I've been thinking a lot about Jedi cats since last week, and about how I'd been living with a master of the Force for all these years without my even noticing it (though, with hindsight, his name – Yoda – was a fairly obvious clue). With just a stare, he can stop anyone dead in their tracks, forcing them - against their will - to drop everything and rub his belly. Like his namesake, he is truly a Jedi master.

Disappointing to me though it may be, not everyone seems to share my passion for feline mysticism. Nicolas is one such individual, and rather than spending his time pondering the levels of midichlorians in the blood of domestic pets, he's actually been doing something useful this past week, and has preferred spending his time thinking about online store stock management.

Imagine it: your online store looks great, you've set up your killer products with unbeatable pricing to leave the competition in your wake. You've spent hours taking multiple images of each and every item against a white sheet you hung up on your living room wall, so your customers can get a good look at them from every possible angle. You've painstakingly adjusted every single aspect of your product page design to fit perfectly with your website design, and have now built the world's most amazing (dare I say, magical) online store; not only have you learnt how to make a website that rocks, but you now have an equally brillant e-commerce website.

You are an overnight e-commerce success story.

Until you run out of stock, that is.

The internet is truly remarkable. Just think about it: 99% of what you'll find online serves no practical purpose at all. Yet that's the stuff most people spend their time watching - a lot like TV. If you want to make a website an overnight success, forget about adding free forums or wondering how to make a blog and build a following; it'll take way more than a couple of hours to build a sizable audience.

Got a great idea for how to make an online store a roaring success? Well, sorry, but that isn't going to get you millions of hits before sunrise. And no, if you're out to break a world record for building a massive following for your free website in as little time as possible, you don't have to take your clothes off, nor anyone else's for that matter.

To make your own website a true internet super phenomenon, you just need one thing: Jedi cats.

It's been a busy week here at doomby, and not only for our awesome website development team, fantastic support staff and brilliant managers. Even Starey the cat has been out and about, celebrating the end of a long winter (though it may actually have been fear of the great Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, or the substantial volume of fresh neighborhood roadkill, that did it).

Most of the productive buzz emanating from the far side of our offices these last few days has centered on the latest updates to our e-commerce website solution. The focus of these updates has been on improving the online store experience for your e-commerce clients, and on facilitating store management and layout to better leverage sales opportunities. As always, the goal of these latest additions is to provide new ways to create a website to really maximize revenue growth and opportunities.

Yes, it's SEO chat time again (but that's no reason to let your eyes glaze over and start wondering how long it's been since you last cleaned out your navel fluff). Figuring out how best to optimize your website for search engines is an essential part of learning how to make a website. Recently, we've looked at the role played by keyword selection and on-page keyword density when you make a website, but there's more to optimizing a website than simply writing some interesting, keyword-rich content.

Remember, if you want to get visitors, you'll need to make sure they find you. And since most people will use a search engine to look for websites, it's of vital importance to think beyond your paragraphs and to ensure all your page text is optimized for search engines, including hidden text like meta tags, together with your page titles and headings.

Given the rapid pace of my colleague's recent programming exploits improving our free website builder, you could be forgiven for thinking he was either:

1. junked up on caffeine (or worse), or
2. a truly conscientious workaholic.

Although he does drink more coffee than I do, I couldn't reasonably describe his consumption as excessive. And as I'm not convinced he's the type who'd take illicit drugs (nor have I really taken the time to examine his pupils lately, what with being busy and all), I'll go for the second option (maybe he wants a raise – a car that old must cost a fortune to repair).

In any case, he's been feverishly working on fleshing out improvements to our e-commerce website tools and online store website manager, and it's really starting to bear fruit: yes, it's now even easier than ever to make a website with doomby. We really like what he's done - in fact, I'm even tempted to make a business website and build my very own little online shopping mall. Well, almost – it's a little hard, since I really haven't got a clue, and have nothing to sell*, save for a billion or so cottony hydrangea scale and about as many cat hairs (wanna buy some, cheap?).

As I mentioned at the end of last week, our development team has been feverishly working away on additions and overhauls to doomby.com and our free website builder tools. In last Friday's post, I detailed doomby's latest social networking additions (or social bookmarking, if you prefer), enabling you to create a website with easily sharable content through Facebook and Twitter integration.

This week we'll have a quick look at the latest improvements to our e-commerce website module, designed to help you make an online store that looks just the way you want it to, with a stack of new web design tools to provide greater control over the look and feel of your store's product presentation.

Our new online store website design editor is all about enabling you to make a business website that looks even better, by editing your store's CSS without needing to have the slightest idea of what CSS is, and giving your store a easy makeover you can be proud of (and that will keep your customers coming back for more!).

For those of you who actually do have an in-depth understanding of CSS, you can edit your store's CSS code directly - just as you can with your website design CSS - to achieve the same effect (and feel a whole lot cleverer).

It's pretty clear that spring has arrived with a bang – not only have temperatures skyrocketed (much to my cats' delight), but after last week's emyspot website makeover, our hyperactive team this week got stuck into developing some really great additions to our members' website builder tools. The team's efforts weren't limited to subscribers to our pro website development offers – if you're one of our members who enjoy the opportunity to make a free website with doomby, you haven't been left out either, and can already take advantage of the latest additions to your favorite free website builder.

This week's development efforts have concentrated on how to make a website better through social networking integration. Though we've long provided an access to social bookmarking services for your website content directly from the site manager, allowing you to publish your page links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, this week we added a few menu gadgets to let your site visitors do the sharing for you. Though simple to set up, they really help improve your SERP ranking – or web presence – exponentially. All without you lifting a finger (almost).

I'm sure our millions of avid readers would have noticed my absence last week, and have probably been suffering in agony ever since. Sorry for that. But there was a very, very good reason, and as I am now back, you can all breathe a collective sigh of relief (and take down that Facebook vigil). For those of you who've dropped by your favorite free website builder in the last few days, you'll probably already have figured out why – for those who haven't, you soon will.

In any case, you'll probably all agree that after four months it was time for doomby to get a little dressed-up (inspired, no doubt, by this image from a few weeks back, to aim for bigger and better things) - both to encourage you to strive for webmastering excellence, and to create a website that rocks. So kudos to Pascal and Florian for some really fantastic work on getting the site up and looking great (I knew they had pretty genes in there somewhere ...).

Over the last couple of days, I've been surfing around trying to get an idea of exactly how small businesses (those with 1 to 20 employees) have embraced e-commerce. I wound up spending a lot of that time focusing on Canada – partly to honor the Olympic spirit, and partly because their results just ranked better in Google. Though I wasn't that surprised by what I read, its implications for small businesses are truly startling.

To give you an idea why, let's go back a few years to 2007 – that being the latest year for which I have a full set of figures at hand. First, the facts: although some 85% of Canadian small businesses had access to the internet, only 36% deemed it necessary to make a business website of their own. Worse still: 45% made online purchases, yet a mere 6% fully embraced reciprocal e-commerce by building an online store¹.

Partly inspired by the lasting image of last week's illustration (I swear that'll be engraved in my memory forever), and partly because my internet connection is going haywire, I thought I'd write a little about getting the most out of your online store. Specifically, how to ensure your e-commerce website attracts customers willing to stick around long enough to buy something. If you're making a business website, and your goal is to use it to sell stuff, then the last thing you want is for people to do a WIWO (walk-in, walk-out – and yes, I made that up) within the first few seconds of their arrival.

First impressions last, and getting your visitors to hand over their plastic means you really need to make sure you know how to make a website that inspires confidence – it's not enough just to have great stuff to sell.