Big Trapeze

Almost two years ago I launched a little side-project called PodAPic. Basically, I take user-uploaded photos and turn them into iPod ads (check out the gallery). It’s been fairly successful, and a tremendous learning process–especially with marketing and customer relations. I really haven’t updated the look of the site since the launch, so it was about time. The refresh includes the new “iPod Nano� styled ads, and, as an added bonus, all photos are now $4.99 (instead of $5.99 - $9.99).

In my logs I noticed that on the previous version of PodAPic, I lost a lot of people after they uploaded their pictures. I was allowing users to upload a photo, add a caption, select a color, and then submit the information and confirm their entries on a second page. From this page, they could submit their order to me. My traffic logs showed a lot of exits from this page, so to combat that, I used Noah Winecoff’s take on Lightbox techniques to get the user image and offer the appearance of keeping users on the same page. I think it’s a more effective approach, and I think I’ll notice a difference on order completions.

Check out PodAPic when you get the chance–and if you like it, link to it from your blog and I’ll do a free PodAPic for you.

Lately, while developing sites, I’ve started to deal with a lot of form submissions, and I’m finding that it takes extra steps to prevent people from accidentally submitting a form twice. Double-posting (hitting the Submit button more than once, or refreshing a page where data has been processed) can lead to all sorts of bad problems. Imagine if PayPal had no mechanism in place to prevent a double post. When you win an auction and pay John Q. $500 for the latest smartphone, you don’t want to be able to refresh the page or hit submit again and pay him an additional $500 bucks. Most of the time, your browsers will give you a warning, much like:

I find those alerts more annoying and confusing than helpful, so I’d like to get rid of them completely. I’ve got a couple of HTML/PHP examples that demonstrate a typical form submission and a modified one that doesn’t show any POSTDATA messages.

You’ll probably want to use some more programming to further prevent double-posts, and I’ve developed a PHP class that may be useful to you. Check out the Post Block class and example here.

Apply BOTH techniques for a post-blocking double-whammy…