I’m helping a client at the moment build an E-Commerce application. After 4 years of development and a nice hefty price tag, the client is left with a system that is barely functional.

I stepped in as project manager at the end of last year, but I think it was too little too late. All is not lost though, we have learnt a couple of lessons from this experience.

Lesson 1: Get the basics right.

If you can’t get basic things working right in the beginning, your entire application will fall apart when you try and do something a little more advanced later on. Advanced features in any application is dependent on the application having a solid foundation. So rather spend some extra time on the foundational elements of your application. Don’t rush it. If you need an application ready at the end of the month, you’re gonna make a hash of it.

Lesson 2: Assume Nothing.

If you are outsourcing development, assume nothing. Don’t assume that the source code is yours, just because you’re paying a premium rate. Don’t assume that it’ll work in all the browsers. Don’t assume that code will be commented. Don’t assume that it’ll use a style sheet. I’ve seen this happen on a few different projects. Just because something is the standard doesn’t mean your developer is going to do it that way. No matter how stupid you sound, or how obvious the question seems, make sure you ask and put it on paper.

With the application I’m working on at the moment, I can only work with it under Windows in VMWare on my Mac. When I questioned the developers on this, they said “no one said it should work on Firefox or Safari, so we made it Internet Explorer only”. You cannot argue with that afterwards, no one asked them, everyone just assumed. So make sure you ask all the stupid little questions up-front.

Lesson 3: Make it as simple as possible.

Don’t try and an be fancy. Really, you won’t impress anyone. Build a simple, functional web application, and make sure it works well. People may not rave about it, but you’re building a web application to server a purpose, not a pretty site to impress a supplier or customer. This also applies to the functional layout of the site. In our case we’re building an e-commerce platform. Stick to what works for the other e-commerce sites. Amazon, Ebay, Kalahari.net etc. Look at what they do, and do the same thing. It works for them, and it’ll work for you.

A few years ago when I started my on-line life, I signed up for dozens of marketing news letters. Every one promised me online riches in no time at all.

4 years later I have unsubscribed to more newsletters that I every subscibed to in the first place. How that happens I don’t know.

And I still get newsletters emailed to me. I do a quick search in Gmail for the name or email address, and find no record of ever signing up. I suppose one Internet marketer builds a list, fails to make money and sells his list to someone else who is going to try and spam the list to death and fail to make any money.

So I was wondering how many email you get each week from Internet Marketers? Have you tried to unsubscribe? But it just continues?

I read and article on Smashing Magazine a while ago and thought it was brilliant. It’s related to web-design and I thought I’d apply them to blogging.

1. Don’t make users think.

When a visitor visits your blog for the first time, what’s the experience they get? Do they know what your blog is about? Are your navigation links easy to find? While blogs are essentially a freedom of expression you’re really free to design it as you please. But if you want a blog to grow and be successful then you need to make it simple and not confuse readers.

Problogger is a good example of a logical design. When visitors get there for the first time, they don’t have to think about where things are. Page links are at the top of the page where they belong. He has a featured post directly below the header, and it’s labeled as such. Below that he has the recent posts, and to the right of the recent posts he has a weekly video post. The rest of the navigation, including sponsors are in the right hand side bar of the blog. This is a pretty standard layout and works really well. However, his blog doesn’t look cliche. He has a professional unique theme on his blog.

2. Don’t squander users patience.

SM point out that when you want a user to test a service you need to keep it simple. And it’s even more relevant on a blog. DO NOT require users to register to comment, unless you want 90% of people not to comment. I have never made a comment on lifehacker, cause I couldn’t be bothered to register.

3. Manage to focus users attention.

Many of the top bloggers make use of images in a post, simply so that they can draw the readers attention to the post. You’ll find, as I have, that posts with images get a lot more attention than posts without images.

4. Strive for feature exposure.

In the world of web-design this is the product or service your website is about. In the world of blogging, this is the popular stuff that’s out there.

Shoemoney for example has his best work listed just below his header. It’s a feature on the site, and you cannot miss it when you load the page.

5. Make use of effective writing.

In the world of blogging you need to be able to get the readers attention and keep it. When designing your blog, keep in mind that you want the title of the post to be visible so your reader can quickly see it, and read it. Keep it short, keep it punchy. Don’t write a title that requires someone to re read it to try and figure out what the post is about. Rich has a nice clear title to his posts.

6. Strive for simplicity.

There really isn’t much to say about simplicity. Just keep it clean. don’t clutter your blog with rubbish and having lots of useless pictures as part of the design just cause it’s pretty isn’t always they best thing.

Dosh Dosh have a nice design.

7. Don’t be afraid of the white space

It’s actually quite hard to get the right amount of white space into your blog design. But not enough white space in your blog design makes it painful to read and follow. Daily blog tips seem to have gotten this right nicely.

8. Communicate effectively with a “visible language”

Like SM, I’m going to quote Aaron Marcus on this one.

* Organize: provide the user with a clear and consistent conceptual structure. Consistency, screen layout, relationships and navigability are important concepts of organization. The same conventions and rules should be applied to all elements.

* Economize: do the most with the least amount of cues and visual elements. Four major points to be considered: simplicity, clarity, distinctiveness, and emphasis. Simplicity includes only the elements that are most important for communication. Clarity: all components should be designed so their meaning is not ambiguous. Distinctiveness: the important properties of the necessary elements should be distinguishable. Emphasis: the most important elements should be easily perceived.

* Communicate: match the presentation to the capabilities of the user. The user interface must keep in balance legibility, readability, typography, symbolism, multiple views, and color or texture in order to communicate successfully. Use max. 3 typefaces in a maximum of 3 point sizes — a maximum of 18 words or 50-80 characters per line of text.

9. Conventions are our friends
Your blog readers are going to expect certain things when they get to your blog. Have the side bar on the left or the right. Have your header at the top with all your pages. eXtra for every publisher does a nice job of sticking to conventions.

10. Test early, test often
Test your design with all the different aspects of your blog. Pictures, lists etc. Also make sure you know what it looks like at various resolutions. What does it look like in Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Does it look different on a Mac and a PC?
Email 10 people you know and ask then to look at the initial design and see if they can spot any faults.
Once again thanks to Smashing Magazine for a great post. I hope I didn’t destroy your post too much.

Remember the milk is a simple web based todo list that is quite powerful. The power doesn’t lie in the service itself, but rather in how it interacts with other services. We all hate having to go to ten different apps to do one thing. That’s one of the reasons an app like Outlook is so popular. You have a single application that handles you mail, contacts, appointments, todo etc.

With Web 2.0 trying to find it’s place in the world this is one of the challenges it faces. We’ve already seen many of these issues addressed and data portability remains a big topic of conversation. But I digress.

Remember the milk (RTM) does this so well. Remember the milk is just a simple todo list. There are many out there that have more features, but it’s not features I want. I want to open my Gmail and see the ads removed and my todo list instead.

I want to open up Google calendar to check my appointments, and I want to see my todo list there.

When I open firefox, my default page is iGoogle. I want to see my todo list there too.

When I’m standing in shops wondering what I was supposed to buy, I want to whip out my iPhone and check that I haven’t forgotten anything.

If like me, you’ve managed to break your iPhone and you have to resort to using a black berry again, you might want your todo list there.

And to top it all off. If you’re a twitter user, you can even add items via twitter, and get some reminders.

They also provide you with a unique email address that automatically turns the email into a todo item. So you could use a service like sendible to email you a todo item at some point in the future. Random, I know.

I’d give this 10/10. I have finally found a todo solution that might actually work for me.

Rofo takes some of the complexity of finding commercial real estate and makes it dead simple. It’s property in Web 2.0. Or shall we call it Property 2.0?

Rofo works in two ways. You can either search for the commercial space that you require. They are aggregating all the listings for the available real estate in specific areas. So when you search for a specific criteria, you’re shown a bunch of options, and you have the ability to connect annonymously with someone who has space available and request a tour from them.

Secondly, you can list your space requirements. This can also be done anonymously. So if you’re just starting to gather information it’s a great way to see what’s out there and begin hunting for ideas without the pressure of a broker or agent calling you every 2 days.

It’s a great service but currently only available in a very limited area. What would be nice is to see this service grow and be available on a global scale.

Mygazines is a magazines community that allows you to upload articles and even full magazines to make available on the web.

When you open a magazine it has a very very nifty flash based flip format. You click the little arrow to the right of that page and it turns the page for you. This is nothing new, I’ve been using Zinio for a while now, but it’s a nice web based format.

Adding a magazine or catalogue is a simple as uploading your PDF with a couple of book marks. Most people who can put together a magazine can put some bookmarks in a PDF.

The quality of the magazine is dependent on the person who scanned it in. Because it’s community based there are no quality guarantees. They do have a fairly large amount of magazines in their collection and some very recent stuff. I’d like to see how publishers are going to jump up and down trying to get content removed.

Clicking on the magazine zooms you in so you can actually read stuff. Clicking again zooms out so you have a full page perspective on the magazine.

The site is really awesome. I often buy magazines only to never take them out of the packaging, but this allows me to read the one or two articles of a magazine I’m actually interested in.

The uses of this magazine go beyond just putting up commercial stuff. Small businesses can use it to distribute catalogues digitally instead of going the expensive print route.

It’s also a great way or new start up magazines to test the waters and begin building a readership before putting it down in the shops.

I found this video, and think it’s fascinating. We all know that the web will change in the future. We’ve seen it move from a very static very basic HTML interface to an interactive dynamic and collaborative system.

There is a little part in all of us however, that does not want the web to change. We all want it to stay as it is. It’s the natural resistance to change.

The above video demoing Aurora is brilliant. I love some of the concepts they throw out in this video.

We can expect anything the future holds to change quite drastically, but the possibilities that the future Internet hold for us is endless.

I’d love you hear what you think in the comments.

It’s Friday night, and I want to give a shout out to our sponsors.

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Andy Crofford

MonFX

Contented Niche

Blogger Venue

Stand Out Blogger

So there are some guys locally how are playing with the Twitter API. I’m really exited to see some of the talent that South African Developers can pull out of the hat.

The first site I found a while ago is www.twittersa.co.za built by Wogan May, you can follow him here @woganmay

The second site only went live last night, you can see it here http://charlvn.za.net/clugmp/ and it’s been built by Charl van Niekerk you can follow him here @charlvn

And of course you can follow me here @shawnjooste

Google have made some changes to their Ad Manager package which is still in private beta.

* Creative preview on your site - You can now preview a creative on your site to test the creative before the campaign starts. Learn more here.

* New look and feel - We’ve changed the style and overall appearance of the product. While most things remain in the same place, it may take a few moments to adjust to the new look.

* Additional languages - Ad Manager is now available in three new languages: French, Italian, and Ukrainian.

* Unlimited flight dates - Originally you could only set unlimited flight dates for ad network orders. Now you can set unlimited flight dates on any Exclusive, Remnant, or House order that has an unlimited impression goal.

I’m looking forward to see where they go with this. Using a robust Ad Management tool can add income to the bottom line of any site.