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-
Platforms & Apps
8 Keyboard Shortcuts for Internet Explorer 9
October 12, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is a modern, fast, and efficient web browser that will speed up the web for its users. But, if you really want to get the most out of this new and vastly improved web browser, you've got to take advantage of keyboard shortcuts. Every browser has keyboar...
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Design & Development
Preparing for Mobile Devices: Commonly Asked Questions
October 8, 2010 • PEC Staff
The shift to a mobile web has many ecommerce merchants wondering what their options are. Should they develop a mobile-optimized site that can be displayed by common web browsers? Or, should they develop platform-specific applications for iPhone and Android devices? And, importantly, how...
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Platforms & Apps
5 Essential Firefox Add-ons
October 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Mozilla's Firefox web browser helped pioneer the concept of browser add-ons and extensions, making custom web surfing experiences and tools possible. The Firefox Add-on directory includes more than 13,000 browser extensions. According to Mozilla, the browser's various add-ons have be...
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User Experience
9 Mouse Gestures For the Opera Browser
September 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio
The Opera web browser allows web surfers to use quick, predetermined mouse movements to complete many common browsing tasks, such as going back to a previous page, opening new tabs, or reloading a page. Once users become familiar with these mouse gestures, they can surf the web potenti...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Libsyn for Video, Audio Podcasting
September 27, 2010 • Armando Roggio
From product or how-to videos to expert audio podcasts, many online merchants use multimedia to help sell products and engage customers. Examples of ecommerce companies using video and audio abound, but they include REI and Maker SHED. Yet, both of these examples are from relatively ...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Internet Explorer 9
September 20, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft released a preview of its Internet Explorer (IE) 9 web browser on September 15, promising users "a more beautiful web." Historically, Microsoft's IE browsers are widely used by Internet novices and widely hated by Internet regulars. Web developers, ecommerce merchants, and ...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Firefox 4 Panorama
September 13, 2010 • Armando Roggio
On average, Americans spent about 56 hours on the Internet in June 2010, according to a recent Nielsen Wire report. Ecommerce merchants, whose workplace is on the web, likely spend many more hours online than the average user. With so much time spent online, a web browser's features an...
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Design & Development
Volunteer for a Free Mobile-Optimized Ecommerce Site
September 6, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Editor's Note: We published the following article seeking a merchant for our forthcoming mobile optimization series. Many merchants replied, and we selected DecalGirl.com, a seller of mobile device "skins," or coverings. You can follow our series on mobile optimizing DecalGirls' ecommer...
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Typography & Fonts
The PEC Review: Fontspring, the Typographical Fountain
August 30, 2010 • Armando Roggio
The very letters and words on a web page can help build a brand and engage customers. Thanks to better browser support and several new services, the Internet is being filled with rich and diverse fonts even now. For years, so-called web safe fonts—meaning the most common fonts supporte...
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Business
New Firefox Release: Faster, Better Video, Different Look
August 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Last week, the Mozilla Foundation released a new version of its Firefox 4 web browser. The new version offers better performance, improved tab management, more HTML5 video support, synchronization, and ...
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Design & Development
APIs: What Online Merchants Need to Know
August 25, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Editor's Note: In our "Need to Know" series, we explain complex web topics on an executive-level, "need to know" basis. For this installment, Contributing Editor Armando Roggio explains application programming interfaces. The "Need to Know" Series Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce M...
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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 & Development
Databases: What Online Merchants Need to Know
August 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Editor's Note: We continue our "Need to Know" series, where we explain complex web topics on an executive-level, "need to know" basis. For this installment, Contributing Editor Armando Roggio explains relational databases. The "Need to Know" Series Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce ...
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Design & Development
Synchronized Applications Transformed Two Businesses
August 17, 2010 • PEC Staff
InkJetSuperstore.com and Wrigleyville Sports were once losing customers and sales. Now they are both successful and growing. In fact, just prior to a recent Practical eCommerce webinar, InkJetSuperstore.com CEO Ilan Douek spilled the beans about his prior day’s order volume. It was more...
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Design & Development
Google Docs: Word Processing, Collaboration, More
August 17, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Google offers a variety of useful free tools merchants can use in place of other more costly software. One of these is Google Docs, a free word processing tool with plenty of room for file storage and many unique tools unmatched by other word processors. The most important of these is t...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Shopify
August 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio
There are nearly 600 different shopping cart solutions to choose from. While many of these carts are functional, a relative few rise to the top in terms of their ease of use, how much creative freedom they allow, and how well they help a merchant present their products. Shopify is on...
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Platforms & Apps
ProStores Upgrades Platform, Simplifies Store Design and Management
August 12, 2010 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: Ecommerce service providers frequently launch new, interesting products, or issue upgrades to existing ones. We address these new products and upgrades periodically, and in this installment Contributing Editor Lisa Morgan explains eBay Prostores' new upgrade to its hosted...
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Platforms & Apps
Getting Started in Ecommerce: What’s a Shopping Cart?
August 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio
The ecommerce shopping cart is a software package that accepts customer payment and shipping information and facilitates the distribution of that information to merchants, payment processors, or others. At the surface, an ecommerce shopping cart is really something that every beginning...
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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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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Comodo Dragon, A Web Browser
August 2, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce merchants are digital natives. They live, in a sense, online, operating their businesses, marketing, and even servicing customers on the World Wide Web. But the Internet can be a wild place, and sometimes digital natives become a little too comfortable with their surroundings...
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Design & Development
Great User Experience Is More than a Pretty Ecommerce Site
July 29, 2010 • PEC Staff
Many ecommerce merchants think of user experience in terms of the user interface. They take great pains to optimize the aesthetic appearance of their sites with the goal of increasing conversions. Yet, it’s often the less sexy backend issues that are driving customers away, and increa...
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User Experience
Screen Readers: Eight Frequently Asked Questions
July 27, 2010 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: The article below discusses screen readers, the software that reads aloud text on a computer screen. Screen reader software allows visually handicapped consumers to use Internet sites. To help text-reading consumers understand what a visually-handicapped user experiences,...
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Design & Development
The PEC Review: IETester for Browser Testing
July 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers must pay careful attention to website analytics. Like conscientious doctors watching a patient for any sign of improvement, site owners and marketers study many details of visitor data, including which web browsers those visitors are using. Thanks...
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Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: nsCommerceSpace by Network Solutions
July 16, 2010 • Kate Monteith
There are nearly 600 online shopping carts. And each week we feature one, interviewing both the cart's developer and a customer. "Cart of the Week" is not a review or an evaluation, but rather an opportunity to learn about a shopping cart from the people who build it and use it. This w...
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Design & Development
Not PCI Compliant? No Problem
July 14, 2010 • Kerry Murdock
By Practical eCommerce's count, there are nearly 600 English-language shopping carts. These include hosted carts, licensed software carts and open-source carts. There are small ones with just a few clients, and large ones with tens of thousands of clients. But, as of July 14, only 40 o...
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Design & Development
8 Questions on Cloud Computing
July 13, 2010 • PEC Staff
Traditional web hosting assumes that customers pay for a fixed amount of storage space and a fixed amount of bandwidth. But the traffic to many websites varies, and storage and bandwidth needs fluctuate over time. For those websites, cloud computing, or cloud hosting, could save them ...
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Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: FatFreeCartPro by E-junkie
July 9, 2010 • Kate Monteith
This week, we'll hear from Robin Kohli, founder and lead developer for E-junkie, the company behind FatFreeCartPro, an online shopping cart. E-junkie is headquartered in New Delhi, India, with its support team based in Tucson, Ariz. According to Kohli, there are roughly 9,000 merchants using FatFreeCartPro, “As well as a couple thousand other users who are in the trial period
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Schools & Resources
Booklist: Invodo CEO Craig Wax
July 6, 2010 • Nic Murdock
In “Booklist” we ask Internet professionals about the books and blogs they read, and why. For this list, we asked Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, an ecommerce video company. Wax leads ...
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Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Digital River’s CCNow
July 2, 2010 • Kate Monteith
This week, we'll hear from Brant Pallazza, vice president of marketing for Digital River, the parent company of the online shopping cart known as CCNow. Digital River is based in Minneapolis, Minn., and its CCNow ecommerce platform serves roughly 10,000 users. We'll also hear from a CCNow customer, Buddy Carr.
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook
June 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Not everyone that downloads Magento can, frankly, figure it out since the platform's effectiveness comes with certain a level of complexity.