Design & Dev Tools
Many digital tools facilitate the running of an ecommerce business. Our library includes tools for web design, infographics, no-code apps, user experience, course creation, logo makers, video editors, performance testing, and much more.
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Design & Dev Tools
11 Mobile Website Builders for Ecommerce Merchants
May 5, 2014 • Sig Ueland
There are a variety of solutions for merchants who are interested in establishing or improving their mobile presence. For small businesses just starting, there are affordable do-it-yourself options with basic ...
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Design & Dev Tools
WordPress Ecommerce Plugins that Speed Up Redesigns
February 17, 2014 • Joe Robison
In “7 Ecommerce Design Trends for 2014,” we addressed factors that will likely influence ecommerce redesigns in 2014. These include the popularity of images, video, and other rich content, and ...
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Design & Dev Tools
5 Tools to Personalize your Marketing Efforts
July 25, 2013 • Jerry Jao
In "8 Tools to Personalize your Ecommerce Site," I discussed methods to customize visitors' experiences on your website. In this article, I'll list five tools to help personalize your advertising and marketing efforts. PadiAct Not everyone is going to buy from you on the first visit....
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Design & Dev Tools
8 Tools to Personalize your Ecommerce Site
July 23, 2013 • Jerry Jao
Personalizing an ecommerce site doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. Often, it’s just about finding the right tool, implementing it on your site, and letting the software do its magic. If you’re thinking about adding more personalization features, the following tools and services ...
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Design & Dev Tools
19 Free Design Tools for Your Website
May 29, 2013 • Sig Ueland
If you have a small business website, chances are you can use all the free design help you can get. Here is a list of tools and resources to help you with website design. There are font, icon and image tools, as well as audio and video applications. Also there are resources to give you ideas and generate your design inspiration. All of these tools are free.
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Design & Dev Tools
21 Free Tools to Open a WordPress Shop
May 27, 2013 • Sig Ueland
WordPress is a free content management system with an abundance of free plugins and themes to launch and manage an ecommerce shop. If you’re looking for an inexpensive and flexible solution to test the ecommerce waters, WordPress might be right for you. Here is a list of free tools to...
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Design & Dev Tools
15 Easy Mobile App Solutions
May 6, 2013 • Sig Ueland
Mobile apps can be easy to make. With the variety of mobile app builders to choose from, even non-coders can build their own mobile apps with ease — from basic catalogs to complex utilities. Here is a list of solutions to build your own mobile app. These tools are primarily for users w...
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Design & Dev Tools
11 Free Screencasting Tools
April 22, 2013 • Kevin Webster
Screencasts are an effective way to promote your products or services. As a video tutorial, a product demonstration, or for reviewing the strengths of your company, screencasts offer substantial benefits.
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Design & Dev Tools
19 Tools to Test your Site for Mobile Devices
January 21, 2013 • Sig Ueland
Is your ecommerce site ready for mobile commerce? Preparing your site for mobile customers can be daunting, considering the huge range of mobile devices and browsers. Fortunately, there are some great tools available to make sure your site is mobile compatible. Here is a list of tools ...
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Design & Dev Tools
8 Tools for Managing Multiple WordPess Sites
January 7, 2013 • Sig Ueland
Managing multiple WordPress sites is getting easier. With the release of WordPress 3.0 and its multisite feature, you can run multiple sites from a single WordPress installation and create a network of sites. However, if you run several websites with a variety of requirements, your need...
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Design & Dev Tools
29 New Tools to Develop Your Site
October 9, 2012 • Sig Ueland
Website owners interested in developing their sites can always find a variety of new resources online. Here is a collection of recent tools to develop your site. There are resources to monitor activity, such as backlinks, downtime, and customer behavior. There are wireframe and mockup...
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Design & Dev Tools
Qwiki’s New Video Creator May Have Ecommerce Applications
July 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A New York-based rich-media technology firm has released a new platform that may make it easier for online retailers to produce product-detail videos with little more than product images and a microphone. Qwiki first announced its Creator platform in May 2012 and set up a private beta ...
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Design & Dev Tools
RSS Plumbing with Yahoo! Pipes
May 29, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Yahoo! Pipes is a free content manipulation service that lets you mix and mash up web content using a visual editor that doesn’t require any code writing experience. The Pipes service has been around since February 7, 2007, and is the primarily the work of then Yahoo! Engineers Pasha S...
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Design & Dev Tools
Designing Web Forms for Better Conversions; 5 Tips
October 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Web forms are the final hurdle shoppers and site visitors must traverse before registering for a newsletter or making a purchase. Even small improvements in the form can make a ...
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Design & Dev Tools
10 Tools to Boost Your Ecommerce Business
October 3, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Crowd sourcing, infrastructure-as-a-service, and even marketing intelligence solutions can help small and mid-sized businesses to grow and become more profitable. It is a cliché, perhaps, to say that business is always changing, but nonetheless the way business is conducted does change...
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Design & Dev Tools
10 Editors for Ecommerce Audio
August 3, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Adding audio to your ecommerce site is a great way to engage customers. With audio features — such as podcasts or audio product descriptions — you create a rich experience as you inform and captivate your shoppers. And audio is a manageable and cost-efficient alternative to video. ...
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Design & Dev Tools
10 Handy Web Templates from Google Sites
July 15, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Google Sites is a portal for creating websites. It offers a gallery of templates, including business and collaboration designs, where you can make a site public or just open to ...
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Design & Dev Tools
14 Online Task-Management Tools
May 26, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Whether you’re working on your own projects or collaborating with a team, you have to manage your productivity. With online task-management tools, you can organize tasks, collaborate in real-time, access your lists across multiple computers or mobile devices, and much more. Here is a ...
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Design & Dev Tools
31 Free Tools for Brand Monitoring
May 25, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Brand monitoring is an essential task for any company. By tracking what people are saying about your brand, and how often they’re saying it, you can ensure the right message ...
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Design & Dev Tools
30 Yahoo! and Bing Tools for Ecommerce Businesses
March 15, 2011 • PEC Staff
Google may have the biggest impact on the web overall with tools and products that have become indispensable. But Google’s competitors, Yahoo! and Bing, offer a wide array of free tools that ecommerce merchants often underutilize. Take advantage of all the tools that every major search ...
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Design & Dev Tools
32 Google Tools for Ecommerce Businesses
February 15, 2011 • PEC Staff
There is a steady stream of products and tools coming out of Google Labs. Many of these are free — and underutilized — by the community that would most benefit: ecommerce businesses. Need up-to-the-minute financial data? There’s a Google tool for that. Need to translate a product descr...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Try Netgear’s Stora for Small-System Backups
January 3, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Managing an online retail business, even a very small one, can be more labor intensive than some might imagine. Even in the smallest of sole proprietorships, there is accounting to be done; state sales tax to be collected, reported, and paid; vendor price lists to keep track of; a webs...
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Design & Dev Tools
New Chrome Update Includes Native 3D Graphics; Nifty Human-Body Tool
December 21, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Google has released a new updated version of its popular Chrome web browser that supports the WebGL extension to HTML5, making it possible to render 3D graphics in a web browser without the use of a plug-in. Google's inclusion of WebGL in Chrome helps the browser catch up to Firefox an...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Google Docs
November 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Managing a small-to-midsized retail business often includes tracking, updating, and storing a lot of information. Spreadsheets filled with vendor pricing, co-op advertising submission forms, project documents, wireframes for a website redevelopment,
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Design & Dev Tools
Google Apps: Free Business Tools, Plus Collaboration Services
October 13, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
As Google expands the number of tools and services it offers, it also seeks to package those services so they can be linked with each other and between the main user and other collaborators. This is the idea behind Google Apps, a suite of productivity and collaboration tools. Google l...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Feedingo Organizes Feeds, Keeps Me Informed
August 23, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Informed ecommerce entrepreneurs must stay on top of industry news, web trends, and best practices. To achieve this, some wander around the web from one blog or site to another, or they absorb dozens of email newsletters. It would be better if all of the best blog posts, articles, and...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Mockingbird, for Wireframes
August 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio
In terms of website design, wireframes serve as a visual guide to page structure and interface. Web designers use wireframes in much the same way that builders use an architect's blueprints. It is certainly possible to build a website without a wireframe, just like it is possible to bu...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Buffalo Technology’s HD-HX2.0TU3 External Hard Drive
May 24, 2010 • Armando Roggio
One of the computer industry's greatest apocryphal tales has Microsoft founder Bill Gates telling a newspaper in 1981 that "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need." The story is false, and Gates has been adamantly denying the quote for nearly three decades. But false as it is,...
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Design & Dev Tools
Demandware Launches Marketplace to Speed Integrations
April 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Connecting and integrating an ecommerce platform with third-party services and solutions can be one of the most costly and time consuming parts of any ecommerce site development. This week, ecommerce platform maker Demandware launched a new marketplace called LINK, which gives develope...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: LABjs for Better Site Performance
March 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Many small- to medium-sized online retailers are entrepreneurial companies. Their owners and employees often have diverse responsibilities, and it is common for a single person to handle multiple tasks, such as customer service, email marketing, order processing and website design. Unf...