my name is ryan coughlin

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!

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!