Within 5 years all new laptops will have touchscreens. Many desktops will come with LCD touchscreen monitors but not as many as laptops. Windows 7 has already announced support for touch interfaces. Apple has a library of touch controls and gestures that it will bring to the Mac from the iPhone soon.

Last night I was reading an RSS feed that had an embedded video. Right in the middle of the video was a giant "play" button. My first reaction was to reach out and touch my laptop screen just like I would touch the play button on my iPhone. Once you've used a touch interface you realize how much you miss it when it's gone. 

The mouse isn't going away anytime soon. Holding your hands/arms up to the screen like Tom Cruise in Minority Report isn't very comfortable. We'll see a mixutre where mouse and keyboard continue to rule but touch screen interfaces are available for those tasks that make sense. Painting, organizing, scrolling and zooming can be much easier and faster with fingers.

If you're a web or application designer the Web 2.0 trend of large fonts and brightly colored buttons will be extended to larger more "finger friendly" buttons. If you're designing a new site remember that larger "click targets" will be needed for touch interfaces. The great news is that adding larger buttons and click targets will make your site more user friendly today for mouse users. Many usability studies have shown that the four corners of the screen are the easiest and quickest locations for users to click with a mouse. The larger the area the user has to click (even when it's not a corner) the better. Nothing is more frustrating that seeing a link you want to click but it's so small that you can't get your cursor on the exact right pixel. 

Start getting ready for touch interfaces today. Use larger buttons, make sure click targets around links are large and try not to group buttons and links so close that a single finger can touch both at the same time.

There are still a lot of customers running on BVC 2004 (the version before BV Commerce 5). BVC 2004 was available as a single store or as a per-server license. Many hosts found the per-server license very attractive as it let them create an unlimited number of stores on a single machine. On of the license restrictions was that a per-server license is owned by the hosting company and customers would need to purchase a single store license to move elsewhere or to have source code access. This also meant that hosts could not charge clients for a "license" to BVC 2004 on a monthly basis as it would imply that they are purchasing ownership rights which the host has no legal right to sell.

Unfortunately, I know of more than a dozen unscrupulous web hosts who were/are charging customers a monthly "licensing" fee for BVC 2004. This is a main reason why we no longer offer a per-server license.

If you are a merchant running on BVC 2004 on your hosts per-server license you should NEVER have to pay anything for BVC 2004. You will have to pay normal hosting fees but your host should never try and sell you a license to BV Commerce.

If you are on a per-server license and need to move to another web host we are (for a limited time) allowing you to purchase a BV Commerce 5 license which will include the right to run a BVC 2004 store transfered from a per-server license. You'll also have the license for BV Commerce 5 should you decide to upgrade your store during the move.

Google has a keyword quality score that determines how much you pay for a given keyword, how frequently your ad appears, and in what position your ad appears. Few people realize that the speed of the landing page counts. That means that whatever page your Google keyword ads link to should be as fast as possible.

If you think the cheapest web host around is the best deal just consider how much you could be paying in extra Google advertising costs because your landing page is slower than your competitors! Optimize your landing page images, cut out graphics if you don't need them and certainly don't add Flash or Videos unless you really, really need them.

I was in Washington D.C. yesterday for the Parallels Summit. Parallels makes control panel applications for web hosts and BV Commerce is now integrated into Plesk (and soon the other panels). During the summit there were a lot of presentations and the experience of the speakers varied greatly. I don't want to point out specific names but watching the mistakes that were made you could learn a lot:

One speaker moved from slide to slide in PowerPoint by right-clicking and choosing "next slide" from the context menu. Don't ever do this! That's what the spacebar, arrow keys and remote controls are for. It wasn't that the information was poor but the constant "right-click, next slide" was so distracting it was hard to concentrate.

Several speakers had slides that looked like they came straight out of Webster's Dictionary. You know, the book with incredibly small print? Needless to say it was impossible to read those slides so you might as well pull them out of the presentation. Always use large fonts and always go for less information on more slides instead of packing it all into one. Human short term memory can only hold about 7 to 9 items at once anyways and that is a lot of information to put on a single slide.

Another speaker had some slides with a white background, silver and light blue text. Contrast is very important during presentations because projectors will tend to wash out colors that are perfectly readable on your computer display. Pull out a color wheel and pick two colors on opposite sides. Orange and Blue, Red and Green, Black and White etc. 

Scott Hanselman is an evangelist for Microsoft who does a lot of tech demos and has some other great presentation tips. 

Even before the PCI security standard for applications (PABP) becomes mandatory the PCI organization has retired it. It has been replaced with a new PA-DSS standard. The PCI web site details the  changes from PABP to PA-DSS.

One of the big changes is the PA-DSS is NOT required to process credit cards unless your credit card gateway/provider requires it. This should be a huge relief to many merchants as it will allow them to negotiate with their payment provider for a reasonable timeline to get certified.

BV Commerce has once again won the AspNetPro Magazine Reader's Choice Award for Best eCommerce application. That makes 4 out of the last 5 years that it has captured the title. An incredible achievement given the pace of innovation in the industry.

DotNetBB our message forum software has also captured the runner-up position for best asp.net forum software. 

If you've ever needed to get a quick export of everyone who has purchased from your store in the last year this SQL script can be used to generate a comma separated text file. Make sure you change the "> date" part to be the correct starting point for your export. You'll get customers' names, address, phone and email as long as they placed an order on your store.

 Run this in SQL Management Studio and then copy and paste the results to a text file. You can open the text file in Excel as "comma separated" (CSV) to get sort the data or mail merge.

I've got a love/hate relationship with credit card companies. On one hand credit cards make it easy for BV to sell software over the internet. On the other hand chargebacks and fraud with credit cards is a royal pain with limited protection for merchants. I watched a great episode of Frontline on PBS about the Secret History of Credit Cards.

The most surprising revelation was that most credit card contracts include a clause called "Universal Default." Basically, if you make a late payment to any other lender or company the credit card issuer can automatically raise your interest rate. If you're on vacation and forget to pay Comcast on time your Visa interest rate can jump from 18% to 25% without warning. 

Credit card companies are the only lenders that get to decide how risky you are when they issue you credit AND change their minds about how risky you are later too. My bank doesn't get to raise my mortgage payments because they think I'm riskier now than when I signed up for my mortgage so why should credit card companies get that ability? Sounds like a huge loophole that lets credit card companies jack up your rates almost at will.

Anyways, if you found this interesting you can watch the whole episode online. 

I was watching our Google Analytics traffic last week and noticed a sharp decline. My first thought was "My God, we've been blacklisted by Google or another search engine." I couldn't figure out why our traffic had dropped so dramatically. If it had dropped to zero I would have instantly thought the tracking script was at fault but instead it just dropped but kept counting with day to day variations.

I discovered that IE was reporting a script error and that was the clue to the mystery. We had added the JQuery library version 1.2.3 to our master page for some fancy image swapping. It turns out that this particular version of JQuery has an odd way of handling some click events and it conflicts with click handlers in Google Analytics. Apparently it doesn't happen all the time and it doesn't happen in all browsers so that's why we were still seeing some traffic records.

I pulled JQuery until it's patched and the stats popped back to normal the next day. Whew!