Part 1 of this blog post covered the roles and early build stages, so here’s more on how building a house are just like building a website with us:

Hold up! Could you just add an extra floor and repaint the house blue?

During the construction of a house, the homeowner’s needs or mind may change. Any changes requested for the house mid-build might mean the builder needs to redo already completed work or alter the floor plan and structure. Changes requested may very well be possible, but would likely incur further costs to cover the additional manpower, time or materials required that were not budgeted for at the outset. The same applies to changes of brief or functionality during a website build. The best way to prevent this is to be as thorough in briefing us on your requirements before the project commences and ensuring everything scoped out and budgeted for is included by your designer from the start of the build.

Moving in the fashionable furniture and kitsch knick-knacks

What you fill your house with – the furniture, knick-knacks, photo frames and artwork on the walls – speaks most to who you are, more so than anything else about a house. Homes furnished by anyone other than the person who'll be living there can sometimes feel cold and detached from the personality of the homeowner, missing the mark about who they are. Websites can be hard to build, so people recruit the experts, just as they do when building the house itself. But when it comes to filling your website with the words, photos or products that make it yours and are your business, there’s no one better to do that than you yourself. Following the approval of the Prototype, our Site Content stage allows for our clients to submit all the text and images they want to fill their site with – their voice, spin and personal touch. Just as you can add, remove and swap around the furniture and knick-knacks in your house as much as you like, once you've approved your site our content management system Mission Control allows you to forever change the text and images in the content areas of your site.

The final walkthrough

When a house enters the final stages of its construction, the new homeowners are given a walkthrough from the project manager. Once you’ve approved the Design, it is then meticulously applied to your approved Prototype. At that same time, the ‘furniture’ of your website – your submitted written site content – is also added to the completed site. Our project managers then deliver the site to you for your first site review. This is the first time you’re able to navigate through your completed website, with all of our design and your content in place. If a lick of paint has clearly been left off, it’s your chance to let us know and we’ll paint it right on. If there’s a hinged door instead of having a sliding door as had been discussed, no problem – we can swap it out.

Handing over the keys

Once all the work has been completed on your brand new website, we hand over the full set of keys to the content management system Mission Control. While you’re moving in you can start rearranging and adding to your written content, images, profiles and products – and you can continue to do so for the life of your website with us. Any other final personal touches can be made – a contact email address here, a setting change there. This is your chance to familiarise yourself with your new website and how Mission Control works. Don’t rush inviting everyone over to see the new house until you feel completely settled – take as long as you need.

The housewarming

Once a house is complete and the homeowners all moved-in, they throw open the doors and invite in friends and family for the grand tour. Equally, once you’re ready to launch your website, your project manager can help send the website live, swinging open the front door to the world. Whether or not anyone shows up to the party is all down to you: your business, the demand and whether you’ve got an online marketing campaign running. You can have the most functional and beautiful website in the world, but if no one knows it exists no one will be rocking up to the website housewarming. But that’s a whole other online marketing story...

Renovations: DIY versus the professionals

Most homeowners don’t want to get dirty or stressed whacking up their own extensions or knocking down internal walls themselves. To get the job done quickly, painlessly and – most importantly – right, you’re best to call on the professionals again. Many clients who have their sites built by us come back from time to time seeking additional functionality, design work or strategic advice for their websites. Within Mission Control it’s incredibly easy and user friendly to change content and adjust day-to-day settings. Deeper still within Mission Control is the power to alter some of the more fundamental ‘look and feel’ and structural settings of your website. But, truth be told, the ability to make such changes yourself lies beyond the patience and know-how of most. For the sake of ease and efficiency, we’d always recommend coming back to us for any additional work to redesign or add-to your website if your business grows or needs change.

If you’ve never built a house, well, I’m sure you can imagine! Here are how the stages and roles involved in house construction are just like those of building a website with us:

The builder-architect

When designing a house, an architect knows what works and what doesn’t. An architect needs to take into consideration everything from usability, budget or even the laws of gravity! They're experienced at striking that balance between their own vision and that of the homeowner-to-be. Our designers are experts in website functionality and usability, perfectly blending our clients’ needs with their own ideas, all the while mindful of design practicality and principles. During their initial discussion with their client, our designers would wisely advise against a Flash-heavy website, just as an architect would advise against a flash-heavy glass-walled bathroom. Likely sporting somewhat less bum crack than your average house builder, our designers then swap their architect’s drafting table for a construction hard hat following the initial discussion. From there, the designer gets to work building the website Prototype: a fully functioning wireframe that acts as the blueprint for your site and – ultimately – as its foundation and frame.

The blueprint

Before work starts on the bricks and mortar of any house, every detail needs to be planned out in a blueprint. Whereas a house blueprint is a small-scale representation of how the final house will come together, The Web Showroom takes the idea of a blueprint many steps further with our Prototyping stage. Your future website comes to life in the form of the fully functioning Prototype: where every click, menu item, login action, e-commerce process and form submission result will work just as they will on your final site. The prototyping process ensures you’re involved in the creation of your website’s functionality and know exactly how it will work before it’s even finished.

The project manager

A building site’s project manager (or foreman) oversees construction from the first ground broken until lock up. Likewise, our project managers are there for our clients before the first pixel is positioned, up until the website is sent live – the person across the big picture of the project. This is never as important as it is on our large e-commerce, membership and directory website projects, where the project manager works side-by-side with your designer to ensure the best solutions are deployed on your site. If you’ve given us a preferred website launch date at the outset, the project manager is watching the clock and helping keep things on track. If there are complicated secure-access, membership or directory setups to adjust or configure before going live, the project manager is there to step you through. If you’re not sure what you need to do next, the project manager is there to let you know and guide you through.

The foundation, frame, plumbing and wiring

Every great house needs a solid slab, a sturdy frame and the power to keep it running. Both a cottage and mansion – so different in their size, purpose and style – are held-up and powered by frames, wiring and plumbing that are essentially (underneath it all) made of the very same stuff. Our content management system Mission Control serves as the foundation, frame, power and brains behind all the websites we build. How much of that potential frame and wiring is used for your website depends on the needs, scope and budget of the project. A clean and simple five-page brochure-ware site is the small, charming holiday house of websites: less time, planning and resources needed to design, build and decorate it. No less attention or effort goes into building it, but there are generally less resources, functionality and cost involved. On the other hand, a site with 40 pages of content, eight forms, five types of site-based memberships on sale, 500 products throughout 27 e-commerce departments and a complex directory search with 400 profiles being listed is more like the Empire State Building of websites. To put it in building terms: the frame holding up one floor of a building that size has to support many more floors above it. The logic of the frame and wiring is also more complex and – like in a big building – one action may need to initiate multiple reactions. In a building for example, buzzing in a visitor may need to trigger a door to open; a light to switch on in the hallway; and a lift to give the visitor access to a certain secure floor. Simply put, the ‘wiring’ of a website project this size is more complex and requires more time, thought, functionality and the budget to accommodate it.

The Italian bathroom tiles and turquoise feature wall

Let’s face it, no one visits your new house and says, "you’ve got one helluva frame and some amazing wiring going on!" It’s the outward aesthetics of a house – paintwork, finishes and kit-out – that grabs the most attention. Remember though, it’s the frame, in-built flow and functionality of the house that makes it truly liveable and long lasting. After your designer has made your future website 'liveable and long lasting' at the Prototype stage, they kick off their steel cap boots and put on their beret and hipster glasses and begin what we call the Design stage. This stage is the website equivalent of choosing the paint colours, the carpet pile and the type of granite for the kitchen bench tops. It’s the part of the build our clients generally get the biggest kick out of, discussing how their site will look. Stripped back to their frames many houses look the same, so the Design stage is where your website is stamped with its personality.

Continued in How building a website is just like building a house: Part 2 - how your content is like filling your website with ‘furniture’, having the final walkthrough and doing renovations to the house down the track.

Skeumorphism is a design technique or approach to make elements look like their real world counterparts. Often skeumorphism is employed to increase familiarity of an object that might be somewhat foreign to the user. Other times it’s purely to connect the user with the object for no other reason other than appearance or nostalgia. In any case, skeumorphism has certainly played a huge part in the way we interact with everyday items.

Take your iPhone for example. There are countless examples of skeumorphism located no further than the iPhone you have in your pocket or the iPad on your desk. The apps are chock full of references to real world objects to help better familiarise yourself when navigating around. The layout of the calendar, the textural appearance of the bookcase in Books, the flip clock look of the alarm clock, the yellow legal pad of Notes and even the filofax look of the Find Friends application. I can’t remember the last time I even owned a filofax (I can actually and it was a Xmas present to forget) but by just making its appearance ‘look’ like a filofax makes the transition from real world object to the digital version all that smoother.

But whilst Apple has been the driving force behind a skeumorphistic approach in recent history, it hasn’t always been a home run for UI design. They were largely criticized by the website development community for their overuse of textures (especially leather and fabric) and ‘noisy’ backgrounds.

Coincidental or not, it was around this time that designers started to rethink their own graphical or UI style in favour of a newer, cleaner, flatter approach.

Companies with a huge a web visibility were the first to respond with the likes of Microsoft, Google+ and YouTube all adopting a decidedly minimal, non-textured approach to their sites, apps and operating systems.

Microsoft’s Xbox Dashboard design paved the way for their website revamp which in turn inspired what would eventually be the Windows 8 interface creating a consistent user experience no matter what medium they’re viewing it on.

Google Plus was designed flat from the start but in the name of consistency they rolled it out across the whole suite of sites.

And of course whenever the big boys take up a shift in the design scene, it’s only a matter of time before it filters down to other sites. Here are a few examples of sites that have taken a cleaner, flatter approach.

Benefits

Apart from the aesthetic, there are a number of benefits to a cleaner, flatter design style that all combine to enrich the user’s experience.

Quicker Load Times – because elements like buttons and containers that would have been traditionally created in a graphics programs are now done by CSS and HTML, load times are reduced substantially which only benefits users both desktop and mobile.

Focuses attention on key elements – rather than focussing on textures or elements that have a ‘look at me’ quality to them, removing them entirely places greater emphasis on what needs to be looked at.

Editable – Elements created by CSS and HTML are a lot more editable these days reducing the need to go back into a graphics program, open the image, edit the image, re-upload the image etc. Elements like these can even be previewed within the browser further reducing editing time.

Good impression – changing to a cleaner, flatter design also shows that you’re in touch with what is current and that you have the user’s experience in mind.

In Summary

Similar to how Ikea goes gangbusters in filling your home with minimalist furniture that organises your possessions, changing your website to a cleaner, flatter, minimalist design has the potential to reduce the clutter on your site whilst enhancing focus on the website’s primary elements.

If Microsoft, a website holding an immense amount of product and service information behind the home page, can successfully adopt a flat minimal style, your website can benefit from a similar style too.

One of my interests was in hearing how some of the world’s larger merchants maintain their market share in the face of increasing competition and a constantly changing technological landscape.

So what did I get out of the e-commerce expo?

Lots of things, but today I want to focus on a very impressive and open presentation by Peter Cobb, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of eBags.com. The eBags.com site was launched in 1999 and has sold over 17 million bags globally. They are a stand out merchant and are often looked to for best practice examples in all kinds of areas. They currently have around 100 employees.

Peter’s perspective was interesting. He considers ebags.com to be a small company. The reason for this? One of their largest competitors is Amazon.com. Sometimes in Australia it is easy for us to forget just how big Amazon.com is. Amazon.com went live in 1995 and now offers dedicated sites in 10 countries with international shipping to many other locations (including Australia). They offer products in an incredibly diverse range of categories and are tipped to hit $100 billion in revenue by 2015. As a comparison, Harvey Norman’s entire business in 2012 generated $2.5 billion in revenue and is struggling with the current retail environment. Amazon.com in contrast is on a steep upward trajectory.

The general theme from Peter was that a ‘small’ merchant like eBags.com had to be constantly on their toes if they were to compete with a company of Amazon’s size and ability to innovate. Time and again he said they were forced to fast track ideas in their future plan to compete with changes implemented by Amazon. Amazon works hard  (and successfully) to make themselves the first stop for many people’s retail journey and their loyalty club alone generates around $1 billion per year in annual fees. That’s right - $1 billion is received annually by Amazon from customers who want to be considered a VIP shopper.

That said though, he was very clear in his view that focussing on price competition with other online retailers was not the big opportunity for future growth. Rather, he was looking at the majority of sales for bags and luggage that do not happen online as the place where growth would come from. Bottom line, there is a huge amount of upside in online retailing in 2013 with continuing movement from bricks and mortar stores to online merchants.

The big questions for any online merchant remain; How do I attract my share of customers? And how do I understand and deliver to them what they really value? If you don’t get both parts of this equation right, one of your competitors (big or small) will be more than happy to fill the gap.

Yes it matters; properly identifying canonical pages within a website can make the difference between a successful search engine optimisation campaign and one that fails.

However, why is this such an important factor for a SEO campaign? There are numerous reasons with various degrees of complexity. One reason is that Google’s algorithms attempt to select the most appropriate URL by choosing the one that appears most authoritative. Unfortunately, many times Google fails to determine the most suitable page unless rel=”caonocial” is utilised and instead displays a URL that is not preferred.

Another reason rel=”canonical’ matters for SEO relates to the scattering of authority. For example, a furniture company such as Nick Scali may sell two sofas that are completely identical except one is upholstered in white leather and the other in black. Thus, the webmaster creates two pages for each item:

http://www.nickscali.com.au/white-sofa/

and

http://www.nickscali.com.au/black-sofa/

Should a webmaster fail to appropriately identify which of the above URLs is the canonical one then it could result in neither of the pages appearing prominently in Google. Now, why does this matter from a search engine optimisation perspective? Under this scenario, whenever webpages mention one of these sofas then half of the time they may link to the URL about black sofas and the other time they could links to the URL about white sofas. The result is links equally dispersed between two separate pages. Hence, the authority that each of these links projects is also split between these two pages and whenever a person searches for ‘black sofa’ or ‘white sofa’ in Google neither of the two URLs appear at the top.

The two URLs are fine if the Nick Scali website appropriately identifies the canonical URL since Google then combines the links pointing to each of these pages. This simple change could result in the webpage now appearing as #1 in Google’s results. However, if the site fails to properly use rel=”canonical” then Google will likely split the links between the white and black sofa pages. This dilutes the value of each page’s authority in half and as a result no pages from Nick Scali appear when someone types ‘white sofas’ into Google.

Now, the next time a person asks, “does rel=”canonical” matter for SEO?” you can confidently answer ‘yes’ and clearly explain a couple reasons. Also, feel free to simply email this page to any of your colleagues. They will likely thank you later, especially if their website is setup incorrectly and they subsequently notice a spike in search traffic from this relatively quick modification.

Often Membership sites we develop require users to fill out a form or purchasing a product to gain access to the Members' area. It is important to think about what type of information you need to collect from users before building a new website.

7. What resources does your company need to maintain the site?

Due to Membership websites generally being more complex in nature and requiring more time to operate and maintain, it is important clients consider how their team/company will manage their staff and time resources to maintain the site once it's live. It is important to discuss and outline/establish these requirements with your website design company from the beginning and during the build of a website.

8. What aspects of the Membership functionality happen offline?

Groups and Associations requiring Membership operate with their Members in a variety of ways, both online and offline. For example, a club might require their initial Memberships to be purchased/renewed/reinstated online, while organising and notification of Member events happens offline….whilst another club might require all of these items be handled online. Prior to building a Membership website it is vital to evaluate what aspects of your Membership interaction happen online and offline.

9. Do you need a third party CRM to manage Members?

Every once and a while clients will get confused about the different between a Content Management System (CMS) and a Customer Relationship Management Tool (CRM). A CMS is a system for managing the interactions and display on your website and a CRM is software for managing interactions with past, current and future customers, and involves specific technology to organise, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. It's vital to understand the difference and keep in mind that your website will be operated and organised by a CMS, but will NOT be a CRM. Often it’s important for a company to have both tools at their disposal so you would need to source an appropriate CRM with a third party but this is separate to service provided by your website developer.

In general, Membership sites can range from fairly simple to complex and involved, and each one unique in its required functionality. The 9 points from part 1 and 2 are not definitive, however it hopefully helps you identify the basic questions to start asking. The site build will be quicker and smoother after considering all of the above points and being clear about what you would like to achieve from the start of the project. This ensures all expectations are met along the way and eliminates extra costs and extra time needed to fulfil briefs that change post the briefing stage. 

Our web designers will deliver you a stunning look your new site, no doubt about that. But then filling your beautifully designed site with ugly product images is like furnishing a grand, palatial mansion with cheap and tacky furniture. No visitor will be interested in sitting on your stained, tattered couch, no matter how ornate the house around it is.

Too often, great web businesses have great products that are photographed horribly. When it comes time to source or photograph your product, here are some of my biggest tips:

1. Source images from your suppliers

If your product is not manufactured by you, try to seek out great quality images from your suppliers. Bigger companies and manufacturers are likely to have some fantastic images that have been professionally shot. Big name suppliers know how important it is to make the product look damn good and hire photographers and stylists who know how to make a certain kind of product look amazing.

Selling water filtration systems is the perfect example of needing to recruit the experts to make a boring-looking product look, well, somewhat less boring. Photographing food is notoriously difficult and just because you can Instagram a meal with a filter and frame, it doesn’t mean just anyone can take great food photos for an e-commerce store. A company like McDonald’s has the best food photographers and stylists in the business working on all their shoots to make the burgers look the way they do in the advertisements and in-store merchandising. If you’re sourcing gourmet jams or wagyu steaks from a serious food manufacturer to sell through your online store, the supplier should have some quality imagery for you to use.

If you have multiple product suppliers, try and use ‘like’ images that you source from them. Each supplier may have a different style in their setup, framing and treatment of their product range photos, but if you can pick and choose ones from each supplier’s set that are similar, that will help. This brings us to the next big tip: uniformity in product images and why it’s so incredibly important…

2. Keep your images uniform

Take a look at popular fashion websites like The Iconic or ASOS, you’ll notice that visually there is not much to the web design itself. ASOS is a white screen with some black text. The Iconic has a few more plain graphics, but is equally basic in its visual design. Can you guess what both sites have in common that make them look so good? Great product images that have all been shot in the same uniform style and framing, highlighted by a minimalist web design.

Many prospective e-commerce fashion clients come to us saying “I want the next Iconic”. That aspiration is great, but the ability to replicate the success of The Iconic and ASOS lies in large part with the appeal of our clients' products and having amazing product images to showcase them. That’s not to mention these sites’ huge warehousing, distribution and marketing teams, of course - but one step at a time!

Try to navigate through to the Men’s T-Shirt departments on either ASOS or The Iconic. You’ll see that the product listing pages of each site show photos where all the models are positioned in the same spot, all the background colours are the same and all the images have been cropped to the same proportions. Proportions are a relatively straightforward yet vital concept to grasp. Essentially, for uniformity, you need all your product images to be proportionately the same: where all images are, say, exact squares or perhaps rectangles with the exact same ratios (for eg. all images having a width to height ratio of 2:3). If you want to know more, try Googling ‘image proportions’ – it’ll help you fully understand what you need to know about proportions.

3. Don’t take photos with your iPhone or Galaxy!

They may be smart phones but for the love of websites, don’t use them to photograph your products! If you’re going to take the photos yourself, you need to know what you’re doing and have the equipment to do it. A digital SLR camera will be a must-have as well as the experience and talent to use it. Be sure you’re using a good, clean white backdrop without visible edges, glare or shadows for all your photos. If you don’t have access to (or even know) what a digital SLR camera is, stop! If you don’t have access to Photoshop (or a similar professional photo-editing program), stop! You’re probably going to need the professionals…

4. Spend the money on a professional product photographer

Do your research to find a quality, expert photographer who specialises in product photography – any pro with a impressive portfolio should do good things for your product. Bear in mind that an amazing wedding photographer may not necessarily make for an amazing product photographer (or even want the job) – unless you’re selling wedding dresses that is!

Yes, it’s an added expense. Yes, it adds another person into the website mix. But believe me – it’s worth it. Another thing to consider is what will happen down the track when you’re adding new products to your website. Don’t become slack: make sure you maintain that consistency in the style and format of images. Perhaps come to an arrangement with the photographer for a good rate on regular additional shoots of your latest products or ranges.

5. Models: the good, the bad and the ugly

Let’s face it. Nobody wants to see a T-shirt being modelled by a guy with a beer gut and neck hair. Superficial as it may sound, try to use somewhat beautiful people in your product images if your products are clothes, accessories or anything that looks best with a human being in it, on it or doing it! Aside from not choosing uglies, it’s probably not a wise idea to use yourself, a non-professional or a family member – no matter how hot to trot you think you (or they) are!

Like employing a photographer, there will likely be some expense in hiring a model – but it’s definitely worthwhile. Photographing clothes laid flat is an absolute no-no, mannequins probably are not the best look either. Even if you don’t want clothing product images to include the head of the model, choose a model with a body and frame that suits your clothes and makes them look as good as possible. Think of it this way: both Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt would look good in a potato sack – that’s because they’re Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt!

Now that we all feel sufficiently fugly, let’s go stuff our faces with donuts. But don’t forget to get a professional food photographer to capture the beauty of it all!

Nick Scali approached The Web Showroom in early 2012 with the aim of developing an online strategy to increase sales in their bricks and mortar retail stores. Nick Scali recognised that online drives offline purchasing habits and felt The Web Showroom could roll-out a strategy to strengthen this relationship in their case. They launched a new website through a custom web development company to better showcase product range, provide potential customer rich data on products and provide easy access to directions to physical store locations. To build trust, and credibility, a range of additional web properties were rolled out to better showcase the Nick Scali brand. This included a Nick Scali biography website to show the connection to the past. A Nick Scali stores website which gives mobile consumers access to retail locations. Finally a Nick Scali Furniture corporate website was built which brings to the fore the companies proud tradition and efforts in the community.

A great video produced by Google showing online driving offline sales can be found here:

The team at Nick Scali Furniture are working hard to ensure that the same amount of detail and effort that has been the foundation to their successful offline growth, now goes into their online strategies. Mainly, they have recognized that companies should never underestimate the value of an effective website and strong presence in Google, especially those who have not traditionally utilised this area to drive offline sales.

As seen above, the emphasise for companies like Nick Scali isn’t always to increase online sales. Indeed the Nick Scali website doesn’t facilitate online payments. In many instances consumers embrace the simplicity of buying online due to the fact that they can buy from the comfort of their homes, they can buy whilst at work or even from their phone on the train. But for verticals like furniture there will always be large percentages of sales which are made in conventional bricks & mortar environments, not online. This however does not mean that online won’t drive offline sales.

Undoubtedly the debate of online e-commerce vs. brick and mortar stores will continue to be a hot topic moving forward in 2013 as the online sector continues to grow. However, with a smart online strategy like Nick Scali’s, you might just be able to get away with making both choices viable and convenient for your customers.

24/04/2013 Update:

Delving a bit deeper into the ways online interactions can lead to in-store purchases, the company does also ensures there are multiple avenues for customers to leave feedback. Aside from the traditional in-person comments, testimonials, and phone calls. Consumers can interact directly with the Nick Scali team online via their twitter feed at: https://twitter.com/NickScaliLtd or their Facebook page located at: https://www.facebook.com/NickScaliFurniture. This further emphasise the positive impact that a well conceived online strategy can create for a store that only sells products offline.

With numerous types of Membership website functionality possible I would strongly recommend clients taking the time to think about some of the points below before engaging any website company in building their Membership site. It is vital for their chosen development company to gain a realistic grasp on what clients specifically want to achieve in order to maintain and fulfil expectations and timeframes for both parties. 

Considering the questions below in advance of the briefing process will help create a stronger website brief to go to your developer with, therefore allowing the project to run as smoothly as possible from the outset. If you have a clear idea of what you would like your website to achieve, so will your Website Designer and Project Manager throughout the build. Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve from the beginning will save you money in the long run, as extra fees can be charged when a brief evolve or changes from the original brief quoted on.

If you want to build, run and maintain an effective Membership website here are some aspects of the site to start thinking about:

1. What is the website mission?

There are many different types of Membership sites, each with different objectives in mind. You need to carefully consider what is your website's aim or mission. Is the primary objective of the website to allow members to access secure information, populate information into a directory listing, buy whole sale products, join an organisation….or a combination or all of the above? Whether is be one of the objectives above or something completely different, it is important to carefully evaluate what your main reason for building a Member site is.

2. How do users obtain their Membership?

How will website users/Member accounts be incorporated into your website? Are potential Members buying a product, filling out a form or being extracted from an external database in order to become a Member or create an online account? For example, a medical association Membership site we developed utilised a pre-approval form submission that required an offline approval to grant new Members access to a secure product to purchase their Membership. There are many different ways this area can be configured but we needed to know up front what specific functionality was required by the client and what outcome was expected before developing the suitable solution. Some things to consider at the build stage will be what functionality is expected to be fulfilled offline and what is expected to be fulfilled online, as well as what aspects will be automated through the CMS and what will require manual activation.

3. Will there be multiple types of Memberships within one site?

It can become very tricky when there are multiple Membership types within one site. For example, a site many have a standard, student and senior Membership type…will all Memberships types require access to the same information? Can you upgrade from a student to a standard Membership? It is very important to detail your expectations for each Membership type and how they may interact with each other.

4.  Do Memberships expire?

Are users going to be lifetime Members, expire after x amount of days, or do all Memberships expire on the same date every year (among other solutions). Here at TWS, we have experience in setting up websites in a variety of different ways but we do need to know at the beginning of a project what expectations and requirements are essential for your Membership site. 

5. If Memberships expire, how are they renewed?

Many clients overlook consideration of the best renewal process for their Members, and whether they want to give clients direct access to review their Membership or not.

Membership sites can range from fairly simple to complex and involved, and each one unique in its required functionality. Next month I will share my final 4 questions to ask yourself before creating your membership website brief. Stay tuned….

Firstly though, I thought it would be useful to discuss how we approach a major upgrade of a core part of the CMS. We are very fortunate to have a large number of very committed clients who provide us with a great deal of very constructive feedback on areas they would love to see improvements. We also receive lots of suggestions from our staff who, as you’d expect, spend way too much time online and have tons of great ideas. We also go out and attend all kinds of conferences and events where we soak up the latest and the greatest in the online retail world.

But back to Ecommerce 2013 here at TWS. What will 2013 see in terms of new projects and functionality? At the moment I can share with you a number of the areas that we are looking very closely at. We are still putting the final touches on tickets and deadlines but following are areas that have received a lot of discussion and thought recently.

• The first cab off the rank is going to be improving the cart and checkout process. These pages obviously form an important part of any online store and we’ll be making changes in many areas big and small. Expect substantial developments in this area.
• We’ll also be looking at our already powerful discounts and on-sale options and plan to introduce a number of new marketing tools for our clients. Expect to see additional flexibility in this area over 2013 including some significant time saving tools for our store owners.
• We’ll be introducing some slick new interface controls for cart summary widgets that appear throughout our websites. These will make the shopping process clearer and hopefully entice more customers into the checkout process.
• We also have a number of significant interface changes planned for the front end of our websites. At this stage these will be mainly around the display of product listing and product detail pages. However, I’m sure by the time we finalise our plans we’ll have made many more visual changes.
• We’ll also be exploring some additional shipping options both with our shipping integration partner Temando as well as within our own custom shipping controls.
• Plus many smaller items.

That’s it for now. The list above is far from exhaustive but is a taste of what’s to come in 2013. Feel free to contact our support team if you have any ideas you’d like considered for a future release.

Small edits on 24/04/2013