Ecommerce Website

How to Create Your Own Ecommerce Website

Website Development / /

If you have a desire to sell goods online then you’ve most likely considered how you will build your e-commerce website. There is no doubt that shopping cart websites are complex. They require not only a high quality, functional and usable layout and design but also a secure and well-thought-out back end as well, in order to facilitate the financial transactions that will take place on the site.

An e-commerce website should be well planned, with every aspect of the site having a purpose and contribution to the overall goal of converting your website visitors into buyers of your products. There are now many options when it comes to building a shopping website. You can use an open source piece of software, you can pay a web developer to build your entire site from scratch, or, in the case of very small e-commerce sites, you can even simply use Paypal to build a simple shopping cart. The size of your website and your budget will determine which path you take.

Other important factors to keep in mind as you plan the design and functionality of your website include the following:

– Your domain name: this will be your branding opportunity so make sure you decide on a domain name that you are happy with and feel represents your products well.

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web typography

Serious Thinking About Web Typography

Website Development / /

For those of you who have never had the occasion to learn how all this “font” or web typography stuff got started in the first place, 37Signals has a great post up about The Art of Computer Typography. It’s a great little history lesson on how hacker guru Donald Knuth basically brought typography to the computer age the way Moses brought the commandments down from the mountain.

It’s good to appreciate how your website’s font pairing setup can make the difference between visitors staying and leaving. There is something wonderful in the way a page full of well-laid-out, well-kerned type makes the reading experience easier for everyone. And of course, it wards you away from those dreadful yellow-on-red pages with Comic Sans text.

consumer electronics show convention season

Savvy, Savvy Tech News ON The Savviest Consumer Electronics Show

Tech News / /

Las Vegas! Hot as blazes (by American standards), seedy and cheesy, and crazy hyped all the time, but when the consumer electronics show convention season starts up it’s like they’re the top spot for geeks and electronic nerds. Might as well browse the list of things to look forward to at this year’s CES and get a lead on the next buzz early, because you’ll be hearing about at least some of it soon enough.

Our bets on what will pan out:

  • Ultrabooks – Hot! They’re just the next generation of laptops, after all.
  • Windows 8 – Let’s see, is Windows still relevant? Yeah, for a while. Hot!
  • 4K TV – Snoo-o-o-ore! Look, bigger, bustier TVs are just for rich wanks to show off. Nobody else really cares. We still like our black-and-white model with the knobs and rabbit-ears we got in 1955. Buying a $4000 unit doesn’t make the shows any better.
  • 3D – Snore. 3D just isn’t here yet. It’s like the flying car from Blade Runner.
  • Ice Cream Sandwich – Hot! Brilliant name, that.
  • Digital cameras – Ah, yeah, they’re very nice. Sorta hot, but where else can it go now?
  • Video content – Hot, but we agree that industry needs to get off the fence and make it more available. Naive international content barriers don’t help.
careless employees

Who Is The Least Secure Employee In Your Web Company?

Website Development /

Dark Reading has a thought-provoking post up about the popular buzzphrase “insider threat”, and, to the point, how it really doesn’t make sense as a term. The post advocates for a more fine-grained approach:

  • rogue employees – This is actually the darkest prospect, and yet entrepreneurs fear it the most while it actually happens the least.
  • security loss through incompetence – now we’re talking!
  • just plain leaks – through, for instance, trusting a third party and then their incompetence exposed you to risk.
  • outside attacker penetrating inside – really, every outside threat aims to become an inside threat.

Experience has proved out time and again, that under-trained or careless employees are the greatest threat vector. For every “Hollywood hacker” trying to get into your site, there’s a hundred receptionists setting their password to “1234”, a hundred associates using a malware-infected Windows PC to send mail, a hundred security guards who aren’t watching what they should, and a hundred coders who left a gaping exposure to XSS in your web page. It’s ridiculous to treat malicious attackers and mistakes all the same way.

Windows 8

Kiss Flash and Silverlight Goodbye on Windows 8

Website Development / , , /

Did you ever think you’d live to see the day when you’d read this headline? Here, wait, let’s hear it in OSNews’ own words first:

“The world’s most popular operating system will not be receptive to Flash, and Microsoft openly stating Flash is history pretty much means that as a platform for the web, it’s done. Flash may still serve a purpose in other ways, but the Flash most of us know and hate – that’s gone.”

Wha… ? Done? Gone? Flash? DOA? Belly-up? Bereft of life, resting in peace?

Yes, the MSDN developer website seems pretty sure about this. HTML5 is where it’s at now. Throw away those O’Reilly Actionscript manuals and beef up on your HTML5. Meanwhile, Apple Insider can barely keep the gloating out of its coverage of the story.

The hilarious irony in all of this? Linux, the platform the Adobe despised the most, is now the only platform that will give the time of day to Adobe. So, ah, Adobe, do you suppose Firefox Ubuntu users can expect their Flash plugin update on time for a change?

Instaview: Instagram to the Macs

Website Development /

InstaviewIconIt’s time to reveal what we’ve been working on these last few months, but first a little background. Instagram, an app available for iPhone is in the words of its creators at Burbn, “a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends.” The number of people who have adopted this service as their favorite way to share photos has been nothing short of amazing. A recent article puts its userbase at 5 million.

We too have enjoyed using the app over the last several months and have decided to provide a way for Instagram users to view these photos with a native Mac application.

Instaview allows you to easily set up one or more windows which will each show an Instagram photo stream. You can choose from several picture frames styles to showcase each photo stream. An overlay appears when you mouse over each stream window, allowing you to see more information about the photo being displayed. At that point you’re a click away from viewing who has liked or commented on the photo, further information about the Instagrammer, the ability to like the photo, follow the contributor or add your own comment. Our badging feature lets you know when new photos are available for viewing. Finally, each window can also become its own slideshow which will cycle through its stream’s photos.

online business

Running your online business like a rock star?

Business Advice, Website Development /

An interesting pocket of web design is found on Naldz Graphics, with a gallery of 40 websites of rock bands. Now, the point of this post is “look at designs, be inspired in your own designs” and in fact some of these might work better for businesses other than a band.

We asked our own resident rock ‘n’ roll expert (he has a Frank Zappa poster in his cubicle) to rate how these designs work for a band as a business case.

Here’s some of the verdicts:

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Internet Usage

Your Wealth Affects Your Internet Usage

Tech News /

A stunning new report from Fast Company asks Why Are the Rich So Good at the Internet? It kind of seems obvious at first, but even within the tiers of people well-able to afford technology, there’s a difference in how much you use the Internet depending on your income.

The report is fascinating, and puzzling. But we think we can make some guesses as to what’s going on (take these with a grain of salt; they’re just theories):

  • The rich have more leisure time, so more time to play online.
  • The rich got that way through being thrifty, so they’re keener to use online shopping to find a bargain.
  • The rich have higher-tech jobs, so they’re naturally more Internet-savvy.
  • The rich are better educated, so they know more about what computers can do.
  • The rich have been able to afford computers for a longer time and so are more experienced. This is a little Easter egg – a $40,000/year and $80,000/year salary can afford the same computer – in 2010. In 1990, computers were much more expensive compared to the cost-of-living then, so only the richer household could have afforded them then. The poorer users have to catch up in learning.

An enhancement for UIAlertView

Tech News /

I like objective-c protocols, and I am a fan of the interface oriented designs that it allows for. But, sometimes the indirection of using a selector with a defined signature just works better, and the problem is that UIAlertView does not take a selector. Instead, UIAlertView defines a protocol, UIAlertViewDelegate, that the alert’s delegate adopts to receive notification of the user intent. To be fair, UIAlertView communicates a bit more information back to it’s delegate than the target of an NSAlert, and the UIAlertViewDelegate protocol does a fine job achieving that goal. 99% of the time, however, I want to show an alert and have it call my named selector when it is done. To that end, I finally busted out the admittedly tiny class that does the job.

Now in my client code I show an alert like this:

RSAlert* alert = [[RSAlert alloc] initWithTitle: @“Title” message: @“Message!” target: self selector: @selector(dismissedAlert:buttonIndex:) cancelButtonTitle: @“OK” otherButtonTitles: nil];

 

and handle the result with a selector, similar to NSAlert:

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hiring an online freelance web designer

Hmmmm, Good Advice For Being A Good Client

Website Development / /

We jumped when we saw the title of the post: How to be a good client, but then when we read the content, it wasn’t what we had in mind. Don’t get us wrong, it’s all good advice, but we’d really like to take this time to advise readers on how to get the most out of hiring an online web design agency:

1. Link to an example of what you want. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can talk to a designer all day, “I want an arty header and a side link bank, but it should move with the scroll wheel and have green and blue colours…” That can still be interpreted 100 different ways. Find a picture to start with, then detail how you want it different.

2. Take the designer’s / developer’s word for it. We don’t know how many clients out there have made their own lives miserable by saying “I want the whole site in Flash.” or “Can I get it with animated GIFs and use this big image as the background?” You hire an expert; if they say that something isn’t a good idea, listen to them. That’s what you’re paying them for is to know their stuff!

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