Overreacting? Of course! It's wouldn't be a Friday Funny without some sort of humiliation :D

I've only recently started playing around with SQL Server 2008 for a new project I'm working on. To date I've found it very easy to use, especially coming from SQL Server 2005. One thing that I noticed early on was my inability to edit any of my tables using design mode. Anytime I wanted to change the column to allow nulls or adjust a column type I would see this error message in SQL Server:

Saving changes is not permitted. The changes you have made require the following tables to be dropped and re-created. You have either made changes to a table that can't be re-created or enabled the option Prevent saving changes that require the table to be re-created.

To stop this message occurring all you need to do is go to Tools and Options from the SQL Server toolbar. A popup will open on screen. Simply select the Designers option from the left hand navigation within the popup window and uncheck the option that says 'Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation'. Click 'OK' and your done. If you now try to adjust your table using the table designer in SQL Server 2008 everything should work OK for you.

If you don't get why the above image is funny then don't bother clicking the link for more. I doubt they even had meetings to come up with these names!

View Products With Unfortunate Names

[UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS NOW BEEN FILLED.]

Dragnet Systems is expanding! We're looking for a talented individual to join our highly skilled design department. You can read all about the new job over at http://www.dragnet-systems.ie/Careers.

This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to move on up in the world of web design. It's a junior role but we do require some basic skills at least for you to be considered for this role. The full list of requirements are over at the Dragnet Careers page. Good luck to anyone applying :)

P.S. don't forget to include samples of your designs and html!!

[UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS NOW BEEN FILLED.]

So you've invested loads of time and money building up your online store and you're ready to launch....now what? How can you get people to go to your site? How can you keep customers coming back for more?

I have been building online stores for customers for over 5 years now and it's always easy to spot the ones that will do well and the ones that will fail. Below is a Top 10 guide for making sure you do everything you can to make your online store the best it can be. These tips are not in any order but they are things that every store owner should be doing to make their online stores a success.

Give proper product descriptions - If there is one major falling point for online stores it's the lack of being able to physically touch the item you want to buy. To help your customers know if the item they are looking at is what they want make sure to put in the time to fill out the product description. If you're selling a jacket don't just put in 'navy jacket with pockets' as the description. Flesh it out. Describe the material used, any logo or brand names, the quality of the build, what the inside of the jacket is like, inner pockets, etc. Show customers more than one image, allow them to zoom in on the images for a closer look, etc. This particular point will make or break your store. Trust me, if you take away one point out of my list make sure it's this one!

Keep your store up to date - This might sounds like a no brainer but there is nothing worse than a store (or website) that isn't kept up to date. If there are items with no stock then either hide them from your store or put up a notice informing customers when the items will be back in stock. If your store has a news page on it then be sure to keep that up to date. Simple news posts to let potential customers know when you have new items for sale is a perfect way to use that section of your site. You don't need to write pages and pages of text but it gives people confidence that someone is looking after this store and keeping it up to date.

Offer free postage - There's nothing worse than an online store you know is only up the road but is charging you €10 to ship your items to you! Doing something as simple as offering freepost to customers is a brilliant way to make them feel like they're not being ripped off. If it's not economical to ship out smaller items for free, make it an incentive to customers to spend more on your store buy offering freepost for orders over a certain amount. This particular method of 'freepost' works great as the customer is rewarded with freepost for spending more money on your store. Win/Win!

Keep customers informed of their orders at all times - I have mentioned this in some of my previous posts on how to run online stores so it should come as no surprise to my regular readers that I am sticking this point in my top 10 list. If I order items from your site then I expect at the very least to get an order confirmation from your site telling me that you received my order. It's very good practice to then follow up that email within 24hrs to let me know if my order has shipped or if you're waiting on stock. Communication is key for any online store to succeed. The better communication you give your customers the more they will buy from you and the more chances there are of them telling their friends how great your store is.

Don't hide your contact details from your customers - I've seen a few online stores lately that don't provide any means of contact besides an online form. This isn't good enough if it's all you have on your online store. Give your customers a phone number or an actual email address they can use as well as your online form. Clearly display your company registration number. The more contact details you can give to customers the more they will be willing to hand over their money on your site. Just like I mentioned on the second point, it's all about giving your customers the confidence to spend money on your site.

Give customers a few payment options - A lot of the main web stores out there do this and I think it's a great idea. Let people pay you the way they want to. There is nothing worse than a web store that uses a crappy 'no name' payment portal. If you are taking money on your site then clearly display the payment provider being used. Let customers pay by credit card through your payment provider if they wish or offer PayPal/Google Checkout as an alternative. I would normally use my credit card for online transactions but sometimes if I'm on a website that I have never used before I like using PayPal instead as it keeps my credit card details hidden. If you offer multiple payment options then you're making it easier for customers to pay you. This is an important topic when you consider the high volumes of users who get as far as the checkout pages only to abandon their goods because they couldn't remember their credit card number or its expiry date. If you offered PayPal or Google Checkout then you might have made that sale.

Make sure your site is easy to navigate - This isn't a big deal if you've only got about 5 products but let's face it, you want to sell as much as you can. A lot of online stores let customers navigate items by departments. This is done for obvious reasons. It's easier for the customer to work his/her way through your store by department rather than to go trawling through hundreds of items on a page. Don't mess things up by putting products into departments they don't belong in. Spend the time to organise your store based on customer viewing habits. If you have a good web site stat package for your store you can easily see what product pages are doing best. You can then set up a new department called 'Popular Items' that lists all of those products to help make it quicker for potential customers to get at your best selling items.

Embrace social media sites - YouTube, Facebook, Twitter...you just can't get away from them. Everyone is on them. Make sure that your store makes it easy for product details to be sent to friends on those sites. Set up a profile on Twitter or Facebook and put links to those profile pages on your store home page. This brings me nicely onto my next tip.

Run special offers - A great way to get people to follow you on Facebook or Twitter is to offer your followers a promotion code. Make it fun for them by limiting the offers to the first 100 customers. Once words gets around that your Twitter or Facebook account is giving away 'Deals of the week' people will be mad signing up to you and you should notice sales going up. Email is still one of the most effective ways to run your special offers. Spend the time to make your email look stunning and the rewards will come. Reduce pricing of 5 or so random items on your store once a week. It will keep customers checking out your site regularly and is a great way to get people to sign up to your newsletter to see what deals you are currently running on the store.

Offer a loyalty programme - We all like getting something for free. Who doesn't? A great way to encourage customers to come back to your site is to give them a bit of a discount off their next purchase. There are a number of easy ways to do this. You could offer your customer 5% off their next order and send them a promotion code when you send them their order confirmation. It's a great way to say thanks for purchasing from your store and it's a brilliant way to have them come back to your site in the future. You could also send them a discount code after a certain period of time. Maybe 30 days after a sale you could just send a quick email to say thanks for ordering from your store and to show your appreciation you're giving them a discount off their next order. If customers know you're offering deals like this they would be sure to tell their friends about your excellent services!

BONUS TIP: Keep your store front end design up to date -A lot of online store owners forget about this one. Web trends change faster than the Japanese bullet trains and it you don't look after your sites front design you run the risk of it looking dated. As more and more people use online stores they are getting exposed to more and more stores that will have the latest design trends. The trend for people to ignore a store based on its dated appearance is rising fast, especially amongst younger people (18yr - 35). If you already have an online store and you just need a new lick of paint for it then it shouldn't cost you an arm and a leg. In fact it will probably cost you less than you think and could transform the look and feel of your site bringing it bang up to date.

Some of those tips might be no brainers for the more experienced store owners out there but for new store owners it's always good practice to keep these points in mind to help maximise the potential of your new online store. Let me know if you have any other great tips.

Dragnet Systems is proud to launch a huge new project for Ballygarvan stonecraft. This project includes a brand new fully content managed website, a micro site for the 'Barn Store' business, a full online store and estimating tool for garden planning!

The Ballygarvan online store is using our newly updated online store engine and features:

• colour and texture pickers.
• size options.
• brand new store layout for front end.
• Wholesaler section with promotions.

As well as all of the features of our amazing online store software which include:

• No nonsense, simple to use interfaces for your customers and your site admin team.
• Excellent reporting tools showing you what products were sold in any timeframe you choose, view all sales for the last 30 days, view all sales for the last year, etc.
• Reminder emails automatically sent to customers. Useful technique to get your customers to return to your site.
• Promotions tools giving you the flexibility to offer your customers discounts.
• Auto image resizing for product images uploaded. you don't need to worry about resizing your images, our software will manage it all.
• SEO friendly page links. Site fully optimized for Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.
• Email Marketing. Your customers can easily sign up, and opt out of email marketing on the site. You have total control over the email's sent to your customers. Includes filters to effectively targeting the right people.
• Site optimized for speed. Sites load insanely fast and fully tested with over 100,000 products and orders in the system - it's fully robust!
• And much much more!

I recently ordered some clothing items off a new Irish online store and it really highlighted how poorly people value the web in this country. I purchased some clothes in a retail shop in Cork and wanted to check out the online store advertised on the tag. To be clear the online store was for the clothing item not the retail shop I bought it in. Actually the store I bought the items from doesn't even sell items online but that's another issue ;)

This clothing web store was quite basic, as most Irish stores tend to be but it was easy to use and had what I was looking for so I put an item into the basket and proceeded to checkout the order through PayPal. Everything went through ok but after payment I noticed some short comings with the site. First off I only received a PayPal receipt. The store itself didn't email me my order confirmation or give me an order number! The PayPal receipt mentioned a different company name and email contact than the one I ordered from. From doing some digging around it turned out to be a parent company of the store I bought from but this is definitely not the thing you want your customers to have to spend time finding out. From a customer point of view this didn't fill me with confidence.

The problem now is that I have had no actual confirmation of my order with this store. I gave the company the benefit of the doubt and I did not contact them until a week and a half had passed. After I had received no email about my order being received or items being posted I sent them off an email to them asking if they received the order and forwarded my PayPal receipt showing that they had taken payments on the same day from me. No reply to that email either.

I usually look out for contact email and phone numbers for online stores before making a purchase on any site but overlooked it for this order. I won't be making this mistake again! I noticed that this store didn't have a contact number or email address visible anywhere. They just had an online contact form but that could be going anywhere.

As it stands I have not received my items and I am in the process of cancelling this order using PayPal.

It's funny that after my previous article on how to make a great online store I manage to find one that nearly misses every point and crucially fails to hit the number one point of "Always keep the customer informed". The sad thing is, the majority of people in Ireland running online stores fail to give their store the proper time and attention it needs. When we deliver online stores to our clients we always make sure to teach them how to communicate with their customers effectively. In fact our store software does most of the communication for them. Store owners should just follow these basic rules:

• If you make a payment, send the customer an order number and order summary.
• When fulfilling an order, email the customer to let them know their item is posted out to them or if you are waiting on stock. Don't have the customer contact you about these issues.
• Clearly display your contact details on your site. Don't hide your contact info as it looks like you are hiding something yourself!
  
• Be pro active about your store!

I've decided not to name and shame here as my issue is still ongoing but hopefully this post will inspire some online store owners to get their act together. What about you? Have you had any bad online shopping experiences? What were they and did you manage to get those issues resolved?