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

Design & Development
Personalized Search: Coming For Search Engines?

October 24, 2007 • Greg Laptevsky

Personalized search could be the next big thing in search engine marketing. In fact, we are beginning to see the shift from homogeneous search results to personalized results already, and all major search engines have tools in place that are collecting such data. A good example is Googl...
Code
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...
Design & Dev Tools
Site Monitoring Tools Help Prevent Downtime

October 22, 2007 • Dave Young

In order for an ecommerce site to sell products and services, it must be continuously available to online customers. Any downtime could potentially cause a retailer to lose thousands of dollars. Consequently, an important element in any online endeavor is having a structure in place to ...
Design & Development
What Are “Tags” And What Is “Tagging?”

October 22, 2007 • Brian Getting

Since around 2004, content tagging has become more and more common due to social networking, photography sharing and bookmarking sites. Tagging is known by a few different names, such as content tagging, collaborative tagging, social tagging and even the scientific-sounding "folks...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Script.aculo.us Effects

October 18, 2007 • Brian Getting

Script.aculo.us is a JavaScript framework that is built upon the wildly successful Prototype JavaScript libraries. Script.aculo.us allows web designers to create engaging user interfaces quickly and easily, due in ...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Tabbed Content – Part 2

October 11, 2007 • Brian Getting

Tabbed content appears more and more frequently in web pages, and is an interesting way to simultaneously save page space and effectively present information. In part two of this two-part tutorial on creating tabbed content, Practical eCommerce's online director Brian Getting illustrat...
Design & Development
Video Tutorial: Tabbed Content

October 4, 2007 • Brian Getting

Tabbed content appears more and more frequently in web pages, and is an interesting way to simultaneously save page space and effectively present information. In part one of this ...
Code
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 ...
Design & Dev Tools
Nine Simple Ways To Speed Up Tedious Tasks

September 24, 2007 • Pamela Hazelton

Because I’m all about automation of the tedious of tasks, this month I’m offering up some key, yet very simple ways, to speed up tasks you’ve probably never given much thought to. While it may take me time to figure it out, I always try to tackle the pesky mundane tasks first. Auto-l...
Design & Development
TechSupport: "What's A Relational Database?"

September 10, 2007 • Brian Getting

Q: Our web developer tells us that our ecommerce site uses a relational database, but I don't understand what this means. Could you please explain? At the foundation of nearly all web applications, including dynamically-generated websites, lies a relational database that stores and man...
Design & Development
Programming Notes: Transferring A Domain Name

September 3, 2007 • Brian Getting

The process of transferring a domain name from one registrar to another can be daunting, and the exact process can vary slightly depending on the registrars involved. The first thing to do is to log into the old registrar, where the domain is currently being managed, and make sure the...
Platforms & Apps
Debate: Hosted Shopping Carts ‘Perfect For Most Entrepreneurs’

August 27, 2007 • PEC Staff

1ShoppingCart is a hosted shopping cart with thousands of small business customers. Michael Valiant, 1ShoppingCart's product management and marketing specialist, offers his views on hosted cart solutions. PeC: Why should an ecommerce business consider a hosted shopping cart, versus pu...
Platforms & Apps
Debate: Licensed Carts Offer Flexibility and Portability

August 27, 2007 • PEC Staff

ProductCart is a licensed shopping cart used by thousands of ecommerce merchants. We asked its CEO, Massimo Arrigoni, whether licensed shopping-cart software is better for smaller businesses than hosted cart solutions. PeC: Why should an ecommerce business consider a licensed shopping...
Design & Development
Web Hosting Companies: Sources To Help You Choose

August 22, 2007 • Pat Callahan

When it comes to selecting a web host, there’s a lot to choose from. It’s possible your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may have its own web hosting capabilities, and it’s not a bad place to start. However, more than likely you’ll need an independent host that can specifically address y...
Design & Development
Catalogs Can Complement An eCommerce Site

August 19, 2007 • Pat Callahan

As ecommerce businesses begin to grow, a dilemma some may face is the decision of whether a catalog is an appropriate multichannel tool. Latienda.com, which sells a variety of items not generally available outside of Spain, was faced with just such a predicament six years ago. And int...
Design & Development
Tech Support July 2007: Accessibility

July 16, 2007 • Brian Getting

I keep hearing about accessibility. What is it and why is it important? Accessibility, in the context of a website, is the measure of how easily people with disabilities can perceive, navigate, access and interact with electronic content and information. People with disabilities face...
Design & Development
Quick Query: Alternative Payment Option eBillme

June 27, 2007 • PEC Staff

Marwan Forzley is president and CEO of online payment alternative eBillme (Modasolutions.com), formerly known as SECURE-eBill. How does a consumer use eBillme? Forzley: When you are at the checkout, there are all kinds of payment options. You've got Visa, MasterCard and American Exp...
Design & Development
Protect Data From Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks

June 25, 2007 • Brian Getting

Security is always going to be a concern for both developers and ecommerce business owners alike, since providing a secure environment for making transactions is not only a matter of gaining customer trust, it is also a legal requirement. As websites become more interactive they are uti...
Code
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...
Code
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...
Design & Development
Product Spotlight: eBay Items, Mouse & Tablet, And More

June 8, 2007 • PEC Staff

Blog Your eBay Items Have you ever found something on eBay that you really wanted to let your friends know about? Or is your business selling items on eBay and you want to cross-promote those items in your businesses' blog? If so, eBay To Go is for you. It's a way for you to share inte...
Design & Development
Web Conversion Strategy: When Design Dominates

June 8, 2007 • Mat Greenfield

A local business magazine had written an article reviewing the website designs of various local companies. As you may imagine, I read with dismay as the three-page article focused solely on graphic design. There was no mention of usability, conversion rate or site effectiveness (using a...
Design & Development
Critique Part Four: Site Search

June 4, 2007 • PEC Staff

The Problem: The results aren't always relevant. The Fix: A search for "snowboard" returns wax as the top result — but no snowboard until the fourth page of results, even though the site has an entire section dedicated to snowboards. Similarly irrelevant results came back for "bindings...
Design & Development
Online Payment Alternative: Bill Me Later

May 24, 2007 • PEC Staff

Vince Talbert is the vice president of marketing for I4 Commerce (pronounced "eye four commerce"), a company offering the online payment alternative Bill Me Later at. PeC: What does Bill Me Later provide to customers? Talbert: "It is a payment option designed so customers can make ...
Design & Development
Installing Google Maps On Your Site

May 2, 2007 • Brian Getting

Implementing Google Maps into your website is an easy way to provide rich, interactive map features that can help your customers find your business. Of particular interest to brick-and-mortar stores, Google Maps provides an Application Programming Interface (API) that makes it easy fo...
Design & Development
Analysis: The New PayPal

April 26, 2007 • Massimo Arrigoni

To more than 50 million users, PayPal used to signify a peer-to-peer payment exchange that relied largely on email notifications. Not anymore. While PayPal still stands as one of the most recognized brands in the ecommerce world, it’s no longer a single payment system: It's a suite of d...
Design & Development
Basic Definitions: Web 1.0, Web. 2.0, Web 3.0

April 18, 2007 • Brian Getting

“What is web 2.0?” We receive this question often. It likely has as many answers as the number of people using the term. However, since talk of web 3.0 has ...
Platforms & Apps
What Do You Dislike About Your Shopping Cart?

April 18, 2007 • PEC Staff

Readers weigh in on what they would like to see improved with their carts. 1ShoppingCart "We offer live UPS shipping rates, but for some reason 1ShoppingCart is only set up for commercial rates. It should default to residential rates. I would guess there are five residential buyers ...
Design & Development
What is Ruby on Rails?

April 9, 2007 • Brian Getting

First there was Ruby, and now there is Ruby on Rails. Ruby is an open-source web-programming language that was developed in Japan in 1995. Ruby resides on your web server and operates similarly to other programming languages, such as PHP, ASP and Perl. “Rails” is a separate pre-built ...
Design & Development
Why Authenticate Email?

April 9, 2007 • Brian Getting

Mail servers require a username and password authentication for outgoing mail (mail being sent from your computer to someone else) so the servers can maintain control over who is allowed to use the resource. The first, and probably most obvious, motivation is to control email spam. By r...

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