WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today unveils the SAP Cloud for Analytics solution, a planned software as a service (SaaS) offering that aims to bring all analytics capabilities into one solution for an unparalleled user experience (UX).

Built natively on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, this high-performing, real-time solution plans to be embedded with existing SAP solutions and intends to connect to cloud and on-premise data to deliver planning, predictive and business intelligence (BI) capabilities in one analytics experience. The intent is for organizations to use this one solution to enable their employees to track performance, analyze trends, predict and collaborate to make informed decisions and improve business outcomes.

“The challenge with analytics solutions on the market today, cloud or otherwise, is the silo approach to delivering capabilities such as visualization and forecasting,” said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. “SAP Cloud for Analytics will be a new end-to-end cloud analytics experience, giving customers the ability to access all data so business users can easily discover, visualize, plan and predict. That to me is more than visualization of data, that¹s realization of success.”

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.4, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 4.4 is slated for release on December 8, but to get there, we need your help testing what we have been working on, including:

Twenty Sixteen — The newest default theme for WordPress.
Responsive Images — WordPress automatically delivers a more appropriate image to users depending on a variety of conditions like screen size, viewport size, and screen resolution.
Embeds — WordPress can now embed rich content from nearly all sites that support the oEmbed standard — not just YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and the like. You can even embed previews of posts from other WordPress sites by pasting the URL on its own line.

eCommerce Website Development Tips

One of the exciting aspects of being in the website development field is that you can often improve sales exponentially by making some minor site adjustments and avoiding some common website blunders. Online ecommerce merchants are all too familiar with the concept of optimizing their site for Google and the three other major search engines to get more organic traffic. To maximize their revenue potential, however, they also need to take a hard look at optimizing their site for humans. Getting the prospects to arrive at their site is only the first of several hurdles in guiding customers from an entry point on their site to the payment processing pages.

Recently, my firm made a series of revisions to a client’s web site to improve their conversion rate. This particular merchant was averaging roughly 940 visitors a day and was closing only about 3-5 sales a week – an abysmal conversion rate! In the 10-days that followed the release of the new, improved website, this client’s sales increased more than 300% compared to the previous ten days. Even though this client’s revenues were relatively modest, a 300% growth spurt has the potential to have a major impact on a business – especially in conjunction with content development, search engine optimization, and other design improvements.

This article will offer ecommerce website development tips that will help you improve conversion rates for your web site. Of course there’s no denying that sites need a substantial amount of traffic for economic survival and growth, and SEO can play a central role in achieving that.

However, if you’re going to work that hard to get traffic, it would make sense to maximize your site’s potential for sales conversion, as well as website traffic. Both those factors are vitally important to the success of an online retail business.