by Headcase Reviews
There has been a growing debate lately, pitting accessibility against usability. Our feeling is that if you can make a page more usable without making it less accessible, by all means do so; do not let your inability to translate certain usability enhancements into accessible functions or features restrict your use of those enhancements. As long as the enhancements do not restrict accessibility, go for it.
We at HeadCase Reviews have provided this site for people to look at and read (if they want) and see what our viewpoints are on certain sites. There shall be more reviews in the future.
Back to topHere is a layout of the key strengths that Amazon.com offers.
It is well known that it is the largest bookstore in the world to date, but
has developed over the years to retailing other items such as DVD’s, videos,
electronics, toys etc. It sells and offers millions of items, but when it opened
in 1995 the sales were $15.2 million with only books to sell (5 million titles),
now there is a massive range of nearly 20 million products including books,
DVD’s and electronics and so on bringing in sales of $2.5 billion. It
is obvious that these figures shows it success but the only reason given above
is that it offers a good range of navigation tools, so lets investigate this
a bit more precisely.
Amazon.com have made it principle to provide the customer with the simplest and user friendly browsing system to give quick and effortless browsing and searching of products, but also one that offers online security of payments. This is exactly what they have done, as once a user has entered in a search they are taken directly to the page and are told some brief details about the product but also are privileged to read previous reviews posted by customer ho have bought the same product, so they are given a sense of actually being in a shop and buying the product. Again another strength that Amazon offers is its broad selection of product range and the low prices that they offer them at; often giving additional products that may interest the customer, i.e. films that are directed by the same director.
Although the above features are important the most important one to most customers is the payment system, as they don’t want to be wrongly charged for a product. Amazon.com has researched into this and has come up with a simple 1-click order technology system which only requires the user to single click what they would like to purchase and it is added to their “shopping basket”, once they finished browsing and are ready to pay then they are entered into a secure page to complete the rest of their transaction.
Another of Amazon.com major strengths is that they get their massive product range as they buy in from business alliances such as Vodafone, Orange, O2, T-mobile for wireless mobile phones and ToysrUs.com for the toys line that they offer. Also due to the sophisticated software and technology that Amazon.com uses they are able to keep record of where specific user searched last time they were there and is capable of prompting if they are still interested in purchasing a product they left last time.
From just looking into the e-retailing business example of Amazon.com we can see that it certainly is able to bring in a mass of custom and sales but is also capable of handling the millions of credit card details and personal data smartly by not leaking them out to hackers. This system that Amazon.com employs has been imitated by thousand of other e-retailers with less effect such as E-Bay.com, so this another factor which draws back custom to Amazon.com, still Amazon.com is one of the biggest e-retailers if not the biggest and it is clear to see from the above short background report.
If you want to see the website for yourself then Bile anale
Back to topThe idea behind Friends Re-United came from Julie Pankurst wondering how certain people from her school year were doing, and thus the birth of friendsReunited.co.uk was born.
The method is simple as all a user needs to do is visit the site and find their school and enter the year they left and a list of hopeful familiar names should appear. The success and strength of the site is down to the ridiculously simple method that is used by the user to locate their friends, this was a major concern for owner and developer Steve Pankurst as many felt he should focus on graphical presentation, but he withheld knowing that what use is a beautiful design that does not function properly. What adds to the overall success of this website is that it only took two weeks to get the database to respond and react as it was expected, and a further few days to get the graphical front end design. FriendsReunited.co.uk is unique as Pankurst put no money into advertising the site and hardly any maintaining was needed but still in the initial year of launch 150,000 unique individuals hit the site. All of this came around what was seen as word of mouth but the site was not finished yet as there was still a bigger problem than they could of imagined arriving.
Soon the site was able to claim at average 200,000 hits a day but this upped dramatically again to 3million a few weeks later which caused problems, this meant adding more servers and tweaking code to maximize performance. The strength of the site being able to cope from this demand was clear from the "traditional" philosophy that the developers, Pankurst and Porter set out. They made it clear that they would create sites and put them out on the web but not fund them in any way so that if they flop it is minimal money lost and if they boom then they have the money to invest as the situation mentioned previously.
From researching the site the biggest strength factor along with the ease and simplicity of the site is that it is completely free and that it allows uses to post up information about themselves, and that they can receive free gifts if they are members and have paid their £5 as a kind of "thank you" donation, and it also provides much more features that are denied to non-members. FriendReunited.co.uk has been a success and still remains a success as the developers and founders are planning to develop similar projects such as WorkmatesReunited which would run on the basis of co-workers old and new, and Gradumates in the pipeline.
Again the success and strength of FriendsReunited.co.uk is that it does not try and become too complex, but keeps everything simple and easy allowing more and more people to keep using it and recommending it on to others.
If you are interested in viewing it for yourself then Click Here
Back to topThis site offers a wide selection of holiday cottages and larger houses to rent, with 9000 properties on offer in the UK, Ireland, France and Italy.
Search through the availability button or select the country of your choice and have a look by area. There are excellent details of the properties, with number of rooms, facilitiies such as washing machines, whether pets are allowed and distance to nearest towns.
Cottages 4 You also offer information on ferries and travel times as well as exchange rates.
Properties are inspected annually. If you prefer not to book online then you can request a brochure or telephone the office in Lancashire.
If you want to see more then Click Here
Back to topAimed at house buyers and property professionals this website searches seven main property portals for properties.
You can register for a 7 day free trial and after that payment is £10 per month. You then have to download (for free) the Java Applet to enable the search to take place. Once registered you can search by location or postcode, price and number of bedrooms.
The search is quick if you have broadband, but could be a bit slow if you don't. They come up with a list of properties from the portals for you to view, zoom in for more details and click through to the portal/website for the full specification.
Interesting to see which other property portals are added to the list.
If you want to see more then Click Here
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