Welcome to EZwebdesign.com. If your a seasoned web designer, your probably at the wrong site :) Though you may find a couple of useful tidbits of information. If you need some tips or looking to start your own site, please stay and take a look around.

Designing a good "clean" looking easy to use website is not rocket science. Now I am in no way a web design guru. If you need a professional looking web site that only provides information about you or your business, you can do so easily and affordable by using sites like this one. There are lots of free resources available online and even buying templates is a decent low cost alternative to hiring a web design firm that will charge you hundreds, even thousands of dollars for a site. Take this site for example, does not look half bad. It's a free wordpress template that only requires a link back to the designer.

My Shopping Cart Experience. You Get What You Pay For.

It’s been a while since I last posted.  I’ve come back from the dark side (working for someone else) and should have more time to post here.

Any how, one of my last assignments at my J-O-B was to implement a new shopping cart. My new parent companies cart was over 9 years old and never updated, very old school and not all SEO friendly. I had some experience with Pinnacle Cart, they offer both a hosted and licensed version of their software. The licensed version will set you back about $800 plus the cost of hosting on your own server. Pinnacle cart will host your site with their software installed with prices ranging from $29.95 to $149.95. When I used Pinnacle Cart we chose the hosted version and it worked out ok.  Technical support was fair and we had no downtime issues.  I found customizing the site challenging but not impossible for someone who has intermediate web design skills. Pinnacle Cart does offer  a free 14 day trial.

I did sign up for a free trial at Bigcommerce but unfortunately I did not have much time to explore their service thoroughly. BigCommerce claims they make it easy to sell online. You get a website, shopping cart, SEO, design, hosting and more. Try it for free!

The two shopping carts I focused on were 3dcart and CoreCommerce.  3dcart has a nice cart but a few nasty reviews online. The reviews did not deter me, ultimately at the time I was ready to make my decision Corecommerce already had Facebook and mobile phone store capabilities. I was looking to start using those features right away. 3dcart does offer api access at any account level which is a plus. Most every other cart with api access requires either a one time fee or paying at least $99 a month for a higher tiered service plan.

I found Corecommerce easy to work with and technical support was available each time I needed help. I chose the chat option but they offer email and phone support as well.  Customizing your website is not terribly difficult but can be challenging. They do offer a wide range of templates and we found one that suited our needs. No sense spending too much time on your design in my opinion. Make the site look decent and concentrate on SEO and marketing. You can always change the design at a later date. A great looking site is useless if no one can find you in Google search results. Speaking of Google, Corecommerce can export your products directly to Google base, a must for any online retailer.

We imported much of our product data into Corecommerce. It is possible to include image imports if you copy all the images into a directory (another Corecommerce perk, they offer FTP access) and include the image paths in your product import file. The product interface is easy to use and all the standard SEO options are available. One of the nicest features is the separate tab for your mobile phone accessible site. You can use a custom thumbnail image and description.  I did not have the opportunity to use the Facebook app but you can export products to Facebook which is a popular trend at the moment. CoreCommerce offers a free 15 Day Free Trial. No credit card is required.

One last note about shopping carts and you get what you pay for. I used Magento on a site for about 10 months. Magento is free open source software. I liked Magento but there is no true support besides posting in their forum or pay $8000 for the enterprise edition. So if your site breaks, your out of luck unless you have a Magento expert you can pay for assistance.  I used a Magento recommended host for $24.95 a month, Nexcess.net (a U.S.  based host). They were a great host and had awesome technical support. But I had some issues with Magento like Google base exports not working and spent many hours reading their forum and trying fixes. For under $50 a month you can use a service like Corecommerce and get a web template, mobile phone site, facebook product app and technical support as needed. If you’re serious about sales, spend the few extra dollars!

Posted in Web Hosting | 3 Comments

Impress Your Clients and Friends with these Jquery Scripts and Javascripts

I frequently send myself emails containing interesting finds of the day from my 9-5 job to my home office.  Today’s a snow day and I decided to post some of the older email links here.

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A Couple of Recent Finds

I’m constantly searching for new scripts. I should probably learn to program my own but I just don’t have the patience for hard core scripting in PHP or Javascript.

Here are a couple of good finds:

  • PDFmyURL.com Simply type in a URL, click the fancy submit button and save the URL to a PDF.
  • Glider Examples – Easy to use ajax script for creating sliding content/carousels.
  • Gmap – Google Map plugins using Jquery
  • Jquery Backstretch – add dynamically resized images to your websites.
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My 10 Year Old’s New Web Site Experiment using XsitePro

The folks that make XSitePro were kind enough to give me a copy of their web design software for evaluation and inclusion in my marketing on this site.  I figured this would be a great time for my son to start his new website, BlindSideCreations.com.

During the web design process my son will act as a guest blogger here. And we will be asking one question from time to time?  Is XsitePro so easy a 10 year old can create a professional looking and functioning website?

Welcome my son Brandon. He will explain his initial thoughts on XSitePro and his custom design process.

Hi my name is Brandon.  At first I picked a design.  They have many choices of designs.  I pick a design that looks like a notepad I realized that it was kinda boring.  I picked a blank design.  The blank design was cool because you got to import a header a footer and a sitemap.  I added some html games that were fun.  For my header I did a spray paint logo using MS Paint.  The tools were very simple.  What was frustrating was that when you type on a page.  Its really hard to center it and write a paragraph properly. Overall it was very easy.

Brandon will be writing more blog posts in the near future about his experience with XSitePro. All links in this post are trackable  links. So if Brandon happens to generate a sale, the commission I get paid will be put into his savings account.

I have not used XsitePro myself except to assist Brandon in entering the ftp information so that he could upload his site up to our web server. XsitePro has a built in FTP client so he is now able to update the site himself with one click of a button.

So is XsitePro so easy a 10 year old can build a professional looking site?

I would say so far the answer is Yes if you use the build in templates.

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Google Labs – Browser Size

Google Labs has introduced a useful tool for web designers simply called, Browser Size.  Enter your URL in the search box and see how your site fits in numerous browser resolution sizes.

One thing this tool fails to do is left justify websites who have their designs centered.

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Thesis WordPress Theme

Thesis Theme for WordPress: Options Galore and a Helpful Support Coummunity.

Free WordPress themes are bountiful but many free themes have strings attached and/or largely unsupported by the developer.  Some require a link back to the developer, others hide spyware in the code and some break after WordPress implements a major upgrade.

In the long run you might be better off using a premium theme like Thesis. It costs just $77 for one site or $164 for unlimited usage. Thesis is very popular due to it’s continued support and  the ability to customize your site without being a WordPress guru.

Plus Thesis is very SEO friendly.

I plan on switching my WordPress driven sites over to Thesis soon. So many sites and so much yet to do.

Posted in Wordpress | 1 Comment

Ajax Content Sliders

If your in need of a Ajax based content slider, take a look at this tutorial/script by WebDesignBooth.com.  I found it very EZ to set up and manipulate.

This script is based on jquery and jflow.

Another good scrollable content slider is available at Flowplayer.org.  Actually they have a great set of scripts all based on jquery. An impressive scrolling content slider is located at http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/scrollable/demo-area.html.

See a live demo here.

The only issue I have with the script from flowplayer.org is getting the content to autoscroll. The script by webdesignbooth.com has a autoscroll version available for download thus much easier to get started with unless you’re already a jquery wiz.

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Smart Columns using CSS and jquery

First off, I love jquery. I could not tell you the first thing about programming scripts using jquery but there are a plethora of ajax scripts that utilize jquery. One recent find,
Smart Columns w/ CSS & jQuery by Soh Tanaka uses jquery to keep pages from scrolling left to right in any size screen resolution. This script works with fixed width and liquid designs. Check out the demo.

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Need a Lightbox Script? See Floatbox – The Premier Javascript Windowing System

I’ve downloaded and played with just about every lightbox script available.  My favorite lightbox script was greybox (at the time of this posting their site was down, http://orangoo.com/labs/GreyBox/). Greybox is nice, easy to use and it’s free!  Then I found Floatbox and I don’t think I will ever use another lightbox script again.

Floatbox is a very versatile lightbox clone. You can open just about any file imaginable inside a floatbox including html content, iframes and flash files.  Not only does the content open up in a new window, you can easily group images or content to create an image gallery. Floatbox is not free. It cost $20 for a single domain and if you need it for more than one site you do get a bit of a discount for each additional site.

You might ask yourself, “why buy a lightbox script, there are dozens of free scripts available?” The floatbox script is supported by the script writer and is imporoved upon every couple of months. Plus he is great about answering questions via email or forum.   I had a few issues in getting some custom looks working and he responded to every email quickly.  For the $20 it’s well worth the cash. Plus you’ll impress your clients with some nice lightbox effects.

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Where to find AJAX scripts

AJAX is more or less fancy Javascript that can be used with ASP.net, HTML or PHP. Since I’m not much of a backend programmer, I usually search for a script that I can make my own. Usually the scripts are free or require a donation.

If you need to add some cool image effects, nice looking forms or tables or web 2.0ish effects to your site then you should check out the following:

  • AJAX Rain – a library of over 1100 AJAX scripts. If you need an image gallery, check this site first. Most are free if you give credit to the author or be nice and make a small donation.
  • Freeajaxscripts.net – All the scripts listed here are free for non commercial use.
  • Dynamic Drive DHTML code library – In addition to original DHTML scripts
    and components, they offer some AJAX scripts.
  • Smashing Magazine – This site is a great resource in general for web designers. The link from here directs you to a post with some useful AJAX scripts.
Posted in AJAX | 2 Comments