Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

This is a guest post by Steven Chappell.

No one can deny that the Internet has radically changed the way we do business in this technological era, and practically every business today from the small company to the huge enterprise recognize and utilize this powerful medium to sell their products and services.

The influence that the world wide web has had on economy in recent years is incredible. According to The IMRG Capgemini E-retail Sales Index, over £46 billion was spent online in 2007, with around £15 billion of that amount during the holiday season alone (Nov 1 to Dec 31), marking a 19% increase over the previous year.

This growth of online spending makes it crucial for you to choose the right e-commerce platform for your business in order to have a competitive site for your customers. There are many different platforms available at varying prices, but the choice can be a little bit overwhelming for the inexperienced.

Some of the most important features of any platform that have to be considered are, security, scalability, reliability, and support. When choosing an e-commerce platform it is vital that you take these aspects into account as you not only want to make it as easy as possible to accept payments from your customers, but you want them to feel assured in the knowledge that their transactions are completely secure. It is also important to evaluate the different costs associated with each platform.

Let’s consider three e-commerce platforms that are well established, and how you might decide which one is best for your business.

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Nearly everyone has a digital camera these days, and it’s never been easier to snap off a quick photo and upload it to your website or email it to a friend. The only problem is, not everyone appreciates your 4MB mega-image in their inbox. So it pays to resize images, optimising them for the medium you’re going to use them in.

Last week I came across a great little Adobe Air application called Shrink O’ Matic. It’s a completely FREE cross-platform desktop application that allows you to drag and drop an image into the application’s workspace and resize it for the web. As I often get clients complaining that they can’t get their 5 gigabyte folder of photos through to me for uploading onto their site, I thought a few people might find this very useful.

Step 1 - Download Shrink O’ Matic

Shrink O’ Matic is a free application that can be downloaded from the Shrink O’ Matic website. On the home page of the site, you’ll see a button labelled ‘Install now’. Clicking the button will advise you that the installation is about to begin.

If you don’t have Adobe Air installed on your computer, the installer will do that for you too. Once the installation starts, simply follow the prompts, until eventually you complete the installation and the Shrink O’ Matic application launches.

Step 2 - Working with Shrink O’ Matic

Once the Shrink O’ Matic application launches, you’ll be presented with the following screen:

At the top of the application screen you’re presented with a 3 options, which need to be correct before you import your image for resizing. Let’s go through them one-by-one.

1. Output size: Here you can determine the physical dimensions of the image you’re resizing, either by stipulating dimensions in pixels, or by using a ratio percentage relative to your original image.
2. Output name: In the second option pane you’re given the choice between saving the output image with the same name, or renaming it (I’d recommend renaming your images so you don’t overwrite the originals). While it’s not shown on the screenshot above, there is also an option to ’specify an output folder’ which allows you to save your resized images to a specific location. I generally opt for the Desktop so I can find my images immediately.
3. Output format: You can choose to change the format of your image or leave it the same. If you’re resizing photos, your best option is to choose JPG and adjust the quality down to around 50%. This will give you a final image that’s optimised for the Web.

Shrinking images

So you’ve set up Shrink O’ Matic’s preferences just the way you want them, and now you’re ready to resize an image. You can either drag and drop an image from your Desktop or a folder into the bright yellow window, or click on the Browse button and search your computer for your image.

Hey Presto! You’re done. If you navigate to the output folder you selected in step 2 above, you should find your resized image. I’ve tried a few images from my digital camera, and the output sizes are perfectly suitable for the Web and emails.

If I had one request for the Quentin T, it would be to allow cropping of images. It would probably make the application a lot less intuitive, but it would allow a bunch more versatility, and I wouldn’t need to open Photoshop quite as often. For the casual user or website owner, there’s really no simpler way to make sure your photos are suited to the environment you’re using them in.

Do you currently use an image resizing solution other than Shrink O’ Matic? I’d like to hear if there are any other free solutions out there that are better. Let me know in the comments.

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WARNING: Geeky Web designer content ahead.

I’ve read a dozen or so articles proclaiming that WordPress, the world’s best blogging platform, can be used as a Content Management System (CMS) for business websites. So when Craig from Presslink asked me to develop a new 100+ page site for Air Products South Africa, we decided that we wanted to give WordPress the opportunity to prove itself as a CMS, a decision which made me more than just a little nervous.

WordPress was obviously not designed to be a CMS, and unlike open source CMS solutions like Joomla, it lacks certain functionality out of the box. That said, it’s a bunch of fun once you add in some plugins (of which there are literally hundreds available) and do a little bit of custom PHP coding.

Not being the world’s best PHP programmer (in fact, I may be among the worst) it took me a little longer than it could have to pull RSS feeds from Air Products’ US site, and I’m still not completely happy with the way I showcase blog posts on the home page. But the final product turned out fantastically. The client loves the design (that was Craig’s doing), I love the way developing with WordPress is faster than with Joomla (and it almost validates too!), and Presslink’s staff are impressed with the ease of populating the site with content.

If you’re a designer looking for a new CMS platform to make designing corporate websites easier and more user friendly, give WordPress a bash. It’s my new CMS of choice.

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