ECommerce Realities
Most people have things they do on the side, sometimes to make a little pocket-money and sometimes simply because they enjoy it. One of the things that I do on the side is build Ecommerce web sites.
I’ve been busy the last week or two in my spare time moving a site that I built for my Sister back in 2003/4 to new servers. Strange how these tasks are never as straightforward as you think, as you wrestle with issues relating to database and web server version incompatibilities which seem to be par for the course in the world of computing. To be honest the whole damn business has been a frustrating venture right from the start.
Building an Ecommerce website for a small business is a complex business which requires a lot of patience, attention to detail and a broad range of skills. Sadly a lot of professional web designers that you meet are skilled in one area but lack the interest or knowledge in other areas that are vital to the success of a project and a plethora of sites offering cut-price but woefully inadequate solutions are giving potential clients an unrealistic view of budget requirements and the work involved. There’s a lot more to a website than eye-candy and if you are looking for someone to give your small business a presence on the web you should be asking the right questions about these subjects.
- Technology and source-code ownership.
Tying yourself to a proprietary solution can be costly as upgrade cycles have to be maintained, incompatibilities resolved and specialist companies can disappear entirely leaving you high and dry. Open source technology is harder to implement initially but protects you from these risks.
- Security and performance, both for the business and customer.
In an internet age of scammers, spam and hackers the importance of security cannot be stated too strongly but sadly many website designers ignore this vital issue simply because of its lack of glamour and its a corner you can cut without the client noticing; until its too late of course.
- Design (appearance) and usability.
Looking good is important but only in as much as it gives customers the reassurance that you mean business. Remember that most of the most successful web companies have very simple design interfaces i.e. Amazon, Flickr, Youtube. Usability and content relevance is far more important to customers.
- Adherence to the business model and unique selling points.
The web site needs to integrate with the flow of other business activities, each can feed off each other. Promote your site at your business and your business on your website. If the two don’t dovetail then the running costs will eat up profits from that activity and staff will loose interest in the project. Competition is fierce so no unique selling point on the web will make you an also-ran overnight.
- Search engine optimization and marketing.
Just getting your site indexed by the Google spider is just the start. The whole site must be optimised to ensure good ranking in all the major search engines with meta tags that provide a suitable description to pull the searching customer into clicking your link. Every marketing angle should be investigated thoroughly.
- Maintenance and upgrades.
Even a simple site is going to come across a fault or require improvements every once in a while so be prepared for it and budget likewise. Like all businesses you need to invest continuously.
- Site updates (products), copywriting and graphic design.
All search engines favour sites that grow and change, it shows activity and relevance. Update often and regularly. Copywriting isn’t just about “buy this now”, useful articles get linked to (which improves your ranking) and brings in visitors. Remember that the internet is a semantic network, if you have nothing to say nobody will be listening.
Most Ecommerce ventures fail because either the customer or the web-designer has forgotten or is unable to address these issues, all of which are vitally important in the path to success.
Think them over before you take the plunge; you’ll be glad you did.
Linkage :
Lessons in Search Engine Optimization.
Attitude is everything and hard work pays.
Inbound links through quality articles.
Useful stuff there. Recently went through the exercise of trying to get my business website a higher profile, adding sitemaps, title & other tags relevant to actual page content etc. as that article says Can’t see much result yet tho, how long does it take?
That’s a good start but there is still lots you can do to get the ball rolling.
1. Submit your site to each of the main (and minor) search engines. Most have hidden pages where webmasters can submit their sites for indexing. Most will push you to pay for inclusion but don’t fall for it, you will be indexed quite quickly with the free inclusion services too. Some web-hosts provide an engine submittal service too, often for a small fee but its worth it.
2. Google has free webmaster accounts, sign up and submit your site. Also they provide a service where you can provide an XML sitemap, this is the future of search. Write a Perl script to generate the XML according to the Google specification and provide the URL of the XML file in the webmaster account panel.
You can see how well Google indexes your site by typing site:www.yoursite.com into the engine and seeing the number of page returned. Doing this for my Sister’s site changed this from 133 to 7,300.
3. Google ranks sites according how many quality (relevant) incoming links it has. Don’t fall for link exchanges but getting other sites with a high rank to link to you will increase this rank, known as the Google Page Rank you can easily determine this for sites by installing the Google toolbar.
Getting your site noticed on the web is hard work but with some research and guile you can make an impact.
Cheers wolfie. Got an xml sitemap and have submitted to some engines but it was some time ago. Need to look at that again I think.