The year is coming to a close and—with luck—you'll leave work early, head to the local pub, and get ready to ring in the new year. But, if you are sitting at your desk trying to look busy, here are ten articles you will want to check out.
These ten articles were all published in our inaugural month, December 2009, and represent the ten most popular posts based on total web traffic through this morning.
Nine Useful PHP Frameworks
Using a PHP framework can speed project development and make it easier to create stable, reliable, and modern web applications.
Scripting language frameworks generally extend the basic principles behind a language like PHP by making it simpler to develop web applications. PHP, which originally stood for personal home page, was created in 1995 when a software engineer, Rasmus Lerdorf, wanted a better way to programmatically track page views for the resume on his personal website. Eventually, Lerdorf made his personal home page tools (PHP/FI) available open source, and the PHP community was born.
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Twenty-Seven Stunning Shopify Stores
Website aesthetics are as important as function. Online shoppers judge a merchant’s professionalism and trustworthiness by how good that merchant’s site looks.
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Audio Interview: Adobe’s Justin Everett-Church Discusses SEO and Flash Content
Adobe Flash-based rich-Internet applications may represent the future of web content in general and ecommerce in particular, but many web developers are concerned that Flash content is not easily optimized for search engines.
In this audio interview, Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for designer/developer relations for Flash, at Adobe, describes the current state of search engine optimization for Flash, discusses the Flash Player for search, and addresses concerns about Flash content.
Listen to this Audio Interview.
Segmentation Made Simple: Magento Enterprise 1.6 Makes It Easy to Show Visitors What They Want to See
Much has been said about the effectiveness of personalization and behavioral segmentation. From improved conversion rates, to lower cart abandonment rates, to increased up-sells and cross-sells, giving visitors a shopping experience that feels unique to them should be a priority for every online store.
After using a personalized recommendation service for its website, WineEnthusiast.com boasted a 200 percent increase in conversion rates and a 9.8 percent increase in conversion rates for product recommendations, according to a MyBuys case study.
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Seven JavaScript Tutorials We Wish We’d Written
JavaScript adds interactivity to web design and development. The language is one of the most important aspects of modern website creation, and without it many user interfaces would be bland indeed.
We often find skilled developers who have taken JavaScript in new directions or refactored common implementations in such a way that they’re nothing short of artwork. What’s more, when these JavaScript masters share their skills in tutorials, we’re even more impressed.
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Seventy Clean and Inspiring Ecommerce Site Designs
The design of an ecommerce site can affect its sales. For instance, an ecommerce site that has dull colors, with products that are poorly organized, will usually sell less than one whose design focuses on capturing the attention of visitors and on assisting them in locating items to buy.
It only takes about three seconds to grab the attention of a prospective customer. If your site cannot accomplish this, then it's probably time to re-evaluate its design.
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Tutorial: Avoid Two Problems Installing Magento On A Localhost
Magento's open source and free Community Edition is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms available today, and web designers and developers that specialize in working with Magento are finding the platform to be very lucrative.
But if, like many developers, you like to build your websites, templates, and applications on a localhost, there are at least two gotchas that can mess up your local installation.
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Augmented Reality Can Enhance Online Shopping
Augmented reality allows ecommerce businesses to create compelling new online shopping experiences and gives savvy developers a new profit-generating technology to offer clients.
Augmented reality (AR) refers to any software application that combines a verbatim representation of the world with a computer-enhanced version of it. This can occur with any of the senses, but is probably the most dramatic when focused on visual information.
Because of this general visual focus, AR is frequently a user’s webcam overlaid with contextually relevant graphical information. Oftentimes, the user will show a picture (called a marker) to the camera, and use that picture to control the CGI content. Like many tools, AR’s usefulness depends on how it is employed. So far, most executions have been entertainment focused and few have attempted to be useful to the consumer.
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Twenty-Four Trend-Setting T-Shirt Shops
The humble t-shirt has become perhaps the most outstanding icon of popular culture. It is more than garb, but rather a vehicle that communicates its wearer's faith, politics, hobbies, and lifestyle.
With so much of a potential customer's social status on the line, online t-shirt retailers have pushed the proverbial envelope in ecommerce website design. In this article, I am going to introduce you to some good examples of niche-specific ecommerce website design.
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SaaS Version of Magento in the Works
Varien confirmed reports that it is working on a hosted, software as a service (SaaS) version of its popular, open source ecommerce platform, Magento.
The possibility of a SaaS version of Magento was first reported on Practical eCommerce (Ecommerce Developer’s sister site) when Rick Wilson, executive vice president for Magento-competitor Miva Merchant, mentioned having a conversation about the SaaS business model with Varien CEO Roy Rubin.
