I recently came across this gem of an article written by the guys over at Get Elastic about how much of an impact a button can have on a potential customer of an e-commerce website. Obviously with e-commerce, building trust is extremely important and therefore consistency and simplicity are your friend. This article gives you some tips and pointers on what kind of buttons to use for your website in terms of colours, design and text formatting. If you are planning to start your own web business I would highly recommend you think long and hard about what colours you are going to use and make sure that they are consistent with your company image or branding. Check out the full article here: 107 Add to Cart Buttons of the Top Online Retailers

A while back I wrote about how helpful outsourcing can be to growing your business and that it can save you a lot of money in the long run. It makes sense to let other people do the tasks that are not your primary concern or that you don’t have the necessary skills to do properly.

In that post I promised to check out oDesk and give my opinion. I haven’t used the site yet but I have taken a look at what they have to offer and can definitely say that it would be a worthwhile consideration if you are looking to outsource some of your business functions.

What I really like about oDesk is that you can place a job or project on the site for free! Which means that there is no risk of you paying and then not finding anyone decent to do the job. They do, however, charge a 10 % commision on the exchange between you and the provider.

Another thing that I quite like is that you have a choice between paying hourly for the work or paying a once off fee, agreed upon at the start, on completion of the project.

If you are thinking of doing some outsourcing, go check them out and let me know what you think!

In this modern era of new technology and the fast paced business enviroment, it’s still very easy to get stuck in the same old mind frame of hoarding ideas and trying to do everything yourself. Is that really the most optimal solution? I think not…

Collaboration is the name of the game in this knowledge driven society of ours. We all need to change the way we think about business and working with people. By sharing our ideas and inviting others to give opinions and help us in growing our ideas we can achieve some amazing results. There are so many new applications on the interent that can help us with this. One such site I have come across so far is Basecamp which allows you to work with clients, co-workers or anyone else that you want to share your information with.

Another great online application that you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for is Google Docs which is great for sharing documents as well as just simply doing some word processing away from you regular computer. Google Docs now allows you to work offline so you can almost just drop that expensive Microsoft Office package of yours and go open source. Or can you?

I will be tesing this over the next couple of months and will let you know what I think.

If you thought that web2.0 was just something in the minds of a few people who pretend to be experts in this field then you are way off. Web2.0 is changing the face of the internet, in ways that were unimaginable a couple of years ago. Check out Go2Web.net and see for yourself how many websites there are in this category. I love going to this directory to get inspiration and look at the technologies that are going to be hitting the web really soon, if not already.

If you are an aspiring e-business entrepreneur, I would recommend that you check this site out, you never know… you might just find something that inspires you to create a new revolutionary business.