Just discovered this Open SOurce ASP.NET ecommerce system called NopCommerce. This is pretty revolutionary for me as in the past, I have been lead to believe that .NET systems are closed source, make use of COM objects and closed library files which resulted in almost every piece of .NET software being a paid application.
The system looks pretty well formed and feature packed and it includes all of the standard functionality you would expect from an ASP.NET Ecommerce system in particular:
As a pro web designer with over 10 years experience it pains me to say this but if you’re starting out with an online business the key is do do things as cheaply and more importantly basic as possible and once the site achieves a high search engine placement, then you can use your experience, not guess work and expendable profit to reinvest in the design, branding and features of your website.
Time after time we get briefs from new business start-ups who dont have any cash but have grandioso ideas about the features and functionality required of their online store. Most of the time this is all wishful thinking an not really based on customer objectives and in the end our quote often makes them lose faith in becoming an online business.
So do yourself a favour…
Get an SEO involved for advice
Buy a domain for a few pounds, get some hosting (beefier the better if you plan on using Magento… more on this below)
Set up the email properly and integrate with Outlook
Find some open source ecommerce software like Magento Commerce, Prestashop or others
Use the standard theme!!!!! just change the logo (make sure it matches the colourscheme)
Ask your SEO how you should format your product titles, categories and ask for pointers on how to write effective descriptions
Populate the site with information
Ask the SEO to promote it.
Total cost (est) £100 plus SEO fees.
Then working with the SEO begin writing about your products from a non commercial viewpoint
The SEO should begin building links and making changes to the site to make it more search friendly
Make money
From this point on the plan should be:
Listen to the customers, find out what features they require
Look at your business rpocesses and work out what systems could be created to simplify/automate time consuming business tasks
Reinvest in hiring a designer to change the theme and branding with guidance from the SEO
Make more money
Repeat
You can even read the FREE online book Getting Real by online application developers 37 Signals which gives you an idea as to how theyve built and managed successful websites without the masisve overhead and complicated initial featureset.
From the creators of jailbreak comes flash for the iPhone.
Steve Jobs said it couldn’t be done but some crayzee guy has managed to port flash to the iPhone 4/3gs/3g so you can now play farmville in all its glory.
Its very buggy but worth it if you’re tired of seeing those blue lego bricks everywhere.
Installing the Magento ecommerce platform on Heart Internet is a complete pig of a thing to do. However I’ve discovered some great tutorials and tips to make sure your installation goes smoothly:
Step 1. Upload all of the files to your web server (took me the best part of 1/2 a day).
Step 2. Create a mySQL database in the Heart control panel
Step 3. Contact Heart Internet support and ask them to allow ‘CREATE TEMP TABLE’ permissions on the database (turned off by default for security reasons)
Step 4. Turn on PHP5 in the Heart Internet control panel
Step 5. Set up file permissions thus…
777
/public_html/var/.htaccess,
/public_html/app/etc
/public_html/var,
/public_html/media (and all folders under media)
755
/public_html/index.php
/public_html/
Step 6. Edit /public_html/.htaccess and add:
#############################
## For heart internet
SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 5
php_flag short_open_tag on
Step 7. Create a file called php5.ini in /public_html/
Step 8. add the following line into the php5.ini
php_flag short_open_tag on
Step 9. Go to the site and begin installation. It usually errors on the first page but press F5 and it will continue.
Step 10. You will need to skip domain authentication and turn on SEO friendly URL rewriting in the wizard on the page where you enter the mySQL information
Step 11. Log in to the back end.
Step 12. Now download this file which will re-set the permissions for your back office which fixes a lot of issues people have
Step 13. the end (or beginning as the case may be).
I’ve been here for over a year now and thought I’d push my luck with the boss and ask if I could get some training to further my knowledge. Originally I thought about some SEO training with Aaron Wall, but at £600 a month and my (no doubt) considerable knowledge and experience in SEO, I was hesitant to spend so much when I know i’ll just end up sifting through the course notes looking for a golden grain of insight that in all reality isn’t there… instead, thanks to a suggestion by the boss I’m getting some training in PHP which could come in handy as I’m constantly frustrated with our existing systems and would love to jump in and fix the issues and make improvements (not that the nice people at Bronco aren’t helpful – its just I know these are quick things to fix if you know what you’re looking at).
I searched nationwide looking for in-office, remote study and local in-person training and finally settled with NTI in Leeds. To be honest the clincher was the 60% Government funded reduction in the original £600 fee for the three day course bringing it down to a much more Yorkshire man friendly £240.
The course uses the Open Source ZEND application suite and is called ZEND PHP I: Foundation.
I’m booked in for the 7th July over at their facilities in Leeds which could be the filler for the hole in my ‘universal’ online marketing and design skillset.
I’ve been playing with some code in an existing script and come across a big chunk of encryption starting with the line : eval(gzinflate(base64_decode, this appears to be a method of encrypting a line with the base64 method and then gzipping the file to further make it difficult to read.
To get around this and to discover the secrets hidden underneath I discovered a great tool that decodes the gzinflate base64 code into a format you can read.
Simply copy and paste the code as instructed to get going:
I love sagepay (formerly protx) as a payment gateway. For small businesses it provides a really simple way of providing secure payment and at a cost of just £20 per month with no set up fee for up to 1000 transactions per month, its a bargain too.
But did you know that on one sagepay account you can use up to five domains? This means that if you’re attempting to dominate the SERPS with micro -sites its going to cost you almost nothing to make these additional domains stand alone sales platforms!
I'm now SEO Manager at the award winning Leeds based SEO Services company, Blueclaw. If you would like to hire my team for your SEO project or would simply like an over the table discussion about how your businesses SEO can be improved please email mark@blueclaw.co.uk with your questions, expectations and project details.
