How your site looks matters. Even subtle improvements—like using fonts or colors that compliment your theme—can have a positive effect on how consumers rate the trustworthiness of your store.

According to a 2003 Stanford University study of 2,440 people, 46.2 percent of online shoppers gauge the credibility of an ecommerce site by how professional and eye-pleasing the site looks. In fact, rightly or wrongly, appearance is even more important to shoppers than the presence of a security banner promoting hacker or credit card safety.

In this edition of Web Design Tips, a recurring Practical Ecommerce feature, I will show you the ins and outs of basic header formatting using a cascading style sheet (CSS) and HTML. This feature is aimed at HTML and CSS novices who have very little design experience.

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By Darryl K. Taft

Aptana releases Aptana PHP 1.0, its integrated development environment for PHP development. Aptana PHP extends the functionality of the company’s Aptana Studio tools suite, which is an Eclipse-based IDE for AJAX and Web development.

Aptana on Dec. 11 released Aptana PHP 1.0, its open-source integrated development environment for PHP application development.

With the new product, Aptana extends the functionality the company offers to developers in its Aptana Studio tools suite, which is an Eclipse-based IDE for AJAX and Web development.

Meanwhile, Aptana PHP provides common IDE features such as code assist and instant syntax checking capabilities that support not only PHP, but also AJAX libraries, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

In addition, developers can use the internal PHP server that is included in the Aptana PHP installation or another PHP server of their choice to preview their PHP pages in any of the multiple Web browsers built right into Aptana Studio. The product also has PHP code generation features and PHP debugging and refactoring tools.