Web Design & Development

Shopping Cart Commerce still has a place in the web

I must admit, not so long ago as a company we used to sneeze at shopping cart solutions and small business websites.  Which is ironic as we were the first company in Victoria to build a payment gateway and one that went by the tagline "E-Commerce Websites" primarily serviced small business. But we've come full circle since and you will find that we work on the occasional shopping cart website.

A vast majority of the sites we rolled out in our first few years were either e-commerce or shopping cart websites.  Then the landscape of the web changed as shopping cart solutions began to emerge left right and centre.  Rather than join the run of the mill we moved on to other things, preferring instead to build shopping cart functionality into our software and Freestyer where it was needed.  Somewhere along the line, we dropped the functionality due to low demand.  Shopping cart solutions became a specialised field and we continued to only use our own products, we would implement high end e-commerce solutions and payment gateways for corporate clients.  We would get the occasional enquiry from small business about shopping carts, but not be geared to service them. 

In the last 12 months, we've built a handful of shopping cart websites.

I think there are a few reasons for this. 
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Sitemap in Footer - A new approach to enhancing your website's performance

A recent website design trend is for sitemaps in footers or "mini-sitemaps", though despite the new approach, only a small number of websites have taken it up.  I'll explain why this approach offers some usability and search engine advantages and discuss the right time to use them.

Some recent high profile sites to use this technique include Apple.com and Australian sites such as the the ABC.  it has recently also been used by sites like Linkedin and LiveJournal.

Too often sitemaps are hidden as an obscure link on a site, indeed often to be found in the footer of a page.  Often they aren't given much thought, they are simply a massive heirarchical list of links and aren't really all that helpful.

Sitemaps, however can and should be helpful, not just a list of links.  I'll explain how a smaller version, implanted in the footer of your site, can make a world of difference.

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Tweaking Webpage CMS Templates for Better User Experience

You've built your new website and you think the job is over ?  Think again.  A website should evolve over time, and an important step is the optimisation of webpage templates to maximise the user experience.  This is even more imporant if you're using a Content Management System (CMS), as I'll explain and point out some examples from one of our recent projects.

If you are using a Content Management System (CMS), and we like to think that noone should build a website without one, then the chances are that your website comes with some pre-built templates for such things as pages, files and other media.  We build most of our websites using Freestyler, which comes with built in templates such as Page, File, Image Gallery, Form etc.  One of the benefits we offer our customers is the ability to easily customise these templates to improve user experience.  Our own skills and experience consulting in the field of information architecture helps us to identify problems and solve them.

I recently sat down with Avexa, one of my clients to discuss ways to improve their site.  Their site design had been implemented into the Freestyler CMS some time ago using the built-in templates but no custom templates.  While the site design itself was adequate to their needs and they didn't want a complete redesign, they explained that as more and more content went on the site, they became increasingly aware that it was looking very text and link heavy and that users were taking too many clicks to get to important information.  As an ASX listed biotechnology company, they had a duty to ensure that information is as accessible to shareholders as possible, especially given the new discoveries and announcements made in their field.   Brand and corporate image is also highly important, so any solution needed to be consistent with the design and style of the site.  So we explored some of the ways that we could improve the site and looked at some usage patterns on a few key pages ....

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