Web Design and Development

When first hearing about the job opportunity to work with an ecommerce company, I was a little skeptical about it because of of others in the Industry. After the interview I knew that working at Niche Retail would be a great step in my career. We pride ourselves on customer care and the company is not just about making money but being passionate about supplying great products that might aren’t readily available to consumers and making sure those consumers have a great experience when going through that process.

After reading all about the big Best Buy scandal , where employees were blocking consumers from getting cheaper prices that were listed on Best Buy’s website. It is great to work for a company, which prides themselves on customer service We have a company blog that catches all reviews, company feedback, and any other words pertaining to our company through Technorati’s search filtering. I was reading over them thinking how great it is, I figured it would be cool to post a couple here to show you how great of a feeling it is to know your making a difference in peoples online experience.

I removed all personal information, since it was our private customer feedback.

I just want to say thank you so much for a very easy and successful shopping experience. Your website was a breeze to use. I received both of my car seats right when you said I would. I will keep your company in mind for any future purchases that I may have. Thanks again for great service.

Thank you so much for notifying me that you received my return. The Customer Service at Niche Retail is EXCELLENT!! I would like to commend you & the company for this - good customer service is often hard to find

Thank you SOOOO much!!! I can’t tell you how nice it is to have such prompt, friendly customer service. It is surprisingly hard to come by these days.

Where can you get instant customer service these days!!!

I was in a panic as I could not find my order online! Jamie was VERY helpful and answered all my questions quickly! GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE!!!

They go on and on, I haven’t seen one bad feedback entry and its not doctored that way either its just a feed that is updated whenever someone leaves feedback. I would like to see the other online retailers compete with that!!

Looking over my Google Reader the other day, all I saw from the new A List a Part issue was Daniel Malls new Swifr technique using flash to give you the ability to apply an assortment of visual effects to any or all images on your website. I totally missed the article written by Ethan Marcotte titled, “Where Our Standards Went Wrong”.

What it represents to me
This article represents everything that I talk about when producing Web Standards valid templates and then handing them over to a backend system that demolishes the time and consideration I put into creating the templates with great valid code. One great point of how validation can benefit are lower maintenance costs.

My experience today
I experienced this very thing today while at work. The sites we work on were not created through our company, but was contracted out to a large ecommerce development company before we had a development team. It is a div based layout, although the code and CSS are poorly written. There are about 18 websites all sharing the same template platform. Anyways we have site managers that work inside of a not so great CMS, who update content and other sections. There was an issue with one of the sites layout breaking and it turned out to be a non closed div tag in one of the administrable content areas. Finding this problem took forever and trying to go into the validator and pinpoint what might of been wrong, there were some 300+ errors. It was an unneeded speed bump brought on by non web standards code.

Ethans point on time spent in non valid code:

I found that approximately fifteen percent of my time was spent mired in invalid code. As an independent designer/developer/something, I’m grateful for all the work my clients send me. Still, what if I was a salaried employee? If IT departments conducted a similar audit, I’m confident they’d find similar numbers. And this kind of auditing needs to happen. Invalid sites may look the same as those built on a foundation of valid, well-formed code, but in my experience, they invariably cost more to maintain. This is the silent weight of invalid code, a hidden cost we don’t discuss nearly enough

The Selling Point
The main selling point, which Ethan points out are the very things I have been preaching to clients, co-workers, bosses and friends.

• Shorten development cycles, as we no longer have to slog through through six layers of nested tables to build site templates.
• lower maintenance costs
• decrease page weight, which in turn reduces page load times and dramatically lowers bandwidth costs
• The promise of device independence
• The presence of a metric against which an individual or a team’s production can be measured
• The knowledge that your site is future-proof, displaying in any standards-compliant browser yet to be invented

My favorite quote
The following quote is so true and I really find it to be dead on with the design and functionality of ecommerce applications:

To be honest, the pragmatists are right: that for the most part, validation and commercial web design are polar opposites

After working on an ecommerce platform I find this to be so true. If you look at the top 15-50 internet retailers you wont find a single site that completely validates or even has a nice clean well laid out design. I think its because there are so many different layouts packed full of different options, products and functionality that it make it so hard to keep our CSS streamlined and our markup beautifully semantic. Over the next year or so I am making it my challenge to turn the front-end code of our sites to just this and show the other so called top sites, that it can be done!! Its just about how passionate you are about what you do and if your passionate in web standards there is no, it can’t be done!