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February - April at osCommerce Watch has seen a number of new topics covered and tools offered. Thanks to all who are regularly reading the weblog, providing feedback on contributions and contributing your thoughts.

Attitude released the following tools and contributions for free to the community of osCommerce users:

DPS PxPost Payment Module For osCommerce 2.2 MS2 - a payment module ideal for New Zealand and Australian merchants.
Free osCommerce Stylesheet Creation Tool - create a stylesheet for your cart and preview your work as you go on a live cart.
Attitude Simple Manual Order Entry for osCommerce - process orders via telephone or mail order through the osCommerce system.

Articles and tips were posted on the following topics:

Essential osCommerce Modification - HTML Title Tag - important modification for search engine positioning
Guidelines for osCommerce Contribution Development - writing good osCommerce contributions
Before making your osCommerce site live ... osCommerce Live Site Checklist - the common things sites miss before going live - prevent problems before you go live!
Essential osCommerce Modification - Generate Thumbnail Images - faster page loads and better quality images
Essential osCommerce Modification - Simple ways to improving admin usability - improve efficiency in administering your cart
Using osCommerce with a Large Product Catalog - unique issues to large product catalogs
Review: Easy Populate - the fast way to add or edit your products - review of a popular contribution which allows spreadsheet importing and updating of product information and prices and synchronisation of data with offline systems

Related:
highlights of the first couple of months of osCommerce Watch
osCommerce Review - find out about this powerful open source shopping cart system
osCommerce Demonstrations

Two helpful articles from Clickz.

The first (from 2001) discusses various issues in creating site navigation which allows your site visitors to more easily achieve their desired goal when visiting your site.
How Will They Buy It if They Can't Find It?

The second discusses how more effective contact forms can be created and how enquiries should be handled to make best use of each lead.
Online Forms That Generate Leads

Article on one of the negatives for site owners and the web as a whole in the emerging popularity of RSS. As RSS feeds can be requested automatically at set intervals by newsreaders this can lead to a large escalation in bandwidth usage for a site. There are aspects of the protocol which, if followed by newsreaders, minimise the load on servers. These measures are not implemented in every news reader. The other alternative discussed is to minimise the amount of information sent in the RSS feed. That is, just sending the headlines or first sentence without sending all content.

Wired News: Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?

Originally cited in MarketingVox