Archive for August, 2007
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
In a mastermind group to which I belong someone asked whether it would be a good idea to use Paypal as a merchant service for e-commerce.
The gentleman wanted to sell touchscreen monitors at $1000 to $2000.
One thing I will say for Paypal, using their system for merchant payments is extremely easy. You just set up your buttons and your links and you can be taking donations in minutes.
For physical goods, Paypal is extremely buyer friendly, i.e. it would be difficult to prevent a customer from abusing a return policy. On the other hand for digital goods, Paypal is extremely seller (i.e. con artist) friendly. I recently made the mistake of purchasing some expensive marketing materials from a dubious seller. In the end, the product was never delivered.
With Paypal's system, there was no recourse. You fill in the complaint procedure (you have 45 days maximum) and then when you are done, they close the case.
Digital goods are not subject to Paypal guarantees.
But for physical goods, they are always on the side of the buyer (i.e. someone can order something and claim that it didn't arrive and all the burden of proof is on you). On expensive items like yours, I would be wary.
If Paypal for some reason decides they don't like your account activity, they freeze your account (no more incoming money, no access to the money on file).
That said, I have put $25,000 through Paypal with little incident (mainly international money transfer for services). That seller probably does close to $1m/year through PayPal and is still using PayPal for about half of their business.
Still with physical goods, you might think long and hard about putting all your eggs in this basket. I suggested the original poster take a look at Google checkout.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Monday, August 27th, 2007
Which help desk to Use to automatically build a knowledge base up over time as you answer customers incoming requests?
This is another question I've answered lately privately.
A lot of smart people are using Kayako for help desks. One of my hosting providers started to use Kayako about a year ago and Kayako made my help requests (all too frequent so I'm not recommending them here) there a whole lot easier.
Kayako have a free month long trial and after that you can pay monthly ($40 for the full package) for a hosted version or buy outright at $500 (you probably have to pay for upgrades after awhile so I'm not sure the cost of ownership is any less).
Details of Kayako pricing.
Another help desk I've looked at which is much less expensive is Will Barden's Three Pillars Help Desk. There is a version at $47 and $77. If you join Will Barden's email lists he sometimes even makes a special offer of Pro for Basic cost to his list.
What's great about Three Pillars is that it is a one time fee with source code and hosted on your own servers. So if you have inhouse programmers, you can customise Three Pillars Help Desk as you go.
What we are using right now for support at Foliovision is Basecamp - as we are already deep in there and our clients all know how to use it - and have experimented with the help desk in Freshbooks which we are using for accounting. Basecamp is not public facing (you need to be a registered use to log in) nor does it allow redistribution of tickets to team members which is why we are still looking at other solutions.
If you are using WordPress on your main site, there is a very simple solution (as we build bigger and bigger sites, simple solutions have more and more appeal), it's WordPress plugin called Ask Me. Ask Me lets you get questions and answers up on your site in a hurry (latest Ask Me news). A larger Ask Me database would benefit from a simple category system. There is nothing to prevent Sara (the creator of Ask Me) or your programmer from adding that feature.
My advice - pick any one system get to know it well and use it to the maximum. We and our clients get huge value out of WordPress as we know WordPress so well. There are better tools for many of the things we do with WordPress. But the time we would lose getting to know each of them would be far more costly than the time we spend writing plugins and adapting WordPress to our purposes.
By Alec
Internet Marketing, WordPress |
Friday, August 24th, 2007
I'm on a professional WordPress mailing list and this interesting question came up:
I'm using Wordpress 2.2 as a CMS to create a site for a client with a small business. My client wants a portfolio page (not necessrily a WP Page) with a list of thumbnails that will each link to its own "gallery" page which will include multiple photographs with some descriptions. My client is a non-programmer who will need to update and add to the portfolio page on her own.
I've been looking at WPG2 and wondering if this will accomplish my needs. I've seen you can put photos in posts, but can you link those post photos to a WP Page that contains more photos from that category in a gallery style (such as the embedded WPG2)? I will also need descriptions about those photos on that Page. I've looked at other sites that have WPG2 embedded within Pages, but their Pages don't contain photo descriptions beyond the photo title.
Does WPG2 seem a good fit? Or is there another plugin that works better? Or will this not be possible?
Alas, Tracy, all of the galleries in WordPress stink. Both Gallery 1 and 2 are way too top heavy on their own. Mixing Gallery with WordPress would be a fatal PHP cocktail, capable of choking the most powerful server and confusing the most adroit programmer.
We've spent whole days at Foliovision playing around with what's out there in terms of WordPress image plugins and there's nothing I would recommend.
The closest thing to what you want are (listed in order of least amount of work to get something passable):
- NextGEN Gallery
- ZenPhoto
- PictPress - Vermeer demo gallery
- WPPA
- Duh Gallery
All have huge problems with URLs and reliability. ZenPhoto is by far the best in terms of simplicity and clean URLs, but it's not well integrated into WordPress just yet.
If you can make any of the above work, without clunkiness and/or very ugly URLs, please comment below. If you find something better, let us know.
At Foliovision, we are currently doing some work on an images plugin but it won't be for larger galleries but for embedding images directly into posts in a simplified workflow. As soon as FV Images is ready, we'll be posting it here.
For the moment, if you want something clean, I'd have to recommend doing it by hand (uploading all the images in both full size and thumbnail and linking and embedding them).
Ecto (available for Windows and Mac) can also be a great help when you have a lot of images to include in a post. The quality of the thumbnailing is poor on Typepad (I have one weblog over there still) but could be handtweaked on WordPress. It can be tricky to get Ecto to play nicely with WordPress built-in XML-RPC.
By Alec
WordPress |
Friday, August 24th, 2007
With the huge sites we build over time with and for our clients, one of the most painful parts is keeping the broken links out.
There are online checkers that can handle small sites (up to about 50 or 100 pages) but when you want to scan a site with 300 or 500 pages or more, you need a desktop application.
We use and recommend the Site Audit tool in WebCEO for advanced website checking, but a lot of the time, WebCEO is overkill. We don't care if our images have the alt tag. We don't care if our pages are considered slow right now. We just want to catch and fix the broken links.
In cases like this, we use Xenu Link Sleuth. Xenu Link Sleuth is a labour of love, created by an anti-Scientology programmer (every report contains a banner ad against Scientology). It's fast and reliable. Really fast.
For Xenu to do a maximum amount of good and not give too much useless information you need to get the settings right. Here are the ones we use:
Xenu Link Sleuth settings
Why these settings?
From the top:
- Parallel threads should be reduced to 10 or less. Five is even better. With thirty threads, there is a good chance you will overwhelm you shared server.
- Apply to all jobs checked: you don't want to have change these settings for every project.
- Ask for password or certificate when needed will allow you to spider hidden parts of the site. Be careful about being logged in or not with Internet Explorer, or Xenu might go through your CMS. A properly written CMS shouldn't delete content without a confirmation dialog but this is an option to be careful about.
- Redirections as errors should be off. While I do consider redirections errors for the most part, they are less urgent to address than broken links, especially internal ones.
- FTP and gopher URLs. Should be checked. If you have these links, it would be good to know if they are working or not. I haven't had any large ftp links on any of our sites, so I don't know if Xenu downloads the whole file or just touches it to make sure there is something on the other end. Checking the documentation, apparently Xenu only gives a list of ftp files. Useful enough to do a handcheck.
- Valid text URLs will give you a full list of all the URLs in your site. You don't need this.
- Site Map will create a sort of sitemap based on site structure. It's generally not been satisfactory for modern sophisticated dynamic site. More confusing than anything else. Leave it turned off.
- Statistics will give you a very good summary of your scan.
- Orphan Files you should always leave turned off. It can't handle ID type anchors which means it reports a lot of correctly working anchors as broken. The orphan files options has never given me any worthwhile information.
Here is the short version of the statistics:
Xenu Link Sleuth Statistics
Very nice. Very simple. We aren't doing too badly here, at over 99% ok.
One reason this looks so good is thanks to Xenu Link Sleuth itself.
To get best use of Xenu Link Sleuth, you'll want to set it to browse external links, but make sure to add a list of URLs not to check in the same format as here (with http://):
Xenu Starting Point dialog
The example above is only applicable to our sites. You'll have to include your own tracking services yourself. If you don't get this right, you'll get errors on every page and your reports will be next to useless. Make sure to include the http:// and then the full base URL of each service. Including shorthand like "google" or "statcounter" won't work. Trust us. We've tried it.
The simple solution to false errors on external linksis to turn off Check external links. This way the off site trackers are not checked. But external links aren't checked either. It's worth the extra trouble to get it right. It might take you two or three tries, but once you've figured it out once, you will be able to run Xenu trouble free in the future (although sometimesI've had trouble getting the Do not check any URLs preference to stick).
Other worthwhile link checking alternatives to Xenu include
- the W3C link checker. Online. Simple, straightforward, free. Times out after 100 pages.
- the SEOMoz Crawl test. Online. Unpaid version 5 pages. Paid version 50 pages. Very detailed reports. Nice formatting.
- WebCEO. Desktop application. Most comprehensive reports. Unlimited crawling. Paid, multipurpose tool. Can be depressing as all get out - it finds every flaw in your website.
By Alec
SEO |
