A handbook for world wide web engineers

Google Analytics: Practical problems

kruked — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:48:35 +0000

Well, this is a must to set. But if your application is a new age app (collection of many services) you might face many issues which were faced by us. I will just get you started and point you to what it takes in setting up and using at enterprise scale.

Validate your pages

kruked — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:43:00 +0000

In this chapter i will give you some commonly used tools to validate and check your web pages.

Use open source apps for FAQ/Help/Forums

kruked — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:41:56 +0000

In line with CMS, integrate with existing opensource apps again. This chapter will give you some practical tips on doing that.

Build marketing/landing pages on CMS

kruked — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:40:36 +0000

Yes, you might be developing your own application but try and build your marketing part of application on a CMS. I will show you here practical challenges in doing this (which i faced ofcourse).

Building sitemap

kruked — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:39:09 +0000

Well its really easy and help search engines in crawling your content. But when you are building a new age web application, you will face lots of challenges.

Setting up an experiment

kruked — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:37:22 +0000

You would need this to figure out usability. I will just give you some brief pointers on how you can setup this in a breeze for your application.

Usability Study: Cancellation of subscription

kruked — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:58:27 +0000

When the user pays for your service, he mostly believes your promises (SLAs). But realty is far from ideal and more often than not we fail to satisfy the user.

And there comes the option of cancellation. Many businesses just do not want this option to be available to the user directly. They play tricks around user begging to you first for refunds and also tell why the heck he does not want to continue.

Well, in my opinion making it difficult for the user just does not work.
And this I know again from the emails from customers. Their emails kind of screamed – just get me out of here, delete everything you have of mine including my card details and let me go.

If any delay happens in this manual process, user just go berserk.
And you are bad mouthed at hundred blogs for just one temporary failure of your software or service.

As with any basic principle of usability, empower the customer , give him the control.

To take this case further consider a service for which we give X days
of money back guarantee. While you develop this feature have some room in your design and your adminastration panel for giving applying this option to services which are well past X days. This again comes
from my experience where user after X + Y days ask for cancellation for ‘xyz’ reason or for no reason at all. And if you are ready for it, you have one more customer satisfied.

Leaving on good notes, and you just had added one more to your organic channels.

Usability: Sign up

kruked — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:28:03 +0000

Needless to say that this is what most product managers want. More and more sign-up, user acquisition. After all user has decided to give it a try or buy.

One thing which we need to understand about usability is: It starts once the user is clear about a GOAL in his mind. For sign-up the goal is very clear in the user mind that he needs to provide certain details to quickly sign-up and avail the service.

This also means if the user doesn’t understand the goal usability of your flow after that wont help much.

Assuming the good case that he understands, how do we make sign-up friendly and usable:

1. Make the form short and simple for sign-up, so even if your service needs billing address break it to some other page (to a page where user actually commits to pay, he wont mind entering valid address on that page).

This helps in customer acquisition and for your sales team this simple sign-up detail is valuable (after all out of 6-bn people he cared to fill this form).

2. Make the form ‘Live’. Go Ajax. This is a must. Do validations like uniqueness etc then and there.

3. After this simple sign-up form comes the user verification. So like all programmers who-do-not-care-about-users you ‘flash’ a message saying go to your email account and click on the link i send to you to activate.

Well, why not help a bit like ‘extract’ the email service domain like ‘gmail.com’ and redirect him (on a new page say) to gmail.com. This simple help will floor the user. Trust me.

4. As point ’3′ goes usability is much about helping the user as much as you can in achieving the goal, quickly.

5. Use recaptcha like service to sway away bots. This can be integrated with a simple web service call. http://recaptcha.net/

6. The page should have minimal advertisements and outgoing links so that user can focus on job at hand.

Do I Need to Know SEO

kruked — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:31:10 +0000

Yes.

Why? Any academic definition of SEO emphasizes on the ‘On Page Factors’. This is something like a ‘good student’ is always liked by a ‘good teacher’. So if you look at search engines as teachers then to go in their favored disciple’s list you need to do your basics right.

And there comes the need of good on-page understanding of SEO. This will also help in multiple things:

1. Rule out bad messaging in your document
2. Help in defining structure of HTML document
3. Forcing you in identifying your most important message in the page

and so on.

Think re-selling against selling

kruked — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:19:19 +0000

You can create a service and start selling it. But once you reach a critical sales mass, you would want to expand. You can do this in three ways:

1. New products and services
2. New customers
3. New region

I wont dwell on 1 and 2 but 3 needs a special mention. Your service is on internet and your service kind of needs presence in a particular region or tie-ups with local partners etc. Say a business card printing where you take orders on web but channel it to your local partners across cities to have it printed and delivered.

Well you management worked hard and captured USA. Now they want to turn to quickly capture other ripe markets.But geographical presence everywhere is demanding. How about a reseller model built in your application for various services.

So all software components which enable a particular service should be under control of your geographical partner. For this to happen software has to be designed this way. It wont work out of the box .

So what are the things you would need to consider. Well it depends on business to business but some common reseller requirements can be brain-stormed for that industry like:

1. Payment/commission models
2. Private level site for resellers
3. All services to the resellers customers must give a feeling to the end user that they are bought from the reseller and not from you
4. Option of repricing reseller products (And you thought your product will always have one price – he he)

Trust me even thinking on these lines will sweat you out.
But i think in the new age of web-2.0 and globalization you have to think it.

And this against your tight deadlines!