Here’s Some Do-it-Yourself Projects to Help Your ECommerce Digital Company
Do you own an ecommerce digital company in the United States? Or are you just about ready to get your online store started? Either way we have some fantastic practices for you to get some real insight technology for yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to want to jump in and hire a team or really see the big picture of what’s possible with digital marketing without having a basic understanding first. Let’s have a little fun with some DIY tech projects to get your hands dirty!
Create Your Own Private Image Hosting
Skills you will learn:
- Open source technology integration
- Digital security (Creative Commons)
- Storage
This project is very simple and great for new or beginner users who have rarely worked with technology before. It gives you insight into how internet security and privacy works and will help you make sure your United States eCommerce digital company is properly secured. This is a great DIY project for those digital agencies that have their own private stock photos or for professional photographers.
The first step is simple, find a host that is non-invasive and doesn’t have a tremendous number of terms and conditions to follow. A few from which you can choose are: https://www.dreamhost.com/, http://www.hostgator.com/, or https://www.bluehost.com.
Once you select your hosting company, you then need to select an open source photo gallery. Open source is software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. LifeHacker.com outlines several fantastic and totally free digital photo galleries that would be perfect for your US eCommerce business, here are 3 of them:
Gallery Project
Gallery was one of the first self-hosted photo gallery tools that anyone could install and set up. Dreamhost offers it as a one-click install, so if you’re hosted with them, they make the setup and update process easy. It’s feature-packed, and while it can be a little tricky to manage, it is flexible, skinnable, supports photos and videos, and has a built-in image editor so you can do basic tweaks to your photos after they’ve been uploaded. (Here’s the full version: http://lifehacker.com/218755/hack-attack-host-your-own-photo-gallery-with-gallery2)
Trovebox
Trovebox is the result of the OpenPhoto Project, and while you can use Trovebox as a gallery service like Flickr or Picasa (in fact, we’ve shown you how to use Trovebox to pull all of your photos from around the web into one place), Trovebox is also open enough that you can store your photos anywhere you choose and use their front-end instead. The beauty of Trovebox is that you can store your photos anywhere you like without having to deal with databases or app engines, and Trovebox gives you an easy tool to organize them, share them, and even restrict access to them as you see fit.
Coppermine
Coppermine is another of the web’s oldest and most popular gallery platforms. It’s a bit trickier to really customize and get working just the way you want, but for your effort you get a really powerful photo gallery/web forum suite. Coppermine is packed with features: It supports image editing, videos, access restrictions and security controls over galleries and photos, skins and themes, multiple languages, and more. Additionally, Coppermine has the ability to restrict specific galleries and forums to specific users, allow users to leave comments and offer feedback, or blow the doors wide open and work like a flat gallery.
Learn the Basics of Coding
Skills you will learn:
- Basic Coding
- C programming Language (basic)
What is coding and how can it benefit your US-based digital eCommerce company? Coding is a system of words, letters, figures, or other symbols used to create or develop websites, applications, etc.
C is one of, if not the, most widely used programming languages. There are a few reasons for this. As noted programmer and writer Joel Spolsky says, C is to programming as learning basic anatomy is to a medical doctor. C is a “machine level” language, so you’ll learn how a program interacts with the hardware and learn the fundamentals of programming at the lowest—hardware—level (C is the foundation for Linux/GNU). You learn things like debugging programs, memory management, and how computers work that you don’t get from higher level languages like Java—all while prepping you to code efficiently for other languages. C is the “grandfather” of many other higher level languages, including Java, C#, and JavaScript.
Simply follow this link, https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi-issues/Essentials_C_v1.pdf, to get started on your journey of learning basic code. Simply by understanding what is available for your eCommerce company you can start thinking bigger about how you want your site be.
Build Your Own RSS Reader
What is RSS?
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS
RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.
So what can you gain from this? You can set up RSS feeds for yourself so your computer automatically generates your news, research feeds, etc, it brings you all of the data you want straight to one place. Save time and energy learning and growing your eCommmerce digital company!
At the end of the day you’ll have a web page that you can visit at any time, on any device, to read all of the latest articles from the blogs you subscribe to. Tiny Tiny RSS supports filters and labels, so you can organize those feeds into categories, filter out the stories you don’t want, and organize them so you read the interesting things first. Tiny Tiny RSS also has an Android app (sorry, no iOS app), a mobile-friendly web interface, a Chrome extension, and more third-party supported apps. There’s even an XBMC client if you want to read your feeds on the big screen.
All you need is one of the hosts like we mentioned earlier, a domain name so that your links can all be stored in one place and if you already have one that’ll work, and of course the latest version of Tiny Tiny RSS. The full details on the how-to are can be found within the link at the bottom of this blog.
It’s All Possible With the Help of an ECommerce Digital Company in the United States
At 1 Digital Agency we enjoy educating and helping our clients learn the necessary skills and lingo so they feel like they know what’s happening with their website. We spend time cultivating a relationship where they feel heard and understood so we can take their vision and make it a reality. But with no context for how websites are made it can sometimes be a challenge for eCommerce company owners to see the big picture. We wanted to have some fun bringing you exciting and creative new ways to learn about the tech-world to make it easier for you to jump into. Ready for a new site? Have some questions about how we can help you, let us know! Call us 888.982.8269 or send us a message: https://www.1digitalagency.com/contact.