Frontend & Backend
June 30th, 2008
When come to system development, we used have to decide on one thing. Let’s look at creating a website for hotel booking. We break it down to front-end and back-end. Front-end refering to the website where customers choose the hotel and make booking online. Back-end, taking care of the management of hotels by administrator of the website. Both access to the same database.
Question is, if you have limited time, which will you develop first? Backend or frontend?
The answer is, Front-end. Why?
Image viewer
May 16th, 2008
Family photos, vacation snapshots or creative artistic works: whatever images you have to present, you can present them in a variety of ways. On a big screen, in slide shows or in a thumbnails gallery. However, to convey the message of presented data effectively, it’s important to offer it in an attractive and intuitive way. Furthermore, the presentation itself can make images more valuable and simplify the browsing through hundreds of slides.
Trip Tracker Slideshow is one of the good-looking, lightweight JavaScript image viewer with an animated slideshow feature. The viewer is free to use in personal or commercial web pages, provided that the script is not sold or exchanged for profit.
Behind a web layout
May 8th, 2008
Started from hand sketch, a web layout was turned into box components. When a more detailed layout was produced, it was reviewed for its usability, technical compatibility, loading speed, extendability and others. Localization to other languages and right-to-left layout was tested. Reviews was done several time until a finalized version of layout was completed.
This is just a start. It would be converted into HTML coding in the web interface stage. This is followed by coding, debugging and finally the launch!
A must-have feature for your website!
May 1st, 2008
Most of the website owners are able to tell us what they want when come to the design of their websites. Their preferences run wild from font-size to the colors used in the web layout!
We started by asking them who and what is the reason for someone to visit their website. Not everyone, please. Until now, they seem to understand pretty well about their visitors.
They continue to propose features which they want. This is where they stray away from their objective. Sadly to say, it sounds that those features are of what the site owners want, than their visitors.
It comes into a long list, from content management system to online payment. If your customers are businesses who prefer dealing with you by check, or group of people who never buy online - how much would this online payment help!?
The simple rule is, starting from something simplier. Do not worry about what features your customers might want to have, because they are the one who will let you know. The site owner, only represents one of the visitor, not everyone!
If there is only one feature you will need to include in your website, it would be how to make the life of customers easier!
Tag, the best search options!
April 9th, 2008
Search options are something that can change from time. In real life, business grow. If today you use a State name (eg, Selangor) to find a housing development project from a Developer’s website, tomorrow you might be sorting your way by country as the developer grows and has more project internationally.
It is an never ending games. Your customers decide what is best to find their way to the information they want from your website. The site owner listens and make changes to their website - But, all this can not be done if your website is build dynamically with a database-driven backend! Why? Because all fields and columns are hardly changed.
Tag or Category present an alternative and better solution to this. Managing Tag is easier, without the need to touch the database. It is parallel, in terms of every item can belong to more than one Tag, yet flexibly enough to be presented in any way you like!
This makes content sorting more logical and practical! Check how 1.com.my sort their content!
Website of web design companies
March 16th, 2008
Most people are wondering, what would be come out with for a website of a web design company? I used to believe hair stylist will have a nice hair cut (at least looks the best for him/herself), or business consultant runs the best business (to me still, the word consultant looks to be too arguably).
I am listing out the top 10 web design companies website snapshot by googling ‘web design malaysia’ keyword.
Malaysian Internet Resources (MIR)
Even the smallest thing matters
March 4th, 2008
While we are over-excited by the ‘overnight’ success story of online business which sold for a don’t-know-how-many hundred millions, there is always a reason behind!
The code and design of such websites are state of art. In this case, the grey bar of where the word Request are, are slightly extended to make sure the word Request aligned with the content below. This is Facebook!
The bigger, the better!
March 3rd, 2008
Most successful websites are not stingy with space allocated for their sign up button. WordPress, as one of the most widely used Blog platform, firmly believe the size of the sign up button has a lot to do with the conversion. And most importantly, conversion is the best measurement of how successful a website, rather than fancy flash animation flying around in your website!
See, even the words used in the button has a lot to do with Google. Imagine if your Sign up now button is in graphical format, not text version…
All Subpages are Main Page!
February 15th, 2008
Visitors use specific keywords. Their landing page is no more main page, in most case. For example, if I am looking for an Internship job at a web design company, I will use keyword ‘internship web design’. Search engine returns result that direct me to the subpage describing the internship program of a company, instead of their main page.
What is important for a subpage then? Limit number of subpage you have. The less the better. You need to be very sure about the goal or the conversion you want for each subpage. Convert them to your customers.
Subpage should have a brief introduction that tells your customer what you are doing, I bet you have this in your main page too.
Remember, every subpage initiates a process to be completed!
Kitchen weeks that turn visitors away
January 27th, 2008
There must be a good reason of IKEA Malaysia not using their portal to sell their home furniture online. I guess the offline conversion it far more profitable than putting it online! Perhaps, using the website to reduce their operational issues can be something that they can think of, such as checking stock avaliability, or checking the delivery status.
Currently, the website is showing their Kitchen weeks promotion in a popup. If you close the popup too early before the website finish loading, you will get a blank page. Well, this is annoying indeed. Considering visitors make their decision on first landing to your website, the approach of using popup for their promotion can be really a bad ideas!
