Web Design and Development

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!

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!!

One of the sites I worked on in the last month or so has launched. The Ann Arbor Board of Realtors were looking to redesign their current site and Inner Circle Media was the firm that they felt would do it right. Luckily this was while I was working in their office and they graciously let me do the front-end development for the project.

I loved creating this site, its a great design especially compared to the other Realtor web sites that I have seen when googling to check out the competition. Not only was the design the reason I loved creating this site, but because of the fact I was able to create it as a flexible width layout. Throughout my freelance career the designers have always created fixed width designs but I felt that this site could be created flexible and not have any serious issues with the design and the great people at Inner Circle were all for it. The site is also built with Ruby on Rails and Inner Circle even created a custom content management system, so the board can easily update their site content and it gives them a lot of cool modules that make it a great data driven site.

They told me that the Board of realtor’s all over the country have a competition each year for who has the best website, hopefully with such a great design, use of great front-end techniques and such a powerful back-end based on rails will put the Ann Arbor Board of Realtors at the top of the list.

Well, its been a while since I have posted on a regular basis. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks that will change, but I have been transitioning into a new full time job as the lead front-end developer at Niche Retail, an ecommerce company that has about 18 different niche product sites.

I will be involved with many things including bringing the sites up to date with standards, which looks like its going to be a long process since it’s 18 or so sites. I will also be involved with more then just the coding but also be involved with the whole development process including new innovative ideas, usability, interaction design and all that great stuff.

It was my first week and I have already met with all the executives and checked out the main warehouse. We even already had a company party playing whirly ball, so yeah its been a big week for me. The development team is just three of us located in a small office in Ann Arbor Michigan while the main headquarters is located in Sylvan Lake Michigan. The work environment is very laid back and everyone is really nice. This is the type of job I have been waiting for and hope to do some great things.

As you can see I have done a little redesign. I’m happy with it but I think I might try something else in a month or two, I just wanted to get an updated look and feel to the site. I haven’t updated the site since my portfolio class and it was looking pretty old school! I don’t do much design work any more, hopefully this can motivate me to start messing around more with layouts and everything since I’m always reading all the blogs on certain techniques or what not.

There are still be some bugs, so I will be looking for them. If you notice any please let me know. I hope you guys like it and feel free to leave any constructive criticism. I’m not completely happy with how everything turned out so I won’t be offended. Its a great improvement to what I previously had and glad I had some time to not be lazy and actually get it up here.

I haven’t been posting a lot lately, well simply because I just haven’t been to inspired to write about much going on. I have been working on a lot of new things for my career in the near future and hope to update you guys all that in a couple of weeks.