ASchroder.com

15 Action Items taken from IRWD 2010

Posted by Ashley on Mar 10, 2010 • (2)

Well, I’m back in New Zealand now and all thawed out after the Internet Retailer Web Design conference – it was a well oiled machine again this year interesting speakers and many great ideas flowing. For World Wide Access it is a chance to set some high level goals for web development over the next 12 months.

In this post, more for myself than anyone, I’m going to set out 15 high level action items that I took away from the conference. This distills the key design and development points I noted over the 3 days of speakers and workshops. During the course of the year I’ll keep you updated with progress on these items and any benefits or issues that arise.

I’ll get straight into it, because we have a lot to cover in 3 broad areas; functionality, design and communication.
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Why I don’t use Flash, ever (and neither should you NZ Herald)

Posted by Ashley on Mar 4, 2010 • (0)

Seriously, just don’t do it – I think I’m going to have to find a new start page…

It’d actually be a really interesting experiment if the Herald just ran Google adwords instead. I wonder if more people would click on ads that related to what they were reading rather than shitty bandwidth consuming banner ads. There might be something in it, seeing as Google only gets paid when people click on targeted ads and by all accounts they’re doing pretty well out of it….

As a Magento developer I’m always a little bewildered by the number of web stores that use flash banners instead of simple javascript powered rotating div ’s – at least the div ’s can have text and alt tags associated, which the search engines can crawl.

</rant>

A new ASchroder.com for 2010 or, why I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks…

Posted by Ashley on Feb 28, 2010 • (1)

Tonight I released my new wordpress theme – what do you think? It’s the bastard offspring of two free themes; SevenFive and Agregado hacked together to make a new theme. In the spirit of the original themes being free, here it is – I make no apologies for the crude hacking together and all original copyrights hold – I’m not trying to pass this off as my own or anything.

I’d really like any feedback you have, particularly the 10% of you who use Internet explorer, as I want to make sure the site is simple, clean and usable. So leave a comment, or email me with the things you’d like me to change.

Also, now that I have got the pseudo-creative bug out of my system, I’ll try to post a few more Magento articles to keep you going – so keep an eye out for them.

Mailchimp + Magento: How to get autoresponders working with the API

Posted by Ashley on Feb 1, 2010 • (2)

Just a quick little how-to on Mailchimp and Magento using the existing extension by Ebizmarts. We want to be able to send customers who sign up for the newsletter through the Magento store a little thank you gift (discount code) X days after signing up using Mailchimp’s excellent autoresponders. This is supported by Mailchimp, but requires double opt-in or the following little 2 step work-around with the Mailchimp API.
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Sitemap Submit – Magento Extension to Submit your Google Sitemap

Posted by Ashley on Jan 30, 2010 • (7)

I’ve made a new Magento extension for submitting your store sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing. My new extension can submit automatically whenever the sitemap is regenerated, or on-demand from the admin UI. More about how I made it and how it works below, but first a little background.
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