He urged all businesses with a shopping cart to check their entire sales process, to ensure there are no problems.

Mr Hardy noted that not all consumers have well-developed internet skills and can easily become confused when attempting to buy goods or services online.

It’s certainly true that a well-designed site can be let down by an apalling shopping cart design.

The key rules:

• Keep it Simple
• Keep it easy to Use
• Let people know what’s in the basket

Walk through every step of the process yourself and imagine what a normal shopper may want to do next – then make sure your cart can do it.

The software which is a 15mb download, offers 120 pre-designed templates and promises integration with apps to come. Hosting is offered with a number of providers and the software is available in 9 languages.

Having lost out in the web design software race with it’s not-lamented Frontpage and it’s under-achieving follow-up Expression, it remains to be seen whether this new software really has what it takes to be a major player.

This has to be my fave theme of 2010. Lets hope for more great themes in 2011.
You can get this theme at wordpress of find out more at freedream2010.

There are many different aspects of search optimization. One important aspect is link development. The inexperienced website owner can spend many hours browsing the internet, submittiting his site to link directories and other websites and gain very little of value in return. Engaging a specialist in link building who has a solid, provable track record is a good investment. A good SEO expert will know what type of websites to get links from and will have tried out different link strategies to find which ones work.

At the blog you can find all the latest news and speculation about search optimization. The blog has archives going back for five years so there’s lots of information in there for anyone looking to seriously investigate the field of search optimisation.

For those looking for the best value web hosting, Temi’s web hosting search brings you a list of some of the leading web hosting plans in the UK. You may find a provider that will meet your website hosting needs from the list and if you already have hosting you can suggest your own web hosting supplier to be added to the list via an online form.

The Velnet Web basic web hosting package offers the user all the usual features including up to 10 email addresses and 1 subdomain. Most importantly, you get 4GB of dandwidth (data transfer) per month and a generous 100MB of hard disk space – easily enough for your wordpress installation or for a small to medium sized website. If the basic package is not enough for you, then reasonably priced packages range up to the Business account with unlimited bandwidth and  400MB of disk space.

Web hosting resellers should check out the Reseller Account which offers generous disk space and bandwidth and up to 100 add on domains for £25.00 per month. One unique feature offered by Velnet is there charity offer. Registered charities are entitled to free hosting by voucher redemption.

As well as basic web hosting and domain registration, Velnet Web also offer a number of packages tailored for ecommerce and cms systems such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress

Haabaa is designed with a simple structure aimed at making it easy for users to find exactly what they want in the easiest way possible. The homepage features the most popular categories, as well as regional geographical directories.

However, Haabaa is not just a directory. The Haabaa homepage, as well as including easy to use navigation for the directory, includes a games section, latest sports news and a finance marketplace. The infopool includes useful articles and information whilst the brain teaser section includes interesting and sometimes obscure facts and figures – from the history of the cricket bat to the location of the world’s first underwater restaurant in the Maldives (could be described as something of a watering hole!)

Of interest to to those in the web design and search optimization community is the Haabaa blog, with some interesting and provocative articles on link building through forums and blogs.

I personally have found a number of forums really helpful as a freelance web designer. It’s almost impossible to know everything there is to know about web design – when you consider the breadth of subjects that need to be covered – graphic design, coding, SEO, monetising your site etc. Tapping into the knowledge of others is a great help and forums are a great opportunity to build online relationships for mutual benefit.

One of the most pressing questions for both the new web designer – maybe designing there own hobby site, or someone responsible for major commercial projects, is how to get there site to rank more highly in Google and other search engines. There are a number of search engine optimisation techniques that are easy to put into practice and there’s plenty of advice and help around. UK Webmaster SEO Forum.

Probably the most important on-site factors for SEO are, correct and optimum use of the title and description tags, having tags of the right length that use the most appropriate keywords but without “keyword stuffing” and appropriate use of keywords in the text/content of the site itself. However there are a whole load of other onsite factors as well as off-site factors such as link building, the validity of link exchanges, blog commenting and a whole lot more.

Forum owners face particular challenges in opitimising and monetising their websittes and a Forum Post Exchange is a valuable resource to help people share ideas.

Many webdesign companies are now finding the benefit of outsourcing their clients’ SEO to a 3rd party provider. These SEO providers can achieve great results due to the scale of their operations, their specialist knowledge and their automated systems. So now, instead of the web designer searching for blogs to comment on, generate articles and submit to article directories by hand, he outsources to an SEO specialist company.

Whether you are an individual looking to hire an SEO expert, a small business seeking to expand your web presence or a web developper looking to outsource SEO services, here are a few important things to remember about an SEO reseller program:

1. There are no easy quick fix solutions. You need to take a long term view. Don’t just look for results in the next month. Sometimes the best results and most long lasting are slow and steady.

2. Set a budget and stick to it. Don’t be miserly, but don’t throw money at it.

3. Make sure you know what you’re getting for your money. Make sure that you receive thorough resports.

4. Outsourcing to SEO resllers achieves an economy of scale. Give a job to an expert and they can do it quicker and cheaper.

The service enables people to build hosted websites and their most basic package is free. However, like most things that are free, many people are going to want to upgrade for more features and the most expensive pakage weighs in at £123.99 per year.

Although the system is designed to be simple to use, it still takes a lot of time to build a site.

By clicking on the magnifying gtlass at the side of each result you can see a preview of the page without clicking through

This is bound to enrage some web designers and wesite owners who are already smarting at Google’s dominance of the search market and who feel Google are constantly manipulating search to their own ends.