We are happy to announce the launch of our new website. It has been a while in the making but is finally here. We always love to hear from our users, so any feedback is appreciated.
With so many bad designed websites on the Internet, we thought we might as well start a monthly post dedicated to them. Each month we will pick a website which we feel is doing one thing or another wrong, and write about it, providing our thoughts as to how it could be done better.
To kick off the month of June, Crust Pizza -www.crustpizza.com.au is our Banana Peel of the month.
If you have not heard of Crust Pizza before, they are a relatively new pizza shop which is doing quite well, taking on the likes of Dominos and Pizza Hut with their range of great tasting and healthy pizza’s. This week when checking out the Crust Pizza website, there were a few things that instantly stuck out to Ziller.
When you have given up your precious time to visit the website of a pizza shop, what is the most likely thing you are looking for? The menu! Apart from maybe the store locations and the opening times, the menu is what you are usually after. Looking at the Crust Pizza homepage you will see in their prime real estate they choose to display a good few paragraphs talking about their business. While this may be interesting and worth while for a ecommerce retailer, this is not what you want here. Ziller would of instead stuck the pizza menu in the users face, maybe with a nice looking picture navigation leading you to different parts of the menu. If users want to read the about us text then they will, but we feel the homepage is not the right place for this.
Crust Pizza Menu
Second thing where we feel Crust Pizza has not done a good job, is the menu itself. If you look at the Crust Pizza menu what do you feel is lacking? Pictures? When you are viewing a pizza menu, or really any menu in fact, you want to see pictures. A nice big picture of each pizza would really help the user decide and even persuade them into a purchase much easier. Apart from the pictures the other area the Crust Pizza menu lacks in is organisation. The small anchor links at the top of the menu are not very easy at all to see, and the menu being as long as it is becomes confusing. Here Ziller would of used the full width of the content area, and better organised the categories to make the page much smaller.
As always though, you wont really know what works until you test it.
Would be really interested to recieve feedback as to your thoughts….
Ziller have recently taken on board a new senior programmer, Shah Bhuiyan. Shah is a highly skilled programmer who is in charge of the main development work at Ziller. Shah holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Masters in Information Technology. We strongly welcome Shah on board.
While this is basic written law, it amazes me just how many web developers are not excluding non targeted traffic from website statistics. Website statistics are absolutely crucial to the success of a website, they allow you to constantly monitor the performance and also allow you to make crucial business decisions. Therefor it is very important that your statistics are accurate, and show a true representation of your users.
An example is if you have a web developer who manages your website, you will be amazed by how much time they spend using and navigating it. If they fail to block their own IP addresses and exclude their traffic, all their activity will show in your reports, and will skew the results. The same applies to your staff and even your own usage. Your staff and yourself do not act and behave like normal users do on the website, and so having this show in your reports is bad and will come back to hurt you.
I wrote a post earlier this year regarding the use of captcha forms - my opinion was that that the majority of them on the Internet are badly designed and are also badly hurting conversion rates - nothing has changed.
I just read a great post regarding the many ways to avoid using a captcha and thought it was worth a shout.
If you have some experience with HTML and CSS, you will understand that you are able to apply an ID or class attribute to any HTML tag, which allows you to then specify styles for that tag via the style sheet. If you look at any well built style sheet you would usually notice the use of both ID and classes. So what is the difference?
The W3C refers to the ID tag as “a unique identifier to an element”, so in plain English what this means is an ID attribute can only be used on one element, where a class can be used on multiple elements. To give an example, you would use an id when referring to a unique element such as a specific list, however would use a class when applying a certain style to one or more objects such as multiple div’s.
One interesting feature of the ID tag that I find is not well known, is the ability to link with anchor text to a specific ID. For example if you specify your footer element with an ID called “footer”, you are able to link directly to that part of the page… Let’s take news.com.au as an example. There footer is contained within a div which has an id named ‘footer’ applied to it, so if we link to:
http://www.news.com.au/#footer
You will notice the homepage loads, but scrolls directly to the footer tag, which is the bottom of the page.
A few months back one of my posts at half-geek talked about the big mistake many shopping carts make by making it mandatory to register when checking out. By registering I mean making them enter a password when checking out that they would then use to access their account and checkout in the future.
My good friends at getalastic today released a post called checkout inspiration from top converting sites which I thought was very interesting. It backs up the fact that making a user register does cause friction and will result in cart abandoment which any shopping cart can do without.
Looking at Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts which lists the top 10 ecommerce converting sites, you may notice that some of the sites listed here do make you register when checking out. Don’t always do what the leaders in your field do, they may well find it more efficient to loose some sales in order to complete some other business goal.
I thought that this question was a pretty good one to write about, as it seems many web designers out there know that these tags exist but couldn’t tell you the difference between them. Using the < b > tag or the < strong > tag will seem to do the same thing, it will bold any text wrapped around the tag, so why are there different tags to do the same thing?
People in the seo world started to talk about how the strong tag had a greater seo benefit, and it was good practice to use the strong tag around keywords instead of using the standard bold tag. Thankfully Matt Cutts cleared this up by stating that Google treats the tags exactly the same.
OK so what exactly is the difference? Basically it’s called semantic mark-up - actively describing the content you are presenting to the user. W3C prefer that you use semantic mark-up, and I have to agree with them.
Building websites is all about providing a good experience to the user, which includes users with visual impairments. Without the use of semantic mark-up visually impaired users will not get the same meaning from content that people who are reading it will, which is surprisingly a large number of Internet users.
Tip of the day - use semantic mark-up.
Ziller is proud to announce that Leonardo Alvarez has joined us as a senior Graphic Designer for Web. Leo has a large number of years experience in the web design industry, and additionally holds a Master of Internet Science / Informatic Technology & Management. We welcome Leo onboard.
As a niche ecommerce web development and online marketing company, we are always being pushed to our limits to come up with the newest and latest technology to make shopping carts faster, more efficient and look better then ever. Clients, who usually have very little knowledge of how websites work behind the scenes and the amount of time that can go into building one, will always have ideas that they want to see appear on the screen.
Are these ideas always doable? Of course not. But do we ever tell the client that? Never.
One thing a client never wants to hear is that something cannot be done. Sure, there are always times when something a client wants can’t be done that exact way, but there are always ways around it to produce the same end result.
Remember, nothing is impossible.
