The best engineering flow chart, ever? You judge.
Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks so, so I’m willing to consider it… however, there is no hammer. A hammer would clinch it. Or, a la Mythbusters, perhaps C4.
Image via Wikipedia
Speaking of Mythbusters… my wife and I sprung for the expensive tickets for this event in Sacramento on January 9th, 2012. Yes, there’s a live roadshow! Maybe I should’ve gotten seats further from the stage?
Over the years I’ve done a few e-commerce things with commercial systems like Miva Merchant and with PayPal carts and the PayPal API… to name a few.
I was asked by a client how best to do a 1200+ SKU e-commerce site, and I suggested Magento… then they said ‘OK, let’s do it’. A couple months later we’re almost ready to go live… with the first 350 or so products.
I’m reminded of a trip to Aruba, when my wife and I, and our friends, said we wanted to rent a ‘Jeep’ (we got a Suzuki Samurai) and drive to the Natural Pools on the far side of the island. The windward side. It’s like Mars over there. They said, “drive down this road then that road then go past the white house onto the dirt road… and then your adventure begins“.
Magento is like that. The destination is awesome, but the markers are hard to find, the routes are multiple, various and nefarious, not much is obvious… but in the end, you get a site that has everything you need to compete with the big dogs… product comparisons by attribute, ratings, surveys, multiple store fronts on a single database, direct support for major payment systems, Google Base, Google XML Sitemaps, etc. and an upgrade path for when you start making millions in sales (I dream big).
Underneath is the PHP framework called “Zend Framework” which is extensible and comprehensible and logically defensible (if you know this stuff) but not for the faint of heart.
But here’s the thing to think about: Are you ready to merchandise your products?
There are a ton of useless e-commerce sites out there that don’t provide useful information, have blurry pictures (more on this later) and don’t really support the buyer’s decision. The reason is that it takes time and effort and expertise to make what is essentially a mini-site all about each product line, manufacturer and category. Companies that open brick-and-mortar store fronts spend hundreds of thousands on signage, window displays, staff training, and store fixtures… then set a budget on their e-commerce site of a few thousand bucks, and virtually no staff-time… If it’s worth doing a window display for your products so passers-by walk in the front door, why is it not appropriate to present products on the web with the same care?
For a small company, there’s another side to the story: The minimal e-commerce site you know you can afford may not pay off, so you don’t invest much. This is understandable, but if you don’t put enough effort in, it’s almost guaranteed not to work. You might try a small number of products where there’s not much e-commerce competition, and put more energy into presenting each product. But do put in the energy to make each product look the best you can and the content about the product as useful as you can, rather than shovel bad images and product id codes without descriptive text onto a cheap or free cart and then call it done. It ain’t likely to work.
For this site, we’re not doing it all at once… we’ll go live with the most important products. We’ll have product descriptions in. We’ll have the best images we can find (legally). But it won’t go live in a perfect state… it will evolve into a (near) perfect state over time. This is the same as a WordPress site… it’s designed to grow and improve over time… and that’s actually a good thing. You want your site in a state of change with new discoveries appearing each week. You want people to shop. To browse, explore, learn, try things on (virtually)… yes: Shop. It’s the national pastime. Play it!
A note about images: Most people now have broadband. Manufacturers that still don’t supply adequate images on their websites for fear of download speed issues (or some other excuse) need to wake up and smell the coffee. Their online, catalog and brick-and-mortar retailers need good photography and those that don’t provide that service are blowing it, big time. Every product should be shot from every angle and web retailers should be given access to the these in sizes sufficient for a print catalog! The bandwidth is there. The browsers aren’t going to squawk. The cost is truly worthwhile. Good images are made with good Photoshop skills. Don’t shoot your products with your cell phone in a dingy yellow light, crop it to 128 pixels square and then JPEG it to death to make it even tinier. Seriously: Half the e-commerce I see is exactly that, and every e-commerce site selling that widget got their photos (mostly exactly the same photo) from the Manufacturer’s website.
I’m always shocked (shocked, I say!) to see a medium to large company that still has a ’90s-era website… Maybe it’s just a lack of understanding about what sells, and why. Maybe it’s an unwillingness to realize that — even though people aren’t going to buy directly on your site — they will buy based on how well you promote your products on other sites, which is largely about imagery, and those images need to come from you, the manufacturer.
I just had to get that out of my system… thanks for listening.
A recent study has been making the rounds, and has now made the New York Times. If you only read the first couple paragraphs, as we are all prone to do, you might get the wrong message:
Trick question: Is it easier to remember a new fact if it appears in normal type, like this, or in big, bold letters, like this?
The answer is neither. Font size has no effect on memory, even though most people assume that bigger is better. But font style does.
New research finds that people retain significantly more material — whether science, history or language — when they study it in a font that is not only unfamiliar but also hard to read.”
Well, keep reading, it’s an interesting study, but don’t apply this logic to your blog. Because people won’t start reading it, or keep reading it, if it’s hard to read; surrounded by distractions, or poorly formatted. The point of the study is that the mental effort that goes into acquiring information is directly related to how much of it is retained. But only material that is required reading can benefit, since voluntary reading is, well, voluntary.
Another study, coincidentally commissioned by the New York Times in the 50’s, showed that line-length, font choice, white space and other factors determined how far their readers worked through an article, as well as how fast, and page designers (who study good design) have been following that advice ever since. It’s worth noting that if no one reads the material at all, it won’t be retained, either. Making people struggle to read your blog simply means it won’t be read. Good design is good practice. Clear, clean formatting is still the best way to get your message across.
Why does this site look the way it does? This started out as a personal blog to experiment with WordPress, now it is dated and technically way below my standard. So, I need to start out with a clean design and a clean message.
Starting a website can be overwhelming. There are so many variables, what-ifs, and strategic decisions to answer about the content. And then there are the questions about the technology. And then there are the questions about presentation, including design, organization, and ongoing development. All this, and by the way, you have to keep up with your regular responsibilities on top of all that planning.
I recommend working with someone who solves these problems every day, and letting them guide you through the process. (Disclaimer: I’m that guy. Hire me. Never mind I haven’t gotten to it myself… that’s a sign I’m in demand and busy!) But if you want to get further before you start that conversation, start with the following questions (Surprise! None are about technology). Most of these are Marketing 101 questions. But most people in business either never took Marketing 101 or have forgotten it. But this is the information you will need to relate to the web designer, so it’s time to polish your answers. The technical term for these questions and their answers is “The Creative Brief”. Start your Creative Brief now:
This animated short film was made by students of the Vancouver Film School. It does a beautiful job explaining biodiversity, and does it with awesome infographics.
Biodiversity – Vancouver Film School from Vancouver Film School on Vimeo.
