Website design - Caz Limited

The architecture of your website

Defining the purposes of your website is vital to avoid 'mission creep' and thus keep costs under control. One of the first nettles to grasp is whether or not you intend to make money out of the website.

The approach taken by many organisations with regard to their website development would seem to indicate that a website is somehow a special case and not subject to the same financial criteria and resource planning as, say, a shop. As an exercise, it can be useful to replace the word website with the word shop during planning and see how your attitude changes, see what you've left out. Consider, for example: “I'm planning the marketing launch of my website” versus “I'm planning the marketing launch of my shop”.

The following are typical objectives for a website:

• Brochure - showing what you do: goods and services
• Commerce - selling what you do
• CRM - keeping the customer happy, encouraging return visits
• Decision support - helping the prospect decide what to buy (this can be for both online and offline sales)
• Product support - increase effectiveness and reduce costs of supporting your wares and services
• Extranet - ring-fenced area for agents, partners, etc to transact business or run a virtual office
• Intranets - typically remote working on centrally held files or updating timesheets of staff working away
• Reference - provision of (usually) non-commercial data like technical specifications, statistics or reports
• A combination of the above

Within each of the above items there is usually a set of sub-objectives.

Budgeting

The budget has to cover (at the very least):

• Planning - setting out requirements and perhaps a specification
• Design 'treatment' or 'visuals' - sample pages to show the style, maybe leading to changes in livery for web use
• Implementation - including databases, associated support software, integration with existing systems
• Testing - both functional and cross-platform compatibility eg PC, Mac, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari
• Launch - deployment of component parts, website configuration, marketing, search engine registration
• Operational costs - hosting, marketing, CRM, secure certificate
• Website content management - in-house, out-of-house

Frequently thought is only given to the design element, but most serious websites also require databases and perhaps integration with an existing sales order processing system. Some calculation has to be done on the likely returns on investment for a commercial website to keep the expenditure appropriate. However there are minimum costs below which you cannot expect a reasonable result. As ever, it's a balance.

Design issues

Website design has a lot of constraints - notably the shape, size, resolution and colour capabilities of the viewing system. Font options are also severely limited at the present time. The accurate placement of design elements that print media allow is not available on web pages, so there are a series of compromises to be made.

The following list indicates most of the major design considerations:

• Target market - what viewing facilities are they likely to have?
• Base layout - is there an existing corporate livery to follow?
• Content - how often does it change? How will it be managed? Is it date dependent?
• Databases - do you have corporate data or reports that need to be presented?
• Multimedia - is it appropriate?
• Accessibility - what's appropriate to your market and your legal obligations
• Interactivity - this frequently requires database support to remember visitor details
• Search/drill down facilities
• Multiple languages - French, German, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian, Arabic, Russian, Japanese
• Locales supported (eg British, US, Australian or other)
• Scope (see above)
• Security - particularly for commerce
• Visitor experience - speed, ease of navigation
• Newsletters - collecting addresses
• Forums - creating a community and a reason to revisit

Commerce

There are specific issues with commerce that can cause problems. Apart from selling something downloadable like software or reports (which are infinitely available) any other system has to take account of stock either in-house or from a wholesaler. This infers some integration with the stock system assuming there is one and it's not the sole responsibility of George in Stores. Even selling software presents its own issues because a number of people making a simultaneous download of a 25Mb program may have a serious impact on the performance of the server, not just for the visitors doing the downloads, but also for any others visiting the website.

Some of the issues are:

• Shopping systems - product management, price list management, baskets, special offers, affiliate schemes
• Payment handling - credit card, cheque, credit transfer, wire transfer, manual or automatic
• Credit card transactions - merchant ID, AVS (address verification system)
• Secure certificates
• Drop shipping - shipping directly from a wholesaler
• Integration with your existing sales order processing system
• Serial number management (software sales only)
• VAT processing - place of supply, place of delivery considerations, EU issues
• Terms and conditions, copyright, privacy policy and securing 'personal information'

Legal

Legislation is starting to catch up with Internet trading and so this is a moving target. At present there are three main sets of legislation that affect UK based websites:

• Disability Discrimination
• Distance Selling Regulations
• Data Protection

The terms and conditions of trade should also be specific about the jurisdiction in force eg England & Wales or Scotland.

Marketing and promotion

Some enterprises lend themselves more readily to search engine promotion than others: ceramic tiles are very difficult to promote because of the wide use of both the words ceramic and tile; a website selling Bewick engravings is going to be much easier to promote, not least because there's a proper noun in there.

Some important considerations are:

• Getting useful traffic to your website - as opposed to inappropriate leads that waste your resources
• Keywords/meta tags - important for some search engines but not the principal one: Google
• Offline promotion - frequently more important than online promotion
• Company livery should incorporate the website and email addresses - unbelievably frequently omitted

Operational issues

Once the website is up and running there will be costs involved in promoting and maintaining it. Out-of-date websites are a turn-off for visitors and are therefore counterproductive.

Keeping the content of your website fresh may turn into something akin to magazine production where there is a need for continuous input. This requires the content management to be someone's responsibility on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis as appropriate. In other cases it may just be a question of keeping course data or an events list up-to-date.

Self-managed websites frequently suffer from poor copywriting, spelling and grammar thus leading to lower credibility and business confidence. Ideally whoever does manage the content should be a complete pedant with regard to the use of English (or the chosen language). Note some British websites adopt US English spelling and vernacular to give them competitive advantage (or more probably reduce competitive disadvantage) on the other side of the pond. This means whoever manages the content is familiar with the US idiom.

There may be a need for training of staff in website administration - we've tried to make our system as easy as possible.

Website requirements evolve, sometimes quite quickly, so a review process needs to be put in place.

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