Code Archives

What HTML5 Means for Ecommerce Merchants

February 25, 2016 • Eric Davis

What is one thing all ecommerce stores have in common? They use HTML. In fact, just about every website uses HTML. That means when an update to HTML comes out, it ...

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Image Recognition APIs May Help Ecommerce

February 25, 2016 • Armando Roggio

A pair of new image-analysis solutions could open the door for powerful ecommerce and retail applications that significantly improve shopping experiences or create new marketing opportunities. On Feb. 18, 2016, Google ...

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Crawl Your Ecommerce Site with Python, Scrapy

February 1, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce business owners and managers have many good reasons to crawl their own websites, including monitoring pages, tracking site performance, ensuring the site is accessible to customers with disabilities, and ...

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What Makes HTML5 Special?

April 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

HTML5 promises to make the Internet more functional and interactive. It seeks to transform a World Wide Web of relatively flat, static pages into one filled with web applications —

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5 CSS-Generating Tools To Help with Small Code Tasks

March 10, 2011 • PEC Staff

Merchants know that the code and script languages that power ecommerce sites are difficult to learn and are best left to developers. But the do-it-yourself ethos is at the heart of ecommerce. For that occasional small code adjustment — where hiring a developer is too expensive — code-ge...

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9 CSS Codes that Ecommerce Merchants Need to Know

February 10, 2011 • PEC Staff

Although CSS code is more complicated than HTML, it ultimately gives merchants much more flexibility in formatting and style for websites. Just a rudimentary understanding of cascading style sheets can open up new possibilities for the way text and images function on your site. Embed ph...

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9 HTML Codes that Ecommerce Merchants Should Know

January 25, 2011 • PEC Staff

Running an ecommerce store can mean wearing many hats. Occasionally, that means dropping in some HTML code into your site. Just a rudimentary understanding of HTML can open new worlds for your website.

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What Are AJAX and Dynamic JavaScript?

June 16, 2010 • Joseph C. Dolson

Editor's Note: Ecommerce merchants operate businesses using complex technologies. We launched our "Need to Know" series to help merchants obtain a basic understanding of these technologies, recognizing that most merchants are not web developers or programmers. In this installment, contr...

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HTML5 Video: 12 Frequently Asked Questions

June 14, 2010 • PEC Staff

Editor's Note: Many observers believe the new version of HTML, called HTML5, will change online video because of the <video> tag that the new version contains. But, there are many unresolved details involving HTML5 video, and we asked a video expert about some of these. The exper...

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HTML5: The Future of Online Video?

June 9, 2010 • Justin Foster

If you pay attention to online video, chances are you’ve heard of HTML5. It could be the next big technology that will change online video as we know it. Apple’s Steve Jobs famously stated several weeks ago, in his "Thoughts on Flash" letter, that Apple prefers HTML5 video to Adobe’s F...

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What Is HTML 5?

May 5, 2010 • Joseph C. Dolson

Editor's Note: Ecommerce merchants use complex technologies in their businesses. A working, "need to know" understanding of these technologies can help merchants. To address this, we've launched our "Need to Know" series, whereby we'll address complex topics in a manner that can benefit...

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Five Handy HTML Tags To Help Your Ecommerce Business

March 24, 2010 • Armando Roggio

There is an analogy between driving a car and operating an ecommerce business. With a car, you need to know a few basic things, like how to steer, accelerate, and brake. Likewise, the manager or owner of an online retail business really only needs to know how to process orders, manage customer service, and keep up with the accounting.

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Web Design Tips: Combining jQuery Effects and Plugins For A Great Marketing Effect

September 8, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The lightweight (small file size) and concise jQuery library makes it relatively easy to add interactive effects and merchandising to just about any ecommerce website. In this edition of “Web Design ...

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Web Design Tips: jQuery UI Accordion Widget

July 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Adding an interactive accordion widget to your ecommerce site can provide a great design feature that conveys professionalism and makes your content more readable. There are plenty of instances in website design when we would like to have a lot of content on a page, but, unless you are...

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Web Design Tips: Mobilizing Your Site Using CSS

July 8, 2009 • Armando Roggio

With a second style sheet and minor changes to a page's HTML, many online stores can offer an excellent mobile shopping experience without creating a second web page or registering a mobile specific domain. Mobile Internet use is on the rise. And online merchants presumably want to pro...

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Web Design Tips: Adding A Featured Section to Your Site Using jQuery and jFlow

May 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Smooth content sliders are widgets that can show clickable product images, Adobe Flash, HTML, or other content, effectively creating a "featured section" in a small amount of space. After researching several "easy" solutions (most of which did not work), I tried the jFlow plugin that ...

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Web Design Tips: Converting an Older Table-Based Email Template To CSS

April 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Many email templates were developed using older table-based layouts that "break" easily and are very complicated to maintain. Tables in HTML are fantastic for displaying tabular data. But as a layout tool they interfere with some dynamic and rich media elements, cause accessibility cha...

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Web Design Tips: Use CSS to Adjust Opacity

February 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The CSS opacity property lets web designers define how particular page elements will blend, adding both style and emphasis to important page sections. Essentially, this property allows you to adjust an element's translucency, changing the amount of diffused virtual light that seems to ...

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Web Design Tips: Basic CSS for Headers

February 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio

How your site looks matters. Even subtle improvements—like using fonts or colors that compliment your theme—can have a positive effect on how consumers rate the trustworthiness of your store. According to a 2003 Stanford University study of 2,440 people, 46.2 percent of online shoppers...

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Web Design Tips: Rounded Borders in CSS

January 8, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Consumers often judge online stores by visual aesthetics alone, so Internet shopkeepers are wise to use large appealing images, handsome fonts, and occasionally an eye-pleasing curve. When that curve is added someplace unexpected, say in a border around a text box or an image, it can b...

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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...

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David Heinemeier Hansson, Ruby on Rails Creator

August 25, 2008 • Kerry Murdock

David Heinemeier Hansson created the Ruby on Rails software framework. He’s also a partner in 37signals, producers of the popular Basecamp suite of online collaboration tools. In this excerpt from a longer audio interview, Heinemeier Hansson discusses the state of ecommerce. PeC: What...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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Flash or HTML: Which to Choose

October 16, 2006 • Brian Getting

The question of whether it is better to design a website using Flash rather than using just HTML has sparked many debates among web developers. For the most part, it seems that developers tend to defend what they know, although there are some important differences between a pure HTML we...

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Tech Support: Isolate CSS and Javascript

October 1, 2006 • Brian Getting

Last month we discussed the separation of content, design and functionality when it comes to developing a website. We introduced the idea that HTML documents should contain primarily content, with as little markup code as possible. The reason for this is that any extra code dilutes the ...

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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...