Thanks for the advice (and the reinforcement), Mike! I'm really pushing this client to try some innovative things on a tight budget. They have a great idea for a site and I think they need a UI to match.
There will be editorial and reference materials, and we're planning on selling banner ads, but I don't know if that'll be enough for Google. There are "similar items", but for now they're all preset by the manufacturer. I guess creating something that links the manufacturer pages together might do it. The client doesn't want anything visible to the user - they don't want a competitor getting a full view at the manufacturer list - but maybe I can make that page user-invisible. That's the closest thing to categories we have in the site. Maybe a page that has every search keyword on it, whether a cloud or just a list? I wish we had the money to do more with automated analysis and adaptation so the site makes better suggestions to the user. For now, it'll be pretty dumb, but if it does well we can start getting all sexy with ideas like yours. I've been designing web sites since the '90s, and studying UID for a while, but this is my first big acorn-to-tree UI site. I'm plowing a lot of my beefs with other sites and search engines into this, and probably going to lose money on it because the programming will cost more than my fee. But if I'm right, and all this stuff I'm trying works, it's a game changer... At least for me. Maybe it'll get me out of "graphic" design. I'm a movie director by training (with an engineer dad) and UX is, to me, a chance to bring my two loves together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38306 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
