The most difficult part for someone in developing a website is adding in the shopping cart functionality so that customers can purchase products securely and easily from the site.

I am a co-partner in another website that sells a variety of products using shopping cart software. But it sometimes doesn't work properly. We have tried to solve the issue which seems to be related to interfaces between three parties - one of whom provides the shopping cart software - but all three point the finger of blame at each other! The problem for us is that it's our customers who experience delay, issues and problems and we can't seem to get the issue fixed.

Our experience shows that what we SHOULD have done was use a complete hosted service solution that included the shopping cart software along with everything else.

You might notice that this blog is based on Drupal. Most blogs are Wordpress or Blogger based but I like to be different....

I like Drupal because it offers more features than Wordpress such as a fully functional forum and the ability to add a lot more 'website' type pages and features. Yes, there aren't as many add ons, themes can be problematic and it is a bit cumbersome to administer but overall I like it better. Once you figure Drupal out, you realize that it has a lot of really neat things about it.

I do like to include a forum in my blogs. I post original stuff in the blog and copied stories with credits of course in the forum - users can discuss in both areas.

You do have to be careful with themes since many (like this) don't offer much variability. On the other hand, some themes are really quite flexible like the one I use at one of my other .

Alexa has changed how it calculates website rankings moving away from reliance on its tool bar to include some wider measures of traffic. Unfortunately for me, all my blogs have dropped quite heavily in some instances. However, the rankings now give a broader assessment of website traffic since Alexa toolbar users really wasn't a true representative sample of Internet browsers.

The issue is that in dropping down the rankings revenues might be unduly impacted. This now means that we simply need to work harder promoting our blogs to a wider audience in order to rank higher.

For example, this blog was ranked in the 800,000 but now has dropped to 2,000,000. A terrible fall. Oh well....