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Today I was featured on Web Worker Daily sharing my experiences running a 100%-online web consulting and design business.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

How has the web changed your working life? Alex Designs LLC is a 100% online business. I never travel to visit clients, so we give demos to clients around the world. We don't even have an office. All of my designers and developers are in different states. Plus, I have never met 99% of my clients. This cuts my overhead costs and streamlines everything into a nice productive system. We use web based SAS programs for accounting, project management and CRM. Everything is web based. Now we even work from our iPhones.

Read the entire article here.
Let me know your thoughts...

Labels: alexdesigns

Are you understanding the NetSuite Theme better now? In this post I will show you examples of using "Custom Web Site Tags" in your NetSuite Theme.

What are Custom Web Site Tags?
You can define custom tags to customize specific aspects of your store. You create custom tags to define information for each individual tab in your Web store. Then, you insert these tags into your HTML templates. You define your tag substitutions on tab and category records.

They are NetSuite's version of "INCLUDE" files.

Tips when creating tags:

1. Use all CAPITAL LETTERS with no spaces, but you can use underscores
2. Add a default value (if needed) but add a DIV with an ID around HTML, like below

Here is an illustration of how I set up my Custom Web Site Tags in the NetSuite Theme. Initially this may look complex, but really it is basic HTML/CSS. NetSuite still uses TABLES, so the Custom Web Site Tags are added to each TABLE cell (TD). This is a little tricky so if you have questions, post a comment.

So why do I want to use these?

Here are a few reasons.

1. You have a non-secure image or tracking pixel and need to switch it between HTTP and HTTPS
2. You want to change a marketing banner between different categories
3. You want to completely remove a right or left column on certain pages
4. You want to host HTML pages and use "INCLUDE" files to make updates easier

Here is an example of site that utilizes Web Site Tags on NetSuite hosted HTML pages. EnergyFirst sells Protein Shakes and they have a lot of content. We used the tags to easily create hundreds of custom designed articles, content sections and landing pages. Creating HTML pages gave us more flexibility with the design, plus .html pages are said to be better for NetSuite SEO.



Are you using web site tags? Post a comment or ask a question.

Labels: netsuite, tips

Every web marketer should be thinking about "personas" when developing a website. To learn more about this, InternetRetailer.com has a great article explaining the benefits of Persona-lizing a site.

Here is a little clip...

Successful persona users have seen their conversion rates and revenues jump. While persona work usually occurs as part of a larger redesign project, making it hard to pinpoint the specific payback, Staples' online revenue went from $3 billion to $4.9 billion within two years after a major site redesign that included the development of seven personas and a decision to design primarily for the two most important ones.

Next chance, I will show some examples of how we use these methods to design and develop NetSuite Ecommerce Websites. Read the article.

Labels: conversion-rates

Here is where we will be this week, NYC - November 7th, 2007

The Future of Web Design is all about getting together leading practitioners and thinkers in the web design field to talk about trends, directions and exciting new happenings in the medium. This isn't just another web event, but one that's dedicated to the creativity in the profession, bringing back the 'design' and drawing together the diverse fields that doing 'web design' now represents.

The FOWD will take place at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (New York City) which boasts state of the art facilities and amazing views of the Hudson river.

If you in the NYC area this week, you should be attending...

I receive a lot of NetSuite questions, but the most popular NetSuite web design question is "How does the web site theme work?" It's pretty easy once you understand how each of the templates and layouts are grouped together. So I have created a diagram to be used as a cheat sheet.

The theme is broken up into the standard Header (Logo and Tabs Template), Left Side Navigation, Content Area Template, Right Side Navigation and Footer. Each section can be removed or changed in size to totally customize your NetSuite Web Design.

The main area I want to point out is the "Content Area Template". This area changes based on the website section you are on. For example, when clicking a category link, the content area will then use the Category Level Layouts and Templates. A "layout" is simply a wrapper of two templates. The two custom templates are known as "list" and "list cell". In HTML terms that means, the "layout" is a TABLE tag, the "list" is the HTML contained inside that TABLE, and finally the "list cell" is the actual TD for each item that is displayed. This is also known as nested HTML tables.

TIP: Use NetSuite Help, really, it works well. Do a search for "Web Site Tags" in the NetSuite Help to get the full list of all the tags that can be used in each of the Theme sections and different custom templates.

Please let me know if this was helpful (or confusing) in anyway. Post Your Feedback - Click Here!

Labels: netsuite, tips