OTHER E-COMMERCE SITE TOOLS

TABLE 4.9 IMPROVING THE PROCESSING ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR SITE

A R C H I T E C T U R E I M P R O V E M E N T D E S C R I P T I O N

Separate static content from dynamic Use specialized servers for each type of workload.

content

Cache static content Increase RAM to the gigabyte range and store static content in RAM.

Cache database lookup tables Cache tables used to look up database records.

Consolidate business logic on dedicated Put shopping cart, credit card processing, and

servers other CPU-intensive activity on dedicated servers.

Optimize ASP code Examine your code to ensure it is operating efficiently.

Optimize the database schema Examine your database search times and take steps to reduce access times.

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encounter one of their “pet peeves,” and around 71% said they might refuse to purchase from the Web site and would view the company in a negative way. About 55% said they would complain about the Web site to friends and associates, and 45%

said they might even refuse to make purchases in the company’s offline stores (Hostway, 2007). See Figure 4.17 for a list of the most common consumer complaints about Web sites.

Some critics believe poor design is more common than good design. It appears easier to describe what irritates people about Web sites than to describe how to design a good Web site. The worst e-commerce sites make it difficult to find information about their products and make it complicated to purchase goods; they have missing pages and broken links, a confusing navigation structure, and annoying graphics or sounds that you cannot turn off. Table 4.10 on page 236 restates these negative experiences as positive goals for Web site design.

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SOURCE: Hostway Corporation, 2007.

FIGURE 4.17 E-COMMERCE WEB SITE FEATURES THAT ANNOY CUSTOMERS

TOOLS FOR WEB SITE OPTIMIZATION

A Web site is only as valuable from a business perspective as the number of people who visit. Web site optimization (as we use it here) means how to attract lots of people to your site. One answer, of course, is through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and several hundred others. The first stop for most customers looking for a product or service is to start with a search engine, and follow the listings on the page, usually starting with the top three to five listings, then glancing to the sponsored ads to the right. The higher you are on the search engine pages, the more traffic you will receive. Page 1 is much better than Page 2. So how do you get to Page 1 in the natural (unpaid) search listings? While every search engine is different, and none of them publish their algorithms for ranking pages, there are some basic ideas that work well.

• Keywords and page titles: Search engines “crawl” your site and identify keywords as well as title pages and then index them for use in search arguments. Pepper your pages with keywords that accurately describe what you sell or do. Experiment: use different keywords to see which work. “Vintage cars” may attract more visitors than “antique cars,” or “restored cars.”

• Identify market niches: instead of marketing “jewelry,” be more specific, such as

“Victorian jewelry,” or “1950s jewelry” to attract small, specific groups who are intensely interested in period jewelry.

• Offer expertise: White papers, industry analyses, FAQ pages, guides, and histories are excellent ways to build confidence on the part of users and to encourage them to see your Web site as the place to go for help and guidance.

• Get linked up: Encourage other sites to link to your site; build a blog that attracts people and who will share your URL with others and post links in the process.

List your site with Yahoo Directory for $300 a year.

TABLE 4.10 THE EIGHT MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS IN SUCCESSFUL E-COMMERCE SITE DESIGN

F A C T O R D E S C R I P T I O N

Functionality Pages that work, load quickly, and point the customer toward your product offerings

Informational Links that customers can easily find to discover more about you and your products

Ease of use Simple fool-proof navigation

Redundant navigation Alternative navigation to the same content Ease of purchase One or two clicks to purchase

Multi-browser functionality Site works with the most popular browsers

Simple graphics Avoids distracting, obnoxious graphics and sounds that the user cannot control

Legible text Avoids backgrounds that distort text or make it illegible

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• Buy ads: Complement your natural search optimization efforts with paid ads on search engines. Choose your keywords and purchase direct exposure on Web pages. You can set your budget and put a ceiling on it to prevent large losses.

See what works, and observe the number of visits to your site produced by each keyword string.

• Local e-commerce: Developing a national market can take a long time. If your Web site is particularly attractive to local people, or involves products sold locally, then use keywords that connote your location so people can find you nearby. Town and city names in your keywords, or regions can be helpful, such as “Vermont cheese”

or “San Francisco blues music.”

TOOLS FOR INTERACTIVITY AND ACTIVE CONTENT

As a manager responsible for building a Web site, you will want to ensure that users can interact with your Web site quickly and easily. As we describe in later chapters, the more interactive a Web site is, the more effective it will be in generating sales and encouraging return visitors.

Although functionality and ease of use are the supreme objectives in site design, you will also want to interact with users and present them with a lively “active”

experience. You will want to personalize the experience for customers by addressing their individual needs, and customize the content of your offerings based on their behavior or expressed desires. For example, you may want to offer customers free mortgage calculations or free pension advice, based on their interaction with programs available at your site. In order to achieve these business objectives, you will need to consider carefully the tools necessary to build these capabilities. Simple interactions such as a customer submitting a name, along with more complex interactions involving credit cards, user preferences, and user responses to prompts, all require special programs. Here is a brief description of some commonly used software tools for achieving high levels of site interactivity.

Bling for Your Blog: Web 2.0 Design Elements

One easy way to pump up the energy on your Web site is to include some appropriate widgets (sometimes called gadgets, plug-ins, or snippets). Widgets are small chunks of code that execute automatically in your HTML Web page. They are pre-built and many are free. Millions of social network and blog pages use widgets to present users with content drawn from around the Web (news headlines from specific news sources, announcements, press releases and other routine content), calendars, clocks, weather, live TV, games and other functionality. You can copy the code to an HTML Web page. A good place to start is Google Gadgets and Yahoo Widgets.

Mashups are a little more complicated, and as explained in Chapter 3, involve pulling functionality and data from one program and including it another. The most common mashup involves using Google Maps data and software and combining it with other data. For instance, if you have a local real estate Web site, you can download Google Maps and satellite images applications to your site so visitors can

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widget

a small, pre-built chunk of code that executes automatically in your HTML Web page; capable of performing a wide variety of tasks

get a sense of the neighborhood. There are thousands of Google Map mashups, from maps of Myanmar political protests, to maps of the Fortune 500 companies, all with associated news stories and other content. Other mashups involve sports, photos, video, shopping and news.

The point of these Web 2.0 applications is to enhance user interest and involve-ment in your site, and to easily include sophisticated functionality and unique data in your Web site.

Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a set of standards for communication between a browser and a program running on a server that allows for interaction between the user and the server. CGI permits an executable program to access all the information within incoming requests from clients. The program can then generate all the output required to make up the return page (the HTML, script code, text, etc.), and send it back to the client via the Web server. For instance, if a user clicks the Display the Contents of My Shopping Cart button, the server receives this request and executes a CGI program. The CGI program retrieves the contents of the shopping cart from the database and returns it to the server. The server sends an HTML page that displays the contents of the shopping cart on the user’s screen. Notice all the computing takes place on the server side (this is why CGI programs and others like it are referred to as

“server-side” programs).

CGI programs can be written in nearly any programming language as long as they conform to CGI standards. Currently, Perl is the most popular language for CGI scripting. Generally, CGI programs are used with Unix servers. CGI’s primary disadvantage is that it is not highly scalable because a new process must be created for each request, thereby limiting the number of concurrent requests that can be handled. CGI scripts are best used for small to medium-sized applications that do not involve a high volume of user traffic. There are also Web server extensions available, such as FastCGI, that improve CGI’s scalability (Doyle and Lopes, 2005).

Active Server Pages (ASP)

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft’s version of server-side programming for Windows. Invented by Microsoft in late 1996, ASP has grown rapidly to become the major technique for server-side Web programming in the Windows environment.

ASP enables developers to easily create and open records from a database and execute programs within an HTML page, as well as handle all the various forms of interactivity found on e-commerce sites. Like CGI, ASP permits an interaction to take place between the browser and the server. ASP uses the same standards as CGI for communication with the browser. ASP programs are restricted to use on Windows 2003/2000/NT Web servers running Microsoft’s IIS Web server software.

Java, Java Server Pages (JSP), and JavaScript

Java is a programming language that allows programmers to create interactivity and active content on the client computer, thereby saving considerable load on the server.

Active Server Pages

Java was invented by Sun Microsystems in 1990 as a platform-independent programming language for consumer electronics. The idea was to create a language whose programs (so-called Write Once Run Anywhere [WORA] programs) could operate on any computer regardless of operating system. This would be possible if every operating system (Macintosh, Windows, Unix, DOS, and mainframe MVS systems) had a Java Virtual Machine (VM) installed that would interpret the Java programs for that environment.

By 1995, it had become clear, however, that Java was more applicable to the Web than to consumer electronics. Java programs (known as Java applets) could be downloaded to the client over the Web and executed entirely on the client’s computer.

Applet tags could be included in an HTML page. To enable this, each browser would have to include a Java VM. Today, the leading browsers do include a VM to play Java programs. When the browser accesses a page with an applet, a request is sent to the server to download and execute the program and allocate page space to display the results of the program. Java can be used to display interesting graphics, create interactive environments (such as a mortgage calculator), and directly access the Web server.

Different vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, HP, and others, have produced several versions of the Java language, and even different VMs. Java applets built using Microsoft Java can play well only on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Therefore, the objective of having Java applets play the same on all Web clients has not succeeded. Many corporations will not allow Java applets through their firewalls for security reasons. Despite the fact that Java applets do not have access to local client system resources (they operate in a “sandbox” for security reasons), information system security managers are extremely reluctant to allow applets served from remote servers to come through the firewall. Many Java applets crash or do not perform well, wasting system resources, and when they do perform, the functions are often trivial (such as flashing logos).

Java Server Pages (JSP), like CGI and ASP, is a Web page coding standard that allows developers to use a combination of HTML, JSP scripts, and Java to dynamically generate Web pages in response to user requests. JSP uses Java “servlets,” small Java programs that are specified in the Web page and run on the Web server to modify the Web page before it is sent to the user who requested it. JSP is supported by most of the popular application servers on the market today.

JavaScript is a programming language invented by Netscape that is used to control the objects on an HTML page and handle interactions with the browser.

It is most commonly used to handle verification and validation of user input, as well as to implement business logic. For instance, JavaScript can be used on customer registration forms to confirm that a valid phone number, zip code, or even e-mail address has been given. Before a user finishes completing a form, the e-mail address given can be tested for validity. JavaScript appears to be much more acceptable to corporations and other environments in large part because it is more stable and also it is restricted to the operation of requested HTML pages. Insight on Technology: Pumping Up the Customer Experience Using AJAX and Flash further describes the use of JavaScript and other tools to create highly interactive Web sites.

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