So why the change?

Well, I was never really happy with the break in design a user experienced when they clicked through from EdenWeb.ie to the blog. By having the new blog integrated directly into our new site, we can better maintain graphic, navigation and branding consistency. It’s something I’ve always thought was important but never really got round to doing until we rebuilt EdenWeb.ie with a CMS in the background and I saw how relatively it was to turn one of the sections into a working blog.

I know some of you in the industry will ask why we didn’t just reskin the original WordPress install. Well, the anwser is simple. Basically our new site is running a CMS in the background. I’ve always think it’s much easier to turn a Content Management System into a blogging tool than it is to hack a WordPress blog and turn it into a working website.

Of course, there’s no point in having a blog if you’re not going to update it. With the new blog and site online and acting as a whole, we’ll be updating the new blog and site a lot more.

Thanks for reading!

Sitepoint book offer

And if you are based in Europe and thinking of buying 5 SitePoint books then consider purchasing another 5 for someone else. The EUR to AUD exchange rate is so good at the moment that it’s practically 2 AUD to every EUR anyway. My mistake – the price is US Dollars, not Austrlian Dollars

Among my favourite enhancements were three that I felt stongly were missing from the original site and vital for Aer Arann

• RouteMap Quick View so you can quickly see where Aer Arann fly to without leaving the homepage
  (this may not be live on the current site as we explore some new banner sizes)
• A ‘Why Fly Aer Arann’ panel to highlight Aer Arann’s unique selling points and their fantastic customer service
• Reduction overall of ‘noise’ and a layout based on a cleaner grid system
• Larger ‘featured routes’ banner to highlight sales, new destinations and similar Aer Arann offers

In total, we explored about 6 concepts, whittled them down to three of the strongest and then settled on our favourite which was then designed and developed further in May 2008.

We also redesigned the Aer Arann booking engine and imporved the user interface with a new simple 3 step online booking process (reduced from 6 steps). More on both of these later but in the meantime, best of luck to Aer Arann and  all the shortlisted companies in a very competitive category and industry.

UPS arrived about 2 minutes ago. I have brand new copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Master Collection) sitting in front of me waiting to be installed. I can’t wait to start playing with this. Here’s a list of the included software in the Master Collection.

• Adobe InDesign® CS3
• Adobe Photoshop® CS3 Extended
• Adobe Illustrator® CS3
• Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
• Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional
• Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3
• Adobe Fireworks® CS3
• Adobe Contribute®
• Adobe After Effects® CS3 Professional
• Adobe Premiere® Pro CS3
• Adobe Soundboothâ„¢ CS3
• Adobe Encore® CS3
• Plus Adobe OnLocationâ„¢ CS3 (Windows® only) and Adobe Ultra® CS3 (Windows only)

If you work in a shared office I’m sure at some stage you’ve come to a website where the music or narration started playing automatically and never gave you a choice?

If HP have put this level of thought into my online experience then I’m interested
in exploring their actual physical MediaSmart Server. Poor usability and design is the bain of my tech life so here’s a few free links for making such a thoughtful gesture.

HP MediaSmart Server
Use it to back up your files, remotely access your PC, share and stream digital media

Thanks!

Peter

Custom illustrations are a great way to bring something unique to your web site and can really enhance content heavy websites.

I’ll upload the other illustrations later in the week and possibly a screen grab of the new website which is being designed by EdenWeb. The other illustrations in the series are for

• Coastal
• Wetlands & river corridors
• Gardens
• Woodlands, trees & hedgerows
• and Grasslands habitats.

Contact me directly for more information. All work is copyright EdenWeb>Peter Knight.

1. Do a search for the item and choose 6 sites from the hundreds available. All 6 are from the first search results page.
2. I have a quick browse through each site and choose the 3 sites that are actually usable, well designed, have relevant information and appear trustworthy.
   Side note: I don’t consciously ‘choose’ these – the sites are just effortless to use and a natural choice.
3. I drop a site because they don’t have my item in stock.
4. I drop another site because because the ‘view larger image’ opens a pop-up window that is the same size as the thumbnail (how annoying is that!)
5. I do an ‘add to basket’ on the final site and fill out my details.
6. The ‘Add your details’ is insisting on some information I just can’t give (details below) and because it’s a ‘mandatory field’ the cart is refusing my order.
7. I leave the site and give up.

In fact, I’d say about 25% of all my online purchases fail because the form fields on eCommerce sites are badly configured, broken or have shopping cart systems thats just plain confusing. And I work in the field as a Web Designer so I’m comfortable with eCommerce and having to ‘work around’ usability flaws.

And it’s not just “Sheila’s flower shop” or your local DVD store with the tiny web presence and some technically brilliant but unusable e-Cart software that is losing them customers at the last step of a purchase. Larger companies that spend massive amounts of money on R&D, Compliance, Strategy and User Experience can get it wrong too and here’s a nice example of that in action.

I’ve seen a product that I want to buy and the site is integrated with Google’s new Checkout shopping cart.

I add my details to the payment form. Name, email, phone and country are all fine.

The postal code field (high lighted above in red) is mandatory and insists that I add it here. My address (and most addresses in Ireland outside of Dublin city) doesn’t have a postal code so I usually add ‘NA’ or ‘NONE’ when shopping online to circumvent this. That won’t work here because not only is the postal code required but the web site thinks that a postal code is a certain amount of letters or numbers long and is trying to shoe horn my details through their mandatory fields.

Thinking that the tiny question mark icon beside the Postal Code field will tell me how to get round this issue and allow me to order my product, I click on it. This opens a new window at the An Post web site.

It looks promising and someone is thinking in the right direction but this site just helps me locate my local post office. It doesn’t help me find my postcode and even if I had one, it doesn’t help me find it. I eventually go back to the check out page and try a few more hacks and give up. I was only shopping for a Letterbox but now I think I’ll just drive into town and buy one in a real shop.

So in closing, I understand that certain fields are consistent and can be made mandatory across most sites on the web.
For example

• All credit cards are 16 digits long and have an expiry date
• All credit cards have a 6 digit Card Verification Value on the back
• All credit cards have a name or company name and associated address

but other details which we take for granted or assume are global often just don’t translate to a one-size-fits-all format. Worse still, some details are driven by user preferences. IE an email address may not match my company domain name because I don’t want to be spammed at work.

So, when it comes to mandatory form field Vs user preference or regional fromatting, the retailer will loose but the consumer won’t win either. The biggest wastage for both in the example above is that it took me hours of searching for this product and dismissing several other sites to get to that particular website. With the average website losing 9 out of every 10 customers, its a real pity that the final site fell at the last hurdle.

Incidentally, doing a quick Google on the whole mandatory fields issue has brought me to this post from Tom Raftery who is having similar postcode trouble with Yahoo.

If you can’t see a product box below then you will know I still haven’t gotten to grips with this yet!

From A List Apart…

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession.

Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

The first ever Web Design survey is almost closed over at A List Apart. If you design, develop, architect, write, break or build websites, please head over and complete the Web Design survey 2007. Over 30,000 people already have.

It’s not without it’s problems as obviated by some of the comments on his blog, but this is the start of a better Captcha solution and Nicolas has done a great job. Some of those CAPTCHAs are not even readable by humans!

By the way – you probably encounter CAPTCHAs all the time and just didn’t know what they were called. Visit Wikipedia for more.