Logo Design Articles

by Andrew Mottershead (www.mindstream.co.uk)

If you have product to sell online you may be wondering how to set up shop without spending too much of the green stuff. There are many off the shelf software products out there or you can have a web developer
create one from scratch. However this costs.

One way around this initial outlay is to base your website on one of thesource offerings.source software is distributed with the source code freely available for alteration and customisation. Using an
source shopping cart as the engine behind your site gives you a thoroughly tested foundation that can get your store online in days rather than weeks. (more…)

By Dennis Dadey© 2004

Making profits with your existing website design or creating a new online store can be exciting, affordable and most of all; rewarding. Mmmm . . . that’s what the last sales guy told me.

What is eCommerce (or selling via the Internet)? It is similar to selling through a physical building’s business storefront, with one big difference: the costs for eCommerce are lower. The lower costs alone make it a lot more affordable for someone to start up a business or expand their storefront business onto the Internet.

So, the cost to do online business depends on how much time and effort you are able to put in and the eCommerce developer you choose to work with. Generally, developers should try to enable their clients to be as independent as possible in areas such as daily site updates, processing online orders, customer feedback and low or no cost (except time) online marketing. (more…)

By Ron Ruiz

Having a successful member only, paid membership site is one of the best ways to make money online. A successful membership site can give you the steady income of a CEO ….but without the job!

For example if you had just 200 people paying you just $20 a month, you would have a steady cash flow of $4000/month, month after month, rain or shine. Many people accomplish this the first month or two their site is up. But that’s just the beginning. Some individuals have member only websites that generate 5-10x that amount of money!
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By Jakob Jelling
http://www.sitetube.com

In addition to Google’s Froogle shopping service (still in beta), which features a searchable database of online merchants, Google is also beta-testing their Google Catalog service. Google Catalogs provides a searchable central repository of hundreds of mail-order catalogs.

The service includes the full scanned contents of the catalogs, not just a photo and subscription information. And these aren’t database entries, but real high-quality images of the catalog images themselves. When you are browsing Google Catalog search results, you will see user interface controls at the top and bottom of each page. These are reminiscent of Acrobat and many other browser plug-in controls or common Windows print preview controls, and you can page through each catalog, zoom in/out, switch between one, two, and thumbnail views, jump to a specific page, and search within the current catalog. As with other Google searches, an advanced search feature is also available. (more…)

To conduct business on the Internet, whether informal, one-time only transactions between two friends, or a full-fledged business selling products or services, payment arrangements have to be made. Before 1998, this often meant either checks sent through snail-mail, or very expensive, and often hard-to-obtain, merchant accounts for online credit card processing. In 1998, PayPal was introduced to fill the payment processing gap.

PayPal now has about 50 million members, but was originally introduced to provide a payment processing service for online auction buyers and sellers, in particular, eBay. Since then, PayPal has grown into the premier third-party payment processing service. In fact, PayPal was so successful that eBay bought the company in 2002, replacing their own Billpoint service with the far superior PayPal service. (more…)

When you’re having a hard time choosing which print media to use for your products and services, then think of postcards. Postcards are one of the marketing tools that can effectively deliver your message to your target clients.
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Macromedia has a wonderful software application that helps users create great-looking text graphics by using anti-aliasing capabilities. In Fireworks MX 2004, artists and designers can create readable and attractive text graphics by substituting shades of the font color around the lines and curves, which otherwise can be broken and craggy in appearance.

Fireworks Anti-Aliasing Capabilities

Anti-aliasing capabilities have been with Fireworks for quite some time now. With the new edition, Fireworks MX 2004 enhanced further its four anti-aliasing options and added two more features.

Its anti-aliasing options include: None Anti-Alias, which disables text smoothing; Crisp Anti-Alias that allows the creation of a sharp transition between the edges of the text and the background; Strong Anti-Alias for a very abrupt transition of the text edges into the background, while preserving the shapes of the text characters and improving on the detailed areas of the characters; and Smooth Anti-Alias that lets the users create a soft transition between the text edges and the background.

On the other hand, the new anti-alias options are the System Anti-Alias that uses the text smoothing method which can be found in Windows XP or Mac OS X; and Custom Anti-Alias, which provides expert level controls (such as oversampling, sharpness, and strength) over the anti-aliasing. (more…)

Any new website venture online will include a domain name. Sometimes the domain is purchased from a domain broker – someone who specializes in reselling domain names. The majority of the time, however, it will be registered through a domain registrar. No matter how it is purchased, in all cases, the domain name (or names) for a website should be carefully considered. The basis of the marketing for the website will be the domain name chosen.

Having been a domain name appraiser for a few years now, I can tell you that the choice of names for your site is critical to marketing. When I appraise a domain for value (in both dollars and marketability), I use basic criteria for my judgment of the domain. The most important of those criteria is length and readability. If the domain is too long or too hard to read (for a human), its value is very low. If it cannot be spoken and typed correctly (most of the time), it’s also of low value. A well-thought-out domain name is the first step in a successful marketing campaign. (more…)

On the World Wide Web your domain name is your own unique identity. No two parties can ever hold the same domain name simultaneously; therefore your Internet identity is totally unique. If you have a business site on the Internet your domain name is your own online brand and in a sense you can use your domain name as your online business card. With your own domain name your web site, and e-mail addresses for example will have that professional look, being unique to your business. Many people often miss the importance of having and then keeping their domain name until they lose it. Once this happens they soon realize that they have lost their whole online identity.

How does a domain name work? To understand why you need a domain name you first need to know how a domain name works. (more…)

Once you have figured out a name for your ‘domain’ it can be really confusing trying to decide on what should go after the “dot” (i.e. com, net, org, etc…) in your domain name. This part of the domain name is referred to as a top-level domain (TLD) and knowing the difference between each top-level domain is important when choosing your domain name.
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