Calgary Web Designer Jenn Armour | Info Architecture + User Centric Web Design + Online Marketing + Social Media + Ideas

Comparing 4 popular Open Source E-Commerce solutions and their payment gateways and shipping modules.

Zen Cart

a. Standalone package
b. Hard to customize
c. Lot of modules in the box
OSCommerce

a. Standalone package
b. Hard to customize (more harder than Zen‐Cart)
c. Lot of modules in the box

Open Source is defined in Wikipedia as “Open source software (OSS) began as a marketing campaign for free software^[1]. OSS can be defined as computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets theOpen Source Definition.

You can think of SEO as on-page jiggying.  Anything that is done on webpages in order to generate targetted traffic to those pages is optimization.  SEM on the other hand refers to any and all types of off page marketing efforts.  Search engine optimization is generally more technical and requires a deeper understanding of the different engines and algorithms.

SEM’s primary goal is to draw traffic.  Specific traffic. Some general ways this is accomplished is through:
 

• Traditional Ad’s (Pay Per Click)
• Pay-for-Inclusion
• Email marketing 
• Link exchanging

In dealing with small and medium business for over 6 years I am still surprised at the prevalence of search engine marketing mis-conceptions. Here are the top mis-conceptions:

1. People are going to find any website you build

Think of the Internet like a big phone book. A lot of businesses advertise in the phone book, but those that get noticed are those that have large advertisements and a lot of information. Just as you need to put a lot of thought and work into an advertisement in the phone book, you need to put a lot of thought and work into a website in order to get noticed.