Ross Since as you said this was a bit of a "cheap marketing email" I'm going to retaliate by providing what I hope will be constructive criticism:
- I hate menus that disappear! The way the menus disappear completely makes the site hard to use. I flipped windows whilst the site was loading (sorry short attention span) and when I came back the menus had already gone - took me a while to find them. - The site's infuriatingly slow - all the ui transitions are too slow for my liking. - There are some positioning issues whereby the close icon is half cut off by the edge of the screen - When you go into looking at one of the products (http://www.michaelhill.com/#ProductList?ProductMenuItemId=8&ProductMenuSubItemId=&ParentScreenId=3) it's then not clear where to go from there..... General feedback - visually it's quite pleasing. Navigation leaves quite a bit to be desired. Nick Randolph | Built To Roam | Microsoft MVP - Device Application Development | +61 412 413 425 The information contained in this email is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not disclose or use the information in this email in any way. Built To Roam does not guarantee the integrity of any emails or attached files. The views or opinions expressed are the author's own and may not reflect the views or opinions of Built To Roam. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ross McKinnon Sent: Tuesday, 1 December 2009 9:51 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Our new silverlight site Hi all, as you guys aren't exactly our target market, this can't be considered a cheap marketing email to promote our new website, but more a demonstration of how silverlight can be utilized to create a global retail branding site. On Monday, we released our new website which is written completely in silverlight. If you get a chance to look at the site (www.michaelhill.com<http://www.michaelhill.com>) it has a number of interesting technical features that I would like to point out to you all. 1. Heavy integration of smooth streaming video. 2. Deep zoom for the product carousel. Significant bandwidth savings are made by the in-built lazy loading of deep zoom product images, plus the natural friction effect. 3. Integrated video inside a deep zoom image (company history section). 4. Search engine optimisation. 5. Deep linking : a. From search engine optimisation links b. Send to friend links c. Browser integration with forward/back buttons d. Sets the browser/tab title e. Appropriate link / title for adding to browser favourites. 6. Client side state. This reduces load on server such that when a user visits a page once, then navigates away / back, the application doesn't have to fetch data from the server. This is difficult to do in a traditional web application. 7. Custom install experience. 8. Analytics integration (via google analytics / javascript). 9. Isolated storage allows us to persist a 'super cookie' using serialized C# objects. 10. MVVM pattern. Dependency injection. 11. Application lifetime objects / client side services. 12. Animations / effects / scaling create smoother experience for user without unsightly page refreshes. 13. ADO.NET data services integration. Rest based / loosely coupled / dynamic data access. a. Easy to secure via policies rather than code. 14. Data driven application, where all menus / and content on particular screens can be changed via CMS. For example, the product carousels are all data driven. Dynamic loading of Xaml at runtime allows us to substitute in content / animations without rebuilding the application. You might have seen Ross Jempson post to the silverlight list occasionally. He is the owner and primary developer of the development company that implemented our site. We believe we have achieved a fantastic result and the capability of silverlight has helped us get there. Enjoy, Ross (on day 1.....)
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