Pixel Thread

The importance of images in product description pages has been well documented.

A high quality pic can turn a browser into a customer. As broadband’s become the norm in the western world, online shops have been getting more adventurous with their use of images.

Combined some well written code, product pages are now giving the user the facility to closely inspect an item before buying. Great from the customer and the shop perspective.

Magneto product page has a nice image zoomer and Habitat’s product page has a very tidy mouseover inspection. Probably soon to become the norm across the web. In contrast, the mouseover action on the category home pages of Habitat leave me reeling! (Fail harder?)

The bigger online stores are lagging a bit behind in this respect. The ebay interface is still pretty clunky, Amazon’s product page is hugely cluttered.

I’ve been watching the development of Magento over the past year or so, and so far it ticks all the right boxes.
But the feature that clinches the deal for me is the one page checkout: instead of taking the user through a sequence of pages until they finally reach order confirmation, Magento does it all in one place, through the use of expandable / collapsible page sections. Neat.

Magento

Last week my post about designing for 1024 x 768 was added to stumbleupon.com. It had a huge effect on the traffic, on the best day, the blog had 4,384 readers - pretty incredible. Up to that point the number of people reading the blog a day was under 20.

I’m still working out how I want to use the blog. So I though I’d try publishing less often but meatier posts. The post about designing for 1024 x 768 was my first attempt at this tactic, needless to say I’m pretty pleased with the results.

But it’s not all roses, I think the visits from stumbledupon were pretty low value - there were few comments and few people clicked through to other pages.

In terms of clicks to other content, this could be partly my current WordPress template doesn’t list other links in the right column if a user views a specific article, or it could be because previous posts haven’t been interesting enough!

When I realised the traffic was going through the roof, I quickly set up a page I’d had in mind for a while with affiliate links to some of the best web design books on Amazon. Adrenaline pumping, I had visions of chalets in the Alps, holidays in the Caribbean… well maybe not quite, but I did think I might be able to pay for a few Christmas pressies with the Amazon commission. Sadly not, clicks: 20 sales: 0.

Although I thought I’d be crazy not to try and make some cash from the traffic, fortunately I didn’t write the post to make money from affiliate links, and this blog is very uncommercial.

It’s been a good reminder that I need to sort out my template asap. I’ve been meaning to do since I set up the blog, but always end up working on other things. For some reason I let this site slip down my priority list, when really it deserves more of my time.

It’s also been a good reminder of the power of social media for driving traffic to a site. Although I haven’t yet noticed a huge improvement in Bang Your Drum’s Google ranking.

Anyay, as far as I’m concerned the key to getting ’stumbled upon’ or to being ‘dug’ is simply to put effort into producing content that is useful and relevant. Content is king?

This little orange rectangle with the curved radio wave lines has become ubiquitous on the web. A quick google doesn’t reveal much other than the fact that it was used by Mozilla and adopted by Microsoft in 2005 .

The symbol has made the transition from design concept to becoming part of the web’s lexicon - quite a big move. It’s used in the address bar in Firefox, on the tool bar in IE7 (slightly adapted) and all over the web beside links to RSS feeds.

I’d be interested to know who originally designed it, and what the design process was - were there earlier contenders that got ruled out?

sIFR uses javascript, CSS and Flash to replace short passages of plain text with text rendered in any typeface - regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Update: sIFR 3 is now available here , although still in beta I think…

For too long typographic style and its accompanying attention to detail have been overlooked by website designers, particularly in body copy. In years gone by this could have been put down to the technology, but now the web has caught up.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web is an excellent resource for anyone interested in graphic or web design. Author Richard Rutter looks at how Robert Bringhurst’s classic book The Elements of Typographic Style can be applied to text online.

The SEO Playbook, is a long blog post by a guy who goes by the name of Stuntdubl. It’s a useful overview of where SEO is today, breaking down the many different aspects that exist to the practice.

SEO is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined.

A lot of companies see SEO as something for the techies to deal with, but it’s about much more than just the code.

If you want to get your head around some of the jargon and some of the tactics that surround Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), check out the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s a great resource for anyone new to SEO, as well as old hands who might need a quick refresher on some of the basics.

The amount of care and attention author Rand Fishkin puts into the guide is inspiring. He’s great at sharing knowledge and experience and comes across as very altruistic. creating a lot of goodwill for his company, SEOmoz.

It’s a perfect example of good content driving traffic and links (like this post).

L-Mail is a new service that lets anyone send a real letter by email. You send an email to a pre-defined email address, L-Mail prints the letter out and sends it to the supplied physical address.

So just when the World has converted to email, and even your granny has a gmail account, who needs to send printed letters? Well it’s probably a few million people…

When you and everyone you know is online it’s easy to assume that the world is connected but according to Internet World Stats , only 17% of The World’s population use the web. So it’s fair to assume a big proportion of those users must be in communication with people who don’t use the web.

I’ve often wished for this kind of service. It’s all too easy to stop communicating regularly with people / family who don’t use email. Often I’d like to be able to type a few lines to older and non-computer user members of my family, but to write a letter, go and buy stamps and find a post box just makes it too much kufuffle!

For me, as a proud Dad, the crucial missing ingredient from L-Mail is the ability to be able to send photos using this service. Apparently it’s in the pipeline, and if it emerges, I may well sign up.

And another company offering this service I’ve just discovered is a site called Postful promising a full colour one-page letter for just $0.99 …

This is a great piece of script that you can use to include an email address in your web page, but stop spambots picking it up.

“Junk email (a.k.a. spam) is a part of everyone’s life if they ever put their email address on the web. For HTML authors, site admins, and for people who want a little credit on the page that they put online, it is a constant problem. You want to include your email address on the page, but you don’t want your email address to be harvested by spambots.

The best thing you can do is encode your email address so that browsers can see it and spambots can not.”