the facilities are up to scratch.

Choosing hosting for your website may not be necessary. For many websites, it comes as a package deal. For some websites, it actually isn’t possible to separate your own website out from the underlying system. But for most websites, it is certainly possible to relocate a website to different hosting if you don’t like the performance or are being charged too much. Just like caravan parks, fees vary hugely, and you tend to get what you pay for.

Rego = Domain Name

Every caravan has to have its own vehicle registration. While providing States with a great income stream, it does also have practical uses such as allowing the tracing of a tow vehicle whose own registration is obscured by the caravan, and also of course the tracing of the caravan itself if it gets stolen. Just like a car, every caravan has a unique serial number which is linked to its registration plate.

Victoria The Place To Be Australian number plate to scale — Victorian number plate

Every year, the rego has to be renewed with the appropriate State authority. Pay a fee, and the caravan is legally allowed on the road.

So it is with your domain name. You register a domain name with a ‘Registrar’ (there are hundreds to choose from) and pay an initial fee. Then you renew your domain name registration every now and then, usually once a year. The registration fee and the renewal fee are set by your registrar, and can vary widely. There may be add-on services attached to a domain, but usually it’s an extremely simple and limited service, just the same as the caravan rego.

As with hosting, domain registration/renewal may be a package deal, so you may not see a separate fee. Unlike hosting, it is nearly always possible to relocate the domain registration to another registrar - in caravan terms, this would be like dropping the rego in New South Wales and re-registering in Victoria as your new base State. Why would you change registrar? Maybe it’s cheaper. Maybe it’s more convenient eg. so you get one invoice for hosting + domain renewal. Maybe the registrar provides better tools to manage the domain (although you’re rarely going to need them, it must be said).

So be sure you are aware of your own ‘caravan’ setup. Are you paying for the website itself? Who is your hosting with, and how much is it? Who is the domain name registered with, and how much is the renewal?

If you know these things, then if you become dissatisfied for any reason with one of them, you’ll be able to look into fixing that - move to a better caravan park, upgrade your caravan, or register the plate with another State!

Knowing your why and how powerful it can be in your business

by Tony Phelps | 5 Feb 2021 | Marketing, Website Design, Websites

Fake Dictionary, Dictionary definition of the word why.

Why do I create and manage websites? Because many years ago I fell in love with the playing-field-levelling technology of the internet. I do it for small/micro businesses and for small non-profits to easily compete successfully on the internet with multi-million-dollar budgets from the big organisations.

I’m not interested in the large corporate projects with committees, lo-o-o-o-ong project timelines, hidden agendas, impact assessments, stakeholder engagement studies etc etc. They are high value but high aggro.

So my ‘Why’ leads straight to my Purpose - which is to help small businesses, small non-profits to succeed via the internet. As a great book has it, “Small is beautiful”.

Having a clear purpose in your business is invaluable.

If you have a why, you have a purpose- and with a purpose, you know what you’re out to achieve. It focusses what you do, how you do it, what you do it with. And means you do it better.
It keeps you authentic - if you care about what you do (ie. it’s more than just simply earning money to survive), your actual and potential customers will feel and recognise that. They’ll be more confident when buying from you.
It keeps you on track - knowing why you do what you do will help you ‘stick to the plan’. It’s easy to add options, and say ‘Yes’ every time a customers asks for something slightly related, but if you keep your why in mind, you’ll know what will serve your aims and objectives and what won’t. You’ll make better business decisions, run more effectively, build a better business. Your why gives you direction.

How to find your why:

1: What drives you? - you get out of bed every day (give or take a Covid lockdown) and do your do. Is it simply what you know how to do, or is there more to it? What inspires you to keep going and want to stay in your industry other than money?

2: What about your business do you love? - when you talk to others about your business, what is it that you are most passionate about? It won’t be the hard description of what you actually do (eg. excavate ditches) but what’s behind doing that (eg. the satisfaction of protecting a town from flooding).

3: What problems do you want to solve for your customers? - whatever it is that you do, it’s going to be solving a problem. Maybe it’s as straightforward as offering a great place to eat. Maybe it’s stroking an ego. Maybe it’s a comfortable retirement. Identify the problem that people come to you to get fixed.

4: Follow your gut - your why is an emotional thing, not a dispassionate factual thing. This isn’t the same as your mission or your vision. It’s what leads to a mission, a vision. See if you can catch or recall those moments that make you happy to be doing what you do. What was that actually made you feel happy?

Review: Uptime360 monitoring service

by Tony Phelps | 24 Jul 2020 | Websites

Winch Websites recently started using Uptime360 to keep tabs on a diverse range of servers, websites and related aspects for clients. Essentially, one place to check on how things are, with automatic alerts sent out when there are issues that might need attending to.

With an increasing array of online tools and services, the prospect of having one dashboard to look at is very appealing. See how busy things are, if anything is failing, or if a client has fallen afoul of antispam or website blocks. Plus, set customised alerts to notify appropriate people to pay attention to something.

Uptime360 aims to fill that need, and has become a part of the Winch Websites stable. It’s relatively new, but then, so are many online services really! I’m expecting the service to improve over the next few months as the developers add new features and facilities, and tweak what’s there in response to feedback.

What does Uptime360 do?

Creating an account and getting things going was straightforward, and the initial dashboard makes it quite clear what goes where. The available options are split into;

Server - for the underlying webservers (up/down, disk space, memory/process usage, network activity)
Website - for individual websites (up/down, response times,
Check - for particular services eg. is a mailserver accepting emails?
Blacklist - is a website blacklisted or blocked on any of 200+ providers?

These cover critical aspects for a client’s digital shopfront. Is the website up and running? Is it suffering slow responses for some reason? Has it been blacklisted by anti-spammers or internet security services? Are emails getting through OK?

At Winch Websites, we are on the lookout for any of these issues for client websites covered by a Website Care plan. We aim to avoid the scenario of a customer finally telling the website owner that they have a serious problem - probably after multiple other potential or actual customers simply gave up and moved on.

For client sites that we host and manage, it means we can jump on an issue quickly, find out what’s going on, and get it fixed. Right now, we have other monitoring services in place. Add a sophisticated infrastructure that aims to self-heal for serious problems (such a webserver crashing, or a website experiencing the White Screen Of Death!). Uptime360 builds on that infrastructure and provides greater insight into activity and performance. It has turned out to be a great addition to our arsenal - pulling into one place an overview of a dozen webservers run by several providers with differing technical architectures.

What’s Not So Good About Uptime360?

The Dashboard

There are some weak areas. The main ‘Dashboard’ is fairly meaningless - showing a large surface-chart of overall server uptime offers no value. It’s always going to be very near 100% (you’d hope!). Likewise, mini-charts for each major monitoring service (Servers, Websites, Checks, Blacklists) have an overall average with a vertical axis based on the recent lowest to recent highest. This means a large dip if one of them has even a slight variation. It can give a bit of a heart-start when seeing Servers drop from a steady 100% down to the bottom of the chart, and it turns out to be down to 99% (the difference between a quick hiccup and complete failure ????).

Snapshot of the Uptime360 dashboard — *The Uptime360 Dashboard could provide more value*

Personally, I’d like to see the Uptime360 Dashboard reflect what I as administrator need to know or see as an overview - and that’s who’s having an issue I might need to look into. For example, fix the vertical axis so that it is always 0% up to 100%, and if I see any line dipping then I can be concerned. Or better, only show anything that hasn’t been perfect in the last day or week, with a link to that item for more detail.

Lists on Summary Pages

A minor annoyance is the selector for how many items to show in a list. For example, when I go to the Server page, it always shows the first 5. I change to 10, 15 or All. Then I refresh the page (which should be automatic, by the way, just as it is on the server detail page). And I’m back to 5 again. I’d like that to stick on whatever number I ask to be listed.

Summary Page Chart Scaling

Detail pages suffer the same scaling issue; on the Server page, I can view the CPU (processor) busy-ness as a percentage and as a chart. If I see a chart with a spike, I need to read and interpret the percentage to assess if the server is actually ‘busy’ or if it’s just ‘busier’. Not a big deal, but it would be great to know I can speedily scan down and if I see a spike, know immediately it’s worth investigating. It’s how the brain works, we’re good at scanning images.

Snapshot of the Uptime360 Server summary page — *Spikes may look large but are usually not*

So What Do We Think About Uptime360?

These are user-interface niggles, though. Uptime360 is a welcome new addition to Winch Websites and is now a standard part of the Website Care toolbox. It gives us greater clarity into what’s going on with critical aspects of what we do - providing effective websites that positively contribute to their owners. Overall I’m happy to give this a browser tab of its own!

Oh, and one nice touch is the ability to create a Status Page with a dedicated and branded URL (webpage). Clients can check and see how well our servers and/or their own sites have behaved over the last week. This page needs a bit more sophistication, but it has potential as a place to refer clients to look at first if they think something is wrong. The page can include details of any incidents, which can be updated with our comments/explanations etc. It could be a way to deflect multiple helpdesk calls when there’s a major outage. It’s not ready for prime time as yet, in my opinion (there’s an issue with hooking up the custom URL with an SSL certificate, for example).

Pros

Nice layout - clean
Easy to learn & use
Quick
Nice charts & numbers

Cons

Main dashboard of no practical use
Chart scaling inconsistent
No auto-refresh or sticky how-many on summary pages

Yes or No?

Would I recommend this to anyone running multiple servers and websites? Yes.

Find Out More

Go to uptime360.net - this is not an affiliate link.

I used to service my

by Tony Phelps | 26 Mar 2019 | Outsourcing, Take Care

Once upon a time, in the 'good old days', I had a Triumph 1500. Cream-coloured saloon, 4 doors, double headlights, manual, leather(ish) seats. Great first car.

(photo: By Charles01 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11341226)

I did all my own servicing on that car. It was like a giant Meccano set (for those not familiar with the brand, you had all sorts of metal shapes full of holes that you could bolt together to make fabulous machines, the big-kid version of Lego). In that Triumph, you could take stuff apart, clean it, replace worn out bits, put it together, and it was better than before.

I do have a mind that likes taking things apart and putting them together, I will admit. All the same, the Triumph 1500 made it quite easy. Generally, access to things was easy enough, spares were easy to find. I was a Mechanic!! (and now I'm regularly on a big red fire-truck, but that's another story...)

My next car was a much more modern Ford hatchback, I forget the model. It had electronic ignition, was packed into a small engine-bay. First time I tried to tune that Ford, I stuffed it. Because now you need specialist equipment, skills and experience.

So I gave up my car maintenance hobby and let the professionals do it. It costs me to get a car serviced by someone, of course, but a) it's easy and b) I can be reasonably confident it will be done properly and quickly.

I'm sure I could still do it myself. However, I have other things I could and should be doing - including newer hobbies like family, doing up this house, learning guitar. Servicing my own car would no doubt still give me a sense of achievement, but it would suck up time and need a bit of learning plus some new equipment and gadgets (hmm, there's a thought...).

This same principle is almost certain to apply to you. What are you doing, where are you spending your time, effort and funds to do something yourself that someone else could do more quickly, more effectively? If you enjoy it, stick with it. But if in a perfect world you could stop doing it, it's worth considering the benefits of outsourcing.

Weigh up the cost of getting someone else to do it against what you would do with that free time, alongside knowing that it has been done properly (no left over bits!).

An example is book-keeping. Are you catching up on your accounts on a Sunday? Imagine just handing that over to someone else. Checkout Roneta's services at Enhanced Power for what I mean.

Another example might be your website. When are you managing that? Are you adding new content every now and then? More importantly, how often are you making sure all the components are updated with security and bug fixes? Backups? Again, all of this can be handed over to someone else for around the price of a couple of hours of your time per month.

At Winch Websites, we offer a Website Care plan that looks after all the technical stuff (updates, security, backups, search-engine basics, speed & performance) and also lets you make any changes you like simply by sending an email with what you want done. Your website hums along all tuned-up. Easy and stress free.

Sure you could look after your website yourself. A great many do. This isn't about whether you CAN though, it's about whether you SHOULD. You're running a business, it's a business judgement you need to make - at what point is your time worth more doing other things? Are you going to build and grow your business more through DIY website maintenance or have you reached a point where it's more cost-effective to hand it over?

I did really enjoy looking after that old Triumph 1500. The cars I drive now though, I'm not interested in getting under the hood. Aside from a wisp of nostalgia, I can't say I regret that, with a lot else to do instead!

Interested in working with us?

Get In Touch Now

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