Web Development Articles

Did you know that one of the best ways to increase sales for any online or offline business is to offer your customers the convenience of paying by credit card? As a merchant, you have several options available when it comes to becoming part of the credit card acceptance and processing chain. Here’s a quick guide to get you thinking.

Merchant Accounts

If you want your online business to be capable of accepting credit card payments, you must have some type of merchant account. A merchant account allows you to take credit cards as forms of payment in a safe and secure manner.

You apply for a merchant account by filling out an application and signing a fee agreement. Unfortunately, navigating the merchant account maze can be difficult if you do not have financial experience. There are many different companies out there, and they all have a deal to offer. But before you sign up for anything, read the fine print.

The three main fees you need to look for are the set-up fees, the percentage you will pay for each transaction, and the monthly fees. All of these fees need to be taken into consideration. One company may advertise low set up fees, but they may take a higher percentage of the sale or the monthly fees may be considerably higher.

How a Business Can Benefit from a Website
 by: Brad Seefeld

With over half of all U.S. households shopping online, the internet has become a massive market for small businesses to sell their products and services to consumers. The Internet is quickly becoming the “world’s market place”. Businesses benefit from websites because it saves money and time, reach a wider consumer market, gives customers what they want, and it will help keep up with competitors. Customers will enjoy better support, not be hindered by store hours, and a sense of professionalism from your company. In today’s age, all businesses that want to go somewhere should have a website.

A small business web site can save a company money and time. Real-world advertising today often costs thousands, or millions for television ads, of dollars to produce and distribute to the intended audience. Internet ads are usually free or less than $25. This means that businesses can advertise more, spend less and ultimately make more money by getting new customers to see ads. Ads that are placed on the Internet usually last forever too. This makes online advertising far superior than real-world advertising.

First of all, some people are worried that they will not be able to use Linux hosting because they run Windows on their PCs. However, what operating system you run on your own PC is irrelevant to which web hosting environment you can use, because the latter is run remotely on a web server, where your website files will be uploaded.

Linux and Microsoft Windows are two different operating systems. Windows is a well-known household name and does not require much introduction. Linux is a new version of the Unix operating system. Both these operating systems make excellent environments for web hosting. However, there are some differences between them.

To help you decide whether Linux or Windows hosting is better for you, we look at the following elements:

Cost

Linux is known as an “open source” operating system. i.e. there is no licensing fees to pay. Therefore, compared to Windows, Linux is very cheap. Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft has begun enforcing software activation. This means that a single copy of Windows can only be installed on one computer. With Linux, once you own a copy, you are free to install it as many times as you wish on any number of computers.

While few companies can boast as we do that our first ten clients are still with us today, many companies often change Web design firms to get a new perspective on how their Web presence could look and perform. The following paragraphs serve as a Buyer’s Guide to use when shopping for a new Web design company.

First, determine what exactly you’re shopping for. Is your Web site down a lot? Do you frequently have email problems? This may or may not be your Web site designer’s problem. Many design firms outsource their Web site hosting operations and if that’s the case, you may just need a new Web host. While most companies prefer to work with a Web site design company that also hosts their Web site because there are great cost savings to be realized in this type on environment, this isn’t always the case and is a question that needs to be asked.

In addition, does the firm you’re evaluating perform all of their services in-house or are they outsourcing development to India? This has become more of a common practice due to the extremely low labor costs, but if your site is changing frequently, this can present a lot of problems in delayed response, delayed postings, and other issues associated with working with such a time difference.

Basic Rules on Page Layout and Color
 by: Granny’s Mettle

For one to be able to stand out from the rest, one needs to go out of the box, break the rules, and some other clichés that apply to breaking out from the traditional. But before breaking any rule, you have to understand first the basic and foundation of the rule itself.

First off, let’s talk about page layout.

The Rule - Too much boxes is bad for your health.

One designer said that a mark of a designer is when he or she starts to use boxes and rules in his or her pages. When you look at your page and realize the need to make something attractive and creative out of the boring stuff you’ve just made, and then decide to throw around a box or two or place rules between columns, then that’s the time when your creativity is getting out from confinement.

Before using all the box there is in your software, just remember to do it in moderation. Anything in excess is a bad thing. Sure, boxes and rules are a good way to highlight important information. But if you’re going to do it in all your pages, or put virtually everything in a box, then nothing will stand out from the crowd.

Basic Rules on Web Design
 by: Granny’s Mettle

In every design there are basic rules to consider. For a web design, here are a few of the rules which you can take or break for your projects.

1 > Viewers do not want to scroll horizontally.

As a personal experience, I find it really annoying to have to scroll the page to the right just to be able to read the whole content of the page. People should not be put to the task of having to pick their mouse and move the web page over to the right so as to see what’s hiding over there.

It’s easier to scroll down a page than to scroll horizontally. One designer suggests checking out your web pages at resolutions of 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768 to avoid scrolling the page to your right. It doesn’t matter that the majority of monitors nowadays come preset at 800 x 600. You never know when one of your audiences would have a monitor with the lowest denominator, and then have that potential client go to a competitor just because he or she also hates scrolling to the right.

The internet is filled with sites and they are good and bad. Some have been known for a long time and some still struggle to get the respect and fame they think they deserve.

Although not all your visitors are web design professional they still can put their finger on a good site and sense the ones that are not that ok. But how can you convince people your site deserves to be known and respected? How can you make them feel your site is better than other thousands they could find on the same subject?

Elegant design

You need a nice looking site. Don’t overdo this either, but try to offer your site a unique and nice feeling. Branding is also important. Try to come up with a nice logo.

Create a nice layout, try to have a consistent colour theme and use nice fonts. Don’t use templates unless they are unique and you have got the only copy. There’s nothing worse for your “respected” site than a theme people have seen for 50 times before.

Avoid animated gifs, annoying backgrounds and music.

Good and interesting content

What is SQL?
 by: John L

What is SQL? SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is the lingua franca in the database world. SQL is a standard that is used by all database vendors and programmers to define, extract and access the information that is stored in databases. SQL began life as an IBM creation but was standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ANSI/ISO SQL in 1988. Since then ANSI/ISO SQL standard continued to evolve. The ANSI-SQL group has since published three standards over the years:

1. SQL89 (SQL1)
2. SQL92 (SQL2)
3. SQL99 (SQL3)

SQL is a query language. It is English-like and easy to use. However, although there are more than 90 SQL reserved words, most programmers seldom use more than the following handful of commands - SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, FROM, WHERE, HAVING, BETWEEN, LIKE, OR, AND, NOT, IN, ORDER, GROUP and BY.

For example, if you had a database table named “employees” and you wanted to retrieve all records where the employee has the last name “goodman”, you would use the following SQL statement:

SELECT * FROM employees WHERE lastname = ‘goodman’;

Does the length of your website’s domain name registration affect the search results at Google? This question has come up recently and a lot of website owners have been wondering about it, especially since it was mentioned in a patent awarded to Google in April. According to the patent, “Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.” According to this statement in the patent, domains that expire in 10 years are more valuable and legitimate than domains that will expire in less than a year.

First off, you need to know what an ecommerce solution is. An ecommerce solution can be defined in many ways. An ecommerce solution is a way to define electronic shopping carts. An ecommerce solution is used for businesses that sell things on the web. An ecommerce solution makes it possible for any sale or transaction to be made. They enable the use of credit cards and other forms of payment to be used right on your website. It is used for large companies like Ebay or Amazon. But now an ecommerce solution is for small companies and businesses as well.

There are other aspects and definitions of this subject. An ecommerce solution can also be defined as software that allows you to do business on the web. It is also software that designs websites that are used just for selling products or services on the web. An ecommerce solution can also be defined as a company that hosts websites. Either way you look at it, an ecommerce solution is for anyone doing business on the web.