Do you need to create professional layouts ready for the press? The most common options for this are Illustrtator or Quark, well known programs that helps you with this issue. But, if you a starting a business with really low budget, Scribus is a very good option for this task.

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.

Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
I tested Scribus and it’s really easy to use. Go ahead, test it yourself…

As many of you know, my company sells e-business applications all over the world. Many times we found customers that, in addition to an e-business application, they need a hosting service. In order to give an end to end service, we offer our customers a hosting service based on resellers plans that we frequently purchase online. Other customers what to purchase their hosting plans themselves separately from our services, and so they asked us how to choose between the different available hosting companies.
Here is my practical guide to choose a reliable hosting company. I’ve to admit that, since using these techniques, we never have a problem with any of the hosting companies that we resell.

1. Select the server operative system you need.
Before you start choosing the best hosting company, you should know if you need a Windows hosting or a Linux one. This depends on the application that you’ll host there. Ask your programmers and designers which server type you need; they’ll probably help you with this subject. Even some Windows servers also support PHP and MySQL, if you really need a Linux plan, it’s better to get a Linux plan and not a Windows one that supports Linux extensions.

2. Determine the amount of space you need.
Nowadays, almost all hosting plan has a huge amount of disk space and data transfer. But still exists some MINI plans that both features are not too high. Perhaps you are planning to host a small application and you only need a great amount of data transfer; maybe you are planning to host lot of media (images, videos, etc) and you require extra space. Before start looking for a hosting company, you should estimate the amount of disk space and data transfer that you business will need, at least, for the next year. You can also get help for your programmers and designers.

3. Search for well known hosting companies.
Once you know the server system you need (Windows, Linux, etc), and the disk pace / data transfer require for your business, you can start searching the web for companies that provides the hosting services. Don’t get into panic. You’ll find thousand companies that can be your potential hosting providers, but be sure that only a few deserve that responsibility. The best way for searching companies, is by recommendation. Ask your colleagues, talk with other companies and let them tell you their experience with their hosting providers. At this point, I recommend you to open a spreadsheet and gather all the information you find for each company in order to help you taking the final decision. It’s very important to pay attention and see if the company offers a plan that fits your need.

4. Find hosting reviews
Once you get a list of potential hosting providers, you can star looking how other people rated that hosting companies. There are many hosting reviews sites: FindmyHost.com, TopHosts.com, WebHostMagazine.com, RateMyHost.com, WHReviews.com, etc. You can find many good and bad comments over there. Some of them could be totally invented in order to position a company on the top; some of them are real costumers’ comments. Just check that reviews and see if how many good/bad comments that those companies have and make your appreciation.

5. Test their service
Finally, here’s the most important task in the process of choosing a reliable hosting company. As you could see, all hosting companies say that they have a 24×7 support. But.., is that really true? Here’s what I used to do:
I tried to contact those companies in some special holidays, for instance, on December the 24th, near midnight, or the day after. I also contact them on December the 31st near midnight, or the day after. I also check where in the world the hosting datacenter is located and figure which holidays that country have. For instance, if the company is located in the US, I contact them on July the 4th. I used to talk to a representative, via chat, or phone and ask them some commercial doubts.
Just figure this: If a hosting company has a commercial people waiting for your call or chat during that special days (and pays for that, of course), probably they also have a support team in the same moment in order to attend any customer call or requirements. So, they seem to be really prepared for any inconvenience, anytime, 24×7. In the other hand, If a company does not pay a commercial representative to be online and ready for your call or chat during that special moments, we can not infer too much about their support area, but clearly they do not have all their critical (sales and support) staff 24×7.
This is the most important part of any decision process for a hosting company. Test their service, especially their commercial one, during those hours and days that you know that almost everyone are celebrating, or sleeping. If they can attend you it’s because there’s somebody that will listen to you anytime.

I did a matrix decision with many hosting companies and I frequently updated it with this information. Many of them fail on the fifth evaluation point.

In order to end this article, if you need my personal recommendation, maybe there are many other really good hosting companies, some of them cheaper, but, up today, we trusted our hosting in the following companies that have really good qualifications: WebHostingbuzz.com, HostGator.com and Rexoy.net and I used to recommend them based on my experience.

If you are looking for a reliable hosting company, just follow this practical guide and do not base your decision only in the hosting price.

When opening your e-business websites you’ll probably need one or more forms from where your visitors can contact you without purchasing. The most common one is the “Contact Us” form, but there are many others that can be useful for your organization in order to segment your contacts depending on each visitor needs.

For example, many stores have, in addition of the basic “Contact Us”, an online form for those who wants to be affiliates or resellers.

If you don’t have a programmer and you don’t know haw to create them, you can user JotForm, a web based WYSIWYG form builder. Its intuitive drag and drop user interface makes form building a breeze. Using JotForm, you can create forms, integrate them to your site and collect submissions from your visitors. It has many preformatted forms, as:

It’s basic usage is completely free and comes with all the available tools that can be added to a form, including CAPTCHA, Star Ratings, autoComplete, and many, many more. Nice tool for everybody!.

Many times I was asked about an online application that let us create business presentations. I just find PrezentIt, a community where someone can create (by himself of in group), share and show business presentations.

This endeavor, created in Peru, allows users to create up to 30 presentations and store up to 30 MB of images.
 
Ah, by the way, PrezentIt is totally free. You only need to register. Nice tool, but, IMO, needs to make some extra improvements and increase the storage per user.

Are you planning to going e-business? Maybe your budget is not too much. In that case, you have to take care of any penny involved in this adventure. When planning your web design, you can hire designers whom can create exclusive artworks for your site, but this represents money.

A free alternative is using an open source wed design. One of my favorites is OSWD.org, where you can find hundreds of free designs for your site.

The Open Source Web Design project (OSWD.org) was founded in September, 2000 by Francis J. Skettino. Their goal was to provide the Open Source community with quality web designs to help get people’s projects on the web in a way that is both organized and good looking. From personal blogs to content managements systems to full fledged businesses, OSWD has been providing free web designs to those who need them for years.

Day after day, many people contribute with this project with their designs. Take a look, some of them are really beautiful!.

Are you selling products online? Do you have an online catalogue that your potential customers browse and search for their needs? The following article details which information are “a must” when considering publishing your online products – or services.

In Part I of this article I wrote about the main information that a product should have in your catalogue. I mentioned the title –or product’s name-, the description and the images. In this second part, I’ll like to write about some other information that you can add into your catalogue in order to attract more customers.

Price: Many people think that a catalogue without prices doesn’t work in an online business. That’s partially true. If you are selling articles that a visitor can easily find elsewhere, you should print your product prices in the catalogue. If you don’t, the visitor will go to another online store where this information is on and they probably shop there. In other hand, if your catalogue has only exclusive articles that visitors could not find in another place, you can ignore the price (of course, always is better if you have it, but sometimes is good to not publish the item price). If a visitor is interested in that article, you can ask his to fill a form in order to be contacted by a seller or a representative.

Previous Price: Many catalogues show both the previous and the actual price of an item. This is a good strategy only if you can control the situation. I mean, if the previous price is lower than the actual price, it’s no good to show both prices because it’s the same as saying your visitors “Hey, I just raised the price of this item; you should had bought this article yesterday, jaja”. And definitely, that’s not polite. I understood that sometimes you should increment the price of an item, that’s OK; but please, remember that, in this case, your e-business application should not show the previous lower price. In another situation, if your product’s price was always the same, don’t lie. Do not put a higher previous price just to get your visitor’s attention. That’s no fair and you can loose that potential purchase. Be honest. There are other ways to attract your visitor’s attention, many of them explained in these articles.
 
Category: In the internet there are many people that go straight to a catalogue and search for an item, especially if the store has hundreds articles. But, there is other kind of visitors that loves to browse the catalogue’s category tree. For them, your catalogue should be correctly categorized in one or more levels, and this depends on the amount of items and their classification. The item’s categories should go for the general classification up to the particular one. For instance, if you are selling vehicles, your first level category could be:
 
 Cars
 Vans
 SAV
 Trucks
 
Then, in the second level, Cars can be categorized by brands, or by origin (national / imported), and so one. There are many ways to categorize your items. You should choose the one that your potential visitors mostly use. In some cases, you can also have two or more category trees. For instance, in the same example, you can maintain the mentioned category tree and you can also add another one, where the first level is the vehicle brand (BMW, Toyota, Ford, etc.).

Brand / Author Name: If you are selling books, having the author’s name is a must in any catalogue. You should think in having this information not on the description (or not ONLY in the item description) but in a separate key field that can help you group many items with the same key. A books catalogue is a very practical example. Having the author’s name you can list all the books of a certain author. In other catalogues, this information is not so easy to determine. For instance, if your catalogue is about furniture, the key field could be the designer, of maybe the collection (2007 collection, etc). Just think in a field that can easily group your products by. Maybe you have more than one; in that case, use them all.

Item Code: Each item in your catalogue should have a unique code. This code can be your internal identification of that item. Even if you are selling products from many providers (and each one of them have their internal codes), you should normalize your items with an internal code. Having a code makes that item unique in the whole catalogue. You can receive purchases by many other ways (telephone, mail, etc) using the item’s code and you can easily integrate internal applications (such as your ERP, your CRM, etc) through this unique piece of information. If you don’t have a codification yet, you should think in one that can really helps your business.

For instance, you can choose an alphanumeric codification that helps you get quickly information of the item:

AA-XXXXXX-BB

Where AA represents the category, the XXXXXX represents the item number and BB the supplier code. Just think in something scalable for your business.

Weight / Size: If your catalogue has not electronic items (such as e-books, papers, etc), I recommend you to include the item weigh ant the item size. Almost always the total cost of shipping depends on this information, so your visitor should know them to take the purchase decision. The item weight is very important for any catalogue. Even you are selling books or phones, the weight is something your visitors always look for. The item size sometimes can be avoided. If you are selling CD the size does not matter, or is not very important, but, if you are selling furniture, your visitors should know the table’s measure in order to check if fits in their room.

Related items: Once your visitors took the decision of buying some product, you can invite them to buy some other related to the one they choose. For example, if the chosen product is a notebook, you can suggest them to by an extra battery, a computer case, or many other related items to the chosen one. This is also known as cross-selling. The items can be related reciprocal, or not. In the same example, the notebook and the case are not reciprocal related because if a visitor chose the case, you’ll probably not suggest the notebook. Having this option in your e-business application will represent extra margin per purchase and adds value for your visitors.

Related documents: Many manufactures publish their detail product specifications or technical information in pdf files (or any other format). If you are authorized by them, you could add this information in your product’s information so your visitors can download that documents and get extra information about the item. Once, in a vehicles catalogue, I saw a movie of the vehicle in a road, as a related document. It was very interesting because that information tries to introduce the visitors the ‘experience’ of driving that vehicle.

Next week you’ll find the third and final part of this article.

Do you have an online business? Are you planning to go online soon? Please, don’t forget to have a tool that verifies if the site goes down. Many hosting providers have these kinds of tools, but are only for internal use and you probably never get informed if the server goes down.

Montastic is an online tool that verifies your domain availability each 10 minutes. You can apply up to 100 domains verification and it’s totally free. The domains availability can be viewed in a Yahoo! Gadget too created by Montastic.

If there’s any problem with your domains, you’ll receive an email alert. Please, do not subscribe for this service using an account of the same domain you are checking, because in case the domain goes down, you’ll probably never receive Montastic alert.

Was 5 o’ clock in the afternoon and I was in that company for almost two hours, spending my time with the five entrepreneurs partners of a new online business store. At the end, they understood something so easy that, at first glance, I suppose it won’t take more than 15 minutes.

We were working in that project for almost 6 months. That represents too much time for an online project (at least, the ones I like!) At the very beginning, the idea was to open an online store that sells exclusive hand made products, so they called my company to help them with it. Yes, I supposed that in a couple months the store will be online so we started working hard on it. We quickly created a new logo, a website design and decided the ecommerce technology that the store will use. Those entire tasks were done in 5 weeks…

After that, they started to upload the products to the new catalogue. In the following 20 weeks, I figured how the company uploads and deletes products; they placed a product description and after 2 hours, they changed it to a new one; almost every picture was modified at least 2 times!. The product’s category tree was in their 4th release. And the store was not online yet!!!.

So, I met with those guys to explain them that, at the very beginning, it’s not very important that their products looks perfect, but they should be online to start face their business in the internet. After going online, they can continue improve their catalogue and other contents, but it’s necessary for them and their company, to going online soon.
 

If you remmennber how Amazon looks like when they launched, you’ll figured that their initial catalogue was not so developed as today’s one. But, going online at that moment helps the company to grow faster.

If your online business is prepared for their launch, many times is better to launch it as it is (perhaps in beta) rather than wait many more weeks. Search engines will not find your online business the very fist day you go online, and neither your potential customers. But doing a pre-launch will help your company with their positioning and their internet exposure. The spiders will smoothly start to find your initial pages and, at the time you finished with your beta release (while being online, of course), maybe your business became well positioned and with some traffic that represents potential incomes.
Finishing with my initial story, it took two hours for those guys to understand this simple advice because they couldn’t thing in nothing more than their products. It took me 15 minutes to write it down here. Be smart: If you are planning to go online, never expect to have the best catalogue before the company launch. Just do a beta pre-launch, go ahead, let your business ‘face’ the internet and improve it while it’s online. It will be healthy for you, your partners and definitely, for your business.

There are many factors than can combine themselves in your business to become it successfully. Of course, lot of them depends on the business type. Selling computers is not the same as selling books. But, after many years helping business for going online, there’s a common key for all of them that MUST be there to have a successful online company.

David Pogue, a New York Time columnist, talks about it in TED.
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. This annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). Watch the video and find what David Pogue talks about. For me, it’s the most important key that every online business must think about, before going online. Enjoy it!

Are you selling products online? Do you have an online catalogue that your potential customers browse and search for their needs? The following article details which information are “a must” when considering publishing your online products – or services.

Many times I helped companies going online with their e-business. One of the first things I ask them is if they really have rich information about their products to put it online. So we start talking about their ERP and how that application manages their products catalogue in order to export them to the ecommerce application.
 
Once, a customer says: -I do have the information of all the products I sell in my 30 stores. Wait me here. I’ll back with you in a minute.
After five minutes, he returned from his office with more that 30 magazines and he started pointing me the products he sells.
-This is my catalogue. I manage all the product information from these publications.

At first glance, I thought he was kidding. How a 30 stores company could manage their catalogues with only some industry magazines? No information was stored in any application or system.
 
Time later, in another company, the customer brought me their digital catalog to be published online. It was a spreadsheet with lot of codes, and where almost each word was truncated because their ERP product tables didn’t support long names. So, I received information such:

HAND MADE FLWR.POT W/ DECOR. RINGS M. SZE.

He pretends their online visitors understood that the product refers to a “Hand made flowerpot with decorative rings – Medium Size”. Inedible, don’t you think? And that was one on the most legible names!.

When going online with your products catalogue in order to introduce your company into the e-business, you should understood that the online visitors can not touch nor sense the product, so extra information in needed in case you really want to seduce them with that item. It’s not the same as selling the product in the real store, because with no extra effort (just putting the product in your shelves and with a visible price will be ok), the product can be purchased by anyone inside.

So, what’s necessary for publish your products online?

Name: The name you’ll use for your product must represent the best description of it. You should not use very long names (such as “Exclusive purse made in Italian leather with bronze decorations, double organizer inside and three extra compartments outside…) because your visitors will not pay attention to them. In other hand, do not use very short names that let you apply the same name for different product (for example: Leather purse). Choosing the right name for each product will help your visitors understand what that product is and, in case they are interested in, read more information in the product’s description.

Images: In the online catalogues, especially those ones oriented to final consumers, the image is the first thing that most visitors focus their attention. If that image is nice, bright and clearly shows your product, your visitor will become interested in the product and go ahead with the description. If not, you will be losing a potential purchase.
On every catalogue, there are several images that can be easily found for each product:
Thumbnails: These are small images that have no more than 3-5 Kb each. Thumbnails are very useful when a page displays more than one product, for instance, when your visitors browse a category, or when they do a search in your catalogue. Because many products appears in one page, you have to show all with a tiny image in order to let them see, at first glance, which product is the one they are looking for. Using small size images will decrease the total time that the page loads in the browser. Remember, visitors don’t like to wait too much. Depending on the catalogue and the design, thumbnails could be from 90 px. width up to 150 px. width.
Normal Size: Once a visitors clicks on a certain product, the catalogue must show all the information of that item, including an image larger than the thumbnail. I call this a normal size image. This picture should have more quality than the smaller one, and has to show your product in their best face. The main objective is to attract your visitors purchase decision with that picture or, added to it, with the item description.
I personally like normal size pictures with a white background, because they focus on the product and nothing more, but I saw many sites that have very nice pictures with background that looks really fine. Having or not background depends on the product type. For instance, a digital camera will look better without any background, but a dinner table should have a background n order to help your visitor’s imagination figure how that table fits their rooms. Depending on the site design, normal images size should be no more than 50-60 kb.
Larger Images: many people like to see the product detail, especially when they have special details, such a home made flower pot or a leather purse. Those details only appear in larger images that can reflect with precision those little things that can finally decide the purchase. These images should be accessible with a click on an icon, near the normal size image or close to the product description. Many catalogues use popups to show these large size images in order to maintain the main window open. Other catalogues uses some extra tools because they know that popups are blocked by many browsers. Larger images have no size restriction. If a visitor wants to open them, they know that it may take more time to show this detail picture. Having more that one larger size image will be useful, in case they show your product in different positions, angles or capture different details.

Description: Once your visitor get a good impression with the thumbnail and the product title (in that order), the description should finally help the purchase decision. While the thumbnail is shown, only a short description or your product should be available. When the visitor click on the item, a more detail description is required. I’m tired of seeing online catalogues with very nice products and at very low prices, but, with poor descriptions. Those catalogues don’t sell all they could because people are not attracted with those catalogues. Many visitors think that if a store doesn’t pay much attention in the online product catalogue, they should not care enough for their online costumers; so, they decide to buy in another place. Detailed description should be different according to each product type. A book should have different detail than a video camera. For instance, an electronic product requires all the product specification (maybe bulleted), and a couple paragraph about the product benefits.

Next week you’ll find the second part of this article.