AJAX - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Many online retailers must work harder to create a more personalised and interactive experience which does a better job of reflecting their brand, writes Aliya Zaidi.

Yahoo! has acquired Zimbra, a provider of web based email and online/offline office software, for a cash price of $350m (£175.5m).

Zimbra's product is essentially a web based version of Outlook, though the company recently added Zimbra Desktop, which allows users to access email and other functions when offline.

James Balmain is the founder of Webtogs, a new outdoor equipment and clothing retailer that’s set to launch a shop and very professional looking site in the autumn.

We asked James, who has little previous retail experience, how the Webtogs team is coping with the various challenges of launching an e-commerce start-up, especially in a sector that’s not as web-savvy as others.

For any budding etail entrepreneurs, it's well worth a read...

Jesse James Garrett , the man who coined the term 'Ajax' and president of Adaptive Path, has been talking to us about usability and the user experience. It makes for a great read.

Jesse's book, The Elements of User Experience, is one of the most widely read books on user-centred design, and he was recently named as one of the top ten user experience experts in an E-consultancy survey.

Here, we speak to him about the psychological background to web design, the pros and cons of behavioural targeting and Ajax, and why he thinks Amazon and eBay's usability has gone "astray".

RIAs like Ajax often have an accessibility weak spot since they need to work with JavaScript off to meet the basic accessibility guidelines.

Rumour has it that the next version of the popular screen reader Jaws may be able to handle Ajax interfaces. 

Yahoo! engineers had to start fixing a bug in a new live search feature, just a day after announcing the addition.

Yahoo! Search's Kevin Lee introduced the new Search Suggest function, which offers suggestions on search terms as a user types.

Even if you had a spy in the heart of your competitor's e-commerce team, you might struggle to answer this question.

It's far from impossible that your competitors are neither appropriately recording their web traffic nor confident in which metrics to analyse.

Web traffic measurement agency Nielsen/NetRatings will reportedly scrap the "page views" metric in response to the growing challenge posed by dynamic websites.

Ajax websites and web-based videos mean content can be loaded with no web page reloading, so the firm will begin instead reporting the length of time users spend at audited sites.

CNN is planning to relaunch its main news site in July with a major redesign and a number of Web 2.0 features, extending the site's choice of video and user-generated content.

Google is attempting to bridge the divide between online and offline working by releasing new software that syncronises the two.

At its Developer Day in Sydney today, the company announced Google Gears, an open-source technology platform that allows programmers to build websites that continue to function even without connectivity.