Things to look for in a CMS.

One big ticket item to look for in a CMS will be a hookable event handler. Why? This simple addition allows the CMS to work for you in previously unimagined ways. For example, Bridgeline’s iAPPS Content Manager contains an event which is fired each time a user saves a piece of content. Since developers are allowed to hook up to these events, great things can happen. Automation of content entry is now possible based on limited information provided by your users. Why would we allow users to enter limited information? Most of the time its because this is all the information they have. Additionally, given this information, we can normally automate a process of deciphering the content we really want.

Google Maps Example

Lets take a look at Google Maps. Its a fantastic application with many mashups available. It can provide a fantastic user interface for personnel and office locator search tools on your website. However, anyone who has played with the Google Maps API knows that you cannot place your pin point using an address. Points of latitude and longitude are required. This information is readily available from Google (through their API) using a process known as Geocoding.

OK, so our end goal is to generate a list of searchable office locations and render our findings on a Google Map. We create a custom template within our CMS which requires the user to enter the office address, a photo, a description, and some hidden values for the latitude and longitude. One page is created per office location utilizing this template. By hooking into the content save event, we can now utilize the Google Maps API to Geocode the address only when required. That is, we make one call to Google each time the address is saved, thus saving the overhead of Geocoding in real time.

Event Handler Function Example

Result

The result is a system that is easy to use for your users, the content authors and subject matter experts. Going the extra mile up front when developing the website to keep things simple for your users will pay large dividends in adoption down the road. And, when a CMS is adopted, it is working for you!

Other examples of making your CMS work for you

• Calculating related pages by any means (not limited to keyword)
• Dynamic content updates via third party database integrations
• Content push into third party systems (On Publish Event)

Just like an iceberg - there is much below the surface when considering open source software

When compared to a SaaS Content Management System (CMS) solution, deploying and maintaining an open source CMS package, either by yourself or via an outside agency, can be surprisingly expensive. An open source integration can frequently incur substantial costs, despite the conventional wisdom. The following is a partial list of costs associated with any open source software implementation:

Software License Costs
This is probably the only good news. License costs are always zero - but keep on reading, there are many hidden costs…

Dedicated IT Staff
Developing and running a quality website takes considerable time and effort. The usual rule of thumb is one FTE - for example, 2 dedicated IT staff each spending half their time on the project and ongoing support.

Hardware
Depending on the amount of redundancy required, you could need anywhere from one to four servers. With SaaS, the hardware cost is built into the monthly fee.

Setup Fee
Agency costs often include basic software installation and hosting setup. This can vary from $1,000 to $5,000 or more, so it’s worth paying attention to.

Hosting
Outside agencies can apply a significant markup here. With a SaaS product - it’s built into the monthly license cost.  Find out from the agency where your site sill be hosted. If it’s godaddy.com (or similar) - then that $100 per month you are being charged for hosting alone might be a substantial premium over the actual cost.

Training
While open source software is free, most open source CMS are notoriously complex. Be sure to account for training costs to get you and your team beyond just the initial implementation.

Site Development
If you are going to develop the site yourself, be sure to include any outside design costs you might occur. When working with an agency - be sure to break these costs out separately.

Software Maintenance
Now that YOU are in charge of the software, it’s critical to budget for necessary security upgrades. Be sure to take into consideration all of the third party add-ons that may be integrated as part of your website development. Quite often a necessary third party add-on (like an image gallery) might not be compatible with the latest security patch releases.

Network Maintenance
There are many tasks associated with network infrastructure that need constant care and attention. If you are hosting your site within your own network, you may need to worry about load balancing, firewall management, setup and installation of web and database servers, and license management - to name just a few.

Support
Most custom developed software has bugs (this definitely includes websites) - do you have the bandwidth to track down bugs? Is there a support phone number to call? Are you going to have to wade through multiple forums and blogs to get your answers?

Conclusion
For some customers that have excess IT expertise and limited CMS demands, open source might be just the solution. However, if your organization has limited IT expertise but considerable business needs for a CMS implementation, an open source solution can bring considerable risk and cost. Regardless of how inexpensive it may appear when downloading “free” open source software, any substitute for an enterprise SaaS CMS must factor in ALL the actual costs when using open source.

Note: This is part one of a three-part series of postings on open source vs. proprietary CMS.

iAPPS Content Manager sees improvements with the release of Version 2.6 enhancements:

The wheels of progress continue to roll with the iAPPS Product Suite. iAPPS Content Manager - Bridgeline’s Content Management System - gets some additional feature and overall performance upgrades: 

Multi-Site Improvements - The ability to manage complex, multi-site deployments is enhanced and simplified with the new iAPPS Site Migration Tool.  iAPPS now supports full sharing of templates, scripts and content definitions across multiple sites.

New CMS Functionality - iAPPS 2.6 includes a new website image gallery library module to enhance front-end applications. The new libary modules allows administrators and content managers to easily configure the appearance and display properties of the image gallery as seen by users on the front-end. Using the iAPPS SiteEditor, administrators can choose between pagination and slider types. The pagination style has options for setting the number of rows and columns of images to display. The slider option has a scrollable preview of thumbnail images. Additionally, the new library module offers the ability to automatically scan a folder, or manually select images that a content manager wants to display in the gallery.

Performance Enhancements - iAPPS usability goes one step further by significantly improving the efficiency of moving between the iAPPS SiteEditor WYSIWYG editing tools and main Site Administration. Additionally, performance improvements have been made for site administration functions within Page Library, Content Library, and Website User Group Management.

Improved Usability - iAPPS 2.6 brings a more streamlined Control Center layout to administrative users. Users of iAPPS powered websites and application will benefit from expanded capabilities in how iAPPS handles complex HTML and special characters in Page and Menu titles. Additionally, embedded HTML tags for improved SEO optimization are now allowed.

So what can you do to make sure that you’re doing site research with the right users? Here are five easy steps:

Step 1: Define terms and criteria for recruiting
This includes (A) establishing what criteria the participants must meet, from demographic, psychographic, and/or business perspectives, and (B) agreeing on a fair means of incentivizing participants.

Establishing recruiting criteria is important because if you’re testing the usability of a financial services application, you’re going to want to weed out anyone who’s not intended to use that application. Another example: if you’re designing a site intended for use by the elderly, then you want to be sure you’re not recruiting 20-something’s fresh out of college. Standard criteria that often come into play include (A) demographics like age, income, and domestic lifestyle (married? kids?), (B) psychographics like level of expertise with computers or various web technologies and level of knowledge about the subject matter, and (C) business criteria such as whether they’re a current or prospective customer, and if they’re a current customer, how much of the product / service do they purchase or use in a given month/quarter/year? Of course, you may not need all three kinds of criteria. For example, demographics like income and gender may be moot if you’re doing research on a web application that involves scheduling a doctor’s appointment, or checking email.

Defining recruiting terms also involves agreeing on a fair means of incentivizing participants. Incentives are key—don’t be fooled. Your  prospective participants will be polite. They want to be humble. They’ll say they don’t care about money—they merely want to help. But we’ve found that those who really want to help need an incentive for helping. After all, they’re taking time out of their day to spend time traveling to and/or attending a 60-90 minute session talking about something that may or may not interest them (like shopping online for food for a pet ferret)—or worse, something that may easily rile them (navigating an informational site about political candidates).

For example, we recently interviewed people about direct mailing. These people had full-time jobs. Busy lives. One ran a tour guide business in the southeast US. Another ran a high-end print shop in London. Both loathed having to prepare mailing lists for the post office. In fact, both became a little enraged when asked to talk us through the process they follow when preparing their mailing lists, because any small business owner who’s managed his/her own mailing list knows how cumbersome the process can be—never mind not having software that’s easy to use to help speed you through the process. In this case, we were working with very busy people to get their feedback on software that dealt with a process that made them quickly frustrated and downright irate at times. So it’s key to be sensitive to participants and to compensate them for taking time and sharing invaluable insights with you. Fair incentives range anywhere from $50-$100, depending on the time that’s required of the participant and the subject matter. For example, the more time that’s involved, and the more specialized the subject matter, the more participants should be compensated. Another means of incentivizing that works—especially when you need a high number of participants—is the raffle, whereby you decide—for example—that 3 of all participants will be randomly selected to win a 30 Gb Video iPod. The iPod winners are always extremely grateful and quick to volunteer to help you in the future.

Step 2: Decide how to recruit
Whether you’re conducting customer interviews or usability tests, there’s more than one way to recruit participants for your research. Here are three ways that work:

1 - Get official: Hire professionals.
There are various professional outfits that can recruit for you, but be prepared to pay
anywhere from $75-$150 / head for recruiting alone. Other fees typically apply, so be sure to cover all the bases with whatever recruiting firm you may be considering. Pros: a recruiting firm can guarantee that (A) you get participants who match the profile you need and (B) those participants show up on time for your session. A professional recruiter usually has a large database of people who match multiple kinds of demographic and psychographic criteria. Also, the recruiting firm will do most, if not all, of the grunt work, such as screening people and scheduling sessions for you. Cons: Costs. That’s the big con. (!) Another is ensuring you allow enough lead time up front so the recruiter has time to screen and confirm participants. It’s simply not reasonable to reach out to a recruiter on a Monday and expect to have 25 participants confirmed by Tuesday.

2 - Friends and Family
This method is a cost-effective alternative to hiring a professional firm to recruit for you. If you or your company doesn’t already have a database of prospective participants from which to screen and recruit, you can ask friends and family. I’m not talking here about merely your own friends and family, but also their friends and family, and the friends and family of your co-workers. Depending on the client you’re working with, you may find that they’re also glad to give you names of their co-workers, friends, and family members. The trick here is to ensure that any given friend or family member matches the criteria you defined during step 1. For example, if you’re designing an interface for use by kids in grammar school, you won’t be able to ask your grandmother for help.

If you’re working for a client who needs to recruit employees internal to their company, you’ll apply a modification of the friends and family method, something I call the Buddy System. When your client is recruiting for you, have them recruit not merely directly necessarily, but to also delegate their co-workers to recruit on their behalf. We’ve found a much higher show rate if the participant is attending because they heard about it from a buddy of theirs. We’ve heard so often: “Bonnie in accounting told me about this, and Bonnie’s great; I’d do anything for her.” So if your client has the equivalent of a “Bonnie in accounting,” then by all means ask your client to enlist Bonnie to recruit employees.

A related “Friends and Family” scenario is recruiting from your client’s current customer base. In this case, your method for recruiting is practically done: your client hands you a list of people who definitively match some, if not all of the criteria. (They may not match all of the criteria if you also need to recruit prospective customers.) When recruiting your client’s current customers, you want to keep in mind two things: First, keep in mind that you’re asking them to participate so that you can evaluate customer experience in some way. And remember that the recruiting process you involve them in is a part of their customer experience with your client. So be particularly sensitive to their perspectives, questions, and needs throughout recruiting.

Pros: Cost savings: With the Friends and Family method, you avoid recruiting fees (not necessarily costs for incentivizing folks to participate, though!). You get to show off what you do for a living to friends and family. You can cast a wide net. Another great pro: the more you recruit friends and family, the larger your database of potential participants grows over time. You can sometimes get away with incentivizing at a lower cost—or not incentivizing at all, although I do recommend compensating them in some way, however small (like treat them to a cup of coffee). Cons: You may have as many friends as Britney Spears has followers on Twitter, but none or few may match the intended audience of the application you’re evaluating. Also, friends and family have been known to ditch you at the last minute, so you can spend extra time rescheduling or scheduling a replacement.

3 - The Web Two-Oh Way
Use the power of the Internet to recruit. You can do this the Web 2.0 way: Call on the various social sites you belong to—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, etc. Or you can also serve up an invitation on your website. Of course, there’s always the Web One-Oh Way: you can send a mass email announcing your study and inviting folks to participate. Pros: You can recruit people beyond your network of friends and family, ultimately adding to that network. Cons: It’s not as reliable as having professionals recruit for you, or using the friends and family method.

Step 3: Draft a Screener
Once you decide on the criteria your participants need to meet and how you’re going to recruit them, you’ll need to draft a screener for you or anyone helping you—including professional recruiters—when it comes time to recruit. A screener is a script that’s used by whoever’s recruiting. If one of your criteria is white-collar professional, then your screener will include questions like: “Which term best describes your profession?  (READ LIST) Professional (e.g. Dentist / Lawyer / Financial Analyst / etc.), Clerical / administrative,  Skilled manual (e.g. electrician / hairdresser / mechanic, etc.) (terminate); Semi- or unskilled manual (e.g. Security guard, waitress, etc.) (terminate).” Pros: Screeners ensure that you’re recruiting the right folks. They’re easily used by anyone else if you’re not the one who’s personally recruiting. Cons: They’re really aren’t any cons to having a screener. It takes minimal time to produce one once you have your criteria in place (see step 1, above).

Step 4: Recruit Participants
If someone is recruiting for you, then sit back and wait to hear the updates throughout the recruiting process. If you’re recruiting personally, pick up the phone and start calling the people on your list. Otherwise, send individual emails to those you wish to recruit. If you plan to handle recruiting yourself (including screening, scheduling, and confirming participants), you should plan to spend approximately two hours per participant.

Step 5: Schedule, confirm, and remind participants
Once you have a list of confirmed participants, schedule them at times that work best for them. Send a calendar invitation in case their email program features calendaring. Once they’re scheduled, follow up with phone calls and emails to remind them of the time. We’ve found that two reminders in advance of the date work well to ensure that people remember to show up and arrive on time.

What matters most when recruiting
All of the above five steps are important to consider when recruiting, but at the end of the day, two things are key. Number One - The participants must be representative of your user base. They’ve got to match your target audience. It does you no good to test the usability of a kiosk designed for a university student center with your neighbor who never even went to college. Number Two – Incentivize if you can, however small; the more, the better. Incentivizing practically guarantees that participants show up—and show up on time.

The challenge is that at times sophisticated marketing ideas are not easily matched with an adequate automation to enable them.  Take for example a popular marketing technique used by one cell phone carrier:

“If you call your friends and family between the hours of 6 AM and 8 PM during weekdays and if you have registered for the 2 year plan then you get a 20% discount but only if you are the primary contact on the account and only if your account monthly fee does not exceed $200 and only if you over the age of 18 etc…”

The above set of complex rules must be enabled by a strong rule-based engine that enable the billing system to manage the discount . In many large corporations, the IT department is often tasked with a monumental challenge to amend the billing software so that business keeps flowing while all the promotional rules are honored.

The example above just underscores one of the biggest areas of contention between marketing and IT. Marketing comes up with ideas and IT just can’t keep up.

This article will touch on some of the techniques that will make your online commerce a sophisticated and self managed Marketing Machine.

Free Shipping – Free shipping is a common mean to induce customers to buy from you. In general, customers are very sensitive to the good old “Shipping and Handling” charges. Sometimes, a good strategy may be to increase the margins on the merchandise in lieu of a reduction or complete elimination of the shipping and handling fees.

Free shipping can be associated with a specific product or a set of products. You may also exclude specific products from the promotion and you can also require a minimum order total in order to enjoy the discount.

Product Discount – Product discounts are discount that are associated with specific product or group of products. A discount can be given in a fixed dollar value deduction from the base (or list) price or as a percent off list price. In general it is highly recommended to discount the product during a predetermined date range. This will allow you to have the product “remember” to revert to the non-discounted list price automatically after the discount date expires. Another interesting permutation of discounting a product is based on quantity thresholds. For example:

This also will induce your customers to purchase larger quantity to realize greater discount.

BOGO – BOGO stands for “Buy One Get One” but truly a BOGO should allow your store to support any type of permutation of Buy One Get One combination. For example:

By 2 or more of product A and receive product B at 50% discount. Or by 2 of Product A and receive the 3^rd one for free. This is a pretty powerful method by which you can move unpopular inventory by promoting it along with more popular items.

Bundled Products - Bundled products is a feature that allows you to group multiple products and sell them as one. The idea is to discount the bundle so that it is substantially less expensive compared to buying each of the SKUs in the bundle individually. Very similar to the BOGO, this will allow you to move unpopular inventory along side the more popular items.

Refer a Friend – Refer a friend, is a great viral, self perpetuating, marketing technique. The concept is to have your customers refer their friends to buy from your site. It is done through an email form that is initiated by your customers from your site.

Once the receiving party, the referee, makes a purchase from your site, the system grants the referring customer a coupon for a discount against any future purchase.

Loyalty Points – Loyalty points is a system by which customers earn points based on their purchase history and the volume of their purchases. These points can be later redeemed as a form of payment against future purchases. We see a pretty sophisticated loyalty point system in the airline industry but the same concept is certainly adaptable to any eCommerce system.

There are obviously many more online marketing techniques and it is important for any online merchant who is considering a purchase or an upgrade of their online commerce to carefully evaluate the online promotion and marketing capabilities of their respective solutions. Promoting your products effectively may be the mere factor that will make your site shine above the rest.

In my opinion Data Caching is the single most beneficial strategy a System Engineer or a Developer can implement in order to achieve scalability. In this article I will discuss a few guidelines for implementing an effective Data Caching strategy.

Data Caching is a method by which data is stored and retrieved from transient memory. Transient memory, distinguished from persistent memory, is storage that is normally short-lived and is reset or removed when the server or the computer on which it resides is rebooted or when the storage is replaced with other transient data. Transient memory is the fastest medium used to retrieve from and store into modern computers.

We often refer to RAM (Random Access Memory) as transient memory. When we work with data driven software (whether a Word Document, a Spreadsheet or a Dot Net Object) we often place it in transient memory in order to manipulate it. As mentioned, data access to and from RAM is extremely fast.  However, without saving it to disk (persistent storage) we run the risk of losing all our data upon reboot or an anomaly in the software.

Accessing data from persistent storage such as File System or Relational Database System (RDBMS, SQL Server, for example) is much slower but safer.  To underscore the difference between the two memory models with a real-life scenario think about how long it takes to retrieve a large MS Word document in comparison to typing content into it when it was already retrieved. Imagine what would happen if you needed to save and re-retrieve your document everytime you typed in a character. It would undoubtedly be extremely slow and inefficient!

A good candidate for cached data in a software application is ‘read-only’ data that doesn’t change very often. In a typical e-commerce scenario this can be a product name and description, category hierarchy, images, or promotional marketing text etc. The cached data can still originate from the database but it doesn’t require a database transaction every time it is accessed.  Modern Database Engines provide their own internal data caching as queries that are repeatedly called to retrieve the same data maintain their last unmodified result in transient memory. In my opinion, it sort of a way for the database engine to compensate for bad programming behavior. In a perfect world, the logic of when data should be cached should truly be the developer’s or the programmer analyst’s responsibilities.

So, how does the cache really work? Cache data is built to support multiple threads accessing its data simultaneously.  Typically, it has a multi-reads (or Unblocked Read) mechanism and a single write. In other words it allows multiple threads (web connection or web browsers) to read from the cached data simultaneously however, when a write occurs (updated data populates the cache) all the ‘reads’ are blocked waiting for the ‘write’ to complete. Using blocking techniques such as Critical Section, Mutex or Semaphores, allows multiple threads to work in harmony as many can read but only one can write at any given time. Most common computing languages provide high level frameworks for multi-threading implementation. However, these tasks should normally be given to the more experienced and responsible software professionals. Multi threaded programming is not a walk in the park and if coded incorrectly could result in bugs that are very hard to isolate and fix.

So what are we gaining here? We are gaining efficiency in database connections and in the number of database queries. To clarify, by using data caching we will normally have one DB connection interfacing with the database and populating the cache. All threads, clients accessing data, communicate with the cache and do not use any DB connections.  Without having the cache in place, each thread would have repeatedly read and write from and to the database. A large number of DB Connections will negatively affect performance and as the number of concurrent users grows the problem will worsen exponentially.

It is obvious that if your cached data is modified frequently, you will lose its effectiveness since the write block will hold up all the reads until it is finished. One more advantage to keeping data in the cache is that you are able to keep business objects in their natural structure vs. converting objects from natural (complex hierarchical structure) to DB format (columns and rows) and back from DB to natural. These conversions are extremely expensive in time and CPU resources. By keeping your objects in their natural format in the cache and segregating your data into well defined structures you will be able to gain even further locking granularity in which a modification to an Object only locks that Object and not an entire collection of Objects. Similar to database locking by which updating a single row only locks the row being updated and not the entire table.

Business Objects are normally stored in a cached dictionary.  You can get to your Business Object by using a key in a dictionary. Reaching your object via key access is very fast as it uses advance binary search optimized to your dictionary size. This is all handled by the Dot Net Framework. Once you got to your business Object you can access attributes and methods by referencing the “Dot” notation of ”Object.Attribute” as you would normally do in C# or VB Dot Net.

There are plenty of techniques which will allow you to unleash the power of your cache but it is important to plan well, and only allow experienced developers to handle the cache implementation. Cache coding requires special attention to thread synchronization and locking techniques.

With the right data caching mechanism in place you will give your application the scalability it needs to meet your growing demand.

An example of how a title and meta description are rendered in a result page.

Create unique, accurate page titles

Your website’s <title> tag is arguably your most important piece of on-site SEO; it should describe what the particular page is about. It’s also one of the first items search engines see, and a descriptive <title> can persuade users. Make sure you as the client have the ability to change your pages’ titles with ease.

Use of the meta description tag

You may have heard that meta tags are no longer important for SEO. Well, this is true, but the meta description tag is still important for your users. It’s the paragraph that appears below your <title> on a search engine result page (SERP). Use it to tell users what they can expect from visiting this page.

Use “friendlier” URLs

Having “friendly” URLs on your site can help search engines figure out what your page’s content is all about and is less intimidating for users when linking to your site. Most CMS packages can help maintain this for you.

For example, http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/folder1/1089258/w1/0000023s.html is not nearly as streamlined as http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/articles/ten-rarest-baseball-cards/

Create useful, high quality content

Google makes the argument that the more useful and engaging your site’s content is, the more likely users will want to share that content (through blogging, social media sites, email, forums, word of mouth, etc). If your budget persists, look into revamping your content strategy rather than re-writing portions of pages for search engines. Google has always said “write for the user, not the search engine.”

Promote your website

Google recommends some good tactics when promoting your website:

• Blog about new content or services
• Engage in social media sites; share your content with like-minded groups
• Reach out to those in your site’s related community
• Don’t forget about offline promotion (include your URL on collateral, mention where information resides on your website in your newsletters and the kind)

Photo by Robert Donovan

Measure and make use of tools

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all provide tools to get you started with diagnosing any SEO pitfalls. Google’s Webmaster Tools account is definitely very useful and provides information like:

• Crawl info: make sure engines can access your site.
• Indexing stats: are all your pages at Google’s disposal? If not, why?
• Top queries: what words are users using to find your site?
• XML sitemap: submit your sitemap and make sure it is valid.

Nowadays, online merchants place a great deal of attention on empowering their eCommerce solutions with the latest marketing techniques. Shopping carts are now equipped with sophisticated promotion and marketing tools such as online coupons, product bundling, cross-sale and up-sale, persuasive content and advanced search engine optimization techniques. However, when a website is finally promoted on a popular blog or covered in an article published by a reliable expert, traffic can abruptly surge to levels never before planned.

In recent years, we often hear about huge online merchants experiencing downtime during the Christmas holiday season when their eCommerce sites are needed most. During last year’s Black Monday (which symbolizes the beginning of the online Christmas shopping season) large online retailers such as Sears, Saks Fifth Avenue, Costco, Dell, Victoria’s Secret, Bloomingdale’s and Williams-Sonoma experienced some sort of malfunction with their online commerce. [PC World Article].

Caught by surprise, their sites simply couldn’t handle the number of concurrent shoppers. This article will address just a few simple techniques that will make you better prepared for your online heydays. For the sake of brevity and in order to stay within the scope of this blog post, I will concentrate on three areas which will give your store the biggest bang in scalability and availability:

• 1) Software development
• 2) Hosting infrastructure
• 3) Use of external content delivery networks

Software Development:

Software development and database technology have progressed dramatically in recent years. However, database connections and database queries are still considered the most demanding and limiting elements of your software performance. The more one can minimize the number of concurrent DB connections, queries and database updates the more scalable the application will be. Obviously, the database cannot be eliminated completely as perpetual changes must be communicated to the end user and new transactions must be recorded. However, if you analyze your user interaction with your site, you will most likely conclude that most of the data gathered by your users is in “read only” format. Hence, your users can tolerate some level of data staleness.

Data caching technique allows your software to display data that may be a few minutes old — rather than up to the second — directly from the database.  For example, Product Name, Description, Pricing, and Attributes are not subject to change every second but rather can be cached and made available to the end user from the cache’s last read from the database. This way, your users are getting data from the cache, which reads from the database once every predetermined time interval (could be minutes or hours depending on the specific business requirements). With the proper cache in place, your end users are getting reasonably current data and in turn are not bombarding your database with transactions that read the exact same data for each user. Data cache should be used wisely as some data does require database reads or writes and cannot be caches. For example, inventory availability must be gathered real-time from the database. However, with added sophistication, even inventory updates can be cached by putting certain thresholds and rules in your software.

Hosting Infrastructure

As hardware costs has become more affordable in recent years, many software vendors find hardware redundancy as a convenient alternative to inadequate software development. I personally recommend using all available techniques combined.

A good hosting infrastructure should provide both availability and scalability. Availability provides an environment in which no single point of failure exists. In other words, it can sustain a degree of hardware failure with minimal or no impact on the end user’s browsing or shopping experience. In addition, a redundant hosting environment can also provide scalability in which multiple servers are sharing the processing load in order to accommodate more users divided among the available servers.

One of the key hardware devices that enable such redundancy is the load balancer. A load balancer is a device designed to manage the traffic distribution among all registered servers. It is also empowered with a heartbeat monitor for each of the servers so that in the event that a server fails to respond, it takes it out of the distribution loop. In other words, it funnels traffic only to “healthy” servers. Load balance devices such as Big IP by F5 (http://www.f5.com) are recommended to be made available in pairs so that a single device does not create a single point of failure. Hence, one load balancer provides redundancy to the other. There are more advanced topics in hardware redundancy such as “sticky sessions” and “stateless users,” but I will discuss them in more detail in future blog posts. In short, sticky sessions create stickiness by which users are forced to stay on the same servers throughout their shopping experience.  Stateless users allow users to move between servers from one request to another as no data related to the user is server bound. As mentioned, stay tuned for future postings regarding “statelessness” and “sticky sessions.”

Use of external content delivery networks

Content Delivery Networks, also called CDNs, are great tools to allow variable scalability without upfront hardware and infrastructure investment. CDN allows scalability of bandwidth and hardware through a sophisticated infrastructure which is shared among many customers. The nice element of using such a service is that you are only subject to  a Pay-As-You-Go fee. Hence, you pay per usage. Static content, rich media, and images are excellent candidates to be delivered through a CDN provider. Most CDN providers maintain a robust and redundant network world wide which allows optimal delivery of such content. In other words, such content does not really come from your servers but rather from the CDN cache. (An example of a popular CDN provider is Akamai (http://www.akamai.com). The beauty of this model is that it is completely transparent to your end users and your online store is now equipped with the same infrastructure of some of the largest online retailers, but for a relatively minimal cost.

In this post, I want to concentrate on the integration of online commerce platforms with in-store Point of Sale systems. Obviously, Online/Offline integration goes well beyond that. ERP, Warehouse fulfillment, supply logistics and Accounting Systems are all great examples of Online/Offline integration platforms. However, for brevity and simplicity I will concentrate here on POS alone.

Many traditional “Brick and Mortar” retailers have expanded their reach to the online community with an eCommerce platform (often called Online Shopping Cart).

After all, 24 by 7 availability and the expanded geographical presence of an online store have no match in traditional retail. I find many retailers treating their online store as just another shop in their chain. In fact, with careful planning and strategy, they can leverage their Online/Offline infrastructure to great advantage.

Let’s take just a few simple real-life scenarios and see how a fully integrated retail infrastructure can help.

For most retailers, the average cost of online transactions is dramatically lower than in-store transactions. However, customer loyalty and a good geographical presence must be nurtured and capitalized on.  A traditional store’s customer-base can provide a solid early adapter crowd to a newly launched online store. A physical store can distribute personalized coupons to customers during checkout, enticeing those customers to log on and potentially makes purchases online. A convenient shopping experience builds loyalty and with just a few smart marketing techniques, a store can expand their reach virally on the web. “Refer a friend” is a feature that can work very well online. You email a product or a store recommendation to a friend and when that friend makes a purchase, you, the referrer, get a coupon towards your next purchase. This coupon can be redeemed in-store, on-line or in both. This is just another example where you can drive behavior with relative ease as long as you have a good data sharing infrastructure between your traditional POS and your online system.

Another simple advantage for integrating your two retail platforms is inventory availability.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you as a store owner can provide real-time inventory access to your customers from their home?  How disappointing is it for a customer to come in and find out that the product that was on store shelves just yesterday is no longer in stock? Many retailers provide in-store pickup - allowing a local customer to purchase online but save the shipping and handling cost by physically picking-up their purchases.

With careful strategic planning, a retailer can take full advantage of both worlds. All it takes is an open mind, an executable strategy and the technology for real-time data sharing!

Don’t underestimate the power (or simplicity) of basic web analytics!  You don’t need to be an expert to make good use of some of the basic reporting in any web analytics package.  And it can lead to some dramatic results without much effort at all.  It’s the old adage “crawl before you walk and walk before you run.”  The same applies to web analytics.  So start crawling with some of the basics of web analytics.

I typically discuss three key areas with customers.  I won’t go too deep into the first and second, but the third is the crux of this posting.

First, you need to understand your goals. Some people call them Key Performance Metrics (KPM) or Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Let’s keep it simple and call it your “goals”. What behavior are you trying to drive with your visitors? e.g., make a purchase, fill out a contact form, pick up the phone and call, etc. Make sure to create goals that push the envelope but are still attainable.

Second, setup your content to drive that behavior. Obviously this is easier said than done, but don’t worry about making things perfect.  That’s why you have analytics — it’ll tell you how well it’s doing and you can always change it. Think about nomenclature for navigation items, page titles, images and highlights, and how they relate to driving the goals you set out. There are a lot of good resources for helping with what is called “Information Architecture”.

Third, and the heart of this posting, use basic web analytics to measure visitor behavior to understand how you are doing and more importantly how to change things to drive improved results.

Here are some simple reports that everyone should look at (and every web analytics package contains):

• Unique Page Views: Total amount of times a page was read by unique visitors. So if John Smith views the same page four times, it only counts once as a unique visitor. This will tell you what content is getting the most air time. Start to ask yourself why and if this is the behavior I am trying to drive to achieve my goals. If it is, great. Follow that trend to make sure it doesn’t change. If it’s not, start to look at the relevance and brevity of the content. Are you hitting key points immediately to drive the right behavior?
• Single Page Visits: Visitors came from an external site (e.g., search engine or typing directly in the browser), landed on that one page and left. Sometimes this is fine like in the case of a landing page from a search engine where they can fill out a contact form and leave. More often than not this indicates a user was confused by the content or not expecting what they saw. So review those common single page visits to understand how they got there and what would cause them to be confused. Refine content as necessary. Change navigation names to be more meaningful. Add more imagery and fewer words perhaps. If you are working with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) then do the keywords match the information on the landing page where people come when they click in the search engine?
• Top Exit Pages: This is what people were looking at just before they left your site. In some cases it makes sense as in a thank you form for submitting their information. That’s a natural place to leave a site from. If it’s on the product index page, you have a problem. Again, understand where people are leaving and figure out why. Is your content too wordy? Do you have way too many links and people don’t know where to go? You should modify your content accordingly.

These are three reports that anyone can understand and begin using within 15 minutes that will significantly help drive better website performance. And you can spend less than an hour a week and see dramatic improvements.

At the end of the day it’s about using content to drive behavior, using analytics to measure the effectiveness of content and then using a Content Management System (CMS) to maintain the content that drives behavior. Continually monitor and manage that cycle.

There are no more excuses for not using web analytics!