Designing Tips For Your Business Website – Part I

Posted in Web design's Tips August 31st, 2009 by admin - Comments (5)

The business world is, by definition, competitive. But when you are dealing with ecommerce you have to expect an added level of intensity in that competition. The Internet has created a never ending resource by way of online business, and many have moved to take advantage of that. This means that web entrepreneurs have to go that extra mile in attracting and keeping a customer base. The first step to achieving this is through effective web design.

You would be shocked to see how often an online business uses shoddy design and a bad layout, and so loses the trust of potential buyers. This three-part series, updated weekly, will be dedicated to ensuring that you don’t make the same mistake. These tips should help you, the business owner, to design an effective website that put off the right kind of image, and attract the customers your company needs to thrive and expand. Read more…

Zencart, is it time to move on?

Posted in News & Discussion August 26th, 2009 by admin - Comments (28)

Last year, the Zencart developer team has announced a new Zencart version 2.0 to be released by the end of the year, every user was excited with the news. More than 9 months passed since then, and now it is “you’ll get it when you get it”.  Kim at zen-fu.com told me:

A client said to me “All this secrecy is very uncomfortable, this is my business were talking about…”

As I have put it before, Zencart is an open source project developed by a closed team, the people inside the team don’t want to open up to ideas and opinions  from people who use their products. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, who is working on what, and when can we expect things to be done to plan ahead. All this gets to your nerve over time, especially if you have worked on it long enough (like me). Read more…

Using canonical link tag on Zencart

Posted in News & Discussion August 26th, 2009 by admin - Comments (1)

Just a few days ago I posted an article about canonical link tag and how it helps your zencart stores, in that article I also warned about certain misunderstandings regarding how canonical link tag works and how should it be used. I later took a step further and brought up this question on seomoz.org, a rather well known and trusted source for seo info, below is the quoted question and answer for those who are interested. Read more…

Move your Zencart store to a new domain/subfolder – SEO Tip

Posted in SEO Tips,Tips & Tricks August 25th, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment

This is a very common issue, as much as you would try to avoid doing it, sometimes you have to move your zencart folder somewhere else, either to a new subfolder or to a new domain. In such cases, it is very important to redirect all visits to the old links to the new locations.

Below is a nice snippet that will help you accomplish the dirty job.

<?php

// index.php on old site
// Get the requested page and redirect to new site url
// from skipwater - yellow1912 - gjh42 20081213
   $new_domain = "www.mynewsite.com"; // if you do not change domain, simply enter the current domain here
   /**
    * example 1:
    * site: http://www.mynewsite.com -> $new_store_path = "";
    *
    * example 2:
    * site: http://www.mynewsite.com/sub1/sub2 -> $new_store_path = "sub1/sub2/";
    *
    * example 3:
    * site: http://www.mynewsite.com/sub1 -> $new_store_path = "sub1/";
    */
   $new_store_path = "store/";
   // do not edit code below
   $request_type = ((isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTPS']) == 'on') || (isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == '1') || (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_BY']) && strstr(strtoupper($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_BY']),'SSL')) || (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST']) &&  strstr(strtoupper($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST']),'SSL')) || (isset($_SERVER['SCRIPT_URI']) && strtolower(substr($_SERVER['SCRIPT_URI'], 0, 6)) == 'https:') || (isset($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']) && $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] == '443' )   )  ? 'http' : 'https';
   $qstring = ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] != '') ? '?'.$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] : '';
   header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
   header("Location: {$request_type}://{$new_domain}/{$new_store_path}{$qstring}");

Place the snippet above in your oldsite/path-to-zencart/index.php (you should rename the current index.php to index.php.back and create a new index.php file just for this purpose).

Can’t login to your Zencart admin? Here is the solution

Posted in Tips & Tricks August 22nd, 2009 by admin - Comments (2)

Today we installed a new Zencart for our client at obtainingmoksha.com and we ran into a very annoying problem: we keeps getting redirected back to the admin login page without any error at all. Thinking it’s the usual cache error of Zencart, I cleared out the browser’s cache. That didn’t help. At this point, we suspect it might be a session error, so we use the Fix cache key module which save us many times before. The cache path is now updated but we still can’t login @_@.

At the same time, on the front page we also had this error (with Zencart debug turned on)

Fatal error: Call to a member function add_current_page() on a non-object in /path…./autoload_func.php on line 90 Read more…

Online Business Basics: Overcoming Failure

Posted in eCommerce August 20th, 2009 by admin - Comments (2)
The dot come bubble

The dot come bubble

The online business boom really garnered a ton of media attention about 10 years ago when “dot com” was one of the most heard terms on television and in publications like Newsweek. That type of online business was completely unexplored territory and definitely had its ups and downs. Today, the online business world is a different place but is especially ripe for the picking if you have the drive and motivation to make it happen. It sounds scary but the number of people who attempt to form an online business compared to the number that actually succeed is extremely low. Some circles will swear as many as 90% will fail. Read more…

Zencart SEO Problem – Is your site indexed?

Posted in Tips & Tricks August 17th, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment

Has your store been open for months and still not get listed in search engines? Do you see a sudden drop in search traffic after updating your cart or changing your store template? Perhaps Google is not indexing your Zencart store?

Problem 1: incorrect robots meta tag

You may be a victim of “noindex” misuse!

Here is how to check:

  1. First, go to your store, right click and choose “view source” or “view page source”
  2. See if you can find this string: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”/>. The string is usually located just above the tag </head>
  3. See if the string above appears on the main page on your store

The string above is telling search engines to avoid indexing and thus listing your site on the search results. Read more…

When good looks do not equal good sales

Posted in eCommerce August 17th, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment

According to a new research conducted by Bianca Price PhD of University of South Australia, the power of “gorgeous girls” at the counter has some very clear limits. Regardless of whether or not the product was related to appearance (for example, a mobile phone compared to mascara) if the female customer perceived the staff member to be better looking than her, she was less likely to purchase the product.

Good looks don't convert to sales?

Good looks don't convert to sales?

This may raise some eyebrows but it’s something I suspected all along (I never liked salemen who are better looking than me :p). How does this apply to online selling, you ask? Well, there are several take home lessons from this research for online marketers and business owners: Read more…

Zencart canonical link – will it really help?

Posted in Zencart August 17th, 2009 by admin - Comments (5)

Google has announced the use of canonical link tag not too long ago, and other search engines also follow this move. Some of you might have never heard about this term before so I will give you a very brief definition here:

Because of the use of dynamic urls, one single web page can have more than 1 valid urls (address) pointing to it. Google as well as other search engines will more than likely pick of these links as official link and the others are flagged as duplicated content. The problem is that we are not sure which link will be picked. The canonical tag allows you to do just that: to tell THE LINK you want to use as the official one. Read more…

Online Business – What you need to know to start an online business

Posted in eCommerce August 16th, 2009 by admin - Be the first to comment

online business

There can be no doubt that the online sector is the largest growing business arena today. Almost every company, large or small, is attempting to establish a profitable and efficient online presence. For some organisations, this means the creation of an ecommerce site, for others it simply means setting up a professional website, to act as a store window. However a company decides it can best make use of the World Wide Web; there are a whole host of challenges to be overcome. Below we will take a look at some of the issues face by a business wishing to establish itself online, and discuss how these can be overcome. Read more…

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