Now, don’t even get me started on why Microsoft would release a version of Word that is not backwards compatible…

But they did, and here’s a tool they are offering to help solve the issue:

Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac

Note this requires OS X 10.4

I’ve also tried out that docx-converter.wdgt, the one that adds a widget to your dashboard, but it doesn’t always work. The one above worked just fine for me.

Additionally, I noticed that I could upgrade my version of Word to 11.35 that would enable me to open these docx from Word - but when I tried to use the Microsoft updater, it wouldn’t work for some reason. So I’ll just stick with the XML File Format Converter to convert Word docx.

Enjoy!

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The short answer: I don’t know. But here’s what I have learned: The more articles you write, the higher the likelihood that one of them will be a hit. Of all the articles I have written, the two most popular are: City Search Click Fraud and Kavam.

Did I know they would be hits before when I wrote them? Nope. Was I completely surprised when my Kavam article got over 100 hits in one day and my Citysearch article started attracting more and more coments? Yup. What’s the secret: Keep writing!

I’ve read lots of articles from other bloggers about what goes into writing a great blog article. They say write compelling, interesting, useful content. They say try to help people solve problems. They say use a snappy, eye-catching title. I always try to do these things, yet I have no way of predicting which articles will do well, and which will remain unread, and eventually get covered with cyberdust.

But one thing that the bloggers say, is to keep writing. And I’ve followed this advice. While I always try to write articles that are relevant to small business website owners, my topics vary from things that annoy me to video tutorials to all kinds of web-related advice. But I always try to write about things that small business website owner might find helpful and interesting.

A good example of a blog article whose popularity and subsequent traffic took me completely by surprise, is my Kavam article. You’ve never heard of Kavam? Neither had I, until one day, after watching my website traffic stats, I noticed that I was getting a lot of traffic from this one domain called “Kavam.net”. Over and over, it appeared as if someone from this domain was coming to one page of my site and leaving. Day and night, they came and left.

Since this pattern looked odd, I did some investigating. I discovered it wasn’t a human, but rather a badly behaving search robot called Charlotte that had been hitting my site. I decided to write a short blog article about what I had discovered.

To my surprise, the traffic started pouring in, other people started linking to my article - I was stunned. Apparently many other people were searching for the same solution, how to stop this web bot from crawling their websites. I just happened to be one of the first to post a blog article about it. Since my blog is optimized for search engines, new blog articles get crawled very quickly, usually in under an hour. So my article was available in the Google index quickly and therefore coming up in search results for “Kavam” or other related keywords that I had included in my article.

So the moral of the story is, to keep writing, about all kinds of things related to your blog’s topic, because you never know which one is going to end up being a big hit.

I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

Ok, so I’m biased because I’m an engineer. Not just someone who calls themselves an engineer, but a real one with an engineering degree. I’ve created concepts, designs, prototypes, tests, and finally production quality products. Engineers might not be the most aesthetically driven sort of folks, but they sure do care about how things work. And websites are not just static pictures that you look at like a painting. They are dynamic. They are part of a living, breathing organic network called the Internet.

Now I agree that websites should be pleasing to look at, after all it’s a visual medium for the most part. They should also be easy for people to use. But the purpose of the internet is the sharing of information.

I typically design websites for small business owners. Not artists, musicians, entertainers or media companies. Small business owners are not in the entertainment industry. Their websites have one main purpose: to get more paying customers. They do this by communicating information about their products and services in a compelling and clear manner.

Artists create art to convey messages, stir emotions and inspire us. They are experts at creating beautiful things. But, they are not driven to create things that DO something. Websites must do many tasks. They need to capture your attention, lead you to perform certain behaviors (like checkout out a shopping cart or filling out a contact form). They must run and get content from a database and serve it to your visitors at lightening fast speeds. They must process credit cards securely. They allow you to create virtual communities by utilizing blogs or forums. They are very, very busy, and anything but static.

And they must be designed in such a way that other people can find them. Do you want your website to be a piece of art that hangs in a museum that no one knows the address of? Or do you want your website to be available to the entire world? Focusing exclusively on what your website looks like, and constructing it entirely of images or Flash, makes your website appear to search engines like a blank page.

Remember what “HTML” stands for? Hyper TEXT Markup Language. TEXT, TEXT, TEXT…it’s about written words. This is how search engines “see” the content on your website. They can’t “see” images, they can’t “see” Flash movies…but boy can they read text!

See how many times this is mentioned on the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Note they said text links, not images.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

Again…Google is telling you to use text, not images.

If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

And again…the more plain, regular, standard text, the better.

Still not convinced? Read this article from Google on “Working with Flash, images and other non-text files“. Here’s the very first few sentences (the bold is added by me):

In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.

Why then, given this clearly stated rule, do some web designers still create websites who have literally no content in text? Why do they make websites that are 100% flash, like the one my friend asked me to review?

Perhaps they simply don’t understand how the internet works and have never cared to learn. They are artists at heart and like to make eye candy. Or maybe they know and simply don’t care about whether or not their website customers EVER get any traffic.

Either way, as I’m sure you can tell by now, this annoys me to no end. How someone can call themselves a web designer and take people’s money and then give a 100% flash website that is completely invisible to search engines, not to mention people with visual impairments who rely on text readers, is simply beyond me.

So before you hire your website designer, figure out whether they’re more like an artist, or like an engineer. Do they focus on appearance to the exclusion of functionality? Are they knowledgeable about even the most basic search engine principles? Ask them, and look at the sites in their portfolio. Is there more to it that just shallow surface flashiness? Do their websites WORK for their clients?

Use this handy tool to check out their portfolio - it will show you how a website looks to a Search Engine

1. Enter the exact website address of the page you want to view. (eg. www.iwebtool.com)
2. Enter keywords you want to search for.
3. Click the “Show Me Search Engine Spider View” button.
The results will be displayed the the box below.

Powered by iWEBTOOL

Look at what’s in the window above. (If it’s not working, you may have to come back later and try it, the iwebtool.com site that provides this tool is very busy!) What you see is exactly how the page looks to search engine spiders as they crawl over your website. If your website has no or little visible text in this box, then you need to add content that is text…simple as that.

ADDENDUM: To Folks With Flash Sites Who Are Paying For Clicks

For some reason, I’ve been recently contacted by several folks who have 100% Flash websites who are looking for Google AdWords (Pay-Per-Click) consulting. I sent them this article in the hopes that they will understand that while I’m more than happy to help them with AdWords, I also feel that ethically I should tell them about how poorly their websites are performing in Search Engines.

There’s absolutely no reason that people should have to pay for all of their website traffic - search engines like Google are continually trying to find websites that are relevant to what people are searching for. Why have a website that’s designed to be invisible to Google and then turn around and pay Google for traffic? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

So if you have a website that’s Flash, and you’re thinking about Google AdWords or another Pay-Per-Click service, please take a moment to learn/read about Search Engine Optimization - I think it will be well worth your time and possibly enable you to ween yourself off of Pay-Per-Click and attract some free traffic that your competition, who doesn’t have a Flash website, has been getting.

Like blogs, forums are a way for people to attempt to get backlinks to their own websites. This is typically done by leaving comments that contain links to their website URL’s. If you’re honestly helping others and truthfully representing yourself, there is nothing wrong with having a link to your website, say, in your signature, or possibly to a relevant article you’ve written. But when you simply fake who you are, put in a useless comment in the hope to get a backlink to your website, you are considered a spammer.

This morning, my partner’s forum received a posting that said this:

Hi my name is collins and I look forward to learning about dogs from all of you. My older dog attacks my young puppy. Is there a way to train an old dog to like the new puppy?

Sounds like someone asking for help doesn’t it?

Except that the person added a link to a website in the signature. Where did the link go?

Take a guess.

A dog trainer! On the dog trainer’s home page, it had this statement. Brace yourself, it’s not modest:

Although she does not claim the ability to “read your dog’s mind”, her knowledge of canine behavior is so vast and her experience is so extensive, that when you describe your pet’s problem, she can not only tell you how to solve the problem, but why the problem exists.

Does the trainer have no idea how to solve dog issues like the one she posted, and she’s misrepresenting herself on her website? Or is she just looking for ways to get backlinks to her website by pretending to be a person looking for help. My guess is that it’s the latter, which is why I wrote this post.

If you want to get backlinks by posting in people’s forums, don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. If you are knowledgeable about the topic and can offer good advice to others, then simply do that. If you are indeed helpful, the forum owner will probably let you post your link, because you aren’t a spammer.

In this case, the forum owner looked at the posting and the link and quickly determined that it was another dog trainer trying to get backlinks to her website by pretending to be someone looking for help.

Now, what the other dog trainer SHOULD have done was to RESPOND to another person’s post who is looking for help. In this way, the other dog trainer was ADDING VALUE to the forum, not just simply trying to exploit it.

So a word to the wise: there’s nothing wrong with looking for forums where discussions are going on that are relevant to your business. Feel free to post and join the discussion. But don’t be a spammer and try to get undeserved backlinks. Be honest, be yourself…contribute!

Since part of my profession is installalling, customizing and configuring online stores for my small business clients, I did some research into what causes shopping cart abandonment and what can be done to prevent it from reoccurring - even what you should do when it happens. Wherever possible, I tracked down the original research article, so you can read the data for yourself.

Global Millennia Marketing did a survey in 2002 that is widely cited in shopping cart abandonment articles. In their survey they asked their clients why they abandoned shopping carts. They state that:

Market researchers say the rate at which Web consumers abandon their online shopping carts before making purchases online runs between 25 percent (Andersen Consulting) on the low end and 78 percent (Bizrate.com) on the high end.

Here’s what they reported were the reason for shopping cart abandonment:

1. Cost of Shipping too high and not shown until checkout (69%)
2. Changed mind and discarded cart contents (61%)
3. Comparison shopping or browsing (57%)
4. Total cost of items is too high (49%)
5. Saving items for later purchase (47%)
6. Checkout process is too long (44%)
7. Out of stock products at checkout time (39%)
8. Checkout requires too much personal information (35%)
9. Poor site navigation and long download times (31%)
10. Lack of sufficient product or contact information (31%)
11. Checkout process is confusing (27%)
12. Site requires registration before purchase (23%)
13. Site unclear on delivery times (17%)
14. No order tracking options (16%)
15. No gift certificates (11%)

Remember, this data is from 2002, but it’s probably still fairly relevant.

The Software Usability Research Laboratory of the Department of Psychology Wichita State University published a study in 2007 entitled “Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited: A Survey of 500 Top E-Commerce Websites“. They studied the top 500 internet retailers (which accounted for 61% of internet sales). Here’s a summary of what they found:

1. Calling a shopping cart anything but a “shopping cart”: They found that 62% of the stores used “shopping cart” as term used to denote, well, the online store’s shopping cart. Don’t call yours anything else - it will only confuse shoppers. And confusion leads to shopping cart abandonment.

2. Requiring users to click a “BUY” button to add an item to the shopping cart: Since “buy” indicates a big commitment and some folks are shopping, they recommend using “Add To Cart” or something less commital and scary. They like “Add To Wish List” as well.

3. Giving little to no visual feedback that an item has been added to the cart: They found 65% of the online stores take people right into the shopping cart where they can see their newly added item.

4. Forcing the user to view the shopping cart every time an item is placed there: While they liked stores that gave you feedback as to what’s in the cart, they really liked stores that continuously showed you what was inside the cart, without having to directly view the cart. The liked it best when the store had a constant display of what was in your cart at all times.

5. Asking the user to buy other related items before adding an item to the cart: They didn’t like it when stores asked them whether they wanted to purchase a recommended additional item before they got to add their original item to the cart. Suggest other products AFTER the customer’s product is in the cart.

6. Requiring a user to REGISTER before adding an item to the cart: My personal most hated part of an online store - don’t force me to register if I don’t want to.

7. Requiring a user to change the quantity to zero to remove an item from the cart: They prefer it if a cart simply has a “remove” or “delete” button next to the items. “Remove” is the more commonly used term (68%).

8. Including written instructions to update the items in the cart: People ignore instructions, so if you have to have written instructions in order for folks to understand how to update the cart, it’s probably not intuitive enough in the first place.

9. Requiring a user to scroll to find an Update cart button: If people have many items in their cart, don’t make them scroll down to be able to get to your “update” button - they might miss it. Note that 68% of shopping cart had it at the very bottom.

10. Requiring a user to enter shipping, billing, and all personal information before knowing the final costs including shipping and tax: They believe today’s online shoppers are looking for free shipping and that shipping costs are still one of the major reasons customers-to-be abandon their shopping carts. A large percentage of online stores still require this (44%).

In addition to the top ten above, they also noted two other areas worthy of mention:

11. Security, security, security: People are concerned about theft, both of their credit card information and their identities. Make sure the online store is secure (uses an SSL certificate and properly uses “https”). Display your security certificates/logos prominently. Make sure your privacy policy is easy to find. Don’t use CAPTCHA to detect humans (errors may scare away customers).

12. Out of Stock Items: Tell folks you don’t have stock BEFORE they reach the checkout stage.

Marketing Sherpa did a study of shopping cart abandonment in 2006 and wrote an article entitled “1,120 Online Shoppers Say Why They Abandon Ecommerce Sites“. Here are their findings:

We asked shoppers: “Which factors keep you from doing more online shopping?”

Site/cart too complicated: 14%
Return/exchange policy: 41%
Fraud/Identity theft: 49% (heavy online shoppers: 21%)
Sharing personal info: 53% (heavy online shoppers: 39%)

…We have plenty of anecdotal evidence from multiple Case Studies that adding various security icons to your site, even if you’re a very famous brand name, makes a significant difference in conversion rates.

So be sure to think about the trust factor of your online store - keep privacy policies very visible and make sure your store appears and is secure - show off those security icons/logos! These themes are also stressed in this Marketing Sherpa article “Absolutely Pitiful Ecommerce Shopping Cart Abandonment Stats — 4 Ways to Improve Yours. They found typical shopping cart abandonment rates of 60%.

So you’ve optimized your online store, followed all the wonderful advice, and someone still abandons your cart - what should you do?

Run after them and ask them why they left!

Seriously. I’m totally serious.

Here’s a wonderful article from Marketing Experiments Journal entitled “Shopping Cart Recovery Tested“. They created an automated email process that went after folks who had abandoned their carts - remember, customers typically enter their email addresses as part of the check out process - so they emailed them. This article is really worth reading because at the end, they list the best practices for recovering abandoned shopping carts including: collecting email addresses, focusing on what went wrong with your store’s service, respond immediately to abandoned carts, automate it if you can and test different messages, considering offering an incentive to return, and adding a link to take them right back to their cart.

One of my clients faithfully does this, and very quickly learned there was an issue with her payment provider settings, which she fixed. Once that was fixed, the abandonments dropped to a trickle, and she is pretty much able to recover a high percented of them as well by simply sending one email to the customer. (Some shopping cart programs even come with shopping cart abandonment prevention features - ask your web designer about it.)
Summary:

If you’ve made it this far, you’re learned a whole lot about shopping cart abandonment, what causes it, and what you can do to prevent it, and what you can do when it happens to you. I’ve tried to pull together the most current and relevant sources of info to help folks who are running online stores.

I accidentally deleted my entire blog, including the database on one awful day, when I was rushing too much and not thinking. Literally, all of my blog files and my blog’s database was gone. In a total panic, I submitted several DreamHost support tickets (like people who push the elevator button multiple times because they believe the elevator will hurry). And without even making fun of me or chastising me for doing something so stupid, DreamHost simply restored the blog and it’s database. Poof! It was back, all safe and sound. Disaster averted.

So when my client (who doesn’t have his website hosted with DreamHost) asked me if his website files were backed up, I was pretty confident that they were being backed up. And if he did something stupid like I did, he could simply submit a support ticket and everything would come back. But because his website was hosted with Aplus.net, I told him he should ask them.

The answer that came back totally surprised me. I wish I had saved it, but it was definitely not heartwarming or encouraging. I was stunned and he was angry. So I made a mental note just to do a quick experiment of my own, and write in to several hosting companies asking them this question: “Do you back up my website files?”

I sent inquires to DreamHost.com, Aplus.net, and NetworkSolutions.com. Network Solutions refused to answer my question via email - why, I have no idea. Here are the responses from Aplus.net and DreamHost:

From Aplus.net:

Dear Jill Olkoski,

Note that personal backups are provided only by exception and once.
It is customers' responsibility to do backup of their files.
There is no guarantee that a custom backup request would be
resolved successfully. Please let us know how you would
like to proceed.

And from DreamHost.com:

Hello Jill,
I would be glad to answer your questions about our service.
Yes we keep automated backups of all of our customer's data
(including databases,emails and site files!), you can read
more about this server (and how easy it is to restore
the data) here: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Backups

Of course it may be good to note that these backups are
provided as an extra service and are not guaranteed, so
we consider it mandatory that our customers keep their
own off-site backups, just in case of moose herd gets
into the data center (or other un-expected event).

If you have any other questions please feel free to ask me.

Perhaps you detect a difference in the level of customer service? In attitude? In sense of humor? So before you choose a hosting company, ask them if they back up your files. See if they answer, see what they say and how they say it. Sometimes a very simple question can reveal a lot about a company.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade my web design WordPress blog to 2.5 - I figured I’d better do this before one of my clients asks me to upgrade their blog Go here to read about the new features it’s got. If you’re a client of mine and you want to see what the new admin area looks like before you upgrade, you can take a look at some of the videos in the link above, or take a look inside my demo blog.

Besides wanting to stay ahead of my clients, here are some of the features of the new WordPress 2.5 that caught my eye:

• Search now searches posts AND pages (before it only searched pages and therefore I had to install a plugin to search posts)
• Easy to upgrade plugins: WordPress 2.5 has this feature that tells you if a plugin is outdated (this part is not new) but then it will automatically install it for you - wow, very, very cool.
• New “Add Media” feature: There’s a neat looking “Add media” row of icons for adding images, video, and audio - I used it to add the WordPress logo above, wow, it’s sweet, much, much improved.
• The Permalink is right there in front of you: Rather being called “slug”, which I never understood, now the “permalink” is right there under your title and easy to remember to edit.
• The fighting between the visual editor and the html editor is allegedly over. If you’ve ever tried to add your own HTML and had it mysteriously and frustratingly disappear, WordPress 2.5 is for you. I can now go back to using the Visual editor
• It sports a new gallery feature that I haven’t tried out yet, but is supposed to be fabulous.

So far, so good, and I’m impressed. I only had one of my plugins (Popularity Contest) fail to activate and I found a fix here - all my other plugins upgraded just fine.  I’ll keep adding to the list as I find new bells and whistles.

The only problem is that I’ll have to update many of my blog tutorial videos, but it’s a small price to pay for blogging progress

Go WordPress 2.5 Go!

(Note: The time it takes to upgrade your blog to 2.5 depends on your initial installation. Some hosting companies like DreamHost, have nice one-click installation and one-click upgrade features that make it fast.)

You’re thinking of launching an online store to sell your products or services. You’re wondering if you’ve got what it takes to be successful in this rapidly changing online arena. You’re wondering how much time it will take and what it will cost. You’re wondering if you’re smart enough. This article hopes to help you answer some of these questions before you invest in an online store.

Developing and managing an online store is not a simple task, and one that small business owners should consider thoughtfully. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself:

1. How Good Am I At Working With Computers and Navigating the Internet?
Online stores do not run themselves. They can save you and your staff a lot of time, but someone still needs to manage it. The more computer savvy you are, the easier it will be for you to understand and manage your online store. If the internet bewilders you, and you often find yourself unable to navigate around to where you want to go, or find yourself yelling at your computer often because you don’t understand what it’s doing, running an online store might be out of your reach.

2. How Often Do I Shop Online?
You should be very familiar with online ecommerce and shop frequently online. If you never or very rarely shop online because you are afraid to put your credit card at risk, or you are unwilling to do online banking for similar reasons, then running an online store is not for you. Why should your customers trust you if you don’t trust your own bank’s website? You should also be familiar with “good” and “bad” online shopping experiences - so you are able to put yourself in the shoes of your customers.

3. How Much Time Do I Have To Dedicate To My Online Store?
Developing an online store requires the active participation of store owners. They must have adequate time to spend learning how their store works, including how to add categories, products, product options, set appropriate shipping fees, taxes, discounts, and many other store-related features.

They must also have enough time to manage the store once it’s finished - they must respond quickly to new orders, ship items in a timely manner, uphold good return policies, just to name a few.

I had a prospective client phone me one day, looking to set up an online store for his girlfriend who was a flight attendant. When I asked why she wasn’t calling herself, he said it was because she was too busy and was often out of town. I asked him how she was going to manage running an online store if she was often out of town. Silence. I declined to accept him and his girlfriend as clients.

4. If Your Small Business Is Failing, An Online Store Probably Won’t Save You.
If you have a small business that is not currently doing well, launching an online store might not be able to save it. If your products are overpriced, if you aren’t good at managing your money, if your product quality is poor - these are all things that an online store can’t fix. It is not easy to get people to a) find your store and b) convert them to paying customers. If you’re thinking that launching an online store will save your small business - think again, there are no magic bullets here.

5. Can You Afford To Develop An Online Store?
Online stores are often large complex applications. Good online stores are not free. It also costs money to pay someone (like me) to install and configure an online store. Then there are fees for credit card processing and fees for SSL certificates, etc.

Unless you already have a pre-established website with lots of traffic, you will need to figure out how to get traffic to your store. You may have to invest in Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click advertising. You may have to purchase advertisements in magazines and other media formats.

If you aren’t able to spend at least $1000, then you might be better of trying out eBay as a medium to sell your products.

6. Can You Take or Obtain Professional Grade Images Of Your Products?
I added this to my list because this really trips up some folks. You will need images of what you’re trying to sell. High quality professional looking images. You will need to be able to manipulate these images yourself - adjusting quality, resizing, etc. If you can’t do this, you should learn how to do it before attempting to launch an online store.

Nervous?
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to talk you out of developing an online store. I really enjoy helping my clients find ecommerce solutions for their small businesses. But I want folks to be satisfied with their online store experience - and am writing this article in the hopes that it will help some of you get a better understanding of what it takes to develop and manage a successful online store.

Want a Demo?
Watch a video tutorial of my own online demo store, from the viewpoint of the customer and the viewpoint of the store owner.

Enjoy!

While click fraud is certainly a pay-per-click industry issue, and not specific to Yahoo, it will be interesting to see how this lawsuit progresses.

You can read more about Yahoo being sued for click fraud in this Information Week Article entitled “Yahoo Hit With $1 Million Click Fraud Lawsuit“.

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Here are step by step instructions for setting up PayPal Website Payments Pro with your ECT (ECommerce Templates) online store. “Pro” allows you to accept credit cards directly in your online store without sending your customers through PayPal - it communicates with PayPal in the background.

Please follow these steps. You will need to have two browser windows open at the same time: one to view the admin area of your ECT store, and another to view your PayPal account.

1. Log into your admin area and select “Payment Providers”

2. Select to modify the PayPal Direct settings:

3. You’ll now see a window that looks like the image below.

Fill in how you want this payment method to appear to your customers via the field labeled “Show As”.

Put a checkmark next to “Enabled”.

4. Now, we need to get the rest of the information from your PayPal account. Leave the ECT admin window open and open a new window in your browser and log into your PayPal account.

5. After you’ve logged into your PayPal account, click on “Profile”.

6. Under the left-hand column titled “Account Information”, click on “API Access”.

7. On the right-hand side, click on “Request API Credentials”.

8. On the left-hand side, click on “Request API Signature”. (Do not select “Certificate”).

9. You will now see your API credentials. One at a time copy and paste the following into the corresponding fields in the ECT Admin area for PayPal Direct:

API Username (paste this into field labeled “API Account Name”)
API Password (paste this into field labeled “API Password”)
Signature (paste this into the field labeled “Path to certificate”)

10. In the ECT Admin window, set the API Method to “API Signature”.

11. In the ECT Admin window, set the Transaction Type to “Authorize Capture”.

12. In the ECT Admin window, leave Login Level as “No Restriction”.

13. In the ECT Admin window, click “Submit” and you are now ok to log out of your PayPal account.

14. You’re all set up. You should now do a test purchase to make sure everything’s working right.

Windows XP

• Image Resizer - Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP (direct link to download)

Mac

• A list of image resizing tools for Mac
• EasyCrop for Mac OS X

If you’ve got a page in WebYep that’s got a large amount of content, you may want to help your visitors get quickly to the section they’re interested in. In order to do this, you need to add an “anchor” to the section you want them directed to, and you need to add a “link” to the anchor at the top of the page. This tutorial assumes you have WebYep installed and have a “Rich Text” element already configured on your page.

There are really four steps to this process:
1. Create the upper content that will link to the lower content
2. Create the lower content that you want the upper content to link to.
3. Create the “anchor” just before the lower content.
4. Create the “link” in the upper content.

The following video will make this more clear:

If you want to add on-page anchors, but the upper link and the lower anchor are spread across two elements, then the name of the lower anchor won’t automatically appear in the pull down menu. In this case, you should refer to the image below:

In the video, since the anchor link and the upper link were part of the same WebYep element, the name of the anchor link would appear under the pull down menu for “Anchors”. If the anchor link is NOT within the same element, then you need to manually add it. You do this by typing “#” followed by the name of the anchor in the field marked “Link URL”. In the above example, the anchor link was called “groundcover”, and so in order to have link go to this location, I typed “#groundcover” in the “Link URL” field.

WebYep is a great content management tool, but sometimes clients get unexpected results when they copy and paste content from other applications, like Word. (Other applications like WordPress Blogs behave the same way). If you’re composing in the WebYep window, you most likely won’t have any issues, but if you try to copy and paste content, like text, from other word processing applications, or even from your internet browser window, you might run into issues. This article assumes a bit of knowledge of HTML and it’s use of tags.

The “Rich Text” Window in Web Yep
Web Yep has two views for entering content. The view that opens first, is the view that won’t show you any HTML. At the very top of the window, it might say “Rich Text”.

The “HTML Source Editor” Window in WebYep
Now, another way to see your content, is to show the HTML. This is done by clicking on the HTML blue button that’s at the end of the second row of icons. This will open up a second window, where you can see the HTML code. At the top of this window it will say “HTML Source Editor”.

The “View Source” Window in your browser
Yet another way to see your content, is to use your browser’s “View Page Source” or “View Source”. This will open a window to show you the HTML code as your browser sees it.

Troubleshooting Unexpected Results
If you copy and paste into the first “Rich Text” window, all may look fine, but there may actually be hidden HTML tags that will mess up your page. It’s always best to either enter content directly (by typing) or from pasting from a Plain Text Editor. Word is NOT a Plain Text Editor. Plain Text Editors are “WordPad” or “TextEdit” or “NotePad”.

If you paste into the “Rich Text” window and get unexpected results on yoru page, you may have pasted HTML tags accidentally. Look in the “HTML Source Editor” window for tags.

is one commonly found tag that is pasted by Word that will interfere with the style of text defined by your web designer.

If you see differences between your browser’s “View Source” and Web Yep’s “HTML Source Editor”, this means that there are some characters in the WebYep window that are not really as they appear - the true measure of the source code is via the browser window. If this happens, you should go into the WebYep HTML Source Editor and manually remove and reenter them.

Take Home Message:
Don’t paste from Word or any other non Plain Text Editor tool, and this includes copy and pasting from the Internet. If you are going to paste, make sure it’s from a Plain Text Editor like “WordPad”, “NotePad” or “TextEdit”. You will save yourself lots and lots of head scratching and frustration. If you must, must paste from Word, try out the little icon with the clipboard and the “T” on it, and see if this will strip away the hidden formatting.

I can’t tell you how happy I was the day that DreamHost, my favorite website hosting company, started selling SSL certificates. Especially since these SSL certificates were from Geotrust, a very reputable secure certificate provider. Here’s a quick tutorial that walks you through the process on how to purchase and configure the DreamHost / Geotrust SSL certificate. The tutorial assumes you already have your website hosted with DreamHost.

Follow these steps to purchase and configure your DreamHost / Geotrust SSL certificate:

1. Log into your DreamHost control panel.

2. Click on “Domains” on the left hand side.

3. Click on “Manage Domains” underneath “Domains” on the left hand side.

4. Under the column labeled “Secure Hosting”, click “Edit” for the domain you wish to purchase the SSL certificate for.

5. You’ll now be looking at a form with a bunch of different choices. Let’s go through them one by one:

• Click the box that says “Mirror Non-Secure Settings”. This will make a bunch of the choices disappear.
• Unique IP. Select how you’d like to be billed for this. All SSL certificates require your website to have an unique IP address.
• Fill out the Generate a New Certificate section with information relevant to your company.
• If I’m your web designer, you can put my name, email and phone number in the Certificate Admin section - this will help speed things up because I’ll get the email notifications.
• Billing Option: Select how you’d like to pay (don’t select “buy it elsewhere”).
• Skip over the Already Have A Secure Certificate section.
• Click the button at the bottom: “Set Up HTTPS Now!”.

6. Fill out the form to complete the purchase of your SSL. You may need to reenter your credit card information.

7. You should next receive an email from Geotrust with your order id, thanking you for your SSL certificate purchase, and telling you that another email will be sent out with installation instructions. This email has a link to Geotrust SSL support as well as their phone number (1-866-436-8787).

8. You should get another email from Geotrust, with a link to follow to review and approve your SSL certificate.

9. After you’ve reviewed and approved your SSL certificate from the above step, you’ll get a final email from Geotrust. This final email will contain a section labeled “Your Web Server Certificate:” and be followed by a bunch of code that starts with “—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–” and ends with “—–END CERTIFICATE—–”. You will need to copy and paste this code back into DreamHost to complete this process.

10. Log back into your DreamHost control, “Domains”, “Manage Domains”, “Secure Hosting”, “Edit”.

11. Scroll down to the section “Already have a secure certificate?”. See the box with the label: “Certificate: You get this from a certificate authority. It’s passed to site visitors to verify your identity.” In this box, you need to paste all the code from the email you received from Geotrust (that starts with “—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–” and ends with “—–END CERTIFICATE—–”. )

12. Click “Set up HTTPS now!” at the bottom of the page.

13. This should complete the Geotrust SSL certificate installation process on your DreamHost website. To make sure all’s working as it should, go to your website, but use the secure URL: “https://www.yourwebsite.com”, note you’re using “https” and not “http”. If you see the little padlock icon and don’t get any error messages, you can assume your SSL certificate is correctly installed. (If you have an ECT online store, I’ll need to do just a bit of configuration, so send me an email when this is done. Once the ECT store is set up with your SSL info, the store will automatically switch to the “https” secure domain when the customer gets to the first screen where they enter personal information.)

14. Since you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of getting a Geotrust SSL for your DreamHost website, it’s highly recommended that you advertise this to your website visitors - and you do this by adding the Geotrust seal at the bottom of all of your web pages. In the last email you received from Geotrust, there was a link to follow to install the seal - send this link to me (or your website designer) so it can be added to your website.

It’s advisable to have your product categories set up BEFORE you start uploading products, since you’ll need to add them to categories that already exist.

If you’d like a “live” tour, please contact me and I’ll be happy to schedule a time to go through this in detail with you. Selecting an online store that suits your small business is critical to your store’s success, and getting first hand experience with the store’s administrative area is vital.

This is a short video tour of the ECT online store from the customer’s perspective. It covers the basic hierarchy of the store, how the stores’s categories and products are organized, and takes you through the entire checkout process.

If you only need to sell a few items from your website or collect different sums of money (like I do on my payment page) you could use a PayPal Buy Now Button to accomplish this. You’ll need to have already set up a PayPal Business/Merchant Account before watching this tutorial video.

After fully setting up your PayPal Business/Merchant Account, you’ll be able to log into your account and create the code that makes PayPal Buy Now Buttons all by yourself, using PayPal’s Buy Now Button creator.

Prepare: Item Names and Prices
Before you do this, you should have an idea of what the items are called, and how much you want to charge for them. This tutorial video doesn’t cover setting up shipping or taxes, which can be done via PayPal also. If you need to collect shipping and/or taxes, you’ll need to set these up separately in advance of creating the Buy Now Button in the appropriate Merchant Services section.

To Encrypt or Not To Encrypt
You’ll also need to know whether or not you want these buttons to be “encrypted”. Encrypting a button means that the code (and therefore item name, price, etc) cannot be changed by anyone, including your web designer. If you have fixed items with fixed prices, you should probably select encryption. However if you want to let customers select what to pay (like on my payment page) you won’t want to select encrypted buttons, because the price will be variable.

Here’s the video of how to set up a basic PayPal Buy Now Button:

Here’s the video. It’s based on the ECT store version 5.5, so if you have a different version, some of the fields or choices might be different. As always, if you have questions, please contact me.

There are several things to consider when choosing a font for your website.

First, you want the website font to be readable. Generally speaking, fonts that are “sans-serif” are considered a bit more readable than “serif” fonts, but some studies that compare different fonts have found mixed results for different font types and sizes. The study noted:

Overall, Verdana was the most preferred font, while Times was the least preferred font.

Secondly, fonts all have different emotional characteristics/values or “ethos” or even personalities. Some are more casual, while others are more formal. Think about your small business clients and what type of products or services you are selling and pick a font that strikes an appropriate mood.

Thirdly, try not to mix and match fonts on your website. Mixing font types just makes your valuable content harder to read.

Lastly, the font size, font color, font weight, and background color will have an impact on readability. The study mentioned above noted that contrast was a very important factor, so make sure there’s enough contrast between your font, and your background. Font size is also a huge factor so make sure your font size isn’t too small - ask someone over 40 (who has lost their near-sighted vision) to take a look at your fonts. The Witchita study found:

Older Adults are more accurate with, and prefer larger font sizes. They also prefer sans serif fonts over serif fonts.

The Witchita study stated that for all age groups:

Fonts at the 10-point size were read more slowly than fonts at the 12-point size.

Here’s my font selection tool. Simply click on the font name to see what the font looks like. I’ve specifically chosen this subset of fonts because they are widely available on both Mac’s and PC’s.

If you find this tool useful, please do leave me a comment. I just love comments! They encourage me to build more tools like the font selector.

Enjoy!