Brian Getting - Practical Ecommerce

Articles by: Brian Getting

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Brian Getting

Brian Getting is the founder and owner of the Tatemae Consultancy (formerly Terra Firma Design & Consulting), an Internet consulting, marketing and development firm located in Newport, Oregon.

Prior to founding Terra Firma Design & Consulting, Brian was a core member of the Practical eCommerce team from 2005 until 2009, where he served as Chief Architect, in addition to being a regular contributor of articles and blog posts.

Brian specializes in Ruby on Rails development, search engine friendly website design and accessibility.

Find Brian on LinkedIn and on Twitter. Visit The Tatemae Consultancy.

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Video Tutorial: CSS Positioning

September 12, 2008 • Brian Getting

The transition from using tables to create a page layout to using Cascading Style Sheets can be difficult to grasp at first, particularly when it comes to positioning elements correctly on the screen. In this video tutorial by Practical eCommerce's chief architect Brian Getting, we wil...
Business
Video Tutorial: Assessing Accessibility

August 26, 2008 • Brian Getting

There are a number of compelling reasons to make sure that your website is accessible to people with disabilities. In some cases meeting accessibility compliance standards is a legal obligation. However, in most cases (such as ecommerce merchants) it is just a good idea. Not only will...
Business
Video Tutorial: Batch Processing In Photoshop

August 20, 2008 • Brian Getting

Got a lot of product photos? Processing a large amount of images in Photoshop can take up a ton of time, and be an extremely boring task. Luckily, Photoshop provides a way to automate repetitive processing, which Practical eCommerce's Chief Architect Brian Getting illustrates in this v...
Business
Video: Overview of Practical eCommerce Podcasts

August 11, 2008 • Brian Getting

This explanation is for anyone interested in the audio podcast content of the revamped Practicalecommerce.com. Practical eCommerce features three unique podcasts: The eCommerce Minute, eCommerce Conversations and eCommerce Articles. With the redesign of the website came a dramatic cha...
Business
Tutorial: Understanding Photoshop Layer Styles

August 4, 2008 • Brian Getting

Learning how to use Photoshop can be a very intimidating experience. In most cases, you have an idea of what you want to accomplish but you don't know how to use the available tools to get it done. In this video tutorial Practical eCommerce's Chief Architect Brian Getting provides a br...
Design & Development
Programmers: Web 2.0 Forms

June 3, 2008 • Brian Getting

Online forms have become much more elegant and usable in the last couple of years as developers take advantage of “Web 2.0” technologies like visual effects and “behind-the-scenes” calls to the server. In fact, I have seen forms that are just downright fun to fill out, which is somethin...
Code
Frameworks For Web Designers

March 26, 2008 • Brian Getting

I've written previously about frameworks and how they help developers build web applications. For the most part, my praise of frameworks has been directed at those of us who develop web applications, such as coding up the Ruby, Perl, PHP or .Net scripts that make applications work. Howe...
Design & Development
Tech Support: Application Programming Interfaces

March 19, 2008 • Brian Getting

One of the most exciting trends on the Internet today is interconnectedness. Application programming interfaces (APIs) help make this possible. For example, if I have created a blog at WordPress, I can get a free key to use the API at Akismet, a comment-spam-prevention service. Addition...
Design & Development
Tech Support: Passwords And Avatars

February 4, 2008 • Brian Getting

Can ecommerce merchants help their customers manage multiple user names and passwords? Many websites require users to create an account to participate. This applies to social networking sites, ecommerce sites, news sites and others. For the site owner, the strategy of requiring a user ...
Design & Development
Programming Notes: Linking To Payment Gateways

January 28, 2008 • Brian Getting

Payment gateways can be intimidating for many web developers. I have always found a certain amount of anxiety associated with them, particularly because of security requirements and presumed liability issues that could arise from insecure transactions. However, the actual integration wi...
Design & Development
Programming Notes: Importance of Hand Coding

December 19, 2007 • Brian Getting

Let's be honest. Most people do not go into website design because they enjoy writing code, or because they want to root through hundreds of lines of seemingly nonsensical expressions. That comes later. Most people start with a visual idea and work from there, usually taking advantage o...
Code
Software Frameworks

October 24, 2007 • Brian Getting

In broad terms, a software framework is a code library that is designed to facilitate software development. The idea is that all of the tedious, low-level details of creating a web application are already addressed in a reusable package. For a web developer, this means you can spend y...
Design & Development
What Are “Tags” And What Is “Tagging?”

October 22, 2007 • Brian Getting

Since around 2004, content tagging has become more and more common due to social networking, photography sharing and bookmarking sites. Tagging is known by a few different names, such as content tagging, collaborative tagging, social tagging and even the scientific-sounding "folks...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Script.aculo.us Effects

October 18, 2007 • Brian Getting

Script.aculo.us is a JavaScript framework that is built upon the wildly successful Prototype JavaScript libraries. Script.aculo.us allows web designers to create engaging user interfaces quickly and easily, due in ...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Tabbed Content – Part 2

October 11, 2007 • Brian Getting

Tabbed content appears more and more frequently in web pages, and is an interesting way to simultaneously save page space and effectively present information. In part two of this two-part tutorial on creating tabbed content, Practical eCommerce's online director Brian Getting illustrat...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Tabbed Content

October 4, 2007 • Brian Getting

Tabbed content appears more and more frequently in web pages, and is an interesting way to simultaneously save page space and effectively present information. In part one of this ...
Code
Video Tutorial: JavaScript Tooltips

September 27, 2007 • Brian Getting

You've probably seen those useful "tooltips" text boxes that are displayed on some websites when you roll over a specific link or graphic. These typically serve several purposes. Most likely, your customers or visitors could benefit from additional information that doesn't warrant an ...
Design & Development
TechSupport: "What's A Relational Database?"

September 10, 2007 • Brian Getting

Q: Our web developer tells us that our ecommerce site uses a relational database, but I don't understand what this means. Could you please explain? At the foundation of nearly all web applications, including dynamically-generated websites, lies a relational database that stores and man...
Design & Development
Programming Notes: Transferring A Domain Name

September 3, 2007 • Brian Getting

The process of transferring a domain name from one registrar to another can be daunting, and the exact process can vary slightly depending on the registrars involved. The first thing to do is to log into the old registrar, where the domain is currently being managed, and make sure the...
Design & Development
Tech Support July 2007: Accessibility

July 16, 2007 • Brian Getting

I keep hearing about accessibility. What is it and why is it important? Accessibility, in the context of a website, is the measure of how easily people with disabilities can perceive, navigate, access and interact with electronic content and information. People with disabilities face...
Business
Video Tutorial: Rounded Corners with CSS

July 2, 2007 • Brian Getting

Rounded corners present a unique challenge to website designers, particularly when using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to create layouts that are search engine friendly and scalable. In an attempt to de-mystify some of the techniques used to create visual effects, such as rounded corner...
Design & Development
Protect Data From Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks

June 25, 2007 • Brian Getting

Security is always going to be a concern for both developers and ecommerce business owners alike, since providing a secure environment for making transactions is not only a matter of gaining customer trust, it is also a legal requirement. As websites become more interactive they are uti...
Code
Video Tutorial: CSS Design, Part Two

June 20, 2007 • Brian Getting

In the conclusion of our two-part video tutorial on CSS layout and design, we will take the layout we created in the beginning of this tutorial and begin to apply graphics and other visual stylings to it, in order to achieve the look we are going for. In Part Two, we will be looking a...
Code
Video Tutorial: CSS Design, Part One

June 19, 2007 • Brian Getting

Designing search engine friendly websites can be intimidating, particularly for designers who are just learning how to use CSS formatting. One of the most intimidating aspects to learning CSS design is creating page layouts that do not rely on tables. In the first of a two-part video...
Business
Video Tutorial: Choosing the Right Image Format

May 2, 2007 • Brian Getting

Choosing the right image format for publishing images on the web can be tricky. After all, you don't want to spend hours and hours cleaning up a product image and making it look irresistible to your customers, only to have it distorted and ruined when you save it in a web format.
Design & Development
Installing Google Maps On Your Site

May 2, 2007 • Brian Getting

Implementing Google Maps into your website is an easy way to provide rich, interactive map features that can help your customers find your business. Of particular interest to brick-and-mortar stores, Google Maps provides an Application Programming Interface (API) that makes it easy fo...
Design & Development
Basic Definitions: Web 1.0, Web. 2.0, Web 3.0

April 18, 2007 • Brian Getting

“What is web 2.0?” We receive this question often. It likely has as many answers as the number of people using the term. However, since talk of web 3.0 has ...
Design & Development
What is Ruby on Rails?

April 9, 2007 • Brian Getting

First there was Ruby, and now there is Ruby on Rails. Ruby is an open-source web-programming language that was developed in Japan in 1995. Ruby resides on your web server and operates similarly to other programming languages, such as PHP, ASP and Perl. “Rails” is a separate pre-built ...
Design & Development
Why Authenticate Email?

April 9, 2007 • Brian Getting

Mail servers require a username and password authentication for outgoing mail (mail being sent from your computer to someone else) so the servers can maintain control over who is allowed to use the resource. The first, and probably most obvious, motivation is to control email spam. By r...
Business
Diagnosing Site Performance Delays

March 26, 2007 • Brian Getting

When your site begins to experience performance drains, which usually show up as slow-loading web pages, the problem's diagnosis can be more challenging than its solution. The first thing developers should examine is the nature of the website. Is the site a static HTML website, or does...