Online shopping carts are getting common with a growing trend of online shopping. Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar business, venturers do not require heavy upfront investment and costly rental fees. The risk is significantly lower when it comes to internet businesses. If you have internet connection, simply following the basic steps outlined below and you can have your cart running, and generating passive income for you.

One of the first thing is that you need a domain name. Domain name is the very way to identify your presence in the world wide web. You will need some thoughts to come up with a brandable name that can best describe your business. Domain names like .com are available at less than 10 bucks a year from domain registrars.

Next, you need a reliable web hosting to support your own site. For shopping carts, the web hosting service should support PHP/MySQL, which is a dominant backbone for numerous ecommerce platforms. In case you have no or little knowledge in programming, you can look out for freelance help from online freelance marketplace to set up and install the script you wish.

Now you will choose your favorite online shopping platforms. Your decision will be determined by your budget you have, and the complexity of your site. If you plan to sell a few items only, you may only need an automated payment gateway hosted by third party. On the other hand if you plan to sell a wide range of products, running your own shop will be the way to go. There are free and paid solutions available. I would suggest oscommerce or zen-cart to run your own site, because this is the one I use most often. Plus, they are available for free.

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It appears that not everyone who has a website knows about Content Management Systems (CMS) and how it can assist them in updating their website. Because my firm designs websites everyday, and each one include a CMS, I thought I would write an article about the basic features and benefits of a content management script.

When used correctly, a CMS can provide a website owner with peace of mind and a simple way to organize, update, and create new content for their site. Not only will a CMS provide you with the ability to manage content, such as articles, word and .pdf documents, and media, like images, audio and video.

How can this help you? Well, since not everyone has been in web development for the last decade, learning the ins and outs of managing a first class website; it can allow you to make small changes and upgrades, soon becoming a website owner’s best friend.

The most common CMS’ are: wordpress, drupal, joomla, and modx. And although they each have their unique features they are also very similar in function. Once setup properly, you will be able to update your website simply by logging in to a computer. Anyone can do it! In addition to the basic functions listed above, many CMS’ will allow you to install plug-ins to stream video, upload a newsletter, offer a membership login, or add a shopping. Now you can easily update or upgrade your website with the click of the mouse, while retaining the same look and feel.

If you do not currently have a CMS or need help installing or choosing a system Website Mentors can help!

Hay Everybody

I’m trying out a Joomla these days…I’m running this news website and it is based on Unicode (not in English). @ The moment I’m running the website in a manual way but want to implement Joomla ASAP coz it will minimize my work load…

So any way… I’m having a problem with displaying the heading, the body of the text display correctly…

Can anyone plz tell me how to solve this issue. I also wants to edit the CSS to increase the font size. Plz assist me…

Thankx..

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We all dream of winning the pools, but how many of us have actually won anything worth shouting about? Well there is hope yet. For to my surprise far from just ticking random numbers on a pools slip, there is a more precise way that takes out all that guessing, its called Fixed-Odds Pools?

What is Fixed-Odds Pools and how can Blueprint7 help I here you ask? Well Fixed-Odds Pools its when odds, or bets to you and me, are published and don’t change. This means they don’t vary according to how many people bet for or against the various options, they remain the same regardless of what happens. Therefore with Fixed odds pools, rather than a chance in million of winning, you could have depending on the odds set a 1 in 4. That’s where the odds are published is 1/4, which means you’d be betting your one coin against four belonging to that of the bookmaker or pools company.

In this example they are setting a probability that they believe there is only 1 chance against 4 that your chosen team will win – this is a ratio of 20% to 80%. So if you bet ?1 at these odds, and your team won, you would win ?4.

And this is where a book I recently came across book by Paul Forester called Blueprint7 comes in, in it he sets out in clear english, and in easy to understand methods and principals that rip the Fixed-Odds Pools wide open.

By using this precise judgment, guesswork is eliminated … and winning is turned into a mechanical – non emotional – event.

For me I can only describe it as a bit like baking a cake. Follow a good recipe and you will end up with a cake. But … try it without a recipe and all you’ll make is a sticky mess.

In addition I must stress that this is a genuine product that is perfectly legal to participate in, and information on Fixed-odds betting can be found online, and in betting shops.

So if you want to start being part of the many who don’t leave there betting to chance, then you won’t go far wrong starting off with The Paul Forester Blueprint 7 Fixed-Ods pools book.

If you’re interested in making a little extra money with your WP blog you should start by choosing the right Wordpress theme. And, if you’ve been blogging for a while and want to see significant increases in traffic and income, you should choose custom made, professionally optimized fee based themes. Getting away from free themes is definitely an intelligent strategy on your part.

Many free Wordpress themes won’t get you indexed properly by Google and most free Wordpress themes won’t do much to increase your bottom-line profits in any way?

My advice is to stop hunting for free themes right now and take a smarter approach that will multiply your blog traffic and increase traffic conversions.

EzineArticles has many archived articles relating to proven methods for setting up and monetizing your blog. You could spend the time to read these articles and quickly see a common theme that most experienced authors include or, you could simply make a few notes on the six points these authors want you to understand.

Some of the decisions you need to make to monetize your blog successfully are:

1) how many columns should you have

2) do you want the sidebar on the left or right

3) is it widget ready

4) should your blog have fixed or fluid widths

5) do you want to use images and icons

6) what is your plug-in compatibility

Don’t misunderstand me here; the items above only highlight a few on the important decisions needed to monetize your blog and be properly optimized for the search engines. A good blog should have… advanced SEO titles, a flexible navigation menu, be monetized with Clickbank Amazon, and Adsense ready profit centers.

Successful bloggers also create a loyal community of subscribers by offering visitors something different like Yahoo’s MyBlogLog that show the faces of the latest visitors to your blog.

If all this is confusing for you and you realize that you may not have the technical skills to answer these questions or set up your Wordpress blog, I have a suggestion for you.

Stay away from the thousands of free, but inferior and sometimes ugly Wordpress themes out there. If you will distance yourself from free Wordpress themes and invest your time and money in professionally designed and properly monetized Wordpress themes you will most likely realize a much improved traffic flow and conversion rate and also have more time to do other important work.

Time is money as they say, and by adjusting your blog to include fee based themes you’ll soon find you made the right decision and will most likely be surprised by better traffic and conversion stats.
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WordPress is turning 7 years old this year and is currently the most popular blog publishing application available today. Over 200 million websites are using WordPress, but it can be a bit difficult to tell because of how easy WordPress customization is. Through the use of templating and widgets integration, WordPress blogs can be customized to the web master’s liking and they do not even need to know PHP and HTML coding although those that know can benefit even more. Therefore it is important to make full use of the WordPress customization techniques to make the most out of your blog.

Benefits of WordPress Customization

While the default WordPress theme is simple and elegant, customizing the theme allows you to give your site a personality and identity. You can put business logos or brand names to give people a better idea on what blog they are reading. It also serves as the basis for what color scheme to use since color schemes often revolve around the logo.

By combining creativity with WordPress customization, you can impress your visitors with a unique design that encourages them to subscribe to your feed or come back to check out some more content when you make updates. If you already have a fully designed website, you can utilize the WordPress customization features to enable your blog to integrate perfectly with your web site’s theme for complete branding.

How to Obtain WordPress Themes

Starters can begin by looking for the many free WordPress themes made available for download on the web. WordPress’s very own website has its own search bar where you can look for WordPress themes that are linked from other WordPress blogs. Social bookmarking websites often post links to free WordPress themes as well. Downloading is as easy as clicking the download link and saving it to your desktop. Themes are usually ZIP files that contain several PHP files and a style.css file.

Another way to get WordPress themes is by buying them from sites that sell premium WordPress themes. These types of WordPress themes look more professional than the free ones and offer greater WordPress customization possibilities. Some free templates may suit your site’s theme well, but it is better to check out the WordPress premium themes and move on to a better design to create a better impression.

Installing WordPress Themes

Whether the WordPress theme is premium or free, installing the WordPress theme is also easy. Just extract the ZIP file to a folder and then upload that folder to your “themes” folder inside the “wp-content” folder. You will need an FTP program to do this or utilize your web host’s FTP tool. Once the upload is finished, activate the template by logging in to your WordPress via wp-login.php. Go to “Design > Themes” and you should see the new theme in selection. Click the “Activate” link and refresh your website.

Review your website and see if you need to do anymore WordPress customization adjustments. Remember that you can always edit the template files once you learn the structure so you can end up with modified and unique designs based on your favorite templates.

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For better managing your custom design website, there are two types of Content Management Systems that you can choose from: the paid CMS and the open source CMS that you can have for free.

There isn’t necessarily any best CMS in the online world today, there are only popular Content Management Systems. Here are some of them:

Drupal

Drupal would seem to be one of the more advanced open source CMS available for download today. Being open source, thousands of people contribute to its development, and you will find no trouble at all finding a web programmer who knows Drupal, or finding a community of programmers who can troubleshoot your Drupal CMS just in case.

MamboServer

Mambo is another popular open source CMS that is free for downloading and extremely easy to set up. Its main edge is that its system is scalable and you can actually incorporate it into the whole spectrum of custom web site design – from the really simple sites to the large company-owned sites. You can use Mambo to manage your advertisements or syndicate your content, among other things.

Open CMS
OpenCMS is another brand of open source (read: free) CMS. OpenCMS incorporates Java and XML technology, thus making it an independent platform.

Joomla!
Joomla! is another open source system and is known among the web developers as a very sturdy platform. Its peculiar may be attributed to the fact that the original team of designers for Mambo are also the creators of Joomla!

Typo3

Typo 3 is another of those open source systems, although it is designed more for enterprise-level applications like corporate intranet. It addresses issues like branding, version control and maintaining templates in an application.

In choosing which content management system to incorporate to your website, regardless if it’s free or open source, one of the key things to keep consider are your custom web design needs, and nothing else.

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First, You Need To Decide What To Sell

If you are fortunate enough to already have a good source where you can get products you want to sell at a wholesale or below wholesale price, then you have some work cut out for you! Make sure that your cost allows you to mark up at least 20% and still be considered competitive when compared to the price of your competition.

If you are clueless what to sell and where to buy products at wholesale prices or better, then I recommend checking out Alibaba.com which is a website that links up manufacturers from all over the world with distributors/resellers. This assumes that you have some money to invest in inventory, as you will probably need to buy a certain amount of goods to stock locally in your area so you can ship them quickly. Most of these suppliers/factories have some kind of a minimum order, so you will want to find out what that is.

Perhaps you do not want to have inventory. Perhaps you do not have the money to purchase inventory. That’s okay, because you can always drop ship, which is you choose a supplier who is in the same country as you, and you use them as a fulfillment center. Basically you get the orders, your customer’s payment, then you pay your cost to the supplier, and they will ship out the product to your customer on your behalf without disclosing who they are to your customers. The down side is that you will have less profit, because the warehouse has to take a cut for stocking the products, packaging it, and shipping it for you.

Import your own stuff or have local warehouses/factories drop ship for you. The choice is entirely yours.

Have Pictures And Pricing Information Figured Out And Ready For All Products

Next you need to have digital pictures of the products you will be selling. You can either take you own pictures (assuming that you have some product samples), or you can ask the wholesaler or factory for website ready photographs. Make sure you resize them so that they are not too big for websites.

Also, you will want to have the pricing information for each of the products you will sell. It would be a good idea to research each one and use a spreadsheet to keep track of your costs, the retail/msrp prices, and your selling price. Spreadsheets like Excel is great because it allows you to quickly change them across the board if you need to. You will also be able to import this ready to go data into your shopping cart in the future, which can save you a lot of time compared to entering them in the online interface one by one.

Setup Your Store Using One of Two Methods

Now you are ready to setup your actual online store! Basically, there are two ways to go about it. You can either choose to use a ready-to-go system such as YahooStores, eBay Prostores, etc., which are subscription-based services where you pay a monthly fee to use all of the features they provide, or you can choose to buy a software, and install it on a website you host somewhere else.

1. The monthly subscription service – These shopping cart services are almost turn key, just sign up, follow the step by step instructions, and you’ll have a functional store in a matter of hours. That’s the good thing about this type of site. The drawback is that there’s a monthly fee to pay, and they usually also take a percentage of your sales as “transactions fees” which is on top of what your credit card company might charge for every transaction. Yahoo Stores is a good example of this type of subscription based all-in-one ecommerce system. Prostores (eBay’s version) is also a good solution to get started.

2. The use your own software model – This is for the more experienced people who has at least built some websites before and are familiar with html, domain names, hosting, file transfers, etc. Some softwares are open source (Free) such as OS Commerce and Zen Cart, but I’ve found them to come with a bit of learning curve just to set up, and they don’t look that great out of the box, and thus may require some serious template tweaking before they are presentable for my taste. I personally use X-cart which is a relatively inexpensive shopping cart software (starts at around $200 for the full version) that is pretty powerful right out of the gate, and has a plethora of plug-ins and after-market codes to help you do just about anything you can think of. You would need to decide what features you want before selecting the right one for your business.The benefit of going this route is that you won’t have to have a hefty monthly fee nor share your profit with the provider. The drawback is that there is an upfront cost (if you choose a non open-source software), and also you would have to piece everything together such as getting a domain name, a hosting plan, a credit card or payment gateway service, SSL certificate (secure socket layer), and then tie everything together at the end.

Test Thoroughly

Whichever type of shopping cart you choose, you will need to test it well. Be sure to try test transactions out on the tow major browsers (IE and Firefox) and correct any bugs or things that don’t look right. Keep tweaking so that you have a fully glitch-free store as well as one that looks professional!

Promote the site

Now that the site is setup to function, you will need to let others know so that people will come check out you site. The old adage “if you build it, they will come” is no longer true on the internet, as there is no such thing as foot traffic. If you create a site, nobody knows about it at first! You will need to study search optimization, pay per click (PPC), and various forms of advertising and promotion and decide what work is worth your time, and what you’d like to outsource. Remember, it’s perfectly ok if you can’t do something. Even building the site. You can always have someone else do it. Just make sure that you do know enough so no one can rip you off!

If you have an HTML based website or blog and want to get a more distinctive and original look you should upgrade to Joomla. Maybe the site that you are using currently is limited in the features that you can use. This is not the case with Joomla. This is a content management systems website that will give your site a professional image. Who is the best candidate for this type of website? Anyone that needs a competitive edge over their competitors should consider it. There are many reasons to check it out.

Open source software

Joomla is an open source software system. This means that not only is it free to use and design, it is constantly being updated. Once these new features are in place they can be put to use by your website. Any bugs or problems will be corrected and any requests for additional features will be created. You can create the site yourself. If you need your site completed right away it can always be outsourced for a nominal fee. Just make sure that you can see examples from some of their previous work to get an idea of what type of work they’ve done.

Professional look

If you look at the sites created for major corporations you will see that they use Joomla. If it is good enough for million dollar businesses surely, it will enhance the quality of your website. Many of the other systems don’t appear to be for business use. There are many cases where a basic site will look terrible and cause you to lose customers. There are so many templates that are available to enhance your site. The purpose for your website is to get marketing presence and sales for your business. Upgrading to Joomla will accomplish that purpose.

Features

Most websites have basic features without a lot of pizzazz. With this system you can create just about anything. If you want a forum, blog, members only site, or poll created there is a plug in component that will do this. You can even integrate the latest social media outlets like Facebook to your site.

International presence

As your business grows, you’ll want to get an international presence. Joomla supports international languages with their CMS system. You could possibly have more traffic to your site with this benefit alone.

If you are ready to take your site to the next level and join the big boys’ club you should upgrade to a joomla cms website. The various features and components that come with it make it crazy not to. If you are adventurous you could easily find free tutorials and videos that will show you exactly what you need to do to create your site. The many templates that you can use will allow your site to have a professional image and bring visitors to your site. You can easily get support from the Joomla website forum that will help you with any setup or installation questions.

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I have a site set up in WordPress that seems to look nice and be functioning okay. It’s actually a directory type site, featuring different entities with pictures, ect.

However, someone said I should use Joomla, which I’ve been unable to learn very well.

Do you think I should stay with WordPress at least for a while, or take the time to try to switch it to Joomla right away? If I keep the WordPress site, I can start my business, but switching will cause me quite a long delay with the learning curve (which would be very bad for me).

Your thoughts?

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