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)

How your website’s style affects your website’s visitors

May 21, 2007

If you’ve seen the movie ‘The School of Rock’ this video should be pretty humorous to you.

If you haven’t seen the movie, then this looks like some sort of suspense thriller movie about a deranged teacher, when it is actually a comedy.

How does this apply to a website?

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

Ecommerce How-to List for Do-it-yourself’ers

May 16, 2007

Following a post from Matt Cutts, I have been collecting how to’s every time I come across one that I use. I have about 900 saved up now, in just about every area imaginable.

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.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: Development, General, Marketing, PPC, SEO, Security, Usability | Comments: (2 comments)

Google Checkout Desperation

May 1, 2007

I went to login to my Google Checkout account today. For some reason instead of clicking on my bookmark, I did a search for Google Checkout and clicked on the link. Something really caught my eye with the Google Checkout listing in Google.

Google Checkout

Google doesn’t even have their own listing as the title for Google Checkout in the SERPS. They are advertising an auction company (hibidder.com) in the title of the Google Checkout listing.

Andy Beal recently blogged about Google Checkout taking a dive after their $10 and $30 coupons went away. Coincidentally I had commented about how Paypal was able to get very large only because of the wide use of eBay, and that without a site like eBay, Google Checkout would have a hard time catching on. It looks to me that Google may be thinking the same thing, and that they are trying to get users away from ebay and onto sites that support their own payment system.

I cant believe that Google would do something this seemingly desperate. In addition to this, it also looks like they had manually changed their title in the SERPS, as nowhere in the Google Checkout Homepage does any of the altered title text appear.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under: General | Comments: (3 comments)

Making a poor image

April 13, 2007

I was driving home from work a few days ago, and I saw one of those Best Buy geek squad cars. They are really noticeable as they are a VW beetle, and they are painted black and white, like an old police car (SEE PICTURE HERE).

Now this may seem like a fairly effective practice. They are definitely noticeable, and they probably appeal to a fairly wide audience. The car itself is a representation of simplicity and clean lines something that Geek Squad would definitely want people to associate them with.

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

Domain parking is out of hand!

April 5, 2007

I have been searching for a domain for several hours now. I know that there are millions of website owners using billions of domain names, but the whole system is completely out of hand.

I have searched for over a hundred names, not one with an actual dictionary word in it, and only one domain has been available so far. What bothers me more than the lack of available names, is that none of the takes names actually have useful content on them. Almost every one, has a parked page or a made for adsense page, with some generic ads on it and nothing else.

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

Want a better ecommerce site, learn by example.

March 9, 2007

I along with thousands of website owners am always trying to improve my ecommerce sites. Hopefully that little font tweak that I make half asleep at midnight will lead to some huge increase in sales. Most likely not, but maybe…

In truth, one of the best ways to get good ideas about what to change on your website, is by looking at other websites that have their crap together. Not every mega site does the right things, and you definitely don’t want to go start incorporating every bell and whistle that you can find, but these sites spend a lot of money on testing, so if they have some feature on their site, is it normally for a reason.

Here are some sites with very good features, some of which may be a good idea for your website. These are only ecommerce sites that sell products through a shopping cart and checkout system.

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

Using Wordpress for your Inranet website

March 5, 2007

Intranet websites can be extremely beneficial for small and medium businesses, but they are often overlooked, or simply ignored. I think that any business who’s employees spend a lot of time on computers, and any business that has constantly updating news and information can greatly benefit from using an Intranet website.

A few years ago we decided to create an intranet website for the company. We compiled a list of everything that we needed in order to have a successful intranet.

Important factors of our Intranet:

Simple publishing platform in a blog format (Reverse chronological).
Commenting and discussion management.
Several static, easily accessible pages.
Ability to upload documents.
Integration with RSS.

After looking at a handful of idea, including some complicated CMS systems and custom programming, we decided on a blog publishing platform. Wordpress was by far the most inclusive, easily editable, and free program that was available at the time, so it was an easy choice when we finally decided to get started. Upgrading is simple, and Wordpress support is readily available.

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

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