Get Your Site Ready for the Holidays Tis the season for sales, so make sure your site is ready.

For many e-tailers, holiday sales account for more than half of their year's total sales. That's great news when you consider that this year is expected to be a big one for online shopping. Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of ComScore Networks, a Reston, Virginia-based global information provider and consulting firm that tracks online sales, predicts a 24 per-cent to 25 percent increase in spending this holiday season over last year, with nontravel online spending reaching about $24 billion.

"It's been clear for a while," Fulgoni says. "The longer somebody is online, the more comfortable they become, and [as] more people switch to broadband, they spend more. And those trends continue to drive growth." He points to other growth factors as well: the fact that online merchants are designing better websites that are easier to navigate, and that multichannel retailers are focusing more on their online channels today than in the past.