Identifying trends in language, or more specifically, identifying the words and terms people search for on the internet can be extremely helpful in discovering which words and phrases you should, or shouldn’t use on your website to attract new visitors.

Lets say you were starting a business and were going to sell “widgets”. You are getting ready to put together your marketing material and source vendors for product, but you aren’t sure if people were interested more in “red widgets” or blue widget”.

Doing a web search and simply observing the number of listings found on a search engine for either really wouldn’t give you any insight into buying trends. But, if you could know which term more people search for, and whether the trend was increasing or decreasing, you would have a much better idea.

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There are just two words that sum up the internal search function of Volusion eCommerce shopping cart software — but being a professional, I won’t use those two words, and will instead just say, “not good“.

When a user searches your Volusion store, the search only returns results where the search term appears in the Product Code, Product Name or if the words were (manually) entered in the Additional Product Keywords field of a product record. By default, none of the text in product descriptions, product options, category pages, help files, policy pages, the “knowledge base”, (or image alt tags, meta data, etc, etc), or any other text in your store is searched.

To enable Volusion’s “extensive search“, (which does at least search the description fields of your product pages), you need to add the following hidden input field into your search form.

<input type=”hidden” name=”Extensive_Search” value=”Y”>

Still the result pages are poorly formatted and since there are no suggestions for mis-spelled words, semantic or contextual search functionality, and no “best match” — this leaves the user to fumble through the results, or worse; may cause potential customers to leave your site and go to Google or another search engine to locate the product they want to buy.

You May be Losing Sales because of Volusion Search!

But, there is a solution…

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So, you’re whipping around the admin side of your Volusion store, you delete or add some categories, move some products from one category to another and then go to the user side of the store and the changes don’t appear…

I found this problem when a category I deleted was still appearing in the left navigation menu, (and now gaves the error message: Category ID# Does not Exist when I clicked it).

Why?… It seems Volusion does not alway publish all your changes immediately — unless you set the Config Variable telling it to. Worse, sometimes Volusion does not honor this setting, (or forgets it was set), and you need to manually reset the variable.

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Resumes, printable coupons, eBooks, and many other type of documents are prepared for distribution and printing as an Adobe PDF, (Portable Document Format), file.

If you have PDF files that you want to make available for download on your blog, follow these easy steps:

• login to the Admin area of your Wordpress blog
• click Write Post
• give the post a Title and begin to enter the text of the post
• at the point in your post where you want the PDF link to appear, click the Add Media icon

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I was playing around with Wordpress trying to create a theme where the blog posts would not use a lot of screen space. I wanted to keep the content and background (wallpaper) image centered on the screen no matter what size the browser window was.

This is fairly simple to do, after you take a few things into consideration.

If you plan to use a fixed width layout for the page’s content, you will want your background image to act as a frame for the content, and will most likely keep the overall width of the image small.

If you plan to use a fluid layout, (one that expands to 100% of the screen size), and plan to design for higher resolutions, (e.g.- 800×600, 1024×768 or higher), you can create an image that is 1600 pixels wide (or wider) and the same CSS will ignore the extra width that isn’t used.   Be sure to keep the key elements of the design centered in the middle 800 to 1000 pixels.

Here’s a screen shot of the “virtual iphone” I wanted to create. It was done as a Wordpress theme to create a micro-blog.

The CSS to center a background image is very simple:

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