Adding an interactive accordion widget to your ecommerce site can provide a great design feature that conveys professionalism and makes your content more readable.
There are plenty of instances in website design when we would like to have a lot of content on a page, but, unless you are creating articles or blog posts, too much text causes the pages to scroll, which makes the content less readable.
As an example, imagine that you have a product detail page with a product description, product image, 20 or more customer reviews, washing and care instructions, inventory availability, related products, and shipping options. That can be a lot of text on a page type (i.e. a contact page or even a product detail page) that does not usually scroll well. So how do you manage all of that copy?
One solution is to use what designers call an accordion, which simultaneously shows some bit of content while hiding other content. You can think of it as a vertical tab.
In this edition of "Web Design Tips," I am going to show you how to very quickly implement an accordion widget based on the jQuery library.
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Thursday, July 30, 2009
Web Design Tips: jQuery UI Accordion Widget
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Web Design Tips: The Laws of Ecommerce Navigation Design
CSS, Flash, jQuery, and an arsenal of other powerful web techniques and technologies have unbound website design, creating the opportunity to develop either exceptional user interfaces or really frustrating ones.
Furthermore, the growth of "cookie-cutter" ecommerce templates (i.e., “insert your logo here”) has quelled site concepts with great potential and made some ecommerce pages as bland and tasteless as a papier-mâché popsicle.
To avoid the pitfalls of a site design that is too confusing, too ugly, or too experimental to be effective, the ecommerce site owner must strike a balance between leading-edge techniques and technologies, effectiveness, and aesthetics. So, in this edition of "Web Design Tips," I'll outline the laws for ecommerce site navigation design to help any ecommerce business.
Shoppers browsing to an ecommerce store don't want to be baffled by navigation. As I implied above, there are a lot of amazing things that you can do with site navigation that you shouldn't.
As a specific example, the agency Publicis & Hal Riney has developed site navigation that responds to gestures captured via web cam. The effect is stunning, and is an excellent way to demonstrate development talent. But as navigation, it is really frustrating. And if an ecommerce site deployed anything like it, I'd bet that they would never make a sale again.
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