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Hey there!

You’ve probably noticed that we’ve begun adding a few new features to Think Vitamin (like Think Vitamin Radio!) and welcoming some new regular writers to the team (like @Grace Smith, @KyleBragger, and me!). During Future of Web Apps Miami, we began experimenting a bit with a news feature, rounding up items that are timely, helpful, and quite a few that are downright inspiring and smattered with quirk.

We’d love your help matching up great contributions with our editorial schedule, it’s a time for you to submit great content you’ve been working on or have discovered yourself and get a little link love from Think Vitamin.

• Monday—All things web design (ux, photo, illustration, art, graphics, CSS, jQuery, tutorials, and more)
• Wednesday—Core stories on web development and business (apps, people, practices, and more)
• Friday—The best in “interestingness!” (lego constructs, stop-motion animation via YouTube, Flickr finds, Tumblrs, and much more)

Send links to news@thinkvitamin.com (Big Hint: we love giving credit where credit is due! So include sexy email signatures with links to your content, but also to your personal Twitter, Blog, etc.)

Cheers!

Chrissie

Editors note: In his first article for Think Vitamin Rob Smith looks at his top five themes for e-commerce for 2010. Whether you are considering starting an online shop or have one that isn’t performing as well as you would like these valuable tips will help you on your way.

Purchasing online and e-commerce has been growing at a rapid rate for many years and during that time things have changed massively. From online merchandising to order management to delivery, things are constantly evolving.

This article is aimed at giving what I believe are 5 important themes in this area over the next year, and what you can do to help yourself or your clients prosper.

1: Focus on Growth and Existing Customers, Not New Ones

The number of online customers has been growing at a fantastic rate over the past decade fueled by the widespread adoption of broadband. This has resulted in an ever growing number of new potential online customers.

Due in part to the recession, and in part due to the slow down of broadband adoption as it reaches near ubiquity, the growth of potential customers is predicted to slowdown in 2010. This has the net effect of new customers being harder to acquire due to reduced amount of overall growth, and more people targeting these new customers as online retailers keep appearing every day.

This leads to the need to focus more on how well we do with our current customers. Examine your customer contact strategy and ask these questions:

• Do you regularly communicate with your customers?
• Have you segmented your database into groups of like minded people?
• Do you then send targeted messages to those segments?
• Have you increased your average reorder rate in the past year?

These questions will give you a good insight into how well you’re doing with your current customers. The time has come to step up your activity to try and retain and grow your current customers.

All the time other online retailers are targeting your customers to try and win their business. You need to work hard to keep building relationships with your customers so they don’t even think about looking elsewhere.

Bodon (a UK online and catalogue company) do a good job of email marketing and customer care, including emails like ‘You haven’t shopped with us for a while and we miss you’. These do a really good job of reconnecting with the user.

2: Tie your Channels Together

Customers will no longer accept (without damage to your brand) discrepancies across your channels. If you’re a bricks and mortar retailer then you need to be able to tie your online offering to your offline offering to ensure customers are not disappointed.

They should be able to order online and pick up in store an vice versa. If you have a telephone mail order element to your business that should tie in with your online business to allow order tracking. There are many more examples, but the bottom line is this:

Customers are becoming channel blind. They see all your ‘ways to order’ as being interlinked and interchangeable.

Here in the UK, Marks and Spencer (a “national treasure” of a retail company who have both bricks and mortar shops and online ordering) have done a good job of tying their channels together. You can order online and get it delivered to home, work, or to a store.

You can return items to a store or by freepost direct. It all makes the experience more congruent and feels like you’re dealing with one helpful company. Argos (one of the biggest UK retail companies) also do an excellent job with the ability to reserve items online for store pickup.

Gap, on the other hand, do a poor job. There’s been little investment in the online channel for the UK and Europe, you can’t even purchase online at point of writing, let alone reserve or see what stock is available.

3: Mobile is Coming

I know, it’s been coming for years. However it’s widely believed that smart-phone adoption will reach a critical mass in the next 12-18 months. What does that mean for us? Customers will have access to the internet or at least a much richer media experience via their phones. People generally always have their phones with them. On the train in the car, the office, at home on the sofa. Many more people have phones than laptops.

What does this mean for e-commerce? Will people really shop and look through entire catalogues to order? Maybe not. Will they bob on their phone to track their order? Maybe. It’s all about context and how they are using their phone to communicate with you and your service.

Some companies are already striving ahead. Pizza delivery companies like Dominoes and Pizza Hut are doing well in the space creating applications and mobile focused websites to help with ordering. It’s important to note that we don’t mean iPhone applications here. It’s a combination of applications and mobile focused websites that are the key. The iPhone is still not a massive % of the mobile space.

Other notable successes in this area are Amazon and Interflora. Some notable failures are Tesco (UK supermarket chain), Sainsburys (UK supermarket chain) and play.com (online entertainment retailer) – all without a whiff of a mobile site on my iPhone.

4: Focus on Form as Well as Function

A lot of e-commerce sites have become very good at getting the basics correct. Good, clear statements about delivery, stock availability and product information are becoming much more commonplace. Checkouts are getting easier to use and less cumbersome.

There’s been a positive focus by most major retailers over the past year to really improve the customer experience in this very functional way. If you or your clients have not got a lot of e-commerce best practice in place then you need to do so before you rapidly fall behind.

Now has come the time for these retailers, as well as smaller retailers, to invest more time in the form side of their sites. By this, I mean the visual merchandising and guided purchases. There’s a lot more that can be done by bundling “like” products together, allowing people to purchase packages of products as opposed to just one.

A good example of this would be a retailer who delivers products for the home. More needs to be invested in tieing products together via well photographed roomsets where people can then quickly and easily purchase items they like from that room. Especially if the brand is stylish or well regarded this approach can work very well as people very often like to reflect the image that a particular brand projects.

This can of course be done by smaller retailers as well. Electronics sites could easily bundle TV starter sets together or the ultimate HD kit . Not enough is being done to intelligently link single products together to form a more cohesive whole, and a better buying proposition.

Good examples of this are starting to crop up in many places but there’s still a lot to be done. Glasses Direct (online glasses retailer) do an interesting virtual mirror (even if it is only for Windows), Next (large UK retail brand for clothes and home) have a lot of videos showing models on the catwalk, and tobi.com even has an augmented reality dressing room focusing on the product and it’s form and connection with user, rather than the function of selecting and checking out.

Watch this YouTube video to learn more

5: Tweaks, not Wide Spread Overhauls

This is a theme for many normal websites, not just e-commerce sites, and revolves around tweaking and gradually evolving, instead of scraping and starting again. It’s a habit of the web industry, especially if you start working with a different agency or developer, to be tempted to throw out your current site and start again, and do that every two-three years.

This is incredibly expensive in comparison. The return on investment of an entirely new site without changing any other aspect is normally quite low, especially in the short term. It is wise to heavily evaluate what you will get from a new site. Why can’t you just refresh your current one, or just tweak some of the functionality and processes to make it more up to date for your customers’ needs?

Very often, a concentrated and considered approach to optimising your conversion rate can help your sites profits much more than a complete site overhaul. It’s not as sexy, and it’s not as exciting for either side, but it’s Return on Investment is normally far in advance.

Good ways to look at how to measure conversion rates can be heatmaps, user testing (either face to face or remote), and looking deeply into your analytics.

Amazon are the king of small changes done overtime making big overall differences. They continually evolve what they do but at a slow pace. The thing is, they do not want anyone to notice anything is changing – big overhauls will cost Amazon millions of abandoned carts due to everything now being different. To learn more about this read “Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart”.

Conclusion

A lot, as ever, is changing in e-commerce as it does every year. Customers are becoming more sophisticated in the way they use technology and the way that they shop. The better the experience they get from your site the better you will be at cutting through the noise of countless other retailers.

It’s really easy to start an online shop, it’s pretty tough to start a really good one. Make sure you have the basics sorted out first before looking towards future themes and cool technology. If it’s hard to pay on your site then all of the above should not be your focus. If on the other hand you’re now looking at ways to eek that extra bit of conversion and customer delight out of your site, then these are for you.

We’ve made it to the fourth installment of Think Vitamin Radio, we think this is the best one yet. No fluff, plenty of web talk and opinion. Let us know what you think in the comments.

A full transcript is available.

In this second part of a five-part series I go one step further in the implementation of the Data Mapper design pattern in PHP 5. Specifically, I build a simple MySQL abstraction class which performs a few common tasks. These include connecting to the database server and running hard-coded queries, fetching database rows and so forth.
- Put in a simple way, the Data Mapper design pattern is an elegant solution that allows developers to keep all of the domain objects handled by an application separate from the underlying persistence layer. This characteristic is commonly known as persistence ignorance. As with many other patterns...

Photo of Alex Hunter by http://www.alexdesigns.com/. Used with permission.

I’ve been lucky enough to make public speaking part of my career. It’s something I love doing and enjoy every second of, but that’s not the case for everybody. For many of you, the thought of standing up on stage fills you with vomit-inducing fear.

But I can’t stress enough how important it is to be able to clearly articulate your thoughts to an audience in an engaging manner, whether it’s a handful of your co-workers or 2000 people at a tech conference.

If you’re trying to get a project green lit, pitch your idea to investors, relay your experience to a group of bright eyed young developers, or rally your employees, keep the following few tips in mind.

1: Rehearse

Again and again and again. So you know every detail of your talk, all the slides and the order in which they appear. Practice in front of a mirror or even video yourself. This is the best way to find potential tripping points, inconsistencies, and also gives you a chance to weed out the crap jokes.

But more importantly, it will make you so comfortable with the content that you won’t need notes or prompts and you’ll appear conversational but knowledgeable.

2: Don’t repeat what is written on your slides

It’s painful when a speaker reads verbatim what is written on each slide. Give your audience some credit, they’re going to be pretty good readers so you don’t need to help them out. Your job is to give context and detail to the one or two lines (at the most) on a slide. Or in some instances, vice versa; I often use slides to add a quick parenthetical note to something I’m saying to the audience.

3: Don’t overload your slides

Further to the last bullet, nothing is uglier or less appealing than a slide with 15 bullet points and a graph. It’s confusing, cluttered, hard to understand and of no value to anyone as a presentation aid. In my recent keynotes, over 80% of my slides only have one line OR graphic/chart on them.

Sure it’s more clicking for me but this isn’t about me, it’s about the audience, and simple slides help you guide the narrative in a clear, concise way.

4: Make eye contact

This may sound like a no brainer but so many speakers spend their time looking at their feet, at their slides, at their notes – anywhere but the audience. If you don’t make eye contact with the people you’re talking to you end up looking like you’re talking to yourself, just like the guy you avoid sitting next to on public transport.

5: Know your audience

I spoke at a two-day tech conference recently and was scheduled to speak on the second day. This turned out to be a huge advantage for me because I spent the whole first day following the (substantial) Twitter traffic surrounding the event and I noticed some interesting trends in the audience reactions to speakers and their content.

As a result, I spent several hours that night retooling my presentation to better suit the audience – I like to think my keynote went down well the next day.

6: Move around

As a speaker, I loathe standing behind a podium when I speak – it feels like I’m preaching down from the pulpit and as far as I’m concerned public speaking is about conversation not lecturing. Also, a podium is physical barrier between you and the audience making it much harder to connect with them psychologically.

So wherever possible get out from behind that podium or lectern, get out on stage, move around, gesticulate and really CONNECT with your audience.

7: Don’t read the script

Reading word for word from a prepared script is the fastest way to put your audience to sleep. It’s also lazy. Don’t do it. It’s perfectly ok to have some notes jotted down which you glance at from time to time but anything beyond that is a disservice to your audience and to you as a speaker.

8: Slow down

It’s really easy to rush through your content and speak very quickly, especially if you’re nervous. It’s much easier for an audience to engage with your content if your delivery falls into a natural rhythm. Try to pace yourself and remember to punctuate your speech with pauses to emphasise key points.

9: Make ‘em laugh

Humor is my most powerful tool when I’m giving a presentation. I almost always try to get a laugh within the first 60 seconds of a talk. It relieves the collective tension in the room almost immediately and helps ease the transition into the bulk of the content.*

10: Be passionate and energetic

I learned this from the best, Mr. Gary Vaynerchuk, whose energy on stage is completely captivating. Look, chances are if you’re standing up in front of people giving a talk, you know what you’re on about – and if you know what you’re on about, you’re probably passionate about the subject.

So make sure you project that passion during your presentation! Raise your voice when it makes sense, be effusive, throw your hands up in the air when you’re making a point! That type of energy is totally infectious and your audience will appreciate the effort.

*A note on swearing during presentations. Those of you who have seen my Future of Web App keynotes might have noticed that I punctuate my talks with some occasional swearing. This is a calculated risk on my part and certainly not something I do whenever I speak at conferences.

Hell, if you did at work you’d probably be fired so I strongly suggest you suss out your audience before you drop F-bombs during your Quarterly Sales Review with the Board of Directors.

That’s the theory, here’s the real thing

Ed: The following video is of Alex’s presentation from Future of Web Apps London 2009.

Regular readers of Think Vitamin may know that Carsonified, the company behind the blog, also run a number of web related events in Europe and the USA. We thought you might like to know that we recently launched our free to join event affiliate program. Here’s how we describe it on the web site:

The Carsonified Affiliate Program allows you to earn money. Every time a ticket to an event is purchased thanks to someone clicking on your affiliate link or banner we pay you £20. Sell five tickets through your site and earn £100, sell twenty and treat yourself to a new laptop.

Here’s Ryan to tell you a bit more about it:

You might wonder what Ryan is pointing to in the video. He’s referring to the new page on our web site dedicated to the affiliate program.

On it you will find all you need to know about how to sign up to the program and will also be able to grab banners for all of our upcoming events including:

• Think Vitamin HTML5 Online Conference
• The Future of Web Apps Dublin
• The Future of Web Design London

If you have any questions about the program please do get in touch via e-mail: affiliates@carsonified.com

Visit our new affiliate web page to find out all you need to know.

In this third installment of a four-part series, I show you that a private constructor can be truly helpful when strictly implementing the Singleton design pattern. In this case, the pattern will be applied within a class that behaves like a simple MySQL abstraction layer, but the same concept can be extended to other classes.
- At first sight, declaring a constructor method protected or private in PHP 5 seems to be a rather irrelevant and even boring topic. The process doesnt differ too much from specifying one of those levels of restriction for a regular class method. However, this first impression may be misleading. ...

As the iPad nears its shipping date, iPad developers are flocking to the Objective-C platform and Apple's SDK 3.2
- Using the same development platform as the iPhone, the iPad has caused a marked surge in use of the iPad development software and emulators almost as strong as the market is picking up the actual iPad units. The iPad itself sold well over 155,000 units in just over three days. Developer's interes...

In today’s constant-distraction-and-huge-todo-list culture, it’s extremely easy to get sidetracked by things that aren’t vital to achieving your goals.

Here are some simple tips for making sure you’re not wasting a large percentage of your time on things that don’t matter.

#1 Gather Your Todos

I use Remember the Milk to record all my todos. I group them by projects and then assign due dates and priorities. They also have a great iPhone app which syncs automatically with the web app.

Whether you use Remember the Milk or another tool, it’s super important to write things down as soon as you think of them. If you don’t, then you’ll constantly be plagued by the feeling that you’re forgetting something (I have over 500 tasks currently active in Remember the Milk).

#2 Organize Your Todos on Monday Morning

A sure-fire way to waste 50% of your time is to charge into the week without organizing your todo list and inbox. There will be hundreds of things shouting for your attention and you need to proactively choose which things are important to you – not things that other people say are important for you to do. As someone once said …

Your email inbox is a todo list that anyone can write to.

Here’s how to organize your todo list:

1. Block off the first hour of every Monday to organize your todo list. Turn off instant messenger, close email and silence your phone. You need absolute silence so you can focus. I tend to do this from 5am – 6am on Monday mornings, before my wife and son wake up.
2. Go through the todo lists for all your current projects (in Remember the Milk in this example) and pick important things that you need to do this week. Prioritize them and assign them a due date this week, or tag them with ‘thisweek’.
3. Use a tool like TadaLists.com and create a list called ‘This Week’. It’s important that this is separate from your main repository of todos (Remember the Milk in this example).
4. Take a deep breath and ask yourself “What are the things that I could work on this week that will get me closer to my longterm, important goals?”. (These things may not even be on your Remember the Milk todo lists.)
5. Put several of these things on your ‘This Week’ list in TadaList and prioritize them by putting the most important things first. Make sure these are atomic, do-able things (not big concepts like ‘Increase signups by 3%’).
6. Go back to Remember the Milk (or whatever tool you’re using) and filter it by tasks due this week.
7. Pick several of the important ones and copy them over to your ‘This Week’ list in TadaList.
8. Close Remember the Milk and only refer to the small ‘This Week’ TadaList for the rest of the week.

What you’ll find is that you had a ton of things that you were supposed to do this week (in your Remember the Milk list) but only 10 or 20 of them are really important. Those 10 or 20 items should be added to your TadaList. At that point, I’d close your Remember the Milk list, and only look at your TadaList for the rest of the week.

Another reason to distill your huge weekly todo list down into a smaller list is that it will keep you motivated and excited, as you’re consistently finishing your todos for the day, instead of having 15 undone items at the end of the day.

Here’s a screenshot of an example TadaList. Note that I’ve created a pretend item called ‘==== END TODAY =====’. This helps me see what I’m supposed to complete today, and feel good about it once they’re all done.

#3 Stick to Your Guns

The most important thing is to stick to your simple ‘This Week’ todo list (the TadaList in this example) and not get distracted when new things get thrown at you. Just remember that you have control over what you’re doing and whether it’s helping you move towards your longterm, important goals.

Don’t waste 50% of your time on things that don’t matter.

In this fourth part of a seven-part series, I demonstrate how to use the PHP reflection API to retrieve useful information about the properties declared by a specific class. Reflection allows you to do more with properties of a class than determine their visibility or learn the values assigned to them, but that's what we'll be covering here.
- In case youre not aware of it, among the many enhancements and helpful features that were added to PHP 5, theres one that has been unfairly overlooked by many developers. This might be because at first glance it doesn't seem to be as useful as the others. Yes, as this articles title suggests, Im t...