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Free - Online persuasion - 7 ways to persuade people to buy

How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? None, the light bulb has to want to change. So the joke goes. However, it's possible that the light bulb could be persuaded to change. Persuading people to buy online (from TVs to groceries, holidays to services) can be achieved with techniques that marketers and psychologists have known for years.

Persuasion isn't rocket science; it involves understanding aspects of human nature that are often automatic and work at a subconscious level. Here are 7 ethical ways to persuade people.

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Free - 5 Ways to Improve online Cross- & Up-Selling

We've all been cross- or up-sold to before. We reach for the magazines or sweets at the supermarket checkout counter. We purchase games the sales person suggests for our new game console. We gleefully pour over the options list for our new car.

Cross-selling is selling an additional product to existing customers, usually related to what they've already bought. Up-selling is selling a better (but usually more expensive) product to customers, after they've decided on a cheaper product.

Cross- and up-selling isn't difficult as you're selling to people who want to buy - probably the easiest job in the world next to selling petrol! The key however is to do it well. Here are a few tips on how to cross- and up-sell online more effectively.

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Free - Usability & security: Unlikely bedfellows?

With an ever increasing online population - 41 million users in the UK alone (source: Internet World Stats) - computer security and user authentication have never been more vital. Unusable security is expensive as well as ineffective. According to Password research, two-thirds of users had to reset their passwords/PINs three or more times in the last 2 years. With each password reset estimated at £35 in help desk costs (source: Mandylion research labs) it's easy to see how expensive an affair this can be.

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Free! - Optimizing your Web Site for Search Engines

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

How can your website rank better than your competitors so it will be noticed by its target audience? This is where SEO comes in.  Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.

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Free - 7 Usability Guidelines For Websites On Mobile Devices

More and more mobile phones users are browsing and searching the Internet on their handsets. The UK, for example, has neared saturation for mobile phones and many handset browsers can now handle sites designed for viewing on computers. Indeed 20% of UK mobile phone users now use the Internet on their mobile devices (source: 3G.co.uk).

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Free, Effective Controls for Attaining Continuous Application Security Throughout the Web Application Development Life-cycle

Given the choice, every organization would want secure Web sites andapplications from the Web application development phase all the way through thesoftware development life-cycle. But why is that such a challenge to attain?The answer is in the processes (or lack thereof) that they have in place. Read More

Free, Implementing Effective Vulnerability Remediation Strategies Within the Web Application Development Life-cycle

Once you’ve completed a security assessment as a part of your web application development, it’s time to go down the path of remediating all of the security problems you uncovered. At this point, your developers, quality assurance testers, auditors, and your security managers should all be collaborating closely to incorporate security into the current processes of your software development lifecycle in order to eliminate application vulnerabilities. And with your Web application security assessment report in hand, you probably now have a long list of security issues that need to be addressed: low, medium, and high application vulnerabilities; configuration gaffes; and cases in which business-logic errors create security risk. For a detailed overview on how to conduct a Web application security assessment, take a look at the first article in this series, Web Application Vulnerability Assessment: Your First Step to a Highly Secure Web Site.

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Free, Web Application Vulnerability Assessment Essentials: Your First Step to a Highly Secure Web Site

If an organization isn't taking a systematic and proactive approach to web security, and to running a web application vulnerability assessment in particular, then that organization isn't defended against the most rapidly increasing class of attacks. Web-based attacks can lead to lost revenue, the theft of customers' personally identifiable financial information, and falling out of regulatory compliance with a multitude of government and industry mandates: the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) for merchants, HIPAA for health care organizations or Sarbanes-Oxley for publicly traded companies.  In fact, the research firm Gartner estimates that 75 percent of attacks on web security today are aimed straight at the application layer.

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Free! - From the Ground Up: Shopping carts

In the last article, I offered you some ideas about whether to carry your own products or services, or whether you might consider third-party sales to make a profit with your Web site. In this article, I’ll look at some shopping cart sites to consider what makes some shopping sites work. Is the site successful because of its slick design, the “buzz” about its product or service, the great shopping cart program, or is it because some people just seem to have all the luck? In the article below, I’ll take you to sites that use five different shopping carts to understand what works for some and what may work for you…

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Free! - Web Ready Digital Video

Web Ready Digital Video

With the recent increases in Broadband speeds, delivering high quality streaming video on the web is now possible. Whilst the final result will depend to a great extent on the quality of the original video, when it is resized for inclusion in a web page, say 320 x 240, any shooting errors or compression artefacts become much less noticeable. Any consumer DV camcorder should be capable of producing video of sufficient quality for web use.

This has been made possible largely due to the new Windows Media Codecs, which produce excellent results with virtually no loss of quality from the original 720x576 (PAL) or 720x480(NTSC) input.

So what do you need to get started?

A DV camcorder

Editing software – Adobe Premiere, Canopus Edius, Vegas etc.

Encoding software (usually included on your editing package) or you can use the Windows Media version, downloadable from Microsoft.  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/default.aspx

Some basic lighting – you can usually hire this for the duration of the shoot.

A clear idea of what you want to shoot. This is the most important aspect. You should spend more time in pre-production than you do on shooting and editing.

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Free! Hot Topics from the Blogs: Autumn/Winter 2004

As things slow down for the festive season, those leading edge web developers keep pumping out new ideas. Here Ian Blackham has a quick run through blogdom and attempts to pick out a few nuggets.

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Free! Hot Topics from the Blogs: September 2004

As the summer draws to a close, minds turn to completing projects and starting up new ones, so this month our blog round-up, apart from maintaining its watching brief, also includes some links to developing resources you might find useful. 

Highlight spotted this month - details of sIFR a new Flash replacement technique.

Hot Topics from the Blogs is a monthly peer into the blogs of Web development movers and shakers, with the focus on highlighting recent postings that will stimulate and educate.

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