Periodically studies come out about shopping cart abandonment.  Shopping cart abandonment is when people start to buy from an online store and then leave the site before they complete the checkout process. The percentage of customers that abandon their carts during the buy process was calculated to be 63.83% by the Baymard Institute.  It’s a really discouraging fact of life for people selling things online.

Take a look at this study of  the issue.  Some of the top reasons for the behavior are high shipping costs, customers aren’t ready to buy, the customer was just checking prices and the prices are too high.   There are many other reasons for cart abandonment including a complicated buy process and forcing people to register for accounts before making a purchase.

One of my customers took this data to heart.  We worked together to make some changes to her Zen Cart shopping cart.  She added a plugin from Numinix.com that cuts down on the steps in the checkout process.  The plugin also added the option of checking out without an account.  It’s early days and her sales are small, but the changes seem to be working.  From the first to the 15 of this month she had two sales from her online store.  The plugin was installed on the 16th.  From the 17th through the 25th she’s had five sales!   That’s over a 100% increase and the month isn’t over yet.

OK, statistically this isn’t a big enough study to come to any conclusions.  Just don’t tell that to my customer.  She’s one happy online business owner!

Today I’m blacking out my three literary sites LitQuotes, The Chronicles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens Gad’s Hill Place in protest of the Internet censorship bills, SOPA & PIPA.

If you’d like to take part in the protest you can install this WordPress plugin to your WordPress site or click here to learn about other ways to take part.

Robots.txt is a file that search engines use. It tells search engines to ignore the contents of certain file folders. For example, you may not want your images listed on a search engine.  Robots.txt is also used to exclude hard-core computer code, like cgi files, from the search engines.

While it’s common to use a robots.txt file to try and keep certain files out of search engine listings, it’s not foolproof.  Some search engines ignore the robots.txt file.

A case in point happened a few years ago.  I had a mystery skin problem.  I carefully researched all my symptoms and decided I might have MS.  How in the world could I go from an unexplained rash to MS?  You had to be there.  It made sense at the time.

A year ago Microsoft did a study on the subject of cyberchondria.  It turns out that I’m not alone in jumping to the worst conclusion on a medical issue.

Brylcreem used to have a slogan, “A little dab’ll do ya.”  I think that’s the route I’m going to go with my own medical research in the future.

What’s VPN?  The folks at WiTopia have a great explanation:

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is technology using hardware, software, or both to secure and privatize data across a network, usually the Internet, by building what techies call an “encrypted tunnel.”

Data passes through this “tunnel,” protected from anyone who tries to intercept it. Even if the data is intercepted, it is hopelessly scrambled and useless to anyone without the key to decrypt it.

This time I purchased WiTopia’s personalVPN™ – SSL (openVPN) plan.  This product installed without a hitch, is easy to use and woked flawlessly on my trip.  I highly recommend it!

FTP stands for file transfer protocol.  It allows you to move files from your computer to your website host and vice-versa.  I use the technology every day when I work on websites.  I edit or create website files on my computer.  Then I copy the file over to my customer’s website host.

I did some investigation and found some nice free software for this – FileZilla.  It’s pretty easy to use.  (FYI – I use WS_FTP Pro.  It’s a great program, but it’s not free.)  You do have to be familiar with file folders and able to navigate through them.

Like I said, I FTP every single day.  It works just fine.  However in the spirit of full disclosure I’ve got to say that FTP software also gives you the ability to mess up your website.  You could delete files or move them around and cause WordPress to malfunction.   if you’re not paying attention you could also mess up your website.  It probably won’t happen, but there is that possibility.

• .html or .htm – These are “regular” website files.  HTML stats for Hyper Text Markup File.
• .shtml - SHTML pages are a step up from HTML.  These are HTML pages with the ability to interpret server side includes.  Server side includes (SSI) files are bits of code that SHTML pages can share.  A great way to use this is to have a shared menu, header and footer file.  It makes website maintenance very easy.
• .asp – ASP stands for Active Server Pages.  These files typically are used on website hosts using  Windows as the operating system for their server.  They have their own coding language.
• .php – PHP pages are my favorite.  (Yes folks, I really am a geeky website developer.  I have a favorite type of website page.)  PHP is a coding language that works very well with MySQL databases.  This is the file type used in WordPress.

In general no file type is inherently better than another. I do tend to stay away from plain .html or .htm files though.  Those are the only type of files that can’t share snippets of code.  Maintaining a website that exclusivly uses HTML takes more time and effort than other websites.