I am currently putting together a step by step walkthrough on how to install and setup a basic zencart system. I’ll go through what is needed on the server side, what is good to have on you local development system and how you can quickly and easily get zen cart 1.5 installed on a hosting platform and ready to run.

So be sure to check back (I’ll update this post as soon as the walkthrough is online) and read up on how to get zen cart up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible.

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Next month, I’ll be discussing E-Commerce and taking a quick look at some of the exciting features available in our new offering Trimbu Retail. So don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter (signup form at the bottom of the page) if you haven’t already!

I expect people using the internet to find a web designer run across this issue many times in their search.  But why does it actually matter?  Surely any web expert is a good expert.  lets break this down a little. What do you actually need from your web developer?

1. Understand your exact requirements for your web project
2. Have an extensive knowledge of the web standards (HTML5/CSS3 etc)
3. Have a wide knowledge of web development languages and procedures (PHP, ASP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, MVC, CMS  etc)
4. Be interested in providing you with the right sort of web presence
5. Be available to talk to you about the project
6. Ultimately be available for face to face discussions

The first four are a given, any good web designer or developer will be able to cover them, or at least have a team of people on hand that can cover them.

It’s the last two that are very important. I personally feel that being able to sit down with my clients and discuss their requirements is a key factor to helping them pick the right developer.  That way I can showcase some of my work that’s related to their requirements and also discuss the actual structure of their web project and give ideas and tips on the best route forward for them.

Without that face to face meeting it would be near enough impossible to interact with them properly.

Picking a local web expert is, im my opinion absolutely vital to the success of you project.

So how do we actually go about getting a local expert? Well google is always our friend.  The google local search is ideal for this. Lets assume you want a web developer in the Kent area. Just searching for web developer would not be enough, you would need to search for “web developer in Kent uk” if you wanted a web designer you would search for “web designer in Kent uk” or perhaps even “web design company in Kent uk“. It’s still going to give you loads of results, but at least they should be local to you.  Of course, if you are in Kent, then why not just get in touch with me. I’m local, based in Tonbridge in Kent, a web designer/developer and very happy to sit down with you and discuss your exact needs are requirements for your web project.

Let me borrow from a good friend, Richard Mott, (a great designer, brand builder and all round guy – check him out at http://www.richardmott.co.uk/)

Imagine you are walking down a country lane. You come across the following sign, daubed in paint on a weather-beaten board.

It says so much more than just eggs for sale. It says, I’m a farmer, my chickens run free and the eggs were probably laid today

A little further on down the lane you see this sign, equally as crude and taken to a leaning wooden post drawn on an old weather-beaten board.

It doesn’t quite give the same impression, more like you would be out of your mind to even think about it!

So what can we actually learn from this? If I see a sign advertising something, I assume that the sign is giving me an idea of what sort of product and company I would be dealing with. If I’m buying eggs I want to see something that gives me the impression of freshness, open space (so I know they are free range) and not some corporate business that pictures chickens locked up in cages no bigger than a shoe box! So the “Fresh farm eggs” sign above works well for that. The same goes the other way, if I’m looking to buy the latest gadget I might look for a sign that says the business is professional, provides good service, is sensibly priced and will give me the after care I need.

Its all about the look!

As much as we might not think it, the design and look of your website goes a long way to keeping people on your website, and making them actually do the Call To Action on the site (buy, sign up, call you, what ever it may be). If the website looks like the “fresh farm eggs” sign, then I really hope you are selling fresh farm eggs and not flying lessons!

So next time you look at your web traffic statistics and think, “Im getting lots of visitors, why is the phone not ringing?” perhaps the next thought should be, “I need to redesign my website”. As no matter how many visitors you get it’s the look that makes the initial impression and goes a really long way in the decision process as to whether the visitor stays or runs off to another website, probably one that recently went through a website redesign!

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• The content of the page.
• The look of the page.
• The links to the page/site.

Let me talk a little about each one, let me know if it makes sense or if you completely disagree with me.

The content of the page.

Lets start off with what we know.  We know people search the web looking mainly for information, we know Google and the other search engines look for words and how they relate to each other. So it sort of goes without saying that if you put the right words on a page, Google will find them (eventually) and people will read them (eventually).  But what sort of content should it be?  Well what is the website really about? There should be one or two key phrases that you want to get ranked for, then you write content around those phrases.  Don’t do lots of different pages, each about something completely different, thats just not going to work. Keep it clear, be authoritative and build up that little niche on the web. Theres a  great article about this can be found about cornerstone content, go read it!

The look of the page.

Google likes the page to look as simple as possible, so it can find the meat of the page as easily as possible.  This means follow some simple rules.  Reference as few files as possible.  Put the stylesheets at the top, with the right meta tags set (but please forget about the meta keywords! Why?  Look here for the answers) and your javascript at the bottom, if at all possible.  Forget using tables to layout the content, use some of those new HTML5 standards! If you have done that, Google will be happy, but will your readers/buyers? If the site is not visually appealing people are just not going to buy/spend time on your site. A good design friend is forever telling me “People buy with their eyes, if they don’t like the look of it, they are not going to part with their money!” So make the site and the pages visually appealing, Simple as that!

The links to the page/site.

OK so you have this visually appealing, well written site/page with content that people want to read, that Google love so how do you get it ranked well?  The answer is meaningful back links to the page and the site in general.  Honestly this is something you don’t always have full control over.  You can’t tell people what link text to put when they link to you, but you can build some links yourself.  Spend time looking for other websites that discuss similar things to you.  If they run a blog or forum, contribute to them. Don’t forget to put a link back to your site/page in the reply you post. Oh and please don’t do the spammy thing of “great article/blog post, I found it really useful” be constructive with the comments and posts you make, if you do others will read your comment and follow the link so you win with both Google finding more links to you and people reading what you have written and visiting your site. It’s a time-consuming route, but one of the most effective routes to increase your rankings.

Additional tips

These should really go without saying, but use the social media to your advantage!  Have a Google+1 button on your pages, have a Facebook like button, and a tweet button. In fact you could add the reddit and stumbledupon buttons as well as a few others.  Give the people who visit your site the chance to share for you.

What is it about the run up to Christmas that seems to bring the hackers out? In the month leading up to Christmas I saw a significant increase in the number of hack attempts against websites I run as well as my clients sites. It’s never good to get hacked, but even less so during the busy period of December.

Now things have calmed down again a little I thought it would be a good time to take a look at what should be done to secure a company website and what tools are available to help.

As most of the sites I run (both for me and for my clients) are built using WordPress, its seemed sensible to take a look at some of the tools available for that platform that claim to help with security.

TimThumb Vulnerability Scanner.

First up, and I think the most important is the TimThumb Vulnerability Scanner.  TimThumb is a small script that seems to be bundled more and more these days with themes, frameworks and general plugins for WordPress. It takes an image, from anywhere, and adjusts it, caches it and displays it on your site. Most of the time you wouldn’t even know its there and as it’s not actually a plugin as such you probably don’t know its added to your site.

Recently a vulnerability was found in TimThumb that allows a hacker to link to any file on the web and get TimThumb to process it and store it in the cache.  By doing this a hacker can get additional files onto your website quickly and easily and then run that additional file.

The TimThumb Vulnerability Scanner does exactly what it says, it scans your entire WordPress site looking for the vulnerable file, an if it finds it, gives you the option to update it. It’s very simple to use, easy to install, and should be on all sites!

Take a look, download it, and add it to your site, and more importantly, run it and follow its suggestions.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/timthumb-vulnerability-scanner/

Ultimate Security Checker

Another useful plugin that will scan the entire WordPress system, files and database looking for issues and report back on any it finds.  Whats even better is it gives hints and tips as to how to fix the issues it comes up with.

Add the plugin to your website and check your ratings.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-security-checker/

Securing a WordPress site is not too difficult, as long as a little bit of thought goes into it. The final tip I will part with is, keep it all up to date!  As the patches for plugins and WordPress itself come out, apply them (or get your tech guy to do it for you) but don’t wait for the next wave of hacks to take your site off-line!

On 12^th December 2011 WordPress 3.3 was launched. For most people it is a completely seamless upgrade (and for some transparent as I did the update and tweaks for you!) There are a few really nice features added to it. For those that are blogging with WordPress adding images to the blog posts just became easier with the new drag and drop image uploader. For those accessing the WordPress admin system from an iPad or other tablet you will find it more responsive as the touch support has been greatly improved. For me, there has been lots of changes behind the scenes, which means I can build the bits you want for your website easier and make them interact with you and your users quicker and smoother. Got to be good for all!  One other great improvement is the admin bar along the top of the page. The more common functions are there at your fingertips. Now there is no need to go scrolling through the menu to find the add new page, or manage the photo gallery sections, they are there at the top!

Continuing on the WordPress theme, I wanted to mention just one plugin that I think is really useful to have. Its called After the deadline and is included in the WordPress Jetpack collection of plugins. It provides proofreading services to help improve and fix spelling, style and grammar within your pages and posts. Not only will it check your spelling, but it knows when to use “new” or “knew” or “their” or “there”. You do need a WordPress.com account setup to enable the jetpack plugins, and After the Deadline plugin, but as that’s free to do, its worthwhile signing up and getting the plugin into your site. If you want help installing and setting the plugin up, do let me know.

The new version of ZenCart extends the PCI-DSS compliance quite dramatically from demanding the admin password is changed regularly (every 90 days) to ensuring is used in the right places as well as a large number of PayPal fixes and enhancements. The big issue is that if your shop relies on any customisations or plugins, the chances are you will be seeing lots of issues with the update. As time goes on, most of the common plugins will be updated so they are compatible with 1.5.0. But customisations will be down to you (and your development team!)

How I handle the update/upgrade of things like this is to produce a duplicate test shop of the shop I’m upgrading and then migrate the site to the new version, testing and fixing issues as I go. It’s a long process, but one that is worthwhile as all the little issues get covered and worked through. Definitely do not do the update on a live, running shop! It will, without a doubt, break an existing shop as there are just too many changes between the versions of ZenCart.

If you have a ZenCart online shop, or are thinking of setting up an online shop take a look through the following URLs to give you some more ideas of what the changes are;

• http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=190424 – the list of changes/fixes
• http://tutorials.zen-cart.com/index.php?article=98 – how to upgrade
• http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=183643– working plugins/modules

Happy 2012 to all!