Web Merchant Resource Center

It’s official. WMS has relaunched its ExpressLane shopping cart as a free, downloadable shopping cart.

ExpressLane was developed to fit a particular niche of merchants who are small and need something more complex than our Quick Checkout Form, something more professional than PayPal, yet something less robust and expenssive than our “top shelf” shopping carts.

We have also found that merchants in this niche

• need a very simple, entry-level solution just as easy to integrate as PayPal “Buy Now” buttons on their site
• have websites already developed and don’t wan’t to have to “squeeze” their designs into a shopping cart template.
• need a shopping cart solution that can be easily custmized to their secific needs.

Read more about this FREE shopping cart here:

ExpressLane — the FREE ASP Shopping Cart

What may have worked a few years ago could be outdated today, so it’s important to constantly improve your Web site. However, a massive overhaul is just too much work to undertake at one time.

read more | digg story

At Website Guru the latest contest is going to award $20,000.00 to the most creative SEO contestants. You don’t have to be a genius to win, but need to be fun enough to make an impact!

read more | digg story

This article assumes that you have decided to start blogging for business and that you have decided to host your blog rather than use a hosted blog service
( see earlier articles if these two topics are new to you:
Increase Exposure for Your Business: Start a Blog
How to set up your blog for your business )

Once you have decided that blogging for business is an appropriate approach for your business, and you have decided that hosting your own blog is what you want . . . the next consideration to take into account is what URI to use for your blog.

That is, will your blog be hosted via a subdirectory on a hosting account and domain name you currently have hosted; or will it be hosted on a subdomain related to the domain you currently have hosted; or will it be hosted on a completely different domain name . . . . and maybe even on a completely different server and/or host provider?

Your eyes might already be rolling . . . . Admittedly, this is rather technical information to make your decision upon.

So let’s start with the differences between these variations in general first, and then apply this understanding to what to do with your blog.

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Ok, so you have decided that starting a blog would be an avenue for you to increase exposure to your business online and that you have the commitment it would take to start and maintain a blog . . . .

So, “how do I get started”, you ask.

Excellent question, and there are some important considerations to take into account before you do.

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Seems hardly a day goes by when some application or other doesn’t need to be upgraded these days.

We had been working on issues getting the WordPress plug-in, Subscribe2, to work on our blog for several weeks to no avail . . . and were waiting for their imminent release of version 4.5 hoping that would solve our problems. It didn’t; infact, we pretty much crashed our backend by upgrading to it.

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Web Merchant Services has spent the better part of the first quarter  of 2008 working along side iChapter Network to improve the iChapter Network application.

iChapter is a novel reservation management system specifically developed for non-profit organizations such as APICS — the “Advanced Processing and Inventroy Control Society” now known as “The Association for Operations Management” ( yeah, the acronym doesn’t work anymore ). For more about iChapter, see:
http://www.wmsmerchantservices.com/iChapter/default.asp

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Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing have come a long way since the days of meta tags and banner ads. One of the newer and rapidly growing strategies for marketing your business online is blogging.

There is a lot of buzz about blogs these days – they are rapidly reshaping social and news networking, but awareness of how blogging can increase exposure for your business online – and thereby increase profits – is really emerging relatively recently. Most online businesses have not yet started to blog. I mean, heck . . . . we only just started poking our nose into the “blogosphere” in early 2008.

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As we were looking at blogging as a new Internet Marketing vehicle/medium for our clients to take advantage of, we followed the  rest of the SEO herd to WordPress. All of the SEO’s that are promoting blogging to their clients seem to prefer WordPress ( with what seems to be good reason, but that is a topic for another post ), and what’s more, pretty much every blog we looked at worth looking at had the tell-tale signs of a hosted WordPress application ( WordPress.org as opposed to the WordPress.com option ).

So, to make that long story short, we settled on WordPress as the blogging application we would recommend to our own clients.

However, WordPress is a PHP/MySQL application, and we know what that means . . . . it would be “happiest” in a “LAMP” ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) environment while we run Windows, IIS servers supporting MySQL & PHP . . . but even though WordPress is a pretty darned sophisticated application, we wanted to prove that we can run it just as well on a Windows servers.

And, of course, we hit some bumps.

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It’s not news at all that LAMP ( Linux, Apach, MySQL, PHP ) servers handle many things via mod_rewrite and .htaccess.

Frankly, we’ve been jealous of what can be done so simply on a LAMP server via a .htaccess file that is just NOT so simple at all to do on a Windows server via IIS.

However, we’re never daunted . . . there is always a way!

Querying this subject via search engines will likely leave on with the impression that it just can’t be done as easily on a Windows/ISS server as it can be done on a LAMP server . . . .  but the brilliant minds at HeliconTech.com have cracked the nut! And WMS is righgt behind them.

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