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!
Apparently, TechCrunchIT declared RSS dead in favor of… Twitter? Really? How come they haven’t removed all of their RSS links and what’s with the 5000+ feedburner subscribers listed in the footer? Do they not matter any more. Content Robot has the level head:
Here are three reasons why we believe that RSS is not dead:
Scanning through your subscribed content is infinitely more efficient than sifting through all the Twitter banter to find the gem or two of the day
Newsreaders can display entire blog posts, images, audio, video, related links instead of the necessary, but cryptic “tiny” URL
RSS allows you to go beyond the headlines, bash through the 140 character limitation, and get more insightful, in-depth information
For those of us who don’t bring with them a mac and a PC on the road with them everywhere they go, there was always browsershots.org. Sure, it just takes a screen shot of the website in question and it’s not like you nudge the code and hit reload, but it can help you figure out the ever-present padded box issues and the like. Furthermore, it will convince you that IE 6 is so far gone, why can’t it just die already. But
Browsershots seems to be broken. Time and time again, I’m getting a queue estimate and expiration time that are just minutes shy of each other or are the exact same time! I guess now, I’m going to have to invest some money in Parallels or a small PC.
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