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Design & Development
Tech Support – April 2006
April 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
What’s a page rank and how does it work? PageRank is Google’s system to rank the relative popularity of a website. Developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, the PageRank system uses the Internet’s vast linking structure to measure an individual web page. A link from o...
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Business
Quick Query – Scott Peterson
March 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
The Streamline Sales Tax Governing Board is the new, multi-state agency charged with simplifying the collection of state and local sales taxes. Since this will impact ecommerce businesses, we’ve asked its Executive Director, Scott Peterson, a few questions. Tell us, once more, what the...
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Conversion
Paid Search Advertising
March 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
How big is paid search advertising? For 2005, Google, whose business is based on paid search advertising, reported total sales of $6.1 billion and operating cash flow of $2.624 billion. That’s for a company that didn’t exist ten years ago. “Paid search is a great advertising method tha...
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Code
Combining CSS and JavaScript to Save Page Space
February 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
Overview Real estate on a website has become a valuable commodity. Website owners and designers are faced with the challenge of providing enough content to satisfy their visitors, while also maintaining the visual appeal and usability of the website. On one end of the spectrum is a web...
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Code
Optimizing HTML Code for Maximum SEO
February 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
Overview Search engine optimization has come to the forefront in recent years as competition for search engine rankings increases. Online business owners often times rely heavily on search engines to generate traffic to their websites, which in turn increases the chances of those visit...
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Design & Development
Fulfillment Companies Offer Benefits
February 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
Imagine having a state-of-the-art fulfillment department. This fulfillment department would have the most up-to-date order management software, computer hardware and warehousing functions. The employees of the fulfillment department would be experienced and professionally trained. Shipm...
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Analytics & Data
Google Analytics Draws Industry Reaction
January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
On November 14, 2005, Google announced its free, hosted web analytics service. Based on the Urchin analytics platform, which Google acquired earlier in the year, the service boasts website analysis tools aimed at executives, marketers, and webmasters. According to a Google press release,...
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Analytics & Data
Web Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior
January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
In the beginning, there were “hit counters”. Occasionally you will still see one at the bottom of a website, prominently displaying the number of hits over a given time frame. There was a time when the success of a website was gauged solely on this number, with a site that received many...
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Code
HTML Email: Effectiveness Requires Planning
January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
Email can be an essential tool for every online retailer. Professional-looking emails instill confidence, build brand awareness, and increase customer loyalty. Retailers can send email communications using HTML that are as visually engaging and effective. There are a couple of points, h...
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Platforms & Apps
osCommerce Founder: Open Source Encourages Collaboration
January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
Harald Ponce de Leon had an idea to create an online shopping cart system that would serve as a guide to other ecommerce developers. That was in 2000. In order to attract interest, he released his cart, then called the Exchange Project, under a free, open-source license. Nearly six year...
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Code
An Introduction to CSS – Part 3
January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
Overview In our last two tutorials about Cascading Style Sheets, we covered how to apply styles to all instances of an HTML tag, and also how to create style classes and then selectively apply styles to only certain HTML tags. For the most part, our styles were limited to font treatmen...
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Code
Encoding Images Using HTML
January 1, 2006 • Brian Getting
Overview One of the most basic HTML elements is the image tag, which is used to tell a browser to display an image on a webpage. While it is a simple tag to learn, the image tag has quite a few attributes that are important to be aware of. For example, using these attributes we can tel...
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Business
1-800-Bakery.com Links Bakeries with Consumers
December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting
Award winning bakery chef Stephen Pazyra thinks bakery items are more than mere food. To him, baked goods represent comfort foods that evoke nostalgia, bring back memories, and make people feel good. As the co-owner of 1-800-Bakery, Inc., he strives to bring the customer experience of y...
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Code
An Introduction to CSS – Part 2
December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting
Overview In our last Cascading Style Sheets (“CSS”) tutorial we learned how to apply CSS styles to HTML tags using tag selectors. Using these tag selectors we were able to format information using an external style sheet rather than putting all the formatting code into our HTML documen...
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Design & Development
Introduction to XML: Creating a Google Sitemap
December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting
Overview Last month, we featured a basic introduction of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and how to begin writing your own XML documents. While we were able to create an XML document to describe data, it may not be clear why this is useful. In an effort to utilize what we learned ...
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Design & Development
Optimizing Your Product Images
December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting
Overview Product presentation is more important for an online store than it is for a brick-and-mortar store. Rather than being able to touch an item, inspect it for quality, or try it on as the case may be, an online shopper has only two-dimensional images on which to base their decisi...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
Fulfillment Help: Try Order Management Software
December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting
Online retailers know that there are many steps required from receiving a sales order to actually shipping it. For many retailers, these steps are separate and distinct: Print the order, enter it into accounting software, produce a shipping label, generate an inventory slip, email the c...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
International Shipments Worth the Effort
December 1, 2005 • Brian Getting
One of the greatest attractions of an online business is the vast number of customers that the Internet allows a retailer to reach. Web surfers from all over the world can navigate beyond the boundaries and borders that exist in the physical world to find the products and services that ...
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Code
An Introduction to XML
November 1, 2005 • Brian Getting
Extensible Markup Language — XML — is a system of tags that identify discreet units of information for processing. XML was created to allow documents to be used on the web.
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Code
An Introduction to CSS
November 1, 2005 • Brian Getting
Cascading Style Sheets allow designers to create HTML that is structured in a search-engine-friendly way and appealing to users.