E-commerce

Online Sales

Selling a product or service over the internet is one of the most popular goals of a small business website. But even within that goal, there are still many possibilities as to the best way to handle e-commerce options.

A small company selling only one or two products may choose a simple option with static pages for product display, and a simple checkout system. They may even choose to outsource the actual sales portion to a third party such as Paypal. Or, you may choose only to display your products and product info online, and sell via telephone.          A larger company selling hundreds of products will need the ability to display product listings dynamically, that is, generated "on the fly," and the ability to easily add and remove products. The solution to this could be a database system, or a business may prefer to purchase a third party shopping cart, such as Miva Merchant, to integrate into the site. A variety of options are available to process the orders, either in "real time" or after your approval and confirmation.

We will discuss a variety of options with you regarding your e-commerce needs, and will work with you to satisfy your requirements and work within your budget. Please contact us to schedule a free consultation.

Database Driven sites and PHP

Content is King!

In other words, your users demand useful information, and they want it to be current, complete, and easy to find. If the content is out of date or stale, the user may not be back. If it does not provide them the details they want to know, it is of little use. And if the information cannot be easily accessed, what's the point?

If you have lots of products to display, or plan to make lots of changes and updates to your content (always a good idea!), the use of "static" HTML pages can prove impractical. A better solution is often the use of a database. The database can store any content you desire for your site - product information, news content, links, user names, passwords - virtually anything. This store information can then be retrieved and displayed however you choose on your website.

We have developed several sites utilizing the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language. MySQL is a very reliable, stable, open source database which is very well suited to web use. The PHP language allows us to pull information from the database and display it in the form of a web page. The possibilities of what information to pull and how it is displayed are virtually endless. We have used these tools to control dynamic news content, to create online catalogs, to store and display membership files, and to build fully customized, e-commerce shopping cart systems.

To take advantage of our skills with database driven site development, give us a call, or contact us for a free consultation.