An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that u

If you're having any issues doing an install on Vista and you encounter the error:
An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 2)

Try the link below to resolve that issue.

http://littletalk.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/an-error-has-occurred-while-establishing-a-connection-to-the-server-when-connecting-to-sql-server-2005-this-failure-may-be-caused-by-the-fact-that-under-the-default-settings-sql-server-does-not-all/

How to beat adwords

A lot of clients ask how they can make sales but not spend a ton of money on adwords. We've used this product to gain some insight on how to market your pay-per-click campaigns. The main focus is based on eliminating generic keywords and better yet focusing on purchasing clicks rather than browsing clicks.

Don't forget, you know your clients the best. Also, you don't have to send people to your home page. The best marketing is specific and product based. Learn more!

Click here to get

How to add a category

How to add a category

1. Log in to the administrator
   
2. Click on the category tab
   
3. Click on the categories sub tab
   
4. To add a standard category, look to the left of the page, make sure the Static category radio button is selected and click on the new button.
   
5. Voila, you have a new category.
   
6. When filling out the information for a category, fill out all of the general options for the best SEO results. These options include Page title, Meta description, Meta Keywords, and keywords.
   

To add a subcategory

1. Browse to see your category on the category page. For instructions, follow those above.
   
2. Click on the option to View Sub Categories
   
3. Add your category
   

System.OutOfMemory

It's never a good sign when you wake up in the morning and your site says System.OutOfMemory. No one changed anything on the site, so why is this happening?

Quick answer... All of the other sites on the same server running BV Commerce were running fine. No one had made any changes to the site, so why was this happening. We're going to track it to see if it happens again.

Solution: To fix it, we simply refreshed the web.config. I couldn't tell you why, but for some reason, I knew that was the answer.

Testing email blasts

So, you've put a beautiful email together and hit the send button in BVCommerce. Whew, time to start counting the sales. Then, what, the page shows an error message. Now what, did the emails go out? Who received the emails and who didn't?

The answers to these questions depend on how much information hosting will give you. We had some issues within BV2004 and here's how we answered some of them.

BVCommerce sends out emails in alphabetical order. So, we simply set up email addresses for aaa@[yourcompany.com] and zzz@[yourcompany.com]. This still doesn't give you all of the answers, but it will give you some insight.

So, with the emails set up above, you will know if the email went to everyone. Next step. If your page is timing out, this is a setting that hosting can help with. What's happening is your page is timing out and there is a limit. I'm not sure about most hosting companies, but Randy at Globalweb has helped us. I'd give him a call.

The combination of those two solutions has resolved our problem.

Free Shipping - BV5

Common question, how can I allow free shipping on an option.Here goes:

First, create or open your method of shipping that you would like to be free.

Next, Go to the bottom of the shipping option details screen.
Look for the "Adjustements" Section.
In there, you will see a text box titled "Adjust price by:" Change this to say -100. Next, change the drop down to state "Percentage." Now, click on the Save Changes button. That's it.

Please remember to always double check this by running through a sample order. Happy holidays!

Common HTML for everyone

Every once in a while I'm asked how to do some simple changes in HTML. Not all administrative areas allow you to use that nice WYSIWYG editor. So, here are the most common requests:

Text Color - red, green, white, black, etc common colors
<font color="red">enter text here</font>

Line break
<br>

Hyperlink
<a href="http://www.bluecreekweb.com">www.bluecreekweb.com</a>

Paragraph
<p>

Bold
<strong>enter text here </strong>

What to do if you want to unbold something?

Well there are a couple of situations.
If the text looks like this: hello joe, how are you
Then the code would look like this <strong>hello </strong> joe, <strong> how are you </strong>

OR the code can look like this:
hello joe, how are you
hello <span style="font-weight:normal">joe </span> how are you