Hosting An Ecommerce Web Site
Just like with any other business, the customer must come first. And the customer of your ecommerce web site is not Bill Gates (probably) or the tech guy who always repairs your computers and taught you everything about the Wed; it’s Grandma Ethel, who can’t use a blender, or Jim, the guy who infected your computer with email viruses he caught from a porn site. In short, you can’t depend on your customers to be able to figure things out. And that’s okay. With ecommerce hosting, it’s all about making money – which ultimately is all about serving the customers. Hosting for the Least Common Denominator – And The Guy at the Other End I once worked at a place where computers from TRS-80s to state-of-the-art IMacs were in use, all networked together and operated by people ranging in skill from Jim to Bill Gates. It was one of the hardest things I ever did – not only did I have to design web sites for the really terrible computers, but they had to look good on the Imacs with 21-inch screens. That’s kind of what you have to consider when you’re doing ecommerce hosting. You’ll have people out there running all kinds of systems; and you have to make sure your site is accessible to the customer with the slowest crummiest system but attractive and professional-looking for the guy with the top-line gaming system. How? By not using anything terribly complicated. Keep your data on your database as much as you can; your ecommerce programs will generate what your customers need on your web server, ensuring faster loads for the slow computers. Give customers a choice between a plain vanilla site and the one with all the Flash and multimedia. Instead of putting huge pictures on your site, put thumbnails – miniature pictures – that they can click on to see the full-size image. And keep it simple – no pop-ups, no animated gifs – besides, moving objects attract customer attention away from your product – and the point of the ecommerce site is to sell the product! So ecommerce hosting necessities will include things like a good database and robust processing speed on the server. You should also make sure your shopping cart is accessible from every page, and the Checkout option shows up with it. And make sure everything works every time. Test Your Ecommerce Site Time for Grandma Ethel to go shopping! With proper ecommerce hosting, Grandma should be able to access the site on her slow old computer without complaining about how slow everything is, and she should be able to get everything to work without a fuss. Pay attention to everything she does; places where she hesitates are places you need to fix, and places that the page hangs up on are trouble spots. Finally, Hosting the Ecommerce Web Site of Your Dreams Every bug