A good place to post random thoughts and useful things.

Better product selection through JQuery

January
23
Better product selection through JQuery

Easy-to-drop-in navigation to improve user experience and conversion in online stores.

 

Conversion - it seems - is a simple equation. A number of visitors (X) check out your products; a percentage (Y) find products they like; and - for a percentage of those (Z) - the price and trust and delivery is attractive enough that they buy.

X multiplied by Y multiplied by Z = conversions.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POST...

First posted Sunday 23rd January 2011

Ubercart - fixing stock control and attributed items

August
23
Ubercart - fixing stock control and attributed items

Ubercart rocks. But it can be a sod to iron out some problems. One of these is when you break a product down into sub-types by attribute and then find that the stock control doesn't track them.

Ubercart tracks stock based on a unique product code (sku). If all your products come in one size or variant, then you're fine. If you need to supply a product in - say - different sizes and colours and manage the stock of each, then it gets more difficult.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POST...

First posted Monday 23rd August 2010

Internet explorer drops stylesheets

August
23
Internet explorer drops stylesheets

It's one of those bugs that you can spend ages chasing and kick yourself for not knowing. Internet explorer limits the number of external stylesheets linked to a page. Once it hits its limit, it ignores the rest. The first sign of a problem is that your site appears to have missing stylesheets - but only in IE. Fortunately there are workarounds.

I came across this recently while developing a drupal website. Drupal (especially combined with the Zen base template) tends to go heavy on the attached stylesheets so if you start adding your own in as well, its easy to blow the 32 stylesheet limit without realising. JQuery plugins will also often add their own CSS files into the mix and are worth bearing in mind. As is any external content.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POST...

First posted Monday 23rd August 2010

Sweat the small stuff

June
18
Sweat the small stuff

Favourite video of the week! TED always throws up some good stuff, but this guy is fantastic.

First posted Friday 18th June 2010

Icon Finder

May
05
Icon Finder

Ever had that problem where you need to find a handful of 64px free-to-use icons for a specific job but you want to see the options side-by-side for comparison?

Iconfinder is a lifesaver. You can search on any term (eg: 'clipboard') and it pulls the specific icons that match the phrase - presenting them as a grid of clickable previewed icons. You can also limit searches based on creative commons licencing or pixel size. Each clickable result links to both the individual  icon (with download link) and the set that it belongs to.

It's perfect for unusual searches (I just found three 16px wineglasses for a client website) and its got pretty much all the sets you'd need indexed. Go try it. http://www.iconfinder.com/

First posted Wednesday 5th May 2010

Graceful degradation: Drupal and JQuery

May
05
Graceful degradation: Drupal and JQuery

Graceful degredation is essential if you're creating web content that may not render reliably in all browsers. Here's some ways to play with Drupal and JQuery - replacing flash animations with back-end-editable, SEO-friendly html and serving up cross-browser page transitions - while also providing reliable fallbacks when things go wrong.

When a client requested a flash-based, CMS-backed website that also scored high on SEO and could be viewed usefully by non-flash users, it got me to exploring JQuery animation as a flash replacement.

Admittedly, there's nothing radical about that, but it did allow me to stack the whole site on top of Drupal - making for easy editing, secure and solid foundations, easy expansion, and great SEO potential... all without ditching the animation they were after.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POST...

First posted Wednesday 5th May 2010

First post.

March
29
First post.

It's customary with first posts to post something short and sweet and mission statementy. So welcome to the blog.   I'm not expecting to post much  - or often - but it's a good place to post anything potentially useful. Thanks for visting.

Welcome mat available at ThinkGeek. Thanks to Bill Zimmerman for the image.

First posted Monday 29th March 2010

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