|
|
Web Design and Credit Cards
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on August 11th, 2010)
It's one of those days here when most people are going to be complaining about the weather but not me. Sure it's cool and it's raining heavily and set to stay that way for most of the day ... but that means it's a great day to say indoors and work and I've got plenty of that to get through today.
HTML5
It's definitely out there and even though it's not totally supported by even the most advanced browsers just yet it is something that you need to start looking at because those parts of HTML5 that are supported do offer us so some great possibilities when it comes to designing our websites.
Of course we still have those legacy versions of Internet Explorer and other browsers to cope with and not even the next version of Internet Explorer will be able to handle a great amount of HTML5 but there are always workarounds and it's not hard to work those into your code.
I've just finished a two-week course in HTML5 and it was interesting to see what can be done with the new version of HTML. It was also interesting to see that it doesn't seem to have really addressed the issue of code-bloat that many designers have complained about in the past.
While there has been plenty of grumblings about HTML4 and XHTML being nothing but div soup HTML5 doesn't really seem to have reduced the amount of code that goes into a web page ... it's just replaced the old divs with different code and perhaps even more code.
If you want to learn more about HTML5 there are plenty of tutorials beginning to appear on the Web and Sitepoint have a two-week course that will teach you quite a bit about it too.
Designing your own WordPress themes
While I'm thinking about SitePoint you might be interested in the latest book they've released. It's all about designing your own WordPress themes and even though the marketing hype suggests that it will help you make lots of money ... something that most people won't do ... it might still be helpful if you do want to take your WordPress blog or website beyond the limitations that others might impose on you.
Of course if you do want your WordPress blog to look different you can pay a designer to produce a custom design for you but that can be expensive and getting your chosen designer to understand and reproduce your vision for your blog theme can be frustrating and time-consuming.
While working up your own WordPress theme can be time-consuming it can also be a lot of fun and it's something that I'm seriously going to look at. I know that Steve has a couple of blogs he wants to build his own themes for so that SitePoint book is definitely on our shopping list.
Friendly fraud
Somehow that's a label that doesn't seem quite right to me ... how can any fraud be 'friendly'?
Even though you may not have heard of that term before friendly fraud has been around almost from the day the first online store opened and someone with a credit card decided that it was an easy way to rip off the store owner.
Most of us who have run online stores or sites where people could access premium content by paying a fee via their credit card have experienced friendly fraud but we probably called it 'chargeback'. Sadly friendly fraud ... or chargeback ... is on the increase according to a leading provider of commerce processing.
While most of us leave the screening up to our billing company it can be helpful to understand what goes on behind the scenes when a potential customer does attempt to buy something from you online. In the past we've often thought that someone who does a chargeback always gets the support of the credit card company and gets their money back without any penalty ... and to a degree that is the situation.
There's never any argument as far as the credit card companies are concerned ... their customer is always right and the merchant or service provider is always wrong.
However it seems that these days if you chargeback on a credit card purchase you may be incurring a penalty because the next time you attempt to buy something online your card may be scrubbed just a little harder. If there are too many chargebacks noted on your credit card history it could be that you will reach the point where you're card just won't be accepted by billing companies.
While it's not clear that something like that definitely happens the billing companies are increasing the amount of screening (scrubbing) that a credit card goes through before an online purchase is approved. That says to me that there is a penalty for someone who does a chargeback even though the card holder may not realize that their being penalized.
And now I'm off to grab some coffee and email a bunch of clients who are all involved in a new project I'm working on for them. Like me, wet days keep them inside so I might get a better response if I send out those emails today rather than later in the week when the sun is shining.
Looking for some quality text for your paysites? Sex Story Text provides quality written work for webmasters world-wide! Check out their website at http://www.sex-story-text.com.
Go Back to The Porn Resource
|
|
