Web design / front end, related news

E-Commerce

Recently attended an e-commerce seminar and got some useful information that's either good to know or be reminded of!

  • 70% of people (Sweden) look at products on the net and buy in a store
  • 19% of people (Sweden) look at products in a store but BUY from tne net

When designing a e-commerce page or site bare in mind to purvey the product with the following considerations.

  • Create buying belief - be personal - be truthful
  • Keep infomation relevent
  • Keep infomation simple
  • Use good pictures
  • Use clear sell facts (list even advantages)
  • Make clear, certifications (EU Certifcate)
  • Shown known Trading partners (if any- eg Fender)
  • Have accurate, fast delivery times 3-5 days max
  • Avoid hidden frieght costs - state clearly
  • Avoid registration requirements
  • Address language, can provide as many as 15

Give appropriate and a broad range of methods of payment. Choices could include credit cards, direct payment, invoicing. Note here Denmark for example have a specific credit card, consider and be aware of certain countries unique buying characteristics. Germany apparently is not a nation that buy online very much so do'nt for exapmle spend alot of money advertising your online selling potential to a nation that does'nt for what ever unique reason buy very much online.

Smart Marketing

Assess Consumers Behaviors - What % do what - read magazines, surf the net, use social media?

Where do you spend money to get the attention of potential customers?

How do you promote a website effectivly?

  • To a correctly targeted audience
  • As cost efficently as possible

From ADVERT > TO GOOGLE > TO WEBSITE

Facebook - A new internet 4,5 million swedish are on facebook.

What can your organisation offer from its facebook page - CREATE THE RIGHT CONTENT - Product news/updates, Product discussion, Customer support

Content is Key

When designing the website or a social media page make sure the right message and impact of your company and product is achieved. Certain things worth considering are

  • Solve the visitors query
  • Create a personal feel, establish trust
  • Sell your worth - what you stand for
  • SEO - Write for people and search engines
  • Build the Brand
  • Use the right Content
  • Create Links - drive traffic to you

Why people buy online

  • 22% - because it's cheaper
  • 20% - to get a wider product range
  • 54% - time and comfort "CONVIENIENCE"

Moile Phones

During the last year there has been a MOBILE TRAFFIC INCREASE of 92% in Sweden

15% of googles searches are coming from Mobile phones

Think about making your site adapted to Mobile phones - some of these considerations include

  • Simple design
  • Easy to read text
  • Good buttons

Mobile site or App

When considering the differences between a mobile site or an App be aware an App needs to be designed for both iphone and android also a mobile adapted website is found from a google search, Apps are not.

HTML5

HTML5 is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997 and as of November 2011 is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers).

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It includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, improves and rationalises the markup available for documents, and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (API)s for complex web applications. For the same reasons, HTML5 is also a potential candidate for cross-platform mobile applications. Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets.

In particular, HTML5 adds many new syntactical features. These include the (video), (audio), (header) and (canvas) elements, as well as the integration of SVG content that replaces the uses of generic object tags. These features are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs. Other new elements, such as (section), (article), (header) and (nav), are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents. New attributes have been introduced for the same purpose, while some elements and attributes have been removed. Some elements, such as (a), (cite) and (menu) have been changed, redefined or standardized. The APIs and document object model (DOM) are no longer afterthoughts, but are fundamental parts of the HTML5 specification. More.. link to html5rocks.com >>

CSS3

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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML. It is very important for front end developers and web designers.

Though CSS3 has been available for awhile some of its new facilitations are not supported by all browers, most obviously internet explorer especially older versions have little or no compatability to the new stylings offered. To this end old browsers do not work with the use of html5 and css3.

There are however ways to incorperate portions of this code in a site and still maintain a satisfactory appearence in less acceptant browsers. CSS3 properties do however work in the more forward thinking browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari (mac).

Listed below are some of the advantages that come from CSS3.

  • Differentiation and Isolation
  • Helps to achieve Multi Column Layout
  • Flexibility in Handling
  • Handling multiple background images
  • Border image
  • Border radius
  • Box shadow
  • Gradients
  • Text shadow
  • Transform
  • Opacity
  • Transitions

Some of the above design features are and can already be seen in web sites but the big difference here is the css3 code is far lighter than graphics that have been generated on other programs and imported into a site as a gif jpg or png image. With the main focus in web standards based on speed for optimised user experience css3 most deffinatly is the way forwards.

jQuery

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Another area that has established an important significants within front end development and web design is jQuery. Recent statistics suggest jQury has taken over from Flash in terms of sites that feature it worldwide. Flash has held a signifcant position within animated web design but recently especialy after Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs issued a public letter titled "Thoughts on Flash" where he concludes that Adobe "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content" and that "new open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win".

Essentially jQuery is a powerful shared library of frnot end code based on java script but does not need such a high level of coding knowledge to make use of it. It provides similar animation features to flash but with more semantic acceptance to web syntax. Visit the jQuery website >>

Visit a selection of sites that use jQuery