Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

Visible.net is a new provider of state-of-the-art ecommerce and online marketing services.

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One thing I’ve explored often is how many web-based applications fail because of a lack of proper planning. One thing that I haven’t stressed enough though, is that proper planning doesn’t always mean spending months on end thinking about every single detail, but actually thinking about things in the right order.

Traditional feature-centric design

Usually developers start planning applications by thinking of everything they want it to do - and let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to get excited: since you’re getting some functionality in, you might as well do all the other hundred cool things too, right? Well, wrong. Getting excited is great, but it may just as well hinder the application development process. Focus slips, pretty soon you’re trying to solve all the world’s problems. You may have heard of scope creep - this is just the same, but it’s your fault, and is definitely avoidable.

Top-down product design

The solution is actually quite easy although it may seem odd if you haven’t done it before: design interface first, then underlying code. Result: no functional slippery slope - you know exactly what you need to build to accommodate the UI functionality. As a side benefit, you get to have something you can experiment with as a prototype sooner, which means you can get more input sooner and iterate over it. Give it a try on your next project - your developers will love knowing exactly what they need to build, and your designers will love not having to design that new page for the brand new functionality that just crossed your mind.

Podtech's LunchMeet vidcast has done an interview with Kris Tate and Thomas Hawk of Flickr rival Zooomr. Zooomr has a lot of nice features, but one thing that stood out in the demo was the use of popup icons that appear when you hover over the photo. As you hover, they show up in the corner, and allow you to do things like open the photo up as a lightbox or toggle its "Fave" status (i.e. declare it as one your favorite pics). The neat thing about this popup mechanism is that it's pretty consistent across the site...whether you're looking at thumbnails or a detailed view of the pic, you get that consistent set of icons. This means you can mark a pic as your favorite without having to open it up first. In the ongoing effort to build a rich collection of tags, it's also conceivable that users could tag the photo with a similar popup mechanism. From an eye candy perspective, the Ajax-powered (or DHTML if you like) portal feature is pretty sweet too. Like Flickr's popup notes, the pic shows a box outline. With portals though, what you see when you hover over it is a new inset photo and you can actually scroll around the second photo while looking at the portal photo. And of course, clicking on the inset photo opens it up. Hard to explain, but easy to understand if you try it out. Watch Lunchmeet's Eddy and Irene talk to Zooomr's Kris (founder/CTO) and Thomas (CEO) ...

Mkemne:) is a basic German "finance 2.0" website aiming for an easy interface for users to assess the state of the market. It presents company info and you get to add your favorite companies to a persistent watchlist. It was developed by Nader Cserny of Brand Infection, who was also responsible for the UI design of several Ajax sites we have previously featured here - Blummy, BandNews, WizLite, all sites developed by Alexander Kirk. (I've recently worked with Nader.) Like a lot of Ajax/Web2.0 sites these days, it uses Lazy Registration - or what Mike Arrington recently termed "Auto-Login via a browser cookie" - to build the watchlist without requiring a formal signup process. Interestingly, Nader calls it "extremely lazy registration" because there is no sign up at all, ever. And for basic personalization like a watchlist, there's a good argument that cookies are all you need.

mkemne:) is a user-friendly stockmarket portal, currently available for the German market. ... I am interested in the stockmarket since the age of 14 and until today I am horified by the existing services. Google Finance being a welcome exception. With mkemne:) I wanted to create a portal that enables everybody to access market data in a fast and easy way. Features:

• Reduction to the max. No 1000 links, banners, colors, etc.
• Keep a watchlist of your stocks. Add and remove them with a simple click
• Quickly catch the Winners/Losers of the day. A click saves your preferred indexes for the next time you visit the front page.
• Very Lazy-Registration. Actually there is no registration :)
• Read News about the stocks you keep in your watchlist, subscribe to your personalised RSS-Feed

Technology:

• LAMP, cURL, cron
• moo.fx + moo.ajax
• ezSQL
• Snoopy
• magpieRSS
• FeedCreator
• PHP/SWF Charts

It's the time of year to be posting random predictions for 2007. Here are 2007 Ajax predictions from Dion and myself, please post your own in the comments. Dion predicts:

• Ajax beats AJAX in all but bad newspapers.
• Someone tries to coin Ajax 2.0.
• A large amount of apps have flash AND ajax, and users don't know or care.
• Many frameworks consilidate or die.
• A widget api means componts can run on many frameworks using one api.
• Ajax wpf/e interop.
• Dashboards become front boards.
• More desktop apps get written with javascript.

Michael predicts:

• 2005 was the year that developers learned all about Ajax and by 2006 everyone else in the industry had caught up. In 2007, is is mainstream users who become acutely aware of the trend towards rich applications inside the browser, and discover that even word-processors and spreadsheets - along with a wide array of workplace applications - can be webified. At the same time, users remain oblivious - and rightly so - to the underlying technologies that power them.
• The boundaries of Ajax harden, with most developers gaining a clear understanding of what it can and can't do with modern browsers and managers in a better position to decide on application architecture (whether to use Ajax, Flash, desktop, etc.).
• More attention on Ajax accessibility due to some government report or court case.
• Google Office. Finally!
• Backlash against Google Office as managers learn that their data must be hosted externally in order to use it. Pressure from bloggers and some analysts to make an Office appliance that can live behind the firewall, but it's not happening in 2007.
• The advertising and media communities finally become aware that page view metrics are no longer the only way, but generally treat it as a problem and fail to see that the situation is actually better than before.
• Several fringe technologies heat up as developers notice they are already being used in some applications and learn how to apply them: HTTP Streaming (Comet), Virtual Workspace (Live Scrolling - never-ending scrollbars), Cross-Domain JSON (along with JSONP, JSON APIs, JSONRequest, and a general lack of awareness about the JSON security issues), Unique URLs (bookmarkability/back button), Lazy Registration (personalized functionality before formal signup). Comet in particular ... it may be 8 or 9 years old, but it's big news in 2007.
• Other fringe technologies grow, but remain, well, fringe. Such as Host-Proof Hosting and applications involving offline storage.
• With its excellent documentation and pattern language integration, the Yahoo UI library becomes the standard weapon of choice among mainstream developers seeking a pure Javascript framework. In the Java world, GWT makes great strides as the platform becomes richer and design patterns emerge.
• Mobile web development continues to suck.
• Javascript increasingly recognised as the world's most popular "second language" and becomes popular as a lingua franca to describe generic programming concepts. Several attempts at server-side Javascript frameworks.
• IE7 causes more than a few headaches.
• Firebug is installed by pretty much any developer using Firefox.
• CSS is back, baby! Echoing the recent mass adoption of Javascript, developers who previously had a fleeting familiarity with CSS now become fluent practitioners.

Best wishes for 2007, however you play your Ajax!