Design & Inspiration
Ten Inviting Shopping Cart Icons & Treatments
Most online shoppers navigate to product detail pages, add items to their cart, and then keep shopping. When those consumers don't return to the shopping cart, rather abandoning it in the virtual aisles of an online store, no sale is made. While...
Audio Interview: Devver Co-Founder Ben Brinckerhoff
Code metrics help web developers maintain large codes bases, minimize errors, and avoid code duplication. While powerful code metrics tools exist f...
Forty-Three Attractive osCommerce Sites
By some estimates there are more than 12,000 active web stores running the osCommerce open source platform, making it one of the most popular shopping carts. Developers are often drawn to osCommerce for client and company projects because of its ...
Eight Examples of Compelling Navigation on Ecommerce Sites
Often online stores must balance trying to provide customers with a unique shopping experience against site navigation that is easy to understand and use. On the one hand, site navigation should never baffle visitors. A shopper should be able to ...
Tips for a Successful Freelance Development Cycle
Whether you are a freelance developer working solo or in a group, a predetermined development cycle will help you keep costs down and stay focused on the job. In this article, I will provide a straightforward way of managing a project from begin...
Do Sporty Web Stores Fall Short?
Sports excite emotions. Fans dye their hair, paint their faces, and don jerseys for their favorite teams and athletes. So the stores that sell team apparel and memorabilia should convey the spirit of the merchandise, representing some of that emot...
Seven Examples of Sites Using Map APIs
The need for integrating map APIs like Google Maps API into your projects has never been greater. Internet users have become comfortable with using online maps, and some users even allow websites and applications to track their positions via mobil...
Sixty-One Inspiring Apparel Websites
Selling clothing online is a challenge. Customers cannot try on items as they would in a brick-and-mortar store. To overcome these challenges, online apparel retailers use good merchandising, branding, photography, and, perhaps, even augmented rea...
Audio Interview: Futurescale Chief Architect Cliff Hall
Complexity and chaos do not have to go hand in hand. And certainly there’s no greater need for organization than in a complex environment. Ente...
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. With this in mind, I have collected 27 examples of nice looking ecommerce websites bui...
Coding for Tax Calculations: Everything You Never Wanted to Know – Part 2
Editor's Note: This is part two of our two-part series explaining the complexities of coding for taxes arising from ecommerce sales. The author is David Brokenshire, a programmer with Elastic Path, an ecommerce platform for enterprise-level mercha...
Coding for Tax Calculations: Everything You Never Wanted to Know – Part 1
Calculating sales-related taxes is complicated enough for a single retail store in one location, let alone when you have multiple customers and locations worldwide, as is the case with ecommerce sites. Every jurisdiction has its own rules and you ...
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 ...
Book Review: “Designing Social Interfaces” Helps Encourage User Interaction
Creating an engaging user interface—one that encourages site visitors to interact—is at the core of Internet and ecommerce success. Applied correctly, there are known best practices and principles that generally foster online interaction and conne...
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...
Award Winning Retail Site Design 2009
Each year the Web Marketing Association's WebAward Competition calls out some of the best examples of website development, design, and marketing. And while this award, like other similar honors, is subjective, it offers a good source of inspiratio...
SEO and Flash: Recommendations for Designers
There's a conundrum in the design world. The web designer, passionate about aesthetics and functionality, has embraced many tools and platforms for developing engaging content on the web. Adobe Flash and the applications created with it are among ...
Eighty Six Examples of Content Sliders on Ecommerce Sites
Content sliders were one of the hottest trends in website design in 2009, and some designers used them in creative ways. In this article, I link to 86 examples of how ecommerce-focused websites are using content sliders to promote products, save ...