ProStores Tips and Tutorials – One Take Media

Use these htaccess rules to minimize or even eliminate CSS background-image “flickering” in MSIE6.

# minimize image flicker in IE6
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

Steel Blue – $299 – Preview Steel Blue ProStores Ready Template – Purchase the Steel Blue ProStores Template. Includes 30 minutes of Customization time by One Take Media!

We have two other ProStores Templates:

Earthy – $299 – Preview Earthy ProStores Ready Template – Purchase the Earthy ProStores Template. Includes 30 minutes of Customization time by One Take Media!

Streamlined Modern – $399 – Preview Streamlined Modern ProStores Ready Template – Purchase the Streamlined Modern ProStores Template. Includes 30 minutes of Customization time by One Take Media!

Do you like these ProStores Ready templates but would like some changes or a different color? Let us know! We can accommodate you. Our Contact Form

*UPDATE* Merchant’s stores are coming online.

*UPDATE* ProStores is working with the power company to restore working power and are attempting to get back up to full capacity in 2-3 hours.

*UPDATE* PG&E Power that services the San Jose area has upgraded the outage from under to 50 customers affected to 50-5,000 affected. No official word from PG&E on when things will be restored. If you must call ProStores please be patient and remember that they can’t do anything about the power.

Keeping your customer’s updated is a good reason to get on Twitter or some other social media platform. I’ve got mine up and will keep updating as I have information, you can follow me if you would like for quicker updates.
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Well folks due to the bad storms in San Jose CA, power is down at the California ProStores offices. Right now this affects ProStores.com and your admin pages. City power officials are working to restore power.

Follow my updates on my twitter account

I will be updating primarily on Twitter.

Article on the storms and power outages.

Heh, i feel like in the past month I’ve had each of these conversaions.
The vendor-client relationship in the real world:

I wish this wasn’t so true… If it wasn’t so frustrating it’d be funny.

Follow us on Twitter For updates, early news, and sometimes limited time, twitter follower only offers!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!

***UPDATE***

Found a way around this, just put in the root domain, i.e. www.perrysjewelry.com without the /servlet/StoreFront on it. That pretty much makes it a non issue.

***UPDATE***

Very recently Google made a change to their Webmaster Tools that will adversely affect a ProStores store that wants to add their site and get it
verified. They have started to automatically append a trailing ‘/’ slash to the urls entered into their ‘Add a site’ function.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great website dashboard that you can add your site to, it allows you access to reports, error tracking, site speed tracking, sitemap upload, SiteLinks, as well as the infamous “Help I’ve been banned from Google!” reinclusion request form.

There are two ways to verify your site in Webmaster Tools;

1. Add a ‘meta’ tag to the Header template above the ‘/head’ tag.
2. You can upload an html file to the root folder of your store.

Problem here is that typically you don’t have access to your root folder ‘/servlet/StoreFront’ so you are left with option #1.

This issue with Webmaster Tools directly affects ProStores sites because it changes the URL of the Store that it looks at to verify your meta tag. A ProStores site thats on standard hosting ends its URLs without a trailing slash.

Example: http://www.perrysjewelry.com/servlet/the-Women%27s-Jewelry/Categories if you add a trailing slash you kill the URL and the ProStores software generates a 404 error.

Example: http://www.perrysjewelry.com/servlet/the-Women%27s-Jewelry/Categories/. For whatever reason, probably CPU cycles, there isn’t any redirection done when you visit a ProStores URL that has a trailing slash. So instead of the site sending you to the page without the slash it dies and gives a 404.

This 404 error causes verification to fail and denying access to the best parts of Webmaster Tools.

This issue also directly interferes with a ProStores store’s ability to upload a sitemap to them because you can’t have access to Webmaster Tools at all until you are verified.

If you have already verified your site before this change went through then you should be ok.

If you are on a custom hosting solution, or running on a version of ProStores 8.0 or so you may not have this issue as you probably have a different URL scheme or have the ability to do some URL re-writing.

I have forwarded my thoughts and research to ProStores already and I hope to get Google’s attention as well. If you have a ProStores store, I would log into Webmaster Tools, click help, and fill out a help request on their user forums. Draw some attention to the issue and hopefully we can get a solution.

- Matt

One Take Media will be closed Dec 22nd – Dec 27th. Emails will be replied to after that date.

Its been a while since I’ve blogged and even though the reasons are good, been very busy with projects, a lack of posts on a regular basis isn’t good.

So I’m going to be trying my best to write several times a month with good lists, tips and ProStores help.

To celebrate I’m offering to answer 1 ProStores question per person. This starts now 12-15-09 at 12 noon Est until 11:59 pm Est Thursday the 17th of 2009.

Questions must be submitted as a comment, you must include a link to your ProStores site as well as a valid e-mail so you can receive the notification that I answered your question.

E-mail questions cannot be accepted, you must post them as a comment and I will reply to them on the post.

Follow me on twitter!

Thanks!
Matt

Both my Grandpas served their country and while they didn’t talk about what they did much I always loved looking at them in their old pictures.

To all of you Men and Women who have and are serving our country, “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer. -George S. Patton”.

Thank you for holding on a minute longer!

Google updated their Google Analytics web tracking software:

New and Expanded Features:

• 2 new Goal Types: Time on Site and Pages per Visit
• Goals per account increased to 20 goals

• Expanded Mobile Reporting: measure more mobile devices and measure them better, javascript or not.
• Advanced Table Filtering feature

Unique Visitor Metric: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics.

Read the full text at the Google Analytics blog