OpenCart – Basics of Launching a Successful Business on the Web

Last Updated on Monday, 18 March 2013 08:36 Written by Joe Stenhouse Tuesday, 19 March 2013 12:00

Clearly, a complete 1,000 page book could be written on how to maximize your chances for success on the web with your online business. This will just cover the basics in how it relates to using the OpenCart software. In a general way we will look at some of best practices out there that have been used and are continuing to be used as well as those things to shy away from.

Opencart can be used for many genres of online commerce, not just as shopping cart. Its MVC-L is very light weight and flexible and can be scaled up or down and/or customized to fit any platform or idea. However, the majority of people that download Opencart are using it for a shopping cart in effort to sell goods whether virtual/digital or physical.

Arvixe ASP.NET Web Deployment (How-To Guide)

Last Updated on Saturday, 9 March 2013 03:25 Written by Eric Anderson Tuesday, 12 March 2013 12:00

Setup for Arvixe WebsitePanel:

1.) Login to your Arvixe WebsitePanel
2.) Click Web>Web Sites> yourwebsite.com
3.) Now under your web site’s Home Tab in the Authentication category make sure
     Enable Integrated Windows Authentication isn’t checked And that
     Enable Basic Authentication is checked
4.) Now under the Extensions Tab in the ASP.NET category if your site was built
with .NET 4.5 make sure that you set the dropdown box to 4.0 (Integrated)

How to Conditionally Load Google Analytics in a Web Application

Last Updated on Wednesday, 27 February 2013 08:44 Written by David Bauernschmidt Saturday, 2 March 2013 12:00

If you are a developer that uses Google Analytics in your ASP.net web applications then you know that loading up the Google Analytics in your web page should not happen when you are building the application. In the past I have always just commented out the section for Google Analytics until publishing the site. Then I would go in and uncomment the lines. This works if you do not forget to uncomment the lines in production. (This happened to me).

I decided that there had to be a better way to automatically do this. After searching the internet and pulling together prior knowledge of how an asp.net web site works I decided to use the web.config to help me. First add the following lines to your web.config production transformation file. (See here if you do not understand the transformation idea).

How to Set the Default Page in web.config

Last Updated on Saturday, 16 February 2013 11:36 Written by David Bauernschmidt Saturday, 16 February 2013 12:00

On most hosted sites the vendor does not allow you to directly make changes to IIS, instead they normally give you some sort of control panel or user interface to do all that you need. The down side is that you normally have to go to each tab or screen make the change and then wait or restart IIS to see the changes. Although this is fine in most cases there are times when you constantly make the same changes to each site you deploy. Until IIS 7 you were hard pressed to do anything other than contact provider to make the changes for you.

Along came IIS 7 with the distributed configuration options. This allows you to make changes to the server without having permission to directly effect IIS. If you put these settings into a web.config file that runs on something less than IIS 7 the server will ignore these setting so you will be fine.

How to Add Different Fonts on a Web Site

Last Updated on Monday, 21 January 2013 02:51 Written by David Bauernschmidt Tuesday, 29 January 2013 12:00

In today’s web environment you have a great number of options when it comes to technologies to use, images to show, animation to run, navigation to launch, as well as many different frameworks to implement but one area that has always been fairly limited is in different fonts.  For the most part you have just a few (relatively speaking) to pick from.  You can look at sites like ampsite, MIT, webDesigndev and many others and you will find that you have about 16 fonts or so.  This has always bothered me.  You want to provide the user with a unique experience which should include fonts that are tailored to your site design.  You can create a wide range of graphics text but these are neither scalable nor search engine optimized.