Inspirational showcase articles dominate our list of the top ten most read Ecommerce Developer articles in August 2010.
At the top of the list is a post about the Big Commerce ecommerce platform. In the post, we see some inspiration examples of the platform in use, but there is also a discussion of how the company's marketers used quotes from several leading publications.
Magento posts were also popular in August, with all three of the Magento theme episodes published during the month making this list. Although the "Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish" series has ended, there will still be plenty of tutorials published about this popular open source platform.
Without further ado, here are the most read posts of the month.
An Eye on Big Commerce
In this showcase article, readers found a list of well designed ecommerce sites built on the Big Commerce platform, along with an exploration of how Big Commerce uses quotes on its home page.
The Mighty Price-and-Feature Comparison Table
Product or service comparison tables are powerful tools for up-selling customers and explaining features, so web developers and designers should pay special attention to these mighty merchandising elements.
Remember, ecommerce includes many types of products and categories. For example, sites that sell software, sell pre-paid movie tickets, or sell vacation packages to the Caribbean are all conducting ecommerce in one form or another. And these companies may well need to communicate the differences between various software versions or different vacation packages to shoppers in a concise way.
Eleven OpenCart Stores
OpenCart is a free and surprisingly robust PHP-based, open-source ecommerce platform aimed at being both feature rich and user friendly.
The platform's administration panel is very functional, even reminiscent of some of the enterprise-class ecommerce platforms I have seen.
In fact, freelance or agency-based web developers might consider adding OpenCart to their cadre of solutions, since it could be a great fit for some clients.
Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish, Part 24: The Final Episode
The Pine Theme will be complete with a few more changes to the checkout pages.
For the past few months, I have been describing the process of building a Magento theme. With just a few more changes to the checkout pages that theme will be complete.
ProStores that Look Professional
Often when we look for inspiration, we also find opportunity. That is what happened to when we looked at several designs for eBay's ProStores ecommerce solution, only to discover that the company has a certified designers' program, and in my opinion, a real need for more and better web designers.
Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish, Part 22: Account Pages
When we think of online stores, we natural think first of the home page, product category page, and product detail pages. But every site also has lots of auxiliary pages for things like customer accounts. In this episode, we begin styling some of my Magento theme's account pages.
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. What's more, careful email design and development is in relatively high demand, with some freelance developers charging more than $1,000 per HTML email design.
A Better Comparison Table
The modern website designer or developer uses many resources to complete a project. How and when those resources—whether coding languages, graphics, or frameworks—are employed often determines how well and how quickly a project comes together. In this tutorial, you will see a demonstration of how to quickly create a "better" feature comparison table using HTML and CSS. Along the way, I am going to share four of the resources that I use regularly. By the end of this post, you should have seen some expeditious coding plus a few tips you can use in your own work.
Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish, Part 23: User Account and Checkout Styles
This episode of the Magento series demonstrated how to make changes to the checkout page's style.
Working with Google's New Font API
Google now offers a Font API that allows developers to include a limited number of @font-face-rule embedded fonts from Google's content delivery network in their projects. The CSS @font-face rule allows a web designer or developer to embed fonts directly into a web page and, in this way, use any font for which a license is available. This technique usually has the developer include the font source files on the same web server that hosts the site using the fonts.
Google's Font API, which is decidedly simple as APIs go, allows a limited number of fonts to be delivered from Google's servers and establishes a font-loading JavaScript that makes it possible to initiate functions at various stages of the font's loading process.
