April 18 Web Reflections galin
I read an article last week about Internet privacy that got me thinking. I started thinking and realized I knew minimal about law. So I forwarded it to my friend, Henry Elster, at The Elster Law Office. He read it and wrote this insightful blog post about privacy and the Internet.
After reading his post, I realized it confirmed a lot of the issues I see with people and how they use the Internet. A simple interpretation of Henry’s post says this: http://shinyfastandloud.com/?p=627 Nothing is private on the Internet and the government does not have the power to change this. This lack of privacy is because the government can’t tell private corporations what to do. Google can track your emails to target you with advertisment. Facebook can do the same. They can do whatever they want as long as you check that box when signing up for an account (that no one reads).
We could get into an economic discussion about how consumer demand is a way to attack this lack of privacy. If consumers would simply stop using sites that invade their privacy and demand more privacy, it could cause sites to be forced to offer this. Will this ever happen? Doubtful. People want their facebook pages. People want to search Google. People may complain about privacy, but clearly (from traffic numbers) what they complain about is not neccessarily what they want.
So what do we do? We can’t just stop using Facebook and Google. I think the key is realizing this lack of privacy. Realize the Internet is a very public place. Treat it like work or church or any social place where you restrict how much you let people know about yourself. Don’t brag about how drunk you got the night before to your friends on Facebook. Don’t get in fickle arguments that could look like a political faux pa. Be smart.
Realize you are being watched on the Internet. Keep your thoughts that could incriminate you at home.
April 15 Customer Web Usage Tips galin
Having a website for your business is important. In order to run a smart business, it is a necessity just like using tools to handle payroll services. But what if you sell a good? Is it necessary for you to have a full store set up on your site so you can sell your good directly from your site?
There are tons of ways to sell your product through sites on the Internet. Examples of these would be Etsy or Ebay. They are great for selling your product, and I highly suggest using these sites. The logic behind using the Internet to sell your good is simple: order provigil europe Why not expand to as many markets as possible?
But what about on your site? Is it necessary to have a personal store?
In addition to using the Ebay’s and Etsy’s of the world, you should give people the ability to purchase your product for your site in a store. First, Ebay and Etsy charge a fee. Whatever you would sell on your personal site goes straight to your pocket as opposed to paying the Ebay or Etsy fee. More revenue is good for business and in the long run an on-site store should be a profit gainer.
The increased revenue is nice, but there is an even better reason. Giving your customers a more professional perception of your business. If you have a business card, it would be nice to display a link to your online store. If this was just an Etsy profile page, this may not look professional to interested buyers. Having it all on your site devoted to your product line makes it seem way more legitimate.
An added benefit is that you can completely control the way the public sees your business through your site. Through Ebay or Etsy, they would just see you and a whole bunch of competitors with just prices and products. Exposing your clients to competitors this easily is pretty ill-advised in any business.
When advising a business on their Ecommerce solution, I always suggest exposing yourself to every avenue. Put your products up on Ebay or Etsy or both, but also have it on your site. The reason being, Ebay or Etsy may send you customers you wouldn’t of received otherwise. At the same time, adding a store to your site ensures you that you can direct interested customers to a site that is professional and devoted to you; not you and a bunch of competitors.
We offer training sessions on how to use sites like Ebay or Etsy in addition to our on-site Ecommerce product. Contact us to discuss web development for your business today!
April 14 Customer Web Usage Tips galin
I’ve had potential customers ask me about making QR codes. They have been getting a lot of buzz lately, even in the local newspaper. Here is an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch about them.
The first time I was asked about QR codes, I honestly didn’t really know what they were. Then when I was shown one, I immediately replied “yeah, I can make that”. This is because I noticed all QR codes do is send you to a url link. From a web developers viewpoint, all that is necessary is creating the webpage that you wish your QR code to take people to. That and going to one of the thousands of QR code generating sites out there.
QR codes have a great use for advertising and specifically for sending people to video tutorials for a specific product. Say your business creates shelves but delivers it in parts to customers to put together on their own. QR codes could be used to send customers to a video tutorial on how to make the shelf they just purchased. Pretty neat in my opinion!
April 13 Development Techniques galin
I code in three different web languages that all work together to accomplish about any task you need for your website. Well three is a stretch because only two involve traditional (difficult) programming. The two languages being PHP and Javascript.
PHP stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor”. It is a server-side scripting language. In simple terms, this means you use php to grab and display specific information from your server. This is great for sites that need to provide a lot of information.
For example, lets say you wanted to make a website that allowed users to view their order status depending on the login. This would be accomplished with PHP. After logging in, depending on what user it is, proper PHP coding would send a query to the database that would then output the specific users information based on what information is in the database.
Javascript is called an “object-oriented scripting language”. This language is used for on page actions (as opposed to page load actions which PHP accomplishes). This is great for making a specific page (after initial load) look dynamic.
An example of Javascript code would be when you hover over the menu at the top. The effect of a drop menu is done through Javascript.
So, Javascript and PHP go hand in hand. For successful web development it is important to feel comfortable with a server side language and an object oriented language so you can cover every angle you are presented with. In my opinion, these are the best two to use since there is a lot of information on Javascript and PHP on the web.
April 11 Customer Website Tips galin
When making a website, you should always keep in mind that you should put some way to have your users contact you from the site. One way to accomplish this is through just having a contact page with email addresses and phone numbers.
A contact page is nice but just putting email addresses up isn’t that practical for users. People use mail clients on web browsers like gmail, yahoo mail, etc. When you just put links up to email addresses and a user clicks it, the click opens the default mail program on your computers operating system. For a lot of people, they do not use these. These users would have to log into their email in their web browser, then copy and paste the email address to send it. Annoying and time consuming for the user, right?
Luckily there is a simple solution to make users not say expletives when using your website: Contact Forms. Contact Forms are ways for users to send emails to you directly from a website. An example of one is the one located at the bottom of every page on this site. These are easy to set up, and we always suggest them to customers. They are great for gathering information about your users and for making the experience better for your website users.
