The thought of learning a new language can be a bit intimidating at first. Especially if instead of Spanish or Latin, that language is Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. To a novice this may sound scary and one may think that instead of hypertext, “this sounds Greek to me!” In addition to hypertext markup language is a stylesheet language, known as Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS.

With Volusion’s free templates, Design Gallery Access, InstantHelp and Built-In WYSIWYG Editor you can change the look of your online store with no HTML or CSS knowledge. However, if you do want to take some extra steps to jazz up your site, all web pages are written in ASP/VBScript plus HTML, giving you the ability to customize your store without limits.

Here are some great resources from HTML.net. The lessons are free and only take some time, and some determination.

Learn HTML Tutorials

HTML Table of Contents:

• Introduction
  A brief introduction to the tutorial and what you can expect to learn.
• Lesson 1: Let’s get started
  Find out what tools you need to make your own website.
• Lesson 2: What is HTML?
  Understand what HTML is and what it means.
• Lesson 3: Elements and tags?
  Elements and tags what the are and how to use them.
• Lesson 4: Create your first website
  Learn to create your first HTML document - the basic template for future pages.
• Lesson 5: What have you learned so far?
  Recap what you have learned so far and discover what you can expect in the next lessons.
• Lesson 6: A few more elements
  Familiarise yourself with seven of the most-used elements.
• Lesson 7: Attributes
  Learn to add extra information to your tags and formulate commands in a more explicit manner.
• Lesson 8: Links
  Discover how to create links to your own and other pages on the Internet.
• Lesson 9: Images
  Find out how simple and easy it is to insert images in your pages.
• Lesson 10: Tables
  Construct HTML tables for the presentation of structured content.
• Lesson 11: More about tables
  Create even more advanced tables.
• Lesson 12: Layout (CSS)
  Understand how Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be used to add fantastic layout to your pages.
• Lesson 13: Uploading pages
  Find out how to get your pages published on the Internet so others can enjoy them too.
• Lesson 14: Web standards and validation
  Learn about the common standard of HTML and how to check your coding is correct.
• Lesson 15: The final tips
  A few pieces of good advice for your website projects.

Learn CSS Tutorials

CSS Table of Contents:

• Introduction
  A brief introduction to the tutorial and what you can expect to learn.
• Lesson 1: What is CSS?
  A little on why CSS came in to the world, and why it is clever to choose CSS over HTML for layout and design.
• Lesson 2: How does CSS work?
  Learn the basic syntax of CSS and have to create your first stylesheet.
• Lesson 3: Colors and backgrounds
  Learn how to apply colors and background colors to your website and how to use background images.
• Lesson 4: Fonts
  In this lesson you will learn about fonts and how they are applied using CSS.
• Lesson 5: Text
  In this lesson you will be introduced to the amazing opportunities CSS gives you to add layout to text.
• Lesson 6: Links
  About how you can add fancy and useful effects to links and work with pseudo-classes.
• Lesson 7: Identification and grouping of elements (class and id)
  A closer look at how you can use class and id to specify properties for selected elements.
• Lesson 8: Grouping of elements (span and div)
  A closer look at the use of span and div as exactly these two HTML elements are of central importance with regards to CSS
• Lesson 9: The box model
  The box model in CSS describes the boxes which are being generated for HTML-elements.
• Lesson 10: The box model - margin & padding
  Change the presentation of elements by setting the margin and padding properties.
• Lesson 11: The box model - borders
  Learn about the endless options when using borders in your pages with CSS
• Lesson 12: The Box model - Height and width
  In this lesson, we will take a look at how you easily can define the height and width of an element.
• Lesson 13: Floating elements (floats)
  An element can be floated to the right or to left by using the property float
• Lesson 14: Positioning of elements
  With CSS positioning, you can place an element exactly where you want it on your page.
• Lesson 15: Layer on layer with z-index (Layers)
  In this lesson, we will learn how to let different elements overlapping one another using layers.
• Lesson 16: Web-standards and validation
  This last lesson is about the W3C-standards and how to check your CSS is correct.

-Stacie Leonard, Ecommerce Marketing/Copywriting

Technorati Tags: learn css, learn css free, learn css online, learn html, learn html free, learn html online, learning css, learning css free, learning css online, learning html, learning html free, learning html online

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Austin, Texas (PRWEB) October 18, 2007 — Volusion has just revealed a recent integration included in the newest version of its ecommerce solution with the advanced order management software system, Stone Edge Order Manager. The Order Manager is a complete back-office package for single and multi-channel merchants, which enables users to manage activity from multiple sales channels more efficiently and through a single portal. It began as a simple program for importing orders and printing invoices and packing slips, and has grown into a wide-ranging tool for e-commerce business management. “Stone Edge Technologies is pleased to announce the integration between the Stone Edge Order Manager and Volusion”, notes Barney Stone, President of Stone Edge Technologies. “The combination of one of the leading order management systems for small-to-medium web merchants with one of the leading shopping cart systems offers a powerful, but very affordable combination. Working together, they give small and growing companies the tools and the capacity they will need for long-term growth, plus immediate labor savings that can be used to help fuel that growth.”

Stone Edge Order Manager is currently used by over 1,500 merchants and was recently included in the 2007 Edition of the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Internet Retailer is the leading information provider for the e-retailing industry and its Top 500 Guide ranks America’s largest e-retail businesses based on their 2006 online sales. It was quite an achievement, and has added to the demand for the software from online store owners. “Volusion merchants have been requesting Stone Edge integration for some time now, and we are excited to launch it” stated Clay Olivier, COO of Volusion. “Stone Edge offers a cost effective way for our merchants to manage multiple channels, which will help them to efficiently grow their online business. We are very happy to be working with Barney and his capable team at Stone Edge.” Stone Edge Order Manger is one of the implemented requests from Volusion merchants included in its latest version.

More information on the benefits of integrating a Volusion Ecommerce Solution with the Stone Edge Order Manager can be found online at the Stone Edge Order Manager Integration Page.

About Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.: Stone Edge Technologies is a privately owned developer of affordable e-commerce software for small businesses. Barney Stone, a pioneer of database software for desktop computers, founded the company in 1983. Stone Edge began shipping its flagship Order Manager in 2000. Today nearly 2,000 Web merchants use the Stone Edge Order Manager to help streamline their businesses. Stone Edge Technologies can be reached online at www.StoneEdge.com.

-Stacie Leonard, Ecommerce Marketing/Copywriting

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If Home Depot or Macy’s had to physically pick up as many abandoned shopping carts as online merchants face everyday, they would have to hire employees to do nothing but stack shopping carts.

Fortunately for online merchants, there is no issue of clutter in the eCommerce world. Shopping cart abandonment is a serious problem though. Andersen Consulting and Forrester Research both show shopping cart abandonment rates at 25 percent. eMarketer’s research shows the rate as 32 percent. NetEffect and Greenfeld Online report shopping cart abandonment as high as 67 percent. Shop.org research goes as high as 75 percent.

While there seem to be as many different abandoned shopping cart statistics as there are marketing research firms, these statistics are not very favorable to online merchants. Understanding the causes can help any online merchant convert more visitors to buyers.

According to Forrester Research, the top reasons sited for cart abandonment are as follows:

* 57% - Didn’t want to pay shipping costs
* 48% - Total cost of purchase was more than expected
* 41% - Used the shopping cart for research
* 19% - Didn’t want to wait for the product
* 18% - Purchased offline instead
* 15% - Checkout process was too complicated
* 12% - Other reasons

How can you as a merchant prevent these reasons from getting in the way of a sale? Here are a few suggestions:

• Offer and advertise free or discounted shipping: Although this is perhaps easier said than done, it really is a great closing tool. If you cannot afford to offer free shipping, be sure that your shipping costs are not inflated beyond what a customer would expect to pay to ship it on their own.
• Take a look at the best shipping option for your business model. Options include flat rate shipping, free shipping, shipping by weight, shipping by price, live shipping rates, and live shipping rates using dimensional shipping.
• Simplify the checkout process. A checkout should take no more than three steps. If you are using Volusion’s One Page Checkout, this should be no issue, but many sites on the web still do not abide by this principle.
• Do not ask for customers to register before purchasing from you. Would you do this in a brick and mortar store? It is much easier for a customer to leave your online store than your physical store, so it’s not worth the risk.

In addition to our One Page Checkout, Volusion’s eCommerce platform now offers abandoned/live shopping cart statistics to manage and lower cart abandonment rates. If you are a Volusion customer, you can read about setting this up in our knowledge base article on abandoned/live shopping cart reports.

How do you try to handle the dilemma of lowering shipping costs? Share your ideas by posting a comment below.

–Michelle Greer, Volusion Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Conversion Tactics, Lowering Cart Abandonment, One Page Checkout, One Page Ecommerce, shopping cart abandonment rate, volusion

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Defining Niche Marketing
A niche market can be defined as a focused and targeted, marketable portion of a larger market sector. Niche marketing would then be, focusing ones marketing efforts on that particular sector rather than the market as a whole.

Who Could vs. Who Would
Although your online store may be open to everyone on the “world wide web”, your marketing efforts should be targeted to a particular part of this audience. Keep the phrase “smaller is bigger” in mind. Don’t waste your time and money marketing to everyone that could possibly buy your item or service. It’s not about who could buy your product, but who would be more likely to. If you have a general product for sale, you may feel inclined to define your market as “everybody”. But how effective is a message that is thrown into an entire crowd of diverse consumers? Not very. Take low fat yogurt for example. Yes, that food can be consumed by anyone. However, are you more likely to increase sales by pushing that item to middle aged women that may be looking to increase their calcium intake, or college-aged males that might eat yogurt simply because it taste good? It’s more effective to find a market with a stronger desire for the product.

The more you relate to a potential customer base, the more you narrow down their particular wants and needs and the better you can address those needs with your marketing message!

-Stacie Leonard, Ecommerce Marketing/Copywriting

Technorati Tags: choosing niche market, find niche market, finding niche market, niche market, niche market strategy, Niche Marketing, niche marketing strategy, volusion

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AUSTIN, TX (PR Web) October 8, 2007– After analysis of previous years’ holiday sales figures, Volusion Inc., a leading provider of eCommerce solutions, predicts that the biggest shopping day of the year will break the typical patter seen in most years this decade.

From 2000 to 2005, the biggest online spending day of the year fell on a Monday. Shoppers tend to spend time browsing in stores on the weekends and then buy gifts online when they return to work, where they usually have the fastest internet connections. This pattern held true in 2006 as well when on Monday, December 11th, consumers spent $556 million online. This was the biggest online shopping day in history. That was of course until Wednesday, December 13th, when consumers spent a whopping $667 million.

The biggest online spending day will be Wednesday, December 12th, 2007. The Monday halfway between Thanksgiving and Christmas has been biggest spending day of the year every year this decade with the sole exception of 2006. Like 2006, this Monday falls on a very early date in 2007–December 10th, to be exact. Merchants will be pushing their free and discounted shipping promotions that won’t end until the 17th or 18th, and consumers will respond to these later promotions by waiting to purchase on Tuesday and Wednesday instead of Monday. This was the case last year and will continue to be the case this year.

With more people online than ever, ecommerce retail sales will certainly break records this holiday season. Expect sales to exceed $750 million on December 12th, 2007.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist

http://www.volusion.com

Here’s a brief addendum to this article. Michelle Megna of ecommerce-guide wrote a very thorough and well-thought out article on getting prepared for the holidays. Take a look at this article about getting ready for this busy season.

Technorati Tags: Holiday Consumer Spending, Holiday Shopping Season, Holiday Shopping Statistics, Spending Trends, volusion

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