Three simple optimizing tricks to speed up your site

July 30, 2007

I’m not going to go whipping a dead horse here because optimizing a website’s speed has been covered so many times that it is pointless to re-post the same thing all over again.

There is more to making a website faster than just the size of pages or html. Sometimes just changing where a script is called can make more of a difference in website loading time than reducing the overall page size by 50%. Here are a few tricks to speed up the actual loading time of a website without making major changes to the website itself. These are very effective and can be implemented on most websites in just a few minutes.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: General, Usability | Comments: (2 comments)

How to track craigslist ads

July 26, 2007

Tracking craigslist ads can be a little tricky because javascript, flash and other useful scripting languagaes are not allowed. It is possible however to track ads using a simple image tracking program. This is limited compared to full-featured javascript tracking script, but it will at least give some idea of the amount of views that your ad is getting.

This should also work on myspace, and other networks that allow html, but do not allow javascript or flash.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: General, Marketing | Comments: (6 comments)

Adding Google Business search to your ecommerce website

July 19, 2007

The internet is abuzz with news of Google’s new business custom search engine. Google is allowing business sites to have their own custom search engine for $100 per year (<5,000 pages) or $500 per year (up to 50,000) pages. This includes some cool reporting and an XML API so that you can customize to your heart's content.

After messing around with Google’s javascript code I decided to write my own little script to better integrate it into my website. The javascript code was giving me some major problems with the width of my pages, so I canned it and went to their XML version of the search function.

The following is a very simple php & html script that you can use for your own Google business search engine. It was made for a php5 server as it uses the built-in simpleXML class. Save this in a separate file, configure one or two lines based on your Google search account, use php to include it between in the body of your site, and that’s it.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: Development, Scripts | Comments: (19 comments)

10 tips to maximize your ecommerce productivity

July 11, 2007

I started this out with five and quickly went to eight and finally split into two five part categories, where I’ll stay. This is for the ecommerce businesses that have only one person or just one person that runs all of the online stuff, for webmasters, and for anyone that spends a lot of time developing online. From web design, to marketing, database programming, and shipping, these tips are to help you maximize your efficiency because there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done.

Personal:

Wear a suit to the office.
Optimize your computer monitor situation.
Make a daily schedule, and stick to it.
Work on one task at a time.
Outsource if you can’t do something yourself.

For your website:

Make very good use of FAQ and self help pages.
Properly integrate and automate payment methods on your website.
Make sure you are using a good website host.
Optimize advertising landing pages.
Optimize your website’s structure and navigation.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: General, Usability | Comments: (4 comments)

eBay launches craigslist competitor

July 4, 2007

eBay formally launched the US version of Kijiji which is a free online classified advertising website, very similar to craigslist, reported PC World.

Kijiji could become a major competitor for craigslist, as it is a free online classifieds website mirroring craigslist in many areas. After only a few seconds, I realized that the usability and features of Kijiji were far better than craigslist in many areas. It offers a cleaner look, and better categorization and the site itself is much faster that craigslist. Currently it is somewhat limited in the cities that ads can be placed in, but I imagine that these will widen once more people start using the service.

eBay currently owns 25% of craigslist which may have played some role in eBay’s lack of public announcement of Kijiji, or even the lack of placing an eBay logo on the Kijiji website. Personally, I think that there will still need to be a better marketing campaign to kick this thing off. But a company with as much money as eBay definitely has the funds that could make it go somewhere. Just a few strategic links on the ebay.com would probably be a good start.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: News | Comments: (1 comment)

Where wikipedia fails

June 29, 2007

I love the idea of Wikipedia. A user generated encyclopedia, where people decide what information needs to be addressed under each topic. Theoretically, people who are well studied or professionals in a particular field can contribute to a topic and make it a great resource of information. However, I feel that the current Wikipedia is a complete failure.

Wikipedia’s failure can be summed in a single word: ‘accountability‘.

Because there is no accountability for what is written, people write about topics that they have no business writing about. Because there is no accountability for creating false information, people correct topics that they have no business correcting. And because of the lack of acknowledgement due to the lack of accountability, the people who actually do have the knowledge and ability to write informative, professionally and concise, don’t!

Here’s how I would fix it: Give credit to those who write, and penalize those that spam and those that create inaccurate or personally biased information.

I have seen several good contributors driven completely away from Wikipedia because their articles were mutilated, or some passerby thought their resources were spam. The articles that those authors had created or edited to a professional level, have since been reduced to garbage. I myself have downgraded to only removing spam links (which is a daily event) and no longer actively contribute content. When 10-year-olds question the whole concept, maybe it’s time to make some changes!

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: General | Comments: (Add comment)

404 error, File not found: What your custom error pages must contain!

June 26, 2007

When a visitor reaches a page on your website that doesn’t exist, by default they get a nasty, ugly document, that very well may end any future interaction with your company.

It is extremely important to create a custom 404 error document for your website. More than any other error page, you must customize your 404 error page to hopefully route those lost visitors back to your mainland.

404 error’s are for the most part unavoidable. I have never seen a website that doesn’t serve a 404 error every once in a while. Whether you mistyped a link, the visitors misspelled a page in their address bar, or anything else, at some point your server will send a 404 error.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: General, Usability | Comments: (1 comment)

My favorite time-saving programs and hardware

June 12, 2007

Mitch at practical ecommerce posted an article about helpful gadgets for ecommerce owners.

I decided to throw together my own list of programs, and hardware that I currently use that really makes developing and managing websites, and generally using a computer much more efficient. Many of these are not free however, they have all paid for themselves many times over in the time they have saved me.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: General | Comments: (Add comment)

Internet Explorer (Auto Complete) stores your passwords unencrypted!

May 22, 2007

When you check the auto-complete option in Windows internet explorer, you just opened yourself up to a mess of potential problems. Internet explorer stores all of the user names and passwords that you tell it to learn, in a single flat-file that is unencrypted and can be easily read by a variety of program.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: General, Security | Comments: (7 comments)