Zen Cart Installation

If your hosting provider has scripts for installation such as those included with the Fantastico package installation is as simple as clicking on Zen Cart in the application list, filling in your URL and selecting the directory you want Zen Cart installed to. However, The Zen Cart developers discourage these methods and prefer you download the installation files from the site. They also provide New Installation instructions in the tutorials section of the Zen Cart website. The instructions are very thorough and answers to any pitfalls you may encounter are available on the site.

Zen Cart Templates

Adding a new template for you Zen Cart is as simple as uploading a new directory named for the template your adding that includes the templates files. All templates are read as a sub-directory of the includes/templates directory of you Zen Cart installation. From the administration page you can now use “template selection” from the tools menu, hit the edit button and select that template or any other you’ve uploaded from the drop down list. It’s that easy! You can use the Zen Cart Tutorials and FAQs page for more details.

Available templates range from free to specifically tailored at a substantial price. Most are very reasonable but may require customization on your part such as integrating your logo into the existing images. Usually, the required tools such as the version of Flash or Photoshop for more advanced designs will be listed with the template offering. Editing output and appearance of templates will require substantial knowledge of PHP and CSS.

Zen Cart Management

The wide variety of features can make the Zen Cart administration page a bit overwhelming. But product management is very straight forward. You start with “Catalog” from the menu in the administration page to add categories and products. The detailed product form includes options for price, taxation, display, availability, shipping and image upload. There are options to add manufactures, display featured products, specials and reviews.

Extensive page layout features, in addition to the template selection, are also available from the administration menu. Selecting “Layout Settings” under “Configuration” you can enable left or right columns and set their widths, add category boxes. Here you can control details such as sort orders, banner displays and the like. Adding any number of additional pages can be done with “E-Z Pages” located under the tools menu. They can be configured separately or left to conform to the style and layout you’ve created for the site.

Zen Cart also includes payment and shipping modules, coupons, specials, customer management tools best learned with hands on exploration of the administrative page. You can stay in touch with site visitors and customers with the Newsletter and Product notification, setup a Welcome email to visitors who sign up or send email from the webmail tool. Give Zen Cart a try. You’ll be amazed at the features afforded with this free open source application.

The Google XML Sitemaps plug-in for WordPress has been made available for free courtesy of Arne Brachhold. Like most WordPress plug-ins, this tool is easy to install and configure. After downloading you need to unpack the file and upload the package to the wp-content/plugins directory on your server. Then login, go to “Plugins” and activate the app and proceed to configuration.

The configuration screen is easy to follow and the options provide features that automate procedures that can be terribly time consuming but are necessary to keep your WordPress site content visible. The options include

• Write a normal XML file
• Write a gzipped file
• Rebuild sitemap if you change the content of your blog
• Enable manual sitemap building via GET Request
• Notify Google about updates of your Blog
• Notify Bing about updates o your Blog
• Notify Ask.com about updates of Your Blog
• Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog
• Add sitemap URL to the virtual robots.txt file

There are additional advanced setting for your consideration. One can only say thanks to Arne Brachhold and offer support to him and the extensive team that contributed to the effort.

During the life of HTML 4 we have seen browsers from Netscape and Microsoft go from developing proprietary elements where website designers had to markup a document to suit each browser or limit features to what could be rendered in both, to the browser developers conforming to common standards from the W3C that so a document could be expected to perform similarly in modern browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome. JavaScript was originally a proprietary scripting language for Netscape Navigator. The Document Object Model was another example. With XML, Microsoft tried to maintain it’s own proprietary implementation. Today, conformity to the standard, and as such to the end user, has become the primary objective.

HTML 5 is still a draft and won’t be considered complete until vendors such as Firefox and Internet Explorer develop browsers that use the specifications. As a matter of fact two implementations of the standard are a condition of it’s status. But we’re still a long ways from that. Definitions for implementing new elements for both accessibility and structure are still in working groups. As for layout, style still be the realm of Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] with continuing improvement of it’s implementation in future browsers. What end users will see is vast improvement in the browser’s recognition of media types and “drag and drop” features that simulate the desktop features found in Windows or Mac. Messaging interfaces will become seamless much like we have come to expect in the applications available with Gmail and Yahoo! which are implementations of what has become known as AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] which is just an acronym for some of the standards mentioned above. These are examples of what will be brought under the common tent of HTML5 and grow, along with bandwith, to present the end user and ever friendlier environment to interact with the web.

Despite the glamor of Bing’s start page it lacks the easy integration to other features found in Google and Yahoo! While Google’s page is stark by contrast, you are one click away from your mail or other accounts such as Adsense or Adwords. Bing’s MSN and Windows Live links along the top don’t provide the same seamless integration to your other Microsoft applications. Yahoo! on the other hand, provides the best integration of all the features you chose to with your account.

There have been blind studies conducted that indicate Google provides the most satisfactory search results. However, they have been found to include samples biased by anonymous participants. As such we’ll have to wait for an honest assessment. Though I haven’t seen anything that would compel you to start your searches from the Bing page, search results from your Windows Live Hotmail account are now provided by Bing.

There are public relations professionals who would tell you press releases should address the media. Their roll in the past was to handle the press release for a client and gain distribution through media outlets. They prefer to describe releases geared toward potential customers as news releases. With the expanded variety of outlets the Internet now provides your chances of benefiting from your efforts to distribute your information directly to the Web improves exponentially.

In his book “The New Rules of Marketing & PR,” David Meerman Scott addresses the topic “News Releases in a Web World” stating

“The media have been disintermediated. The Web has changed the rules. Buyers read your news releases directly, and you need to be speaking their language. Today, savvy marketing and PR professionals use news releases to reach buyers directly.”

Meerman goes on to define “The New Rules of News Releases:”

1. Don’t just send news releases when “big news” is happening; find good reasons to send them all the time.
2. Instead of just targeting a handful of journalists, create news releases that appeal directly to your buyers.
3. Write releases that are replete with keyword-rich copy.
4. Include offers that compel consumers to respond to your release in some way.
5. Place links in releases to deliver potential customers to landing pages on your Web site.
6. Optimize news release delivery for searching and browsing.
7. Add social media tags for Technorati, DIGG, and del.icio.us so your release will be found.
8. Drive people into the sales process with news releases.

PRWeb provides an excellent vehicle to publish your press release. If you feel comfortable building you own press release the costs to distribute them through this outlet make the press release a very competitive advertising outlet. As of this writing, a basic release that will get distribution through Google and Yahoo, as well as a permanent place on the PRWeb site, for a mere $80. On the high end you can include embeded video, get distribution through nationwide publications such as USA Today, news wires such as The Associated Press and received professional consultation for $360. There are additional options in between.

When building your release, keep in mind many of the organic search principles you would use for preparing any web page. Keywords with pertinent links back to relevant content on your site are important. At the same time you don’t want search optimization to mute the impact the content will have on the viewer.

With over 175 million participants around the globe Facebook popular pages garner a wide following and can generate an astounding response to any variety of topics. CNN takes advantage of this audience to place news topics on their Facebook Wall, the space for user profiles that provides for the posting of messages, at http://www.facebook.com/cnn#/cnn. Topics might range from breaking news to specific topics like the stimulus package and garner thousands of votes on whether viewers liked the post and hundreds of comments.

MSN and MSNBC attempt a more frivolous approach catering to food, entertainment and personal interests. Fox News, on the other hand get numbers similar to CNN but with a consistently differing point of view. Their page at http://www.facebook.com/foxnews got 2,600 votes with over 600 comments March 23rd on a story about protest gatherings regarding the budget and government spending; impressive numbers for a single story on a single day. For those serious about gauging public opinion these figures can be more telling than the broadcasts themselves as one never knows public reaction to the opinions of a particular network just by tuning in.

Public reaction can be expressed in a more enthusiastic manner than simply posting a negative comment. One group expressing an angry backlash to bias in mainstream media is 1,000,000 Against the Bias of the Mainstream Media (MSM) that contains subheadings of “CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, they all have an agenda and it’s time for us to say so” and “This swoonfest over Obama is ridiculous! And let’s not even get started on the idiocity of Nancy Pelosi!” One never knows what one will get pushing a product, service or agenda on Facebook but membership is free. What do you have to loose?

From HTML to XML

HTML 4 brought about a variety of improvements that accommodate the evolving graphical interface of the Internet. With the use of Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] site builders could separate content from style. Separating content from style allows the content to be displayed with a style suitable for the device displaying it, be that a printer, monitor or hand held device. And 4 was also the first HTML standard that recognized the role of client-side scripting such as JavaScript. When a browser loads an HTML document it creates a map of all the elements in the document or Document Object Model [DOM] that the client-side scripts can act upon. These are object that scripts that can act on within the browser without sending a request to the web server.

XML [Extensible Markup Language] is another great advance that provides the “X” in AJAX. Extensible in that it is a language for creating custom markup languages. While HTML has fixed elements XML allows developers to create custom tags and control how they are displayed using XSL [eXtensible Stylesheet Language] or CSS . Further, it provides a non-proprietary medium for exchanging and displaying data described by the custom elements. With this power you can build customized models for displaying data on the web. The perfect example would be the product catalogs of Amazon.com.

XHTML allows site builders to wrap the capabilities of XML in a HTML style presentation. In contrast to the formal nature of standards development by the W3C, the XHTML 1.0 recommendation encompasses elements of HTML 4.01 and certain XML features regarding document structures. To take advantage of XML capabilities the document must stand up to the rigorous requirements necessary to pass XML source code validation. The often lax dissiplin of many HTML site builders will not be tolerated. Even if a new site has no immediate plan for utilizing XML in the near future these requirement should be implemented for future compatibility.

XMLHttpRequest JavaScript Class

Here is where the power of AJAX application development takes place. The XMLHttpRequest object enables an asynchronous [the "A" in AJAX] HTTP request whereby a script sends requests and receives responses to and from the web server without the user leaving the page. If you are a user of Gmail or Yahoo! webmail you are witness to this process and already take it for granted. Input can be sent to the server and the response received by and acted upon by JavaScript to update a piece of the page.

With the proliferation of AJAX there is a growing collection of libraries of code and references available to facilitate the use of XMLHttpRequest. These include Google AJAX APIs, the Yahoo! User Interface Library [YUI], along with several independent developer libraries such as dojo and Prototype. If you don’t have sufficient experience with JavaScript trying to dive in to these sites can be quite daunting. There are some great online references online such as those found at Webmonkey.com. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the technologies with concise examples the book by Thomas Powell shown to the right is an excellent place to start.

Targeting Your Audience

Developing a customer profile is often overlooked in the effort to develop an effective ad. This will help you refine your keywords so you’re not competing for high priced terms with large national organizations. One of our customers, splitmaster.com, offers information on stock option strategies for stocks that split. Trying to compete for the term “stock options” not only pits them against large national firms that offer stock options but companies that develop stock option plans for corporate executives and pension plans. While you may get more clicks appearing in this mass market they will more likely be out of curiosity incurring a cost without a conversion. Best to get fewer clicks from a highly targeted audience.

The context in which you appear can also be controlled. When you first set up a campaign in AdWords “content network” is on by default. Using the example above, this contextual advertising may cause the ad to show in articles in the New York Times financial section or the NASDAQ site where once again curiosity seekers may be chewing up the ad dollars. In this or similar circumstances it is best to turn off the content network and limit ad impressions to specific searches for a well defined key phrases. The Google Keyword Tool can be indispensable in finding out just what that is. It can also help you discover just what keywords your competition is targeting.

Geographical Targeting

Google AdWords provides ways to use your ad dollars to target specific geographical regions or cities as well as a defined radius from one or more geographical hubs. Local business starts with adding your business to Google Maps at the Google Local Business Center. This is actually a different vehicle than then text ads. Your listing will show similar to organic search if you show for a type of business in a selected city and will be complemented by an appearance in sponsored links if you allocated ad dollars to your listing.

AdWords campaigns can be restricted to a specific country and region. You can also select a city within a region to exclude from your campaign. Once you establish the area you want searches that specify your selected area and product or searches for you product or service that originate within that region will trigger your ad.

Optionally, you can select a specific city, Sacramento for example, and specify a radius that establish the coverage of your ad. You can ad multiple points and use a radius for each. A business with locations in California’s central valley may want to use a radius from multiple points such as Sacramento, Stockton and Walnut Creek. Searches for your product or service for any city within this coverage or originating withing this coverage will trigger your ad.

Advertising in any media is a very demanding and often expensive task. In that respect it is no different with AdWords. It can often take a great deal of time, money and experimentation to find out what works for you business. The best way to cut down on all these expenses is to either higher an experienced professional or make the effort on you own to learn all you can to create the best campaign before putting your ads in play. The place to start is the Google AdWords Learning Center. The devil is in the details!

A basic understanding of XHTML, CSS and PHP is essential to this undertaking. If you need to brush up on this knowledge you can do so at the W3 Schools site: http://w3schools.com. If not you should be satisfied to make to with the free themes you can find at WordPress Themes Directory. Editing existing themes, to a lesser extent, will still require this knowledge. Should you do so you will want to document your changes as you may have to undue them when updating your WordPress installation.

WordPress Theme Editor

Here you have an excellent interface to edit an existing theme. Here you can edit the templates for the main index, sidebar, header, footer, theme functions, CSS and other elements for the theme. What you have to work with will depend on the complexity of the theme you have selected. Nearly all will contain those files mentioned above but this is something you should examine before selecting a theme to use as your base. Be sure do document your change in case they need to be undone.

As an example we wanted to change an “Almost Spring” theme to accommodate a page wide AdSense space across each single page with an addition that looked as follows:

/* google ad attop each single post template */
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”;
/* 728×90, created 12/7/07 */
google_ad_slot = “xxxxxxxxxx”;
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
//–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

Problem with that is the search box in our sidebar covered the ad at the top of the page. To remedy that we increased the margin at the top of the side bar specified in the site CSS. That edit required one simple change from 0 to 65 as follows:

/* sidebar top margin changed to 65px in sidebar css */
#sidebar {
float: left;
margin: 65px 20px 0 20px;
padding: 1.8em 0 0 0;
width: 190px;
font-size: 0.9em;
display: inline; /* IE double margin bug fix */
}

Not rocket science at all but you may think so if you don’t properly document you edits and find it necessary to undo them. You might want to keep a list of changes made and the modules involved and save them in a text file on you site. At some point you’ll be glad you did.

WordPress Theme Construction

Creating an original theme requires a greater knowledge of WordPress structure that forms the basis for your WordPress installation. With the default theme you have about 20 files. If you have sufficient knowledge of XHTML, PHP and CSS you can gain a great deal of knowledge about how WordPress generates and formats output that will enable you to create your custom theme. The “index.php” page in your root directory will read that themes have been set and require the “wp-blog-header.php” file in the same directory. From there your going to show whatever is set as your theme. The files used for your default theme are located at the “/wp-content/themes/default/” sub-directory. The new theme you create should be placed at “/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/” to be selectable within WordPress.