Last Friday I launched Hungry Hikers, the web store front of a local Portland business that sells quick-to-make meals for hikers, cyclists and outdoorsy types.
The Client decided they wanted to use Shopify as their e-commerce solution and I couldn’t have been happier. While certainly not perfect, Shopify has powerful tools that help get your store up and running as well as let designers and developers be able customize the experience. They have a pretty good support forum and a developer community that is always finding ways to use their proprietary code called Liquid to its fullest.
The design was done by Josh Leo whom I’ve been working with on the last few projects. He’s also an outdoors enthusiast, so he jumped at the chance to add his quirky and organic designs to such a product.
Well, it’s been a great 2010 and I’ve got a lot of work to show for it so I spent the day updating my Portfolio page.
While you can see I’ve concentrated much on using WordPress as a light-weight and easy-to-use CMS for my clients, I’ve also done a few sites that worked better as hand-coded HTML and used J-query to give it some motion and playfulness.
I often get clients that want me to build them an e-commerce site. Basically, they have some products and they want to sell them through the web. No problem, right? Set up your product gallery, maybe have some more detailed info and most important of all, have a nice big “Add to cart” or “Buy Now” button. The point of an e-commerce site is to simply display your goods and make it extremely easy for someone to buy them.
I bring this up because Velo City Bags, makers of fine bicycling messenger bags and accessories, whose products I love, just redesigned their website to be full of motion and side scrolling. It’s slick, it’s pretty, the motion is smooth the coding is solid. But it fails as an effective e-commerce site, because it takes at least six clicks to add one thing to the cart (and that’s not even clicking on any of the options).
This site is a perfect example of where pretty can actually hurt your sales. I’m a firm believer that if anything takes more than two clicks to do, no one is going to do it, much less buy it. Your e-commerce site doesn’t have to be ugly or plain, there is a balance that can be reached, but it’s important to remember the function of an e-commerce site is to make money, above all else. Keep that in mind during the design process and you’re golden.
Designers and especially web designers may have noticed how Adobe Photoshop sometimes drains colors from your images when you use “save for web”. I finally found this article that not only diagnoses the problem, but has ways to solve it.
So here’s the situation: Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. For designers and developers, this is a significant step forward. No longer will you need to trap your content in images or Flash just to express yourself visually. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable. This is a massive upgrade for the web.
The only thing that bothers me is the definition of “major browser”, but I know several of my clients will be happy to see this news once it becomes available!
However, I will still steer my client’s clear of using Old English Gothic text for their post texts!
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