5 Questions to ask before you build
Although the first billboard business-to-business Web sites could easily be designed in-house by the owner’s college-aged son, modern e-commerce sites take significantly more expertise. Happily, that expertise is more available than ever before, either by hiring a full-time Web development specialist or by contracting out to a design firm.
Thinking through what you want your site to do before you begin will save you from hours of rework—and additional expense—down the road. The following are key questions to answer before you meet with your designer for the first time:
Will your Web site change frequently?
Web sites that change frequently are usually database-driven
rather than written directly in HTML. Although it takes more effort,
time, and expertise from the Web developer to build a database-driven
Web site, it’s much easier to add new information or change old data
in them.
“You don’t have to know about HTML—you don’t have to touch the code at all to update a database-driven site,” says Paula Turgeon, a Web designer based in Roslindale, Massachusetts. “You can just go in, fill in fields [in the database] with the new item information, load that database file back up to the Web server, and boom—the information is up to date.”
What do you need from your database?
If you opt for a database-driven Web site, you’ll want to think
carefully about what you want that database to do. As a rule, it’s better
to have too much information than too little in your database.
“It’s a lot harder to make a change after the database is built,” says Turgeon. “Say you decide you want customers to be able to search by size, but you don’t have a [field] in your database for size. If you have a catalog of 5,000 items, it’s not a fast task to add that information.”
How real-time will your inventory be?
One of the advantages of phoning in an order can be that the
operator has up-to-the-minute information about stock levels of particular
items. Although some companies do tie their Web sites into their internal
inventory control systems, it can pose difficult programming challenges
and introduce new security vulnerabilities.
As a result, few companies choose to offer true real-time inventories. Some opt to offer no inventory information at all, while others update stock availability information several times a day. Opting not to provide inventory information means you may annoy customers by alerting them some time later that an item they ordered is not in stock. Frequent updating is often the best compromise, but it requires a commitment to making those updates on schedule.
What equipment will you use?
Just as personal computer users can choose between Windows and
Macintosh operating systems, buyers of Inter-net servers can choose between
several different server platforms. If your Web site is hosted by an
Internet service provider, what platform they use is likely of little
concern to you—but it will matter to your Web developer.
“What kind of server is important because it will determine the technology the server supports,” says Turgeon. “You won’t, for example, use a Windows-based scripting language if it’s running on a Unix server, because they’re not going to play nice together.”
You will need to tell your developer what server platform the site is going to run on so he or she can choose the programming language and techniques that will work best.
How secure is your site?
Your Web designer can easily help you ensure your credit card
transactions are secure, but B-to-B sites also pose other security concerns.
Real-time inventories, for example, require tying your Web site to your
inventory control system, opening a potential security hole hackers can
use to get at confidential information.
That vulnerability is one reason Gesswein opted to manually upload and download orders and inventory information several times a day. “We can guarantee there is no way someone can get [personal] information out of the site,” says Corwin.
Another security issue is ensuring that only authorized individuals can place orders. Gesswein handled the situation by setting up two separate security levels for each account. “Let’s say a disgruntled ex-employee of a customer had a password to get into the Gesswein Web site to place an order and ship it directly to [himself],” says Corwin. “To prevent that, we set up two security levels for each account. You can set up several people as administrators, and other people as users. Users can place orders on the Web site, but that’s it. They can’t change billing, shipping, etc. Only the administrators can access all parts, add or remove users, or change passwords.”
Such security planning can help customers feel more confident in ordering online, and can reduce problems later down the line. But like all things in Web site building, it’s usually easier to plan for solutions in the early stages, rather than try to build them in after the site goes live.
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