– Done one advertising related web site but not updated on my portfolio site because owner has not officially launched the site
– Designing Easter theme for a Danish client, ongoing..
– Designing virtual restaurant in Facebook Restaurant City, but.. getting a bit bored
– Browsing fashion online shop repeatedly yet forbidding my finger to add items into the shopping cart

Oh no, it is already March 2010! Hmm, just a little updates to let the world know that I have not fainted but going into hibernation, for a while…

The second review is on Victoria’s Secret. I shopped less frequent at VS but started my first purchase on Aug 2008. The reason is simply they don’t add in new stock frequently as compared to RalphLauren.com.

Shipping: VS provide direct shipping back to Singapore and I find that it is much cheaper to ship direct rather than using a 3rd party shipping like VPOST.
Initially the items took more than 2 weeks to reach me but over the time, the shipping improved and took about 10 days.

Quality of clothing: Sweaters are pretty good in material wise and I really love their styles especially the sweaterdresses. I simply can’t resist my temptation and have recently bought this dress(see picture below) even though I might not be able to wear it now in my humid and warm country.

I love their shirts which are in cotton/spandex and it is very comfortable and fitting. Below are those that I have purchased recently.

Their blouse/bra top are not bad too but my advice is not to choose those very light color like white. I have bought a white polo dress and have never wore it once(guess will not wear it at all) because it give me that kind of “naked” look as the inner wear can be seen through.

Conclusion: I would come back to shop becasue of the generous discount sometimes and for those lovely shirts and sweaters. But I do wish that Victoria’s Secret can frequently update new range of clothing in future which they don’t seem to have improved over these years.

Next will write on JShoppers.com, a japanese based online shop.

The first one that I am going to review is Ralph Lauren. I have been a regular to this site since 2008. During the 1st year, everything from shipping to the quality of clothes were perfect. Shipping has always be fast and satisfactory. But things started to turn sour since the begining of this year.

I bought a tight skirt on Jan and when I received my item, there was dirt visible on it. So without hesitation, I hand washed it immediately. To my horror the black dye ran like mad under the running tap. The light yellow part of the skirt was stained with the black dye and as you can imagine, the whole skirt was in terrible condition. I didn’t even have a chance to wear it for once. I had taken a few pictures and sent them to the RL customer service. During that time I did receive a prompt and courtesy reply from them. The customer service requested the item to be sent back for inspection. After checking with my local post service provider, I realized the cost of sending back the item to US was expensive, even more expensive than I were to buy another piece of the skirt. I wrote back to explain the whole situation to RL. As a courtesy, a credit for the skirt have been issued back to me.

Well, at that time I just wondered why did such a big and reputable shop has such an under-sight on their part, to not run through a more thorough quality inspection. Nevertheless I continued to have faith in Ralph Lauren and still shop with them regularly after this incident.

So, things went fine for a few more purchases but the horror began on September. Sigh!

There was a sale on September and my best friend wanted to buy a few clothing from RL as well, we combined our order as one and I was the one who make the purchase. When the items finally reached us, all were in good condition except a white shirt which my friend ordered for her hubby. We had not yet opened it from the wrapping plastic bag, the bag itself was already being cut with a big hole as shown in pictures below.

What could I say? Am I always the unlucky one to receive such a bad quality which slipped out from a supposed to be tight quality controlled big shopping giant like Ralph Lauren? Also, we noticed that all the 3 pieces of clothes(those good one) have a “QA inspected” sticker on them(on the plastic wrapper) EXCEPT the defected shirt. Therefore this appears to me that somehow that defected piece got slip out from RL usual QC check and reached the unlucky me! Again, I sent in the photos to file a complaint to the RL customer service. But in this mail, I have indicated that we have no intention to send back the item due to the high shipping cost back and forth and we were deeply disappointed but rendered this to our bad luck.

This time, added to my disappointment, there was a 2-line reply 3 days after I have sent in the mail, like these:

CustomerAssistance@RalphLauren.com 1-888-475-7674
Visit us at www.RalphLauren.com

Can anyone imagine how would I feel at that moment? It was an indeed bad customer service, not only bad but rude! I guess we at least deserve a sincere apology from RL for sending out something which apparently did not pass the quality check. I wrote back and voiced out my disappointment with lines like these: “Although we do not expect anything from RalphLauren.com BUT we do expect an apology from RalphLauren.com to address such a negligence/lack of careful inspection on your side before the purchased items are being sent out to the customer . And may be an assurance of better quality inspection for any future order.
Since this appears to us that it might be some human-made mistake during your packing process, we decided to bite the bullet by not asking for an exchange as it will probably cost us a shipping price that is higher than the shirt itself. However we still sent in the complaint and hope that RalphLauren.com will make some clarification and apologize on this issue. Instead, what we received are just 2 lines of links without a human touch, “cold” and short.”

It was then after the above mail was sent, I received a reply with short apology from RL. These comes rather late to me. I was deeply disappointed.

Well, both my friend and I are not those picky type and we understand the risk of online shopping. Some minor flaws here and there are acceptable as long as the clothes are still wearable. However in both cases above, the skirt and the shirt were absolutely not wearable at all.

Conclusion: I have always be a loyal customer of Ralph Lauren as I truly like the design of their clothing but after these 2 separate incidents which indicate “emerging” poor quality inspection , I indeed lose some faith in RL. It is really a hard decision whether to continue shopping with them and at the same time have worry whenever I make a new purchase. Or am I the only unlucky soul out there? Sigh!

Next will write on Victoria Secret, stay tuned..

Recently has been rather addictive about the games in Facebook, especially Restaurant city. Building up the interior of the restaurant is kind of fun, sort of fulfilling my interior design dream.

Anyone fan of this game?

Before I start, I would like to emphasize that this is solely based on the view point of a designer regarding the template system and not on a standpoint of an owner. Why would I say so? Well, for owner or anyone else who wish to open a webshop and start selling right away, webshop v5.5 is a good start, simply because the ease of use as most of the settings are controlled in the admin panel. There are a number of default templates and styles that one can set easily with very little knowledge of html programming. As far as I can see, this webshop is rather popular with its Danish clients.

But on a designer point of view, it is really a pain in terms of programming and setting up custom templates here and there. As I mentioned earlier, most settings, including templates, css styles and add-on modules has to be done via admin panel. The codes are pretty messy as the system auto-inserts quite a number of redundant codes which in returns, designer will need to find ways to "hide" it in order not to disrupt with the intended design. An example is that many non-semantic "<span>" tags are added un-neccessary here and there and therefore efforts need to be taken if a block level element is required here, either by changing its’ default display property with css or doing a small "hack" of "un-span" and "re-span" later in between the block level elements that one intend to insert.

In addition, this system is "table" codes based and hence messy nested table are seen every where. I have to close one eye on my developer tool "HTML tidy" sitting right at the bottom of Firefox window where warnings statistics show up with a flying color. To name a few: "<html>" and "<body>" tags can appear in the middle of some content pages, styles declared inside <td> elements etc..

Finally I survive through the design and implementation phases by significantly lowering down my expectation towards producing a design that passes W3C validation with warning and error free. And most of all, with great patience. Giving me a choice, Zen-cart is still my preferred option so far.

This much for now…. and last but not least, just for sharing, a nice piece of artwork from deviantArt by gigi4g.

What is jQuery?

Extracted from the official home of jQuery.com:

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

Let’s go straight to explore the cool plugins now…