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Announcing: Refresh, Redesign, and Relaunch of No Turn On Red

Found in: Site News
Tuesday
August 24, 2010
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Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ve completed a pretty major overhaul of the site last week. Launched late Thursday, this is the first major refresh of this blog in nearly three years and I am very, very excited to share it with everyone. In addition to a new design of the site, I have completely revamped the underlying WordPress theme in an effort to make the blog more readable, archives more browsable, and content more shareable.

One of the challenges that I faced was how to deal with the archive of over 300 blog posts written since 2006. I spent a considerable amount of time reorganizing the category structure, reviewing tags, and creating a better archive page all in an effort to make the past content more accessible. All posts now have intergrated Twitter, Facebook, and Digg buttons to make sharing the content here easy.

If you do enjoy the content here, I hope you will consider subscribing to the RSS feed, following me on Twitter (@noturnonred), or Liking us on the new Facebook page (where our content is also syndicated).

As we enter the wind down of the Back to School season and prepare for the ramp up into the madness that is Q4 retail, I have exciting content and thoughts to share that I hope will get all of us through the busy season. Expect to also see some fresh content shared from ecommr and a new release of my Retail Twitter Aggregator, which shows a real time, one page view of what retailers are Tweeting.

Thanks for reading No Turn On Red!

Express Lane for 8/24/2010

Found in: Express Lane
Tuesday
August 24, 2010
1 Comment

Sharing with you the stories that I’m reading today. Some notes on Gap International, Google makes a retail-related acquisition, and links to good resources for e-commerce developers.

The always terrific Get Elastic blog has an excellent roundup of 22 features of e-commerce site search. The terrific review of a variety of search options and search results from different e-commerce stories is really helpful. Site search is a very important, and sometimes overlooked, area of e-commerce implementations. The Get Elastic blog post should inspire some conversations about ways to improve your search.

Seeking Alpha has some notes on Gap’s Q2 results and their international strategy. Australia, China, and Italy will all see new Gap and/or Banana Republic stores this year. I don’t blame Gap for expanding internationally as that division has been on fire this year. According to my tracking, the international division has seen only one month of negative comps this year; everything else has been flat or positive.

Google makes a big splash by buying visual search engine like.com. Great deal for Google, probably an even better deal for like.com. I’d love to see what Google Product Search will look like after the like.com engine is integrated.

Finally, Practical E-commerce has another good article discussing the pros and cons of different checkout methods. More food for thought for developers and designers.

Adding Twitter’s Tweet Button To Your WordPress Blog

Found in: Twitter, Wordpress Tips
Friday
August 13, 2010
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This week, Twitter has announced a new feature: the official Tweet Button. This feature will allow publishers to add an official button to share their content via Twitter. Mashable has more information on the button and what this means for publishers and site owners.

I really like this idea and hope that this leads to more analytics from Twitter, similar to the Facebook Insights program.

I’ve started adding this new button to a few sites that I maintain and thought I’d share the (very simple) code for adding this to a WordPress blog template so that it appears on every post.

On this blog, I’m displaying the Twitter Button with a horizontal count. The link is a direct link to the blog post and with the title of the post serving as the Twitter content. In order to populate that, I’ve inserted the following code into the WordPress loop in my template:


<?php $twitVia = "noturnonred"; ?>
<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>" data-count="horizontal" data-via="<?php echo $twitVia; ?>">
  Tweet
</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

If you want to put this on your blog, just change the first variable from noturnonred to your own Twitter account name. After that, the permalink and page title will be properly inserted into the link and your button should appear on your blog posts.

For more information on the options available or to generate a different Tweet Button, visit the Tweet Button page on Twitter.

52 E-Commerce Stores on the iPhone

Found in: Inspiration, Retail, ecommr
Wednesday
January 7, 2009
12 Comments

I was curious to see how retailers are handling and delivering mobile content. I decided to visit a variety of e-commerce stores, on my iPod Touch, and captured the results. Consider this a beginning of the year snapshot of the mobile online retail web – I look forward to capturing these sites again in 12 months and seeing what changes.

A few observations:

6 of the 50 retailers redirect iPhone users to a mobile-optimized website: Amazon, Best Buy, Foot Locker, Target, Victoria’s Secret, and Walmart. Ralph Lauren should be on this list, since they offer a mobile-optimized website, but the server doesn’t redirect iPhone visitors.

Way too many retailers have Flash movies with no non-Flash support. Typically these are promotion pieces and don’t interfere with the navigation. However, the Nike shop redirects the iPhone user to a page that tells them they should download Flash with no way to view the site otherwise. I also have to note Ralph Lauren’s Rugby store and Express, both sites are just about completely unusable without Flash.

Kudos to retailers like Gap and J.Crew who have javascript animations for their homepage promotions. The iPhone user still has a pleasant visual experience.

If you are interested or involved with the design, development, or user experience of e-commerce stores, please visit ecommr. ecommr is a website showcasing the best (and sometimes worst) in e-commerce design, with a clear focus on the individual elements that make up online stores.



  • Abercrombie & Fitch


  • American Eagle


  • Amazon


  • Anthropologie


  • Armani Exchange


  • Best Buy


  • Bloomingdale’s


  • Bluefly

Continue reading this post »

Announcing ecommr: a collection of e-commerce interface and design elements

Found in: Site News, ecommr
Monday
November 10, 2008
1 Comment

Working in the e-commerce field, I often find myself looking at other retailers to gather ideas on how to best present various elements of e-commerce sites. From design to information architecture, I find it fascinating to see how different retailers tackle the same problems in different ways. I’m often looking at different retailers and constantly looking for changes, no matter how small, and trends in e-commerce design.

I always wanted to see a site that broke down e-commerce stores into their different elements. I wanted a resource that would allow me to see the various ways retailers display their products or style their “Add to Cart” buttons. There are sites that break down general web elements (see: Elements of Design) and sites that highlight e-commerce design (see: Carted Up), but still no resource that broke down the individual elements.

Of course, this is where I looked to do something about it.

Today, I am proud to announce the launch of ecommr. ecommr is a collection of screen captures of e-commerce design and interface elements. From product listing pages to e-mail newsletters, ecommr is a resource to view all of the individual pieces that make up the e-commerce puzzle. Right now, there are 87 elements from more than 20 retailers.

No Turn On Red won’t be going anywhere. I will use the content on ecommr as a jumping off point for larger discussions and spotlights of trends or patterns through e-commerce. Those discussions will take place over here while I try to keep ecommr editorial-free and keep conversations in the comments of each posted element.

I hope others find this as interesting as I do. I also hope that other people within the industry can get some use out of it, like I know I will. If you have any feedback, comments, or helpful advice, please let me know.

Again, the site is launched and available now at www.ecommr.com.