February 2010 was a short month—just 28 days—but there was still plenty of great content here on Ecommerce Developer. We covered everything from Facebook's HipHop announcement to Magento theme development and more.
Based on the number of page views each article received, these were the ten most popular posts that we published in February.
Ruby on Rails: Code Metrics Identify Weaknesses, Strengthen Code
This contributed article from Devver co-founder Ben Brinckerhoff described using code metrics to improve the quality of your code.
"Using Ruby on Rails, programmers can quickly and easily build complex sites in very little time. As a result, Rails is an ideal framework for quickly iterating on new ideas, especially with a small, focused team."
Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish, Part Six: Product Navigation and CSS Rounded Corners
This Magento theme-series has been very popular. Part six focused on using CSS to create rounded corners for a Magento theme's main product navigation.
Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish, Part Five: The Home Page CSS Continues
"An ecommerce site's home page is the central hub of activity. Even if a shopper arrives at a store from a search engine on a category page or a product-detail page, that shopper will almost certainly visit the home page at least once. So it's important that the home page offers options and is aesthetically pleasing."
In this episode of the ongoing Magento theme series, the focus was on home page style.
A Web Developer's SEO Checklist
"Not only is the code of a website the most controllable aspect of search engine optimization (SEO), code-side optimization also makes up the majority of SEO-related tasks. From site architecture to semantic page structure to the handling of dynamic content, much of what a developer does can and should be optimized for the highest possible search engine rankings, traffic and conversions.
"With that in mind, here is a helpful checklist of SEO best practices to consider while developing or managing a website."
Twenty-Six Exemplary PrestaShop Sites
This showcase article provides good examples of live online stores built using the PrestaShop ecommerce platform.
Better Icons for Better Communications
"Graphics can be crucial when communicating information to customers. This is the goal of icon design, attempting to put a face with the name and make it easier and more enjoyable for visitors to navigate your site."
Is the Olympic Store Worthy of Gold?
"With so much interest and so many potential customers the Olympic store must be robust and attractive, stable and engaging, so that technically it can handle thousands of orders per hour, while looking good. If done well, the Olympic store, will be a shiny Gold Medal for its designers and its platform, Elastic Path."
SEO-Friendly URLs in CodeIgniter
"We can have URLs like www.mywebsite.tld/catalog/product/3215. However these URLs don't help us very much with search engine optimization (SEO). So we will probably want something like www.mywebsite.tld/catalog/product/best-laptop/3215 or even www.mywebsite.tld/best-laptop/Toshiba-3215."
Book Give-a-way: Effective UI
Giving something away is a great way to boost traffic. It is little wonder that this post was popular.
Ten Bookish Site Designs
"Books are, after all, a nearly perfect long tail item. A local bookstore can certainly have the latest releases in stock, but there will always be hard-to-find texts or specialty genres that are beyond the scope of a local brick-and-mortar bookshop."
