The Mission To provide education, training and employment in the field of technology for women and the disabled who are unemployed or underemployed. The Existing Business I presently work with one specific open source program, Zen Cart. I can hire and train any bright mind to do work for me but am unable to take that step without additional capital. I would need more computers, space,… more
Corraling those social media icons from Facebook, Google+….
November 12th, 2011It’s getting so that the group of social media icons one can have on a website is just a bit unwieldy – having to size them all the same. Getting up the new one to see if it looks okay, etc. There’s an easier way to do this work that I use on all the websites I work on. Instead of using the separate icon images, I create a background. The one to the left is 20 pixels high and 145 pixels… more
Zen Cart Discount Coupons for free shipping and discount amounts
September 26th, 2011I had not had the necessity of digging into discount coupons deeply before last week and got a bit of a shock when my client’s planned coupon turned out to be impossible. Zen Cart’s discount coupons do have a number of editable parameters and I just hadn’t gotten around to reading the fine print before. You cannot have free shipping on a coupon along with a discount amount! I tried to… more
Zen Cart Best Practices for SEO and Google Base Feeder
August 23rd, 2011After working with the Google Base Merchant Feed Mod from Numinix these past couple of months, I realized it was time for some instructions for entering product names and descriptions for Zen Cart. This is not just for folks who plan to use or are using the Google Base (formerly known as Froogle). These instructions will benefit anyone with an ecommerce site – or even for that matter with… more
PCI Compliance is driving me crazy!
July 20th, 2011Well, not me, really, but the customers who want it. And why wouldn’t they want it? Well…. PCI compliance is a complicated subject that credit card companies are presently using to charge most small online merchants more money. What is PCI compliance? Basically, PCI compliance is all about standards of protecting the credit card holder’s information. The major credit card companies… more
Does your e-commerce website scream “Trust me!”?
July 13th, 2011So what is a trust feature? Sometime last year I watched a webinar about site security and what to do to have your customers trust you and therefore buy from your site. It was put on, as it turns out, by one of the big names in the industry to sell a specific product. The product will remain unnamed but it is a good product and good idea that is offered by several industry giants. It’s… more
What’s wrong with the Zen Cart checkout?
July 10th, 2011I want to talk seriously about the Zen Cart checkout. A frequent request I get from my clients is for a one page checkout as if it was the holy grail. Everyone seems to be under the impression that having several steps to the checkout reduces sales. I want to seriously – and loudly – say NO! There’s very little wrong with the Zen Cart checkout. First off, if you have customers signing… more
Open Source – Rebellion or Responsible Development?
July 8th, 2011I had a conversation with developer from the Drupal community yesterday that did not center on the technicalities of developing for the open source community but on more global issues and philosophical concerns. This fellow, Alex, stated that open source was a community made up of rebellious folks – they want it their way and do not follow blindly the code of others. Well, he didn’t say it… more
The Streamlined, Efficient Checkout Mod for Zen Cart
July 5th, 2011So all of my research and thought have come down to this. I wanted to improve the existing Zen Cart checkout without altering core files. Here are my conclusions that I have incorporated into my newest mod. First, I took a piece of advice from Fast and Easy Checkout and Numinix.com. He recommends turning off the sideboxes for checkout – getting rid of distractions for the buyer and keeping… more
Editing the Login – Shopping Cart – Checkout links in Zen Cart
June 21st, 2011The default Zen Cart template has some hidden functionality that I like to bring out of the shadows. You know, the two links, Home and Login, right up top in the header? What you may not realize is that there is also the links for the Shopping Cart, My Account, Checkout and Logoff mixed into that coding. So many folks get rid of that coding when redoing the template and that’s a really bad… more
