Applied Innovations is always trying to bring more value to our e-commerce web hosting customers. We often will find a popular product that our customers find useful, and we will see if we can get our customers a discount. Revolver Commerce makes many useful add-ons to the ASPDotNetStorefront e-commerce app, and they also provide design and development services.

Revolver Commerce brings some much needed add-on applications to the already wonderful ASPDNSF product. These apps can save you a lot of time, and potentially increase sales. I was able to ask Chris McKellar, one of the lead developers at Revolver Commerce about their products. Here’s a couple of the questions I asked:

From customer feedback you’ve received, what might be the most important add-on if someone had to choose just one?

“Product Attributes. Search is a great add-on, but there are a couple others out there as well. Attributes is something that was desperately needed in the ASPDNSF community and we’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to be able to provide a solution there.”

I see that my purchase of an add-on includes a year of upgrades. Can you tell me about how often they are updated? For example, if ASPDNSF releases a new version, if there’s any compatibility issues, will there be an update to the add-on?

“Add-ons will be updated shortly after ASPDNSF releases new versions. As we add features to the add-ons, we’ll also update our clients with those features. We have no specific roadmap for feature development since it’s highly demand driven from our client base.”

AppliedI customers can log into the control panel  and check out the market place to redeem a 10% off coupon from Revolver Commerce for add-ons to your ASPdotnetstorefront website.

A great deal of our e-commerce web hosting customers choose to order Instant SSL certificates from Applied Innovations. For the $99 price tag we install the highly secure 256-bit encryption SSL certificate for you, you get $100,000 warranty from Comodo, and you also get the Trust Logo free. 

Today, Applied Innovations has been informed before the official news release, that Comodo will be updating their Trust Logo. The Trust logo is getting a much needed aesthetic facelift, and becoming more useful by allowing a customer to hover their mouse over the graphic to activate a Java Script that tells them more about who you are. This equals more trust, which potentially equals more sales. You can see the demo of the new graphic here. 

Here’s the Old Trust Logo:

Here’s the New Trust Logo (To see how the Javascript works, please click the above link to the demo): 

Comodo has also had the scrolling “CornerTrust” logo for a while now that essentially has the same Javascript mouse-over feature as the new logo, but the CornerTrust required a graphic to hover on the corner of the customers browser. This new logo is a stationary option.

For instructions on how to install the new logo, please see this Support page.

Remember those SSL certificates called Extended Validation certificates? Well, one of their major drawbacks was that they only worked when your customer was using IE7 to browse your website. Now, with Firefox version 3, you have more than 8 million more browsers on the internet able to see an EV certificate. Upon entering a site using a EV SSL certificate, Firefox will display a green button, much like IE7’s green bar. A blue button means an SSL certificate is installed, but it’s not an EV cert, and a grey button means the  page you’re on is not using SSL. The worst buttons to see are red (a known malicious website) or yellow (an invalid SSL certificate). You can read more about this new feature here.

Firefox 3 has many other new features. Among them is a better handling on your computers resources (memory) which equals a quicker more efficient browsing experience.  Other features include a new URL discovery designed to allow you to quickly navigate to the website you want to get to. The address bar will try to find an address you’re typing based on your browsing history.

As always, our customers can purchase a Comodo EV SSL certificate from Applied Innovations at a greatly discounted rate ($349.95 as of the date of this writing).

Today Joomla released an update to their CMS called “Naiki” and our PHP webhosting customers using this CMS may want to install the update. If you are running a previous version 1.5.x, you should download the update patch and run it. You can read the release notes and installation instructions here.

Although Applied Innovations is an ASP.net specialized web-host, many do not realize that PHP is available to our customers. With the flip of a switch in the HELM control panel, you can enable PHP. Then, with a mySQL database which is included with VS-1 and higher plans, you can install Joomla! for free and have a huge community of PHP/Open Source developers working together to bring you free add-ons such as the famous free shopping cart “Virtuemart“. PHP runs on Windows, and it runs great especially with “Fast CGI” which is installed on AppliedI’s shared webservers. It should be noted that an advantage of Windows and IIS is that you can run ASP.net 3.5 and PHP side-by-side. Something you can not do on Linux (Well, not 100% functionally anyway; see “ASP.net - mod_mono“).

We are pleased to announce that we are offering Graffiti CMS as a part of an easy to install Application Pack available to all of our shared web hosting customers. Customers who install this CMS on their site will be able to take advantage of Graffiti’s simplified content management system that brings together the best of proven CMS platforms and the convenience of modern publishing systems, like those found in common blogging apps.

Here are some of the advantages of Graffiti:

     No need for a database! Well, that’s not entirely true, but Graffiti does implement VistaDB, which eliminates the need for a SQL server and connection information.

·         Easy Customization with the use of pre-existing themes or by creating your own theme using Chalk (http://graffiticms.com/support/advanced-options/)

·         Search engine friendly URL’s, Smart redirects, and structured content that will help take your sites rankings to the next level.

·         Graffiti CMS is built by Telligent (http://telligent.com/) the same people who developed Community Server (http://communityserver.com/) community platform used by companies like Microsoft and MySpace.com

Installation takes just a few clicks of the mouse using the application pack feature on your control panel’s domain menu.

Interview with the Developers (Windows Media Format)

Customers who sign up for any of our shared hosting plans will be able to immediately take advantage of Graffiti’s features.  Although Graffiti will execute under the Value Plus plan, we recommend you run it under a VS-1 if you are looking to use this application in a production environment. Click here to see some of our Knowledge Base articles on how to get started. It’s literally installed in about 3 clicks.

In the near future we plan on offering this as part of a “Software as a Service” (SaaS) hosting solution so be on the lookout for that.