Page 180 - Electronic Commerce

Selling on the Web

connection type so that the streaming media adjusts itself to the bandwidth for that
connection.
A good site design lets visitors choose among information attributes, such as level of
detail, forms of aggregation, viewing format, and downloading format. Many online stores
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let visitors select their preferred level of detail by presenting product information by
product line. The site presents one page for each line of products. A product line page
contains pictures of each item in that product line accompanied by a brief description. By
using hyperlinked graphics for the product pictures, the site offers visitors the option of
clicking the product picture, which opens a page of detailed specifications for that
product.
The use of Adobe Flash to create animated graphic elements on Web pages has been
controversial for years (see, for example, WebWord.com’s Flash Usability Challenge pages
or Jakob Nielsen’s commentary on Ephemeral Web-Based Applications). Although some
Web site designers love Flash as a creative design tool, many electronic commerce sites
are reluctant to use it because of the nonstandard interface it can present to customers.
Web pages built with Flash (or large portions of those pages) are not rendered in HTML
and do not provide the same navigation tools or visual hints that Web pages created in
HTML offer. Flash files can be large and thus take a long time to download; another
issue is that Flash does not work on Apple’s iPhone and iPad products. This has increased
concern about its use in Web sites designed to be viewed on smartphones and tablet
devices.
As HTML 5 (which you learned in Chapter 2 includes the ability to include
multimedia links directly in the markup language itself) becomes more widely used, most
experts predict that the use of Flash will decline significantly. In the meantime, some sites
provide an option on their home pages that allows users to select Flash or non-Flash
versions of the site.
Some specific tasks that customers want to perform do lend themselves to animated
®
Web pages. For example, the Lee Jeans FitFinder is a series of Flash animation pages that
®
can help customers find the right size and style of jeans. One of the Lee Jeans FitFinder
animation pages is shown in Figure 3-7.

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