My website clients often want to be able to send out newsletters to their customers. Sending out newsletters without being labeled a spammer is tricky business. Many folks opt to use a monthly fee-based service like Constant Contact or My Emma, which send out emails using their own mail servers.  But if you have an ECT online store,  you can utilize a “mod” from ECT Modifications called Advanced News Letter that costs around $25 (one time charge). It sends out emails from your website using your ECT online store program.  This article explains how to send out email using this particular mod.

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This article is written for clients who may have just had their ECT (Ecommerce Templates) online store upgraded to a new version. One of the wonderful things about using ECT for your online store, is that they are very dedicated to continually improving their product, and come out with updates (newer versions) on a very regular basis. How do you, as an ECT store owner get the most out of your upgrade? Read on.

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I work on website redesigns, which means I often work in a temporary subdirectory. When I’m ready to launch the website, I move the files from their temporary home, into their permanent home, typically under the root of the website. But if I’ve installed WebYep on a client’s website, moving these files will break things, and since I can’t find this on WebYep’s FAQ page, I’m posting it here in the hopes of helping others.

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I’ve had a few clients ask me this question, so I’m posting the answer here - because it wasn’t super easy to find on the internet. When you get to the end of a line and hit “return” on your keyboard - what do you want to happen? Sometimes you want a new paragraph. Sometimes you might just want a line break. This short tutorial shows you how to accomplish this. It works for WebYep and WordPress…and probably for many other text editors that might use TinyMCE or FCKEditor or others.

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Website hosting, like many other things in life, is not guaranteed to have 100% uptime. There may be times when your website is down, or loading slowly. If you are using DreamHost as your website hosting company, it’s a simple matter to submit a support ticket to find out what’s up and get whatever may be causing the issue resolved. This article assumes you are using DreamHost.com for your website hosting company.

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Loves

One of the most wonderful things about having your WordPress blog hosted on DreamHost, is the ease of keeping your WordPress blog up-to-date. This is a quick tutorial on how to use the DreamHost one-click-installation feature to keep your blog version current. This article assumes you used the DreamHost one-click-installation to install your WordPress blog using the Advanced Mode.

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If you’re changing from one website designer to another, it’s important to know how to reset your FTP information in your website hosting account. This article assumes that you have DreamHost as your website hosting company.

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Here are step by step instructions for setting up PayPal Website Payments Pro with your ECT (ECommerce Templates) online store. “Pro” allows you to accept credit cards directly in your online store without sending your customers through PayPal - it communicates with PayPal in the background. Note, you MUST have PayPal Website Payments Pro fully activated - if you only have Website Payment Standard, this will not work!
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I’ve had several clients ask me how to resize images, and so I’ve compiled this list of free image resizer programs that are available for different platforms. If you have one you like to use, please let me know and I’ll be happy to add it to my list.
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If you’ve got a page in WebYep that’s got a large amount of content, you may want to help your visitors get quickly to the section they’re interested in. In order to do this, you need to add an “anchor” to the section you want them directed to, and you need to add a “link” to the anchor at the top of the page. This tutorial assumes you have WebYep installed and have a “Rich Text” element already configured on your page.
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WebYep is a great content management tool, but sometimes clients get unexpected results when they copy and paste content from other applications, like Word. (Other applications like WordPress Blogs behave the same way). If you’re composing in the WebYep window, you most likely won’t have any issues, but if you try to copy and paste content, like text, from other word processing applications, or even from your internet browser window, you might run into issues. This article assumes a bit of knowledge of HTML and it’s use of tags.
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Adding a new category to your ECT online store is easy to accomplish. This video tutorial will show you how.
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Adding an online store to your website can dramatically increase sales, but it’s important that you understand HOW to run your online store BEFORE you select which one to purchase. This is a tour inside the store owner administrative area of the eCommerceTemplates (ECT) store, my favorite online store software application.
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If you’re shopping for an online store, it’s important to become familiar with the particular online store application before you make your purchase decision. Online stores vary significantly, and I’ve made this video tutorial to give you a quick overview of my favorite online store: eCommerceTemplates (or “ECT”).
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If you only need to sell a few items from your website or collect different sums of money (like I do on my payment page) you could use a PayPal Buy Now Button to accomplish this. You’ll need to have already set up a PayPal Business/Merchant Account before watching this tutorial video.
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This video shows you how to add a product to your eCommerce Templates (ECT) online store. It assumes that you already have categories set up. If you don’t have categories set up, please watch that video first before you try to upload products, because you will want to put them into categories.

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This article contains instructions on how to convert a Blogger Blog into a WordPress Blog. It assumes that you have a Blogger account that uses Gmail, and that you already have WordPress fully installed on your own domain. It also assumes that you know how to use a .htaccess file accomplish page to page redirection. (If this sounds like gibberish and you would like me to do the conversion for you, please contact me.)

Why consider converting? You know all that wonderful content you’re writting on Blogger? If you have a blogger subdomain (ie. yourname.blogspot.com), and you have your own website, that content is not benefiting your website one bit!

Moving to WordPress that’s fully integrated with your website is a great way to get credit for that content, because the content lives on YOUR domain, not Blogspot. While Blogger does have a FTP publishing capability, in my experience it’s super slow for large blogs, and WordPress is a much more effective solution - easier to customize and jam packed with plugins that make it easy to super-charge your blog.
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Perhaps you like to write your blog articles in Word or received articles from other that are in Word. You have been simply copy and pasting from Word into WordPress, and wondering why the font and style of text doesn’t match some of your other blog articles.
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To optimize your blog for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO), you should understand how much of an impact individual post titles can have on your post’s rankings, and how to manipulate post slugs. Titles and slugs?!
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Maybe you’ve noticed the orange icon at the top of my blog’s URL or on this page, and you’re wondering what the heck is it.

Or maybe you’ve heard others talking about RSS feeds and felt left out.

Or maybe you just are looking for a way learn about ways to improve your small business website but don’t have time to go around searching for information. Using RSS is a great way to have information that’s customized to your tastes and interests, come right to you - just like a waiter will bring you what your ordered from the menu.
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