1 Jul 2007

Web Development 101

They say a picture is worth 1000 words. So a video should worth more than a picture. Definitely a hands on experience is worth much more than a video. All you starting web developers: here is your most important lesson. I'll tell you what I did to learn this lesson. If you follow what I did, hopefully you will also learn :-) Steps to follow:
  1. Think of a very good Tamil song that you don't have right now, but would love to add it to your music collection.
  2. Google for it and most likely you will get a link for that song in Raaga.com. (If not pick another song; in this particular exercise, we are gonna learn from Raaga.com.)
  3. Click on the link in Google results and if you are lucky, you can listen to the song in their site. If you run any non-Windoze OS you're doomed.
  4. Then you decide: alright, I really like this song and I'm gonna download. Click on "Download" button. You will be politely informed (with a JavaScript alert) that you got to log in if you want to download.
  5. So, you click on Register link. And you know the rest: I am too lazy to type all that now.
  6. You will have to activate your account, this, that, and all other bullshit.
  7. After you have downloaded that song, sit back and think "do I want my site to be as brain-damaged as Raaga.com?"
If you are really unfortunate (like me) you will end up visiting their site often and curse them every time. See my shopping cart now: I have no idea how item 2 and 3 differ. Worse, I cannot find that out at all. That's all for now. Now you're free to dream about your cool web site.

4 comments:

  1. Well well well.. I didn't even know Raaga sells music. :O I very rarely use Raaga... in case of downloading Tamil music I use tamilbeat.com

    Coming back to topic,I didn't understand the post... Are you talking about duplication of the song on the cart? I mean is that all?

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  2. Venkat: I seriously tried to buy music from their site. Navigating their site was an awful experience. It was not intuitive. Moreover, signing up for an account, activating etc. were unnecessarily difficult.

    I am not talking about duplication of songs in the cart; in fact there's no duplication in that cart at all. Those two songs are sung by two different singers. They could have made the items in shopping cart as links to the actual item description.

    It's the usability factor of the site that makes me grumpy. I tried to buy music three times. Every single time I got irritated and gave up in the middle of the process.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Now you know why iTunes went on to sell 2.5 billion songs! Yes! Developers need to concentrate more on usability these days.

    ReplyDelete