AA Blog

In designing and developing webpages, I am often asked to incorporate email marketing tools within the sites I build.   Well, I found a site that offer these types of tools& features and even more….

iContact is the best option out there for anyone who wants to send out email newsletters. They have great inbox deliverability, an extremely easy to use interface, great prices that start at $9.95 per month, lots of templates, and also include surveying, autoresponder, and blogging capability from the same application at no additional charge.

The application available allow small businesses, non-profits organizations, and associations to easily communicate online with their customers, prospects, and members.

They have an easy to use interface and over 300 professionally-designed email templates. The application allows you to track the opens and clickthroughs on your emails, add a sign-up form to your web site, segment your list, and manage your subscribers.  They will even take care of managing bounces and unsubscribes for you. In addition, they also take care of making sure your message gets to the inbox of your recipients through their ISP relations, feedback loops, and whitelist status. If you are currently running into deliverability issues with your existing newsletter sending method, iContact will be very helpful and ensure inbox delivery of your messages.  I cant begin to tell you the horror stories I have heard about developers doing things like this on their own from scratch.  The last thing you want to have happen is to get black-listed by your ISP for spamming.

This is definitely the tool that will make your life easier and make you look like a champ in the eyes of your clients.

More and more I am asked to create sites that accommodate shopping cart technology and ecommerce software.  I have gotten tired of creating these features from scratch and incorporating them into what I build.  So, after some searching, I was able to find a company that offer hosted chopping cart software.  This means all I have to do is integrate their technology into the sites that I create.  This makes my job easier and faster, which means I can collect faster.  The tools provided by this hosted shopping cart software vendor are intuitive yet powerful.  They allow for a multiplicity of options and are feature rich.  They offer great customer support and are able to answer any and all questions you may have and they provide the total solution.

Some of the other things they offer are:

1. TECH SUPPORT AND CUSTOMER SERVICE
2. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED STRUCTURE
3. EASY SOLUTIONS
4. AFFORDABLE SHOPPING CART SOLUTIONS
5. CUSTOMIZABLE DESIGNS

Im just glad I found them and I now use them regularly.

I develop websites as a side business and Domain Name Registration has become a part of designing sites.

Its amazing that in this day, people still do not know how to do this. As such, here is a step by step process:

1. Go to an official online Internet registrar (they provide the services of registering a domain name).
2. Search for the name of the domain name you would like to register. This process will let you know if the URL you are looking for is available.
3. If the name NOT available, enter a new name and search again until you find one that still available. You may also want to try a different suffix like .org or .net.
4. Once you find an available domain name you want, register the domain name.
5. Pay the filing fee online by following the instructions on the Web site.

The domain name registration process is that simple!!!
Thats it!!! The domain is now yours. All you need to do now is find a web hosting provider.

The other day, I had a client who wanted to add Online Surveys to his website. This had to be quick as he needed this to be up and running that night. After looking for some quick solutions, I came across Easy-poll.com!!!

This had to be the easiest thing I have ever done!!! Once I set up the poll on their site, I simply copied and pasted the code into the html of the page I wanted it to appear on and BAM!!! there it was…really that fast and easy. I was a bit skeptical at first, but the features provided and the ease of use to add a poll to the site was really amazing.

I was able to get this Poll feature up and running within literally a few minutes. All of the components are hosted on easy-poll.com’s website, so I didn’t even need to set up a DB. The poll results were accurate and more importantly the poll was (and still is) stable!!! I had control of everything I wanted the poll to be. Adding online surveys has now become a service that I will offer when developing sites for other clients.