SQLEditor makes it easy to design a database. You can quickly create tables, add fields, edit field attributes and determine relationships between tables. SQLEditor’s visual display helps you understand the relationships between your data.

For example, I’m building a simple, web-based task management app that makes it easy to manage to-do lists (more on this later). Here’s what the database design looks like.

As you can see, I have three tables (users, lists and todo) with various data fields and 1-to-many relations between users and lists, and lists and todo. That is, one user can have many lists and each list can have many to-dos on it.

After visually creating the database, SQLEditor can then export directly to a database or it can export SQL commands to a file. Here’s the SQL commands needed to create my database.

These commands could be written by hand, especially for simple databases like the one I’m using in this example. However, for large, complex databases, database design tools like SQLEditor are indespensable. They remove alot of the work in building databases for web apps.

What do you use to build your databases?

1) Redesign product pages

Over the years Amazon has added more services and data to its product pages, resulting in long, unwieldy pages. On book pages for example, you have to scroll past special offers and related products areas before you can find out a book’s publish date or number of pages. It’s time to redesign product pages and put the emphasis back on the product.

(Full view of redesigned page) You can see how bloated the page is when you compare the size of the current page to the redesigned page, which only has relevant product info.

2) Don’t push shipping

Amazon offers deep discounts on shipping thanks to a volume-business deal they have with UPS. Fast, cheap shipping may be a selling point, but Amazon promotes shipping well before the user is ready to make a purchasing decision. Take search for example:

When searching for a book or product, you’re faced with a barrage of shipping deals. Instead of using valuable space to push shipping, which most Amazon users are already aware of, Amazon should focus their efforts on helping you find and learn more about the stuff you want to buy. Which brings me to…

3) Enhance search results

Amazon should replace shipping deals on search results with deeper information on the products. For example, I’d to see a Twitter-style 140 character user review and links to the back cover, table of contents, and excerpt.

4) Offer digital downloads

As a student, I find it frustrating that I still have to buy and lug around heavy textbooks. Not only is this ruining the spines of students around the world, but it’s also expensive and eco-unfriendly. Amazon should follow O’Reilly’s lead and offer DRM-free digital downloads of books. This might be wishful thinking as the decision lies not with Amazon but with the publishers. But given Amazon’s size and market share, I suspect they would be in a strong bargaining position to encourage publishers to make this leap.

5) Better product images

When shopping online, being able to see large, sharp photos can make or break a sale. Amazon’s “see larger image” button only gives you a slightly larger, zoomable image. With the vast majority of web users having screen resolutions of 1024×728 or higher, it doesn’t make sense to have such a small viewing window. Showing large, complete product photos would improve the shopping experience.

How would you improve Amazon.com?

Auto-detect location

Given the relative ease possibility of determining a user’s geographical location via IP address, why doesn’t the site auto-detect your location and show your city’s weather on the homepage? Why make the user enter their city/ZIP code to get the information they want? I’m tired of repeatedly having to enter 30308 to get Atlanta’s weather. Yes, I could use their tiny, poorly-located “Save Location” button to cookie my city, but as I travel, I’d rather have the site immediately display the weather in my current location.

Distractions

It seems Weather.com has lost its mission and its understanding of what most people are looking for when visiting a weather site. They’ve put too much emphasis on peripheral services and promos, like golf/skiing guides and travel services, and made it hard for us to get what we really want: current weather, hour-by-hour and 10 day forecasts, and satellite and radar maps. Instead, they’ve buried the good content among a pile of useless services, promotions and advertisements.

It seems Weather.com is still playing the pageview game, even though advertisers and traffic measurers have given up on it. Weather.com is hiding their content in order to boost ad impressions, thereby increasing revenues. This tactic has probably worked for some time and may continue to work simply because they own the weather.com domain. Yet, their missteps may soon lead to a bolt for newer, better weather services (see Other weather sites below).

They’ve even gone so far as to hold back some good content and services behind a paywall, clearly showing an ignorance of the movement to free content. NYTimes is now free as are many others, with the WSJ being one of the last holdouts. In this age of free information, I find it astonishing that Weather.com would require me to pay to get basic weather information and services. Gold, Weather.com’s subscription service, allows you to customize the page, access up to 11 cities weather at the same time, and access the larger interactive radar/satellite map. Would you pay $25 for this?

Design and layout

The site’s design is in dire need of a face-lift. Not only is the design lacking, but it’s cluttered with ads. In fact, nearly half the page is either an ad or a promotion for Weather.com or a partner. (Click for a larger image; green=ad or promo; red=content I don’t want)

Instead of throwing all these ads at the user, why not charge a higher CPM by presenting only one 300×250 ad and then give the user the content they want right up front? Yes, revenues may initially fall by reducing the number of ad placements, but I strongly believe that by creating a better user experience, traffic and revenues would eventually increase as users that Weather.com drove away return to the site.

The one good thing

Yes, I had to find one good thing. Weather.com recently upgraded their radar map widget to be much more interactive, ala Google Maps. It’s a pretty neat flash widget, but they’ve limited it’s size (500px wide) and don’t allow you to embed it on your blog or website. To get a larger map you have to pay for the Gold subscription.

Other weather sites

Savvy web users found better weather sites long ago (I use SimpleWeather) and I suspect average users are beginning to as well. If NBC doesn’t whip the site into shape, it might not be long before Weather.com is overtaken by a crafty upstart. What do you use to get your weather data?