Bob Browning's blog

Another site released… things are getting busy around here..

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Should an ecommerce site cost £1,000, £10,000 or £50,000? There is a big disconnect between our development costs for an ecommerce site and many prospect’s expectations.

• With a designer, we developed an ecommerce brand and web site (www.dotcomstore.co.uk) and used Pay Per Click (PPC) to get clients. I think it is a great site, and it seemed like a pretty good wheeze at the time. We spent a couple of grand on PPC before we gave up. Why? We got lots of leads but every one of them expected to spend £2,000 or less on their web site.
• www.firstratedirectory.co.uk is a pretty smart lead generation web site. They publish requests for information (RFI) aimed at people in our businesss. I don’t believe I have seen an ecommerce RFI on the site ever with a budget of more than £5k. Mostly budgets are in the low four figures. I recall someone who wanted an ecommerce site for an auto parts business with a full bill of materials breakdown and a budget of £2k.

There is no way we can produce a web site for this sort of number. A good design by a competent designer is in the £3-6k range and even a very vanilla site will take us a week to set up. So our starting budget is around £6k and we go up to £50k for the bigger more custom sites.

Are we doing something wrong? One of our clients decided for very good reasons to use a (very) serious hosted US-based service called Netsuite. Sadly there was some confusion about who was going to skin the various functions and we ended up doing it. My programmer was on this for about four days with the HTML already cut. This stuff can be complicated.

The only way these expectations can be met as far as I can see is:

• Use a pre-existing template married to a vanilla ecommerce system. Literally plug and go.
• Off-shore the work.

There is obviously a market for the first approach. I have had a few leads myself from people with low level operations and a vanilla requirement who I have pointed at a templated system. However the leads I am discussing above are for people who’s business model justifies something better than this, indeed won’t get anywhere without a substantial marketing budget.

The other issue is that project management time is often disproportionately high for low-budget projects, simply because small clients don’t have the internal disciplines of larger companies. A £2k budget could easily be eaten up in client relations.

The £64,000 question is what happens to these guys? Do they get a serious site built in India for £2,000 and then go on to make their first million or do all these enterprises disappear?
Should I be developing a templated £2k solution or stick to my knitting? If I do, how do I control project management costs?

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Did you know that if you search for racing grannies on YouTube, there are over 200 clips. Very cool. At last the web site is live. Punters can now buy their Racing Grannies and Fighting Grandads from the source.

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About eight years ago the banks looked at the new world of e-commerce and were horrified at the possibilities for fraud. Visa and MasterCard came up with SET (Secure Electronic Transactions). The idea was that our banks would all issue us with certificates and we would digitally sign every credit card transaction that we made on-line. Huge amounts of money were poured into this and a whole industry created.

• Certificates were going to be put on the chip on our bank card.
• All computers would be made with built-in smart card readers.
• All the e-commerce software was going to be enhanced to support SET.
• Venture capitalists funded software companies by the dozen.
• A web site was set up (it is gone now http://www.setco.org)
• Bankers would tell me that it was ‘definitely going to happen’.

At that time cards didn’t have chips in them and PCs didn’t have card readers. So it was all completely impractical of course. I said so at the time.

Have things changed?

I think they have. In the first place cards do have chips in them. And although PCs don’t have card readers, they all have a USB port now. So why not include a wireless proximity gizmo in the credit card (like your Oyster card) and distribute a USB receiver to customers. The receiver would be pretty cheap to make an so the customer would just have to wave the card at the PC to transfer information to it.

Chip and Pin security for ecommerce transactions. It would save banks and merchants lost of dough.

Bob

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Salesforce.com pretty much has the market for Sales Force Automation services sewn up. (it used to be called ‘Contact Management’) They offer a hosted application accessibile via the web and it is a great product. They deserve their place at the top.

So why have we just release a new Sales Force Automation system?

I don’t want to sound too patronising here, but most sales people I know have a relatively short attention span and zero interest in details. They want their tools to be simple, intuitive and fast. So the number of screens and menu options in salesforce.com tend to lead to confusion. I have designed a system based around just two screens.

1. A list of your accounts and a list of current actionss outstanding.
2. A screen about one customer or prospect that you can do anything with by revealing various forms.

The important thing is that neither screen shows all the options up front. But when you click on a link to (say) record a conversation, a form is revealed. Even this form is fairly simple, but as you click on options different bits of the form are revealed. For example if you want to send an email you select from a list of potted emails and a pre-filled email form is presented.

Because our system is integrated with our other software we can customise it. For a client who has an online directory, the sales person can switch directory options on and off and give temporary features from the customer page.

Take a look and let me know what you think. http://www.textor.com/sales-force-automation.html . There is a link to a demo.

Bob

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Is Perl old hat. Shouldwe all be retraining in the latest shiny thing to pass by (Ruby on Rails I think)?

I have been programming for more years than I can mention and every few years a new language comes along that absolutely everyone has to get into because the old languages are dead.

The fact is that since PL/1, which was the first 3GL to combine the requirements of commercial and scientific users, the world has only needed at most one more language. Sadly not one that has been created: PL/2 the object-oriented version of PL/1.

I use Perl from day to day because it is there. It is no better or worse overall than all the others. I can deliver solutions with it, and frankly that is all I care about.

Bob

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I don’t use my mobile much. What I need is a phone that also stores my calendar and frequently-used phone numbers. That is about it.

All phones synchronise with your PC don’t they? That is what the nice man in Carphone Warehouse told me anyway.

Nonsense of course. All phones synchronise all the entries in your outlook address book. In my case around one thousand. Very few phones allow you to tag entries in your address book for synchronisation. My Moto does.

Very few phones sync your calendar. My Moto doesn’t any more. Not since I installed Outlook 2007. The support forum for the software tells me that a new version is with Moto for testing and that this normally takes two months.

They only ship a few million phones, what is so hard about shipping software that works.

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So it seems that my Dell Optiplex 745 (a fairly recent model) comes equipped with a network card that does not support ‘TCP Window Scaling’ – whatever this is. The effect of this is that Outlook, Skype, and Windows live messenger all fail to work.

You have to type this at the prompt

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

which disables it until windows encounters a problem and decides to heal itself when the process starts over again.

Aaaaarrrrhhhh…!

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I have my brand new shining computer with Vista. Dell delivered it last week. It has been hell. Nothing works:

We have three printers networked.

• One old HP for which there is not and never will be a driver for Vista.
• One relatively new HP deskjet for which there is a local printer driver but it seems no network printer driver. I can just about get this working by pretending it is a local printer, but creating a port which point to a network address. Thanks to someone in a forum somewhere who provided this workaround after about half a day.
• A Minolta colour laser that just works (do we see the beginning of a pattern here).

I also got Outlook 2007. The email didn’t work at all. After another half a day we found that you needed to disable some TCP framing or something. It involved copying a horrendous instruction into the prompt as administrator. Not for the faint hearted but it worked.

Trying to get a dual monitor arrangement wasn’t fun either – another whole day at least – and another story.

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With all these millions being made from ‘communities’ and ‘user-generated income’ obviously there is a bomb to be made out of a myspace aimed at the business community. Now BT have one http://www.bttradespace.com/. OK I have registered (http://textor.bttradespace.com/). What do I get out of it?

1. A fairly neat way of creating a web site about my company. Actually I already have one of those.
2. I can join a ‘community’ such as software developers or business services. However apart from being listed with other members I don’t seem to be able to commune in any way
3. A forum. I don’t believe it! I have to re-register to use the forum – presumably because they have used a third-part product and haven’t figured out how to integrate it. Given how much money they spent on everything else I would have thought they could work this out.

What is this doing for me exactly?

We have discussed developing something similar ourselves in a particular niche. Investors are keen because ‘community’ and ‘user generated content’ are flavour of the month. However I coudn’t see it then and I don’t see it now. Unlike the average MySpace member who probably thinks it pretty neat to have their own web space (it is), a business looks for business benefits if this is going to take up my valuable time.

This obviously cost BT a lot of money but I don’t see it going very far.

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