E-Commerce

A couple weeks ago NPR's Planet Money and This American Life had some really great episodes about the broken patent system. These are great stories for people who don't understand why patents are a problem, but they overlooked a couple of crucial points.

Before doing any changes to your web site, the first thing to figure out are your goals. As a web development shop, we focus on building web sites that create measurable value for our customers, aligned with their goals.
Some common goals:

Yesterday Drupal.org got hacked, and potentially all the password hashes on the site fell into malicious hands.

Hey, that's not what I was thinking!

That's a very common complaint customers have with developers, when they receive the result of weeks or months of hard work. And it indicates a failure of planning.

I was talking with a new client the other day who spends a lot of money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to try to get people to visit his online store. And yet his blog -- what search engines value most -- was on wordpress.com.

Will asks:

> I ... have been thinking about alternatives to QuickBooks. I sent these links to my bookkeeper but she has not used any of these. Do you recommend any of them, or is a “custom open source” option viable for me at this point?

There's a huge range of skills that come to mind when somebody asks for a web developer, and when you start looking for Drupal developers, it gets even more complicated.

Drupal developer, module developer, back end developer, what does that mean?

In the world of software and web development simplicity is a funny thing. We are always striving to make our work and our product simple: simple to understand, simple to use, and simple to maintain. This is one of the many reasons we use Drupal as our development framework here at Freelock.

Marc asks:

Why do websites get hacked? Websites get hacked for a bunch of different reasons:

Mavis asks,

I have already spent thousands of dollars on my [Zen Cart] website. What would be your advice for [a company] who wants to transfer their site to a new host but not redesign it?