Ecommerce site Design Glossary: All You Need To Know About Graceful Degradation

When a person tries to develop an ecommerce website a number of things are needed to be kept in mind. This includes the kind of browser that the customer might use to login to your ecommerce site design. There is a lot of range of web browsers itself. Many new features have come up with modern browsers which lack in the old browsers. Now in this situation you have two choices. Either you make a website according to the old browsers that looks average in modern browsers or the one that is quite fascinating and have a dynamic appearance in modern browsers. Graceful degradation is all about how your ecommerce web design looks in different browsers.

Whats Graceful Degradation

Graceful degradation is a technique or a process that creates a good ecommerce site in modern browsers and degrades the appearance gracefully in the old browsers. It thus means

• Making your site look as much as nice possible in the old browsers even after adding some additional feature of new modern browsers
• Gracefully degrading its appearance means that the quality of appearance will be degraded in old browsers but still the Ecommerce website design will be quite approaching to the customer
• It makes your website to look beautiful in modern browser as well as the old web browsers

Hence, one can deduce that graceful degradation is all about making your ecommerce web development as much as relevant as a person can by degrading its some features gracefully in some browsers.

Another Part Of Graceful Degradation: Progressive Enhancement

Just like graceful degradation there lies another process called progressive enhancement with a slight difference with graceful degradation.

In graceful degradation where ecommerce web development is done on the modern browsers and the features are gracefully degraded to the old browsers, progressive enhancement focuses on developing ecommerce site for old browsers and then adding newly features to the modern browsers. It can be thus said that:-

• Both of them are one at the same but uses different approaches
• One starts from the modern browsers whereas other from the old ones
• Progressive enhancement focuses on adding few features later on whereas graceful degradation believes in filtering some features gracefully

This is how the two differ but have the same motives at the end of the day. There just lies a difference in the ways the ecommerce web development takes place. Apart from that, everything else is the same.

Rules Of Graceful Degradation

As graceful degradation gracefully degrades few features in the old browsers there are few basic rules or concepts that will help an ecommerce web developer to make a good ecommerce site, as you don’t know from which browser your customer will be logging in also you cannot ask your customer to download modern browsers. Hence, here are some rules about graceful degradation

• Use easy compliant code for developing your ecommerce site design
• For adding extra designs use the external sheets and layouts
• Make use of the scripts externally while developing your ecommerce site
• See if the content is properly visible in all kind of browsers.

The above rules will help you to make a good ecommerce website with a good appearance in all browsers.

Pros & Cons Of Graceful Degradation

Now each and every concept in this world is not perfect and has some pros and cons. The case is same with graceful degradation. So, let us have a look towards few pros and cons of graceful degradation

The Pros

• It makes the process of creating complicated user interfaces easy and fast
• It makes the ecommerce developer to focus on ecommerce web development rather than thinking about the compatibilities and complications
• It gives a good appearance to your ecommerce site in old as well as new kind of browsers

The Cons

• This process may sometime lead to complications that will increase the development time as well as make the process quite difficult
• Designing applications and ecommerce sites through this approach may make it quite bulky which may fail to leave a good impression on the customers’
• Sometimes, the functionalities may fail which may ask the customer to update the browser for seeing them. This can be the worst thing for any ecommerce site.

With few pros and cons, this graceful degradation is still a good way to develop and ecommerce site. All you need to do is to use it the best way you can.

An Overview On Graceful Degradation

Graceful degradation can thus be defined as a methodology used for ecommerce development. This uses a fall back approach and focuses on making your ecommerce site to look good enough on different web browsers. So, use this beautifully and make your ecommerce site to look dynamic and attractive on all kind of web browsers.