Wowza, A New Website – Part IV

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Hi, I’m Sean, the web guy around these parts and this is the last in a series on the new website design here at Salsaddiction.  (Get to part one, two and three).  In this entry we will be covering the blog, unsubscribe and a few other pages.

Starting with the blog:

 

  • Gravatar Profiles for commentors and us bloggers
  • The blog page has “infinite scrolling” which means you never have to reload the page to continue reading, just scroll to the bottom and it will load another set of blogs posts.
  • A lot of work has also gone into the comments section including Gravatar profile icons, timed re-editing and email notifications.  In fact, why don’t click on this post, and try them out for your self at the bottom?

 

Another feature is the custom unsubscribe page (make sure to refresh it!) which we hope is not a page you ever use.  When you press “unsubscribe” a lot of things kick off, first, it uses Ajax to keep your browser from refreshing and sends a command to the server to unsubscribe.  That server then talks to our Mailman newsletter server and either unsubscribes you or sends back an error, which is then passed back to the page and displayed.  Try it with a fake email and see what you get back!  If you accidentally unsubscribe your self, just use the subscribe feature on the drop down!

This website has also been tested on a variety of browsers and devices, for example:

 

  • Firefox
  • Safari
  • Internet Explorer (v8 and v9)
  • Chrome
  • iPhone and iPad (ongoing improvement)

Hope you enjoy your stay,

Sean.

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Wowza, A New Website – Part III

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Hi, I’m Sean and this is part three in a series on the new website and talks about Woocommerce, an ecommerce plugin for WordPress.  For most of the life of the SA website, Magento, another shopping cart solution was used, however, it was overkill for the small number of products that are sold here on Salsaddiction.

For our user, the shopping cart provides a lot of useful features:

 

  • First, you can find a complete list of all the classes being offered in one place.
  • It offers a simple but obvious interface, for example, if, while on the registration page, you click on “Add to cart”, it will quietly add the product and let you continue shopping.  A little bit of custom javascript was added to make sure you know when something is in your shopping cart:
  • It also includes reviews and if you look closely at the bottom of the page, a breakcrumb was added in case you want go back to see subcategories of classes, like just Cuban, for example.

 

Woocommerce is one of three top WordPress shopping cart solutions and after a lot of research, was chosen over the others.  Probably the formost reason is because it is under active development and closely mirrors Magento, the environment the previous cart was built on.

It has also proved easy to customize as the Registration page has been built from the bottom up to give you a clear list of all the classes going on at any one time.

Cheers,

Sean.

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