Archive for April, 2006
I have been working with eCommerce solutions for the past several years. In that time, I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of all the eCommerce shopping cart software solutions available. Please plug your favorite shopping cart software and provide a working link to each suggestion’s Web site along with reasons that you favor working with your recommended solution.
I prefer to hear from designers about shopping cart solutions because I want recommendations that are flexible enough to handle design requirements while being praiseworthy as software applications. Of course, others are also welcome to post suggested shopping carts.
April 30th, 2006
Gaining traffic from your Web site’s content is a relatively simple process. I’ve provided a list below of steps you can take to begin this process.
- Anticipate what your potential customers or Web site visitors will want to read. This can be an act of imagination and guesswork; even better, it can be based upon conversations and more formal demographic research.
- Know your industry. Keep up with trends and provide useful commentary.
- Write articles that demonstrate your expertise in your field. These can be tutorials, advice columns, and even questions that solicit information of value for yourself and your readers.
- Research key phrases that are relevant to your product or service offering and use high traffic phrases to form ideas and to write your articles and other content.
Getting visitors to come to your Web site for content is relatively easy. However, getting those visitors to purchase your product or service is not always so easy. Aim for a direct relationship between your content and your sales offering.
Keyword Research Tools:
April 27th, 2006
Before You Build Your Online Store - Click to Play the Podcast from Harvey Ramer
There are two routes available to online store owners regarding designing a Web site around a shopping cart. You will choose one that is search engine friendly, or a shopping cart that will hinder your search engine visibility. There are viable reasons to choose either option. My hope is that this podcast will provide a framework from which you can make an informed decision.
Choosing Search Engine Visibility
Simple buy now button solutions for under 20 products:
Database driven solutions:
April 25th, 2006
Admittedly, the title of this book feels a bit like hype to me as did much of the content. I feel a bit of queaziness about regarding blogging, a forum for the free and unrestrained expression of opinion, as one more tool for marketing spin. However, I still feel that Blog Marketing is worth repeated reading for the owners of small businesses.
Here’s why: in the new economy of information, content and community are as real a currency as is the US Dollar. Without either of these components, small businesses must spend non-existent capital to generate more-or-less disinterested Web traffic from the pay-per-click services provided by Google, Yahoo!, and others.
While I don’t mean to demean pay-per-click as a marketing strategy, I do acknowledge that it is extremely difficult to run pay-per-click marketing campaigns in a cost-effective way for start-up businesses (which make up most of my client list).
Blog Marketing’s author, Jeremy Wright, is a marketing veteran who points out the latest trends, tools, and tips for creating a successful blog marketing strategy for business. Though almost all of the many examples in this book are drawn from the ranks of big business, most of the principles you will extract from the case studies will apply to businesses of any size.
Blog Marketing covers topics ranging from getting into the blog mindset and how your company can use blogs to using external tools that will help you succeed as a blogging company. For companies with employees that blog, Wright has included a sample blogging policy that will help spur your internal debate and policy formation around this powerful new social phenomenon.
- Author: Jeremy Wright
- Hardcover: 321 pages
- Publisher: McGraw Hill (December 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN: 0072262516
- List Price: $24.95
April 24th, 2006
Joseph W. Lowery’s book, CSS Hacks & Filters, makes a great effort towards amassing all the current CSS Hacks available on-line and explaining their appropriate usage. To a great extent this volume succeeds in making order out of chaos and I heartily recommend its use as a supplemental resource for anyone who does not want to bookmark every CSS Hack Web page they might find useful.
While Lowery’s clear explanations of the rationale and appropriate application of each hack adds significant worth to this book, the real distinction between CSS Hacks & Filters and other CSS volumes I own is its focus on implementing CSS design with Dreamweaver’s internal template engine. This can be a real time saver for those new to Dreamweaver’s template engine and/or CSS.
CSS Hacks covers tasks like using Javascript/DOM to serve appropriate style sheets to various browsers, server side solutions for CSS, CSS based navigation systems, and image scaling with CSS. In addition, it includes several example templates that have been broadly tested on current browsers and that can provide a more secure foundation for your cross-browser design project than your own untested layout. Lowery also includes a detailed appendix that lists the various CSS Hacks/Filters and their applications.
This book is an excellent resource for those beginning CSS, especially if they are interested in Dreamweaver and Web development or scripting languages like Javascript, PHP, or ColdFusion.
You can find a bit more information about the author at his Flashbang! Web site.
- Author: Joseph W. Lowery
- Paperback: 266 pages
- Publisher: Wiley (June 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN: 0764579851
- List Price: $29.99
Wiley books are available at your local bookstore or by calling 1-800-225-5945. In Canada, call 1-800-567-4797.
April 24th, 2006
An idea is neither more nor less than a new combination of old elements.
If you have never been stumped by a problem that seemed too complex for you to solve or overwhelmed by a creative challenge, then read no further. In fact, you can probably stop reading altogether because you have surpassed the need for learning! Almost every day, I face challenges that need problem solving. I used to wonder how it was that I sometimes found ideas that worked well and failed miserably to generate ideas in other situations.
Though I still am mystified by the mind’s ability to synthesize data and create solutions, I have found a process that works quite predictably to minimize the confusion I feel when facing a tough challenge. James Webb Young’s little book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, has been on my bookshelf for about three years now and rarely gathers dust. The ideas Webb presents are simple, effective, and discipline is required to apply them.
Originally presented as a lecture to graduate students in advertising at the University of Chicago’s School of Business, the book contains a simple framework on which to hang the shreds of creative thought that pass by us so fleetingly. After some excellent discussion of the social theory of Pareto, Webb clearly explains his framework. I’ll provide a simple summary below, though it in no way replaces the book!
When facing a project whose solution requires a creative idea:
- Gather specific materials related to the project.
- Seek a synthesis of facts by focusing on new relationships between ideas
- When you have exhausted all avenues of inquiry and have applied all your efforts to finding a solution, put the project completely out of your mind.
- A solution will arise when you least expect it as a “Eureka” moment.
- Bring your baby idea into the real world for critique and application.
So run out to the bookstore today and grab a copy of this resource and tackle your next challenge head on!
- Author: James Webb Young
- Paperback: 48 pages
- Publisher: McGraw Hill (2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN: 0071410945
- List Price: $6.95
April 24th, 2006
Have you ever met one of those people with a tendancy to make things more difficult than they really are? If you haven’t, then you don’t need this post. This post is for people like me. People who view the world as one massive interconnected system and make the mistake of trying to understand it all in the abstract. There’s a problem with comprehending something as a system, especially if it’s bigger than you are!
The systems approach to problem solving works well for visual design because a Web site or printed piece is a comprehensive package and must be designed from that perspective. This approach also works for brainstorming a proposed database driven Web site, but it often breaks down when the actual programming begins.
I have realized that systems thinking is actually a liabililty when getting a basic programming task completed. For example, when an SQL statement needs to be written to delete a record from a table and all related records from linked tables, it may appear that writing a single SQL statement will be most efficient. For most, that’s not the best approach and will lead to wasted time. The first step is to write an SQL statement for each of the record deletions then combine the logic into a single statement.
Perhaps this atomic or mini-task problem solving approach is a principle that can be applied to other complex tasks. While my bent leads me to attempt the most complex approach first, I have begun to realize the merits of taking the route of least resistance. Especially when other people are paying me for my time!
April 8th, 2006
This is an amusing, yet interesting way of creating the worn look in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Normally I keep my design digital, but sometimes it is fun to experiment with real-world techniques.
read more | digg story
April 5th, 2006
