Following on from the previous post about my rant over giving a company carte blanche to debit your credit card, it seems that the same applies to Facebook advertising. Now I particularly wanted to try an advertising campaign on Facebook because it works so differently from Google adwords.  So a solution to my objection had to be found.

My objection is very simple - I don’t like giving anyone the authority to debit my card without my express permission. If there is a dispute, they still have your money while you are arguing, and if it is a large company, the bureaucracy can become nightmarish.

Eventually, I decided on a rather crude approach: I give them a credit card number that has a very low credit limit. If this somehow spirals out of control, at least the damage will be limited. The downside of this approach means that I will have to check the status of the card more often. It requires that the card is signed up with the bank to receive Internet banking facilities which will then allow a daily check on the account status.

That’s my solution. If anyone has a better solution to this dilemma, please leave a comment.

Well, finally we are on-line and fully operational.

The CMS is Wordpress 2.8.3

The shopping cart is WP-eCommerce 3.71

I will blog about WP-eCommerce and the other plug-ins in later posts.

For today’s post, I want to discuss the setting up of a pay-per-click account, and pass on some information that cost me 2 hours of productive time. I first went to Google and set up a Google adwords account. I threw together a simple campaign just to get the hang of how it works and gave Google a budget of $20 to play with for a week. I will watch results and correlate what I see with what I learn. When the $20 runs out I will then have a much better idea of what I am doing and how to proceed. This pay-per-click is quite a lot more complex than it appears at first glance and I am in fully-fledged study mode.

However, the problems arose when I attempted to do the same for the Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN/Bing system. Yahoo has some superb tutorial flash presentations and its site is slick and works well. I especially liked the on-line calculator where I could experiment with the estimated clicks and impressions when I chose different monthly campaign budgets and different keyword bids. This calculator is great. However, the downer came right at the end, after I had set up an entire campaign for a particular targeted product page. They wanted me to sign up for a monthly amount which would be debited each month from my credit card by them. Now, sorrrreeeee, I don’t allow anyone to automatically debit my card. (Fingers burnt too many times). To crown it all, there was no reassuring paragraph or link telling me how I could stop this automatic debit. So, I abandoned Yahoo just in time before giving them my credit card detail.

Then I went across to Microsoft’s ad centre and found I could easily sign up using my MSN account that I have had for years and is used when windows messenger. is used That was a good start. Unfortunately it was downhill from then on. After requiring that an entire advert be crafted before even activating the account, they then wanted a monthly budget in Swedish Kronen. Sorry, not my currency or country. But no apparent way to change it. OK, back-browse, I might have missed something. But while going backwards I realized that I’d better copy/paste all the details of the advert and keywords that I’d created, so as not to have to do it all again. No chance. It wouldn’t allow me to. (No, I wasn’t using my usual Firefox on Microsoft’s site - I was using IE8.) I eventually went all the way back to the beginning and started again, but nowhere did it allow me to change the currency of the monthly budget. What a half-baked unfinished excuse for a system! Do they actually want to make money through this? No wonder Google is coining it hand over fist!  Eventually, I gave up. I still don’t know if Microsoft Ad centre wants to automatically debit my credit card, but when they murmur about a monthly budget without any further information, I get nervous and bail out.

I’ll maybe go back to them once I have cut my teeth on Google’s system. At least these guys seem to have thought it out properly - but wow - what an incredible amount of documentation to wade through, though…

Well, it’s been a while - what with playing around with different designs and shopping carts and finding that I have to learn much more CSS and php that I bargained for.

Eventually I decided to go for a wordpress blog powered by wp-eCommerce. However, finding a nice template and then modifying it to do what I wanted has been quite fascinating, but stressful.

The new site should be up next week in a primitive form and will be fleshed out throughout the month.

Stand By

Not much to report - I am experimenting with the WP-Ecommerce plugin and Wordpress. Instead of wasting your time and posting just for the sake of posting, when I have something sensible to say, I post here again

Please subscribe to the RSS feed so that you’ll see immediately when the saga continues.

Well waddayouknow - following on from Friday’s post about how to perform web publicity well, there is now a comment from Eli of Market Theme (the competition of WP e-Commerce) that just missed my post on Friday or I would have mentioned it.

The post is a bit different to Dan’s but also enjoys my pleasure for using it as a demonstration of good Internet public relations:

• The comment is relevant to the blog post.
• It offers value to any blog reader who is also looking at e-commerce plugins for Wordpress.
• It gets his company’s URL onto my blog which the search engine takes notice of and he scores another inbound link.
• It provides a useful tip.
• His post directs me to a product demo.

I am not taking Eli’s advice yet; instead I am using an entirely different site as a test site, which is totally blank without a single file in it except just one called ROBOTS.TXT.

This little file prevents any search engine spiders from indexing the site until I am ready for them to. I would hate all my fiddling of pages to get indexed until matters were ready for prime time.

The way to do this is very simple:

Create a pure text file called ROBOTS.TXT

Place the following two lines in it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The first line means:  “Attention all spiders and web-bots”

The second line means: “No indexing of any folder whatsoever is allowed”

For an easy overview of Robots.txt go here.

Every day there are many comments left on each post I make and most I immediately delete.

Why?

Because they are spam.  See this blog post for a discussion on spam.
Spam seems to fall into 3 categories on this particular blog:

• A blatant unsubtle list of URLs - usually linking to online ph*rm*c**s or p*rn sites. (Sorry for the asterisks.  They are there to prevent this blog post itself being classed as unwanted.)
• A comment that is of such a general nature that it could be applicable anywhere. Usually these are accompanied by unwanted URLs as well.
• A very subtle form of spam which seems to have some sort of relevance to the post, but doesn’t really add any value. Such posts are really designed merely to create a link to the sender’s side and thereby increase the sender’s ratings.

Whatever form they take, this is comment spam - unwanted irrelevant comments - and I delete them immediately. There is a Wordpress plugin called “Akismet” which automates this process and I will probably start using it once I get tired of manually deleting the spam after having a good laugh at some of those attempts to be classed as legitimate.

Then comes a comment from WP eCommerce showing the way that it should be done.

Please take a look at the comment placed by Dan Milward. I have come across his name in connection with the WP eCommerce plugin discussed in yesterday’s post, but I have not yet corresponded with him directly. Dan works for the company that creates the WP e-Commerce plugin. Either he has been following this blog (unlikely), or he created a Google Alert for any new posts that feature the word “WP e-Commerce” (more likely). Google Alerts send you a daily digest of the latest web pages that Google catalogues which have a particular word or phrase in it.

Dan’s post typifies the real usefulness/business-aspect-trade-off that makes the Internet great.

• The comment is relevant to the blog post.
• It offers value to any blog reader who is also looking at e-commerce plugins for Wordpress.
• It gets his company’s URL onto my blog which the search engine takes notice of and he scores another inbound link.
• It provides a link to Wordpress’ plugin download site.
• His response immediately indicates to me that his company offers other services as well and is on the ball, which impresses me. As a result, I am very likely to do business with them one way or another.

All in all, a very effective win-win situation whereby his services are publicised without spamming and gives me a good feeling about them. You want to know how to publicise your site on the Internet?  That’s how it’s done!

OK, the decision is made - for better or worse. We go with Wordpress and add an e-commerce plugin to it.

An e-commerce plugin? I thought you were going to program this all yourself, Dave?

No, sanity has prevailed again. Rather get the best possible e-commerce plugin and spend enough time with it to extract the maximum from it.  If it still won’t quite do the trick, then custom-programming will have to be brought to bear. But first, the best plugin needs to be found. From quite a few that I have found, there appear to be three popular possibilities whose owners seem to be really serious about their product:

1. Market theme
2. Shopp
3. WP E-commerce

Now which one to choose? That choice had better be the right one, or more time will be lost…

• They all say they are the best and will do wonderful things for me.
• They all offer a whole hoard of features, most of which I do not understand.
• Some advertised features I see no necessity for.
• Some advertised features I doubt will work the way I want them to work.
• They all cost money (albeit not a devastatingly large amount).

What to do? Well, the best way would be to set up a site and try them out. Oops… One claims to be free (WP E-commerce), but you need to buy at least one essential add-on. The rest don’t seem to offer trial versions at all.

Well, let’s start with the free one. If it does the job more or less, then they have made the sale and I’ll go with them. Otherwise, I’ll have to buy the next most-promising one. Or maybe I’ll bite the bullet and get all three and try them out. Expensive but maybe wise. I’ll decide later and start with the free one for the moment.

Now, where to set it up?

• On a local server? This will probably take too long to set up and may not be totally compatible to what is offered by my hosting company anyway.
• Delete the old site (after backing it up, of course) and install the test setup in its place? This would be fine, but in the meantime there would be no site up at all! And if I ran into payment-gateway problems, at least there would be an existing site to cross-check with, if I didn’t delete it.
• Rent some new server space temporarily, and point another domain name to it? This might be the most expensive option, but it wouldn’t break the bank either!

So, the third option it must be. Now to order a new site and let the site hosting company set it up. This usually takes 24-hours so in the meantime, I’ll continue trawling the Internet for information on these three plugins…

Wordpress is a blog, right? - Right!

Wordpress is designed for people to post new pieces of prose and pictures regularly, right?  -  Right!

Wordpress is not designed to be an e-commerce solution, right? - Right!

Wordpress can’t really be used as an e-commerce solution, right? - Wrong!

It seems that Wordpress can be customized into just about any kind of web site. The customization potential is enormous - it seems like it was designed to be taken and messed about with. Let’s take a look at what an e-commerce site needs:

1. A database to store the stock for sale. In our case this would be downloadable PDF courses.
2. A way to retrieve those database entries together with their illustrations. In our case this would be example pages.
3. An easily expandable menu system.
4. A search facility.
5. A shopping cart and payment system.
6. To be Search engine friendly with the ability to add metatags to pages.
7. To be able to easily facilitate the addition of new database pages and link to static pages.

Wordpress offers:

1. A database.
2. A way to retrieve those database entries together with their illustrations.
3. A flexible, expandable customizable menu/navigation system.
4. A search facility.
5. The availability of an e-commerce plugin.
6. Search engine friendliness - you won’t believe how fast a new blog post gets indexed by Google.
7. An easy way to facilitate the addition of new database pages and link to static pages.
8. Open source software with built-in permission to be modified.
9. Many other possibilities that I haven’t yet even discovered.

I found a wordpress demo theme for a clothing shop which uses an e-commerce plugin (recommended by one of those helpful Business Warriors), which with a bit of imagination could serve as a very good basis for Fundisi.

This is definitely the way to go. Notify the reverse-engineering department and let’s see how this thing works…

As promised, this blog now reflects current activities and developments in the saga of getting Fundisi.com on the road to a successful e-commerce site.

As of yesterday, Version-1 of the site is now history. (For interest’s sake you can still see what it looks like - but this will be temporary and will be replaced by something much better as soon as possible.)

Uppermost on my mind during the previous 24 hours has been what system to use for the new site. Do I begin DHTML/PHP/MYSQL programming from scratch; building the site pages; the secure shopping cart pages; and all the admin pages and consoles? Or do I piggy-back on an existing modifiable system as we did with Zen-cart?

Doing everything from scratch has the huge advantage that the programming is unique to the needs of Fundisi, while everything that we require can be realized exactly how we want it.

While there is much to be said for not “re-inventing the wheel”, we came up against some really awkward problems using Zen-Cart. Because we battled to get around the fact that it was not easy to create our unique “look and feel”, and to place the graphic elements and input forms exactly where we wanted to, we had to make many compromises. It made matters even more complicated when we attempted to implement the two-shopping cart system. (Click here for an explanation of our ill-fated two-shopping-cart system). I use the word “ill-fated” because, as of yesterday, the idea of the two-shopping cart system (as well as the site itself) has also been scrapped forever because it’s too complicated. The guinea pig site testers could not seem to come to terms with the idea.

On the other hand, yesterday I received lots of feedback from the Business Warriors Forum. (See my earlier blog post about this group). All the gurus giving advice emphasized the difficulty and time commitment involved in “programming from scratch”. They all suggested using Joomla, Drupal and other platforms as a basis. Having had exposure to Zen-cart, I was dubious.

Then, another possibility was mooted: Create the whole site using Wordpress as a basis.

More about this alternative tomorrow.

BTW, if you have anything that could assist my thinking and decision-making processes, please do not hesitate to comment on one of these posts.

What happens when the site sucks and you need to re-design it?

Late last week the sky fell on my head! In the process of publicising this blog, I received a comment from the Business Warriors forum (see my earlier blog post about this group) from a wise young man who knows much more about Internet commerce than I. In effect, he said “Re-design the main Fundisi.com site”. I asked him to be a bit more specific, and he obliged with a fair amount of detail. (Constructive criticism backed up with logical reasons might be hurtful, but it is very helpful.) Another comment was also posted on this forum from another expert. It was brutally critical (and even more helpful). Effectively they both implied that the site really sucks.

Now after so many months of development, I’m sure you understand that I have a large emotional attachment to this site. My first reaction was horror and annoyance. My next reaction was, “OK, they may be experts, but my site is designed to be easy for Joe Soap to use. It couldn’t be simpler…”

However, it’s important  to try and remain objective. I realized that I was far too familiar with the site and probably couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Time to bring in some guinea pigs who will test the site. Fast. The reason why I hadn’t done this sooner was because you’ve got to have a functioning site to test before you can test it. (Or so I thought.) Once we had the site more or less up and running, it was so far behind schedule and so over budget that all I wanted to do then was bring it on line as soon as possible. Money had run out, and my predominant feeling was that the site had better start bringing in some sales.

I quickly spanned in quite a few testers who were unfamiliar with the site and simply told them to browse the content, choose a course, and buy it. I gave them no instructions at all.

The results from the guinea pig test were frightening and left me in no doubt that the gurus were correct. “User unfriendly” was the consensus. Everything would need to be re-designed and programmed again.  Sure, some of the development programming code could be re-used, but, in essence, I start building a new site today.

The very expensive moral of the story:

Get feedback from potential users early and often. Since site evaluation is subjective, never trust your own judgement since you are way too close to the project.

From now on, this blog will reflect the development of a new site. This time, it will not be the re-telling of something that is done-and-dusted, but rather, I will be reporting back with information as it happens. My opinions, thoughts and decisions will reflect my current state of mind and may well be subject to change as the story unfolds. Stay tuned…