by Bruce Morris
Corporate Webmaster
While establishing and managing a commercial Web site several key issues
need to be addressed not just during the initial planning stages but on an
ongoing basis as well. Here are a few items that a smart Web manager should
be thinking about.
September 1997
Community Building
People hang around in a community because they live/work there or simply
enjoy what they find happening there. 'Happening' is the keyword.
Traditional forums and chat are the largest part of online communities but
the Web offers some unique opportunities for interactive community
happenings. A creative, net-savvy approach could develop unique, newsworthy
community building features that would bring in new members and increase
satisfaction of existing members.
Things that make a visitor say "I'd better set a bookmark for this page
since I want to see what happens here later" are what you want to create.
For instance allowing visitors to write their own reviews of books, CDs or
other products mentioned in your pages makes people want to come back and
see what develops. Allowing readers of articles and editorials the
opportunity to add their own comments about the subject increase activity
in specifically designed discussion groups.
Move to Open Standards
The question of how to choose Web site development and management solutions
involves one basic decision: build it yourself or buy off the shelf? Taking
advantage of open Internet standards offers significant advantages.
In many instances building custom software using in-house development teams
can be more cumbersome and not as economic or effective as evaluating and
using commercially available products. Internet technology is developing
quite rapidly and the possibilities of taking advantage of "land rush"
opportunities means Web site development and management solutions are being
developed at a rate rarely experienced before in the computer industry. For
instance, there is an interesting variety of off the shelf software for
such essential community building features like chat and threaded
discussion groups. These programs offer a competing list of "bells and
whistles" that would be time consuming and expensive to develop in house.
Many of them can be customised to suit particular site needs.
Combining legacy systems with new, open Internet solutions can at times be
problematic but it is essential not to make platform and hardware/software
decisions based on prejudices for using either old, comfortable products or
new, whizzy products. In many instances legacy systems work as well as if
not better than newly developed solutions and can be integrated with the
latest Internet publishing systems. The reverse is also frequently the case.
Focussing On Online Demographics
One of the most interesting things about the Internet and surely one of the
biggest things stimulating commercial Internet efforts is the ability to
target individuals based on their particular demographic needs and
interests. This is of extreme value to direct marketers and to users
themselves. I buy Computer Shopper more for the ads than for the editorial
content because they are ads about things I want to know about. To me this
is not intrusive but rather a valuable feature of the magazine.
Sophisticated systems are being perfected designed to not only allow users
to customised their own experience on a Web site, but to allow the site
publishers to subtly customise the users' experience based on the pattern
of their previous visits. Having detailed demographic information about
site visitors allows customised page serving that benefits not only the
site visitor but advertisers trying to reach a particular demographic
market. A car manufacturer could have ads featuring economy cars served
college students and ads featuring luxury cars served to users based on
their profession residence in a typically high-income area. Using an
extreme example to illustrate the power of this type of demographic
targeting imagine sending serving ads for disposable diapers 9 months after
their new marriage. Unacceptably intrusive? Perhaps but many Web users
invite this type of targeting and more will do so as they are made aware of
the benefits.
Building Loyalty
People return to a Web site because they liked what they found there and
want more of it. Perhaps they didn't take advantage of all of what they saw
during their first visit and will return but once they have absorbed the
initial site offering they will expect new things if they are expected to
return on a regular basis.
To build site loyalty it is important not only to have a stream of fresh
content but also for it to be obvious at a glance at site entry what that
new content is and where it can be found. "Coming soon!" announcements
presented when a visitor clicks on an external also entice people to return.
Building this type of loyalty makes managing an on going Web site very much
like publishing a daily newspaper or television station. Web site content
"editors" or their managers responsible for particular types of content
refreshment need to have not only the new Internet cyber interests and
skills but traditional journalistic experience as well.
The usual, obvious chat and discussion group features are big loyalty and
cleverly enhanced and promoted can be the primary cause for loyalty to a
site. There are a variety of other programming features that have yet to be
developed to their potential and can be utilised by savvy, creative Web
site publishers. Live, Web broadcast events such as concerts, chats with
authors, experts, celebrities for example have yet to be developed as
skilfully as they could be and cause not only huge visitor surges but are
cause for new visitors to become enamored of a site and plan to return.
Developing Incremental Revenue Streams
Traditionally ad revenue has been the only revenue stream for most
non-transaction based Web sites. There are other ways to take advantage of
the value a highly trafficked site creates by its very volume.
The main thing a site has to sell is eyeballs. Optimising advertiser
opportunities to economically focus on particular eyballs with particular
demographics can take many forms. As advertising efforts become more
focused they are received more favourably by the recipients. Email
marketing allows you to send announcements, etc. accompanied by highly
targeted ads in an economical way that direct mail could never hope to do.
Mailing lists sponsorship opportunities are another ad revenue stream that
is often not properly developed.
Improving Performance Factors - Speed, Performance, Reliability
One of the obvious ways to increase visitor satisfaction and increase
loyalty is to make sure pages are served as quickly and efficiently as
possible. There are several things needed to make sure this happens.
Graphics - Obviously we all like our sites to be whizzy and cool. Everyone
knows about the performance trade off but there are a couple of things to
keep in mind that can keep your performance as fast as possible and still
have a "kewl" site. Use Debabilizer to squish your graphics files down to
their optimum size. Intelligently use a 256 colour graphics palette since
most viewers have their computers set to the standard Windows palette.
Server - For most sites a hugely powerful processor is not going to make
your pages serve any faster. Serving static HTML pages is not processor
intensive. When I worked at Gateway 2000 we served over a million hits per
day on a plain old Pentium 166 for over a year. What we did do to move
files out faster was load the system with RAM. I'm a firm believer in using
as much RAM as money can buy. You can't be too thin, too rich, nor have too
much RAM.
Dynamic Generation - If you are serving pages dynamically you can almost
certainly increase apparent page loading times by using multi-processor
systems or a Web farm that shares the load. Microsoft SQL Server sites
should dedicate a separate, powerful machine to run the SQL Server software
by itself. It also makes sense to determine which pages really need to be
dynamically generated and only spend the processing power on those
particular pages. Loading every page on a site dynamically using templates
is appealing to the propeller heads but without fail slows down site
performance. Perhaps it is a good idea to only dynamically serve those
pages where that type of flexibility is essential and serve all other pages
statically. Alternatively it may be a good idea to dynamically generate the
site pages off-line and upload them automatically every hour or so instead
of building the anew for each visitor.
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