betterplacerescue.org

No one thinks about head and face protection at all, which is quite odd if you consider that we’re probably living in one of the most safety-conscious (some would say obsessed) times in recent memory.  For where parents would once not blink so much as one eyelash at kids sleeping over a friend’s place, now it’s a marvel to see even a teenager more than five feet away from an adult!  Yet how many do you see playing ball or engaging in other rough-and-tumble activities without a helmet or mouth-guard?  In all likelihood, however, it’s just a matter of time before manufacturer’s marketing departments jump in and create yet another cottage industry.

I was just strolling in Midtown this past weekend and came upon a demonstration.  Well, it wasn’t quite a demonstration as such, probably, but rather the remnants of one, folks going back home and such.  I noticed a cop snickering at all the people with their signs, mostly young kids and, if I may surmise the motivation behind the officer’s smirk, apparently well-fed.  Now  this happened a little past On Off Digital World, that electronics and photography store that caters mostly to tourists who absolutely must have some obscure piece of camera hardware and such.  And now, it’s nothing at all, really, in the proverbial ultimate scheme of things but something about that dismissive smile really caught my attention.

Perhaps no other company in the industry is as famous as Timeshares Only, likely due to their television infomercial blitzes of the past few years.  Yet not too many people understand the service, nor how to get the most out of it.  Well, this short primer will explain it all!

Yes, here in about a hundred or so words the mysteries of Timeshares Only will be solved…because it’s all so simple.  You see, what the company offers is basically a kind of online Yellow Pages of timeshares.  Whether you’re looking to rent, buy, or sell one.  It’s a giant electronic bulletin board focused solely on timeshares.

That’s all.  The company does’t sell anything for you; they won’t buy anything from you.  They merely serve as a content portal, if you will, for timeshare listings!

When it comes to finding the right WordPress shopping cart for your needs, it’s all much too much rather like Charles Dickens’ opening lines for A Tale of Two Cities: It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times.

I say that because it looks like WordPress eCommerce is finally about to get serious, what with the revolutionary Jigoshop shopping cart plugin that promises to provide a robust solution comparable to Zen Cart, Magento, and the like.  On the other hand, Jigoshop’s been forked by competitor WooThemes, threatening to split the development community along two mutually exclusive lines.

It all depends on how you want to look at things.  Forking is entirely the point of being open source, and should provide enormous benefit to end-users, ultimately.  Forking in this particular case, others point out — of a still-nascent plugin practically right at its debut — can well result in shutting down everything for everyone involved, the community of end-users included as competition for little ROI cause serious developers to abandon the WordPress market.

And in the midst of all this, you just want a WordPress shopping cart system that does what you need for your business to succeed.

Tall order, eh?

Maybe not next year.  In another twelve months, the picture should be much, much clearer.  But until then, what’s a business-owner to do?  Use WordPress only for blogging and general content management while relegating online retail to more robust solutions?

Not necessarily.  It just depends on how well you understand your own needs — and, more to the point, how technical you’d like to get.  Right now, eCommerce is not only possible with WordPress but fairly easy.  It still remains to be seen whether enterprise-level needs can be met adequately.  But for the overwhelming vast majority of small business owners and, especially, webpreneurs of the sole-proprietor variety, WordPress will most likely prove quite competent at most tasks.  Again, it’s really just a matter of knowing what you need and matching that with what’s available — which is another way of saying understanding the technical stuff involved, as not all options will offer…well, all options!