Category: Web Development

Any general web development topics are covered here, ranging from ecommerce web stores, search engine optimisation or store optimization to framework discussion.

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Magento Developer Conference vs Volcanic Ash

I was so very excited about presenting at the Magento Developer Conference but thanks to the Volcano in Iceland, I was instead grounded in Dubai – I got to within 2 hours of London, check this out for a bizarre flight path.

Turned back 2 hours away from LHR - thanks volcanic ash!
Turned back 2 hours away from LHR - thanks volcanic ash!

Anyway – Dubai turned out to be a fairly interesting place – I got to ride a camel and snowboard in a shopping mall. Emirates were very good to us as well, so I really cannot complain. I’ll put up a blog post with some content that would have been in my presentation in case anyone is interested.

With a bit of luck there will be another Magento conference in the future, and I’ll get to head along to that one. I’ll look forward to it.

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More Internet Retailer Web Design Conference tips to improve your ecommerce store

It took me a bit longer than a week to finish my list of IRWD action items, didn’t it? Hopefully no one was holding their breath. In this second part I’ll be expanding on the first part of the action items list with two sections, one on Design improvements for ecommerce stores and the other on Customer Communication, which is less of a technical category, but one I think is worth covering.

Continue reading More Internet Retailer Web Design Conference tips to improve your ecommerce store

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15 Action Items taken from IRWD 2010

Well, I’m back in New Zealand now and all thawed out after the Internet Retailer Web Design conference – it was a well oiled machine again this year interesting speakers and many great ideas flowing. For World Wide Access it is a chance to set some high level goals for web development over the next 12 months.

In this post, more for myself than anyone, I’m going to set out 15 high level action items that I took away from the conference. This distills the key design and development points I noted over the 3 days of speakers and workshops. During the course of the year I’ll keep you updated with progress on these items and any benefits or issues that arise.

I’ll get straight into it, because we have a lot to cover in 3 broad areas; functionality, design and communication.
Continue reading 15 Action Items taken from IRWD 2010

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Why I don’t use Flash, ever (and neither should you NZ Herald)

Seriously, just don’t do it – I think I’m going to have to find a new start page…

flash-is-shit

It’d actually be a really interesting experiment if the Herald just ran Google adwords instead. I wonder if more people would click on ads that related to what they were reading rather than shitty bandwidth consuming banner ads. There might be something in it, seeing as Google only gets paid when people click on targeted ads and by all accounts they’re doing pretty well out of it….

As a Magento developer I’m always a little bewildered by the number of web stores that use flash banners instead of simple javascript powered rotating div ‘s – at least the div ‘s can have text and alt tags associated, which the search engines can crawl.

</rant>

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A new ASchroder.com for 2010 or, why I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks…

Tonight I released my new wordpress theme – what do you think? It’s the bastard offspring of two free themes; SevenFive and Agregado hacked together to make a new theme. In the spirit of the original themes being free, here it is – I make no apologies for the crude hacking together and all original copyrights hold – I’m not trying to pass this off as my own or anything.

I’d really like any feedback you have, particularly the 10% of you who use Internet explorer, as I want to make sure the site is simple, clean and usable. So leave a comment, or email me with the things you’d like me to change.

Also, now that I have got the pseudo-creative bug out of my system, I’ll try to post a few more Magento articles to keep you going – so keep an eye out for them.