Owner: GoingeBusiness URL:http://www.goingebusiness.com Join Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:59:53 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Business advices, articles, webnaster tips, tricks, Gadgets, and tons of useful tools! Site statistics:Click here
Open Source Web Designs 2007-07-27 06:51:29 Are you planning to going e-business? Maybe your budget is not too much. In that case, you have to take care of any penny involved in this adventure. When planning your web design, you can hire designers whom can create exclusive artworks for your site, but this represents money.
A free alternative is using an open source wed design. One of my favorites is OSWD.org, where you can find hundreds of free designs for your site.
The Open Source
Web Design project (OSWD.org) was founded in September, 2000 by Francis J. Skettino. Their goal was to provide the Open Source community with quality web designs to help get people’s projects on the web in a way that is both organized and good looking. From personal blogs to content managements systems to full fledged businesses, OSWD has been providing free web designs to those who need them for years.
Day after day, many people contribute with this project with their designs. Take a look, some of them are really beautiful!. Read more:Designs
How your product should look like in your online catalogue? (Part II) 2007-07-26 08:09:36 Are you selling products online
? Do you have an online catalogue that your potential customers browse and search for their needs? The following article details which information are “a must” when considering publishing your online products – or services.
In Part I of this article I wrote about the main information that a product should have in your catalogue. I mentioned the title –or product’s name-, the description and the images. In this second part, I’ll like to write about some other information that you can add into your catalogue in order to attract more customers.
Price: Many people think that a catalogue without prices doesn’t work in an online business. That’s partially true. If you are selling articles that a visitor can easily find elsewhere, you should print your product prices in the catalogue. If you don’t, the visitor will go to another online store where this information is on and they probably shop there. In other hand, if your catalogue has only exc
Verifying your domain availability 2007-07-25 08:15:17 Do you have an online business? Are you planning to go online soon? Please, don’t forget to have a tool that verifies if the site goes down. Many hosting providers have these kinds of tools, but are only for internal use and you probably never get informed if the server goes down.
Montastic is an online tool that verifies your domain
availability each 10 minutes. You can apply up to 100 domains verification and it’s totally free. The domains availability can be viewed in a Yahoo! Gadget too created by Montastic.
If there’s any problem with your domains, you’ll receive an email alert. Please, do not subscribe for this service using an account of the same domain you are checking, because in case the domain goes down, you’ll probably never receive Montastic alert.
Waiting for the best catalogue… 2007-07-24 07:54:23 Was 5 o’ clock in the afternoon and I was in that company for almost two hours, spending my time with the five entrepreneurs partners of a new online business store. At the end, they understood something so easy that, at first glance, I suppose it won’t take more than 15 minutes.
We were working in that project for almost 6 months. That represents too much time for an online project (at least, the ones I like!) At the very beginning, the idea was to open an online store that sells exclusive hand made products, so they called my company to help them with it. Yes, I supposed that in a couple months the store will be online so we started working hard on it. We quickly created a new logo, a website design and decided the ecommerce technology that the store will use. Those entire tasks were done in 5 weeks…
After that, they started to upload the products to the new catalogue. In the following 20 weeks, I figured how the company uploads and deletes products; they placed a product descr Read more:Waiting
The most important key to success in your online business 2007-07-23 07:01:50 There are many factors than can combine themselves in your business to become it successfully. Of course, lot of them depends on the business type. Selling computers is not the same as selling books. But, after many years helping business for going online
, there’s a common key for all of them that MUST be there to have a successful online company.
David Pogue, a New York Time columnist, talks about it in TED.
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. This annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). Watch the video and find what David Pogue talks about. For me, it’s the most important key that every online business must think about, before going online. Enjoy it!
How your product should look like in your online catalogue? (Part I) 2007-07-20 07:51:25 Are you selling products online
? Do you have an online catalogue that your potential customers browse and search for their needs? The following article details which information are “a must” when considering publishing your online products – or services.
Many times I helped companies going online with their e-business. One of the first things I ask them is if they really have rich information about their products to put it online. So we start talking about their ERP and how that application manages their products catalogue in order to export them to the ecommerce application.
Once, a customer says: -I do have the information of all the products I sell in my 30 stores. Wait me here. I’ll back with you in a minute.
After five minutes, he returned from his office with more that 30 magazines and he started pointing me the products he sells.
-This is my catalogue. I manage all the product information from these publications.
At first glance, I thought he was kidding. How a 30 s
And where’s your business plan? 2007-07-18 13:34:39 Many times I met people that ask me some advises to put their business idea online. At first glance, they were encouraged about doing their first steps online, facing the “e” market. Their ideas sounds terrific, and their planned earnings too. They usually start talking quietly, because they don’t want any spy in our conversation. Even we are at my office or at a bar, they start the conversation in a very quiet voice.
Sometimes they mention the whole business in our first meeting… Sometimes they don’t. But, I have to recognize than in more that 90% of the situations, they never mention a Business Plan. And that’s because it doesn’t exist any business plan. All the ideas are just that, ideas in their own minds.
If the potential business have partners, there are rigorous contract between them already signed, but, no Business Plan.
Business projects without business plans have high probability of fail. Yes, I know some exceptions, but believe me, they are only exceptions.
A
Editing Videos Online 2007-07-15 07:07:41 Movie Masher is free software that can be installed on any web server to enable advanced video editing features for end users. Like other open source development projects, it benefits from ongoing community feedback and code contributions.
It’s a very nice application, and great for those that doesn’t know much about what and how to edit their videos. Anyway, in my opinion, a little improve of their interface is need.
Online contact manager 2007-07-14 07:48:15 From Plaxo you can centralize your contact
information for multiple services as Outlook, Outlook Express, Google Calendar, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Hotmail, Thunderbird and LinkedIn. When a friend of yours changes their contact info, you’ll see the change automatically (in case your friend is a Plaxo user). Other features included birthday reminders and some more.
There’s a free basic service and some other premium services with some extra features such fixing duplicate contacts, sending unlimited ecards, getting assistance from Plaxo and many more.
It’s really a wonderful tool!. Get connected!. Read more:manager
Domains availability 2007-07-13 06:32:24 PcNames brings us a very interesting tool. It shows the domains names availability while you type it in their search box. Developed in Ajax, it quickly shows if domain is taken or not, checking the following extensions: .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .us.
In case the domain is taken, it shows a whois button to know who registered our desired domain. Read more:Domains
Online forms for your eBusiness 2007-07-29 14:01:31 When opening your e-business websites you’ll probably need one or more forms from where your visitors can contact you without purchasing. The most common one is the “Contact Us” form, but there are many others that can be useful for your organization in order to segment your contacts depending on each visitor needs.
For example, many stores have, in addition of the basic “Contact Us”, an online form for those who wants to be affiliates or resellers.
If you don’t have a programmer and you don’t know haw to create them, you can user JotForm, a web based WYSIWYG form builder. Its intuitive drag and drop user interface makes form building a breeze. Using JotForm, you can create forms, integrate them to your site and collect submissions from your visitors. It has many preformatted forms, as:
Contact Form
Document Uploader
Job application form
Blog Contact / Survey
Satisfaction survey
RSVP for a Party or Wedding
Event CalendarTime Sheet
Bug tracker
It’s basic usage is complet
Create your business presentations online 2007-07-28 06:42:57 Many times I was asked about an online
application that let us create business presentations
. I just find PrezentIt, a community where someone can create (by himself of in group), share and show business presentations.
This endeavor, created in Peru, allows users to create up to 30 presentations and store up to 30 MB of images.
Ah, by the way, PrezentIt is totally free. You only need to register. Nice tool, but, IMO, needs to make some extra improvements and increase the storage per user.
It’s all about methodology 2007-08-01 06:50:34 I started my professional life as a business consultant. I worked in lot of projects and get involved in many consulting firms. During that period, I co-worked with people from the big six (now big four) and many other small consultant firms. I have to admit that the big lesson I learnt from the big firms -that generally did not find in the smaller ones- is methodology.
Methodology is a ‘way of doing things’. Is something that was already test by many people and, when they figure that it really work, they write it down in papers and start teaching it. It’s a kind of ’steps’ that everyone has to follow in order to get thing done better.
Even if each of the big consulting firms has their own methodology, the common thing is that they already have it, and their business consultants have to follow it. This is amazing, because it also teach discipline on your daily job.
When planning a business, even an online one, you have to take care of the methodology. You
Creating professional layouts 2007-07-31 06:46:35 Do you need to create professional
layouts ready for the press? The most common options for this are Illustrtator or Quark, well known programs that helps you with this issue. But, if you a starting a business with really low budget, Scribus is a very good option for this task.
Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.
Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
I tested Scribus and it’s really easy to use. Go ahead, test it yourself… Read more:Creating
A practical guide to choose a reliable website hosting company 2007-07-30 07:27:52 As many of you know, my company
sells e-business applications all over the world. Many times we found customers that, in addition to an e-business application, they need a hosting service. In order to give an end to end service, we offer our customers a hosting service based on resellers plans that we frequently purchase online. Other customers what to purchase their hosting plans themselves separately from our services, and so they asked us how to choose
between the different available hosting companies.
Here is my practical guide to choose a reliable hosting company. I’ve to admit that, since using these techniques, we never have a problem with any of the hosting companies that we resell.
1. Select the server operative system you need.
Before you start choosing the best hosting company, you should know if you need a Windows hosting or a Linux one. This depends on the application that you’ll host there. Ask your programmers and designers which server type you need; they’ll proba Read more:website
Programming web pages 2007-08-02 06:38:35 One of the programs I mostly use to program web pages is Dreamweaver. This is a terrific tool fordoing this job and is part of Macromedia (now Adobe) suite. The program itself it’s perhaps a expensive if your budget is low. In this case, I recommend you NVU, another great.
NVU is a complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.
NVU includes an FTP administrator in order to publish online your works; It also comes with a WYSIWYG editor and helps you validating the code while you write it down.
The other good reason for choosing NVU is because is Open Source. Go ahead, test it!. Read more:Programming
The Best Free Software Applications that are Better than Purchased Software 2007-08-06 10:30:42 There are many good software applications that can help you with your daily duties, much f them very expensive. Software
for image processing, design, and office suites are my favorites. But, why pay too much for tools that perhaps have similar totally free. Even more, sometimes, the free versions are better that the paid ones.
Blogger Not a Blind prepared a list of useful free applications; from FTP clients to file encrypters; from image editors to compression tools, this list includes the most wanted software applications. Take a look at the "94 of the Best Free SoftwareApplications
that are Better than Purchased Software".
Keep your computer update 2007-08-03 13:54:00 If your business or your job depends too mucho on your computer, you'll probable want to keep it update with the latest versions f your favorite software.
With Update Checker you can quickly scan your computer for installed software, check the versions and then get informed on the new software releases.
You require only 100Kb in your PC and only takes seconds to run.
The Update Checker works on any Windows PC running Vista, XP, 2003, 2000 or 98.
It requires that the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 is installed.
What is a Mashup? 2007-08-09 06:23:58 Perhaps you are planning your e-business and heard or read an article that mentioned the mashups. But, what is a mashup?
According to the Wikipedia, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience. The etymology of this term possibly derives from its similar use in pop music.
Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) –the ones used in many blogs, web services and many more.
Many people are experimenting with mashups using Microsoft, Google, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, and Yahoo APIs, which has led to the creation of Mashup
Editors
I constantly see many useful mashups as many other that are really scrap. As mentioned before, anyone can create a mashup in their site. The most important thing before doing this is evaluate the “What for”, the idea.
There’s also a lot of already done mashups so can
Tutorials and Presentations for your business 2007-08-08 13:10:34 There are many applications that can help your business creating tutorials or how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). One of them is Wink, a freeware available for all flavours of Windows and various versions of Linux.
Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
You can also add audio to your tutorials and export your tutorials or presentation in many available formats (SWF, PDF, PostScript, HTML and EXE). Using smart capture tools, you can easily grab screenshots from your pc based on mouse and keyboard input.
Wink is a nice tool for your business, and it’s free. Read more:Tutorials
Flash Websites 2007-08-07 07:55:14 Even if many people say that it’s better not to program the whole site in Adobe Flash
, I still see lot of new heavy-flash sites. In a previous post, we suggested to limit the use of flash in a website because this is not good for many browsers.
Last month, in the Google official Webmaster Blog, Mark Berghausen wrote an article “Best use of Flash”. He recongnized that “Googlebot (the Google robot) can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing”,. He also says that “textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely”
So, he suggest the webmasters to use Flash only where is needed. He recommends that the site structure and the important keys should remain outside the flash so googlebot can take a look into them.
He also says that the use of non-flash vers Read more:Websites
Planning an e-business buying and selling domains? 2007-08-10 14:02:18 I know some people that generate huge incomes by buying and selling
domains. Sometimes they buy never-used domains and wait until receive a good call to sell them; nowadays, when almost all nice domains are taken, they are working a bit different: They create some records of domains that are about to expire, their Google Page Rank, their Alexa traffic and some other statistics and, when the domains expires, the quickly buy them.
There’s a paid search engine that helps with this work. Dots.org is an expiring domains search engine. You can search using many filters including the expiration date, the domain type, the part of a domain and many more. You can also have access to different language dictionaries in order to get some help in your searches.
If you want to use this search engine, you have to be a member. There a many options for this. You can become a one day member or buy a 1, 6 or 12 months membership.
By the way, below is a chart taken form this site that explains us the do
Planning a e-business? Consider using a a Wiki 2007-08-14 06:17:03 Many people know Wiki
pedia, a great source of information that I frequently use. Almost all the information that I need and that could be written is there.
Wikipedia is developed with an application called Wiki. The Wiki is a system that let us have a collaborative website so every user can create and edit content there. The application saves the information and stores the older version of it, so you can have all the tracking of every piece of data there.
In big companies people uses Wiki as a documental tool for grab information about all their processes, systems, marketing and other useful data. Their employees write in the wiki all these information so, for instance, they quickly know how to answer a special type or email, or how to proceed to install a software, etc.
In small endeavors, people also use wikis following the same goal: documenting. The next video, shows in a very simple way, why wikis are so useful. Enjoy it!.
Another online presentation software for your business 2007-08-13 06:46:17 I once wrote about PrezentIt, a very nice onlinepresentation
software. Now, I found Preezo, a similar online application to create professional quality presentations using an ultra-fast Ajax user interface.
With Prezzo is very easy to collaborate with your team on a centralized web document, as also share your documents with partners, customers and other users. Of course, in order to use it, you have to register.
This application in very new, it was launched some days ago. Even if it’s not much complete and functional as PrezentIt, I saw lot of potential in this new tool.
Checking your links 2007-08-23 09:20:24 You’ll probably know how badly for SEO your e-business is having broken links
in your website. Is very common to link external pages and then forget about those links. Those pages can go offline and you’ll never get noticed.
To prevent this, you’d better check your links frequently, especially those external ones, but also those one that point to some other pages inside your website.
The most obvious way to do this is manually, by clicking on each link. This can be a tough task if you have a very big site or with lot of external links. So I recommend you to use an application that helps you with this control.
A very good one and free for Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This application checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different
Real Time Blog Traffic Feeds 2007-08-22 06:17:37 Can’t wait until tomorrow to see today’s traffic stats? If you are an anxious person, this tool can crisp your nerves.
FEEDJIT gives you real-time traffic data on your blog. You just need to cut and paste a piece of code and you’re all set. No registration required and it’s completely free.
FEEDJIT also track popular links across blogs, so if you’re the first to link to a popular site, your blog may appear on their home page. Read more:Blog Traffic
Managing your document’s versions 2007-08-21 07:30:40 How many times do you find two or more versions
of a single document
in your computer? Did you use to program? If you do, this will sound familiar. Today, I’ll like to write about a terrific tool that will help you manage these documents.
WinMerge is an Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. It is highly useful for determing what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.
When you select two documents to be compared, you’ll get visual differencing and merging of text files. The documents are located in different panes so you can quickly see both.
For instance, if you download an open source application form the internet and then you make some modifications in the code, this application can quickly help you find those modifications comparing them with the original files. I use it also with office documents. It’s really cool!
Testing your site in different browsers 2007-08-20 14:21:02 One of the major problems when designing and programming a website is the way it looks like in the browser. Many people use to design and program the website in a unique browser and forgot o test it in the other ones (or al least, in the most popular ones).
In my opinion, every website must be tested at least in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Maybe I can add Opera too, but the other three represents a great percentage of all internet users.
The best way to do this is installing all these browsers
in your computer. If you are lazy for this, you can use BrowserShots, a very nice online tool that helps you testing your website in different
browsers. Be patient, sometimes it’s a bit slow, but a good tool. Read more:Testing
Replacing texts by images 2007-08-24 06:11:14 A very common practice for spammers is to crawl websites trying to find email addresses in the page text, so they can uses those addresses for sending spam. A nice way to block them is to write the email address using an image.
You can create an image with your email address or any other text using Fireworks or even Microsoft Paint. Also, there’s a simple website that helps you if you are not familiar with these tools. ImageFromText is a page where you can write some text, choose their font, color, size and background and quickly generate the image with the desired text.
Images are generated in a PNG file that you can download for free. Nice site! Read more:texts
Creating thumbnails of your sites 2007-08-30 06:08:34 Want to have a screenshot of your current webpage including all the scrolling content? With thumbalizr you can take screenshots of any webpage you want. You can use it for your presentations, documentations, visualizations or your webpage. Just enter the target-URL and press the “thumb it”-button.
Wait a moment and a screenshot of the desired page will be taken. You can choose between a screenshot with a fixed height of the screen or the complete webpage. That’s it! Just click one of the resolution-links (320, 640, 800, 1024 or 1280 pixel width) to download your screenshot.
The best thing: You don’t need to register in order to get the thumbnail. Excellent tool! Read more:Creating
Recommend Site To A Friend
