Summer 2016’s Best Magento, WordPress, and ExpressionEngine Content

Sadly summer is coming to an end, but that simply means that we’re coming up on Fall conference season! EllisLab recently announced the speakers for ExpressionEngine Conference. We’re honored to be the Presenting Sponsor and hope to see you in our hometown of Detroit in October! Without further ado, we’ll let you jump right into the roundup of July’s best Magento, WordPress, and ExpressionEngine content. Check out the Summer’s best posts from around the web below. If you’re looking for the same great articles the rest of the year, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Enjoy and let us know if we missed anything important in the comment section.

WordPress and Blogging

How To Make WordPress Hard For Clients To Mess Up – WordPress is a wonderfully powerful CMS that ships with many versatile features giving it the flexibility to work out of the box for a wide range of users. However, if you are a professional building custom themes and plugins, sometimes these features can be problematic.
10 Awesome WordPress Features That You Probably Didn’t Know Existed – WordPress comes with so many awesome features and is continuously changing. Some of these features may not get the attention they deserve and remain a little hidden. In this article, we will show you 10 awesome WordPress features that you probably didn’t know existed.
26 WordPress Plugins for Social Media Marketers – Do you want to improve your WordPress blog? Have you considered customizing WordPress with plugins? One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is the sheer number of easy-to-use plugins that help marketers add functions with little hassle.
The Art of Scannable Content: How to Write for Today’s Online Readers – Here’s the truth: There’s no guarantee that anyone will actually read your writing online. You have to compel them to do that. And one way to do so is to create writing that’s effortless to consume.
What Brand is Tops with Small Business Owners? WordPress, Alignable Index Says – Winning the trust of small businesses is not always easy, but one brand that seems to have succeeded is WordPress. According to the new SMB Trust Index, WordPress is the most trusted brand for small businesses, with a Net Promoter Score of 50 in Q2 2016.
WordPress 4.6 “Pepper” – Version 4.6 of WordPress, named “Pepper” in honor of jazz baritone saxophonist Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams III, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.6 help you to focus on the important things while feeling more at home.

ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine 3.4.0 is Out! – We’re dropping another feature release on you, this one with some nice surprises. Grab it now and start playing or keep reading for the details.
4 Ways to Use HubSpot Forms with ExpressionEngine – ExpressionEngine meet HubSpot, a powerful Marketing Automation System. HubSpot meet ExpressionEngine, a flexible Content Management System. Now, play nice. If only it were that simple.
Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site – Prior to this week of meetings with the pMachine people, I had worked with Rick Ellis on a variety of smaller projects, and we had developed a very good working relationship. This paved the way for one of the largest projects that I’ve yet to take on in my career, and includes new website designs for pMachine (now EllisLab) and ExpressionEngine, as well as redesigns of CodeIgniter and pMachine Hosting (now EngineHosting).
EEHUB – If you’re looking to keep up with the best ExpressionEngine content through the month, sign up for the EEHUB newsletter.

Magento and eCommerce

Lessons From A $900 Million Company Sale – Magento is the archetype of the company whose products you use but you’ve never heard of: Their open-source platform is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce sites and corporate clients around the world, ranging from the biggest of the big box stores to corporate titans like Nike to small mom-and-pop retail stores.
Smartphones Overtake Computers as Top E-Commerce Traffic Source/a> – For retailers at least, the most important screens are now the small ones. Smartphones accounted for 45.1 percent of web-shopping traffic in the first quarter of this year, edging out computers at 45 percent, according to a study from Demandware, an e-commerce software provider.
The Future of ECommerce vs. Bricks & Mortar Retailing – For the last several years, the biggest question in retailing has been the competition between old-school bricks and mortar stores and the rise of ECommerce and online retailing. Here I extend the work done for my recently published report on retail trends to take a closer look at the future of the industry.
Letter from the CEO to the Magento Community: Magento’s Evolving Role in Our Ecosystem – Today we announced the acquisition of RJMetrics, a powerful cloud-based analytics solution for digital commerce merchants. It is our first acquisition since becoming an independent company, and represents another milestone in this historic year of change for Magento.
The Future of e-Commerce: What if Users Could Skip Your Site? – Have you taken a look at Google Shopping recently? Okay, so it isn’t quite the ecommerce monster that Amazon or eBay are, and yes, it’s only filled with sponsored posts. Playing around with it, however, proves that it provides a decent experience.
Magento Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies – As a Magento Certified Solution Specialist at Creatuity, I help Magento merchants increase conversions. In this article I’ll share some of my proven strategies that anyone can implement.