My Merchant Account Blog

Best Practices in Electronic Payment Processing for Web Hosts

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

We wanted to remind our readers that we will be once again be attending Hosting Con 2007 in Chicago, Illinois from July 23 - July 25, 2007.  We will be in booth 812 this year.  Also, we wanted to inform you that we will actually be speaking on Tuesday, July 24 on Best Practices in Electronic Payment Processing for Web Hosts.

If you have anything that you would like see covered in our presentation, please contact us and let us know.

Microsoft Expression Web Designer

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Since Corey Bryant was nominated for Microsoft Most Valueable Professional for Frontpage, I decided to take on the newest edition to the family - Microsoft Expression Web Designer (EWD).

Having a recent hard drive crash, I had to reinstall my operating system and program files. I took this opportunity to install Microsoft Expression Web Designer since the words BETA and Microsoft can bring chills to the computer user.

After installing, I opened a website with the Expression Web Designer. And then I went to a new page. It automatically put the DOCTYPE in there and it chose Transitional XHTML. Can Microsoft be changing the ways it views code?

I then went to Tools - Page Editor Options to see what goodies that had installed there. They had an Authoring tab which allowed you to choose different DOCTYPEs. Once again, very nice. Now I wonder if I chose HTML Transitional - would it know not to close the META tag Content-Type? I opened a new page and sure enough, the tag was not closed as in XHTML.

It stills adds that   in the empty cells but instead of using the attribute width for the table tag, it actually used styles. So let’s try the style sheets – what might happen here? I created a new style sheet, typed in bo and I saw body. And then for the attribute, I typed in wid and saw width and hit the tab key to complete. So far, it seems that Microsoft might have a pretty good winner here.

Do I Do It Myself

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Usually when you want to start selling products - you have a few different options. Download a shopping cart and set it up. Or locate an ecommerce company that only does shopping carts. Or maybe hire someone to do it.

Some downloaded shopping carts are very easy and you just have an admin section to add your products and then you choose what electronic payment gateway that you want to use. Very simple, but what about your design? Can you incorporate that into the cart?

If you are using a WYSIWYG editor, like Frontpage or Dreamweaver, chances are that you might not even know HTML. If this is the case, you will spend your valuable time trying to learn the basics and then you have to learn the server side language. This might take you weeks or most likely months. It would be cheaper if you hired someone to do the development work.

You can also use a company that hosts the cart themselves. The problem with this, you are usually tied to them for life. Moving to another hosting company or provider can prove to be very difficult. And if any changes are needed, you might have to shell out hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands of dollars, for those changes. Plus some of them take a percentage of your sale as well - so on top of paying the merchant account fees and the electronic payment gateway fees, you will be paying something to the shopping cart host.

Do I Need a Web Site

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

I would say yes.  Twenty years ago for a business to be considered legitimate, you needed to have a toll-free phone number.  Now in the 21st century it seems a business has to have a web site. 

Your business is ever changing and so is your web site.  Your web site should reflect what your business is doing today.  There are millions of people accessing the net every second.  Your web site should have all the information needed for a customer to be able to get the most basic questions answered.  Your web site should have a contact form along with an email address.  Some people prefer to use an email for tracking purposes.  Using a contact form can help stop web bots from capturing your email address and spamming you. 

Own Your Own Domain Name

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

I see this at least once a week.  Someone calls or emails me saying they are having a difficult time changing hosting companies.  Or their web developer / web designer won't release their domain name.

Always make sure that when you register a domain name, the domain name is in your name, not someone else's.  For example, if you were to buy a new home, you would not put the title in the real estate agent's name, would you?  Of course not!   So why would your web developer need your domain name in his / her name?  There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for this to happen. 

If you check and find out that your domain name is not in your name, contact the individual or company at once.  Find out how you can get the domain name in your name.  You are paying for it. 

Speaking of which - make sure that the contract you sign does not allow the designer / developer to put the domain name in his / her name.  You always want the domain name in your name for control.