JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for August, 2007

I under­stand ‘shop­ping cart frus­tra­tion’ because I have started at square one with my own shop­ping cart and helped oth­ers with their ‘shop­ping cart frustrations’.

Most online busi­nesses, at one time or another, look at hav­ing a shop­ping cart. A shop­ping cart helps a busi­ness to:

* List build­ing — Estab­lish a rela­tion­ship of trust and show­case your tal­ent. Offer a free newslet­ter or spe­cial report.

* Keep in touch — Reg­u­lar broad­casts to adver­tise spe­cial offer­ings and a newslet­ter are two excel­lent meth­ods of keep­ing in touch.

* Prompt and secure order pro­cess­ing for your prod­ucts and deliv­ery of dig­i­tal products.

* Increase you mar­ket­ing poten­tial by enlist­ing oth­ers to pro­mote your prod­uct for a com­mis­sion through the use of an “affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing” program.

* Track your suc­cess — Using track­ing codes so you can mea­sure what you are doing and what might need to be changed.

A good num­ber of busi­nesses also pass on hav­ing a shop­ping cart or hire some­one else to han­dle it because it appears so com­pli­cated. Well I have cre­ated a new ser­vice to help. I invite you to view Shop­ping Cart Survival

Yes this post is a tad ‘salesy’, and I don’t want it to come across as a mar­ket­ing promo, but I do want to help oth­ers with the knowl­edge I have gained.

Jan

One process many clients don’t under­stand is ‘slic­ing and dic­ing’. When we first cre­ate a client’s unique web tem­plate, the ban­ner, side menu, etc., this is done as an image. In most cases it is not pos­si­ble just to stick up and ban­ner and have a back­ground color with a light inner table, except with cer­tain sales pages or ezine tem­plates, for example.

Why Slice and Dice to Cre­ate a Website?

The short­est and sim­plest answer is the smaller the file size of the images used in a web page, the faster the page will dis­play. This in itself is a good enough reason.

Web­site vis­i­tors tra­di­tion­ally have a very short patience span. Broadband’s steady pro­lif­er­a­tion has not changed this. If any­thing, vis­i­tor expec­ta­tions is now that pages should load instan­ta­neously. At rate, the longer they have to wait for a page to dis­play, the more likely it is you will lose them before they have viewed your offerings.

So how does slic­ing and dic­ing pro­duce faster page display?

Have you ever seen a page with cen­tral table with shad­ows to make the table appear as if it were float­ing on a layer above the page? Here is an exam­ple using a site we devel­oped: http://www.iaccweb.org/ . The left and right edges of the cen­tral table are tiny tiled ver­ti­cally to pro­duce the effect of a solid graphic. The slice is a very small file size, so takes much less time to dis­play than if we had used a side graphic big enough to fill the required area. This brings up another rea­son — why we slice and dice images.

Read more of this arti­cle here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Dice

Jan

How many of you use Google Alerts? How many of you have heard of Google Alerts?

Ok, for those that haven’t heard of it, this is Google’s definition:

“Google Alerts are email updates of the lat­est rel­e­vant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

- mon­i­tor­ing a devel­op­ing news story
- keep­ing cur­rent on a com­peti­tor or indus­try
- get­ting the lat­est on a celebrity or event
- keep­ing tabs on your favorite sports teams”

I signed up for Google Alerts a num­ber of months ago to keep informed on new issues and sto­ries in par­tic­u­lar areas of inter­est for my busi­ness. I also signed up for a par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gory to see if my site would show in the alert if I worked the site enough. A test to some degree, but very impor­tant when it comes to get­ting the word out about your business.

The par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gory is Sec­ond Life and I started this site Sec­ond Life Snip­pets on May 18, 2007 in Word­Press. Sec­ond Life is cer­tainly news­wor­thy. When you type in Sec­ond Life in Google you get 599,000,000 results. So you can see com­pe­ti­tion is stiff.

Today I received my nor­mal daily Google Alert sum­mary for Sec­ond Life and there was a post and link to my site under “Google Blogs Alert for: Sec­ond Life. I am very happy with this achieve­ment. It shows you can get noticed and get out there if you work at it.

Read more here: www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Alerts

Jan