I recently had this question put to me:

Hi Stefan,

I found your article while doing a search about sitemaps, so I figured I’d see what your take on it is.

I work at an agency that does small business websites, some as small as 5 or 6 pages, like an online brochure. I know sitemaps are useful, and help with SEO, but it’s part of our standard design to put text links to each page in the footer of each page. I think a sitemap page with 5 links on it is kind of silly, and a waste of space. Should we continue with the sitemaps or do the footer links suffice in those cases?

Thanks a ton!

I agree. Sitemaps are really useful when there is a lot of content in a web site - if you have a really simple site, it is probably overkill.

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There are plenty of articles on how to build an e-commerce website. The problem is that they speak to web-nerds and not to the business people who want to build on online business.

This article speaks to those not so tech savvy entrepreneurs.

What we want to do:

The goal is to create an e-commerce website that builds a business using all the cheap and free tools available in the market today. One great thing about the nerd driven computer revolution, is the strong sense of community and desire to give opportunity to the masses.

Because of this freely available cheap and/or free technology, it is just so much easier today to start a business than it was just 15-20 years ago.

These are some of the questions this article will answer:

1. What are the components of an e-commerce site, and how do you best get those components into your web site?
2. What makes an e-commerce website successful?

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Hi,

Have you ever loaded up a web page and found funny looking symbols in your text where there should just be normal text? Take a look at this screen capture:

Those funky symbols are appearing because you are using symbols (in your web page) that fall outside the normal character space range … you need to tell your browser you want to use international symbols.

To do this, you need to add the UTF8 meta tag:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>

And this is what you will get:

Hope that helps.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi,

I’ve been using Paypal to process my credit card orders since 2001 and overall, it’s a pretty good service.

… In fact, I would argue that Paypal is essential for just about any e-commerce site since it is used by so many merchants and most importantly, just ordinary people.

Paypal’s main advantages are:

• Easy to set up.
• Can accept several types of electronic payments: credit card, e-checks and Paypal.
• Since Paypal is so well known, it will put your clients at ease. You’d be surprised at how nervous people still are of buying products online!

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Hi,

I’ve been a advocate of website templates in commercial web design for years now, because it saves the designer a lot of time and in saves the clients a good chunk of cash.

… There are occasions where from-scratch custom design makes sense, but for most web design projects, templates are a great solution - especially with a little customization to make it look unique.

How to use Templates in the Web Design BUSINESS process?

I was recently asked by a web designer how I would show clients the templates that are out there? Do you send them to a template site (free or commercial) or do you do something else?

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