Earlier this year Google announced the opening of Chrome Web Store during its I/O conference. Google showed a presentation to a room of game developers at the GDC Europe conference. According to the presentation Google showed off the Chrome Web Store, a marketplace for HTML5 apps. The presentation also revealed some new details about Google’s new app store. According to the presentation, the Chrome Web Store is launching in October.

Google Chrome users who find web apps in the store will be able to create convenient shortcuts in Chrome for easy access. Also, developers will have the option to easily sell their apps through the store using a convenient and secure payment system.

Facebook and Apple, Goggle’s two biggest enemy have been threatening Google’s dominance of the web through two distinct platforms, social media and mobile. Facebook on one side shows no signs of stopping which creates a real threat to core search and advertising businesses of Google. On the other side, Apple has already attracted a huge number of developers to its iOS platform and hence products like iAds eating into Google’s profit.

The search engine giant Google is pitching its marketplace as a huge platform for gaming. It’s sure to be a main selling point of Chrome OS, which is supposed to launch later this year. The Chrome Web Store gives Google a path to competing with game consoles through integration with Google TV. It could even become the app platform for the company’s much-rumored Google Me social network.

To know more information about Chrome Web Store visit chrome.google.com/webstore

On the onset of web development work for the Kolkata , India based company , we knew that we were dealing with a very professional group of people. They had a clear understanding of their website requirements . The deliverables and expectations were well defined , and they gave us well prepared materials for their website. When our web designers created the initial design layout, they liked it right away also. Building up on a custom CMS and a database driven Store Finder took place in the next 7 days .

With the website completed such quickly, we are now almost ready to begin for their website promotion and another new website for the Wall Depot group of companies. It would be our great pleasure if you can take a look at their new website and leave any feedback on the same.

Website : Wall Depot Retail (India) Pvt. Ltd.

The first and foremost point here is that website is a form of Advertisement. Business’ which are controlled and operated by forward thinkers , people who have interest in leading among other business and have interest in business growth will consider such Advertisement a worthwhile expenditure.

Almost all forms of advertisements bear costs – be it in the print media such as Newspapers and Magazines . In a metropolitan city like Kolkata, cost of such an advertisement is often quite high. Comparatively, total cost of having a 10-15 page website would be lower.

And in actuality, we have been seeing more and more small to medium size business, shop owners and professionals have been finding the exposure that has been received by their competitors, who already have websites are tremendous. Some of our clients include punjabi shops, budget hotels, imported tiles distributors. In all these cases, we did not have to explain the need for a website, rather the client came with their own vision as to why they wanted a website and what they expected from it.

Not to mention, that in my last count I found almost over 300 web design companies in Kolkata and numerous freelancer web designers.  With such a high provider count , the market for web design and development surely is booming. It is only upto you , the visitor – to stop thinking and start contacting a professional web development company like WEBSYS.

Websys

Often it can happen that a business idea springs in , and you have decided to build a website for the same. Getting a business website up does not take much time – you can choose from a variety of free and low cost template designs. Or you can get hold of a freelancer from your locality or freelancing website; Or even you can get a true and professional web development company and get started. With the website up and running, add to it a shopping cart and you are already making sales. But without a proper business logo, what are you loosing out ?

You have a business but you do not have a brand . Be it a online ecommerce shop or a offline business – you need to build your brand . Creating a business logo does not cost too much … depending on the time and dedication and thought you want to involve in building your brand identity – it can be anywhere between 55 USD and 199 USD and you can have use prepare various concepts for your custom logo . During a logo design process we remain closely attached with you to find out more about business and the identity you wish to display. We have our graphic artists to hear from you and show you variations and how it can look on a webpage or a business card or a poster.

When you are operating offline through a store with daily customers, names of business are less easy to remember but a impressive logo on your product or stationery – be it a mailer or brochure can help you catch  peoples attention. And when you are operating online, your logo on each page header, banners on other websites, Favicons, and avatars in blogs and forums will go a long way in getting popular among millions of websites springing up every day.

To start with, it is better to specify that such a measure by Google and even Firefox which automatically adheres to such reports is commendable, no doubt. The notification comes when

• your website actually uses or embeds harmful content / virus / trojan or distributes them
• when your web pages have been coded insecurely – such as not checking for input validations
• Insecure file and folder permissions resulting in XSS injection and MySQL exploits etc
• Your website uses some code that Google does not trust , which could be affiliate tracking code, text link ads code and even Analytics softwares tracking code

While a lot can be written about XSS and MySQL vulnerabilities , that should be the scope of a more detailed post on that topic itself , we have recently come across a more dangerous scenario where websites are getting hackend into via loopholes in FTP. Uploading files to your web server – any web server typically happens through the File Transfer Protocol ( FTP), where the web designer or web site owner uploads files via FTP clients such as FileZilla , CuteFTP or even Adobe Dreamweaver using regular FTP mode. But recently a Trojan named Gumblar has effected thousands of websites and users spreading stolen FTP credentials.

Now if all these are the problems, what are the solutions ?

• The solutions to MySQL injection and XSS are to better coding .
• The insecure file and folder permission should be reviewed based on the applications requirements. Many server administrator and hosting companies also put in many server wide restrictions to disallow hacking attempts.
• To fight against trojans , it is also like fighting against viruses on PC . So probably a better way to protect your password from being leaked,you should think of using SecureFTP or SFTP mode. Almost all servers have this as it is , if it does not , ask your web host ( or host with us ) to enable SFTP and disable normal FTP.  Regular FTP mode stores the passwords in text mode , where as in SFTP mode the passwords get encrypted, thus preventing the leakage and future hacking or defacements of your website.

So , what happens when you have fixed the security loopholes on your website ? Does Google find about it automatically ? Not really . The following process is needed after you have updated your website with malware removed codes .

Login / create a a Webmaster Tools access and verify your domain ownership. Once you are validated, you will find a message / notification from Google specifying the same Warning for your domain . Just under it will be a button for Requesting a Review of your website from Google, which will happen within 1 week or sooner .  If Google finds no such malware on this reindex , your website shall get a clean chit on the search engine result pages as well .

Hence , as solution providers , our first task is to understand how a website owner wants his shopping cart to perform , what is his exact requirements , who his prospective site visitors are going to be , what expertise level are they at – before we start pitching for the project with a quote . If you ( reader of this post ) are a prospective customer , please take a little time and provide us with details such as how much is online payment important to your e-business , do you need to constantly update your products and prices , would you be interested in having cross selling of items on your pages , do you need to have multiple product / item categories and sub categories , will your customer be searching for products or will he be categorically viewing different options , do you sell egoods / services or will it include shipping etc .

Also important questions are : If your cart will be used for lead generation , do you wish to have multiple emails – for customer, for admin ; is it important for you to track how the visitor arrived at your cart , which items he expressed interest upon , which he selected and then removed ?

If your cart is not for end users , but for distributors , who would be selecting items in bulk and saving them in personalized accounts and printing them , do you want them to provide any other options such as discounts , save searches etc ?

Apart from the use of the cart , being on the topic , i should also like to mention : even though we have good expertise on developing custom shopping carts , there are also some open source alternatives available , which provide similar facilities . Quite a few of our existing customers had given us specific projects , where we had to customize oscommerce , and zencart etc . The advantages are well known , so it is probably not required to be detailed , but what i sometimes feel is a shopping cart , like a CMS is better made with custom requirements , instead of being a ready made package , because ready made packages comes with design ideas , functionality which has been conceived not by you – thus you would be often be forced to adher to the ways specified by the package , and spent time learning a plethora of features and documentation , which may or may not be required for your website and website visitors .