Category

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.

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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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,
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: FormSpring for Easy Form-building

November 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Read any online marketing book, blog, or journal—Practical eCommerce included—worth its salt, and you’ll be told to “know your customer.” In ecommerce, getting to know your customer and building rapport with that customer takes time. It also takes an exchange of information that is of...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: StoreSync Lets You Manage Your Ecommerce Business On Your iPhone

September 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce can be a 24 hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week business. For many small-to-medium sized merchants, providing great customer service means paying close attention to their businesses, even after normal business hours. A new iPhone application assists with monitoring orders, inventory,...
Design & Dev Tools
Five SEO Mantras for Website Redesign

August 18, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

I’m often asked to make search engine optimization recommendations during a site’s redesign process. From the clients' points of view, they’re making a major investment and they need to safeguard their existing SEO success in addition to growing their natural, post-launch search traffic...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: Use 99 Designs for Crowd-sourced Graphics

July 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The appearance of your online store matters. Customers use a store's logo and website design to judge its trustworthiness and professionalism. But ecommerce storeowners and managers are businesspeople, not necessarily graphic or web designers. So their expertise is in merchandising, bu...
Design & Dev Tools
The Shopping Experience: Icon Dock Excels at Downloadable Graphics

July 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Icon Dock is a beautifully designed, easy-to-use online retailer specializing in downloadable, vector graphic icons. Each month, Practical eCommerce sends me shopping. I make a purchase from a real online merchant—like Icon Dock—and report back to you about the overall checkout process,...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: Adobe Kuler Creates Stunning Colors for Websites

June 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Adobe Kuler is a free web application that can help ecommerce site designers select beautiful and communicative color palettes, earning it four-and-a-half stars in "The PeC Review." "Color is such a pervasive part of everyday life that one tends to take it for granted," wrote Ayn E. Cr...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: Microsoft Tool Helps Designers with Internet Explorer Compatibility Problems

May 18, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Designing for Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser has always been a problem as designers were forced to choose between widely accepted Internet standards and what would work in IE. This problem has been exacerbated by the complexity of designers having to maintain various generat...
Design & Dev Tools
Web Design Tips: Configuring Templates, Adding a Product Grid in Magento

April 1, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Adding a dynamic product grid or list to any static page in Magento is as easy as adding a few lines of code. The challenge is knowing which lines to add and where to put them. Magento is a popular open-source ecommerce platform that has been downloaded more than 750,000 times, accordi...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: Audacity Makes Audio Editing a Snap

February 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Audacity is an excellent, free, open source audio editor that makes it a snap for ecommerce merchants to develop customer-engaging podcasts for any online store. More and more online shopkeepers are turning to rich multimedia content to inform (and even enthrall) Internet shoppers. F...

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