The first quarter of 2010 is coming to a close and some important trends in ecommerce development are emerging. You can follow those trends by reading the articles and watching the videos right here.
What's more, when you visit one of our articles, you are—in a way—casting a vote for the top ten posts of each month.
This monthEcommerce Developer's visitors have focused a lot of attention on articles related to the popular Magento ecommerce platform. In fact so much of our traffic was aimed at Magento-related posts that we worried the results could be related to how frequently we covered the topic rather than the quality of our videos and articles. Please let us know what you think in the comments below.
Mobile development was also a popular topic for the month.
Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish, Part Ten: The Home Page Home Stretch
This Magento theme series continues to be popular with our readers. Please let us know what you think of the series in the comments at the end of this post.
Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish, Part Nine: A Content Slider
Part nine of the Magento theme series added a content slider to the theme home page. This slider was based on the Prototype JavaScript Library. Content sliders are extremely popular in 2010, so don't be surprised if you see more posts that mention them.
Magento Prepares for Growth, SaaS?
Magento announced $22.5 million in new investment, modified its corporate structure, and continued to push toward a software-as-a-service offering.
Expressive and Well Done "About Us" Pages
It almost goes without saying that shoppers prefer to buy from stores they like.
As ecommerce designers and developers, our success is tied directly to our clients' success. If we can help a client's online business grow, we can grow our own businesses. So don't overlook rapport building. Think about how you can design relationship-building content and layout into your projects.
Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish, Part Eight: The Boring Middle
Surprisingly, a post that includes, "The Boring Middle" made its way into the top ten. Either it wasn't so boring after all, or folks click just to learn how boring it was.
Professional-Looking Product Images
Increasingly web developers and designers are also becoming general site consultants, so know-how in related areas can be a huge boost. Maybe that's why Drew Coffin's excellent tutorial about product images was so popular this month.
The box created in the latter part of the video is excellent.
Beautiful and Functional Demandware Sites
Demandware is one of the industry's premium ecommerce platforms.
The service gives large merchants control over site branding and merchandising while removing most of the technical worries associated with operating a large-scale site.
I have been very impressed lately by what I've seen on several Demandware-powered ecommerce sites, and I wanted to share those sites with you.
Mobile Phone Simulators Test Designs, Applications
This post was nothing more than a quick list of mobile phone simulators, but apparently it was a list you needed.
Invigorating Red Designs
Red is a powerful color, particularly for establishing a brand—just ask Coke, McDonalds, and Marlboro. This post offered several examples of online retailers that used red well.
Mobile-site Development: Best Practices for SEO, Usability
This post was an interview with Stephan Spencer, an SEO expert and the vice president of search strategies for Covario, an SEO consulting firm.
Director's Cut
While our readers are always right, or something like that, there were five posts that did not make the top ten list that I thought deserved an honorable mention.
Some of these posts came out later in the month, others, perhaps, did not get the promotion they deserved. Regardless, please take a moment to check out these five posts.
New Flash Content Switcher Spices Up Site Design
This was my favorite post of the month. The CU3ER content switcher (slider) is a tool that I will be using in several of my upcoming projects. It is just that good. I wonder if calling it a "content switcher" rather than a "content slider" was one reason, it did not get the attention it deserved.
Augmented Reality Using FLARManager and Papervision
In this video tutorial, Jonah Werre is giving away the secret to the universe. Well, not really, but he is demonstrating how you can create augmented reality effects. Imagine you're developing a t-shirt store, you want to create an app that allows site visitors to virtually "try on" tees using their web cameras. This is the tutorial you would start with.
Audio Interview: Chris Drake, FireHost CEO
Our ongoing podcast interview series has brought you, our listener/reader, some of the leading minds in web development-related topics. In March, one of those interviews was with Chris Drake, the CEO and founder of FireHost, a prominent hosting firm.
If you're developing for ecommerce and if you care about PCI compliance, you need to listen to this podcast.
Batch Processing in Adobe Photoshop CS4, Part One
Adobe's Photoshop is just one of those tools that you need to be able to use, and use well. This tutorial on batch processing was one of the most-useful Photoshop lessons I've seen.
“Video for Everybody” Gracefully Degrades
The iPhone doesn't run Adobe Flash. RSS readers cannot interpret JavaScript. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) does not understand a simple HTML5
Video on the Internet has reached a crossroads. There are several techniques for embedding video, none of which work on every platform or with every browser. Perhaps, the best overall solution is to use simple markup—HTML5—with the unencumbered Ogg open-standard container format. But at present that optimal solution only works in Firefox and Google's Chrome, and it may well be that other video-embedding techniques win the day.
