Category

Design & Development

The nuts and bolts of an ecommerce site are design and development. We address design innovation and trends — including layouts, colors, photography, logos, video, and more. We explain the basics of code — HTML, CSS, JavaScript — as well as platforms, themes, plugins, open source, and related topics.

Code | Design & Dev Tools | Platforms & Apps | Schools & Resources | Typography & Fonts | User Experience

Typography & Fonts
Choosing the Right Font for Your Website

August 18, 2015 • Daniel Kedinger

Choosing the right font for your website not only impacts how visitors feel about your site but also how they comprehend your content. Picking the right font is also a way of deciding how you want visitors to perceive and understand your company. Different fonts convey distinct emotions and can provide site visitors with a clear sense of your company culture and professionalism just as quickly as when using colors or graphics.
Platforms & Apps
17 Call-to-action Plugins for WordPress

August 17, 2015 • Sig Ueland

If you have a website or blog on WordPress, a call-to-action plugin can help you grab the attention of your visitors and help them to take action. Use call-to-action elements ...
Design & Development
Apple.com Redesign Pushes Ecommerce Site Trends

August 14, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Apple’s August 2015 website redesign emphasizes visual communication and advances several site design trends. Large photographs, meaningful graphics, and useful video abound. When Apple.com relaunched on August 6, 2015, many ...
Platforms & Apps
How to Keep Your WordPress Site Safe from Hackers

August 6, 2015 • Daniel Kedinger

Once open-source software becomes the most widely used content management system on the Internet, it will undoubtedly also become a target for hackers.
Schools & Resources
11 Website Design Galleries for Inspiration

July 30, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Website design galleries are useful for inspiration — with your own site or if you’re just a fan of great design. They can also be good resources for finding a ...
Design & Development
Monitor Competitor Prices with Python and Scrapy

July 29, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Monitoring competitors’ prices and product lineups can help online retailers win pricing battles; optimize sales and special offers; and track product trends over time. For many small ecommerce businesses, however, keeping tabs on the competition is a painful, manual process.
Design & Dev Tools
11 Online Video Creation Tools for Small Business Use

July 15, 2015 • Kathleen Fealy

Online video has become an integral part of the business marketing toolkit, especially in an era when the use of mobile devices is commonplace. Despite this fact, small businesses often consider the use of video to be a difficult and expensive undertaking. Business owners worry about everything from the skills needed to produce video content to camera-shy employees to promotion and distribution costs.
Design & Dev Tools
10 Online Backup Services for Small Businesses

July 12, 2015 • Sig Ueland

For small businesses, online backup services offer more than just storage space in the cloud. Complete solutions provide a variety of features to protect your system, including file management, encryption ...
Platforms & Apps
14 Niche Market Business Software Platforms and Apps

July 2, 2015 • Kathleen Fealy

This article presents 14 software platforms and apps that help niche market businesses improve their marketing, heighten customer experience, and manage assets more efficiently. They focus on the following industries: hotel, medical, real estate, financial services, photography, publishing, human resources, HVAC, and contracting.
Schools & Resources
13 New Ecommerce Books for Summer 2015

June 19, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Summer is here. Don’t forget to bring new ecommerce books with you to the beach. Here is a list of new ecommerce and Internet-marketing books for summer 2015. There are ...
Design & Dev Tools
14 Color Tools to Grow Your Business

June 14, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Color has a powerful affect on consumers. According to KISSmetrics, up to 90 percent of a person’s initial assessment of a product is based solely on color. Bring dynamic color ...
Platforms & Apps
WordPress’s WooCommerce Acquisition Could Improve Support, Features

June 4, 2015 • Armando Roggio

The announcement that WordPress’s parent company, Automattic, would purchase WooThemes and its widely used WooCommerce plugin could be good news for online sellers using the ecommerce platform. WooCommerce, which by some ...
Platforms & Apps
8 Questions before You Choose an Ecommerce Platform in 2015

June 2, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Selling online requires an ecommerce platform. Fortunately, for entrepreneurs there are many good ecommerce solutions available. Selecting which one to use can be a matter of choosing the best option ...
Schools & Resources
15 ‘Contact Us’ Pages, to Inspire

May 6, 2015 • Kathleen Fealy

Contact pages on websites are where businesses typically drop in the phone number, email address, and perhaps a contact form. Often treated as an afterthought, contact pages deserve more attention since they serve as a: Consumer resource for contacting key personnel; Lead generation touch point; Trust generating focal point.
User Experience
Make Your Website Mobile-friendly Now; 3 Ways

May 5, 2015 • Daniel Kedinger

Having a mobile-friendly website isn’t just good practice — it’s a prerequisite. For the first time in history, mobile has exceeded desktop Internet usage, according to comScore.
Schools & Resources
15 Infographics to Improve Your Online Marketing

April 29, 2015 • Kathleen Fealy

It is often easier to process information visually than through reading. These fifteen infographics and their related articles include actionable insights that can help improve your online marketing efforts. Topics include advertising, consumer behavior, mobile, local search, email marketing, social media, and search traffic.
Design & Development
How to Install WordPress, WooCommerce on Amazon Web Services

April 27, 2015 • Armando Roggio

WooCommerce, a powerful ecommerce plugin for WordPress, can be a good foundation for an online store. What’s more, when you run that site on Amazon Web Services, you can have ...
Design & Development
4 Email Newsletter Best Practices to Drive Conversions

April 2, 2015 • Phil Frost

An email newsletter can be one of the most powerful tools that a small business owner has for converting website visitors into prospects and prospects into customers. The reason is that newsletters address two fundamental aspects of conversion: engaging your audience with valuable information and staying top of mind, so that your company is the most logical choice when it’s time to make a purchase.
Schools & Resources
15 New Ecommerce Books for Spring 2015

March 22, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Spring is here. Here is a list of new ecommerce and Internet-marketing books for spring 2015. There are new titles on digital currency, Google Analytics, peer-to-peer economics, tax and legal ...
User Experience
SEO: Google to Make ‘Mobile-friendly’ a Ranking Signal

March 15, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Do you have a mobile or responsive site? If not, on April 21 you may find it harder to rank in Google’s mobile search results. Google announced algorithm updates that will ...
Design & Dev Tools
20 Podcasting Tools, for High-quality Content

March 9, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Podcasting continues to be an effective way to generate rich content for your website. With so many inexpensive and relatively simple tools available to capture and edit audio and video,
Design & Development
How to Choose Charitable Auction Software

March 4, 2015 • Cathy Qori

Many non-profit organizations (NPOs) hold charitable auctions to raise funds. Often, software is needed to manage bidding, checkout, and administrative functions. To choose the software package that best fits your needs, consider the options you must have, those it would be good to have, and those you won’t use.
Design & Dev Tools
12 Tools to Create Animated GIFs

February 23, 2015 • Sig Ueland

The Graphic Interchange Format can turn a stack of images into a short looping video. Animated GIF images can be embedded into a website, email, or ad — giving viewers ...
Design & Dev Tools
11 Tools for Online Presentations, Videos, Animations

February 18, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Presentation tools can be helpful for creating content, such as product demonstrations to enhance a shopping experience. Oftentimes, slide presentations can be repurposed from your existing content. And, you can ...
Platforms & Apps
20 Tools to Run a Small Business

February 16, 2015 • Sig Ueland

A small business owner assumes many functions — marketing, sales, human resources, information technology, and research and development. Fortunately, there are some terrific online tools to help you perform most ...
User Experience
SEO: How Google Decides If Consumers Can Trust You

February 15, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Consumers base purchase decisions in part on trust. Google is working on ways to algorithmically determine trust, in an attempt to send searchers to the best sites. Think about how you ...
Schools & Resources
8 Common Responsive Design Mistakes

February 10, 2015 • Gagan Mehra

A mobile-optimized website is a must-have for ecommerce merchants. To achieve this, many use responsive design, which makes a site render well across multiple devices. I addressed the basics of ...
Platforms & Apps
20 Collaboration Tools for Small Businesses

January 19, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Small businesses that rely on teamwork can enhance their organization with a variety of helpful online tools. Here is a list of collaboration tools to meet the needs of small businesses.
Design & Development
Wearable Devices to Impact Ecommerce?

January 14, 2015 • Gagan Mehra

The annual Consumer Electronics Show just wrapped up. This year’s focus was on wearable devices. Several new devices were launched at the show. These included new watches, headsets, motion sensors,
Platforms & Apps
13 Innovative Mobile Commerce Apps

January 12, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Mobile commerce is no longer a novelty. According to an IBM report, mobile accounted for 45 percent of all online traffic during the 2014 holiday season, and online sales from ...

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