Yesterday it was announced that Ebay had purchase the Super Cool (Yet complex) Megento E-commerce software business. This news came out later and somehow I missed it at first and was told by a fellow developer. We here at Dreamsites have worked on many Ebay ProStores sites, as well as various Megento sites. (3+ in works now). My initial reaction was UGH, NO NOT EBAY! – After some reading not I am not intirely sure yet, but I will be keeping my eyes peeled for any “funny” business that Ebay adds to Megento. That being said I hope they don’t mess with the business model, but use it’s resources to help advance the platform. Big business doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to making good things better. Remember Ebay buying Skype?

Why I don’t think this is good for Megento:

• Ebay’s Business Model is Making Money off Percentages, Not Software. This means those decieving “final value fees” from Pro Stores and Ebay could come when Megento is updated down the road.
• Ebay’s ProStores is great at connecting Ebay Store Owners to Ebay… but sucks in the template management department. Upgrading an custom templated site is a mess.
• My gut tells me that Ebay will change the overall model of how Megento gets customers in the future.
• Just attaching the Ebay brand may not be good for Megento… Store owners who have left Ebay in the past as it changed it’s fees around

Why I think it could be good for Web Development Firms…

• Some clients may see this as a validation the Megento is now mainstream and be more willing to spend the money to use Megento over some other platform.
• Maybe clients who were thinking or are using Pro Stores will now want to switch over to Megento.

I would love to hear your opinion… what do you think?

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Some of you have wondered how people get those cool Facebook fan boxes on their actual website.  Facebook tries to make it easy for you, but even their “easy” approach is pretty tricky at best.  I recently had a customer ask me to put a “fan” box on his site and tried this out myself for the first time.  Let me share with you what works, and what doesn’t, because if you do it wrong you will end up with something stupid on your page that looks like this…
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For anyone that has ever used Adobe Photoshop for anything from fixing photos to mocking up a web-page, you know it can be time consuming to get what you want.

I myself have been using Photoshop since version 3 when I first started making cool background for my college notebooks. Using all the filters in Photoshop, meshing photos together, creating cool looking text effects (Who doesn’t remember the diamond text from those Master P – CDs?)  Anyway… it looks like the folks at Adobe are coming out with something really cool that makes even me want to upgrade.  It’s called “Content Aware Fill”.  The time it will save some designers makes this one tool, an automatic “buy” in my book. [Read more →]

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