Archive for September, 2007

Build a web site

There are lots of things to consider when you want to build a web site. A few of them involve:

  • Layout
  • Color
  • Font/Typeface

Layout is important when you build a web site as this provides the limits/boundaries of site content and the flow of the site. A builder site web application can be useful for layout as it makes things easy for you to keep the layout and flow the same on all pages of the web site you build. Layout will also create an impression/feel for the site. If you look at a circle, you may have thoughts of openness, adjustable, more free. However, when looking at a square, you may have thoughts of structure, strict, confined. Thus, the shapes used for your layout (such as the navigation, body, and footer parts when you build a web site) will have an unconcious impact on the user browsing. Keep in mind that the shapes may not be defined immediately with lines but parts put together build the overall structure and layout of the site.

When you build a web site, the color also plays an important rule as colors also create various types of feelings. You’ll notice that a lot of tech companies use the color blue, web hosting included :) . This is because the color blue promotes a new, advanced, innovative, technical feel. If you choose to build a web site related to home trends, colors to consider may be shades of light green or light reddish brown colors. Before building your web site, you may want to visit sites that obtain similar content and take a look at the type of color schemes used. A builder site web application is also helpful here as it will more than likely pick a color scheme for you when you choose the overall theme of the site.

Font and typeface, just as color, provide a specific type of feel when you build a web site. When you look at sites that have a ‘modern’ feel, what type of font do they use? Likely they use a variant of the font Arial, or another type of a sans-serif font (opposite of serif fonts, that have an extra ’serif’ at the end of strokes on letters). Keep in mind that your font choice when you build a web site will provide extra meaning and feelings about your site. Again, a builder site web application may be helpful here with pre-defined fonts based on the overall theme.

However, when using a builder site web application for your site design, please keep in mind that you may not have the type of freedom you have when you write the code for the site yourself. But then again, writing the code yourself requires some knowledge in at least HTML and likely a programming language such as PHP or Perl. Have fun with building a web site :)

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Ecommerce Solution for Business

Some great pieces of software out there for e-commerce solutions include:

  • X-Cart
  • osCommerce
  • Miva Merchant

osCommerce is an open source application that is highly customizable given some knowledge of PHP. It is a free application that can be downloaded at http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/downloads (being free can keep your business costs down, so this can be a great e-commerce solution for a business). If you are familiar with and have SSH access to an account with your hosting provider, you can then install the application yourself, or you may want to ask your host to help you with doing that.

X-Cart and Miva Merchant are both proprietary pieces of software. I’ll talk a little about Miva Merchant as I do not have to much experience with X-Cart. Miva is something that you may find with some packages provided by various hosting providers. The later versions are pretty smooth and allow you to customize the page layout quite a bit with minimal HTML knowledge.

So, if you’re looking for an e-commerce solution and need to build the site yourself but you don’t have any web design experience, look for a hosting package that will come with something like osCommerce, Miva Merchant, or X-Cart. All of these applications will provide a nice interface to work with to allow you to easily built and customize the store yourself. You can always keep the default layout these applications provide if you’re not to technical with web design (i.e. no web design experience).

The only other thing you need for these would be an account with a merchant/gateway provider such as PayQuake, Authorize.net. This will allow your customers to make a purchase and the transaction will get linked to the gateway provider that will likely act as a merchant provider as well and hold your funds for you. The e-commerce applications mentioned make it really easy for you to link to your merchant/gateway provider, which by the way would be an extra service from a separate (likely) company than your hosting provider.

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