28 Dec

Overcoming a Common Pitfall for Ecommerce Home Pages

By Karon Thackston © 2008, All Rights Reserved

It was a typical request: one I’ve gotten from many e-commerce site owners because the vast majority make the same mistake. An online business owner emailed me last week asking for help with his conversions. His search engine rankings were good, but his conversions were lacking. At his request, I spent some time on his site and compiled a list of my thoughts, a few suggestions and a quote for making it all happen. What I found on this home page was typical of many other e-commerce sites I’ve worked on.

There was a severe lack of benefits-oriented copy.… Read the rest

07 Nov

Save HTML Table to Excel using jQuery

After a few hours work looking into this, this turned out really easy to implement using jQuery and server side PHP programming as follows:

On the client side the following HTML code needs adding to the page (note this is older code – for newer code follow link at bottom):

<form action="/SaveToExcel.php" method="post" target="_blank"
onsubmit='$("#datatodisplay").val( $("&lt;div&gt;").append( $("#ReportTable").eq(0).clone() ).html() )'>
<input  type="image" src="/images/icons/Floppy-48x48.png" width="12" height="12" >
<input type="hidden" id="datatodisplay" name="datatodisplay" />
</form>

Note – variables used above – ReportTable is the id of the table you want to save and datatodisplay is a hidden variable used to post the table to the server.… Read the rest

13 Oct

How Poor Usability Can Kill Your Copy and Conversions

By Karon Thackston © 2008, All Rights Reserved

It’s funny how we, as website owners, don’t always think like our visitors. A course of action that might seem perfectly obvious to us may stop our visitors right in the middle of their buying process. Take, for instance, e-commerce–type copy. Do you realize that what happens after your customers read your copy could make or break your sale? I’m not talking about shopping cart abandonment. I’m talking about good communication that keeps the buying cycle moving forward. Let me give you a real-world example.

One website offered custom-designed gift bags. The photos on their site were gorgeous.… Read the rest

26 Sep

Anyone Else having Issues with VPS

Weird issue on my sites recently. I have one VPS account with Plesk and the ports all get locked in a ‘CLOSE_WAIT’ state. Using ‘netstat -p” shows its usually httpd locking them up. Restarting VPS will get the ports unlocked but in investigation I found restarting Apache from the Unix command line does the trick to.

Anyone have any experience with this type of issue and how to fix it?… Read the rest

24 Sep

More on PHP Error Handling

OK so I’ve been talking about PHP errors for a while now but one more post. I found some code for customizing error handing in PHP , I installed it and got overwhelmed with emails reporting errors on my sites. I had to spend most of yesterday fixing issues on my sites. Most were minor issues of course – the worse is using uninitialized variables such as $ret = $Data[‘notset’]; where the value in $Data hasn’t been set. In reality the code works and its being pedantic but it still needs fixing with:

$ret = isset( $Data[‘notset’] ) ? $Data[‘notset’] : “” ;

But some reports were real errors, such as unitialised variables that needed a value, referencing arrays using -> instead of [], and other nasties.… Read the rest

19 Sep

Google Analytics Cross Domain Setup

I recently had quite a problem with a site that used a different website name for the checkout process compared to the regular non-secure site. For example non-secure site is www.site.com, secure site is secure.site.com. This is addressed in the Google Analytics FAQ in a number of places, mostly to do with 3rd party shopping carts which doesn’t really apply here. In addition this issue is mentioned by a number of other people but their solutions were missing something as well.

After much digging around and wrong turns from the Google Analytics FAQ I came up with the following code that seems to handle this situation perfectly.… Read the rest

10 Sep

One of our sites was hacked

Put in a whole bunch of PPC (pills porn casino) links and we only noticed because the site wasn’t ranking when it should have, and by looking at the source code. The sire is pure HTML, no applications installed. How the heck they got in I don’t know, all I can assume is they got into the box through someone else’s site and added these links. Now I have to spend time cleaning it all up. Were do I send the bill for the cleanup?… Read the rest