The main objective of an eCommerce site is to sell. More specifically the activities involved in the process of selling are:

• 1. Choose product
• 2. Add to cart
• 3. Register
• 4. Checkout
• 5. Pay

It is difficult to get a visitor to actually add a product into the shopping cart; some won’t like the product, some won’t like the terms, others won’t even be able to do that. A 2009 research by Forrester shows a dramatic 71% abandonment rate after adding a product to cart.

The top five reasons that customer involved in the research gave were:

• 1. Additional costs (shipping, taxes, extras) were too high
• 2. I was not ready to purchase the product
• 3. Just comparing prices with other sites
• 4. Price of product was too high
• 5. Saved products in cart for later consideration

Not only the product range, prices, terms do decrease the chance of a successful checkout; technology is also an issue. The pre-checkout and checkout processes themselves were not mentioned in the research, but do play a considerable role.

The technology used to present the products might be inconvenient and design-wise uncomfortable – small fonts, too many colors, etc.
The shopping cart system might also be unclear when it comes to adding, deleting and editing items. A mistake of adding a wrong product and finding no evident way to remove it will result in an abandonment (we’ve seen websites instructing the customers to edit the product quantity to ’0′ to remove the items – that’s not too practical, is it?).
Registering is another pain in the neck – filling forms is a burden, and the longer they are the more downturn mood they incite.
Paying might also be an issue. Thus, a good eCommerce Merchant account should be able to provide and support an excellent service of accepting major payment methods as quickly and safely as possible.

Another incredible research by SeeWhy in March of this year shows that such design- and technology-wise tuning such as a short checkout process, which is simple and intuitive or even better a guest checkout should drastically decrease the abandonment rate.

Knowing this (many thanks to SeeWhy), Frumatic is able to design effective eCommerce platforms from the end-user point of view resulting in higher conversion rates backed up by excellent online marketing strategies.

Novrealty was set to be very dynamic, highly technological and yet, very easy to use. The website features a clean user-friendly home page and a ton of features behind the scenes. Just like Novron, Novrealty is powered by WordPress CMS, allowing multiple user registration and content management opportunities.

Most of the features have been programmed and integrated from scratch: Advanced Real-Time Search (including Map-based Search), Property Alerts (including automated SMS Alerts), Membership and Accounts, and a Mobile Version of the website. The original technical description contained a lot of requirements, and Frumatic has managed to meet them.

The property database is updated through the WordPress administration panel by one or several members of staff. The system also is able to update the catalog through user accounts, given the right permission settings. Posting and updating content is as easy as posting an article in your personal blog. It took 2 hours of training to be able to confidently work with the new system.

The design and development stages of the Novrealty project took around 3 weeks. The website is being fine-tuned and several important additions will be developed in the nearest future.

Basic social media management technologies have been implemented as part of a vast SMO/SMM campaign specially designed, analyzed and planned by Frumatic. As for SEO and SEM, alongside initial content optimization and structure optimization, full-scale Google and Yandex campaigns have been launched. Analytics data and statistics are constantly being fed back to us in such a way that, after thorough analysis and research, we are able to provide in-depth reports and make any necessary adjustments to Novrealty campaigns and even functionality.

After the redesign and the vast development work done for Novrealty a successful fresh start is imminent. One week in, and we’re already seeing an increase in visitors and potential customers. We are confident that conversion rates will increase with time.

Website: novrealty.com
Russian website: novrealty.ru

Requirements:

• Good education
• Excellent written and spoken English
• Very PC-literate
• Sales-type personality
• Responsibility
• And all the other stuff that allows sales managers to sell

Requirements:

• Solid XHTML, CSS knowledge
• Google and Yandex SEO experience
• Search Engine Marketing experience
• Ability to devise and work with link-building tools
• Rel canonical, rev canonical, http shortlink, etc.

Good written and spoken English

Requirements:

• PHP, Javascript, XHTML, CSS
• Linux, Apache, MySQL, и.т.п.
• WordPress, Joomla, Drupal и.т.п.
• Experienced Subversion, Git users
  Good written and spoken English

Requirements:

• 3+ years experience
• Portfolio (with web-design examples)
• Good written and spoken English

This how-to is divided into three stages – recording, editing and mixing, and uploading.

Recording Your Skype Voicemail

Skype’s voice mails are played back and stored in a very low quality, so there’s no need to aim for a $1500 professional studio microphone + pre-amp set; a simple headset will do as long as we’re dealing with Skype VoiceMail. You would also need some audio editing software, and since we’ve set a $0 tag on our voice mail recording, we’ll use one of the most popular open-source audio editor – Audacity. Download, install and launch. You can also use any other audio editor you are comfortable with.

Make sure your microphone is connected, and works with your current settings. Hit the big red record button in the transport area and test out your volume levels, noise, etc. A new track will appear and you should see your voice waveform. Hit [space] or the stop button and delete the test track by pressing the [X] in the top-left corner. If you hear no sound, check your microphone connection, Windows settings and Audacity’s Edit/Preferences/Devices settings. The waveform should NEVER be too loud as to hit the top-boundaries of the clip (called ‘clipping’).

Make sure you remove or switch-off all noise sources (like fans, air-conditioning, telephones, people, pets, traffic outside, etc.). It always helps to have a pre-written text, so if you don’t have one, now’s the time to jot it down. There should be no other tracks, so if you have them from previous takes – remove them. Ready? Hit the record button, wait 1-2 seconds, and start talking. As soon as you’re done, wait for another 1-2 seconds in silence and hit the stop button. Play and listen. If you don’t like what you hear, delete the track and repeat the recording process. It usually takes 3-5 times to record a version you’re content with.

Save your project and let’s move on to our editing and mixing part.

Editing & Mixing Skype Voicemail

During the editing stage you are able to remove unwanted clicks, noise, add some effects to your voice (like pitch, echo, etc.). Use the Selection Tool (found next to the play/record/etc. controls [transport]) to find areas that need editing. Remember those 1-2 seconds of pre- and post-recording silence? Select the head and tail of the clip, where this silence is. Move the selection boundaries around as needed and press the [delete] button on your keyboard. Double click the voice clip (to fully select it) and apply some amplitude normalization (Effect/Normalize..).

If you do not want to add any background music to your voice mail message you can skip this part over and move on to the next part.

Press File/Import/Audio and select your favourite tune. The whole track will be added to your project in a new track. Use the Selection tool to carve out the piece of music that you want to accompany your voice. It’s best to select a 10-15 second clip without any lyrics or loud sounds.

Next, you need to apply some Fade In and Fade Out to your music. Select 1-2 seconds from the beginning of your music clip, and hit the Effect/Fade In.. option. Do the same for the tail. The voice clip should also have 0.3-0.5 seconds of fade in, fade out time to avoid clicks and sudden background noise.

Now select the Time Shift Tool tool and move your voice as to position it around 2 seconds from the beginning and 2 seconds from the end of the music clip, ending up with something like this:

Now, play your mix from the beginning. Your voice should be in the foreground, set at 0 dB. The music clip will generally sound good in the -10-15dB range. Adjust the track volumes (left side of each track marked with – … + scroll bar) so that your voice is clearly heard. Listen to the mix several times and as soon as you’re satisfied with it, press File/Export to WAV or MP3.

Find your file and play it in your media player. Sounds good? Then we’re ready to move on to uploading it to Skype VoiceMail as a message.

Uploading Your New Voicemail to Skype

Skype does not allow direct uploading of voice mails (too too too bad!), so we’ll have to bypass this somehow. Uploading a voice mail message to Skype involves playing around with your Audio settings.

Go to Soundcard Recording Settings in Windows/Linux/Mac and set recording device to Mono Mix or Stereo Mix. This basically means that all that is playing will be internally routed and interpreted as a recording. So instead of recording from a microphone – you will record from the system sound. Not all sound cards support this.

If your sound card does not support this, you can externally rewire your output with your input jacks using a standard jack-to-jack cable.

Open Skype and go to Tools/Options/Calls/Voicemail. Open your media player and cue up your new voicemail recording. Hit the Record button in Skype and immediately the Play button in your player. As soon as the recording ends, press the Stop button in Skype. Play your new message and listen to it. The quality will drastically decrease, but most important is the clarity. If it’s too loud and distorted, lower either the player volume or the recording volume. Another (much better) way is to use Skype answering machine Extras (plug-ins), which do support high quality and direct uploading.

Here’s a quick sample voicemail message edited and mixed down in Audacity and saved as MP3
>> Frumatic – Custom Skype VoiceMail Greeting

If everything has been done correctly, you now have a custom Skype VoiceMail greeting.