Consumers with the bad economy and rising fuel prices, are flocking to the web more and more, to do their shopping. Online shopping is expected to be very popular this holiday season.

Online Shopping Portals Popular, Plus ExplorZ Review

I want to review shopping portals, and one in particular ExplorZ. This is an SEO optimized site that allows small shop owners to feature their products on the web. This creates excellent search visibility of your products.

How Does It Work?

Essentially the way it works is you register up an account, set up your store details through their interface, and then list your products via easy to submit RSS feeds.

Store Directory

I browsed through the store directory, and randomly picked a store. I found one called Blue Dragons Gifts. This store sells collectibles and hard to find gift items, such as glassware, 45 RPMs, vhs tapes, books, postcards, 33 RPMs, dvds, and figurines.

SEO Friendly Pages

If you take a look at the products featured in this store through Explorz, you will notice that each item get its own page, and carries an SEO friendly title on each page. What does this mean? It means that with proper marketing and promo, each page (and hence the products) will be found by web searchers. This is good.

How Much Is It?

There is no cost to list your store, or your products. According to the About Us page on the site, the service is 100% free. I can tell they make their money based off of banners on the site. There is no cost to sellers or buyers.

Final Note

My final comment on this site, is on the design. It could use a different sized width, as i quite dislike scrolling side to side to see what is on a page. This can easily be remedied, with some minor site modifications.

Let me also mention, that the site is web 2.0 enabled, as it features store reviews and ratings, tell a friend buttons, and has social networking built-in, via its community forum.

To wrap up, if you have an online store and are wanting another venue in which to showcase your products that is search engine friendly, give ExplorZ a try. If you do use it, let me know your thoughts and experiences with it.

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According to the developer, the wordpress theme below was inspired by Microsoft Vista. I don’t run Vista, (i still run Windows XP), so i can’t tell how relevant it is. But i like its color, design, and overall layout.

Vista WordPress Theme

The theme features include:

• Three Columns
• Valid XHTML & CSS
• Widget ready
• SEO Optimized
• Gravatars support
• Compatible with the following browsers: IE6+, FF2+, Safari, Opera

The Vista WordPress Theme was created on August 2nd, by A-Z Money Web Design, and it is available for free. To download, visit the developers site.

The theme is quite diverse, i see it being used by a variety of web professionals. Enjoy.

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