Ecommerce Detective Feedback
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
October 20, 2005 [3459 views]
A really good showing this week with over 90 students completing the activity on time. Some of you really “get it” while others are still struggling to understand why any of this stuff might be important.
Let me spell it out. Successful ecommerce means large amounts of well-targeted traffic arriving at a well-designed high reputation site and converting into (repeat) customers. This means high search engine visibility and excellent relevant content. I cannot stress the importance of branding and search engines too highly (but we’ll come back to that in the near future).
This exercise was designed to get you looking beyond the home page and to start to address the technology as well as aspects of the business. Here are some of the things you found out…
Technical
Operating systems: 20% Linux, 44% Windows, 13% Solaris, 4% other Unix, 19% unknown
Web server: 35% Apache, 39% IIS, 8% other
Scripting languages: 15% ASP, 1% .NET, 2% Perl, 14% PHP, 6% JSP, 9% Java Servlets and 11% others.
I wanted you to see that when it comes to serving web pages the world is split between Windows and Linux and IIS and Apache. You might find if you looked harder that bigger sites are less likely to use Windows than smaller ones. Try investigating what some very large sites use by revisiting Netcraft. I also wanted to illustrate that there is a wide range of software solutions. Once again its worth investigating some of the larger sites and finding out what they use; ASP tends to be the cheap and cheerful Microsoft option but is often used by less serious sites.
Launch dates and upgrades:
I asked you to look at this because some companies build a site and then forget about it while others relaunch or refresh their site every 6-12 months. If you are looking to work for a company that takes ecommerce seriously which type of company would you want to approach?
Reputation and search engines
I asked you about PageRank, AlexaRank, traffic, keywords and links from other sites to start you thinking about the “reputation” of sites. You will discover that reputation is one of the most powerful concepts in ecommerce. Without it a site gets no visitors and without visitors (customers) there is no business.
A good number of you instinctively seem to get this and share my fascination with the figures. You want to know how to improve PageRank, lower your AlexaRank, find appropriate keywords and increase inbound links. For some of you this last sentence will have meant nothing; the figures are meaningless and you cannot see what this has to do with ecommerce.
My aim is to convince you that along with the technical building of the site (HTML, ASP, databases, security etc) you must know about these factors because they affect the design, the choices of technology and tools and the work that you might do for a client.
Comments and questions
I am delighted that as a group you appear overwhelmingly positive about the module and the style of teaching that I use. For those of you who find it unusual I would ask you to stay tuned as we become more technically orientated. I hope that by the end of the semester it will all make sense.
Here are some particular responses to comments some of you made:
“I found this particular activity hard, any suggestions”:
Doing ecommerce well is hard. Go back and use the tools to explore some more sites. Really try and understand what the numbers are telling you. Try with common sites such as Amazon.co.uk, compare popular and unpopular sites and read the documentation or FAQ’s for the tools.
“Can we be informed if an activity survey has been received?”:
I have added a thank you page to my site. If you reach that after you have submitted your responses then they have been received.
“How does this relate to the exam?”:
I will provide an additional document to describe the exam case study. So far you have been looking at my choices of site. From the start of the case study you will choose your own and repeat some of the activities done so far.
“Do Boolean expressions enhance web search?”:
Learning to search well is probably one of the greatest skills you can learn at the moment. There are some many things you can find and you will improve the quality of your results if you use the advanced search (of all the big engines) or the extended notation.
Read Google Hacks, Rael Dornfest, Tara Calishain, 2005
“Can we have sessions on security, payment, search, asp.net, web development?”:
We will try and touch on many of these issues and provide pointers to resources for those who want to follow up more deeply. It is impossible to cover everything at the same depth but if I can motivate some of you to get excited about researching them for yourselves then I will have succeeded.
“What do we have to learn for the exam?”:
I could already grade many of you from the answers to the activities so far! The differing quality of the thinking is already apparent. A high grade in this module is not related to memorizing a set of facts or theories about ecommerce but applying your increasing set of knowledge and tools to interesting problems in a convincing way (that industry would find very useful). The exam is therefore based on a case study that you have time to prepare in which you explore a client and make recommendation. The exam is a time to demonstrate that you can present these ideas in a succinct and convincing form (as you would in a client presentation).
What do you think?
