1 EROL E-Commerce Toolbox : 10 Essentials Tools for an Effective Online Store

Author: Pinakin Patel
11th October, 2007

Building an online store using an out of the box package is easy enough nowadays. But the daily management like editing images, adding features and editing html cannot be done without these essential tools. As a developer for one of the largest e-commerce software houses I do not go a day without using these applications.

1. Image Editors

Now I use Adobe Photoshop to edit, crop and resize images. There are so many online tutorials available for Photoshop that it makes it the ideal application to start learning with. One of the best features is the select tool and the ability to select fixed aspet ratio boxes. From this you can create thumbnails easily without losing the aspect of the original image.

Now I know this package is expensive so you could purchase the lighter version Adobe Elements. Or you could use the following free to use graphics editors GIMP and paint .net.



2. CSV editor

Those of you that have used the CSV import features may have run across problems with creating valid CSV files using Microsoft Excel. Most users of EROL do not understand the difference between a spreadsheet in Excel format and a CSV file. When you open a CSV file in Excel this is really Excel interpreting the CSV file and showing CSV data in spreadsheet format. So like most people you would expect Excel accept your changes and write this back to the CSV file.

Wrong, Excel makes some naughty mistakes and will allow special characters such as return carriages and the wrong number of cells to be written in CSV format. In this case I also run the csv through CSVed a free application written by Sam Francke. This checks the file for invalid columns numbers on each row. I then use simeple notepad to perform a global replace on the carriage return character to remove these from the file. This usually allows a clean import into EROL.



3. Web Site Tracking

I use a combination of two online applications for tracking and website stats. The first is AWstats which usually comes with your hosting package. It is provided free with EROL hosting and is much better than webalizer as it tells you when the search engine robots came round to index your website file. If you do not get this application with your hosting then you can download it from the Sourceforge website.

The second essential online website tracking application is Googles free Analytics. It shows you everything you need to now about your visitors and where they came from, what pages they click and what keywords they used to get to your site. I also trust these stats more than a weblog analyser such as AWstats, as the changing way in web pages are accessed by robots and different programming techniques weblog analysers show an unrealistic view of hits.

You should also be looking at how long people stay on your site and how many pages they click and not just the absolute visitors. This is exactly what Google Analytics does visitor stats by themselves are not exact.



I also recommend reading Piers Parkers guide on implementing Google Analytics in and EROL store. Do not bother with Googles own instructions.

4. HTML Editor

My two favourite html editors are Notepad++ and Editplus. Both are light in size and memory usage and load just as fast as Windows Notepad. However, they both have there benefits. Editplus requires you to purchase it after 60 days use but it has better colours for the syntax checking. This makes a big difference to me.

If you are going to be building your own application using PHP and Perl I receommend a larger application such as Komodo IDE. This is also free to use. It has built in syntax checking and allows you to manage your files easily. I do not recommend Dreamweaver as it just takes too long to load on my laptop. When it has loaded it then creates ugly code when design your pages visually. I would even use the trusted notepad over Dreamweaver.



5. FTP Client

There is only one application I use here and that is Filezilla. EROL does have its own built FTP client for uploading to your webserver. However, you still need to have an FTP client installed to upload your bespoke code, images and large attachment files like PDFs. I usually let EROL upload all files except for those in sub directories. I then use Filezilla to upload images as you can set it to connect to your file server using multiple connections. This is set to 6 on my machine. So it’s like having 6 ftp connections at once for uploading and downloading. You will find that your files will transfer a lot faster as you do not have to wait for each file to upload before the next one is sent.



6. Web Page Explorers

When ever you make changes to your site locally in EROL and then upload your changes you will find that the webserver does not reflect your changes. In most cases the files on the web server have uploaded, its just that your web browsers local cache and isp cache need to be overrided/cleared to get the real copy of the server. In this case I use the following application from Softnik technologies. Good Keywords has a feature to request a file and show you it in html format. You can even see the page headers. Once requested you can see if the server really has been updated or if it is your browser that keeps showing you a cached page. The ability to see the page headers is also useful as this will tell you if the page has been redirected using a 301 or 302 redirect and what the status code is incase the file is missing.

An online version of this application is www.seo-browser.com which shows you what it thinks search engines look at on your page. Again you can see the page headers, meta tag density etc.



7. HTML/CSS reference Websites

With all the different programming languages in my head I can never remember the syntax exactly. There is no need to buy program refernce manuals anymore as there are so many sites that do this job for you. So if you can’t remember the attributes for a specific CSS class then goto HTMLdog. This site has really good internal linking to follow one commands that you only use the search box once on your visit.



8. Remote Desktop Control

EROL developer allows you to edit and manage an EROL store across two machines. However, in most cases your EROL software is installed on your office machine and access it using Developer Edition over a broadband connection is just not going to work. In this cases it is better to use remote desktop software. The easiest and again free is logmein.com which allows you to connect to your home computer using any web browser. There is no router or firewall configuration and usually works with no technical expertise.

Otherwise you can use UltraVNC which gives you more control and power but does require you to set up port forwarding on each of your routers and usually works best when you have a static IP. If you do not have a static IP then make sure you buy a router which allows you to configure a dynamic DNS service like no-ip.com



9. XML Sitemap Creator

It is essential to tell search engines what pages they need to index on your website and how your site is structured. Most search engines require a sitemap in XML format. You don’t really need to understand what XML is just use an online sitemap generator like xml-sitemaps.com. Just goto this site and tell them wher your site is and it will create the XML file for you. You can then download it and keep it in the same directory as your EROL files locally. Then let EROL upload the file on your next publish

This alone is not enough for Google, you then need to give this file to Google using their webmaster tools and then add the sitemap to your robots.txt file on your server. This tells Google and other search engines where your sitemap is.

10. Firefox Addons

Most web developers will have a number of browsers installed on their machines. However, Firefox is my choice for testing, debugging sites when your HTML coding goes funny. Firefox has a large number of add-ons and the most essential is the web-developer add-on. It allows you to outline tables and cells (essential for EROL). You can also view CSS information which make it easier to work out why the wring colour is being assigned to the text on your page.

Having EROL, Photoshop, Firefox and Internet Explorer open at the same time can slow your ultra fast computer down. So reducing the need to have two different browser open can help. Try out the IE Tab add-on which allows you to switch from firefox rendering to Internet explorer rendoring without having to start IE.

SEOQuake allows you to see page ranks in Google, Yahoo, Live, Delicious and others everytime you load a webpage. The Google search results are also amended to show the same information.

Hope this list is useful

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