UK based bookshop Waterstones has launched a new website. I think it looks pretty good; clean and straight forward to use. I ran some sample searches to look up Titan Books, Gollancz and Solaris Books. I found matches on paperback and in ebook.
The Waterstones developers have been especially geeky. I approve. If you look behind the scenes and peak at the source code you’ll find a bunch of book recommendations. I wouldn’t go as far as describing this as hidden code or an easter egg on Waterstones.com. This reading list is easy to spot as HTML comments right in the head section of the code.
The top three recommendations in the Waterstones’ source code are;
- HTML & CSS: Design and Build Web Sites by Jon Duckett
- Python in Easy Steps – In Easy Steps by Mike McGrath
- JavaScript & JQuery: Interactive Front-end Web Development by Jon Duckett
Jon Duckett and Mike McGrath are the only two authors mentioned dice; Douglas Crockford, Alex Bradburty, Shyam Seshadri, Andy Clarke and Craig Sharkie also get a mention.
What do you think? Is this an effective way to make recommendations? If you’re interested in code, web design and development would you trust recommendations from HTML comments?
