Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Back in the day, it seemed like it took forever to set up a PayPal account, get verified and start selling. Today, I have to give them some props. My perspective has changed completely. You can literately set-up a PayPal account in about 10 minutes and be ready to start selling. The best part about PayPal is that it is almost entirely free. Yes, there are a few charges, but nothing like the common merchant account provider. Let me explain.
With a regular merchant account you usually pay a set-up fee, a monthly service fee and a transaction fee (like 1% to 3% per transaction). Regardless of how much you sell, you will still have to pay this fee. With PayPal, you don’t have to worry about any fee except for the transactions. Any fees you pay to PayPal are based on transactions. They charge a flat fee of 3% + 30 cents.
This is great for new/startup companies or companies that have inconsistent sales. If you don’t sell anything for a month, you don’t pay any fees. You can keep promoting your online store with out worrying about the overhead costs that come from an expensive merchant company.
Designers out there… check out gold cart and how smooth it integrates with PayPal. Sure, you will need some developing, coding and design experience/know how to put something like this together, but you’ll be impressed with simplicity of integrating these products together.
Don’t ever settle for a overnight online shopping cart like “Quick Shopping Cart” from Godaddy. You will be using the same template everyone else in the world uses, while paying way too much. You will also have to open up a merchant account through your bank (or whoever) and pay those fees on top of what you are already paying. Do your homework utilize some of the developments in the open source world today.
Our most recent site development using WP Gold Cart and PayPal was with an awesome christian clothing company http://vtjclothing.com A fully customized shopping cart website based on the C28 (NOTW) style. Still working out some details. But it is now officially launched! Leave a comment and give us some feedback.
If you need help putting together your WP Gold Cart website or/and integrating it with PayPal. Leave a comment and let me know. I’ll do my best to help you.
Tags: ecommerce, gold cart, online, paypal, selling, shopping cart
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Friday, November 20th, 2009
Lately I have been dealing with a ton of browser issues across the board. It seems like every website I’ve worked on in the last year has been loaded with issues on each internet explorer browser. I’m here to share some of those tips with you.
It would actually be very helpful if our virus developing enemies did something productive and created a virus that would destroy internet explorer 6 on every computer in the world. All joking aside, the seven year old IE6 has major issues that leave the best web designers begging for help. On most sites, I’ve decided to simply not fix IE6 and instead place a conditional statement on the top of the site when it is viewed in the outdated browser. I’ll show you how to do that later. For now, let’s look at the basics and deal with IE7 and IE8.
I’m assuming you made your designed your site looking at Firefox. If not, you can do similar fixes described below. You should be able to make all the corrections using your CSS files (creating conditional style sheets/css files) Look below at the different solutions. You might be able to fix it pretty quick if it just a problem in Internet Explorer 8. Find out where you are and follow my instructions.
THE WEBSITE WORKS IN IE7 AND FIREFOX BUT HAVING PROBLEMS IN IE8
You’re lucky. This fix is easy because Microsoft figured out that IE8 was gonna cause problems for sites designed in IE7.
Here’s what you do:
1. In your headers below the “meta keywords” or “meta description” paste this code:
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />
2. If your working in Wordpress just paste this in the header.php file. You’ll be good to go on all your pages.
DESIGNED THE WEBSITE IN FIREFOX HAVING PROBLEMS IN IE6/IE7/IE8
This one is a little more complicated. So we will start with IE7 since it is the most used today. Here are the steps:
1. Create a file called ie7.css and copy all the code from your style.css file into it.
2. Drop this into your FTP directory next to the style.css file
3. Open your index.html page (or if working on wordpress/cms website open your header.php file)
4. Put this code immediately before the </head> tag (change the directory to match your directory and replate “yoursite” with the appropriate domain.
<!–[if IE 7]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://yoursite/directory/ie8.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
<![endif]–>
5. Begin adjusting items like padding, margin, color, etc. in the ie7.css file. Save and refresh your browser. The changes should only be happening in the Internet Explorer 7 browser.
6. Repeat this same process for IE6 and IE8 (or use the force compatibility meta for IE8 described above)
Again, you want to start adjusting items like margin, padding, float, align etc. These are usually the core of the bugs. If all else falls you can manually create tables as a last resort.
Tags: Firefox, fixes, force compatibilty IE8, forced compatibilty, IE6, IE7, IE8, internet explorer bugs, Issues, Problems
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Monday, November 9th, 2009
New website coming soon vtjclothing.com. This is an concept design. The project included a shopping cart and custom design. Pretty cool? Give us some feedback.
Tags: C28, christian shirts, custom, design, ecommerce, murrieta, san diego, shopping cart, site, t shirts, temecula, website
Posted in AP Design Studios | No Comments »
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