Here we present articles and reviews about Internet-related software. Whether you're a suit, ponytail, or prophead, we should have something to interest you.
E-commerce Resources (Web Developer's Journal). How to build online shopping sites. Tutorials on internet security, credit card merchant accounts, shopping cart software, and other electronic commerce help for home or small business.
eCommerce, Ecommerce, Electrionic Commerce, Web Commerce, whatever you want to call it, for us it's selling things over the Internet. You want to take orders on your Web site, your customers will pay for things with credit cards. It might be retail and it might be business-to-business.
We've assembled some articles and opinion pieces
that should help you find your way though the electonic commerce maze to get the
piece of cheese we hear is at the end.
Building
a Simple Ecommerce Web Site
You don't need to spend $millions to build an ecommerce
Web site. There are viable do-it-yourself alternatives at hand. These are cost
effective and require little technical expertise.
Tune
Your Ecommerce Site for the Rush
Christmas Rush, Easter Rush, Summer Rush or a bit
of brisk business next Friday. It doesn't matter when, the principles are the
same. Your servers and bandwidth have to be big enough. Your systems have to be
solid.
Is
SSL dead?
Most security experts have been aware of problems
with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), but they haven't been exploited extensively.
Chances are they will be, though.
Adding
A Dealer Locator To Your Site
Many large corporate Web sites have a "dealer locator"
feature that lets a user enter a zip code and get a list of the closest locations
to them. It turns out to be both cheap and easy to do.
Hey
wait! You didn't pay for that!
There's a dirty little secret about shopping carts: <whisper> most shopping
carts are abandoned full of merchandise before they ever get to the checkout counter!</whisper>
Find out how to reduce your abandonment rate.
Ecommerce
Tutorial
A detailed, three-part tutorial about how to set
up a simple ecommerce Web site.
Ecommerce
on a Budget
A simple, dependable, and inexpensive ecommerce solution
for small businesses is proposed.
E-commerce
in the UK
Multimillion pound savings are emerging from use
of the Web in the UK. Investment bank Schroders are looking to cut over one million
pounds from their annual buying costs. However, it's not all a smooth ride, as
Freeserve will confirm.
Do
the banks hold back E-commerce in the UK?
In the UK, doing business on the Internet is in
some ways still a frontier-town activity. The worst of the outlaws in this game
of Cowboys and Indians are the UK banks and credit card companies.
Shopping
Cart Programs Compared
Need a shopping cart? Here's an overview of your
options, from homegrown JavaScript to easy-to-implement turnkey solutions for
merchants.
NetObjects
Authoring Server Suite 3.0
NetObjects is shooting to alleviate the bottleneck
created when Webmasters are forced to do all the work of developing and deploying
Web content to Internet and Intranet sites.
EDI
as the Backbone of Electronic Commerce
Large and medium-sized companies have been doing business with each other electronically
for years via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
Toolkits
for a Distributed, Agent-Based Web Commerce System
This is an 8-part series. As information on the Internet
becomes more dynamic and heterogeneous, 'software agents' have been touted as
the new building blocks for a new Internet structure.
Ecommerce Environment
Why The Web Still Isn't Ready For Consumers
Despite early projections, consumers have not been overwhelming e-retailers with business. The questions we need to ask ourselves are why, and is there anything positive we can do to improve the situation?
Reducing
Online Credit Card Fraud
Credit card company figures show that 90 per cent
of consumers are reimbursed when their cards are used fraudulently, while 75 per
cent of online retailers have to eat the cost when they're the victims of credit
card fraud.
Gambling
Online And Offshore
Online betting and gaming revenues are predicted
to reach $10 billion by 2002. Interactive betting services are looking to attract
a new audience - the middle classes and women.
Dotcom
Bubble - "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"
Expect valuations in ecommerce companies and other
consumer business to go down even further. Somebody has noticed the Emperor is
nude and the stock market and venture capitalists are no longer prepared to pay
for his wardrobe.
You
Paid How Much For That Domain Name?
The domain name Business.com was recently sold for
a staggering $8 million. If you've got a domain name to sell, or you'd like to
buy one, where on the Internet should you start looking, and how much will it
be worth?
Archive
Electronic
CommerceBy Frank Griffel, Tuan Tu, Winfreid
Lamersdorf (editors)
Book review.
Web Commerce
Cookbookby Gordon McComb
Book review. Explains how to set up sites to sell
either tangible goods, or content. Includes a wealth of useful CGI scripts and
HTML templates.
Internet Commerceby Andrew Dahl and Leslie Lesnick
This is also a pretty comprehensive guide.
Frontiers
of Electronic Commerceby Ravi
Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston
This textbook covers credit card systems, EDI, electronic
cash systems, security, and much more.
Electronic
Commerce - A Manager's Guide by
Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston
Acid Pro 2.0
This program rocks! Acid Pro gives reviewer Oak Norton a taste of the future of audio composition.
Viscosity 1.5
With the dramatic improvements and cost reduction of CD storage and incredibly large hard drives, people will soon be moving from still shots of the family to video storage and home movies. Viscosity is a program that allows you to create and edit those movies and more.
Dreamweaver 3
The ease of creating DHTML, CSS and JavaScript features is just a beginning. What's equally impressive is the possibility of restructuring Dreamweaver the way you like it, adding new features and sharing them with others. With this open philosophy, Macromedia is paving the way into a new kind of software.
Adobe InDesign 1.5
Adobe's top-line page layout package, aimed at graphic designers, production artists, and prepress professionals. It can save to many formats, including HTML.
PageMaker 6.5 Pro
This fine page layout package is a favorite of the newsletter set. It's designed to produce print output, but also lets you produce HTML pages. You won't want to use it for your main Web editor, but if you're producing a print publication that you want to mirror on the Web, you'll find PageMaker 6.5 Pro mighty handy.
Dreamweaver 3 Fireworks 3 Studio
The release of both Fireworks 3 and Dreamweaver 3 should capture an even greater share of the Web tools market for Macromedia. By using them together, designers have access to probably the best design bundle currently available.
Microsoft FrontPage 2000
Microsoft FrontPage has been the Web design tool that "serious" developers love to hate, thanks to nasty code mangling and bloat, IE-only compliance and dependence on proprietary FrontPage server extensions. Whatever was saved using it as a handy visual design tool was lost in the agony of cleaning up after it. With FrontPage 2000, Microsoft has tried to address the concerns of serious developers while retaining and expanding their core audience. This release is significantly better all around.
Optimizing Graphics for the Web with Corel Xara 2.0
If I had to take one graphics application with me, on my laptop, to that fabled desert island, it would probably be Corel Xara. Now, if I were planning to create Web graphics on that fabled desert island, then it would be Corel Xara for sure.
Welcome to Apache
The Apache Web server is probably the most popular Web server in use today. This article covers the basics of Apache configuration (first part of a series).
How do I build a Web site with Linux?
Have you been debating whether to jump over to the Linux camp and try your hand at building a Web site on this upstart operating system? Or are you all ready to go, and now your only question is "how?" Lucky for you, Linux comes with a complete toolkit to get your site building in full gear, and even includes a Web server to make testing sites easier!
Getting the Most out of Adobe Acrobat 4
In this latest release from Adobe, Acrobat 4 offers a wide variety of useful new features. One of the things that makes the PDF file format so popular that those who receive your files will experience your documents as you have created them.
Web Publishing Programs
NetObjects Authoring Server Suite 3.0
NetObjects has teamed up with developers in the battle to build corporate Web sites with the release of Authoring Server Suite 3.0. With this product, NetObjects is shooting to alleviate the bottleneck created when Webmasters are forced to do all the work of developing and deploying Web content to Internet and Intranet sites.
NetObjects Fusion 4.0
After running Fusion through the paces of building a few demo (and one live) small business sites, I found it to be fast, relatively easy, and a good way to get a small business on the Web. Fusion, through a clever design implementation, and simplified integration with e-commerce services, is definitely a good bet for getting started on the Web.
ColdFusion 4.0 - A Positive Review
ColdFusion, for those of you who've never encountered it, is an alternative to the combination of Visual InterDev and Microsoft's Active Server Pages (or ASP) technology for creating high-level HTML for database connectivity and more dynamic Web sites.
ColdFusion 4.0 - A Negative Review
I have a tale of ColdFusion woe and have to add my 2¢ worth. I don't think ColdFusion is ready for Prime Time. " . . . let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend."
HoTMetaL Pro 5.0
SoftQuad's HoTMetaL Pro version 5 does an exceptional job at not only being good for the intermediate user, but also at being useful for beginners and advanced HTML designers alike.
Drumbeat 2000
Drumbeat 2000 is by far the best ASP (Active Server Pages) development environment I've ever seen.
PHP 3.0 Most Web application developers are divided into two camps - the Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) folks, and the Cold Fusion users. However, there are other options out there, and one of these, PHP 3.0, is in much wider use than one would think.
Dreamweaver 1.2 A graphical Web page editor aimed at the
pros. Take control of the latest browser features.
UltraEdit 5.20 Shareware HTML editor (an excellent text editor too).
Allaire HomeSite
3.0 "Our Favorite HTML editor. Feature-packed
and customizable."
Microsoft FrontPage 2000
Microsoft FrontPage has been the Web design tool that "serious" developers love to hate, thanks to nasty code mangling and bloat, IE-only compliance and dependence on proprietary FrontPage server extensions. Whatever was saved using it as a handy visual design tool was lost in the agony of cleaning up after it. With FrontPage 2000, Microsoft has tried to address the concerns of serious developers while retaining and expanding their core audience. This release is significantly better all around.
FrontPage
97 "Not Too Bad but a Bit Weird." - Paige
Turner
NetObjects Fusion "It's the best tool I've seen yet for
building and managing Web sites." - Fred Katt
Macromedia
Backstage "A powerful tool for building dynamic
multimedia Web sites." - Anthony J. Accetta
Corel WebMaster
Suite "Includes a great site manager and several
excellent graphic tools." - Charlie Morris
Director 7 Internet Studio
The sophisticated and powerful big brother to Flash gives Web authors as much as they can handle in multimedia authoring possibilities.
Operating Systems
How do I build a Web site with Linux?
Have you been debating whether to jump over to the Linux camp and try your hand at building a Web site on this upstart operating system? Or are you all ready to go, and now your only question is "how?" Lucky for you, Linux comes with a complete toolkit to get your site building in full gear, and even includes a Web server to make testing sites easier!
BeOS 4.5
With BeOS Release 4.5, the whole OS has been beefed up, producing faster, more stable, and more enhanced graphical capabilities while also changing the focus of the OS somewhat.
BeOS Designed around a Unix-like kernel, while retaining the friendly look and feel of a Mac-style OS, BeOS is a strong contender for the "big thing" in media development.
There's something better than Windows, and it's free! Linux isn't as scary as you might have heard. I'm writing this article in WordPerfect beta 8.0, which will be released for free in November 1998. At the same time, I'm browsing the Web with Netscape Communicator 4.5.
Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 and Red Hat Linux 6.0
The newest distributions of Linux are drastic departures from the Linux many of us know and love. What once was an arcane text-only system now offers graphical installs, plug and play, and full suites of applications.
Internet-based Real-time Quote Systems Can Java handle this most demanding streaming real-time application? Find out why most vendors of real-time financial quotes are sticking with proprietary Windows apps (for now).
Toolkits for a Distributed, Agent-Based Web Commerce System
This is an 8-part series. As information on the Internet becomes more dynamic and heterogeneous, 'software agents' have been touted as the new building blocks for a new Internet structure.
WebTrends Log Analyzer 4.52
What good is a Web site if you can't measure its success? Log files provide a lot of information about Web site traffic, but good software tools are needed to make sense of the data. With WebTrends Log Analyzer, Web staffers can produce high quality reports.
LinkBot
Bad links, malfunctioning site features, and glacial page loads cost you page impressions, customers, and respect. No matter what you do, errors will creep in, so it's well worth using a tool like LinkBot to find and fix errors on your site.
Ad Management Software Shootout
Ad management packages run the gamut from free scripts to big-ticket software packages. Here are details of all the available products, in all price ranges, including a features comparison chart.
Evaluating Ad Management Software Everybody wants to build cool Web sites and sell ads and get rich. You need to decide what kind of ad management software you need.
Laplink 7.5 A very handy tool that lets you transfer filessansnetwork, and control computers remotely.
Macromedia Flash 3
The best program out there for
creating animated Web content. A complete, object-oriented
authoring tool for producing anything from animated banners and splash pages to
complex, fully interactive multimedia presentations.
Photoshop 5.5
This powerhouse graphics editing package has been a standard for a while now, and the latest version, 5.5, contains a few long-awaited Web-friendly features.
Adobe InDesign 1.5
Adobe's top-line page layout package, aimed at graphic designers, production artists, and prepress professionals.
Macromedia Flash 3
The best program out there for
creating animated Web content. A complete, object-oriented
authoring tool for producing anything from animated banners and splash pages to
complex, fully interactive multimedia presentations.
Virtus WalkThrough Pro 2.0 for Windows The possibilities for sharing ideas for all kinds of things architectural, mechanical, or virtually anything conceptual are endless. [If you're thinking about VRML - Read This]
SimCity 3000
I don't usually review games for the simple reason that I don't play many games. Shoot-em-ups never held any interest for me. We artistic types like games that let you create your own fantasy worlds. Simcity and its successor, Simcity 2000, are old favorites that have stolen away many hours from you, dear readers. I've been awaiting the launch of Simcity 3000 with cautious anticipation, and can now pronounce it worthy.
