To read the first part of the article – click here.

Since the client is in some sort of the rush before his niche shopping season starts he needs a solution ASAP. The newly acquired web site generates orders that he unable to fulfill given the outdated inventory and pricing.

We’ve offered to create an offline database (MS Access would be a good choice for this case) that will keep the current inventory and extract in into three different importable packages for each web site.

Why Access? Because it exists on almost every computer, and if not – it’s very easy to create a distributable package for Access database. One more serious advantage is that Access doesn’t require any additional licenses to sell end products based on Access. Built-in tools allow very easy importing and exporting data, creating reports and developing forms thus decreasing development time. More under the cut…

The advantages for this method are:

1. Another off-site backup, in addition to web hosting’s own backups
2. Single point of control for inventory for any number of web sites
3. Delayed actualization of data – if there is a data entry mistake there’s a gap before it become live data on the web site
4. Ability to add more features to admin interface without the need to update numerous web sites
5. Chance to eliminate admin interface altogether, improving web site security
6. If client decides to create more web sites there will be no need to worry about importing database again
7. Convenient easy-to-use tools for creating various reports and analyzing performance data across all sites
8. Ability to work offline
9. With increase of the business having all inventory data already in a single database will allow the development of a more scalable solution

There are, however, some disadvantages too:

1. Results of update are not immediate – that is after making all the updates you still have to upload the information to the databases before the updates will be live
2. Higher chance of making a mistake on all sites at the same time
3. Need to synchronize all database copies in case client wishes to work from several locations
4. Need to synchronize database with web site in case any changes were introduced via web admin interface
5. Not available to client remotely

Currently advantages outweigh the negatives of this approach. However, if anyone had similar experience but has a different view on the problem – I’d love to hear it.

The long delay in posting was caused, as some of you might have guessed, by the fact that we got ourselves a busy client (at least for now). We’ll see how it all go, but so far I was faced with an interesting dilemma. Or, rather, was sort of presented with the task to solve.

Our newly signed up client owns couple of web sites that are being fed from the same database. Administering these two sites is a breeze, since any product that has been entered in one immediately shows up on another. The administrator’s interface combines both web sites, so there are no surprises so far.

On his next step this businessman decides to create another web site. This one is fed from a different database, since it was a new team of developers who created this store for him. Additionally, the admin interface is not as friendly as the first one, although the feature set is the same. It’s worth to say that all three web sites are developed on PHP/mySQL platform. The story unfolds under the cut…

Couple of months later this entrepreneur acquires yet another web site, in hopes to use it’s customers base and decent Google ranking. Turns out the web site is developed in ColdFusion 6 with mySQL database on the backend. It requires different hosting platform. There is a different database structure in place, since the site was developed good five years ago. The administrator’s interface is lacking all but basic stuff – add/edit/delete product, view orders, edit categories.

Obviously the owner is now faced with triple-tasking of updating inventory on three different web sites. Before the last acquisition the idea was to import through a set of rules the inventory database from main site into the newly developed one and then just keep updating them. Not a bad idea, given that inventory changes aren’t very dramatic – around 20 – 30 items each two weeks. It all got much worse after acquisition of third web site, where the structure of products already set in scripts and database tables. To add injury to insult this web site’s inventory wasn’t updated since Traveling Willberies were touring USA.

Read more in the next post.

    Lack of action leads to actions lacking sense. Christmas and New Years happen to be very close, so all operations at Zealus were a bit slow. Which led us to a (not so bright idea) to reanimate an old forum that was set up for Russian community web site that never took off.

So the forum has been set up and is operational under new name – Zealus Community Forums. Registration, of course, is free, but there will be paid areas eventually. Right now there is a paid forum with expired domain names updated daily. Subscription costs $5.99 per week or $19.99 per month and readers of this blog may contact me directly for 20% discount on monthly subscription.

There will be, also, some areas for our clients’ discussion forums. They not necessarily may be in English, so don’t get scared right away.

When choosing a Content Management system for your web site it is usually a good idea to ask yourself – what is the problem you are trying to solve?

Most people (as I noticed on several message boards) make same mistake – they try to figure out what software they need to make money online. “I want to create a community, what software do I need?”. First of all – what kind of community is it going to be? Writers? Photographers? Make-up artists? Everyone has a different requirement, and different level of knowledge. Photographers are a little easier to please, as they are used to complicated and cumbersome camera controls, but try to cater same interface to a community of models and make-up artists (same industry, after all) and you will be hit with an outcry for mercy.

Management 101: Before offering a service think – what is the problem the service is going to solve. If you have the answer to this question – you will find tools in no time.

(This is a guest post from the DontDateGuy.com – an upcoming blog on dating advice. Zealus Web Design helped DDGuy with hosting and WordPress set up and, if they will not spend all earned money dating,  hopes to help get their web site more useful and pleasant.)

There is hardly anything older then human relationships. From the moment a Neanderthal man killed whatever animal he hunted down and first brought the corpse to the flock of women to impress them instead of just eating out alone – that was the dawn of dating. Little has changed since then, but what did change is the ability of us, men, to find ways of bringing our killed animal in front of as many women as possible. Corpses rot, so we had to go and hunt one more animal. Then one more again. When roaming from one woman to another with dead animal on our hands became too cumbersome – we invented photography and dating web sites. Now we can show off a picture of same animal to numerous women simultaneously, from the comfort of our chairs.

But being as manly as we are, we kept creating as many dating sites as we could possibly do, always thinking about “what if some of the women didn’t like this one”. What it boiled down to is that now we have drag ourselves to almost all the dating sites out there, just like we did in Neanderthal era, but with added comfort of our chairs and photography. So we decided to get up, stretch a little and take the woman who’s picture we like to the dinner out there. Little did we know about the wild wild world of dating that was awaiting outside. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve been sloppy. We’ve been ignorant. In responce women never told us what went wrong, it was always “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse.

Our goal at DontDateGuy.com is to shed some light on what is going on behind the scene. What is she thinking about you? What are you doing wrong? How to capture the attention of the lady you are interested in. And, ultimately, how to create and maintain a respectful and romantic relationship. We are no cure for every problem out there, but we hope that we can help you avoid certain mistakes and pitfalls. We want to give you that little extra edge, a competitive advantage, if you will, to get what you want.

Subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed or navigate to web site itself and don’t forget to answer the tag line question: would there be dates if everyone wasn’t dating material?

During the course of creating e-Commerce web sites we get a lot of similar questions. This post contains five major DON’Ts for starting E-commerce entrepreneur. This is not, by any means, a concise guide, just answers to most commonly asked questions.

Don’t be afraid of Google, Yahoo and anyone else. It has been said numerous times – don’t think about search engines, think of your target audience. If you are in the business of selling widgets – write couple of good reviews on latest widgets, provide decent photos, build a reputation of a vendor who knows its widgets and not just sells stuff. Google likes good content as do your customers. One reason why I prefer to shop at Amazon and NewEgg – is because I can read reviews (including those of customers) and see lots of pictures.

Don’t be afraid of competition. Whatever you do (or decide to do) – there always will be a competition. Think of the ways you can do better then competition. Target niches, provide more information, stand out. If you sell what everyone else sells (like knock-offs, replicas and such) – be one step ahead, write a review, describe why people buy knock-offs, why yours are better then a shop next door.

Don’t forget to follow-up. This way your customer will know that you are serious seller, even if you sell one dollar widgets. Sending e-mail is as inexpensive as it could be. Even follow-up e-mails can be automated (schedule sending of an e-mail in your e-commerce system to your customers, 7 days upon successful finalizing of the order).

Don’t force your customer to register in order to check-out. Always offer a no-registration check-out option. You still be able to collect all the information about a customer you need, but you will save them a minute or two during checkout process and (this is more important) save them a hassle of remembering their password next time they are at your virtual door. They will register once they realize they return often enough.

Don’t overwhelm  your customers with all the current promotions and e-mails. Maintain a database of how many times you have e-mailed each customer. Try this trick: if you have sent out around seven promotions and a certain customer never visited any links from those e-mails – generate another e-mail that will ask the customer if he/she wants to unsubscribe from future e-mails. Unsubscribe automatically if no responce is given. Chances are hight that all your promotional correspondence ends up in Spam bin, so there is no reason to overload your servers or pay for e-mail delivery for this customer. On the other hand – it may alert customer and enact him/her to actually confirm subscription and look closer to your deals.

Duh!
Moving to a dedicated platform/domain from Blogger account proved to be an exciting experience. And WordPress proved to be much better platform then two years ago. Smile.

Not sure if I am the only one who get clients like this one, but hear read me out.

Potential client calls and asks for a pricing quote. We assess the scope of work and present him with certain numbers that we think are reasonable and well thought. Clients immediately (i.e. without any sort of consideration) replies that “5 years ago someone else did the site for this guy for XXX dollars, why are you charging more?”.

Indeed, why?

Zealus.com is back and better then ever

Now the site is being driven by CMS, portfolio and contacts are updated and guess what?! We’ve got ourselves nice toll-free numer (long overdue)!

Call us at (866) 4ZEALUS or (866) 493 – 2587

And one more thing… Zealus.com is temporarily out of service being moved to a new, more advanced server, so visit Zealus.net instead