Just read some interesting Internet usage stat on Wikipedia…
The most-used language on the Internet is English. Although the total number of native English speakers in the world is about 322 million, English is spoken as a second language by up to 1.2 billion people around the world. They make their contributions to the Internet in their own language as well as in English.
Chinese is the most common native language on Earth, and the second most-used language on the Internet. According to CNNIC, the number of Chinese Internet users increased by 42% in 2008 to a total of 298 million. This high rate of growth is expected to have a significant impact on the Internet in the near future.
With the above stats, Casual Commerce is laying the groundwork to build a network/community of Chinese content web site that caters to the Chinese demographic. The first project launched in this series of sites to be deployed is 52my.info, which serves as a foundation for Chinese local communities to interact, find jobs, rent houses; the web site is due for a relaunch in early April with new features to accomodate growth and facilitate the ease of posting advertisements on the Internet.
If your business is looking to expand outside of the English-speaking demographic, please contact us for a free consultation on building a business presence catering to the high-growth Chinese user demographic on the Internet.
blog posting, services
Chinese demographic, Internet usage, localize content
Aside from making a profit, Casual Commerce also believes in contributing back to the community. We are always on the look out to work with non-profit organizations in helping them establish a web site and get their mission statement out to the general public. If you are a non-profit organization and you are looking for technical assistance, please contact us.
blog posting, news, services
non-profit organizations, service
As more clients begin to request for quotes on web projects, I need to start building up a stronger development team to support clients requests. If you live in Southern California and have experience developing with PHP (LAMP), please contact me with and how me what you have done as of late. It’s a strong plus if you have written plugins and/or themes for Wordpress, and it’s also a plus if you have extensively worked with Magento
I want to talk to you!
If you have experience writing application for IPhone and/or experience working with authentication mechanisms such as Facebook Connection, OpenID, please drop me a line too!
Send me an email at jerry at casualcommerce dot com
blog posting, magento, services, wordpress
jobs, php developers
Saw this posting on mashable.com - 20 Great Free Wordpress 2.7 Themes, it’s just what I need as I start my practice building corporate sites for clients. These will serve as great foundation for my new designs for the clients.
I have picked 2 themes that I think are great for redesign and repurpose for clients of all business types.
blog posting, recommendations, services, templates, wordpress
templates, wordpress
As we ramp up our Magento and Wordpress practices, we are actively looking for clients to help us build our case studies portfolio. whether you are a start-up business or a business looking to get an online presence, in which we are offering to build your web site AT COST. What exactly is at cost? well, we will only bill you for an initial setup fee of $300-$500 (depending whether you need logo designed) and then simply charge you a monthly fee thereafter.
If you currently already have a web site, we can help too, we will help you redesign your site and integrate a content management system to ease site administration and content update.
Help us help you! Contact us today, and tell us about you and your business!
services
case studies
Having helped so many clients set up their web hostings and e-mails with the web hosting company where the sit is hosted…i have come to realize, why use the primitive “free” email provided by the web hosting companies when you can use the best e-mail application from Google: Google Apps for Business; essentially this is simply gmail with your own domain name.
I have recommended this solution to so many friends, and yet everytime i mentioned this service, they were so surprised that such great thing existed. With Google Apps for Business, you can essentially host up to 25 user accounts for free, and anything above that you would have to pay for their service. My honest opinon is that even if you have to pay, it will be worth every penny, as Gmail has one of the best Spam filters out there.
The best feature i liked about Google mail is that i can actually point multiple domains names to the same mailbox, so i can have jerry@domainA.com and jerry@domainB.com point to the same mailbox, and i can send from either addresses. Pretty cool imo.
Drop me an email if you need assistance in setting this up.
Microsoft’s Office Live and Yahoo’s Business Mail offers similar features, I would say Yahoo is second to Google, but you would have to pay for it, as for Microsoft Live mail, it offers similar service for free, but as a veteran user of hotmail/live mail, I suggest you just go with Google Apps for Business.
blog posting, recommendations, services
email, gmail, service
After countless number of projects in developing e-commerce web sites for clients, it has finally hit me that most of the small companies and entrepreneurs simply don’t have the 1) time, 2) knowledge, 3) money, 4) manpower to run and operate an e-commerce web site. A lot of the time, customers simply want to build a site, hoping that once the site is launched, orders would roll in without them having to do anything..well that may be true 10 years ago, but in today’s online landscape, having an online storefront is not much different from operating a physical brick-n-mortar store…lots of effort is required.
In order to have a good site, the store owner would need to have the following (this may serve as a good starting point for a checklist, but it is far from complete)
- product information (SKU #, Product Name, Product Description, Price, Inventory, Categorization)
- product images (the quality of the product photography essentially makes or breaks your site, if you don’t have good product photography, you may as well stop thinking about launching the site)
- domain name - your store should have a easy to remember web address, start searching for a domain name if you haven’t already. Yahoo domain is pretty good for finding domains, but Godaddy is cheaper to perform the registation.
- corporate identity - having a good logo to go along with a domain name is important in building a brand for your business; you need to make your brand memorable, and having a good logo is a good start. To say the least, it makes small stores look more professional and bigger than they actually are.
- web site - you will need a web developer and graphic designer to help you build out the store from idea to reality, you will need to know what you want in the site, and how the store would look like. store looking around on sites like amazon.com, gap.com, walmart.com (some of the most popular e-commerce sites) to get a better understanding of how you want to site to look like and what features you would like to have in your site.
Once you have accomplished all the above, it is time to start thinking about promoting the site, we will talk more about web promotion in a future post.
In conclusion, there’s a lot of work required in building an e-commerce web site. We, at Casual Commerce, understand that, and would like to offer a service in which we will take care of all the technical and tedious work that future store owners have no time to deal with. For a monthly fee, we will offer the following:
- Help you register you domain name (you pay the registration fee)
- Help you design a corporate identity (logo, business cards, stationary headers, etc.)
- Build your store, incorporating the corporate identity.
- Product information maintenance
- Product photography
- Web site promotion
- Email set up
- Technical support related to your web site
The store owner’s job…focus on bringing in sales. Happy E-commerce.
blog posting, e-commerce, services
checklist, e-commerce, services
