Thursday, November 10, 2011

Zen Cart - Shopping Cart Management

  • Zen Cart is an Open Source online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components. Support is provided for several languages and currencies, and it is freely available under the GNU General Public License.
  • Zen Cart branched from osCommerce as a separate project. The major differences between the two systems come from Zen Cart's architectural changes and additional included features in the core.
  • Zen Cart's default installation provides everything needed to maintain a shopping cart web site. Products, pricing, shipping, newsletters, sales etc. are managed by the store owner through the administration area.
  • The shopping cart is set up to receive payments from major credit cards and several payment gateway services are also provided.
  • Some of the key features of Zen Cart are,
  1. Zen Cart provides multiple language support to the customers.
  2.  Allows customers to shop your store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
  3. Updating the product or catalog is very easy, no HTML coding required for adding, deleting, or modifying products.
  4. It is very safe and secure, no one but your administrative personnel can access your customer/catalog data.
  5. Easy to install, helpful installation program guides you easily help you through the setup process.
  6. It has unlimited category depth which allows you to have as many product categories.
  7. PhpBB integration through external module.
  8. User frontend is validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
  9. It also provides you with multiple shipping options and multiple payments options along with a newsletter manager.
  • Zen Cart is easily customizable to whatever your needs, depending on the skills and resources you have available. Only minimal skills are required to get started.
  • Advanced customizations may require stronger knowledge of CSS, HTML, and maybe PHP or maybe even MySQL, depending on your unique requirements.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website Development and Maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing, (SEM), is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. Depending on the context, SEM can be an umbrella term for various means of marketing a website including SEO, or it may contrast with SEO, focusing on just paid components.

Major SEM Tools
There are four categories of tools to help you optimize websites.
1. Keyword research and analysis: (a) Make sure the site can be indexed in the search engines; (b) find the most relevant and popular key terms and phrases for the site and its products; and (c) use those key phrases on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic.
2. Website saturation and popularity: show how much presence a website has on search engines through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity). It requires your pages containing those keywords people are looking for and ensure that they rank high enough in search engine rankings. The followings are major tools measuring various aspects of saturation and link popularity: Link Popularity, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.
3. Back end tools (including Web analytic tools and HTML validators): Web analytic tools can help you to understand what is happening to your website and measure your website's success. They range from simple traffic counters to tools that work with log files and to more sophisticated tools that are based on page tagging. These tools can deliver conversion-related information. Validators check the invisible parts of websites, highlighting potential problems and many usability issues ensure your website meets W3C code standards. Try to use more than one HTML validator or spider simulator because each tests, highlights, and reports on slightly different aspects of your website.
4. Who Is tools: show you who owns and operates various webites, can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues. Useful tools include Who Is Source, ARIN. Read a competitor's source code to look for hidden clues, Use Web analytics tools to find out more about your customers, Use the source code and Who Is tools to research legal issues.
For more details about Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and E-Commerce Consulting  please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Key Features of WordPress

WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible.
  • Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of theW3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.
  • No rebuilding — Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
  • WordPress Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static "About" page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone.
  • WordPress Links -- Links allow you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
  • WordPress Themes — WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.
  • Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.
  • Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
  • Spam protection — Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
  • Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
  • Password Protected Posts — You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.
  • Easy installation and upgrades — Installing WordPress and upgrading from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake. Try it and you'll wonder why all web software isn't this easy.
  • Easy Importing — We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.
  • XML-RPC interface — WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
  • Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.
  • Typographical niceties — WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands.
  • Intelligent text formatting — If you've dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
  • Multiple authors — WordPress’ highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
  • Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
  • Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Latest Trends in E-Commerce

  1. Multichannel presences: There’s a growth of multichannel retailers as traditional high street brands expand their presences online.
  2. The rise of mobile-commerce: Following the increased usage of smartphones, major retailers are launching mobile sites and smartphone applications to encourage their customers to make purchases using their smartphones.
  3. The use of online payment services: There’ll be an increase in the usage of online payment services such as PayPal and Google Checkout as people want to make faster, easier, and more secure purchases over the Internet.
  4. Engaging customers online: Businesses are putting more effort into the design of their websites to ensure they provide their customers with an engaging online experience.
  5. The social element: Social networking options continue to expand onto ecommerce sites where site visitors can share their opinions about products on Facebook and Twitter.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Tips for E-Commerce Websites

1. Think like a consumer, and put your products in more than one category. People purchase more and they experience greater overall satisfaction with the Web site. Consider up sell and cross sell opportunities by offering products that make logical sense together.

2. Keep it simple. Successful E-Commerce sites simplify the checkout process and display clear pricing and shipping information. They also post clear return policies and access to customer service. Putting your brick and mortar store's phone number in a visible place on your Web site is a good idea.

3. Picture really is worth a thousand words, so use photos of your products and go easy on the text. Online usability studies suggest that people do not read; they scan. It's 25% harder to read on the Web, so keep these guidelines in mind for optimum readability: Headlines should be 8 words or less, shoot for 9-12 words on a line (people don't want to read across the entire screen), keep sentences short (15-20 words) and try to keep summaries under 30 words and hold paragraphs to 40-70 words. In this way you can maintain compelling product descriptions alongside your product offerings. 

4. Market your site once it's live. It's not enough to just build a Web site. You need to make an effort to market and promote your Web site to new and existing customers. Collect email addresses on your site to help you keep in touch with customers and consider creating a newsletter. Seek links from other sites that complement yours. Optimize your site's content for relevance and submit it to the major search engines.

5. Make payment processing easy. Online shoppers need a way to give you money online. You can accept credit card payments with either a PayPal account or an online merchant account.



For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Reasons to Use Drupal

  1.  Advanced URL Control — Unlike WordPress, Drupal gives you precise control over URL structure. Each item of content in Drupal (called a node) can be given a custom URL (called a URL alias). In WordPress you are generally limited to one type of permalink The Global Redirect Module will automatically 301 redirect the internal Drupal URL to the custom URL alias. Unlike many other content management systems, Drupal's content pages have nice clean URLs.
  2. Custom Content Types and Views — You can use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules to create new content types and create advanced custom views for them without writing any code. A few examples of "content types" are "blog posts", "news stories", "forum posts", "tutorials", "classified ads", "podcasts". Most content management systems would require writing code to accomplish these tasks, but there is no programming knowledge required to do them in Drupal.
  3. Revision Control — you can configure Drupal to save a new version of your pages every time they are editing. That means that you can go back to view or revert old revisions if you want.
  4. Taxonomy — Drupal has a powerful taxonomy (category) system that allows you to organize and tag content. Each Drupal "vocabulary" (set of categories) can be limited to certain content types. You can also have hierarchical categories, with single or multiple parent categories. Drupal's advanced taxonomy features, combined with CCK and Views; allow you to easily target all of those long-tail keywords that you researched in Wordtracker.
  5. User Management — Drupal was designed for community-based Web sites and has strong user role and access control functionality. You can create as many custom user roles with custom access levels as you need. For example you could create the following roles, each with different levels of access to your features: "anonymous visitor", "authenticated user", "moderator", "editor", "webmaster", "admin". You can keep the advanced user management features (like multiple blogs) turned off if you don't want them, enabling them later if your site grows to a point where you would like to add more community features.
  6. Page Titles and Meta Tags — Drupal's Page Title Module gives you custom control of your HTML <title> elements, while the Meta Tags Module gives you control over your pages' individual Meta description tags. This is difficult in some content management systems, but it's easy with Drupal.
  7. Excellent Documentation — Documentation includes the official handbooks, the massive API Reference, numerous tutorials, blogs, videos, and podcasts, and the excellent new book Pro Drupal Development.
  8. PHP Template — Drupal uses the PHP Template theme engine by default. Theming in Drupal is easier than theming in WordPress and doesn't necessarily require any PHP knowledge.
  9. Drupal Cookbooks — if you want a feature that is not built into Drupal by default, chances are that someone has already written a code snippet for it and posted it in the code snippets section of Drupal.org.
  10. Large and Friendly Community — The Drupal forum is highly active and are a great place to get your Drupal questions answered.
There are other open-source alternatives to Drupal, but here are a few reasons that Drupal is better:

  • Joomla - It's not as search engine friendly out of the box as Drupal.
  • Plone - It''s powerful, but Plone is written in Python and has certain server requirements. It is not as easy to extend as Drupal, and it's harder to find people who know Python than who know PHP.
  •  WordPress - WordPress is excellent, but if you need something more heavy-duty or are building a site that you might want to extend in the future you should be considering Drupal.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Content Management Systems, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.