Welcome Members!

Happy Holidays!
If you live in the U.S., I hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend! Mine was just lovely! It was a warm and fuzzy way to start the holiday season. :)

Wherever you are, no matter what you celebrate, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you and yours all the best for safe, warm, joyful holidays.

Autoresponder Alert
It recently came to my attention that my autoresponders have not been functioning properly. Technology! How does a system that's working properly suddenly break?! (Be sure to subscribe to your own autoresponders periodically to check them.)

The good news is they have been completely restored. So if you've had difficulty receiving the Top 21 Myths of Online Business series or the Welcome Member series, please do try again. Click on the name of the series you want to go directly to the sign up form. I apologize for the inconvenience.

New Service
I just launched a brand new Web Site Critique service. For years I've been telling people about the value of feedback for any business web site. It really is imperative to know what your customers think when they view your site in order to get maximum results.

But, recently it occured to me that it's very hard to get a complete, comprehensive review of any site. At best, you're likely to get one or two tips from anyone you ask instead of a fullscale test and evaluation. While these tips can be helpful, it would be far more effective to just pay someone to take a good, comprehensive look.

This is the essence of my new service. I will walk through your entire sales process including main page, order page and payment procedure and give you a full report on the experience from the customer's point of view. I'll also give you expert tips and advice wherever necessary to improve the performance of your business web site.

Those of you who know me will guess that the price of this new service is low, but honestly, it might be too low this time. So, I am calling it an introductory price and we'll see how it goes. No guarantees on how long this price will last.

New Recommendation
In response to requests for a shopping cart recommendation, I turned to my good friend Roy Houston. I knew, with his technical expertise and experience, he'd have a tried and tested recommendation that is inexpensive, functional and easy to use. He's never let me down. :)

Roy's shopping cart recommendation is CubeCart. He says, "It's an all around solution for the avid marketer. It handles digital or tangible items, can accomodate various sale pricing and has an easy to use interface for adding categories and products. With is wide assortment of payment gateways and the ability to integrate with affiliate tracking services, it makes a good addition to a website."

I think that says it all.

Promotional Opportunity - For Article Writers
ONE STOP Member, JoDee Inscoe, is actively seeking articles for her content site, Jodee.biz, which is growing by leaps and bounds, seemingly over night. Don't miss an opportunity to have your article, along with your URL, published on a high quality, business information site.

Tip of the Week - For Web Masters
For a long time I've been recommending that people design their web sites for 800x600 resolution, but recently I got a new pc that came with a larger resolution, 1024x768, and now many web sites seems too small. Instead of taking up the whole screen, they fill only about two thirds. This prompted me to look into it and I found out over 70% of my visitors are using this same resolution. Wow!

Now, I could start recommending that you design your site for this next larger resolution, which, indeed, I think you should. But, more importantly, I think web masters should define table widths in terms of "percent of page" as opposed to pixels. When you define widths in terms of percent, it matters less which resolution your viewer has. Your page will adjust for larger and smaller resolutions so no one will have to scroll sideays to read your text and no one will see a lot of extra space.

With technology changing so rapidly, it pays to keep up with what's current. But, it's even better to make changes that will allow your web site to adjust with the changing times. Look for touch ups of this nature at ONE STOP in the coming weeks. ;)

Tip of the Week - For Everyone
Every now and then I get a message telling me that something is wrong with my web site. Maybe there's a broken link, or worse, my autoresponders are not functioning properly. While it may be irritating to find out something is wrong, it is far more irritating to find out it's been wrong for months and nobody has taken the time to tell me!

My second business tip for today is:
Do other businesses a favor and let them know when you find an error.

It may not have anything to do with your own business, but if everyone got into a habit like this, we would dramatically reduce the chance of months worth of malfunctinoing web sites. Let your business associates know about problems and, hopefully, they will let you know when the problem is yours.

Have a Profitable Day,

Cathy Wagner
ONE STOP Internet Business Services
Providing Freedom Seeking Entrepeneurs with
Low-Risk, Online Profit-Building Guidance.

---------------------------------------------
Bookmark this page! Member Updates are always published at this URL.
See past updates in the Archive.
Read articles by Cathy Wagner.
Have a question? Ask Cathy.