The most read posts of July featured email marketing, graphic design, and site interactivity.
At the end of each month, we share with you the ten most read posts published during the month. These posts were our top performers for a reason. If you read and liked these during the month, please leave a comment to let us know why you liked them. If you missed these during the month, here is your chance to catch up.
No. 1: Twenty Email Marketing Examples for Design Inspiration
Email marketing is one of the most effective tools in the ecommerce marketing toolbox. But in many ways—thanks to less-than-stellar rendering—designing for mail clients can be harder than designing for browsers.
This extremely popular post provided excellent examples to inspire your designs.
No. 2: Well-Designed and Colorful Background Images
Background designs can change the feel of an entire site. Whether you want it dark and trendy or light and happy, a well-designed background can get the job done. In this popular post, Photoshop Jedi Drew Coffin demonstrated how to make a colorful background design in Adobe Photoshop CS4.
No. 3: Develop a Scrolling 'Merchandiser' Like Gardener's Supply Company
Multi-channel merchant Gardener's Supply Company uses an Adobe-Flash-based scrolling ticker to merchandise to site visitors. In this post, you'll see how to build a similar ticker using JavaScript.
No. 4: Build A Flash-Powered Content Slider from Scratch, Part 1
Content sliders are an extremely popular feature in modern website design, particularly for online retailers. These sliders are often implemented with JavaScript, but there are many cases when an Adobe Flash-based content slider may offer more flexibility or a more polished finished project.
In this video tutorial, which some believe may be the best ever on Ecommerce Developer, Jonah Were gets you started developing a Flash-based content slider that will handle everything from text to SWF files.
No. 5: Meet ‘960 Grid System,’ a CSS Tool that Speeds Development
Nathan Smith's 960 Grid System is a CSS framework created to speed website design and make seemingly complex layouts simple.
The framework creates a 960-pixel-wide layout that may have 12, 16, or 24 columns, wherein each column has a specific width and a specific left and right margin. By specifying grid-related classes, a web designer can position elements easily and create a balanced, visually pleasing design.
This post and video will give you a quick introduction to 960.
No. 6: Sliding and Gliding Page Content with JavaScript
Repositioning page content is, perhaps, one of the most common challenges a front-end web developer faces. JavaScript—in conjunction with HTML and CSS—offers a number of possible solutions.
In this article, readers get a step-by-step explanation of one of the ways to slide and glide page content using JavaScript. This coding example can be applied to create effects similar to the ones seen on Roxy, HobbyTown USA; or Family Christian Stores, to name a few examples.
No. 7: Twelve Hours of Ruby on Rails Video
Ruby on Rails is the popular server-side development platform powering well-known applications like Shopify, Twitter, and even Ecommerce Developer. Increasingly, it is the language and structure that developers are turning to get projects up and running quickly.
In this article, you'll find 12 hours of introductory Ruby on Rails (RoR) video, aimed learning the basics about the platform.
No. 8: Product 'Quick Views' Become Popular, Have Development Implications
If you turned back the ecommerce clock a few years, you'd find that most retail sites had very clear paths from the home page or a landing page to a product detail page. This path was created to help shoppers step easily through the site's content to the products that interested them.
While these clear paths are good for many reasons, unfortunately the landing-page-to-category-page-to-product-detail-page-to-shopping-cart model rarely works in a real shopping experience. Rather, a shopper might arrive at a landing page; go to the home page; go to a category page; and then move back and forth from a category page to several different product detail pages before making a buying decision.
With this more realistic shopping pattern in mind, many leading ecommerce sites are implementing "Quick Views" that allow shoppers to get more information about a product from either a landing page or a category page. This approach means that shoppers will land on fewer product detail pages, but it does strive for a better shopping experience and may expose potential customers to more of a merchant's inventory.
No. 9: An Introduction to HTML5 Geolocation
In addition to adding new and powerful tags, HTML5 also includes an extended JavaScript API. This new API allows developers to implement advanced features without additional plug-ins or requiring software downloads.
Included in HTML5's JavaScript APIs (or as a separate draft, depending on who you ask) is the ability to capture, with permission, the user's approximate coordinates in longitude and latitude. While this interface is not perfect (it may point to a user's Internet service provider on occasion), it can provide very useful information. For example, if a shopper visits a multi-channel merchant's website and looks for physical store locations, the site could check the user's geolocation and organize the list of locations by distance from the shopper's current position. The site could also plot the shopper's position on a map relative to the position of a store.
In mobile applications, geolocation in conjunction with Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps could provide a shopper with turn-by-turn directions to a retailer's store.
No. 10: Use Images, Shading to Add Visual Depth
In a fast growing trend, web designers are making clever use of images to add depth and interest to the two-dimensional web.
As a media form, the Internet is something of a paradox. It is at once a broadcast (YouTube, podcasting) and print media. It offers stunning interactivity and static text. It can be full of color or devoid of it. With such pliability, a web designer can have a significant impact with a few subtle techniques. One such example is a trend toward adding depth with a simple, but well planned background image.
