Q&A: Gerrard Dennis of Simply Group on e-commerce

The Simply Group operates seven e-commerce sites in the UK, from SimplyScuba, to the recently relaunched SimplyBeach.

I've been talking to founder Gerrard Dennis about the challenges if running seven separate sites...

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Posted 20 November 2009 09:33am by Graham Charlton with 0 comments

How can etailers handle the Christmas rush?

Over the past year, we've seen a couple of examples of well known e-commerce sites being unable to cope with traffic spikes, mainly caused by sales.

This time last year, Debenham's website went down for around 24 hours thanks to the weight of sales traffic, while the Next website had to implement a queuing system in July thanks to a traffic spike.

But what can online retailers do to avoid such problems?

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Posted 18 November 2009 10:30am by Graham Charlton with 7 comments

3am site goes from swearing off SEO to keyword stuffing in 3 months

The Daily Mirror's 3am.co.uk gossip site has gone from disavowing SEO and promising to concentrate on building a loyal audience - to stuffing its HTML titles with as many keywords as it can think of. And then adding some more. Before finally making sure Britney is in there.

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Posted 17 November 2009 13:38pm by malcolm coles with 23 comments

Site review: Virgin Trains revamp

Virgin Trains relaunched its website yesterday with an updated look and feel for the site, which apparently aims to 'convey the brand's new positioning of train travel as superior to other modes of transport'.

I'm not sure whether it does that, but it does look a lot better than the previous version. I've been comparing the site with the old version...

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Posted 12 November 2009 10:52am by Graham Charlton with 3 comments

World Usability Day 2009 - OK It's my fault!

World Usability Day LogoI was delighted when the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) chose sustainability as the theme for World Usability Day 2009 (WUD 2009).  They even quoted the revised human-centred design standard, which I helped to draft, explaining how human-centred design can have a positive impact on sustainability.

Recently we have been talking to some key people working in design and usability about how sustainability might influence design in the future.

Here I summarise some of the main themes that have emerged. We will be sharing the highlights of the interviews as a podcast to celebrate World Usability Day.

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Posted 11 November 2009 09:04am by Tom Stewart with 1 comment

Mobile news sites: best practice tips

Most of the UK's newspapers now have mobile versions of their websites, but many could provide a better range of content and user experience.

Here are some best practice tips for mobile newspaper sites...

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Posted 10 November 2009 12:06pm by Graham Charlton with 4 comments

Site review: Whistles.co.uk

Fashion retailer Whistles relaunched its website last week, and the resulting Flash heavy site is certainly different.

According to Whistles' Jane Sheperdson, 'We spent a lot of time researching best practice online. We then threw out everything we had learned, and just designed something that pleased us visually.'

This is an interesting way to approach the design of an e-commerce site, but what will the result be for the user experience?

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Posted 10 November 2009 11:20am by Graham Charlton with 52 comments

Outlook for online retail is bright this Christmas: survey

According to a new survey,  93% of consumers are planning to do at least some of their shopping online this Christmas, with 71% planning to buy more than half of their gifts on the web.

The survey by eDigitalResearch and IMRG reveals that more people are planning to shop online this year, and now that the threat of Royal Mail strike action has receded, there is some cause for optimism for online retailers.

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Posted 09 November 2009 13:26pm by Graham Charlton with 0 comments

American Airlines fires an employee for...customer engagement

Imagine for a moment that you're the CEO of American Airlines (AA). A customer named Dustin Curtis comes to the conclusion that your website sucks after booking a flight on it and finding the process to be a "horrific displeasure".

A UX designer by trade, Curtis takes it upon himself to redesign your website's homepage and provide some suggestions. All at no cost, of course. He publishes this as a blog post that begins, "Dear AmericanAirlines". Shortly thereafter, the UX designer receives an email from an AA employee who does UX design for your company.

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Posted 09 November 2009 11:38am by Patricio Robles with 15 comments

Top three conversion rate optimisation tools

Here are some handy tools that we use in our conversion rate optimisation service that could help readers understand this process better.

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Posted 09 November 2009 10:45am by Shane Quigley with 5 comments