Archive for the ‘Web Tips and Tricks’ Category
Because I have to collect a lot of information from customers regarding their FTP access, Admin access, etc., the easiest and most secure way I could find to do this was to use google docs. I recently had someone ask me how to embed a google docs form into their website, so here are some instructions that will help you do that.
1. Create the form at http://docs.google.com in your account
2. Click on the link to the form to see the spreadsheet
3. Mouse over the form menu and a dropdown will appear, go down to embed form in a webpage and click on that link – (see image)
4. Copy the iframe coding it gives you in the popup
5. Go into your ezpages and set up an ezpage for the form (Tools>Ezpages) – make SURE you are using Plain Text as the editor
6. Put a title in, put a sort number in the header, footer, sidebox, etc wherever you want the link to be, paste the code from google and save the ezpage
7. If you do not want a column to show up with this form, go to Configuration>Ez-Page Settings and you will see EZ-Pages Pages to disable left-column and EZ-Pages Pages to disable right-column where you can enter in the number of your ezpage.
8. When someone fills out the form, the information will be displayed on your spreadsheet in your google docs area of your Google account.
Hope this helps someone with adding a form to their zen cart website easily.
As fraud runs rampant on the internet today, many online shoppers are looking more and more for “reassurance” that you are a legitimate online business.
If you use authorize.net as your payment processor on your zen cart store, one way you can give your visitors an extra feeling of security is to display their verified merchant seal.
Here is the way you can do that.
1. Log into your authorize.net account
2. On your main page once you log in, you will see a menu on the left. Look under Account and you will see a link for Verified Merchant Seal to click on
3. Click on the Sign Up button.
4. Read the agreement (no worries – this seal is free) and click the appropriate places to say you have read and agree with the terms.
5. In the box provided, list any distinct / different domains that you have that are a part of your authorize.net account. (no need to add sub domains). While I do not know if it is required, it is a good idea to make sure the way you type your domain is the way you purchased your SSL certificate. Eg: www.yourdomain.com or simply yourdomain.com with no www before it. No need to put the http:// before the domain name(s). After adding the domain(s) to the box, press the submit button.
6. Copy the code that is provided to you and paste it into the desired spot on your website.
If you want the code in a sidebox, there are a couple of ways to do this. One way is by placing the html code provided to you into your banner manager. Another way is to install the Sidebox Editable in Admin zen cart module.
I have had clients ask me if they should purchase an SSL certificate and dedicated IP address for their zen cart hosting account with us, and my answer is always a resounding “YES”.
My rationale for this answer two-fold:
1. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificates encrypts your customer’s data by scrambling it up in a numeric process so that when it reaches the place it is supposed to go to (eg: authorize.net, paypal, etc.) it is then decoded and read. This safeguards your customer’s sensitive information.
2. SSL certificates also provides your customers the assurance that a 3rd party verification from the certificate issuer (eg: Comodo, Verisign) has been done to verify you are who you say you are. This is very important today as scammers are stealing people’s money and identities. Any savvy shopper will look for indications that your site is secure. If they do not see that indicator, they will most likely leave the site to shop somewhere else.
In my professional opinion, any web site that will be collecting sensitive information from their clients should have their own SSL certificate for their company. Using a shared server SSL certificate is not even close to professional and should be an indicator to your visitors that your business is not “successful” enough to afford the $100 per year for your own SSL certificate and dedicated IP. For this reason, we do not even offer a shared SSL certificate on our servers.
The latest version of zen cart – specifically the 1.3.9 series, focuses on several things including: security, bug fixes, speed and PCI Compliance.
For example, when doing a manual install of zen cart version 1.3.9, the software will force you to change the name of your admin folder. It will not allow you to log into your administration area without renaming the /admin folder and removing the zc_install folder. This is an important security feature, because hackers know that the standard name for the admin folder is /admin.
If you are using an automated installation program such as Fantastico to install your zen cart, it will automatically rename your admin folder name to zc_admin. Nice, huh? No… not really.
Keep in mind that hackers have the same access to hosting accounts with these automated installation programs. If they were to use Fantastico to do an install… they would see what the admin folder name is re-named to and from there can write their stupid little hacking programs to search for and try to hack into that folder.
It is ALWAYS in your best interest for security sake to rename your admin folder to something meaningful to you. Do not feel secure with the fact that the automated installation program has renamed your admin folder. Change it to something else – and don’t forget to change that information in your admin/includes/configure.php file as well. There are 3 different lines of code that you will need to change in that file.
Zen Cart has a great banner feature that you can use. But sometimes you may put in a banner and put in a URL for that banner, if clicked, to go to and you will get a blank page and the URL will lo
ok something like this:
http://yourdomainnamehere/index.php?main_page=redirect&action=banner&goto=banner#here
Solution: Check your includes/languages/YOURTEMPLATE/english.php file and make sure there are absolutely no spaces at the bottom of the file after the closing ?>
If that does not fix the problem, check your includes/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/common/header.php file and make sure there are no spaces there either.
There is probably nothing more irritating to me than to visit a website that takes FOREVER for it to load. If I am surfing the internet for something special, and run across a site that takes longer than a few seconds to load – believe me, I am on to the next site that came up in my google search! I don’t suppose I am much different than the average surfer or shopper on the internet – so to me this means that if your site is slow to load – don’t expect too much business from it!
While there are many reasons a site can be slow to load – one reason can be because the images you are using are too large in file size. Zen cart will automatically resize images based on the perimeters you set up under Configuration>Images in your admin area. BUT, zen cart does not optimize the images – they need to be optimized prior to putting the images up on the server.
I always recommend to clients that they make sure their largest image they use for products on their zen cart stores is no more than 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels long. If you have a photo that you upload that came off a digital camera – sometimes those images can be over 2500 pixels by 2500 pixels! That size alone would slow down a website if there were alot of images being served up that large.
If you have ever been to a site where you see an image that starts “developing” or showing at the top… and slowly shows the complete image – the reason for this could be that the original image on the server is huge, or that it is not optimized. Images that are not optimized for the web, will not only slow down the loading of the site but also use alot of bandwidth.
I have a client that is hosted on one of my dedicated servers that ran into this problem. In only 2 weeks time, her site used up a little over 25 GIGABYTES of bandwidth! No, she had not sent out an ad campaign to 5000 people or received hundreds of orders a day from her site… so traffic was not the issue. She told me that her images had been down sized to no more than 600×800 pixels, and was afraid that maybe people were hotlinking to her images.
Based on that statement, I took a look at her images folder in her zen cart and found that, while the images were indeed reasonably sized pixel wise, the file sizes were huge. I looked at her web stats and saw that over 95% of the 25 Gigabytes of bandwidth was attributed to serving up images. There were almost 1900 images in her images folder and all total they were 160 Megabytes.
I promptly used an image optimizing program, and reduced those images by 75% in file size which made them 44MB which is much more reasonable – and the images did not noticibly lose quality.
There are many great programs that will help you with optimizing the filesize of your images. One such program can be found here:
http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Download.aspx
I like this program because it is free – no strings attached – and because you can optimize many images in a folder with just a couple of clicks of your mouse! I have found that if you have more than 900-1000 images in the folder, this program runs out of memory. But it is well worth the time to divide the images into separate folders to get the results you want. This program is also nifty because it does not “overwrite” your original images, it saves the optimized images in a separate folder.