I’ll be your host, Rob Fredley. For the last 20 years of my life I’ve been a designer, developer, and all around web guy.  For the last 11 of those years, my focus has been refined to ecommerce, branding, and developing sites and systems that marry customer needs with retailer desires. In that time, I’ve amassed quite a bit of knowledge, learned and developed best practices, and have the perspective of being one of those people that’s been doing this since the very beginning.

The realization that I should be writing this stuff down came to me about 4 years ago. Unfortunately, I’ve been far too busy actually doing the work to take the time to really sit down a write about it, so what I’m working from here is a bunch of notes, scraps and random thoughts.

One of the lessons I’ve learned is that if you’re not going to do something right, just don’t do it—but it feels like I have enough pieces right now at this very moment to try and do this right.  So here goes.

My format of choice may be a little scattered for many of you, but in the long run I think it’ll be far more entertaining and provide important context to the issues we all face on the web—especially the ones faced by retailers every day.

There are (literally) thousands of sites dedicated to lists, how-tos, and quick-fix answers.  Those of us actually creating sites know that reality is usually far more colorful and rarely as cut-and-dry, one-size-fits-all as most of the “experts” would have you believe. If you’re hoping for one more, short form, ADHD blog of lists parroted or reworked from another blog, move on. There’s enough of that out there now.

What this will be is longer form, more prose based, higher-level, strategic, and hopefully more thought provoking. In reality, it probably won’t be published weekly—though that’s what I aspire to.

What you can hope to learn about are modern concepts in ecommerce design and development, product asset development, branding, mobile strategies, seo, information architecture, graphic design, and more.

So, once again, welcome. May your visit be as entertaining, enlightening, and inspiring as I hope.