Shopping Cart Frustrated?

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

Slicing and Dicing an Image to Create a Website

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

Google Alerts

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