Category Archives: Webmastering

webmaster related blog

Webmastering

With Boss Cart “Affordable ecommerce solution” every online sale becomes a hit

One of the first things to do in order to create an online business is to choose a shopping cart software that processes the orders. Shopping carts can be divided in two major categories:

1. Local shopping carts – these are to be installed on a personal server

2. Third-party shopping carts – these run on the supplier’s site

Both categories are very easy to customize and use, and for both categories there is a large variety offered by software vendors. However, choosing the right shopping cart for a specific business is one of the most important decision to be made.

Boss Cart is a very easy to use shopping cart – just install, upload products, choose payment processing and done.It was created as a response to small and medium businesses’ needs for growing an online presence and to have a secure and very competitive e-commerce website. Being developed as a search engine friendly shopping cart, this means no further money will be involved in fine-tunning the software for the search engines.

Boss Cart’s developemet team has provided for almost 10 years services like SEO, advertising campaigns and link building and this experience has proven to be benefic when they created this shopping cart.

This ecommerce software cart comes with a built-in catalogue manager for helping those people out there with less experience in using computers to create and manage a highly-competitive online store. Among its major features, here are the most that provide a good customer-satisfaction when using it:

1. Easy to manage thanks to an over 10,000 products catalogue manager
2. SEO friendly cart
3. Bulk product upload/products export to Google Base or eBay
4. A great variety of themes to choose from
5. Comes with free installation and support

One of the main features Boss Cart has it is the integration of an online store with a payment gateway from a large list, list that comprehenses PayPal, PayPoint, Nochex, Google Checkout and others.

We should talk a little more about PayPal, while this shopping cart has been recently PayPal certified.

Every payment processing company makes serious efforts to keep the credit card and personal details in safe, fulfilling the policies issued by law. In order to ensure that ecommerce softwares follow their standards, they have introduced the certification program, which is basically a very rigorous inspection of the software. The inspection included $_POST data handling, processing and validation with special regard to shipping cost calculation.

Boss Cart achieved the PayPal Certified Integration with PayPal Express Checkout, PayPal Website Payments Pro and PayPal Website Payments Standard.

More information about this shopping cart like updates, new releases and special offer can be found on Boss Cart official blog.

Webmastering

Link Bid Script – Classic and Premium Edition


A bid directory is a place where users can increase their directory’s rank by placing bids for positions. Lately, many webmasters and directory owners offer to users this kind of directories while its feature some great advantages users enjoy using. For example, having the option to move a link to the top only by placing a higher bid can make a mind-budget website owner to rank on a first page with only few bucks involved.

Link Bid Script makes it an easy task for any webmaster to start a profitable bid for position web directory. This is a PHP based script and it comes in two different editions: Premium Edition and Classic Edition. While Premium LBS is not free, the second edition can be downloaded by anyone, no restrictions involved.

Link Bid Script Classic it combines classic dollar linking type interface with the traditional directory’s categories based one. Even though its first purpose is to be used as a bid for position script for bidding directories, some users went further and build regular directories or reciprocal link exchange directories with the help of this script.

This script comes for free, additional reasons for downloading and using it might be:

– upgrades are free

– free listing in LBS forum directory category

– awesome free templates

– can be used as reciprocal link directory script

– free website promotion

– free upgrade support

On the other hand, Link Bid Script Premium comes with a ₤15 price but also with additional features over the Classic version. Advanced spam prevention, enhanced auto-bidding notification or a new Web 2.0 design are some that worth a remember. Though the improvements’ list is larger, here are some that Classic version does not feature:

– multiple currency support

– advanced SE stats, back links info and PR info

– screenshots for the listes sites

– Google Map, and many others

For a live demo of LBS Premium, visit LBS demo webpage .

Webmastering

Easter is here again

The biggest noteworthy event in April is Easter holidays, like most Holidays in UK it’s a big opportunity to buy and sell, Easter is no exception. The biggest winners are the chocolate manufacturers as the churn out chocolates in various shapes and sizes.

From a Webmaster viewpoint, it is a good opportunity to make your website “Easter ready”. In addition to adding Easter specific services to your website it is an opportunity to make that modifications you have been putting of for a long time and also a good opportunity to do some link building and search engine marketing as you post special Easter offer in forums and other medium.

Now that brings many costs regarding the development of new banners and other items you need to do your Easter marketing. This need not be expensive if you budget carefully, sales from your special offer will more than compensate for the minimal outlay you spent on your Easter campaign.

Though I can see the need to do all the things I suggested above, however I haven’t yet managed to do all the modifications to my site, but I will soon find the time to end it. Is your site ready for Easter ?

IT, Webmastering

Chatting blogs

Is it possible for those lifeless, body-less, AI-less things to communicate? Of course! And as it shows it may be beneficial for your blog!

Chatting blogs ;)

The magic words are: blog pinging. The technology created to make avaliable crosslinking between blogs following same topic or simply for giving credit to an author of interesting and/or cited by you post.

Here’s how it works:
1. I write a post which you like on my blog.
2. You write a post on your blog about same/similar topic and mention my post (giving link to it).
3. Right after you post your new entry in your blog, your blog software checks each outgoing link.
4. If the link is to another blog (my blog in this case) the software looks up the html code if it contains a special tag, which points to a pinging script on my blog, it looks more-less like this:

< link rel="pingback" href="http://DOMAIN-SUBFOLDER/PINGSCRIPT.php" />

5. Then your blog sends a ping to my blog with a short notice of the related entry on another (your) blog. (It contains urls of my post and your post).
6. My blog receives this ping. First it checks if the post on my blog really exists.
7. If yes, then it checks the referral post url (your entry).
8. If incoming link is also from a blog, then my blog grabs some small summary and link to your posts and puts it in comments under my original post.

As you see this makes cross-linking almost automated and really useful. In building authority, relatedness and SEO of each blog.

Requirements

Yes, your blog/server needs to have this feature enabled. To see the geek description of this check this page.

If you want to check if your blog has this feature enabled the easiest way I think is just to view any of your pages source code and look for element < link rel="pingback"... />. If it’s there (it should be in the section) then it is enabled. The following blog platforms are known to support pingbacks: WordPress, Blogger, b2, Ecto, MarsEdit, Movable Type, Nucleus, Radio UserLand, TypePad.

In addition, if you are registered in Technocrati, it is good to know they also use pinging feature to update their info about your blog. It works similarly, only yo need to set up your blog software auto notification settings to ping Technocrati when you post a blog. Technocrati has a detailed instructions hot to set your platform to do that (look in Tools -> Pinging). If you’re using them to promote your blog it is worth adding this feature.

And finally there is also a ‘thing’ called Trackback. It is very similar to ping back but it is not automated. It does not require you to post any link in your blog as well. You just go to the blog you cited (or is related to what you have written) and ‘leave a trackback’ there (look for this feature next to ‘leave a comment’ link). This way you give the author of the other blog notice about your blog, then if he likes he can add info about your site to his blog.

I hope this puts some light on this features which I think are cool and make our Internet life better 😉

Haabaa, IT, Webmastering

To CMS or not to CMS…

Okay – the question may seem dumb. You say “of course yes” – it is easy, installs fast and has looots of features. And most of all it does not require you to have much technical idea of what is going on with all this PHP, MySQL and stuff. Even if you pay something it still saves your time and time is money…

Sure… But go back to the project itself. What is your purpose? To build a unique website on your desired topic. Unique in look and contents. Only this can guarantee success of the project in search engines optimalisation and users rating. But what do you get with those ready-to-go CMS? Themes – few standard themes. So if 2000 people use this software and there are 4 themes your site will look like 500 other sites… This is no good.

“But there are loads of free themes on the web!” -Okay, yes, not all of them are free, but sure there is more. There is also more sites using this and other CMS’ with all of their themes… But let’s say you end up with sharing “the look” with 2-5 other website. Better, but not perfect. And if your theme is really nice it has quite a chance to become popular…

So what now? To make it really unique you need a little bit of D.I.Y with the theme files. But this requires at least minimum HTML and CSS, not to mention it would be very good to know some PHP on top of that… Huh… What is the option then? Basically there are two – either you learn mentioned above or live with the fact some site look alike as yours. There is a third option too – you get someone to do it for you…

“Okaaaay – so should I or should I not use ready CMS???” Well, I say yes, no matter if you are beginner or advanced, do it for money/company or pleasure. The reason is quite simple – time and effort to build it from scratch is just not worth it (unless you are a professional and really do this things in minutes/hours…). But how to stand out of the crowd? By trying! The picked up theme is good for start. Then in time, if you learn (because you do it for pleasure) or earn more money (business) you can make effort (in time or money) to make it unique. This or that way the real thing that makes people come back is the CONTENT which actually is another vote for CMS in matter of saving time and using it for building good content 🙂

I haven’t said anything about the soft yet. This is because it really depends on what you really want your site to be.

Blog – WordPress – the best soft I ever worked at – it is extremely EASY! in installation, use, customisation and adding extra modules. If you want blog, this IS your choice 😉 Oh, yeah, it has like a million free themes…

Forum – I’ve got experience with two kinds of software in this field – phpBB and VBulletin. The first one is quite simple. However installing any extra features require some… patience 😉 In looking and changing all those template files… It’s biggest feature is being totally FREE. And you can really have nice forum with it. VBulletin on the other hand is a commercial product. The licence for 1 year is around $100! But if you can afford it it is worth the price. Better support, easier installation of additional modules, more functions in administration panel and for users too. Worth trying it, but if you are sure you really need it 😉

General CMS – you just want a website, some news, few articles, few pics etc… Yes, this is your choice. I will skip commercial products, mainly because there is quite a lot of free and good software! Just to give few names of popular ones: Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Fusion… Basically there are almost the same. So my advice – look for feature you will want to include, extra modules, themes etc. on websites supporting such for those CMS. See how they look like, are they easy to install and if they are free (yes, people write those addons also for sale, so be careful – free basic pack does not mean all of the addons are also free!). Once you’ll find what you want go for it! 😉

And there is a cherry on top of that! Imagine you have forum and after a while things go sooo good you want to make it a portal. How to do it without any data loss? It turns out there are software ready for that. E.g. MKPortal can adopt some popular forums (phpBB, VBulletin) and other CMS. It will even import the skin! Beautiful.

OK, that’s all from me, hope this helps some of you with a start 😉

Best wishes,

Piotrek