Informed ecommerce entrepreneurs must stay on top of industry news, web trends, and best practices. To achieve this, some wander around the web from one blog or site to another, or they absorb dozens of email newsletters.

It would be better if all of…

Editor’s Note: We continue our “Need to Know” series, where we explain complex web topics on an executive-level, “need to know” basis. For this installment, Contributing Editor Armando Roggio explains relational databases.

The “Need to Know” Series

…

Google offers a variety of useful free tools merchants can use in place of other more costly software. One of these is Google Docs, a free word processing tool with plenty of room for file storage and many unique tools unmatched by other word processor…

In terms of website design, wireframes serve as a visual guide to page structure and interface.

Web designers use wireframes in much the same way that builders use an architect’s blueprints. It is certainly possible to build a website without a wirefr…

Ecommerce merchants are digital natives. They live, in a sense, online, operating their businesses, marketing, and even servicing customers on the World Wide Web.

But the Internet can be a wild place, and sometimes digital natives become a little too …

Many ecommerce merchants think of user experience in terms of the user interface. They take great pains to optimize the aesthetic appearance of their sites with the goal of increasing conversions. Yet, it’s often the less sexy backend issues that a…

Editor’s Note: The article below discusses screen readers, the software that reads aloud text on a computer screen. Screen reader software allows visually handicapped consumers to use Internet sites. To help text-reading consumers understand what a vis…

Ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers must pay careful attention to website analytics.

Like conscientious doctors watching a patient for any sign of improvement, site owners and marketers study many details of visitor data, including which web browser…

Traditional web hosting assumes that customers pay for a fixed amount of storage space and a fixed amount of bandwidth. But the traffic to many websites varies, and storage and bandwidth needs fluctuate over time.

For those websites, cloud computing,…