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

Platforms & Apps
Third-Party Integrations Make Shopping Carts Easier To Use

June 23, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

By day Sean Dupuis is a courier for FedEx. By night, he sends out packages of his own: boxes of boots and moccasins and sheepskin bags for his bustling website business called Sheepskin and Things. Stretched thin, he’s able to get it all done because his shopping cart and its third-part...
Platforms & Apps
Shopping Carts And Search Engines

June 18, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

When searching for “educational toys” on Google, at No. 5 on the list you’ll find BrainwavesToys.com—up from No. 78 a year ago. Michael Stebbins, co-founder of the business, employed a series of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies within his cart to achieve this result. “A lot ...
Platforms & Apps
Magento Shopping Cart and 20,000 Friends

June 18, 2008 • Michael A. Cox

Roy Rubin held the cyber equivalent of a barn raising and had several thousand of his closest friends over for the event. Of course, everyone actually stayed home and did the work from their own little cubicles, kitchen tables, laptops on airplanes and Blackberrys on bar tops.
Design & Development
Programmers: Web 2.0 Forms

June 3, 2008 • Brian Getting

Online forms have become much more elegant and usable in the last couple of years as developers take advantage of “Web 2.0” technologies like visual effects and “behind-the-scenes” calls to the server. In fact, I have seen forms that are just downright fun to fill out, which is somethin...
Design & Development
Quick Query: Credit Card Expert Stresses Integrity

June 2, 2008 • PEC Staff

Virtually every ecommerce merchant processes credit card payments. We asked Michael Shatz, publisher of The Merchant’s Guide, a resource to help merchants understand credit card processing issues (at Themerchantsguide.com), to share his views on choices merchants must face when deciding...
Platforms & Apps
Field Test: Shopping Carts, Part Three Of Three

May 28, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

In Field Test, Practical eCommerce has gathered twelve seasoned ecommerce merchants and asked each of them the same questions around a given topic. This month’s topic is shopping carts. The participating ecommerce merchants are: Dave Norris, House of Antique Hardware; Justin Hertz, Mut...
Design & Development
Internet Security: The Seatbelt Is In The Trunk

April 30, 2008 • Michael A. Cox

Suppose you took delivery on your new car and the salesman told you, as you signed the order, that the seatbelt, antilock brakes, and the airbags were in a box in the trunk and that if you want to be safer you might want to have an expensive expert install them. That would be about the ...
Design & Development
PCI Compliance Is “Industry Self-Regulation”

April 28, 2008 • PEC Staff

The major credit card companies, Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express, have collaborated on minimum payment-processing security requirements. These requirements make up the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Merchants and merchant account providers who wo...
Design & Development
Interview: Ex-hacker Mitnick On Avoiding Fraudsters

March 31, 2008 • Michael A. Cox

You know that hidden bomb shtick in the movies? There's a bomb that's going to go off and kill a gazillion people. First, the good guys have to find it. Then they have to figure how to get into to it to disarm it. Then they almost have it disarmed when they discover a booby trap they ...
Code
Frameworks For Web Designers

March 26, 2008 • Brian Getting

I've written previously about frameworks and how they help developers build web applications. For the most part, my praise of frameworks has been directed at those of us who develop web applications, such as coding up the Ruby, Perl, PHP or .Net scripts that make applications work. Howe...
Design & Development
Tech Support: Application Programming Interfaces

March 19, 2008 • Brian Getting

One of the most exciting trends on the Internet today is interconnectedness. Application programming interfaces (APIs) help make this possible. For example, if I have created a blog at WordPress, I can get a free key to use the API at Akismet, a comment-spam-prevention service. Addition...
Design & Development
Pay-per-click Spyware and Other Scams

March 3, 2008 • Greg Laptevsky

If you thought click fraud was bad, consider this: your Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing ads and Microsoft adCenter accounts are new targets for spyware applications, hackers and scam artists. If thieves obtain access to your pay-per-click account, they are in complete control o...
Design & Development
Tech Support: Passwords And Avatars

February 4, 2008 • Brian Getting

Can ecommerce merchants help their customers manage multiple user names and passwords? Many websites require users to create an account to participate. This applies to social networking sites, ecommerce sites, news sites and others. For the site owner, the strategy of requiring a user ...
Design & Development
Programming Notes: Linking To Payment Gateways

January 28, 2008 • Brian Getting

Payment gateways can be intimidating for many web developers. I have always found a certain amount of anxiety associated with them, particularly because of security requirements and presumed liability issues that could arise from insecure transactions. However, the actual integration wi...
Schools & Resources
Booklist: Brulant CEO Len Pagon

January 28, 2008 • PEC Staff

In Booklist, we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite books. For this list, we asked Len Pagon, CEO and president of Brulant, a company that combines technology, interactive marketing and creative design. The Fifth Discipline By Peter M. Senge A great source fo...
Design & Development
Get Organized With Advanced Searchbar

January 23, 2008 • Dave Young

If you are like me, you enjoy organization. Everything needs to be in order so you can work efficiently and get to things you need quickly. Most likely you spend time on the Internet doing research to enhance your business, reading interesting blogs, or watching videos that spark creati...
Design & Development
Determine Analytics Questions In Advance

January 23, 2008 • Michael Stebbins

 Once a web analytics solution is installed, the most common initial use is to validate some past event. User testing shows that 80 percent of marketers focus on charts that go up and to the right, thus validating the success of the website or an advertising campaign. I call this “web...
Schools & Resources
Booklist: Juice Media CEO Rick Enrico

January 21, 2008 • PEC Staff

In Booklist, we ask ecommerce professionals to name a few of their favorite books. For this list, we asked Rick Enrico, President and CEO of Juice Media Worldwide, a media and marketing technology company.   Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die By Chip and Dan Heath ...
Design & Development
Testing Site Accessibility

January 18, 2008 • Joseph Monks

Here's how to perform a standard test to see if your website and store are accessible to the vision impaired. Let It Be Seen By All First, for PC users, open the Narrator program. For Mac users, use the APPLE+F5 keystroke to turn on VoiceOver. Do this before you open your browser. O...
Schools & Resources
Booklist: Mercado CEO Corey Leibow

January 14, 2008 • PEC Staff

In Booklist, we ask ecommerce professionals to name books they are currently reading. For this list, we asked Corey Leibow, CEO and President of Mercado, an ecommerce search and merchandising provider for small-to-mid sized business. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping By Paco Under...
Design & Development
What Makes A Site Effective?

January 14, 2008 • Mat Greenfield

A client recently asked me to do a quick-and-dirty analysis of a half dozen competitor websites. I decided to look at each competitor site and then give it a good/fair/poor rating for certain criteria. I thought that these criteria, and some explanation of what I was looking for, coul...
Design & Development
Programming Notes: Importance of Hand Coding

December 19, 2007 • Brian Getting

Let's be honest. Most people do not go into website design because they enjoy writing code, or because they want to root through hundreds of lines of seemingly nonsensical expressions. That comes later. Most people start with a visual idea and work from there, usually taking advantage o...
Design & Development
What Is PCI Compliance And Should Merchants Be Concerned About It?

December 12, 2007 • PEC Staff

The major credit card issuers created PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance standards to protect personal information and ensure security when transactions are processed using a payment card. All members of the payment card industry (financial institutions, credit card companies and me...
Platforms & Apps
Microsoft Exec on Future of Software

November 7, 2007 • PEC Staff

Many industry experts, such as Microsoft's Baris Cetinok, believe software will increasingly migrate to web-based applications and away from localized, licensed products.
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...

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