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Joomla_e_commerce.jpgWhy choose Joomla! instead of Drupal or WordPress for your stand alone simple e-Commerce store?
Well, Joomla probably has the largest number of e-Commerce components available of the big 3 Open Source CMS platforms. This can be good and bad.

Having choices is good, no?
Trying out five or six components, testing them and then discarding them as not a viable option for your client is time consuming. But, I believe I have found the perfect combination and I will share it with you.

Hikashop is my first choice for any Joomla store. It is easy to modify and all styling and language changes are kept through all their upgrades. It has the standard online merchant portals like Authorize.net, PayPal etc. And one advantage that other products don’t offer as easily as Hikashop does.

The advantage I have found is for clients who have a physical commerce and want to add an online store to their business. They most likely have a credit card terminal in their store, so why pay another $40-60 a month to have an online merchant account?

Hikashop safely allows credit card info to be entered directly on the site. It then gets to your client by diving the credit card into parts, neither of which are ever in the same place. Your client can then put the two halves together and enter them into their terminal. With SSL installed as well, you have a secure solution. Since many small business owners are taking orders and shipping themselves or by an employee this makes perfect sense.

I have seen many small online business owners have orders that take their client to an outside portal (many times never to return) If these 3rd party sites aren’t blended seamlessly it can be bothersome to a potential online shopper. Hikashop is your site no url changes, no hangups just full integration and customer piece of mind.


But the best part is the ease of which it integrates with Acymailing (the best e-mail marketing solution for Joomla!) Your products can now be added to any HTML newsletter or campaign. Acymailing just has so many features it really lets your client take control of their online business!

And even better, HostPress can create this e-Commerce solution for you.  Feel free to talk to us about out reasonable rates.


nimblize_bluelogo.jpgHostPress will be launching a new free service soon... DIY websites.

As you may know many great site building tools come with our various hosting plans. But now HostPress is giving away WordPress sites to friends, clients and new acquaintances. There are many premium themes and pluginsto choose from. Also we have how-to-videos as well to help you get up and running in no time.

What is the name of this service you ask? Well it’s called Nimblize and if you hop on over to Nimblize.ca you can see just how swiftly you can achieve your dreams of having a website.


mac_mini2.jpgMac Mini with 2 external hard drives on topIt’s been about two months since switching from a PC to a Mac and I must say no regrets here.

Working the Mac way didn’t take more than week to get used to. I also finally figured out a way that suited me to work between the PC and Mac. I purchased a new external 2TB drive and formatted it for the Apple with a bit of partitioning for the Time Capsule. The trick was getting the PC to read and write with this new drive MacDrive was the solution, it works great.

Luckily my PC was an HP and for some reason HP externals play very nice with Mac so plugging in cameras and printers worked great.

The size, look and keyboard is nice too. It just sits on top of my desktop like a silver external drive or something.

harddrive_icon.jpgI was recently alarmed at the number of gigabytes I was storing on the various hard drives on my home computer (just over 1 TB). I knew it wasn’t just me stockpiling files or something. It was old backups. With the demise of Windows One Care I had some backups I forgot about. Looking closer they represented about 300 gigs of HD space! The problem was trying to delete these gave an access denied message. Just great, I can’t delete these files? Thanks again Microsoft. who owns this computer anyway?
 
I looked checked on the old Google and found a few tips. None seemed to open up those files to be deleted. Getting a little frustrated (just a little mind you… I’ve come to accept gross imperfection from Microsoft) I discovered a number of steps to get me through this ordeal. First I needed a Security tab added to my other Properties tabs for my folder.
jardins_enfants.jpgThe past couple of weeks I earmarked some of my time to a project close to my heart my daughter Chloë's preschool. One goal of the site is to provide a donation portal through Canada helps to solicit online donations to the school.

There is a Calendar of school activities to keep parents up to date on school issues and events. The second service provided by the website is an intranet for board members. There are documents pertaining to fundraising and well as board meeting agendas, minutes and comments contained in these private sections.

The site is bilingual using one of my new Nimblize.ca’s Wordpress 3.0 MU’s sites with the multi-language pluging WPML.