15 What I have learned this semester

I knew HTML pretty well before 10 grade, and visually know what do to do and what not do for designing a website. But PHP is very new to me I learned NEVER leave a space between < and ? and php in your PHP code, and always remember your ; after each line of php code or your webpage will throw up all over you. I have I've made a lot of "flat" websites: a place for people to read, listen to music, and view pictures of whatever the website is about. But I've never thought about the design principles of e-commerce website, for example I would normally not have a "buy now with 1 click" button like Amazon does because I would want the visitors of my website to make sure before charging their credit card. Since a lot of websites are e-commerce websites I have to starting thinking of design that's not just good for the visitors but also for the business. In addition to that, I learned how the changing (or lack of changing) laws, regulation, and policies play huge rule into e-commerce. How the Automated Clearing House might not be needed for electronic purchases and how e-commerce hurts government funding (even though the law is on online businesses side states governments might not like e-commerce because it deprives them of their sales tax (see blog 8 Amazon vs. State Sales Tax)). This class required me to use WordPress (see blog 13 Drupal, Wordpress, & Joomla) and Microsoft Expressions. Normally, since I'm old school and can make a whole website from notepad, I hate programs that auto-code things for you because if you want something very technical done it won't let you go in and fix it the way you want it and a lot of auto-coders often add a lot of unnecessary code (Front Page was well known for that, made a table for everything). Microsoft Expressions, though annoying at first getting used to their style sheet with so many <div>s and I would often write code that pops up so I had double end tags, but has been useful and lets me go in and edit things the way I want. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal I'm still debating with if I like them or not. They're it not just place for pre-made website layouts for people that don't have a clue how to do HTML but it does more with widgets. WordPress is for people that don't know PHP and other computer languages. I don't like how you can't go into the code and edit the layout and style at all, but at the same time it does more PHP than I can and has some neat widgets (like old school HTMLgear). It was especially interesting learning about web servers (see blog 11 Apache & Microsoft IIS web servers), because on summer a lot time ago I tried put several of my websites on an old computer because I ran out of room on Geocities and Angelfire and tired to turn it into a server. I managed to get the website up but only on my home network, I never manged to launch it to the web (probably because I didn't want to pay for anything and couldn't figure out how make a free domain name).

4 Cartier, Harry Winston, Tiffany, & Safety

Cartier

http://www.cartier.com/

The bad: Clearly from get go the automatic audio(1) and video flash(2) intro is a nightmare for slow computers, but at the same time if they’re selling such high priced jewelry for example a $32,000 bracelet they probably don’t care about poor people with a 10 year old computer lol! The animated navigation(3) is so fancy it’s almost useless because you can get lost easily.

The good: Through the navigation is too complex, it’s a double edged sword; the perk is that the whole Cartier website’s index(1) is on one page, and it appears that you stay on one page the whole time you browse their products. Some would argue that all that flash animation that kills the load time makes the site looks pretty(2), (the age old controversy of flash vs. html), I would disagree and call far too unnecessary for the tradeoff.  The overall fancy look of the website probably makes their customers feel rich(3).

Harry Winston

http://www.harrywinston.com/

The bad: The first time your computer goes to the site it takes a while to load(1) and seems slows down computer initially, and I don’t see a lot animations and graphics that would account for bad load times - long story short, if you going to hurt the load time better be a good reason for it. Just like Tiffany’s (below), the overall appearance of the website is boring, too plain because there’s too much white(2). Again on the plain-Jane appearance, Harry Winston doesn’t have any animations or dynamic pictures that I can see of, and some of the product pictures have a black background which looks crappy on the white page background. Another web design error is the lack of submenus or rather lack of explanation(3), for example “The Incredible” section, you have to click the link to get any sense of idea of what it’s about.

The good: Though the links needs to be labeled better the site’s overall navigation is good, you don’t have to look for links(1). Refreshing, instead of using buttons like most traditional eCommerce sites Harry Winston just uses links throughout the checkout process(2) to look cleaner. The good news about being too plain is that the site is not too cluttered(3) like its competitor Cartier.

Tiffany

http://www.tiffany.com/

The bad: Overall Tiffany’s site seems bland(1), it needs more sparkle considering what they’re selling, especially the home page(2). They forgot the readers when they decided the color scheme, the contrast between the text and background isn’t enough(3), it just hurts the eyes, especially the white text and blue background.

The good: I do very much like the way they show their product details, most eCommerce sites have a grid of their products with details of the products underneath the pictures. If there’s a lot of products on one page customers might get confused of which is which. The way Tiffany’s has the mouse over detail pop up there’s no confusion as well as it saves space and the zoom on mouse over is a nice touch(1). The only thing they could’ve improved upon with that feature is if the users could see a slide show of different angles of the product on mouse over. With the topics across the top, dropdown hover over submenus, and mouse over font color highlight(2) their website’s navigation overall is easy to use and clean looking(3).

It's beginning to bother me a lot that our assignments involve having a picture of ourselves, email address, and first and last name, and describe ourselves paragraph were anyone can see it - that doesn't seem safe at all. I've been stalked before, and it was really scary, it doesn't take much information for someone to find more information to stalk you. How do you feel, classmates, about this?

(all images are screenshots)

2 Three Snazzy Websites

 There are many things I love about newegg.com (as well as the company itself) but probably the most unique thing I like is the navigation. Not the navigation on the home page but if you just search for a product and start narrowing down your search results there will be at list of links in order of how you  would’ve of got there if you didn’t use NewEgg’s search bar. For example: Home>Computer Hardware>Memory>Desktop Memory>Kingston HyperX>Capacity 2GB>Type: 240-pm DDR2DRAM>Speed: DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

                                                              (screenshot)

Deviantart.com I don’t visit often enough, for the mere fact that it’s a place on the web you can spend several hours on and not notice. Deviantart does a good job of handling lots of media files and keeping page load time down.

For all we know Google company might just take over the software world and run out Microsoft when Google starts making operating systems and hardware. Google.com is one of the top websites hands down, mostly for the genius search engine but I’d like to point out for this blog the under-mentioned services Google provides: Gmail, Google Calendar, iGoogle, Google Tasks, etc. It is amazing for one website can do so many different things but still be organized enough for users to access everything easily and quickly.

 With Gmail, Google’s email, introduction to the “tag” organizational system saves the user trouble of making folders and putting their email in folders, it solves the problem of if an email involves two different topics and you don’t know which folder to put the email in – just put two tags on it. I can’t wait until we can do that kind of file system on personal computers; most people don’t know that if you have 1,000 files each in 100 folders takes up more memory than does the same 1,000 files in two folders. ECU’s pirate mail could take a lesson or two from Gmail, it’d be great if pirate mail would require a tag just like a subject line before sending out an email. In addition iGoogle is a nice where the user can edit the Google search home page with mini Google product iframes and apps for popular websites like Facebook.