My Demos

[vDesign]

:hi:

I'd like to know what you think about these websites:
www.vmall.byethost9.com
www.v-mall.byethost6.com/ajax/

The first one uses AJAX for the shopping cart and the second one is a fully AJAX driven website (v-mall.byethost6.com is the non-AJAX version). I must admit I'm not much of an artist but the websites are XHTML W3C valid, support multiple font sizes and all major web browsers, are fast (for a free web server) and safe. For the vmall I've used a custom PHP script to read the SEO URLs instead of .htaccess.

The websites are hosted by the byethost servers ( www.byethost.com ). They are pruity professional and have payed plans too. I'd recommend them if you need a hoster.

 

[Mike]

Both look to outdated to me. You could consider different template(s) with more up-to-date representation of web design standards. It doesn't all have to be Web 2.0, but a few elements can't hurt.

M.

 

[vDesign]

Yea, I've designed it myself. I need alot of time to get a design right since I'm not much of an artist.
What about the AJAX/overall functionality ?

 

[crazyluv]

I'm not going to comment on looks since you already know it's lacking.

I'm not too savvy in ajax or web 2.0 but the sites functionality seems good. Everything works, the layout is organized and easy to navigate. I assume you can place product pictures on both pages, right? and that most thing are editable.

Like I can remove the calendar in v-mall.byethost6.com if it serves no purpose and make the cart always appear on the page (since customers might not notice that it magically pop in when they clicked add).

Seems like a nice tool I would just like to add this small opinion:

vmall.byethost9.com has a xhtml button, I wouldn't place this on a live page since most customers don't really care about it, making it a waste of space, although for displaying functionality and such to developers its a good add on.

 

[vDesign]

Yea, you know... I built 'em as demos. I could take out the calendar and some other non-sense you've mentioned to add banners for example, as probably a customer would like/need. Also the v-mall.byethost6 was one of my first websites, now I'm using loading messages and such for the AJAX and it was all one big test, I've built everything from scratch and the calendar was just to see if I can come up with something like that, as I found out is far complex than one would think of such a "basic" application.

I've built an AJAX website for a customer with far more intuitive interface: http://www.vframe.byethost2.com/twerq/sr/ . You get all sort of messages with this one when AJAX is doing something.

I know the importance of having a visible cart preview. Like lately, I'm developing a shopping cart class, you can find some demos here: http://www.vframe.byethost2.com . You will see 3 demos and I'm using for each of them different setups, with some demos the shopping cart preview is vissible and with some is not.

Unfortunately you're right about the XHTML banner too, people don't care much about standards. I usually check websites out to see if they are W3C compatible but just because I'm a web developer. It's there to make it easier for potential customers to see the quality of my programming as the websites were built as demos to showcase my best practice regarding web development.

EDIT: about product pictures, I don't sell anything, actually I built a generator to populate the database with products (for v-mall). Of course I could add pictures, info about products and whatever a potential customer wants.

Another EDIT: the database was populated with generated names to make it easier to test the search functionality. That's why the product names don't make any sense but you can notice they follow an algorithm.

 

[crazyluv]

You got some nice scripts there, everything seems to be in working order. Only thing I found was on the http://www.vframe.byethost2.com page. Demo 1 has some HTML issues (in firefox at least), other that all seems good.

I do have some suggestion though; add some product pictures with you test info (even if its the same unrelated image for all items) since more often then not people will ask for this. Make sure you make the pages easy to skin (haven't checked if you had) and customize, people love this.

Good luck!