ECOMMERCE BEGINNINGS - XXXII

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

My main website Original New England Enterprises is currently ranked at 437,238 by Alexa.com. While my site is receiving traffic and is ranked well, it is not getting very many final "click throughs", i.e. the purchase of the products that I am marketing. I have been puzzled as to why this isn't working the way I had hoped. So, I recently had a few people review my website to get their "unbiased" opinion on the layout, content, etc., etc.

Some of the feedback surprised me. Comments like: confusing, too many steps "clicks" to reach the main objective, etc.

Sometimes it is hard to have a completely open mind when people are offering you advice. It is easy to get a little defensive on the subject. It is almost like someone saying that your child, who you think is the best thing since sliced bread, may not be "perfect"!

After listening to this advice and thinking about it for a day or so, I realized that I completely agreed with what they were telling me. Sometimes the most obvious things are right in front of you.

So, I took their advice (the main advice I received was that my home page and my ecommerce solution page were too similar, i.e. they had duplicate content and therefore placed an extra step in the process to reach the main goal of providing useful content and of obtaining a sale.

I ended up spending several hours on Saturday and Sunday combining the best of both pages, eliminating duplicate content, and trying to get the new page to be highly focused and on target with the message I am trying to convey in respect to my three main ecommerce solutions:

• website development
• wholesale product sourcing
• successful marketing

Hopefully within the next few weeks I will start to see some positive results with the redesigned home page and the elimination of the "duplicate" ecommerce solution page.

My final advice for 2007 is:

• Keep an open mind

and

• Listen to the advice of others!

I hope everyone had a successful, healthy and happy 2007. And hopefully 2008 will be even better!

HAPPY NEW YEAR

That's all for this week! (and for 2007)

As always, I wish you the best in your success! We hope you found this weeks' article interesting and/or helpful.

Make sure you stop back each week for our latest installment. Take care and have a great week!

Mark@original-new-england-enterprises.com

Original New England Enterprises

Ecommerce Beginnings - XVII

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

My apologies for not posting last week. The database creation is still a work in progress. It seems that in addition to the MySQL database creation, that in order to take the next step, which is for the database to display, you need to use another programming language, PHP. From what I have learned PHP is a server side HTML embedded scripting language. Huh? What does this mean? I really don't have a clue what this means. All I know is that this means there is one more step needed to make all of this work.

I'm also working on uploading all of the files for the companies that will be part of this database. This is also taking quite a bit of time to do. The good thing is that this keeps me out of trouble and I am constantly learning new things concerning programming, etc. The online education continues!

The new anticipated release of the database together with the new websites has now been moved to June 1st. This way I will be sure to have it completed by then and will not have to keep changing the completion date each week.

That's all for this week!

As always, I wish you the best in your success!We hope you found this weeks' article helpful. Make sure you stop back each week for our latest installment. Take care and have a great week!Mark@original-new-england-enterprises.com