In this issue

Ticking the boxes

When you make a quote for a web site to a small company the customer is concerned about just one thing: meeting their business needs.  What does the client want to achieve: sales, market presence, brand recognition?  The only objective from the client side is to get the business benefits they need from the web.

Now bid for a bureaucratic organisation, like a large bank or local government organisation and things change.  The need to meet the business objective is there of course.  But the primary objective of anyone in a large organisation is to make sure that if it all goes pear-shaped someone else will be to blame. Sorry – did that sound cynical?  OK, I will rephrase that in management-speak.  The project has to be transparent and auditable. 

In practice this means that at some stage in the bidding process someone will have made a requirements list with a set of checkboxes. People will put in everything they can think of to protect themselves and this will all have been signed off by some patsy (oops there I go again - by the end-user).

Because a web site has an IT aspect to it, the IT Department may well be involved and they will do some research and come up with all sorts of objectives that your end-user has never heard of. Or they may have industry standards that someone digs out. So often you are confronted by a brief with a bunch of requirements that neither your ultimate client nor you may fully understand.

Let’s summarise some of the jargon here.  Some of these I have written about before.

Accessibility

The need to make the site available to partially sighted or blind users.  This is a long and complex subject and you may see mention of W3C Level x (W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium who set standards for the web.  A basic rule here it to keep the HTML very simple using HTML as it was designed to be used – lists should be (HTML) lists, headings should be headings and so on. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) take you a long way down this road.

Search engine optimisation

The need to make the site can be found on search engines.    The key here is to research keywords your visitors will use and build them into your copy. Keep HTML very simple and as it was designed to be used… (see above)

Security

The need to make sure that parts of the site or the computer on which it runs are not accessible other than by authorised users.  This is a technical issue which you will need a technician (e.g. us) to address. An IT Department will often set security standards which cannot be met on a shared web server such as we would normally propose.  The budgetary implications can be very significant and this should not be taken lightly. 

Cross browser compatibility

The site should be equally usable on all browsers.   Of course this will rule out CSS as it works badly on old versions of Internet Explorer (e.g. 5 as on older Macs) and not at all on Netscape 4 and earlier.  We normally propose a solution that works as designed on browsers used by 90% of visitors and acceptably on most others.   

HTML standards

There is no single HTML language. HTML has had different versions and now a new variant is around called XHTML. If the IT Department is involved they will often ask for strict adherence to the latest standard (XHTML).  This is OK as long as you keep the HTML simple (etc etc).

Underlying technology

If an IT Department is involved they may insist that the site is developed using a particular set of technologies. You may see these words:
- Unix
- PHP
- Windows / ASP
- Cold Fusion
- Oracle
- MySQL
The reasons are many. 

* The IT representative thinks a particular technology will look good on his/her CV. (the cynic in me comes out again)
* The IT representative is some sort of born-again Unix / Windows evangelist.
* Someone on the project had a content management system developed in (say) PHP in a previous job, is totally confused and thinks that this is the only way to develop a content management system (I do not joke).
* The IT Department is concerned that at some time in the future they will have to maintain the system and they need to restrict the technology to one that they can support.

The last is of course the only legitimate reason, and it is a very real concern in many IT operations who have inherited systems developed outside their remit, which they can’t support properly (I have run such an IT Department so I know whereof I speak).

How do you respond

You may need to talk to a techie (e.g us) to respond properly. We (or the techie of choice) will draw up a section of your proposal called a Compliance Statement.  This will list all the technical requirements in the brief and against each will indicate the degree of compliance.

Don’t expect to be 100% compliant and avoid the temptation to fudge. My view is that if you are accurate in this section of the proposal and give good alternatives or reasons for non-compliance you will gain credit. Right now your objective is to win the bid at all costs. Later some project manager may curse you when the client insists on meeting technical requirements that you cannot meet and still make a profit on the job. 

Remember this - a fudged compliance statement and a client with a good lawyer can bring your business down.

Business intelligence

What’s in a name

Some  technologies get a really idiotic name (PCMCIA?) other get a really cool name (Like FireWire). Obviously the cool names were given by talented marketers – right?  Wrong. Here is the engineer’s side of the story.

The Firewire name was chosen by a bunch of engineers drinking too much beer after hours just before Comdex '93, when the project was about to go public. We were under the gun since the marketing droids would have picked some name like "Performa" if we hadn't acted soon.  The extra capitalization (from "Firewire" to "FireWire" was the big marketing-based change). http://www.teener.com/FireWire/

Who says there is tension between marketers and engineers?

Search engines

If you are interested in the sort of research going into search engines these days check out Microsofts paper on ranking. 

Google has a network of people checking sites.  Their guidelines are here.

Business blogs

Businesses are using the Blog format as part of their marketing effort.  When biggies like GM use the medium you know it has arrived.  

Technical tips - Don’t rely on Google for PPC statistics

If you use Google Pay Per Click (PPC) to drive customers to your e-commerce site, your spend will only makes sense if the numbers show a profit.  Its no good just saying you spent £x on Google and made £y profit.  

* Many of your sales may come from repeat visitors or other that didn’t come through Google
* You may be spending money on keywords that are not turning a profit.

When you sign up for PPC you have access to an administrative area. Google will give you some Javascript to include in your acknowledgment page following purchase, and if you set up this JavaScript you can see in Google the number of sales and cost per sale per keyword.  However a word of warning:

* If you are paying via an external system (such as Netbanx) you can’t guarantee that the customer will click on the link to take them to your acknowledgment page once the sale is confirmed.
* If your customer reloads the acknowledgement page the sale may get double-counted
* The Google results give you cost per sale but not cost per value of sales.  It is likely that some keywords (camera) will give you more profit than others (film), but the Google data won’t tell you this.
* The Google figures are fairly accurate as far as they go, but I have difficulty sometimes reconciling with our own data. 

So you need to make sure that your e-commerce system allows you to get PPC data independently of the Google reports.    (Ours does ).

News from the web

 Internet advertising tops $2.8 billion in the first quarter, makng the three month period the highest in nine consecutive growth quarters – 26% higher than the same period last year.

While much of the industry is moving from advertising-funded to subscription, AOL moves in the reverse direction offering free web mail and content.   AOL has a problem – they are traditionally a dial-up service provider with rather a lot of content and software.  Now the telephone companies are switching all their customers to DSL they need a new business model.   

The European Union added 4.18 million DSL subscribers in the first quarter of 2005, reaching a total figure of more than 35.6 million subscribers.

While on the road, 450,000 paid to use T-Mobile WiFi in the USA.

Microsoft has set up its Spaces blogging service for Chinese users.  But they had better not use suspect words (like ‘human rights’).  Shame on them. 

Google is planning to launch an e-payment system in competition to PayPal. 

Meantime Paypal launches a payments service in competition with traditional payment gateways

Google is beta testing a new search that learns from previous searches and what the searcher has previously clicked on to optimise results for that searcher.  So the old question – ‘what position am I in Google’ would be answered by ‘who are you?’

American corporation Covad is offering a hybrid VOIP (Voce over IP or Internet Phone) service. Using the customers landline to connect with a central VOIP switch.  The argument is that access can be from anywhere in the house that has a phone socket.  This sounds to me like the purest marketing hype.  

Vonage meanwhile are developing a cordless internet phone  - doesn’t that make more sense.

WiMax is wireless internet connectivity but over city-wide areas, not just around base stations.  This is potentially a competitor for mobile phone operators as portable VOIP handsets become available in the future.  Intel and Nokia are developing a standard for mobile WiMax which allows for roaming and which could be a part of the offering from mobile phone operators.