Disappointing
Lately you will see my posts will be geared towards web standards in the ecommerce industry. Its very disappointing because there really aren’t any industry leaders that try to produce their sites with them. Since I have started working for an ecommerce company, I have been doing a lot of research and hunting for sites to get some inspiration from.
I have looked at the top 30 or so internet retailers and haven’t found anything that would show me sites that are doing web standards to the fullest. There might be some that use div based layouts but fall short of using it all the way throughout their site. they are also very non-semantic and suffer from serious divitous.
Anyone can create an XHTML/CSS website but just slapping up some container divs and applying some CSS doesn’t cut it in my book. To me its the same as an old school mechanic that gets a hold of some new techniques/tools and starts slapping on these parts and using these techniques on a piece of crap car thats going to give out no matter what. He doesn’t take the time to learn the power of these techniques/tools and how to use them to gain their full potential or their correct use. Sorry to any mechanics, I was just trying to think of something to compare it to.
Anyways after realising my search for a great site to learn from was going to be harder then I thought, maybe I would ask some of the leaders in the industry. I figured some of these guys that preach web standards and put out great sites would know of some good ecommerce sites. I emailed Roger Johansson, a Swedish web professional specializing in web standards, accessibility, and usability. He is one of my favorite bloggers to read and anyone reading this should start subscribing to his blog, if you haven’t already. I emailed him a description of my problem, thinking he had to know some sites, but like all my previous attempts he is just as puzzled as me. In a way it made me happy because I was thinking, I must be dumb if I can’t find one site but on the other hand, is it that hard for this industry to do it right?
I will be emailing others that are leading the industry and see if they know of any and please post any that you might know of. I will keep you updated with any links that I find also!
March 4th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I think this might be a case where the business ends justify the means. While I do agree that all e-commerce sites should strive to have well crafted and built websites, with the number #1 goal of selling as much as possible sometimes “web standards” take a back seat to making the website sell.
I will admit that the e-commerce sites I have worked on are far from the greatest feats of web development - but it was more important to develop a site that the client could afford and sold the product rather than spending extra time on cleaning up the e-commerce engine it was built on.
Passionate about standards, accessibility, and coding I am - but if a business model proves it a disadvantage to go so far in any of those areas I won’t hesitate to start cutting corners.
But maybe I am just evil at heart? =)
March 4th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
http://www.wiltshirefarmfoods.com/
This is a pretty good e-commerce site btw
March 4th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
I think your 100% correct when your talking about creating an ecommerce site for a client because usually the functionality, budgets, timelines and the platform you are working on all make a factor of what you produce.
The thing is though my responsibility at my job is primarily for the maintenance, clean up of existing code and creation of new templates/sites. The existing platform is a custom made platform from a major development company, but I work directly with a software engineer and we are working on cleaning that up also, so the possibilities are endless.
Of course since this is my job and I won’t be creating an application with a deadline and budget constraints, my goal is to get the sites to be as perfect from the front-end as possible. But maybe thats because I am a perfectionist at heart
and should just realize that they don’t have to be perfect. The main reason I have been looking into it s the fact the sites I work on currently have horrible CSS, HTML (although it is not table based). Working inside of it could be so much better for all of us. It would definitely save time on page load and not to mention better SEO rankings because currently a long with the tag soup, there isn’t even the use of proper header elements and other key factors.
I just know that with these sites I have seen, a lot of time could of been saved if they did do it the correct way and it would make maintaining it much easer. I would think there are a lot of companies out there that have internal development teams that could create great sites. Maybe I’m complaining to much!
Thanks for that link thats exactly what I am looking for of course you would find something I’ve been searching for forever, although all they have is the one product description page that is more like a category page. It works for them though.
Thanks again Ross