Meet the author: Jill Olkoski
Jill has a MA in Clinical Psychology, a BS in Computer Science, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering.
She currently owns Aldebaran Web Design in Edmonds (near Seattle WA) and enjoys educating her clients on topics related to small business website design.
In Jill's previous life, she spent 17 years in the engineering and quality organizations of a Fortune 100 tech company.
My favorite shopping cart to install for my website clients is eCommerce Templates, or “ECT”. ECT has a long list of features already built in, but what happens if my ecommerce customer wants a feature that the ECT shopping cart doesn’t have? Sometimes there are after-market modifications or “mods” that web developers sell. But which actually work? Here’s my review based on my own experience installing various modifications, mods or add ons for the ECT shopping cart. Read the rest of this entry »
If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill
This video tutorial takes you through the basics of creating a post in a WordPress blog. No matter what WordPress looks like on the outside, the administration area is always the same, and therefore this tutorial will apply no matter what theme of WordPress you may use. This video assumes you already know how to login to the WordPress Dashboard.
For those of us who work with Pay-Per-Click campaigns, who obsessively check our Google AdWords results several times per day, here’s a little humor.
Enjoy!
If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill
Posted in SEO and PPC | Comments Off on Pay-Per-Click Humor: A Wonderful Don’t-Do-This-In-Your-Campaign Video
I recently was asked by a client to help fix some issues she was having with her osCommerce shopping cart. The first two shopping carts I did were osCommerce and ZenCart (an osCommerce derivative), and although I now work exclusively with ECommerce Templates, I agreed to help try and fix her store. She had already been through 5 other website designers! Since I enjoy being a hero, I agreed to help. But it wasn’t easy, and I wanted to document what I discovered so that other people who are shopping for an online store and thinking about osCommerce vs ECommerce Templates would learn from my experience.
New websites often don’t rank well in Google’s organic search for several months and therefore to get website traffic, new website owners sometimes engage a pay-per-click campaign using well-known Google AdWords. Here are some tips and tricks I’ve learned from helping my own clients with their Google AdWords pay-per-click campaigns. I also recommend visiting the impressive Google AdWords online Learning Center - It’s got an incredible amount of information that teaches you how to totally control your AdWords campaign.
I recently had an experience working on a website that was created using an online website builder tool. This article describes the experience of using an online website builder tool and your other options. My client had created the website herself using one of the many available do-it-yourself online template tools and wanted to integrate a shopping cart. After a few tests, it became clear that my work on the website would interfere with this website builder, and we had to abandon the builder altogether if we were to have a successful shopping cart integration. After working with the files that were generated with this website builder tool, I wanted to share the experience, because many of you might be contemplating doing websites yourself using an online website builder tool (free or otherwise).
I do WordPress blog installation and customization for my website design clients, and have developed a list of my favorite plugins. Here they are: Read the rest of this entry »
If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill
Posted in Blogs | Comments Off on My Favorite WordPress Plugins
This is a short video of Matt Cutts who works for Google. He often publishes information that’s helpful to website designers. In this video, he explains the different parts of a “search snippet”, the results that people read and hopefully click on. I thought this would be helpful for clients who are trying to understand search engine optimization - understanding the different parts of the search results seemed like a logical first step. Here’s the video:
While I don’t design websites using Flash, there are occasions where using Flash is recommended, such as when a website client wants to add video to their website. My hosting company, DreamHost, has made converting video to Flash and configuring your HTML code easy…DreamHost says: “DreamHost has licensed Jeroen Wijering’s excellent Flash Media Player. This tool enables all DreamHost customers to embed streamed audio and video into any of their web pages!” Note, I no longer recommend DreamHost to my clients.
