March 25th, 2010
About two months ago I started a design for Commerce Generation’s Virtual Gift Card System. This is a turn key solution, where an online retailer is able to implement in to their current solution. This system is fully hosted on their servers and is easy to implement, which makes this a plus to online retailers. I started sketching some designs and used MetaLab as design inspiration. I took that crisp/sharp UI style boxes for the layout and buttons. The end result looks very nice and clean. It is shocking to see just how much a design can change from the Photoshop mock up even after its coded. Comparing the two are very interesting.
Check out what it looks like as of now:
I have been running the AdWord campaign for this and so far so good. Looking at great click through rates and keyword placement, now we just need the conversions! The original version of the site opened up in all lightboxes, which at first I thought was good for displaying content, then at the same time it can lack in SEO. Google would only see this as one HTML page. Today at work, I tweaked the layout to fit the content in to a expandable container. Now each lightbox is its own page. With this change, we should see some change in analytics data once it populates.
Now that this site is complete, I am going to start up some designs for a Commerce Server micro site. It will be a similar concept of the virtual gift card site. The Commerce Server micro site will cover information on components that Commerce Generation has built. Online retailers can use custom components developed by Commerce Generation on their e commerce store. Ill be sure to post designs as I go in to this new project.
Working on some other write ups, trying to make a big effort in publishing more posts, but senior year coupled with work in my free time is crippling!
Posted in Commerce Generation, Recent Work | No Comments »
January 27th, 2010
The past week I have been on several blog layouts for the Commerce Generation. We are currently working on launching the new website (which is much needed). Along with the new website is a company blog, as well as two blogs for the founder and VP. I started to browse other blog layouts and got some ideas of to run with and they also loved a very clean, simple, and big typography. Below are the various layouts that I came up with, these are just Photoshop layouts.
They are currently up right now at their locations, but not 100% complete, they’re almost there! I am going to be using WordPress, makes this quite the easy task. I am going to have to say that I like the Commerce Generation blog layout the best (the last one of out of the three). That one was the first round and got it on the first try, but the others went through a couple of revisions.
Once their all up and live, I will post links to the new blogs as well as the new and improved Commerce Generation website. Take care until then next post!
Posted in Commerce Generation, Recent Work | No Comments »
January 27th, 2010
Since I started working at Commerce Generation last fall, we have been working on a very large project for Pet Food Direct.
We launched the site about a month ago and its looking pretty good so far. I was in charge of slicing a PSD and converting to XHTML. Another site that they own is NationalPetPharmacy.com which is similar to their other site, but sells pet medication.
Its great to see a project that you and many others put time in to and see actual customers utilizing the new site. It was probably the largest site I have completed before working with lots of Javascript and CSS files.
The sites backend that was built at Commerce Generation is running Commerce Server with ASP.NET. Some features include:
- Warehouse integration
- Auto-ship prorgrams
- Account management and much more!
Lots and lots of hours, but worth it once you see your work up and running.
Posted in Recent Work | No Comments »
January 21st, 2010
I have found some free time this weekend to sit down and clean up the blog as well as write up some new posts to keep it going! I have been slacking the past couple of months and have been really busy working at Commerce Generation in Burlington, VT. We recently finished up a large project with the websites going live. Along with that news, there are other coding tips and much more. Expect lots coming up.
Ryan
Posted in Ranting | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009
A friend who started Cat on The Couch Productions, tweeted me an article titled “Browser Version Market Share” and I found this extremely interesting, check out this clip that was taken from the website. Most of you are going to have the same feeling as me when you see what the first result is. This article was published along with the data presented in October, 2009. I am sure there might be other data that says otherwise, but I believe this is very creditable, this resource came originally from the CNET website.
Browser Version Market Share
Find Internet Explorer 6 at the top using 23% – was a huge shock to me. Waiting til it dies out and Firefox, Safari, Chrome and others start to take the market share for browsers. Slowly but surely, that number will dwindle as new computers are coming with Internet Explorer 8 preloaded. As for Web Developers, you all know this still means we will be using CSS fixes to fix double float margin and many other issues that we deal with when testing a website on IE6.
Tags: browers, firefox, ie, safari
Posted in Browsers | 1 Comment »
I have been running the AdWord campaign for this and so far so good. Looking at great click through rates and keyword placement, now we just need the conversions! The original version of the site opened up in all lightboxes, which at first I thought was good for displaying content, then at the same time it can lack in SEO. Google would only see this as one HTML page. Today at work, I tweaked the layout to fit the content in to a expandable container. Now each lightbox is its own page. With this change, we should see some change in analytics data once it populates.
