I had a client recently ask me to add some logos from other companies to his website. The logos were from news organizations, and his intention was to use the logos as links to articles that those organizations had on their websites. This raised a question about proper use of trademarked symbols and so, like I usually do when I learn something new, I wrote this article about what I learned. Disclaimer, I’m not an attorney and this isn’t legal advice. It’s just a blog article.

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Ok, so maybe this is unrelated to web design, but on several occasions clients and friends who are on a mac have received .docx files (2007 Microsoft Word) and have been unable to open them.

Now, don’t even get me started on why Microsoft would release a version of Word that is not backwards compatible…

But they did, and here’s a tool they are offering to help solve the issue:

Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac

Note this requires OS X 10.4

I’ve also tried out that docx-converter.wdgt, the one that adds a widget to your dashboard, but it doesn’t always work. The one above worked just fine for me.

Additionally, I noticed that I could upgrade my version of Word to 11.35 that would enable me to open these docx from Word - but when I tried to use the Microsoft updater, it wouldn’t work for some reason. So I’ll just stick with the XML File Format Converter to convert Word docx.

Enjoy!

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The short answer: I don’t know. But here’s what I have learned: The more articles you write, the higher the likelihood that one of them will be a hit. Of all the articles I have written, the two most popular are: City Search Click Fraud and Kavam.

Did I know they would be hits before when I wrote them? Nope. Was I completely surprised when my Kavam article got over 100 hits in one day and my Citysearch article started attracting more and more coments? Yup. What’s the secret: Keep writing!
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I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

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My partner runs a dog training forum to provide a community space for her clients and others to share information about dog training. This morning, someone posted a fake item that I thought I’d share with you as an example of how NOT to build backlinks to your website and trust in your business.

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Shopping cart abandonment is a visitor behavior and a metric that every online store owner should be aware of and actively tracking. It happens when a potential customer puts an item in their shopping cart, but fails to complete the purchase process. Studies I’ve listed in this article quote shopping cart abandonment rates of 60% - 80%. Knowing what your rate is, and what you can do to improve it is vital to the well-being and success of your online store.

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I had a client recently ask me whether or not his hosting company was backing up his website files. At first, I thought this was a silly question, because I thought the answer would be “of course!” I host my own website and have nearly all my website clients hosted with DreamHost (for a bunch of reasons listed here), and I have, on occasion, become overzealous and accidentally deleted something I shouldn’t have. Yes, even web designers make mistakes

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I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade my web design WordPress blog to 2.5 - I figured I’d better do this before one of my clients asks me to upgrade their blog Go here to read about the new features it’s got. If you’re a client of mine and you want to see what the new admin area looks like before you upgrade, you can take a look at some of the videos in the link above, or take a look inside my demo blog.

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You’re thinking of launching an online store to sell your products or services. You’re wondering if you’ve got what it takes to be successful in this rapidly changing online arena. You’re wondering how much time it will take and what it will cost. You’re wondering if you’re smart enough. This article hopes to help you answer some of these questions before you invest in an online store.

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Think click fraud is a thing of the past? Nope! Bigreds.com is suing Yahoo for 1 million dollars alleging that they were charged for fraudulent clicks as part of their pay-per-click online advertising campaign that Yahoo could have and should have prevented.

While click fraud is certainly a pay-per-click industry issue, and not specific to Yahoo, it will be interesting to see how this lawsuit progresses.

You can read more about Yahoo being sued for click fraud in this Information Week Article entitled “Yahoo Hit With $1 Million Click Fraud Lawsuit“.

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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.
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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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I can’t tell you how happy I was the day that DreamHost, my favorite website hosting company, started selling SSL certificates. Especially since these SSL certificates were from Geotrust, a very reputable secure certificate provider. Here’s a quick tutorial that walks you through the process on how to purchase and configure the DreamHost / Geotrust SSL certificate. The tutorial assumes you already have your website hosted with DreamHost.
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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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