Open source marketing applications are a great way to build visitor loyalty and enhance visitors’ interaction with a site. The open source marketing applications enable you to take the advantages of easy to use features like poll mechanism, feedback mechanism and various other features that allow you to measure visitors’ interest, enabling you to make your site sticky.

Let’s have a glance at some of the marketing  applications on our platform.

Advanced Guestbook:

It is a PHP-based guestbook script that offers the users an easy to use feedback mechanism with its wide array of useful features, such as preview, templates, e-mail notification, picture upload, page spanning, html tags handling, smilies, and others. Advanced Guestbook enables visitors of a website to leave a message without actually creating an account. It also allows the users to modify, view and delete messages though the admin script. You can use all the user feedbacks for improving your website. LimeDomains currently supports version 2.4.3 of Advanced Guestbook.

Some of its benefits can be summarized as:

•    Simple to use and highly customizable
•    Easy Management
•    Fast and efficient administration
•    Completely secure, keep spammers to a minimum

Advanced Poll:

Advanced Poll is a simple yet robust polling plug in for a web site. Its powerful administration features, easy to use management interface, and numerous customization options make it an excellent option for engaging users to a website. Built on a MySQL database, Advanced Poll installs and configures in just few minutes. Once completed, it offers 15 different poll demos, mixing and matching options like bar and pie charts, e-mail capture, a commenting system, and built in CAPCHA protection to the users. Advanced Poll adds stickiness to a site and gives users a reason to return frequently. On the other hand, you get a powerful tool to measure visitor interest and reactions to any topic you can think of. LimeDomains currently supports version 2.0.8 of Advanced Poll.

Some of its features can be summarized as:

•    Multiple polls
•    Unlimited options
•    Multi-language support
•    IP-Locking
•    Cookie support
•    Comment feature
•    Random poll support
•    Vote expire feature

Noah’s Classifieds:

Noah’s Classifieds is a highly customizable classified ad application that enables users to post advertisements to unlimited categories and sub-categories. It also notifies the ad owners when their ad is approved, about to expire, or deleted. Since 2003 Noah has helped thousands of customers, businesses and web developers transact online through our simple classified listing software.

Some of its features include the following:

•    Unlimited number of custom fields per category,
•    Flexible display formatting for number fields
•    HTML notifications, notification templates
•    Upload multiple images per ads
•    Browsing the list of recent, or most popular ads
•    Bad word replacement
•    Theme support

Some of its benefits include:

•    Easy to install and update
•    Highly flexible
•    Customizable
•    Search engine friendly
•    Internationalized
•    E-commerce enabled

We at LimeDomains are all set to assist you with marketing applications such as Advanced Guestbook, Advanced Poll, and Noah’s Classifieds.

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Joomla! is one of the most popular CMS’ available today. The popularity of Joomla! is furthercomplemented by the Alexa Traffic Rank Stats which defines Joomla. org’s rank as 398.  Joomla is used all over the world to power web sites of all shapes and sizes. There are a tons of Joomla extensions available to complement your Joomla based website with added functionality. No wonder,  Joomla is used today as one of the most preferred CMS for millions of websites and approximately 20,000 downloads are made per day from joomlacode.org.

Here is a list of some popular Joomla extensions, which would help you select one that is in tandem with your  requirements.

Community Builder: This popular extension contributes in enhancing the user management system. It makes your website a collaborative platform which facilitates users to interact with each other. Besides, you can also create user list, upload varied images & extra files in your profile, form a connection path among users, integrate your site with other forums, bulletin boards, galleries etc. If you’re a key user, you can use this extension to become a moderator & exercise privileges such as creation of content, membership groups etc. for your website. Your website users would experience a greater sense of belonging for your website.

Joomla Content Editor (JCE): This free, customizable extension is an advanced WYSIWYG editor for your Joomla-based website. It comprises of a repository of good plugin support, admin interface for configuration of editor, link handling etc. It also facilitates normal office-like functions such as formatting, spell checking, copying text from Word to other documents, inserting images with the help of file browser interface. It’s a great improvement over standard TinyMCE editor.

NinjaXplorer NinjaXplorer is the premiere file system explorer for your J1.5 website. You can edit, upload, delete, zip, unzip and download files directly from your Joomla Administrators panel.

VirtueMart: This open source Joomla extension is an advanced E-commerce shopping cart solution. It is quite popularly used by online store owners worldwide in both store & catalog mode. Its functions can be broadly placed under three distinct categories, (a) General features, (b) Product Catalog features, and (c) Administration features. These functions help you handle different products & categories, online customers, shopper groups, order status management, order handling in multiple currencies & multi languages etc.

Simple Image Gallery: Using this popular extension, you can easily create as many number of image galleries comprising of tasteful shadows on each thumbnail, original images featured in ‘lightbox’ popups etc. inside your Joomla website. You can opt for loading a module position for banners etc. in the popup window. This extension, with improved thumbnail generation & caching engine, is fairly good for news portals. This Joomla extension entails varied popup engines, editable labels/captions for the integrated images, multiple templates etc.

JEvents: This Joomfish compatible popular extension creates events calendar. It also comprises of a large number of templates, modules, plugins etc. It also entails location/venue manager (for managing events/locations via geocoding & Google maps), available in multiple special layouts (such as Ruthin, Extplus etc), management of team/resources via creation of managed lists etc.

Now that you know about some of the most popular Joomla extensions & don’t want to miss out on the benefits these extensions can offer your website, create your Joomla website, in case you don’t have one. We, at LimeDomains, can help you in the creation of your Joomla-based website in just a single click of mouse.

We wanted to tell all our customers and blog readers about the latest change happening in the domain name world. The company, which provides the world with .com names is raising the .com cost.   This clearly indicates that the .com domain name price will shoot up all across the world.

We have already increased the price for the new .Com domain to $9.99.

But for all existing LimeDomains customers, we are offering .com renewal at an older price of $8.99.

It might be a good time for you to renew your .com domain for a longer period as the renewal at older price may be offered only till the month of June. Post June, even the renewal rate might be normalized to $9.99

Even though recession gripped the entire economy in its clutches, one sector that still showed an increasing trend was e-commerce. In US alone, the E-Commerce sales in Q4 2009, went up by3% as reported by comScore . It is thus evident that online retail spending continues to gain share of consumers’ wallets.

So, if you are one of those who are planning to set-up an e-commerce store, here are certain points that you must keep in mind.

Setting up an E-commerce store

These are some of the steps involved in getting your store up and running.

• Domain name is the first thing you’ll need for your online store. You may choose a domain name that reflects the essence of your business and best reflects your product or service.

• Once, you finalize a domain name, you may ensure that your e-commerce store has the support of a reliable e-commerce web hosting service, which will make your e-commerce website accessible to your target audiences round the clock. It will also help your business by listing its products and services, handling shopping carts, and tracking customer orders.

• Selecting shopping cart software is extremely important while setting up your e-commerce business. You may consider the number of credit card processors and shipping services, the shopping cart supports. You may also ensure that it is easy to add products to your shopping cart so that users have a great shopping experience.

• Setting up payments is yet another essential requirement of an online store. For this you need a merchant account that would help you accept online payments. Now there has to be some link that hooks your merchant account with that of your customer’s credit card. This link is an online processor called payment gateway. It also helps in ratification of information, authorization of credit cards etc.

• Yet another integral component of an e-commerce site is Secure Socket layer (SSL). If your website has SSL certificate then the message reflected to the customers is that the site they have used for online shopping & input their credit card information is reliable, and that the transactions they’ve made are quite secure.

Management of your E-commerce store

You can easily manage your e-commerce store with the help of online store management software. Online store management software would help you in managing & tracking the orders placed by your customers via payment authorization.

You can also keep a constant vigil on the progress of your web store by integrating in-built reporting tools & Google Analytics into your website. This will help your website get a clear picture of the website traffic &  store sales. Using these tools, you can view best selling products by category in your store; most used keywords, top-rated customers, geography-specific website traffic etc.

Now, since you are aware of the steps for setting-up and managing your e-commerce store, you know that selecting the right web hosting service provider who is able to provide you with all the above mentioned services would be the key to your success.

We, at LimeDomains, provide web hosting, domain name registration and domain transfer services. We also help you build your own online store with our open source ecommerce applications, osCommerce and Zencart. You can install these applications and get started with selling your products/services directly from you site, processing of payments, building & managing shopping carts, customizing your store with help from a robust pool of support resources etc.

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