The world wide web has become the world’s #1 source of information. While newspaper advertisements have been somewhat historically effective, the fact remains that it is a gamble whether or not your target audience will actually see them. It has become more of a gamble, as most newspapers offer free online versions of their printed articles funded by corporate advertisers, thus eliminating the need for a traditional subscription. In addition, a newspaper advertisement is typically “one and done”, meaning that once that issue has been distributed, your target audience has only that one chance to view your ad, then it’s gone. Does this really give you the most effect for your advertising dollar?

Similar to newspaper advertising is direct mailings. How many flyers do you need to send out just to bring in one customer? How many of those flyers end up in the trash or a recycling bin without ever being read? Probably more than you’d like to think about!

By contrast, in our technology-driven society, a very large portion of the public has internet access at home, at work, or both. More and more people use search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing, to research products of interest and local businesses. Believe it or not, your business is probably already on the internet… the problem is that you have little or no control over the information that is already there!

Having a website for your business is the equivalent of having your business open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, along with an advertisement that’s never tossed in the recycling bin. You are in complete control of the public image your business portrays, and users can find pertinent information, such as store hours, locations, and phone numbers, as well as your current sales and promotions, at their convenience. With a website, your sales flyer or advertisement is never “yesterday’s news”!

Ready to talk about how a website can improve your business and connect you with your customers? Give us a call today at (814) 723-4597.

A calculator can be a great asset for your website. For example, if your company lends money, your website could benefit from a loan payment calculator, so your customers could see what their payments would be, based on the amount borrowed, interest rate, and length of the term.

We can create a calculator to perform any calculation that you have a mathematical formula for. We recently built a Gold Value Calculator for a Pawn Shop. The Pawn Shop buys scrap gold from it’s customers. With our Gold Value Calculator, the customer can get an idea of what their gold is worth, on the Pawn Shop’s website, before they take it in. The Pawn Shop also uses the calculator to determine the value of their customers’ gold items, after verifying the authenticity and weight. Our Gold Value Calculator has proven to be such an effective tool, that one of the Pawn Shop’s competitors actually uses the calculator, on the Pawn Shop’s website, to determine Gold Value for his clients!

Our calculators are written in PHP. We prefer PHP over Javascript, because it is fast, effective, and hides the mathematical formula from potential copying. Viewing the source code of one of our calculators will only reveal the same information that can be seen on the screen. The mathematical formula is never displayed. 

Try our Gold Value Calculator Demo - be sure to right-click and view the source code of the calculator. Note that it doesn’t reveal the proprietary mathematical formula that performs the calculations.

With new requirements for server security, many older osCommerce stores are not able to run with the new settings. A common error seen in these older stores is:

1054 – Unknown column ‘p.products_id’ in ‘on clause’

select count(p.products_id) as total from products_description pd, products p left join manufacturers m on p.manufacturers_id = m.manufacturers_id, products_to_categories p2c left join specials s on p.products_id = s.products_id where p.products_status = ‘1′ and p.products_id = p2c.products_id and pd.products_id = p2c.products_id and pd.language_id = ‘1′ and p2c.categories_id = ‘85′

[TEP STOP]

What to do? Chances are, you probably paid for a nice template and spent lots of time adding your products and building a customer base over the years. The simplest solution is to have us upgrade your store to the latest version of osCommerce, keeping the look and feel, as well as your products and customers intact. We write custom code for your template, then move your products and other pertinent information over to the new store.

Ready to get started? Contact us by email, or give us a call at (814) 806-3505 to receive a custom quote on your store.

We also build new osCommerce sites from scratch, to your specifications! For pricing info on new stores, visit our other site – Dealer Catalogs. Be sure to view our Portfolio, while you’re here.