Why you shouldnt do your own e-Commerce

Ok, so you got a great new product or a new spin on a old one or provide services to your customers and want to sell those goods or services online.

There are numerous companies out there waiting to take your money for a shopping cart system or e-commerce type hosting but only a few will deliver the goods so to speak.

Theres Zen Cart, X-Cart, OS Commerce and CubeCart to name the big 4 all of these carts have their good points and bad points. of the 4 I love CubeCart for several reasons.

1. Its easy to skin or design the layout to fit what you want your online store to present to the world
2. Its easy on Site /store owners to learn to manage, maintain, edit and update your products, site documents and products.
3. Its extensible, meaning if you need a feature thats not part of the core CubeCart files you can have those new features written into the system. there are several excellent mod authors creating incredible tools and features for use with CubeCart
   
4. Its Flexible, You can use CubeCart for everything from selling tickets to laundry detergent or your bands MP3's

Depending on which system you choose to use as your means of selling on the web you will need someone to get you up to speed on what it means to you and your customers to sell online securely and safely. emphasis on securely...

Unless you are very familiar with HTML, CSS, Graphic Design, php and MySQl I do not recommend anyone selling online w/o first getting a Proficient web developer who KNOWS the shopping cart system you will be using.

Most of the systems brag you can download, install and begin selling this is a plain out lie...
Heres why...

Most of these systems at a minimum need a site owner who knows web technologies to set up the system properly and skin and work out your payment gateway, shipping product options etc.
Selling online is not for the weak, timid or the broke.

To sell successfully online will take a web developer working with you to teach you the ins and outs on Search engine optimization, Payment gateways, SSL certificates, shipping methods and other areas to ensure your customers have a trouble free enjoyable experience shopping on your site.

Those who choose to sell online w/o at least researching these areas and not getting a qualified designer to at least design a custom layout for the shopping cart system (templates can be purchased cheaply for most of the above systems but remember if you bought it someone else has too and the only thing distinguishing your site from theirs will be your logo or company name. templates are cheap for a reason... and usually are not full skins but rather stock skins that come with the system and only mildly modified) are looking to go out of business if not quickly then slowly and painfully. I have had too many of my clients complain they never knew what it really takes to do e-Commerce properly so that they and their customers are not frustrated or fighting with a imporperly set up system that isnt using a SSL certificate to encrypt the information being submitted to the site. Hosting companies will take your money and give you the tools but at what cost? some hosting companies like Host Gator and Blue host have so many users that anyone using a pHp MySql driven website will wait long times to only have their site page fail because the sql server is way over sold and trying to push data to too many users at once. Other places will try to make it easy on you to install the system from your Cpanel via Fantastico but as anyone knows fantastico is the last to know when there has been updates to the system or will cause problems on the install because the server isn't configured properly and installation is only one step to getting setup...

1. If you are going to sell online get a good shopping cart, research them all find the one you believe will serve you and your customers best.
2. Research what it takes to shop and to sell online successfully
3. and above all find a qualified web developer who knows the system you want to use (check each systems website for forums for people who know the system and will work with you to get you up to speed and level the playing field for your online store.

I hope this post helps anyone out there looking to sell online it can be fun, and lucrative if you DO IT RIGHT

Designing the Web - Where to start....

If you are a web developer or web designer or just a guy with a hobby site or a business owner doing your own site you need to know a few things about browser usage and display resolution. If you dont know what people are using when they are surfing the net you wont be able to effectively design websites that work in ALL the top browsers and wont be able to determine what WIDTH your site or your clients site should be. When people visit websites we keep their stats to help us understand the trends happening on our own sites. But their are sites out there with huge amounts of traffic that publish the BIG PICTURE. What internet users worldwide are using for a browser, their screen resolution, their IP and country of origin and much more.

Browser Stats
Sat Sep 1 00:01:01 2007 - Wed Oct 31 23:58:00 2007 61.0 Days
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/October/browser.php

Thecounter.com's statistics clearly show Microsoft with a 75% usage share which is now at 80% for the first part of November with their 2 browsers and TheCounter.com isn't geared to any one segment of the internet population so it should give us a much broader view of actual usage. IE6 with a 48% share and IE7 with a very respectable 25% share which has grown 7% to 32% nearly one third of the internet population, already in November. But that is due in large part to MS making IE7 a recommended update. If you visit w3schools which is a site geared towards web developers and web designers, you will see a higher Firefox usage as more and more developers are adopting Firefox.

"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. This fact indicates that the figures below might not be 100% realistic. The average user might have display screens with a lower resolution. Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files over five years, clearly shows the long and medium-term
trends".

Developers need to realize that you cant simply adopt a new browser like Firefox while it IS better and not design for IE because far too many people are still using IE6 which doesn't support PNG alpha transparency and haven't updated to IE7 which does support png transparency and IE7 like its older brother still doesn't follow the guidelines for the better box model.

Personally, I design for Firefox then tweak for IE. If that means I don't use or "zero out" my margins and simply nest another div inside the first one with lesser dimensions to give the effect putting a margin on the first div would have given me but because of the differences in Firefox and Internet explorer (internet exploder) We are forced to use "hacks", "tweaks", or simply not use margins or padding either with nested divs or with nested tables. A designer or developer who only designs their clients' site(s) for use in Firefox is doing that client and all the clients' web site visitors to come a huge disservice. As most of those website visitors will be using Internet explorer 5, Internet Explorer 6 or the new almost got it right browser from Microsoft, Internet, Explorer7.

Now don't get me wrong I'm no Mozilla shill. Although I do like Firefox better than IE and it is my main browser of choice I know it isn't perfect. It crashes far more often than Internet Explorer does (at least in my experience). Sometimes it crashes because Im working in a Firefox window using a wysiwyg editor called FCK editor that we use in our CMS, sometimes it crashes because Im switching windows from Firefox to WSFTP Pro, or sometimes Firefox crashes because I didn't touch anything and I looked at the screen too hard (crashes of its own accord).

W3Schools Browser Statistics Month by Month: 2006 - 2007
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Display Resolution

The current trend is that more and more computers are using
a screen size of 1024x768 pixels or more:

Resolution Stats: The Counter.com

Sat Sep 1 00:01:01 2007 - Wed Oct 31 23:58:00 2007 61.0 Days
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/October/res.php

We are assuming the high Unknown users percentage are resolutions higher than
1600x1200 which TheCounter.com cant test for properly (1920x1200)

W3Schools Resolutions Stats: 2006 - 2007 (Semi-annual statistics)
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

A good web developer/designer will keep a watchful eye these trends and do it from multiple sources to get a good idea of what people are getting on the internet with. They should also take care in designing their website or their paying clients websites to ensure a enjoyable experience in visiting the website. By taking care to use valid XHTML and valid CSS and know the real differences from one browser to another in parsing the html and css to make that website they have designed "work" in as many of the top browsers and at the largest resolution currently showing the largest usage (1024x768) which means a fixed width site should be a minimum 776 pixels wide to a maximum 990 pixels wide with 923 pixels wide being recommended (923 pixels wide gives us a nice proportion on a 1024x768 screen with nice, not too wide gutters, outside of the page to the left and right).

Why using a Contact Form is a Good Idea

Ive been a big fan of Ying Zhang of http://regretless.com/scripts/ and her other site http://pure-essence.net but especially of her dodosmail and randgen php apps.

I used to use in the bad old days of doing websites and the best thing around for processing form emails was Matt Wrights FormMail and the infamous FormMail clones almost every server had installed by default if they were doing virtual hosting. Face it Matts cgi script was a beautiful piece of cgi and perl but no matter how hard they tried to plug up the huge security holes in it it just became more sensible to not use it.

So what to use when processing a form? We need it secure, hardened from header injections (You deal with 4000+ emails all bounces from a BCC header injection of a 5000+ email list... not fun...)

We need it easy to implement. Since I love php I started searching for a php based mail processor and if it was free even better.

I came across dodosmail almost by accident a friend of a friend recommended it and knew I was looking for a solid php form mail processor, something light and secure.

dodosmail met all my needs and it is now the only form processor I use for our CMS and other instances where a client needs a good email processing app.

Why putting your email address on your site is a bad idea

You have seen it, lists of peoples names followed by their email address with a mailto: link on it and everyone of those people if you asked would all state they get alot of spam.

Why?

Because spam spiders live for mailto: links and the almighty @ they scour the internet spidering like the benign and helpful spiders googlebot and msn bot but in the case of spam spiders or email harvesters (sounds more like a plague of locusts if you ask me) they scour all the servers out for every followable link and not paying any attention to your robots.txt file they look for mailto: links and the @ symbol looking for emails addresses to spam.

So what is a guy supposed to do?

Get smart thats what. People try to hide their email addresses by typing it al AT out DOT COM.

Spiders will recognize a pattern of words and know to look for simple tricks like that. Using a script like dodosmail allows you to have the processing script or file hold the domain or query for the domain from a Database to make up the @mydomain.com of any email address you pass to it. and allows you to pass the user portion of the email address via HTTP GET or POST
http://www.mydomain.com/contact-form.html?send_to=dave
to pass the send_to variable to the form page and set the value of the hidden field that posts the user portion to the dodosmail form processor to complete the full email address.

SO if your company has a large member list or employee list with everyones email address after it get your web developer to get with the 21st century create "Contact Dave" type links that pass the user portion to the contact form and if no user id or name is passed then the php else condition could be to show a drop down menu where the visitor can select from a list of Departments or Employees or members names what ever the situation with your organization and use a single form and a single form processing file to do the job.

Narrowing the avenues for spambots to inject spam data into your form fields and if you like the captcha visual image code system dodosmail comes with that as well giving another layer of control over your contact forms and making sure you dont have to list your email address on the web but still allowing you have interactive ways of contacting yo about your business goodss, products and or services.

Hotlinking is THEFT

Ok I do graphics and wallpapers for my enjoyment for others and my rules are simple
"You want one of my wallpapers you MUST link to my website and you MUST NOT hotlink..."

Some people just don't get or can't understand these 2 simple rules and continue to download my wallpapers and upload them to photo bucket or other websites or just plain steal from me and hotlink to my images.

Why is hotlinking theft?
Hotlinking to someone else's images is theft of that persons bandwidth. We pay for hosting and we pay for bandwidth and when you hotlink from myspace or somewhere else and anyone views your page the image is being pulled from my server using up my bandwidth which you arent paying for...
I am...

Downloading my images and posting it to photobucket or somewhere else and not giving me a link on your pageis just bad manners.

I appreciate that you like my images and my creativity so why not give me a link? It doesnt cost you anything and gives me much needed back links.

How to stop bandwidth theft in its tracks
To stop hotlinking of my images I had to get nasty, I wrote a simple .htaccess file to stop hotlinkers from unauthorized domains and write rules to allow those domains I want to allow to hotlink to my images.

Writing a htaccess file is fairly simple and almost all hosts support it.
heres an example htaccess file to stop (blacklist) and allow (white list) different domains

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?youtube.com/.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?myspace.com/.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://profile.myspace.com/.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.allowedsite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.allowedsite.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*.(jpg|jpeg|png|bmp)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/images/hotlink.gif [R,NC]

The lines are pretty self explanatory anything with the [NC,OR] is the black listed site or domain
anything with just the [NC] is allowed

The rewrite rule is the part that does the magic if the condition is true
all my wallpapers are jpgs so I left out gifs from the rule so I could display a nasty image on the page of any offending page (the hotlink.gif) you can create an image or even an ad or shtml page instead of a gif file.

Personally I believe once you see my nasty hotlink.gif you wont be hotlinking to my images anymore and it has the benefits of showing my nasty gif when my images are used for a page background via css (imagine their shock when they see what their hotlinking got them...

Get smart dont hotlink and dont steal images without giving the artist credit on your site link to them, ask them for permission (if you ask I will give you permission unless your page is about rascism, hate crimes, violence against women or pets and animals or adult oriented) Artist are catching on that it is easy to stop leechers and if you do hotlink you just might find that the cool image you were linking to has been replaced by a mod_rewrite rule and a htaccess file with something you really dont want to be showing to your friends..

What to do about those people who download then upload to their site or some other domain?
Most hosting companies that provide Cpanel access as part of their hosting can easily find and track down people grabbing your images. look to the logs section of your cpanel and click on the latest visitors this will show you where peole are hotlinking from and what images are popular
you can also google your image names and see if they are showing up on someone else domain like photobucket or my-backgrounds.

If you find this is happening simply email the hosting company in charge of the offending domain and let them know one of their users is violating yourt copyrighted material. Most hosts will take immediate action because once they know about it they will comply because if they don't they are now just as liable as the person doing the stealing.

If you are an artist and need further information on how to stop these idjits from stealing from you don't hesitate to contact me I will be more than glad to help you stop the thefts.

Why Kinetic?

Ok I get asked this alot by people all the time "Why is your screen name kineticartist?"
Merriam Websters Online Dictionary has this to say about the word Kinetic
Main Entry: ki·net·ic
Pronunciation: k&-'ne-tik also kI-
Function: adjective
Etymology: Greek kinEtikos, from kinEtos, from kinein
1 : of or relating to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith
2 a : ACTIVE, LIVELY b : DYNAMIC, ENERGIZING kinetic performer>
3 : of or relating to kinetic art
- ki·net·i·cal·ly /-ti-k(&-)lE/ adverb

and we all know what Artist means...
I put them together to make my screen name because my design philosphy is such that when I design web sites for people I try to give just enough "eye candy" to make the site visitor sit up and take notice to make the site stand out just enough from the crowd to make pople be interested in the content. I like my energy to be in the design exciting but not annoying intriguing but not so loaded with graphics it slows you down I like to see my design have movement and flow within them even if the image is static it should direct you to the message or content and besides its a cool screen name and makes people ask "Why Kinetic?