Steve Mills

Yep that’s right… the iphone has been announced in San Fran and will be swiftly out in the UK from o2 in less than 2 weeks!

Its called the 3GS with the “S” for speed as under the bonnet hardware improvements speed up common tasks such as rendering graphics.

The 3GS also has better battery life. Apple said it should run for five hours of talk time and nine hours of wi-fi net browsing between charges. Not only does it have the expected video camera but its a decent 30fps and comes with on-the-fly editing that looks pretty cool here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/

Camer Specs:
- 3 megapixels
- Autofocus
- Tap to focus
- Video recording, VGA up to 30 fps with audio
- Photo and video geotagging
- iPhone and third-party application integration

As expected there’s a 32gb version although it starts at a painful £274 on a £35 18 month tariff.

More from o2 - http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/newiphone.html
o2 tariff - http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/paymonth.html

About 1 year ago one of my sites - www.netcurtainsdirect.com - disappeared from the Yahoo! index.  It had been number one on every major keyword - net curtains, cafe curtains, jardinaires, for over 4 years, then all of a sudden, nothing.  What ensued was numerous emails, a few re-inclusion requests, a fair bit of money thrown at Overture and finally, a full site re-design.

With every email I sent I got the same reply to look at the there listing guidelines. The only count they could have even marginally had me on was keyword overuse. My main keyword, baring in mind it is in the company name, was used about 6-7 times on the front page. However, it was that, which got it up the top in Google!

But now, alas, its up there on both! I dropped all the tables for layout, used full use of my h1, h2′’s, relative positioning and all the rest and by jove it worked!

Bottom line being, there is no quick and easy way to get out of Yahoo’’s black list, I tried everything I could before re-designing, but now I am so much happier, the site is much better and much more suited to the ever growing size of the company. It was just the excuse I needed. If only I was thinking that during my months of disspair!

When you are faced with the momentous task of redesigning an e-commerce site you need to do one hell of a lot of planning. It’’s no different to someone choosing a new sign for the bricks and motor shop, buying the display stands, laying it all out, choosing where to stick the counter etc etc… There is SO MUCH to it.

Personally I think you need to do 2 things.

1. Prioritisation - what does your site need to do. Emphasis on design / usability / accessibility  - a mixture of all?
2. Plan. Plan everything. You wouldn”t walk in a scrappy and buy loads of car bits and just start piecing them together, hoping it will work out and you”ll be driving down the pub for the weekend.

Prioritisation

OK so that sounds pretty obvious? It kind of is I read this story on the BBC today. 97% of sites are no accessible. Take that with a pinch of  the proverbial as it is so so hard to get a site 100% accessible, especially if you strive for any form of style and design. But that is exactly. why you need to prioritise it. Is it essential to your site? if you run a roller-coaster website - it might not be, fine,  build the site as you would, doing all the standard measures - I would say they are:

• - Good use of ALT text
• - Relative sizing on positions and text
• - Do not use images unless you have to
• - Keep the colour contrast high

There’’s a few basic rules everyone designing a site in this day and age should follow.

However if you are designing a site where your emphasis is more on accessibility then say, the look and feel then make that your goal. Add the table descriptions, don”t use any unnecessary javascript, don”t use pop-ups and everything else that the W3C state.

When it comes to Usability I think the guru that is Jakob Nielsen is the one to follow. The best points I have taken from his books -

1. Observe users using your website. stand behind them and record everything - where their mouses hovers, their amount of hesitation, what do they buy, what route do they take etc etc… It is SO MUCH better to observe then it is to do retrospective questionnaires where the quality of the information will be so much poorer.
2. Study other site. Look at the big boys in your industry. If you have an e-commerce site, look at amazon, B&Q, Play and my favourite John Lewis. See what they do well, and see why they have done it. Obviously all of these sites can improve. Why the hell you cannot see any details of your shopping basket at Amazon while you browse I do not know. Their cart abandonment rates must be sky high. People will forget what they have added and simply browse away. They will feel no pull or relationship with the site.

I think I”m starting to overlap in to planning.

One thing I like to do, maybe I”m a bit old school, but print out your designs, your current site, competitor sites and your favourite e-commerce sites. Then get the red pen out and see what they are each doing well and doing wrong. Circle where key parts of the websites are. Where is the search box, where is your basket displayed, where are the offer banners?

Get a strong indication of your layout. Seriously consider your white space. Even the space on your left and right columns when people scroll to the bottom of a page. If you want people to scroll down that far, as you have so much info; make the use of the space. If people are reading down that far because they are looking at product reviews, they must still be unsure of whether they want to purchase or not. Why not add some testimonials of your site, info on your security, details of how large and established your business is, or remind them of your free postage offers.

There is so much to it all. This post is long enough, especially for the first one on the blog! I”ll give you guys a break and add more, much more on the above subjects shortly.