Tag: website development

Sell Online with Local Line
How Local Line Can Help You Start an Online Store for Your Market Farm

Local Line is ‘an e-commerce tool for food suppliers’, based out of Kitchener Ontario Canada. Their complete suite of features is designed for farmers and market gardeners to sell and make their stock available online. Their white-label e-commerce, CRM, inventory, and logistics make it easy to set up an online store, communicate with customers, manage orders, deliveries & more.

Local Line is great software for the local food industry. With COVID 19 we saw first hand how global events can affect all aspects of the food supply chain, and now we see it again with tariffs. It is an important time for building new and solidifying current relationships between food suppliers and local consumers. From households to restaurants and grocers, Local Line helps provide direct to farm food sourcing for local customers.

“Our goal has stayed the same: put suppliers in control of their sales, so they can control their futures.”

Challenges faced by market farmers in selling direct to consumers

Farmers and food producers have unique needs for selling online, and they need something simple, affordable, and has great technical support.

Benefits of selling online and the need for an online store

Much like the seller wants to simplify the selling process, so too does the customer want to simplify the buying process. The more simple and accessible you make the process for customers to access your products, the happier you will both be. An online store helps increase access to your market items.

Why Choose Local Line for Your Online Store

Streamlined Online Ordering
- Intuitive interface for customers to browse and order products
- Customizable online store with your branding
- Easy management of inventory, orders, and customer data
Flexible Delivery Options
- Allow customers to choose pickup locations and delivery schedules
- Integrate with your existing delivery and logistics processes
- Support for both individual and wholesale/bulk orders
Powerful Sales Analytics
- Real-time reporting on sales, customer behavior, and order trends
- Insights to optimize your product offerings and marketing
Dedicated Seller Support
- Onboarding assistance to set up and customize your online store
- Ongoing guidance from the Local Line team
- Access to a community of fellow market farmers
Key Features of the Local Line Platform

Online Storefront
- Branded, mobile-responsive online store
- Customizable product catalogs and collections
- Flexible checkout and payment options
Order Management
- Real-time inventory tracking and updates
- Automated order fulfillment and customer notifications
- Integrated delivery and pickup scheduling
Customer Relationship Tools
- Customer accounts and order history
- Mailing lists and email marketing
- Loyalty programs and discounts
Business Insights
- Sales reports and analytics dashboards
- Customer segmentation and targeting
- Inventory forecasting and demand planning
Why Local Line is the Best Choice for Market Farmers
- Tailored to the unique needs of small-scale producers
- Affordable pricing with no hidden fees
- Trusted by thousands of successful market farms
The benefits of bringing your market online are numerous.

Explore Local Line https://site.localline.ca/
February 2, 2025
Stack Overflow for Developers

Stack Overflow is a regular and essential part of my web development work. Development and programming is a wide world of many languages, processes and paths. One of the things that is so cool and appealing about the internet is that it is a network and community of developers who build it together. To do this, much of the internet as well as common computer apps are built on what is called open-source code.

Open-Source Code

Open source code allows everyone access to learn and build the same code languages. It is a community of developers that set what web standards are. This also helps keep the internet mostly free to use and gives everyone equal access. Stack Overflow is a question and answer site where developers share information, problems and solutions about making their code work.

Online Community for Developers

Using the SEO tool Ubersuggest I can see Stack Overflow gets an estimated 20-26 Million visits a month. This is a great developer community where code problems are solved.

Stack Overflow is the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their programming knowledge, and build their careers.

With a little help from my friends… at Stack Overflow

When I come across a functional issue with how my code is performing I usually start with one of two things. I either go directly to Stack Overflow and search for previous references to the issue that I’m having or I search my preferred search engine for my issue and usually I still follow a link to Stack Overflow.

If I have a code problem that I cannot already find a reference to on the web, that’s when I ask my question on this question and answer site. And then I wait for some kindly coder out there in the world to answer my call – or rather my question so to speak. Answers come in quickly and are ranked by their relevance via a user ranking system. This is based on questions asked and answered. You get points for asking questions too, not just for having answers!

July 18, 2020
SEO by Yoast WordPress – Best Plugins
The SEO by Yoast WordPress plugin offers free and paid services. Their free services are pretty amazing and likely is good to be on everyone’s wordpress websites. SEO is a tricky thing for most folks to begin to wrap their head around and even for me, a tech savvy coder and SEO services provider, I find their plugin essential to my website strategy. It provides a checkpoint ‘traffic light’ colour code system of how well your web page or blog post is following best standards of search engine optimization.

How to use Yoast SEO plugin?

Once you have the Yoast plugin installed on your wordpress website, you’ll find the essentials of the plugin located under the page editor which is where you are typing in your post/page content. Find something that looks like the screenshot below. Yoast will begin to perform it’s function analyzing your page’s SEO once you have entered your page’s keyword into the Yoast ‘Focus Keyphrase’ field. Shown in the screenshot below, the focus keyphrase is ‘Yoast SEO’.

Analyze your wordpress SEO by using Yoast SEO

Even if you don’t already know what SEO really even is, how it works or how to do it right, this plugin will guide you through current best practices. Details like text length and whether or not you used images or links will all make a difference for how well you rank on search engines and how well your website is optimized for search engines. Of course there are other things that affect your website’s SEO that Yoast doesn’t help with, like page load times to begin with. But using Yoast helps you with your website and blog’s content and that gives your SEO a major advantage.

Yoast grades with a green, orange or red light for the following SEO features listed below. Handy links of ‘how to’s’ are included for each of these features is provided by Yoast to reference them further. I often follow these links to their website to learn more about improving my blog writing for SEO; particularly for the Readability analysis & to get the list of suggested transition words and also to have ‘flesch reading ease’ described to me (again).

SEO Analysis
- key phrase length
- use of internal links
- use of outbound links
- page title, slug & description length
- text length
- image alt attributes
Readability Analysis
- paragraph length
- transition words
- flesch reading ease
- passive voice
- consecutive sentences
- subheading distribution
- sentence length
Page Meta
- page title
- slug
- description
One other major thing to understand for SEO is that different keywords are going to be more effective than others. Yoast doesn’t help you choose keywords, but it does analyze for the keywords you set.

One last thing…

What is post / page meta?

One of the highlights of the Yoast plugin includes greater control over your page and blog post meta. Meta is the text information that is shown of your page when it comes up in a search engine search like Google. You can control how the page title appears which in this case I have titled Digital Marketing Services Winnipeg | Sabourin Web & Media.

The next bit of meta shown here is the slug, so the URL extension. The slug here comes after your domain ie. https://yourdomain.ca/slug. And finally, the description of the page. SEO is based off of keywords which should describe what the content of the webpage or post are about. You’ll want to use your page’s keywords in each of these locations. Use the keyword(s) in your page title, slug and page description. Use Yoast to enter this meta and take advantage of their handy check point system to see if you are staying on top of your website SEO.
January 10, 2019
Screenfly – Test Website for Mobile & Responsive

Is my website mobile friendly?

There are more mobile web users than ever before. The number of mobile web traffic is gaining the lead over desktop as the new default. This is what is being called mobile first. Google has been making it clear that responsive mobile first websites will be prioritized in Google search ranks. If your website isn’t yet mobile, or is having mobile issues, you will want to spend a bit more time with your website making sure that it is responsive and looks good across different devices and screen resolutions.

Test Responsive Web Design with Screenfly

It doesn’t matter if a website is being viewed on a Blackberry phone or a 15′ Macbook, It needs to to look good everywhere! Making a website design flawless across many different screen resolutions used to mean I was testing websites on all my friends phones, tablets and computers. Now there’s an even easier way! I can see how my website would look on dozens of devices and screen resolutions, all from just one website Screenfly Here you can easily choose desktop, tablet or mobile options at the top. Choose one of these and you will see a drop down of a dozen or so devices to test your site on. Select any of these and watch as Screenfly shows you how a website looks on any of these devices and screen resolutions.

https://screenfly.org

January 3, 2019
SEO Guide to Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization – aka – SEO is the process by which you can improve your ranking score for certain search terms in a search engine like google or yahoo.

Let’s say you own a florist shop called Deloris the Florist in Regina Saskatchewan Canada.When someone searches their preferred search engine with the key words “florist in Regina” will they find you in the first spot, or on the seventh page?

No one usually looks beyond the first few results and very rarely do they make it past the third page of results. For this florist shop to achieve their goal of being on the first page of google when someone searches with those key words, they will need to follow best recommendations for SEO.

First things first is to understand a bit about how your website is ranked by Search Engines. This will help you understand how to optimize your site. Search engines like Google have bots that are searching the web non stop. Bots scrape the text of new websites that have been added to the web and submitted to search engines and will periodically revisit your site. Bots do not have eyes so they do not see pictures, but they do read text. They search the text of a website for terms that are used most often, but not too often otherwise the bots will think you’re spamming them. Bots pay attention to how long a user stays on your page. This is called a bounce rate.

A high bounce rate means people are leaving your page or website too fast. To keep a low bounce rate, you want to be sure to optimize your site with terms that are truly descriptive of the content they will find on your page. Bots will rank your site with favor when they see that your site has a low bounce rate with steadily increasing traffic. Other ways to think about how to keep users engaged with your site and staying on your pages longer is by having plenty of interesting text for both users and bots to index, as well as other engaging content for your traffic, such as images, video and blogging.

Our Beginners Guide to SEO – Search Engine Optimization

1.Optimize your website by making sure it is running well. If your website is slow to load, people leave fast This contributes to a high bounce rate which will damage your search engine ranking. There can be a lot of reasons for a slow website. Luckily it is pretty easy to find out what these reasons are. Here are links to online sites that give you free website metrics, telling you how fast your page is, how it compares to other sites and recommendations for ways to improve your websites optimization.
- GTmetrix | Website Speed and Performance Optimization
GTmetrix is a free tool that analyzes your page’s speed performance. Using PageSpeed and YSlow, GTmetrix generates scores for your pages and offers actionable recommendations on how to fix them.

Source: gtmetrix.com/
- Pingdom Tools
Enter a URL to test the load time of that page, analyze it and find bottlenecks.

Full Page Test Analysis

Source: tools.pingdom.com/

And the Google version…
- PageSpeed Insights
Learn more about web performance tools at Google.

Source: developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

2. Research keywords for your industry to use in your website copy. The best way to do this is probably using Google Ad Words and have get some training using SEO and developer keyword tools. But for something a bit more accessible we recommend, MOZ PRO

With MOZ you can easily look up keywords and get information back about the search engine relevance of that keyword. We also recommend reading the MOZ Beginners Guide to SEO and Keyword Research https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

3. Use an SEO plugin

Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins. Their Search Engine Optimization plugin is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there. They also have a website that is full of great articles and content about website optimization best practices.

Yoast is our #1 Recommendation for a SEO Plugin

SEO for everyone • Yoast

Yoast helps you with your website optimization, whether it be through our widely used SEO software or our online SEO courses: we’re here to help.

Source: yoast.com/4. Monitor your website traffic. You can track your website traffic progress by signing up with Google Analytics. There’s lots of free information that they provide you such as how much traffic your site gets, how people are finding you, and how users behave on your site and you can even get information about the organic search words that people are finding you with. There are ways to identify how to monitor your websites ranking for certain key words. Most of these online resources want you to make a paid subscription which can be very worthwhile. Of these you might like to check out https://www.semrush.com

Google Analytics Solutions – Marketing Analytics & Measurement

Google Analytics Solutions offers free and enterprise analytics tools to measure website, app, digital and offline data to gain customer insights.

Source: www.google.com/analytics/
November 16, 2017