So to recap, here is a summary of the core bits you need to know (you can get the full original text here):

1. Facebook promotions must be administered within an App. That means you are not allowed to simply publicise or run a competition on your wall but must either set up your own app or use a third-party app to collect entrants’ details.
2. You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. In other words, simply liking a page or a status update, uploading a photo, sharing a photo etc. cannot enter someone into a competition automatically. People have to do something specifically to enter your competition. You cannot automatically enter ALL fans.
3. You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. This one can get a bit confusing because this seems to contradict the previous point! However, in plain language it means that  you may demand an entrant to ‘like’ your page but this still has to lead to a separate action of entry through a special competition tab within your page.
4. You must not notify winners through Facebook. So no messages on your wall announcing the winner! You can notify winners by email, SMS, post etc. or provide a link to your own website where you are announcing the winner.
5. You have to add some statutory blurb to your competition page to disassociate it from FB and make sure that nobody could mistake it for an event that is endorsed by them.

There are plenty of apps available that can help you run your competition to meet these requirements, set up your competition tab, collect your entrants’ details and add all the legal disclaimers automatically. And if you need help, give me a shout. inTandem is currently running a competition for a free landing and fan-reveal page using these systems on our Facebook page. Take a look and see how it works!

Whether Facebook will actually take the time to go after small and medium business that are running competitions and promotions outside of their regulations remains to be seen and you can certainly take your chances. There is however evidence that they are shutting down pages (http://www.simplyzesty.com/facebook/how-to-run-a-brilliant-but-illegal-facebook-competition-case-study/) and I recently read on LinkedIn about evidence that this is starting to happen here in Ireland too. So the choice is yours!

• A custom-designed MODx site (inTandem’s content management system of choice) using either single PayPal buttons or the PayPal shopping cart functionality
• A custom-designed MODx site using the third-party Foxycart shopping cart with either PayPal or a merchant account
• A template-based Prestashop

There is no better or worse solution but rather the right solution for the right eCommerce requirements. Let me explain:

1. MODx with PayPal only

For projects that require more of a personalised design element than using a predesigned template, we recommend a MODx installation. This means that your shop is developed from the bottom up to match your requirements exactly. No compromise, with all the elements exactly where and how you want them.

‘Pay Now’ or ‘Add to cart’ buttons that tie in with your PayPal account can be generated either individually or on-the-fly by MODx, allowing for a small number of customisation fields to be added to your order (e.g. colour-choice, enter name for personlisation, gift-wrapped yes/no etc.). Please note, that even though PayPal provides their standard yellow buttons by default, it is also possible to replace these with custom-designed buttons that match your website perfectly.

This is a great option for a site with a straight forward line of products. Or perhaps your site isn’t really a full online shop but rather requires a small eCommerce element to offer users to make specific online payments such as a deposit for a course booking, paying an annual club membership, purchasing a t-shirt for the local village festival or making a donation.

2. MODx with FoxyCart using PayPal or a Merchant Account

For clients who require a more professional shopping cart, yet wish to retain the custom-designed aspect of MODx, I recommend a MODx/FoxyCart combination. FoxyCart is a third-party product that provides full shopping cart functionality that goes way beyond what PayPal itself can offer. In this scenario,

• all payment buttons are automatically generated by the system
• you can add a multitude of customisation options for your products
• users can register their accounts with your site and use their details for future purchases
• you are able to easily set up volume discounts (based on no. of items, price or weight)
• stagger shipping costs
• offer multiple shipping options
• generate discount voucher codes that can be used in advertisement or coupons (such codes can be set up to be valid for a limited time only) and
• obtain a whole array of reports relating to your online sales
• etc.

However, as FoxyCart only manages the actual shopping cart functionality, you still have a choice of payment management and can either take payments through PayPal or through a merchant account/payment gateway combination (eg. Elavon/Realex). For most small businesses and upstarts, PayPal tends to be the better option. Although PayPal charges higher commission rates per transaction, there are no set-up or monthly fees and no minimum amount of transactions. So if you are unsure of what your monthly sales will be or are operating in a seasonal marketplace (where monthly charges would be a waste of money when business is at a lull), PayPal can be the perfect choice. And remember, your customers DO NOT need to have a PayPal account to make a payment via PayPal. There is always the option to simply enter your credit card details there and then to complete the transaction.

With increasing sales however, it may become financially more effective to operative with a payment gateway and merchant account. The merchant account is set up with your bank (usually involving some sort of set-up costs) and a payment gateway account can be set up with a number of providers. However, Realex is the recommended provider for a FoxyCart implementation as their technical integration has been tried and tested by inTandem without problems. Now, there will be monthly base charges (currently €29 p.m. with Realex) for a set number of inclusive transactions (currently 350 p.m. with Realex). For higher transaction volumes, this is more attractive than PayPal’s higher per transaction commission charges.

Please note that there is a monthly fee of $19 for a FoxyCart subscription in either scenario.

3. PrestaShop

PrestaShop is one of the leading open-source purpose-build eCommerce applications in the market and recently won the Packt Publishing Open Source E-Commerce Applications Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. inTandem selected PrestaShop as its all-in-one eCommerce solution of choice due to its low learning curve for our clients, long list of features, ease of installation and of course open-source status.

However, to make a PrestaShop installation as cost-effective as possible, we are not offering a design customisation service for our PrestaShop installations but rather advise our clients to select one of the pre-designed templates that are available for purchase with this system. Depending on the selected template, we will be able to make a number of design amendments (e.g. change background image and colours, change font type and colours, change page titles and add or remove certain page elements) but the focus is on the template layout in hand in order to keep implementation costs to a minimum.

PrestaShop sites are therefore suitable for clients who do not require a customised eCommerce site and are happy with the more standard look and feel of an online shop. inTandem generally offers a PrestaShop implementation at a lower rate than the custom-designed MODx sites outlined above and turn-around times can also be faster (as always depending on the client’s submission of content). However, at present we only offer PrestaShop in conjunction with PayPal only and not with merchant accounts.

I still haven’t figured out why PrestaShop stopped giving new images the correct 644 permission when it had done it perfectly well until this morning. But Rocky at Nethercott Constructions had the perfect workaround:

In the images.inc.php file, insert a line after line 256 and place

chmod($filename, 0644);

just in front of:

imagedestroy($ressource);
return $flag;

Sorted!! Now, all new images are created with the correct file permission and everybody is happy. Any clues as to why PrestaShop stopped doing it itself are however still very welcome!

Now, as I mentioned I have been a very happy customer of Register365 and their server set-up works perfectly well with the MODx content management system I love so much. This cannot be said for some of the other hosting companies I have had to deal with. From gruff support technicians that treat their customers with disdain at their lack of detailed technical know-how (“You could have found the answer to that question in our knowledge base” – that’s perfectly fine – if you would label your knowledge base in such a way that it is actually possible to find your way around it ….) to hosting companies that only offer human telephone support on weekdays between 9-5 and weekend email support that takes more than 6+ hours to reply to a request – websites have a habit of operating 24/7 and it is often best to switch a new site live over a weekend when there might be less expected traffic, so why leave your customers hanging should issues arise at the slightly less convenient times?

Well, I am really only writing this blog post to let off a major build-up of steam. Hoping to get a beautiful new site online over the weekend, I have been left hanging due to the non-contactability of my client’s current hosting company to sort out a small technical issue (repeated requests to their so-called out-of-hours support email have been left unanswered for the past 7 hours). Very frustrating! Fingers crossed someone might feel the need to step up their customer service fairly soon and perhaps I will get a result before the weekend is out …

So, if you purchase your own hosting or have a web designer purchase or supply it on your behalf, make sure that you buy from a hosting company with decent customer service, both in terms of office hours and the standard of behaviour.

And on a final note, if I purchase a domain name on behalf of a client, I make sure to register it with their own details as admin contact and don’t stick in my name other than for billing purposes. This makes it easier for the client to move their domain to someone else in the future should they wish to do so. I feel that I would rather work within a positive and trusting relationship with my clients than ‘lock them in’ by making a move difficult for them. So again, if you are using a third-party service for this, just make sure you instruct them to set up your own details as the administrative contact and don’t accept any excuses why it should be anybody else! The day might come where you might fall out with your web company (has fortunately never happened to me but I have certainly witnessed it for clients moving their business to me from a previous unhappy relationship) or their company even might no longer be in existence (maybe they won the Lotto!) and the fight to take ownership of your domain if your name isn’t on it can be drawn out and tedious.

Spamavert.com is a great little service that can help you hang on to your email address to be used online only when absolutely necessary. Whenever an email address is required in an online form and you know you will not need to access any communications from the sender after 7 days (e.g. all you need is a registration key) or maybe don’t even need any communications from them at all, simply enter an email address in the format yourword@spamavert.com and later go to www.spamavert.com to collect your email if required. Your account will last for one day and there is not need for a password. It’s as simple as that!

As a web designer, I also make use of this service when I test online forms, distribution lists or user registrations, saving me from having to use multiple existing addresses and then needing to access a series of mailboxes in different locations to see the result..

Behind spamavert is a three-man company from Norway called Digital Creations AS. They tell us that “Spamavert was born out of annoyance at the amount of junk mail we received. A lot of the junk mail came from companies we at one point had a relationship with, even for something as tiny as downloading a piece of software. And we were annoyed at those companies, because there is no need for them to have our e-mail addresses.”

Please refer to the spamavert.com website for FAQ about the usage of the system.

During the development stages of creating a new website, I generally help my clients with the resizing and compressing of images to make them suitable for their new website. However, after going live, it is up to the customer to upload new images that are optimised for the web. Some clients have decent image editing software already on their computers, most likely from a CD that came with their digital camera. But even if they already have the software, they may not feel confident in using it and therefore don’t update their site with new imagery as often as they could. Others don’t have any tools themselves for image editing at all.

So rather than going out to pay for an application that then is only available on the computer you installed it on or paying me to do all the image editing on the client’s behalf, I took a look around to seek out an online system that could easily do the job for my clients.

For the past several months, I have been recommending Picnik with great success. Picnik is an online application that lets you carry out all of the resizing, cropping and compressing you need to do to optimise your images for the web. You can even add text to your images and do all sorts of fun stuff with ’stickers’ etc. And the best thing is that the free version is perfectly enough to do all your web-related editing. There is also a Premium version for an annual fee but for our purposes here it is not really necessary.

Using Picnik is as simple as uploading your image, selecting to resize, entering the new width or height and saving it back to your computer.

1. Go to http://www.picnik.com and click on ‘Upload a Photo’ – there is no need to sign up.

2. Upload your photo from your computer and then click on the ‘Resize’ tab.

3. Change the image width or height as instructed by your web designer (ensure ‘Keep Proportions’ is ticked) and click OK.

4. That’s it for resizing! If you’re done, then skip to Step 6. However, if you wish you can now also add some effects, e.g. text, drop-shadow etc. To do so, click on the ‘Create’ tab.

5. Here, you can use features such as Effects, Text, Stickers, Touch-Up, Frames etc. You really need to play around with these to see what you can do. Note that not all features are available with the free version. The above example shows the ‘Text’ feature where you can add text to the text-box in the top left, select a special font and change its colour. Use the handlers around the inserted text to resize it to your requirements.

6. When you are done, click on the ‘Save & Share’ tab. You can change the file name if you wish but leave the Image Compression at the default 8. Finally, click on ‘Save’ and select the location on your computer to which you wish to save the file.

7. Congratulations! You’re done!

So where did my aversion to setting up my own blog come from? I guess many of you have, like me, come across websites with blogs that seems to have been set up just for the sake of it. Someone was told that having a blog is great for search engine ranking, so you better get one on that site immediately!! Random content that rambles on or content that is simply a re-hash of the site-owner’s latest sales offer, only this time written up in a more ‘informal’ style to make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Then there are the multitude of websites that were quickly set up by using free blogging systems like WordPress, with pages generated as blog posts and homepages showing us that they were created on the 16th February 2009, uncategorised and comments closed. There is no place for a blog post as our home page entry unless your website itself is a blog and it suits the business you’re in! There is nothing wrong with the Marketing Guru styling his home page like a blog, because that’s why we’re on his site – to get his opinion and use it as an information source about his area of expertise. The same goes for the security expert, financial advice service etc. But if you are the local plumber or hotel, please don’t take the quick route and set up your brochure site as a blog…

No disrespect to WordPress of course! The very blog you are reading here is powered by WordPress, even though the rest of my site was built using MODx content management system (inTandem’s CMS of choice). MODx does offer functionality to create blog posts with commenting, archiving etc. but why re-invent the wheel when there is already a tool out there that can show the rest how it’s done? And then there are of course also countless excellent full websites represented all over the Internet that use the power of WordPress to create beautifully designed and well structured sites without even the slightest hint of a blog in sight. But these sites are most certainly built with the help of experienced WordPress programmers who know how to ‘turn off’ the blog style and ‘turn on’ proper web design. So please don’t take this as a WordPress bashing exercise! It’s more a call to action to use such tools at the right time and in the right manner.

So what’s the other side of the coin? A quick google for “Why I should start a blog” leaves me with an endless choice of Top 10 Reasons-type lists giving me core arguments such as:

1. To express your thoughts and opinions
2. To market or promote something
3. To help people
4. To establish yourself as an expert
5. To connect with people like you
6. To make a difference
7. To stay active or knowledgeable in a field or topic
8. To stay connected with friends and family
9. To make money
10. To have fun and stay creative*

Now, if I take a look at what I’ve just written, these really aren’t reasons for me not to put a blog on my site, so why not just get over myself?!! Yes, the blog will (hopefully) improve my search ranking. But it can also be used as a tool to communicate with my web design peers and perhaps help answer some of the regular questions I get from my clients. So here it is, the inTandem Blog is born! And I shall endavour to fill these pages with posts that are relevant, informative and perhaps at times even entertaining. I will try to create a mix of articles that speak both to my web designer community as well as my existing and potential client base. I will recount some experiences I might have using certain web design tools and applications but also provide tips and tricks for clients and others in charge of updating their own websites that will help you make the most out of your web presence even after I have handed your ‘baby’ back to you on going live. Social media will feature prominently and so will current security issues. Anybody already ‘liking’ inTandem on my Facebook page will be familiar with the kind of status updates offered there (and if you have not yet shown me your Facebook love, please don’t hold back and check out inTandem’s page on Facebook!).

So if this sounds of interest to you, please add my RSS feed to your feed reader (e.g. Google Reader), engage with comments and let me know if there is a particular topic you would like me to tackle.

* Top 10 Reasons to Start a Blog by Susan Gunelius