*Please note that the above offer is only available to customers within the USA

Some Interesting Tips

• Did you know – you can minimize your exposure to PCI-DSS compliance requirements by using a hosted payment application to process online transaction from your website? A hosted payment solution is simple to integrate, and provides a safe, secure, and efficient way to process credit card data. The sensitive transaction data is stored with your processor and not within your store environment, protecting your customers and minimizing your risk.

• Adding payments to your existing Web site, while maintaining the look and feel your site already has is easier than you think. By using the First Data Global Gateway Web Service API solution, which leverages XML/SOAP-based messaging technology, you can easily integrate the payments portion of your online shopping environment with the shopping carts, order management, accounting software or other applications you already have. By providing a seamless online shopping experience, your customers don’t have to leave your site to complete a purchase.

• Did you know - payment alternatives to debit and credit are expected to grow to 30% over the next 4 years? Giving customers multiple payment options such as PayPal, Google Checkout or eCheck, increases the likelihood that a customer will complete the purchase and not abandon their cart. Industry studies show that by adding more than two payment alternatives to your checkout can increase sales conversions by 14%.

• A payment gateway provides your website with simple acceptance of electronic payment transactions and leveraging the gateway’s online transaction administration tool enables you to manage your payment transactions more effectively. This tool should provide a Transaction Terminal for manual processing of orders taken over the phone or face to face. It should also provide access to extensive transaction reporting and administrative tools that manage your business the way you want.

• Online fraud is one of the biggest concerns that merchants have today, accounting for over $3.3 billion in lost revenue in 2009. Additionally, merchants reject, on average, about 2.4% of all orders due to the suspicion of fraud. How can you prevent these losses and potential good orders that are rejected (false-positives)? By leveraging a fraud scoring and management solution, you are able to identify fraudulent transactions, score them according to your business requirements, and track these scores over time to more effectively accept or reject order transactions to get the highest rate or return by minimizing losses and accepting more good transactions.

Learn More

By Amy Armitage

Last week we launched our I Love Lunarpages Testimonial Contest and we received so many innovative, creative and hilarious entries. One of our staff members submitted a poem just for laughs (of course our staff cannot win any prizes).

“I love Lunarpages” by Brian Furphy

When my website was ready to go online,
I called up Lunarpages, just in time.
They listened very carefully to all my needs.
The best technical support with no extra fees.
I needed email and I didn’t want SPAM,
SEO for my site and a database plan,
a new domain and a dedicated IP,
Lunarpages made this all easy for me.
I love Lunarpages more and more every day,
I love them very much, but, in a platonic way.

It was our task to try and pick our top 3 favorites, which was extremely hard by the way and the results are in.

The first week’s winners of 12 months of Basic Web Hosting are:

David Miles
Kalamazoo, MI
www.davidmiles.us
Hosted with Lunarpages for 9 years

I started hosting with Lunarpages probably 9 years ago when I first decided to set up my own website. In that time my website needs may have changed but Lunarpages hasn’t! They have always been reliable, quick to address my issues, easy to use, affordable, expandable, … it should suffice to say that no matter what my web needs I feel confident that Lunarpages will be able to meet them now and in the future. I hope to be hosting with Lunarpages for years to come! Thanks! LP crew!

Michael Hernandez
Loma Linda, ca
www.foto-genic.com
Hosted with Lunarpages for almost 1 year

Easy signup and an incredibly easy to use control panel as well as hosting and domain name registration all in one. Lunarpages Rocks!!!!

Ian Flynn
UK
www.flynnstudio.com
Hosted with Lunarpages for 3 years

I love Lunarpages, my Lambretta loves Lunarpages…so much we rode all the way to the moon to take this photo. Just to show our love.

How do you enter?

Grab your camera, put on a happy face, and send us your best photo that creatively displays not only you, but a sign that says “I Love Lunarpages!” And, back it up with a glowing testimonial!

Hint: Lunarpages is one word and the p is lower case

Just because your testimonial was not selected this week does not mean you are still not in the running for the grand prize of an iPad or the weekly web hosting prizes, so keep ‘em coming!

A reminder of the prizes:

• Grand prize – one (1) Apple 16GB Wi-Fi iPad (a USD$499.00 value) plus12 months of Free Web Hosting on the Lunarpages Basic Plan
• Weekly prizes – for six (6) weeks we will choose 3 weekly winners to receive 12 months of Free Web Hosting on the Lunarpages Basic Plan

Everyone has a chance to win (providing you are a lunarpages customer and meet the terms and conditions), and the more unique images and testimonials you enter, the more chances you have!

Enter Now!

Here is a little more about the upset:

Social-networking star Facebook surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the United States for the first time last week, industry analysts showed.

Facebook’s homepage finished the week ending March 13 as the most visited site in the country, according to industry tracker Hitwise.

The "important milestone," as described by Hitwise director of research Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185 percent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same week in 2009.

Check out more here.  So is this the first shot fired across the social networking/web site popularity wars?

Bray is the co-inventor of the XML Web standard, and most recently worked at Sun Microsystems. In a blog post, he explains that he is drawn to Google in part because he hates the iPhone, or at least its closed and controlling environment from a developer’s perspective.

Read the rest of the story here.  It is an interesting insight on what you need to do to keep a developer of any kind, happy.

Looking for a simple way to check your web site’s loading times?  By doing so, you might be able to tell if your speed problem is a connection issue, or one caused by your design.  If you need a good tool to diagnose your page loading woes, look no further than Pingdom.

How does Pingdom’s page tests work? The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.

You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file.

Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.

Note: This version doesn’t load objects included in JavaScripts. We have also put a limit on the number and size of the objects that are loaded (to prevent the tool from downloading movies, for example).

Try it for yourself at: http://tools.pingdom.com/