An e-commerce website is generally established by business houses in order to provide online ordering and delivery of goods or services. E-commerce websites are also used to advertize and promote businesses among masses at a simple instant of a click. There are several aspects that go into the creation of an eCommerce website. There are multiple design features that need to be kept in mind while developing an eCommerce website as your business website is deemed to represent the image of your brand to web surfers and potential customers. It is thus essential to ensure that all necessary aspects are incorporated into your website to make it easily navigable and attractive for visitors.

The main element that needs to be decided while coming up with an eCommerce website design is the kinds of fonts and colors that you are going to be using for the text displayed on the webpages. This is not a simple decision and should never be left to chance as the way the text is inserted in your website can go a long way in encouraging visitors to stay and read the content. If you use fonts that are too large or too small or are in garish colors, you can end up alienating your customers as they are likely to find it difficult to read your website’s text. It is thus vital that you make use of standardized fonts in basic colors to sustain their interest.

Your ecommerce website should have a well defined layout and should be properly organized into different sections so that it is easier to navigate and customers can retrieve the required information quickly and easily. Everything should be categorized into different relevant headings so that all customers can figure out the elements present in your website and use them to make purchases. It is also imperative that you provide a FAQ section to answer frequently asked questions and queries of customers. This helps make your website more user friendly and hassle free. For answers that cannot be found in this section, there also needs to be a “contact us” section so as to be able to get in touch with your company for addressing other grievances of customers.

If you are planning to start a eCommerce website or thinking of revamping your existing website, then feel free to contact us on our Toll Free no - (800) 236-1497. We at Centex Technologies (Offices – Dallas & Killeen Tx) create user friendly ecommerce websites for our clients across the globe.

Web Development Dallas – Website Design Dallas Tx

With the development in the web technology, the number of web sites that are being hacked is also on the rise. Keeping the website secure is an intricate issue that the web site designers and owners often fail to notice. Here are some important tips that you should always keep in mind to keep your web site safe and secure.

Keep your software updated: To prevent other people from taking advantage of your software ambiguity, make sure you update it from time to time and also download the patch program. If you are using the old version of any software, your web site is likely to be in a state of high insecurity. Thus, instead of manual updating, turn on the automatic updates of the software if it is available.

Use strong passwords to host account, FTP and control panel: Short and simple passwords are likely to be very easily accessed by the hackers. It is advisable to make your password as difficult as possible. The password should never contain your name, date of birth or any relevant information. Try to keep changing your password after every two or three months.

Update your antivirus: Make sure that you have updated antivirus software. Scan your computer frequently for any sort of viruses. It is possible that the hackers gain access to your passwords through any sort of viruses in your computer.

Backup your web site: Always have a complete backup of your web site. Even if it is hacked, you would not lose your files or the web site. Do not expect your web host to guard you if there is any blow. Do not store the backup files in the web servers. Instead, store them in the PC or USB.

Monitor your traffic regularly: Check your log files on a regular basis and monitor the visitors to your site. If there is anyone unusual, you need to be very careful. This could be a hacker.

Choose a trustworthy web host: Always go for a reliable web hosting service providers who offer customer support round the clock.

These are the important steps that you, as a web site owner, must take in order to keep your web site safe and secure. It is better to be cautious than be remorseful afterwards.

To know more how you can keep your website secure, feel free to contact us at Centex Technologies. We provide IT Support, Web Application Development, SEO and Internet Marketing services.

Web Development Austin – Web Design Austin

Google checkout is a service provided by Google that makes it simple for you to make payments for your online purchases. Users can save their debit or credit card as well the shipping information in their Google account so that they can easily make purchases at the online stores that are participating in it. Google checkout also puts forward protection from any type of fraud and also has an integrated page to track the purchases and its status.

Overview

Google checkout is an alternative method that can be used for buying online. Although it is primarily designed to process the transactions that involve digital and tangible goods, yet it can be used for other transactions such as subscriptions, services and donations. However, at present, one cannot make use of Google checkout to transfer money person to person.

For the buyers, Google checkout has turned out to be a secure, convenient and a fast way for online shopping. Google checkout has made it much easy to shop online by presenting a single log-in to make any sort of purchases all the way through the web.

Benefits of Google checkout to businesses

• Attract leads: Google checkout is itself a brand and a symbol of trust. Google Checkout logo acts as a seal of trust for online shoppers. If you are using Google Checkout for processing payments you are bound to get an increase in sales.

• Convert sales: When the clients skim over your web site, the efficient checkout process of Google checkout helps to reduce the cart desertion and convince the clients to purchase. If the buyers have already made use of Google checkout, all they have to do is to login their Google checkout account to make purchases from you. There is no need to re enter their shipping and payment details at every purchase they make.

• Processing: When customers purchase anything from you, you get a notification from Google about the order.  This allows you to then process the order.

• Fighting fraud: The advanced tools of Google checkout help you to fight fraud by stopping any invalid orders from approaching you. You can also enjoy chargeback protection.

Thus, Google checkout provides you an easy, secure and convenient way of shopping online and saves you from any sort of hassles and frauds.

We at Centex Technologies provide complete eCommerce solutions including payment gateway integration with shopping cart. For more information on our eCommerce solutions, call us at 800. 236. 1497

Web Development Austin – Web Design Austin

Website navigation pattern is one of the important elements that can actually govern the ease of use of a particular portal. Not only visitors will be able to use your website effectively, but they will know what to find where? Website navigation or html sitemaps for bigger websites plays an important role in achieving better and higher ranks in search engines. They not only direct website visitors to targeted pages but also let Search Engine spiders know what and where to index. This is the reason why the companies that offer professional web designing services emphasize the need of good website navigation and architecture.

The basic step for good website navigation is to build a suitable site map. As the name suggests, a site map is the basic outline of your whole website. The website may consist of numerous pages, sections as well as sub sections. A sitemap will be an indicator of all those and will also provide a hyperlink to all the pages. Obviously, if you have a site map on your website, it would be much easier for the viewers to navigate through the pages. Web designing services give more consideration towards constructing a site map that is easily understandable to facilitate the search engines to index the site. It is important to note that site map may not be required for small websites with 20-30 web pages but they are must for websites having multiple sections and sub sections.

Apart from easy site navigation, there are numerous other benefits that a site map can put forward. Some of them are:

• Your website attains easier navigation as well as better ranking by the search engines.
• You attain the opportunity to index any changes in the content of your website at a faster pace. You can just inform the search engines about these changes through the site map.
• It can be very helpful when there are some links that are accidentally broken or some urchin pages that you cannot access through other means.
• For new websites, a site map speeds up the procedure of indexing the pages.
• It helps in the better classification of your website content.

In addition to the site maps, there are many other things that you need to follow to provide an easy navigation to your viewers. These are:

• To hyperlink the pages through the use of relevant keywords in content. It helps you to maintain an organized website.
• Usage of Breadcrumbs within the content pages.
• Categorizing content pages into sections and subsections according to the nature of information/ service/ products provided.
• To create links, link titles, anchor texts, urls according to the page (and keywords targeted).

We at Centex Technologies provide wide range of Web Design and Development services. To create Search Engine Optimized websites with compelling content, call us today at – 800 236 1497 (Toll Free)

Web Development Austin – Web Design Austin

Many business officials do not understand the significance of attaining an SSL Certificate for their internet site. This is because of the fact that most of the business owners do not know about the technicalities or how to get an SSL certificate for our website. The following article helps to clear the matter up.

Firstly, it may be sensible to describe about what an SSL certificate actually does. SSL is an acronym for the words: Secure Socket Layer Protocol Certificate. The certificate’s function is to permit a high degree of protection between the browsers and the servers. A SSL encrypts the data for ecommerce transactions (or other submitted data) to such a level that the data exchanged over the World Wide Web becomes extremely secure. Every SSL certificate utilizes unique credentials indentifying the certificate owner. The owner’s identity is authenticated before issuance of a SSL certificate. These SSL protocols basically assure that the website is legitimate.

You, as a business owner with an e-commerce site are surely going to acquire SSL certificate in an effort to ensure that all your transactions are extremely secure and safe. By attaining an SSL certificate, what you are basically doing, is not only legitimizing your own business and turning it to be more credible, but also assuring for yourself and the clients that your e-commerce transactions are much safer. For your customer, having a secure place to carry on business can make quite a lot of difference. Not only does an SSL Certificate make substantial sense in order to keep the information secure; it is also necessary when carrying out any money related transaction. We do not recommend users to provide their personal & financial information including SSN, Credit Card details etc on websites that do not have a valid SSL certificate. You can verify the same by looking at the address bar of your browser when you have opened up the page. The address bar should have HTTPS instead of HTTP.

Centex Technologies provides web hosting solutions to various clients across the globe. Contact us for web applications, security services, shopping cart installations, networking solutions, and IT consulting. We are located at 501 N. 4th Street Killeen, TX – 76541. We can be contacted at (800) 236-1497 anytime. Centex Technologies is always ready to assist you with the best we can.

April 11, 2011

In the modern era, everybody is eager to get his business online to reach masses. For that purpose they need to hire a web-design company to create a website that represents their products and services. It is one of the common mistakes made by most of the web design and development companies that they do not incorporate the much needed SEO elements. This is due to the fact that most of the web design companies are not mindful of SEO-friendly designs. As a result, even after making an awesome website, the company does not make much profit. It is all due to weak SEO web design concept.  This makes it important for you to always opt for a professional company that has exact knowledge about SEO elements to be incorporated in the website design.

Below you will find a few common SEO design mistakes that one must always avoid to attain Search Engine popularity:

1. Extra usage of Flash: Adobe has made a lot of outstanding strides in getting its files readable, and should be applauded for it. But it must be noted that the text in the Flash files gets embedded into the images, which are not interpreted by the search engines. Most of the time, the search engine sees a big blank spot whenever Flash is exhibited, so it cannot judge how relevant a website is.
2. Utilization of frames: Search engines also don’t like internet sites in frames as it is difficult for search engine spiders to examine and rank the website. The old hat coding impacts the reputation of the website and ends up in lowering down its rank within the search engines.
3. Applying JavaScript navigation: JavaScript is devaluated by the Web spiders. So abstain from making extensive use of javascript drop down links and other navigation tools.
4. Unnecessary usage of Graphics: Web crawlers do not acknowledge links that are made in graphics. They distinctly support links in text format, so whenever you need to make link, you should make it using the plain text format. For image links, proper usage of ALT tags should be done.
5. Utilization of hidden text: Making use of hidden text is against the guidelines of the search engines. Search engines might ban such websites and this would result in an immediate disbarment from all the web crawlers.
6. Lack of content on the home page: There are a few very big companies who think that they can get adequate search engine rankings with no need of supplying readable text to the website’s homepage. This is a huge mistake done by them. Content is what makes our websites readable for search engines and ideally, we should have keywords based content on the home page.

For hiring able web designers who very well understand the concept of both Web designing as well as SEO, choose Centex Technologies. We can be contacted at: Toll Free: (800) 236-1497.

SEO Austin – Web Design Austin

March 28, 2011

The marketplace of web has not been a consistent one as it goes through regular modifications in its trends and styling. For a web developer, it is hence a must necessitate to maintain himself updated and in sync with the varying characteristics of web development. At the same time web businesses need to upgrade themselves in order to provide the best to their users. Here I would be going to talk about few of the upcoming features of web development that are anticipated to make considerable change in the future of the web industry:

An Improvement of Priority: From Customer Work to Mobile Marketing:

An upcoming vogue of the industry exhibits that the priorities for web businesses are quickly shifting from a simple web based solution to full-fledged internet marketing business. Instruments like iPhones and iPad are altering the scenario of web development as they constitute a  bit more mature and user penetrating mediums. Now web applications are developed to run on computer systems and mobile phones/ handhelds.

Decreased demand for the conversion services:

It is anticipated that in the forthcoming days, open source script customization; for example WordPress, will acquire more momentum in the market. This would remain true for small segment businesses while medium and large segments will continue to use customized application development. The prevailing trend in the industry already exhibits an up-scaling growth of demand for the open source softwares and pre-created scripts such as WordPress and Dot Net Nuke etc.

Interactive and dynamic layout:

With customers turning more tech savvy, static web development will turn past in no time. Already in the ride, interactive and dynamic web development is considered to turn into an ultimate web solution to be trusted by both the customers and developers.

Web 3.0

Concept of Web 3.0 web applications is growing at an exponential pace. Semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data mining, and artificial intelligence would be used even more by the web based businesses in times to come.

Are you trying to find the best web developers for you? Don’t worry when Centex Technologies is here. We strive to provide you with the best we can in terms of web development and designing services. Contact us today at (254) 213-4740.

Web Development Austin – Roundrock Web Design

If you are planning to start an online shopping business, the first thing that you will need to do is to create an eCommerce website that can help bring your products to customers. You can create a ecommerce website by roping in experienced web development company. The eCommerce website can be hosted on web servers by paying web hosting company a certain annual or monthly fee. The name of your website should be easy to remember and spell so that visitors do not experience any problems logging on to it. If you are creating an eCommerce website for the first time in order to give impetus to a new business, you should try to incorporate the following elements in your website:

1. Online selling is a lot more social now days. As an eCommerce website, you should incorporate various available social media promotion tools within the website to effectively put your products across masses.
2. There must be a well developed home page in colors that are not too garish and are in accordance with your products. This helps set the theme for the rest of the website. For example, if you are into the business of selling environment friendly products, you should keep the color of your homepage in different shades of green. There should be other buttons on the homepage that should be big enough to be seen by the average viewer and help direct visitors to other related pages.
3. It is vital for an ecommerce website to have a detailed product catalog listing all the products that are on offer for sale along with the price that is being charged on them. The product id should also be affixed to each product to help identify them easily. The colors offered should be showcased with the option to see the particular product in all colors available.
4. In today’s times, internet fraud and stealth of money has become quite common. This has made it necessary to have certain security features like SSL in place as potential buyers are going to be sharing their bank account and credit card details on your website while buying items. This also helps build you credibility among customers and makes it easy for them to purchase from you.
5. You should incorporate features like affiliate system, auto product suggestions, newsletter, promotional codes in your shopping cart. It is beneficial for increasing the sales of your store.

The whole idea is to keep the eCommerce website simple and user friendly. Well planned ecommerce website can generate high business revenues and can make your online selling business a success.

We at Centex Technologies provide complete ecommerce solutions to our clients. We custom create shopping carts to generate personalized experience for users. For more information on our web development services, please feel free to call us at: (254)-213-4740

Website Development Austin – Web Design Austin Texas

Payment gateway is a software solution that allows internet users to make purchase online. There are several websites online that are selling products to its customers online and are making use of payment gateways to charge them for their purchases, the most popular payment gateways being PayPal, and Authorize.net.

These gateways are analogous to POS as seen in the offline shops. While selecting a payment gateway, you need to be very sure that it is reliable and 100% secure. The popular gateways like PayPal have been around for years and are known for reliable services to the customers. All the payment gateways use mandatory security procedures like working on SSL, having independent servers and incorporating fraud tracking mechanism.

If you have an online store, you may need to have a payment gateway which works with the shopping cart to allow successful checkouts. The process of connection of an online store with gateway is called Payment Gateway Integration. To integrate a payment gateway with your ecommerce website, you will need to take services of a reliable web development company.

How Payment Gateway Works:

• After selecting the products that a customer wants to buy online he submits his order and it is forwarded in an encrypted form to the web server of the seller. Through SSL, the information fed in the form is encrypted and is sent to Gateway.
• The details of the transaction are then forwarded to the acquiring bank of the merchant.
• The acquiring banks then forward the same to issuing bank i.e. the bank that has provided the credit card to the buyer.
• After getting the details, issuing bank then forwards the response to an online gateway that whether the payment has been acknowledged or not. If not acknowledged, the cause is also sent in the response.
• The cause is then forwarded to gateway and hence to the server of the merchant.
• The response is ultimately sent to buyer in an encrypted form to inform the customer if his order has been placed effectively or not.
• At last, the issuing bank deposits the required amount in the account of merchant.

Why Online Payment Gateway is essential?

• It is an indispensable part of online shopping, payment of goods bought online cannot be made without a payment gateway.
• It adds to the use of E-Commerce i.e. selling and buying of goods via internet.

The only thing that you need to keep in mind is the security of the whole process while working with payment gateways. You need to follow the procedures laid by the local agencies as well as payment gateways for integrating these successfully. You should take services of experienced Web Development Company for payment gateway integration. We at Centex Technologies are experts in providing Ecommerce solutions including creation of shopping carts, payment gateway integration, ecommerce optimization, and pay-per-click management.

Web Development Central Texas – SEO Central Texas

The launch of Windows SharePoint Services has made it easier for corporate organizations to ensure team collaboration through a scalable, secure, enterprise-level portal. All the information is collected and organized at a single place, making it easy to find relevant data quickly. Team members and site managers can coordinate to work on projects, documents, announcements and other activities.

Functions of SharePoint

• Single point access to information provides an integrated portal to team members. This leads to better decision-making and collaboration.
• Page and document changes can be instantly declared through subscribed alerts.
• It is very convenient and flexible for users who access the SharePoint portal with personalized content and layout.
• All team members can enjoy easy personal and public views of information, applications and documents. This encourages collaboration with coworkers, partners and clients.
• Standardized templates provide for best-practice SharePoint sites along with simplified site and document editing via integrated Microsoft Office applications.

SharePoint for Work Management

With excellent flexibility and high level of functionality, SharePoint allows team members to execute tasks quickly, share information and maximum productivity through greater collaboration. The main advantages of using Microsoft SharePoint include the following:

High Productivity
Better productivity can be achieved through SharePoint sites that get rid of time, place and technical limitations. On the other hand, team members get a reliable, affordable and flexible method of increasing productivity. Workspace site creation is also enabled through flexible user management and in-built templates. A single, password-protected site gives constant access to team information and documents.

Community Environment
SharePoint empowers easy gathering and sharing of information, ideas, documents and communication among team members. It also has features that enable surveys’, discussions and document collaboration. Web browsers as well as client supported web services can be used to access content of the site.

Personal Tasks
Individuals can locate documents, read and edit events, assignments and communicate with clients and project leaders through SharePoint. Other useful features include alerts, calendars, appointments, etc.

Centex Technologies provides Web Development services for clients across the globe. Contact Us today for a free quote.

Web Development Central Texas – SEO Central Texas