Create A Website

I have been posting a few bits and pieces about best practice building online stores recently, partly because I have built a huge number of stores the last few years.

I have always been a keen follower of marketingexperiments.com. They recently blogged on things to test to help reduce shopping cart abandonment rate:
What else can I test … to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate?
Here are some suggestions from the article (of course test) …

1. Offer alternative payment methods.
2. State your shipping prices or rules upfront.
3. Offer exclusive products online.
4. Put your nav bar to work for your cart.
5. Promote your promo codes.
6. Plug in a progress bar.
7. Brand your checkout process

Definitely read the article. There is more detail there. In fact their whole site as a whole is worth a look!

Via GrokDotCom: How to Improve a Product Page …

Ralph Wilson interviews Bryan Eisenberg on Product Pages. Using examples from Lands’ End and Amazon.com Bryan provides some very practical tips.

Worth a watch if you are involved with operating or building ecommerce sites.

This is more a note to myself to read this …

Real World Web: Performance & Scalability:

It has been a while since I last posted. I have been building a few online stores lately and came across this article via osCommerce Watch (Questions to Answer for the Online Shopper) that I thought was worth sharing for anyone who owns or builds online stores:

The Shopping Cart: How to Answer the 5 Unanswered Customer Questions

Besides questions related to shipping costs they identify five questions that are commonly in the minds of online shoppers …

1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
2. Are you safe and secure?
3. Why are you asking for this information?
4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

A good list and definitely worth reading the discussion in the comments too.

Had a bit of a break from posting while I have been travelling with work. Back now and so should be posting a bit more regularly.

Found this great presentation today on Slideshare by Manuel Lemos of PHPClasses.org:
“Sending E-mail that reaches the destination using PHP”.

It provides a basic overview of email protocols and systems and covers best practices to ensure email gets through, including specific reference to PHP classes he wrote. The MIME Email Message Sending PHP Class is really useful.

Some high quality and impressive looking 404 pages.

read more | digg story

We might understand what 404 means, but many users do not. Some good tips to provide a more helpful error page to the user when a page cannot be found.

read more | digg story

Some great stuff on getting the best performance out of MySQL …
MySQL Performance Blog

I have just been reading this …
ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization. Pagination is used on just about every site I work on - that article is great on speeding up queries using ORDER BY and LIMIT.

A fantastic presentation from Yahoo! on multiple ways (including CSS, Javascript and server-side technologies) to speed up page delivery and rendering. I think most developers would learn something from this.

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Here is another presentation from Yahoo! which touches on the same issues …

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