News From Flying Orange Tips, Tutorials, Marketing, Design and more for building a website.

22Apr/090

Custom Slideshow with Order Form

One of the photographers that I work with, Crystal Spath from Reflections by Crystal, asked me to create a custom slideshow for her clients who wanted to share photos with friends and family outside of the studio.  In turn, sharing these slideshows would give the opportunity for friends and family to order their own photos.

I suggested that with the slideshow, add a custom order form so that friends and family could immediately order the portraits online, thereby cutting down phone time and automating the process a bit more. For added protection, the page is password protected so only those with the username/password can view the page.

The slideshow uses a Flash image rotator with a logo watermark to protect the image. The order form is using Mals-e shopping cart system with a Multi-Item Add form including drop-downs to select from the various poses. Ideally this works best for items that are single choices from a drop-down but we incorporated collections and packages that the customer can indicate their choices during the checkout process.

If you are interested in a custom slide show or order form for your website, please submit a FREE Quote or contact me for further information and pricing. Pricing will vary based on size of slideshow and number of options for order form.

17Apr/090

How can Google Base help my website?

I haven't always concentrated solely on web design. At one point, I was the owner of a retail website, River Street Gourmet, that sold gourmet foods, teas, coffee, mixes and other food related items. I struggled as most do at first with getting my products on the Internet and ranking. The biggest thing I wondered, HOW could I get my products out there for the millions of Internet users to see and compete with like products.

The answer was Google Base, formerly known as Froogle.

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we'll make searchable on Google (if your content isn't online yet, we'll put it there). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. In fact, based on your items' relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Google Product Search, Google Maps and even the main Google web search.

Google Base lets you describe your items with detailed information called attributes, which will help searchers find your content more easily when they search on various Google properties. Attributes are words or phrases that help describe the characteristics and qualities of your items. For any given attribute you may enter multiple values separated by commas.

With Google Base, my products appeared within search results driving traffic and most importanly, BUYERS, to my website. Within weeks I saw an instant increase in sales. And best of all, Google Base was FREE to use. No service charges for the service, no fees, just the time and effort to create the feed.

Sounds simple right? Do you know how to put your feed together? Do you want to spend the time putting your feed together? Let me do it for you!  Accurately and affordably! For further information about my Google Base service, please click here.