Stuff and Junk » backend

Simple web apps for shopping, Lenshero.com gets it right

Vern — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 02:26:13 +0000

The amount of times I’ve found myself in a shopping centre browsing for products thinking to myself, why can’t they just build an online app for this? It would make it so much easier to find what I want. A fridge is the perfect example. Why doesn’t fridge shops have an online app where I can plug in my dimensions, select what I want, then just show me what fits.

Being a programmer makes this extra frustrating because it really quite a simple thing to build if you have the content. The content is easy to, that’s just however many hours for a temp to plug it all in.

Then you come across a site like lenshero.com. Ahhh, now THAT’s how you do it! Easy.

If you want to buy a lens, tell the site what camera you have, what lens you want, or what you already own, and they show you the results. Simple. Love it!

Hits vs Page Views vs Visits, The Simple Stats.

Vern — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:18:44 +0000

A simple description of the three big stats when it comes to websites; Hits, page views and visits.

Imagine you have a web site with two pages, both pages containing text and 3 images.

If someone comes opens the home page, clicks to the second page and then leaves you will have;

1 visit
2 page views
8 Hits

They have visited the website and no matter how many pages they look at, it is one visit until the session is closed. Sessions are usually ended by the user closing the browser or clicking through to another website.

During that visit they viewed two pages, the home page as one and then the second page.

Each page records 4 hits, the 3 images plus the HTML page containing the images and text. The server has produced 4 files in total for the home page, but because they opened the second page that also contains 3 images and another HTML page, that adds another 4 hits.

Remember me?

Vern — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:49:56 +0000

The success of social networking sites is of course in their personalisation and you could even go as far to say that the attraction to these sites is that people just like being remembered. Having a personal connection to your experience on a website needs to be easy and often, similarly to real world socialising, people like the connection initiated by someone else.

A website should, again similarly to the real world, initialise the connection to the person viewing in an approachable, but not to overwhelming manner, do the introduction in the form of registration, giving some information as well as request it, and then jump straight into the personalised options for the user. Show them a personalised version of the home page for example.

Once the connection is made between the person and the website, the website needs to than remember that person as best as possible, sometimes you can’t of course. But it should be as easy as, “what was your name again? Oh, that’s right, now I remember! Here’s the stuff we talked about last time”.