MySQL 5.1 offers some major improvements in some areas to MySQL 5.0. MySQL 5.1 was released over a year ago and it’s been a long wait for those cpanel users needing 5.1 features.

Upgrading is not as easy as the 4.0 – 5.0 upgrade but looks to be a reasonable procedure.

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This is meant to be a framework for creating an ecommerce product page. There are of course many additional things that could be put on a product page, but these are the essentials that every page should have. The more features that a product page has, the more likely a user won’t notice them.

In the end, websites benefit from clean and well organized content.

This theme is an extremely flexible / fluid layout based on the Fluid 960 Grid System.

If anybody’s interested in obtaining this theme for their own development, let me know and I will create a more portable version. Please let me know if you notice any other problems as well.

Thanks

In reality, the way your business’s DNS is handled can be a gift or a curse. I can’t think of a technology that has been under more security scrutiny lately than DNS. Years after our typical DNS system was thought to be safe, huge exploits have been found having the potential to wreak havoc on large portions of the internet.

To start off with, what exactly is DNS?

DNS or Domain Naming System is basically a directory of what domain belongs to a particular IP address. A domain can have other features such as email, ftp, sub domains, all of which DNS can manage. In reality, it’s a lot more complicated than this, but for simplicities sake, it just matches a domain to an IP. An IP address is something computers understand, and a domain is something humans understand. Without DNS we wouldn’t have the internet as we know it.

How DNS affects your business…

For the purpose of this article, there’s two main uses of DNS that businesses run into. The first is the DNS that your computer or office uses to connect you to another website. When you click on a link or enter a website in the address bar, your computer goes out and through a series of DNS servers, directs your browser to the server of the website you are trying to reach.

The second, from the other side of the picture, is how the DNS of your website is registered with the DNS servers of the internet. This is important because when someone goes to visit your site, the registrar lists your root DNS servers, and the visitor queries those to find out the actual location of your site.

Where all of this can go wrong…

The easiest way for DNS to work against you, is that if someone has the ability to change the DNS entries that your DNS server would normally give you. Meaning, that if you request the IP for google.com, you are sent to the wrong server such as: hacked-spam-server.com. This is called DNS poisoning, and is a very common tactic for phishing, and malicious attacks. Old DNS servers are particularly vulnerable to poisoning.

As far as your website goes, if your DNS server is the same server that your site is hosted on, which is very common, and the server goes down or is unreachable, it’s as if your site doesn’t exist at all. This can have dire consequences from search engines and even large networks depending on how long DNS entries are cached for.

There are two similar fixes for these, both involve you not managing your own DNS…

For your office network, use a DNS provider like Open DNS. You can add open DNS IP addresses to your router, or to your computer’s network configuration. This will prevent any DNS poisoning to your network, and will also give you the ability to block spam and other websites from your network completely. You can block pornography, malware, proxies, and just about anything else using Open DNS. This is an essential tool for small business owners and IT administrators that don’t want the hassle of managing their employees browsing habits.

For your websites, use a 3rd party DNS service. DNS Made Easy (not free) is a perfect example of this type of service. Instead of entering the address of your own DNS servers, enter the addresses of the 3rd party servers with your website registrar. Services like DNS Made Easy have multiple redundant servers for DNS, so if your server goes down, search engines and browsers have the correct location of it. This way they will be more likely to return once it is back up. You can also use DNS for website fail-over, which would automatically direct traffic to an alternate server if your primary server becomes unavailable.

Troubleshooting and fixing DNS problems can be extremely difficult due to DNS caching, and the fact that you probably don’t have control over any DNS server than your own. For this reason, and to save time and money, I highly recommend using 3rd party services for your DNS.

Mistake 1 (Old dates and information):

The internet is a very dynamic machine. When a visitor shows up on your website and sees your copyright date “Copyright © Anything < This Year” it instantly brings up questions. Are these prices still correct? Is this company even in business?

Unless your website has an enormous amount of perceived trust and you have a very strong brand (in which case your copyright date would most definitely be current), you will undoubtedly lose sales from this date alone.

The same thing goes for about us pages, and other information pages that can be date specific. If your about us page states that you specialize in computers with Windows 98, and Windows 2000 while Windows Vista is the current release, it brings up questions to which there is no good answer.

Mistake 2 (SSL related error messages):

I come across sites on a daily basis that serve up secure pages with some problem in their SSL configuration. When you send a visitor to a SSL protected page, there is a good reason for it. And, when an error message precedes that secure connection, all confidence in your security is lost. If you can’t figure out how to properly encrypt a website / page / sub-domain without errors, you need to hire someone who can.

Does this make you want to continue checking out?

Also, to help prevent this from ever happening, make sure you do not permanently install mis-configured ssl certificates. If you do get a ssl error, make sure not to click the permanently allow this connection option.

Mistake 3 (Not showing payment and shipping options immediately):

You should display your accepted payment methods on every page of your website! Don’t make your customer click on the about us, faq, or any other link to get this information. I’ve got securely hosted credit card logos here, if you need them.

You should display the shipping options and prices as soon as technically possible, on the shopping cart page is best! Also, do not make your user enter all of their shipping or billing information, (or worse yet, make them register) before you give them shipping prices. Much of the time, your customer won’t even consider filling out that much information just to get an idea of how much shipping will cost.

Use a single zip field to calculate shipping and ask for the rest of their information further in the checkout process.

Mistake 4 (Improper add-to-cart functions):

With the Web 2.0 craze going on, it’s common to see spiffy Ajax and dynamic add to cart functions where some small area of the website is updated when an item is added to a shopping cart. This is not only a bad idea, but it can be usability suicide.

While these actions may seem obvious to you, a lot of users don’t notice a small box being updated, and it’s rarely what a shopper is expecting to happen. It’s always best to redirect your user to a shopping cart each time they add something to it. You can then provide a return to last item / category / brand or whatever else link from the shopping cart page as needed.

Mistake 5 (Poor internal search):

Google became popular because their search results were quick, and highly relevant. Search function on your website is extremely important, and should be quick and relevant. You need to be able to account for things like misspellings and incomplete words. If you don’t have the ability to implement a solid search function yourself, you should look for a 3rd party application to use. If your website is well indexed, Google offers a custom search engine that you can integrate into your website.

The only thing worse than showing bad search results is showing none at all.

Do people actually respond to fake, photographs? Only your own testing can tell for sure, but one thing’s for certain, if the images on your site are actually unique and speak to your customers, you have an advantage over everyone else.

Here’s my favorite examples of the too-stock photography that we see everywhere!

The collaboration

Great ideas come from conflict and discussion, not cooperation. If everybody’s happy, then chances are nothing is getting done.

The corporate team

When you take a picture of a bunch of models in business suites, you end up with… A bunch of models in business suites!

The business professional

Hmmm. Just out of college and standing around dreaming. My advice is to stop standing around and get to work.

The customer service rep

If it were this much fun to work in a call center, they wouldn’t have the highest turnover rate of any job.

The grunge factor

Nothing says professional like a scruffy face or a crumbling wall…

However, You shouldn’t take this as a recommendation to put a bunch of low quality pictures on your site. But, trying to find some realism isn’t a terrible thing.

Do this:

• Show realism!
• Connect with your visitor!
• Don’t choose a photo just for a pretty face!
• Choose photos that have some relation with your service!
• Use only clear, sharp, and high quality photos!
• Take time when choosing any stock photo for your website. Make sure you can easily explain why you chose that image!

Here’s an interesting article about how people in photo’s can affect your website’s conversions.

There are so many how to guides that people need for running their ecommerce website’s. With that in mind, this is a list of very useful how to’s related to ecommerce. Hopefully this post will be a good resource for site owners, and those looking to get into ecommerce. Topics include everything from setting up a web server, marketing, to integrating a website with a payment gateway.

Please send me some feedback if there are some good how to’s that should be on here.

Servers / Networking / Programming Setup:

• The perfect Fedora 5 server setup – While I don’t like the virtual control panel that the guide recommends at the end, this is a perfect step-by-step guide to setting up a Fedora 5 Linux server. This guide covers setup for PHP5, mysql, SSL Support, ProFTP, and a few others. The guide states that it is for 64 Bit systems, but I have setup five, 32 Bit systems without any additional modification.
  Fedora Core 4, Fedora Core 3 setups are also available.
• Setup a Windows XP Web Server – Also php.net has an excellent guide on the overall steps to setup php and Apache on windows. The php.net version tends to leave out some things that later may cause errors, but the comments section of the article probably cover all of the missing information.
• Windows XP Apache Virtual Hosting – Having needed to setup a Windows XP server recently, this guide covers both the setup, and how to use virtual hosting on the server allowing multiple websites to exist at the same time. I have a company server that was setup using this and the previous guide running several websites, very effectively.
• How to make Cat 5 / 5e Patch Cable – I’ve saves myself a few hundred dollars in under a year, by making all my own Ethernet patch cable. You can get cat 5e cable and connectors really cheap when you buy them in bulk. If you think you may be needing a lot of cable in the future, this is the way to go. It may take a few tries to get your cables nice, but once you get it down, you cables are just as good as anything.
• 13 *nix command line tricks – A quick tutorial on a few command line codes that are very useful but often not known, not used, or one’s that we forgot.
• Top 5 PHP security holes – After running a server scan I was referred to this excellent resource on the major security problems that websites commonly have with php. Since almost all of these problems are due to use error and poor programming, they are all fixable.
• Integrate Linux PHP with a MSSQL database – After working on a few of these integrations, one successfully, and one failing, this is the best overview on the topic that I have found. Easysoft.com also has another good guide, but it is geared to using their own paid extension, which is expensive. I don’t recommend performing this integration unless you absolutely have to (Just save yourself the time, and switch the site to a windows server), but these should get you pointed in the right direction.

Web Design / Hosting / Usability:

• How to make a horrible Oscommerce site – From Jason Chance, this is a great, humorous guide on how not to make your oscommerce website.
• 10 Ways to ruin visitor experience on your website
• 10 easy steps to a horrible ecommerce site – Another from Jason on sitepoint.com, this is an extension of the oscommerce version, and covers mistakes that all websites should avoid.
• B2B Usability – From Jakob Nielsens Alertbox, a guide to usability from a B2B vs. a B2C standpoint.
• Top 10 mistakes of web design – One more from Dr. Nielsen, on the top 10 mistakes that website creators make. Weblog mistakes is another valuable article for blog owners out there. I admit that ‘Irregular Publishing Frequency’ is one that I rarely adhere to…
• Shopping Cart Abandonment – Don’t do this… – 3 simple tips to lowering shopping cart abandonment rates.
• How to ruin a web design – This is a good article covering how to not over think a design project, and that often more people working on something means less quality.
• How to choose a web host – This is a good overview to help people that aren’t quite sure what they need, pointed in the right direction in choosing the company to host their website.

SEO and Marketing:

• How to Conduct Keyword Research – This is a great introductory guide on finding relevant keywords for a SEO or PPC campaign.
• 5 most common SEO mistakes – 5 simple SEO mistakes that are often overlooked.
• Ultimate guide to link-baiting and social media marketing – From one of the most authoritative persons on link building anywhere, Andy Hagens tells us how to properly build linkbait. I would consider this the definitive guide to linkbaiting. What is linkbaiting you say?
• List of the best directories – This is the best list of web directories out there. Directories are separated by value, and prices are listed next to each directory.
• How to market to other business owners – From entrepreneur.com, this is my ’7 commandments’ on marketing B2B products and services. I highly recommend printing this one out and looking it over any time you need to deliver a message to a B2B audience.
• How to add $1 Million in revenue to your business in 1 year – From Andy Beal at marketingpilgrim, this is written with an SEM agency as the intended industry target, but it can be applied in theory to almost any ecommerce business.
• How To Generate Targeted Site Traffic Without Search Engines – This is an awesome guide on building traffic without completely relying on search engines for it.
• Top 10 business mistakes, marketing firms make – Another from marketing pilgrim, this can also be applied to just about any business.

Payments:

• Six Payment Gateways Reviewed, The Chargeback Challenge, and Solve the Payment Processing Problem are all written by John Conde from the merchant-account-services.org blog. These are all great articles and should be considered essentials for website owners looking to accept credit cards on their website.
• How to accept credit cards on your website – This is a simple guide that I wrote a few months ago covering basic option to accepting payments online.
• Integrate a website with Authorize.net using php 5

Other / random useful stuff:

• Microsoft Windows Power Toys – If you don’t know what these are, check them out. Extremely helpful, and can safely change a lot of things on your computer that you couldn’t before. I highly recommend the Tweak-UI, Clear Type, Virtual Desktop, and the Image Resizer toys.
• Magazines for small business owners This is an article covering some good business magazines for print and online for business and website owners.

Web Server Control Panels:

• Plesk
• cPanel
• Webmin
• cube panel
• CWIPanel
• ISPConfig

Getting Information (Where I go when I need help):

• Digitalpoint Forum
• Sitepoint Forum
• Webmasterworld
• WebProWorld

Freelance Marketplaces (If I need programming/ design work):

• GetAFreelancer – #1 choice
• Rent A Coder

If you know of any really good how-to’s or guides for ecommerce do-it-yourself’ers send them to me. I may add them to the list.