Maintaining the Success of Your E-Commerce Website

By DoItYourself.com Staff

Even though many Internet stores achieve initial success, retaining that customer base is vital and mandatory. This short and sweet article is intended exactly for that purpose. You may choose to use a combination of the following techniques for the continued success of your e-commerce site.

For example, product information can generally be displayed using a handful of templates, and your product information will usually be entered into a database to begin with. Combining the templates with the database makes the most sense for producing that content. Pages for special promotions and other free style pages are better created manually, even if you use a basic template as a starting point. Of course, you will need to employ one or more HTML programmers unless your content authors are sufficiently skilled in HTML manipulation.

Version Control

A major concern in most e-commerce companies is version control. What if someone modifies a file by mistake, or worse, deletes one? Version control offers rollback capabilities to prior versions of the file.

Deploying Content: Coordinating With Content Authors

When it comes to content creation, security, and deployment, there are certain issues you should be aware of. Discuss the following questions with your content authors and make sure you incorporate their responses into your website's formal documentation and plan.

• Will there be a formal content approval process? In other words, will an editor and/ or a manager review an author's content before it is deployed? If so, consider how these approvals will be tracked. Microsoft does not currently offer an off-the-shelf document management system, although the upcoming "Tahoe" portal server should provide some solutions in this area. You may need to write your own content-workflow system to support this need.



• If your content authors will not be using an off-the-shelf Web development tool such as FrontPage, what will they use? You may need to build an interface that enables them to enter information into templates or into a database for later merging with a template.



• How will deployment work? Will newly created pages be deployed immediately, or will you "save up" all changes and deploy them on a regular schedule? Will you have a means for content managers to immediately deploy important pages if necessary?

Take time to understand your content development, management, and deployment processes to be sure the website you create meets your company's needs. If these needs include robust content management and deployment, you may need to look outside the Microsoft product line for the immediate future.

Your company's fulfillment process is possibly one of the most important factors in your continued success. After all, fulfillment is the process responsible for delivering the services and products that customers purchase from your website.

© Doityourself.com 2006