Toubeauty is a site where Internet meets style both design and content wise.

Toubeauty currently consists of various sections such as Products Reviews (Features include articles and reviews, where you can vote for the products you really like), Photo Contest (Monthly photographic competitions for photographers and the beauty they falled in love with), Fresh News (with news on lifestyle, french lifestyle, beauty trends, and much more), and Shopping Tips where you will get a usefull shopping guide.

Our goal is to create a certain vibe, by which style, fashion and a sense of creativity will be conveyed to our visitors. Toubeauty wants its guests to be exposed to the best. This obviously includes the most important section, with complete runway / fashion show coverage, fashion trend reports, beauty trend reports, celebrity style essentials, and much more.

Relax focuses on the good things in life, which provide perfect relaxation, while the hotspots guides of Toubeauty serve you with information regarding the places to be in happening cities around the world.

The website is intended for a young and avant-garde audience that keeps an eye open for the good things for their beauty. With Toubeauty, make your own beauty salon… right from home.

Thanks to the Smashing Magazine for their choice of Toubeauty on their 45 Fresh, Clean and Impressive Designs !

And the author gives us an answer full of nuances: Adobe is still in a strong position with Flash… but Microsoft is catching up with WPF/E… and as we don’t know how AJAX will evolve… so we are sure of nothing.

Yes, I know, you certainly believe that there was no need to write such a long article for that… Nevertheless, the author built such a great argumentation and asked the right questions (mainly about performances, methodological approach, audience analysis…)

That’s an article to bookmark and reread in 6 months.

The HTML page: simple and effective

The simplest way to create a web interface is to use HTML.
To check a web page, you need: an operating system and a navigator. It’s simple and effective, effective enough to make a fortune (like eBay and Amazon).

An applet offers a little more power to the expense of comfort.

During the late 90s, mirco-applications that could be executed within web pages appeared: the java applets. To be able to execute them, it’s of course necessary to have an operating system, a navigator but also a virtual machine. It’s the latter that is used to interpret the Java code (that has nothing to do with the Javascript).

The applets make it possible to do more things than HTML, but they are less comfortable, because they are heavy and take long to start (1 to 3 seconds) and the virtual machine requires more inconvenient updates. When it’s about a 3D configurable of Volkswagon, then it’s okay; but when it’s about a simple calendar to choose a date like on the Fortis bank website, then it’s inadmissible.

The RIA: The best compromise so far

Rich Internet Applications appeared afterwards, they offer greater display and manipulation possibilities than HTML. Those rich interfaces could be done using AJAX (like in the diamond selector of Amazon or the GAP website), or by taking advantage of vectorial technologies like Flash or WPF/E. To make them work, you should have the appropriate plug-in (which is the case for 99% of computers for Flash). Integrating animations within a web page is transparent and very powerful (like for the very good comparison tool of Ford Vehicles).

Widgets : small but extremely effective

More recently, some small autonomous modules are installed on our desktops: the widgets. These micro-applications need many things to work: either a program called a widget engine (Yahoo! Widget, Google Desktop, Kapsules with Linux or the Opera browser), or an new operating system such as Windows Vista or Mac OS X.

The GDR: The future of software?

The latest web interfaces are called the Rich Desktop Applications. Like the applets, the GDR need a virtual machine (RCP Eclipse, NetBeans, Java Wed Start, XULRunner of Mozilla, The future Apollo of Adobe or the SmartClient of Microsoft). These technologies make it possible to create interfaces that are as strong as applications, and the simplicity of the deployment of websites (no need to install them on the operating system).

Many experiments about the RDA are in process: SongBird (a competitor of iTunes built with XUL), the Mozilla Amazon Browser (a RDA that exploites Amazon’s catalogue) or eBay’s module that is built with Apollo.

Conclusion: Service first

After this fabulous presentation of all these promising technologies, I suggest to make the following conclusion: Who do we have at the left of the diagram? Amazon and eBay. Who do we find again on the right of the diagram? Amazon and eBay. The idea that we can get from that is the following: if your service is good, then these different technologies (the most recent in particular) can’t help but to enrich the user experience you offer. But if your service isn’t that great, then don’t even dream, the interface (whatever technology you’re using) will not change the negative user experience.

I will let you ponder about that…

In fact, up to now, the principle of operating on the internet works like in stores: large companies make their retailers take care of marketing their products and loose then control on the service and its image. Jean Paul Gaultier brought a new innovative approach following the example of “shop-in-shop” of luxury brands in big stores, by launching a “website-in-webshop”.

The idea is simple: create a website that is accessible from the distributor’s website to offer all the ranges of the brand, the content and graphics are related to the DNA of the brand and remind of its vision, and its developed imagination. It’s only when it’s time for an actual order that the internet user is sent back to the website source of the distributor who will manage the sale.

It’s obvious that the control of image is, more than over, in the centre of strategies of luxury brands when internet offers a maximum exposure to these brands.

Why is this new interest for the web channel?

If luxury brands avoided internet in its beginnings,it’s because it may get disruptive to their business models: “US customers tend to get better deals, while Asian consumers often pay hefty premium-and they did not want that fact exposed by a globally accessible website”.

But on the other hand, internet is a fabulous medium to reach a larger number of potential consumers, without big expenses on a large network of stores, namely in China. This way, many luxury brands have just a few stores, like Dunhill for example (one in UK, one in the USA, but none in Italy or Germany), the Internet offers them the chance to be known quickly.

Furthermore, referring to a study done by Ledbury Research, “rich” people are online more than other population categories, and therefore spend more money online. It’s then one of the reasons why luxury brands take special care of their websites and of multiplying buying possibilities online.

The risk is once more a massification of the products and a huge accessibility, with the risk of losing interest in these brands. The stake of these luxury and style companies is to find, in the future, a “presence balance” on the internet to avoid making the same mistakes, like some did with the massif extension of licences. To be continued…