E-Commerce

Shan asks,

Everybody is writing about Heartbleed this week. The reason? It probably affects more people than any other vulnerability we've ever seen. If you ever log into any web site, anywhere, your password might be revealed -- and that is just the start. The biggest problem?

I've long been a Bitcoin skeptic, not necessarily seeing the point of it. While I've kept passing tabs on its progress, I did not think it was viable, or worth much beyond pure speculative game play, a forum for making bets that today are up quite a lot.

It goes something like this:

(Client): I want to add a shopping cart to my site. I heard that xyz cart is free, can you add that for me?

(Developer): Sure! That looks easy.

Results. Return On Investment. Value. How do you measure these things in a website? There's one thing you can easily measure -- cost. Or at least the amount you actually spend to build and maintain a site. The others are far more troublesome to measure.

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?

Short answer: it depends.
We still do most of our projects in Drupal 6, mainly because it's been around a few years, and modules we use on many sites are not yet stable for Drupal 7 (and some are still a ways off).

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups.

Planning a vacation is tough. Between the pain of finding a hotel or final destination, booking an airline, and locating information on things to do, one could spend days online surfing from website to website searching for items that may or may not be correct and/or relevant.