There were quite a few components of the project that needed to come together in very short period of time: the overall look/feel of the applications (including functionality), RSS news feeds and events, the video media, subscription section, and analytics.

Design and Functionality
Using an outside company to develop an application can sometimes limit design somewhat. We went through various iterations of the splash screen and over-all look/feel. The icons and brand recognition were particularly important — especially since there are numerous applications associated with the KCRW brand. An important aspect of the main navigation was the ease in which listeners can join the station.

News and Event Feeds
Our primary website developer created a custom RSS feed in Plone specifically for the iPhone. Users can now stay up to date with Good Food and music related KCRW events and the RSS feeds can be used for other projects.

Video Format
Media is encoded in H.264 and uploaded to our CDN at 640×480 then auto-transcoded into high and low versions. The application detects bandwidth and serves appropriate versions.

Analytics
Pinch Media provides the (almost) real-time analytics on usage and uptake.

Subscribe to KCRW
A feature that was later removed was a “join” section. All KCRW applications were to include a section for member support but it was later found out that Apple doesn’t allow this functionality built into the application. The original plan was to host this section on the KCRW servers for easy updates. I used iWebKit_4.5.3 to make the website — which would’ve eventually been integrated with a secure mobile Ecommerce solution for the iPhone. Magento was an obvious option (with an iPhone skin already available) but found the integration with non-profit CRM systems lacking.

COMING SOON: A KCRW Fringe Benifits application for members, and a tricked out media player…

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.

For the full pdf, click here (Stanford.edu)

For more customized self-hosted solutions I tend to go with Zen Cart. Its open source, there’s a ton of plugins, and an extensive developer network for support. Lately though, I’ve become more interested in Magento. While I’ve heard the server load can be intense, the theme system looks very intuitive, and minor details (like mobile commerce support) make their application very attractive.

For small scale boutique sites I’ve come across a few hosted shopping cart solutions: E-Junkie, Shopify, and Foxycart. E-Junkie looks great except they offer no support for UPS shipping (a requirement for a recent client) and Shopify is fairly expensive for what you get (and you’re locked into their CMS system — which works for some people, but not for a web designer). I recently launched a site using Foxycart — a hosted solution charging a flat per-month fee. So far its worked great. The cart is easily customizable, works flawlessly with an Authorize.net gateway (and they use their own SSL certificate). Most importantly for this particular client, Foxycart supports automatic UPS shipping calculation and discounts over a certain price in a specific product category.