Patio Umbrella Land – the blog

I know, I know.  I haven’t blogged in months about the status of our site.  I haven’t done a lot of things, but I just got really, reallly happy when I realized that we where finally started our HTML markup.  For those that don’t know, html is HyperText Markup Language.

What?

It’s the language that describes how to render a web page in a browser.

And it’s time that we started the work.  This project has been a real long process, but now that we have all of our Sunbrella and Outdurda fabric, as well as some polyester prints, and some olefins, we’ve got what is going to be the Largest Patio Umbrella program in history put together, and it’s going to be alot of fun putting together.

Now, we’re not ready to rollout the site, we’re just putting the HTML together, the building blocks of how the website will actually layout on your computer screen, and we are trying to make it as cross-browser compatible as possible.  We are using alot of CSS, but, and we don’t wan’t to dissappoint a lot of xhtml/css junkies out there, we’re using a base table design as the most basic, basic, basic outline.  We’re forced to because of our e-commerce engine, so please don’t picket us.  It’s one of the tenets of do it wrong quickly.  It’s high time we get out there, and as soon as possible.

But ooohh, it’s getting fun now.

Website navigation, I feel, is pretty crucial.  Although there are great search technologies available, I think that it’s best for a shopper to find what they are looking for within a click or two from the home page.  That’s why we’re building what we hope to be a very precise and easy to use navigation system into our framework.

Using both text and images, pretty much our whole offering should be readily available from the front page.  It’s taken us a while to really work out the details, but we feel that we’ve created a navigational system that is both easy to understand and easy to follow.

I don’t think that a lot of e-commerce sites really put a lot of thought into their navigation system.  After looking through some heat map testing, we see a lot of web user’s going straight for the search.  This is really a double edged blade, in my opinion.  On the one hand, the good news is that the average web user is well versed in internet technology and uses, they know what a search is.   However, on the other hand, it also means that they didn’t see what they where looking for when they got to the page.  This is probably a good indication that a site’s bounce rate (how many users bounce off the page) might be high, and really could be avoided.

So far, I’m pretty happy with the nav system we are working on.  In essence, it’s a project unto itself, and we’re finding really exciting ways of changing an old system of looking for something, into a new system of finding something.