This post is a complaint about First National Merchant Services and their account representative Ted Napolitano. If you are considering using this company for credit card processing please read the rest of this post.

In January of 2007 we signed up to transfer our merchant processing services from another company to First National Merchant Solutions. At the time, I expressed concern to the account representative, Ted Napolitano, that we had an existing Authorize.net account with hundreds of recurring billing transactions that we did not want to loose in the transfer process. I was assured by Ted that nothing would be affected and that the existing Authorize.net account would continue to work with the new merchant processing provided by FNMS.

The first month after we switched to FNMS this proved to be false. After placing multiple phone calls to Ted with no response, I had to call Authorize.net myself to set up the account to work with FNMS.

Fast forward 2.5 years later. On May 1, 2009, I found out that my Authorize.net account was closed by my old merchant processor and that the hundreds of recurring billing transactions in that system were no longer available to me. After dozens of phone calls to Authorize.net and the technical support staff at FNMS, I was told that there was nothing that could be done to retrieve those recurring billing records and that I would have to manually enter them back in. This is EXACTLY what I wanted to avoid in switching my merchant processor account. This is exactly what Ted Napolitano assured me would not happen.

On top of it all, First National Merchant Servcies has a $250 early termination fee to close our account. Since we only had six months to go on the account, I asked if I could just schedule the account to be closed now, pay the minumum processing fee and then simply not renew the account. Not possible. Accounts can only be closed 30 days prior to the contract end date. So I could have set a reminder, written the letter in a couple of months and saved a $100 or so but frustration got the better part of me and I just closed it early. I have a letter written to the office of the president explaining the situation. I will make sure to post how it works out.

Moral of the story, make sure you know who owns your Authorize.net account and work with an merchant processor who is going to do what they say. We are working with a new merchant processor. Once I have had a chance to see how things work out, I will certainly post their information.

We are often asked to do web site redesigns. Most of the time the goal is to optimize the existing site for search engine rank and visitor conversion. While it is tempting to just throw away the existing site and start over, many times there are ways that we can use what is working from the site to our advantage.

One of the biggest parts of the site that can usually be salvaged is the existing search engine position for pages of the site that bring in traffic. The first step is to look at a 30-90 day web stats program that shows you the top entry pages of your site. We use an excellent open source program called Awstats for all our hosting clients. 

The entry page report shows the pages that visitors come to FIRST on your site. Most sites will list "/" as the top entry page. That is your home page. We don't have to worry about salvaging this page because we will have a page with the same name (index.html or index.php or ??) on the new site.

However, what if we look at the entry page report and we see 50 people landing on a page named index6.html which is a big content page on, for instance, where to buy baseball bats in San Diego. Ideally we would want to name that page something like buy-baseball-bats-in-san-diego.html which would be much better for SEO. 

Well what happens if we just change the name of the page? Those 50 people a month suddenly get a "Page not found" error when they come to the site for the first time. How many do you think will give your site a second chance?

Enter Apache ModRewrite!

With just a little code like this...

RewriteEngine On
redirect 301 /index6.html http://www.mywebsite.com/buy-baseball-bats-in-san-diego.html

we can automatically redirect visitors asking for our old page name to our new page name without the visitor knowing anything has happened. Even better search engines will automatically update their search engine listings to include the new page name.

You only need the RewriteEngine On line once. Then one line for every page you want to redirect. You should leave the .htaccess file in the same folder as the home page of your site. 

By recycling page names with Apache ModRewrite you are able to more rapidly increase your search engine rank for the most important pages of your site.

For more information on Apache ModRewrite see this page.

 

Here is some sample Perl code I hacked together to solve an interesting problem today. We are building an E-commerce web site for a client. This client was given a DVD with over 22,000 product images images equalling over 1 GB of data. However he only wanted to use around 750 of these images. We had a list of file names that he wanted to use and the DVD.

This bit of Perl code looks at the list of images we created with one file name per line and copies these images only to a new directory. Then we simply moved over the images in our new directory to the web server.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use File::Copy;
# establish variable list
my $movefile;
my @movelist;
# this is the path that we copy from
my $srcpath = '/source/path/here';
# this is the path that we copy to
my $movepath = '/destination/path/here/';
my $line;
# this is the file that has the list of files
open (MOVEFILE, '/Path/to/filelist.txt') or die "problem open";
while ( $line = <MOVEFILE> ) {
chomp $line;
push (@movelist, split(/\r/, $line ));
}
foreach $movefile(@movelist){
print "$srcpath$movefile"." — ". "$movepath$movefile"."\n";
system("cp $srcpath$movefile $movepath$movefile");
}

I found these two sample sites that helped in formulating this solution:

http://forums.hostmysite.com/post-6651.html

http://www.bradrice.com/wposx/archives/59

Let us know if you find this code sample helpful.

 

We have seen an increasing number of referrals come to us looking for a reputable search engine optimization firm after poor results with other companies. Many web site designers claim to provide search engine optimization because clients ask for it. However, many clients simply do not know what kind of questions to ask when shopping for a search engine optimization company.

We are always asked by prospective clients if there are any quick tips that we can share to help optimize a web site in order to get better search engine rank. With a little HTML knowledge and some time there are some very easy things you can do in order to start ranking. Please be aware that your mileage may vary based on the competitiveness of the terms that you are trying to rank for and the age of your domain.