Things you want on your site

This section on my site will soon have pages on how to add the following capabilities to your dreamsite.

Downloads

If you are selling or distributing digital products like eBooks or software you must provide a way for visitors to download. There are an unlimited number of requirements in this area (e.g. access levels, followup, serial numbering, logging, updating), no commercial product could possibly satisfy them. I will show you how to go about integrating downloads with tracking, testimonials, payment, serial numbering, etc.

Testimonials

When visitors see testimonials about your product they take notice. Testimonials and feedback can come from many sources and be prompted or

spontaneous. Never allow one to be lost. This feature of your site is divided between administration and sales. On one hand you need to decide how to archive incoming testimonials and what information to save with each. On the other hand you need to decide how to present the testimonials to maximize their impact.

Login Page

Intelligent sites need to know who is visiting to customize to them and give them access to selected resources. A custom login page and the infrastructure to make other pages respect and respond to login is a must have on any dreamsite. Your login page must give them the ability to create an account with basic access rights, edit their settings and retrieve their password via email if forgotten and it must integrate with the people and sales databases. A login page combined with a people database is the magic that makes it possible to restrict access to certain parts of your site. I will show you how to do this.

Education

You must give your visitors information, educate them to provide reasons to come back. Coordinating and maintaining control over content is a real challenge and most content managers like Mambo, PHPNuke, etc. are overkill, difficult to integrate, and a poor fit at best to any dreamsite. Your content has to be evolved, integrated, cross linked, leveraged, indexed. Since education pages are often managed in databases, an often overlooked aspect is getting them to place on search engines, I will show you how to put thousands of education pages in the top 10 on search engines.

Website Security

Security is a very general term and includes things like digital certificates and secure pages on your site, secure communication with payment institutions and management pages on your site, information gathering practices that do not leave holes for people to exploit. You just need to learn it in parallel with all other things as you mold a dreamsite. It is mostly common sense after you understand the basics of the internet, languages, databases, servers, etc. I will give you lots of examples and you will be able to learn from these what to look out for on your site.

Reports

With the advent of PDF generators and Adobe reader capability on all computers today any website can now produce graphical reports just like native PC applications. I will show you how easy it is to integrate reports into your site.

Invoicing

All of your sales records should be on your website with administration pages to query, edit and add them as well as functions to send invoices to customers via email and web FAX as and collect payment via your dreamsite. This is one of the most exciting aspects of web development, creating a totally online company that can be managed from anywhere.

Taking Payment

How do you take payment from someone on the internet. There are so many possibilities and there are so many montrocity commercial applications that try to shoehorn you into particular methods. You need to start out with a secure custom payment page that you can send anyone to to provide their credit card information and the invoice number and amount they are paying. Then you can evolve to using online credit card terminals, then to automatic payment processing buttons on your invoice administration pages and finally to completely automatic payment at the time of purchase. I will show how to head down the right roads to make all of this happen.

Contact Page

You need a page where visitors to your site can personally contact you and it should be handled internally by your website (they use the send message page and you login to your administration page each day to see and answer your messages). Since this system does not use email you get no SPAM. The page can use cookies to remember people who use it and can greet them in a customized way when they return. There are many possibilities that I will discuss.

Only custom-written web components can go down any road you choose!

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