If you are like most Americans, you have an old cell phone or two hanging around. Please don’t throw that old cell phone away, no matter how old it is. Like many other modern electronic devices, phones contain circuits boards, batteries and LCD that each contain a number of harmful materials.

When phones are dumped in landfills, these elements eventually break down and leech out into the environment. Lead, Cadmium and Mercury pollution could potentially cause deadly side effects and are the primary reason why states like California have made cell phone recycling mandatory for any retailers that sell mobile phones. Sadly, the heaps of obsolete computer equipment have a greater negative impact on the environment than phones, thus my previous blog topic of recycling old CPUs and monitors.

Not sure what to do with an old cell phone? At the very least, drop it off at your carrier. There are many places to donate your old phones… here are a few:
Tucson Gospel Rescue Mission
Cell Phones for Soldiers
PetsMart Charities

Have a green day! MO

Carl, my merchant contact here in Tucson recently told me that Discover Card has lowered it rates and is now very competitive with Visa and MasterCard’s rates.

Carl Shultz with Card Solutions, Inc. takes care of many of our client’s merchant accounts. If you are interested in checking out those rates, or enabling your merchant account for Discover Card, Carl can be contacted at 520-514-8971. He is happy to answer your questions (no sales pitch or pressure!).

The Discover Card is one of the credit card options in our Spirit for Commerce software and it is easy to enable.

As they say, “It pays to Discover…” MO

Just wanted to let everyone know that we upgraded our WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) rich text editor. We are fans of the open source FCK-editor project and use their rich text editor in Spirit and Recordit. Previously, we were using version 2.4.3 which did not play well with Safari and had some other case specific problems for some of our users.

We have upgraded the editor to the latest version 2.6.0 which does play well with Safari. We have also reconfigured how it generates HTML. It will no longer wrap text in <p> tags and inserts <br /> tags instead of empty <p> tags for break-returns. This should help out folks that were running into problems between their CSS and the HTML made by the editor. Should make life just a little bit better.

Here is a screen shot of the editor with all its goodness

enjoy!
Steve

We have sent up more good stuff for Spirit 3.4. Cart, login, and checkout screens can now have customized background colors and font styling. The simplest way to set this up is in the administrator store tab. Look at the cart & layout settings. There, you’ll find some settings that look like this:

You can also set these options in your templates directly by adding bgcolor=”xxx” or style=”xxx” directly to your cart and checkout tags.

Here is a screen shot of the Spirit login screen that has a different background color set:

If you are on Spirit 3.3, now is a great time to ask us to upgrade your site. That said, we will begin upgrading all 3.3 sites to 3.4 later this year.

enjoy!
Steve

Spirit for Members got some serious lovin’ recently. This past weekend we pushed up several great features for member sites (and a little something for commerce users too).

We are introducing an ‘additional info’ tab to the ‘my account’ screen which can display any number of custom fields for your members to view and edit. The fields can be hidden, or shown as un-editable text, or editable text boxes, drop downs or text areas. In the admin tool, its a snap to configure the the new ‘additional info’ tab with a new setup screen titled ‘my account’. All fields are available for edit in the member details screen.

Members are also now available to search and display on your pages in much the same way that products are handled. Searches may be created that are based on several criteria (state=,title= ect.) and results can be sorted by any field. Pagination is also supported just as it is for products.

For Commerce and Member users, you can now add custom headers and footers and control the css for the ‘my account’ screen directly from the admin tool without the need to edit your templates.

Very fast and pretty cool. Hope you like it!
Enjoy,
Steve

We just finished up a new site for our Recordit service. The new site has more information and several new screencasts covering setup of Constant Contact, your web forms and file uploads.

We will be phasing out most of the Recordit content that is currently on PepperStation.com in favor of the new dedicated website.

check out the new site at: http://recordit.pepperstation.com

enjoy!

OK, now that I am fortified, I can write about something technical… thanks for reading, oh and try the Tabouleh! MO

We recently wrote about domain names in our April newsletter. Odds are that most visitors come to your site from another web site, either by clicking on a banner, following a link on someone else’s site, or drilling through results in a search engine. To find your site again, most people have to remember how they found it the first time. In this case a good domain is worth a lot.

Here are a few simple rules… the basics of a good domain name:

1. Don’t be cryptic. Use the name by which people know your company. In practice that usually means don’t abbreviate, unless the abbreviation is your company’s trademark. In this case, at least visitors have a chance of correctly guessing your domain name if they spell out the company name.

Domain names can be 67 characters long so get your company’s full name. Typing a long domain name may seem undesirable, but if your company name requires that extra space, it’s worth considering.

2. Avoid dashes if you can. With the number of good domain names dwindling, dashes are commonplace.

Wal-Mart learned that lesson the hard way. The company first launched its e-commerce site as “wal-mart.com,” the company’s official name. They lost millions in sales before registering “walmart.com.” Now both domain names take you to the same web site.

3. Register multiple versions of your name. Make it easy for your customers to find you. If your company’s name is hard to spell, register every common misspelling of its name. Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, a domain speculator (aka, cyber squatter) had already registered “wallmart.com.”

Register every domain people might use to find your company. That includes products and services your company offers. Then point all these domains to your home page and visitors will be automatically redirected there. Domain names are cheap and can help you avoid losing a customer.

Finally, no matter what your name is or how many domains you’ve registered, it’s a good idea to support the domain name. Incorporate it into your site’s logo and put your domain name on all company collateral materials. In a digital age, your company’s web site is its electronic business card.

Hey Everyone
It is 11:28 am and my mind is on food. Forget about SEO, websites and all that stuff (at least for a moment). This weekend, I made the most delicious, simple Tabouleh and now that summer is upon us, I thought I would share this fresh, hi-fiber dish:

1 1/4 cup Trader Joe’s whole wheat couscous (or medium grain bulgur)
1/2 cup boiling water
1/3 cup lemon juice
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bunch roughly chopped parsley
1 bunch roughly chopped mint
2-3 firm Roma tomatoes, chopped
diced onion to taste
salt and pepper to taste

Add boiling water to couscous and stir. Add the lemon juice and olive oil, stir again and let sit for 5 minutes. Couscous should be easily fluffed with a fork. Add remaining ingredients, stir and refrigerate.

So fresh… off to lunch! Enjoy! MO

Today Yahoo begun their new pricing for PCC adds. The update comes with other changes including lower bid prices for higher add relevance.

Here is an excerpt from Yahoo’s email notice:

Pricing Update:
Minimum Bids are no Longer Fixed at $.10
Starting today, the minimum bids for some Sponsored Search keywords are no longer fixed at $.10. Minimum bids can now be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10. Throughout the next week, you may start noticing new minimum bids on some of your keywords. You will be notified by email and within your account when the status of any of your keywords is affected.

check out Yahoo’s site for more details pricing change.

In case you missed it, on April 9th, New York legislators approved a law that calls for the collection of taxes by internet retailers in certain situations. This new law often referred to as “Amazon Tax” requires tax to be collected by companies that sell goods or services through “referrals” in the state of New York.

It does not mean that any internet sale to a customer in New York is subject to New York sales tax. Rather, this is a very aggressive stance by New York in determining what constitutes a “nexus” or relationship with their state. Federal law states that a “nexus” must exist between a company and a state before a company is obligated to collect sales taxes for that state. Typically, for example if a business runs any operation or has remote employees in any state, then a “nexus” is said to exist with that state and taxes should be collected and payed as appropriate. Each state dictates what conditions constitute a “nexus”.

As I understand it, in the case of New York, they basically are saying that companies that have a referral agent living in New York constitutes a “nexus” between the state of New York and the company. Therefore any sales done through a referral agent are subject to sale tax collection by the selling company. Amazon by way of example has a large number of folks who earn referral commissions by placing a Amazon link on their website to the online bookstore giant. This new controversial law would require Amazon to start collecting sales taxes on these sales. New York estimates that the new law will generate approximately $50 million a year in new tax for the state.

So, don’t fret that you must start collecting sales taxes for New York. If you do not currently have a “nexus” with that state and you do not have a referral program, then you are probably OK. That said of course, you should check with your tax and legal advisor’s and not use this post as your guiding light.

On a personal note, though I understand the need for a state to appropriately collect taxes due, I’m not sure that I should pay New York sales tax for a book I buy from amazon when I live in Arizona and I just happen to buy the book by clicking into Amazon’s site through a referral link of someone who lives in New York… Guess I don’t see the “nexus” there.