Planning an online business? I use to advise my friends and customers concerning this great “adventure”.

Many times they introduce me to their terrific projects and, when defining their online strategy, they fail in some little usability things.

Even I use to tell what I think and criticize these issues, many times my advices are not implemented because they suppose their original idea is great.

I recently find this article in Smashing Magazine that resumes the common usability issues I criticize when I find them in the project I received: 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of

It presents the most common usability nightmares everyone should avoid when designing functional and usable web sites. Please, take a carefully look and know how I think!.

Source: Smash Magazine

I started my professional life as a business consultant. I worked in lot of projects and get involved in many consulting firms. During that period, I co-worked with people from the big six (now big four) and many other small consultant firms. I have to admit that the big lesson I learnt from the big firms -that generally did not find in the smaller ones- is methodology.

Methodology is a ‘way of doing things’. Is something that was already test by many people and, when they figure that it really work, they write it down in papers and start teaching it. It’s a kind of ’steps’ that everyone has to follow in order to get thing done better.

Even if each of the big consulting firms has their own methodology, the common thing is that they already have it, and their business consultants have to follow it. This is amazing, because it also teach discipline on your daily job.

When planning a business, even an online one, you have to take care of the methodology. You can read many articles, get many advises, but at the end, you should have a methodology of doing things.

Whit the methodology I learnt how to prepare a business plan, even a draft. I learnt about managing difficult customers and how to change not productive meeting. It also helps me when creating a presentation or a university class.

An excellent book I do recommend you for learn about methodology is The McKinsey Way. McKinsey is a big business consultant firm worldwide. It’s also one of the teachers in my professional life. I learnt a lot working with McKinsey people.
The McKinsey Way was first print in 1999 and its content has many lessons that can be applied anytime. From preparing a 3 minutes presentation for the CEO in the elevator to be successful in you job meeting, this book is all about methodology.

As many of you know, my company sells e-business applications all over the world. Many times we found customers that, in addition to an e-business application, they need a hosting service. In order to give an end to end service, we offer our customers a hosting service based on resellers plans that we frequently purchase online. Other customers what to purchase their hosting plans themselves separately from our services, and so they asked us how to choose between the different available hosting companies.
Here is my practical guide to choose a reliable hosting company. I’ve to admit that, since using these techniques, we never have a problem with any of the hosting companies that we resell.

1. Select the server operative system you need.
Before you start choosing the best hosting company, you should know if you need a Windows hosting or a Linux one. This depends on the application that you’ll host there. Ask your programmers and designers which server type you need; they’ll probably help you with this subject. Even some Windows servers also support PHP and MySQL, if you really need a Linux plan, it’s better to get a Linux plan and not a Windows one that supports Linux extensions.

2. Determine the amount of space you need.
Nowadays, almost all hosting plan has a huge amount of disk space and data transfer. But still exists some MINI plans that both features are not too high. Perhaps you are planning to host a small application and you only need a great amount of data transfer; maybe you are planning to host lot of media (images, videos, etc) and you require extra space. Before start looking for a hosting company, you should estimate the amount of disk space and data transfer that you business will need, at least, for the next year. You can also get help for your programmers and designers.

3. Search for well known hosting companies.
Once you know the server system you need (Windows, Linux, etc), and the disk pace / data transfer require for your business, you can start searching the web for companies that provides the hosting services. Don’t get into panic. You’ll find thousand companies that can be your potential hosting providers, but be sure that only a few deserve that responsibility. The best way for searching companies, is by recommendation. Ask your colleagues, talk with other companies and let them tell you their experience with their hosting providers. At this point, I recommend you to open a spreadsheet and gather all the information you find for each company in order to help you taking the final decision. It’s very important to pay attention and see if the company offers a plan that fits your need.

4. Find hosting reviews
Once you get a list of potential hosting providers, you can star looking how other people rated that hosting companies. There are many hosting reviews sites: FindmyHost.com, TopHosts.com, WebHostMagazine.com, RateMyHost.com, WHReviews.com, etc. You can find many good and bad comments over there. Some of them could be totally invented in order to position a company on the top; some of them are real costumers’ comments. Just check that reviews and see if how many good/bad comments that those companies have and make your appreciation.

5. Test their service
Finally, here’s the most important task in the process of choosing a reliable hosting company. As you could see, all hosting companies say that they have a 24×7 support. But.., is that really true? Here’s what I used to do:
I tried to contact those companies in some special holidays, for instance, on December the 24th, near midnight, or the day after. I also contact them on December the 31st near midnight, or the day after. I also check where in the world the hosting datacenter is located and figure which holidays that country have. For instance, if the company is located in the US, I contact them on July the 4th. I used to talk to a representative, via chat, or phone and ask them some commercial doubts.
Just figure this: If a hosting company has a commercial people waiting for your call or chat during that special days (and pays for that, of course), probably they also have a support team in the same moment in order to attend any customer call or requirements. So, they seem to be really prepared for any inconvenience, anytime, 24×7. In the other hand, If a company does not pay a commercial representative to be online and ready for your call or chat during that special moments, we can not infer too much about their support area, but clearly they do not have all their critical (sales and support) staff 24×7.
This is the most important part of any decision process for a hosting company. Test their service, especially their commercial one, during those hours and days that you know that almost everyone are celebrating, or sleeping. If they can attend you it’s because there’s somebody that will listen to you anytime.

I did a matrix decision with many hosting companies and I frequently updated it with this information. Many of them fail on the fifth evaluation point.

In order to end this article, if you need my personal recommendation, maybe there are many other really good hosting companies, some of them cheaper, but, up today, we trusted our hosting in the following companies that have really good qualifications: WebHostingbuzz.com, HostGator.com and Rexoy.net and I used to recommend them based on my experience.

If you are looking for a reliable hosting company, just follow this practical guide and do not base your decision only in the hosting price.

Are you selling products online? Do you have an online catalogue that your potential customers browse and search for their needs? The following article details which information are “a must” when considering publishing your online products – or services.

In Part I of this article I wrote about the main information that a product should have in your catalogue. I mentioned the title –or product’s name-, the description and the images. In this second part, I’ll like to write about some other information that you can add into your catalogue in order to attract more customers.

Price: Many people think that a catalogue without prices doesn’t work in an online business. That’s partially true. If you are selling articles that a visitor can easily find elsewhere, you should print your product prices in the catalogue. If you don’t, the visitor will go to another online store where this information is on and they probably shop there. In other hand, if your catalogue has only exclusive articles that visitors could not find in another place, you can ignore the price (of course, always is better if you have it, but sometimes is good to not publish the item price). If a visitor is interested in that article, you can ask his to fill a form in order to be contacted by a seller or a representative.

Previous Price: Many catalogues show both the previous and the actual price of an item. This is a good strategy only if you can control the situation. I mean, if the previous price is lower than the actual price, it’s no good to show both prices because it’s the same as saying your visitors “Hey, I just raised the price of this item; you should had bought this article yesterday, jaja”. And definitely, that’s not polite. I understood that sometimes you should increment the price of an item, that’s OK; but please, remember that, in this case, your e-business application should not show the previous lower price. In another situation, if your product’s price was always the same, don’t lie. Do not put a higher previous price just to get your visitor’s attention. That’s no fair and you can loose that potential purchase. Be honest. There are other ways to attract your visitor’s attention, many of them explained in these articles.
 
Category: In the internet there are many people that go straight to a catalogue and search for an item, especially if the store has hundreds articles. But, there is other kind of visitors that loves to browse the catalogue’s category tree. For them, your catalogue should be correctly categorized in one or more levels, and this depends on the amount of items and their classification. The item’s categories should go for the general classification up to the particular one. For instance, if you are selling vehicles, your first level category could be:
 
 Cars
 Vans
 SAV
 Trucks
 
Then, in the second level, Cars can be categorized by brands, or by origin (national / imported), and so one. There are many ways to categorize your items. You should choose the one that your potential visitors mostly use. In some cases, you can also have two or more category trees. For instance, in the same example, you can maintain the mentioned category tree and you can also add another one, where the first level is the vehicle brand (BMW, Toyota, Ford, etc.).

Brand / Author Name: If you are selling books, having the author’s name is a must in any catalogue. You should think in having this information not on the description (or not ONLY in the item description) but in a separate key field that can help you group many items with the same key. A books catalogue is a very practical example. Having the author’s name you can list all the books of a certain author. In other catalogues, this information is not so easy to determine. For instance, if your catalogue is about furniture, the key field could be the designer, of maybe the collection (2007 collection, etc). Just think in a field that can easily group your products by. Maybe you have more than one; in that case, use them all.

Item Code: Each item in your catalogue should have a unique code. This code can be your internal identification of that item. Even if you are selling products from many providers (and each one of them have their internal codes), you should normalize your items with an internal code. Having a code makes that item unique in the whole catalogue. You can receive purchases by many other ways (telephone, mail, etc) using the item’s code and you can easily integrate internal applications (such as your ERP, your CRM, etc) through this unique piece of information. If you don’t have a codification yet, you should think in one that can really helps your business.

For instance, you can choose an alphanumeric codification that helps you get quickly information of the item:

AA-XXXXXX-BB

Where AA represents the category, the XXXXXX represents the item number and BB the supplier code. Just think in something scalable for your business.

Weight / Size: If your catalogue has not electronic items (such as e-books, papers, etc), I recommend you to include the item weigh ant the item size. Almost always the total cost of shipping depends on this information, so your visitor should know them to take the purchase decision. The item weight is very important for any catalogue. Even you are selling books or phones, the weight is something your visitors always look for. The item size sometimes can be avoided. If you are selling CD the size does not matter, or is not very important, but, if you are selling furniture, your visitors should know the table’s measure in order to check if fits in their room.

Related items: Once your visitors took the decision of buying some product, you can invite them to buy some other related to the one they choose. For example, if the chosen product is a notebook, you can suggest them to by an extra battery, a computer case, or many other related items to the chosen one. This is also known as cross-selling. The items can be related reciprocal, or not. In the same example, the notebook and the case are not reciprocal related because if a visitor chose the case, you’ll probably not suggest the notebook. Having this option in your e-business application will represent extra margin per purchase and adds value for your visitors.

Related documents: Many manufactures publish their detail product specifications or technical information in pdf files (or any other format). If you are authorized by them, you could add this information in your product’s information so your visitors can download that documents and get extra information about the item. Once, in a vehicles catalogue, I saw a movie of the vehicle in a road, as a related document. It was very interesting because that information tries to introduce the visitors the ‘experience’ of driving that vehicle.

Next week you’ll find the third and final part of this article.

Are you selling products online? Do you have an online catalogue that your potential customers browse and search for their needs? The following article details which information are “a must” when considering publishing your online products – or services.

Many times I helped companies going online with their e-business. One of the first things I ask them is if they really have rich information about their products to put it online. So we start talking about their ERP and how that application manages their products catalogue in order to export them to the ecommerce application.
 
Once, a customer says: -I do have the information of all the products I sell in my 30 stores. Wait me here. I’ll back with you in a minute.
After five minutes, he returned from his office with more that 30 magazines and he started pointing me the products he sells.
-This is my catalogue. I manage all the product information from these publications.

At first glance, I thought he was kidding. How a 30 stores company could manage their catalogues with only some industry magazines? No information was stored in any application or system.
 
Time later, in another company, the customer brought me their digital catalog to be published online. It was a spreadsheet with lot of codes, and where almost each word was truncated because their ERP product tables didn’t support long names. So, I received information such:

HAND MADE FLWR.POT W/ DECOR. RINGS M. SZE.

He pretends their online visitors understood that the product refers to a “Hand made flowerpot with decorative rings – Medium Size”. Inedible, don’t you think? And that was one on the most legible names!.

When going online with your products catalogue in order to introduce your company into the e-business, you should understood that the online visitors can not touch nor sense the product, so extra information in needed in case you really want to seduce them with that item. It’s not the same as selling the product in the real store, because with no extra effort (just putting the product in your shelves and with a visible price will be ok), the product can be purchased by anyone inside.

So, what’s necessary for publish your products online?

Name: The name you’ll use for your product must represent the best description of it. You should not use very long names (such as “Exclusive purse made in Italian leather with bronze decorations, double organizer inside and three extra compartments outside…) because your visitors will not pay attention to them. In other hand, do not use very short names that let you apply the same name for different product (for example: Leather purse). Choosing the right name for each product will help your visitors understand what that product is and, in case they are interested in, read more information in the product’s description.

Images: In the online catalogues, especially those ones oriented to final consumers, the image is the first thing that most visitors focus their attention. If that image is nice, bright and clearly shows your product, your visitor will become interested in the product and go ahead with the description. If not, you will be losing a potential purchase.
On every catalogue, there are several images that can be easily found for each product:
Thumbnails: These are small images that have no more than 3-5 Kb each. Thumbnails are very useful when a page displays more than one product, for instance, when your visitors browse a category, or when they do a search in your catalogue. Because many products appears in one page, you have to show all with a tiny image in order to let them see, at first glance, which product is the one they are looking for. Using small size images will decrease the total time that the page loads in the browser. Remember, visitors don’t like to wait too much. Depending on the catalogue and the design, thumbnails could be from 90 px. width up to 150 px. width.
Normal Size: Once a visitors clicks on a certain product, the catalogue must show all the information of that item, including an image larger than the thumbnail. I call this a normal size image. This picture should have more quality than the smaller one, and has to show your product in their best face. The main objective is to attract your visitors purchase decision with that picture or, added to it, with the item description.
I personally like normal size pictures with a white background, because they focus on the product and nothing more, but I saw many sites that have very nice pictures with background that looks really fine. Having or not background depends on the product type. For instance, a digital camera will look better without any background, but a dinner table should have a background n order to help your visitor’s imagination figure how that table fits their rooms. Depending on the site design, normal images size should be no more than 50-60 kb.
Larger Images: many people like to see the product detail, especially when they have special details, such a home made flower pot or a leather purse. Those details only appear in larger images that can reflect with precision those little things that can finally decide the purchase. These images should be accessible with a click on an icon, near the normal size image or close to the product description. Many catalogues use popups to show these large size images in order to maintain the main window open. Other catalogues uses some extra tools because they know that popups are blocked by many browsers. Larger images have no size restriction. If a visitor wants to open them, they know that it may take more time to show this detail picture. Having more that one larger size image will be useful, in case they show your product in different positions, angles or capture different details.

Description: Once your visitor get a good impression with the thumbnail and the product title (in that order), the description should finally help the purchase decision. While the thumbnail is shown, only a short description or your product should be available. When the visitor click on the item, a more detail description is required. I’m tired of seeing online catalogues with very nice products and at very low prices, but, with poor descriptions. Those catalogues don’t sell all they could because people are not attracted with those catalogues. Many visitors think that if a store doesn’t pay much attention in the online product catalogue, they should not care enough for their online costumers; so, they decide to buy in another place. Detailed description should be different according to each product type. A book should have different detail than a video camera. For instance, an electronic product requires all the product specification (maybe bulleted), and a couple paragraph about the product benefits.

Next week you’ll find the second part of this article.

If you really want to have success when creating your website, I recommend not making the following common mistakes:

1. Don’t have a main focus or objective
Many times, I get into a website and I don’t understand the site objective. It has not a common subject and it’s hard to understand what the site offers. Content? Products? Services? I once visited a website that sells perfumes and also offers soccer tickets. What for? Which was their relationship? Who knows… For me, it was a waste content. Even if your site is not ecommerce oriented, it’s very important to define the main objective of it, so every piece of content that you add will follow this goal.

2. Flash Made
I really like Flash and the things you can do with this wonderful application. Lot of great animations and creative designs can be created with Flash; however, not all internet connections are via CABLE / DSL, especially in not developed markets. Heavy Flash sites could be a problem when the visitor’s connection is not so fast and could invite your visitors to exit the site. In other hand, search engines could not successfully index flash content, so the site will become invisible for this great traffic sources. So, pay attention if you decide to go live with a website created 100% in Flash.

3. Give too many options for the site visitors
If your site has a main objective, you can simple guide your visitors to it. For instance, if your site objective is selling toys, it’s correct to generate content related to it, showing a toys catalogue, adding recommendations based on children age, instructions for play games, and many other contents that follows the same objective: sell toys. But, if the site content is not well organized, your visitors could become frustrated trying to follow your site links. So, pay attention in your site objective, focusing in how you organized your site content. A good strategy is show al the information in no more that three clicks.

4. No Follow Up
Many times I talked with clients that invested lot of time and money preparing their online business, and then, going online following their master plans. But, in many occasions, those people didn’t follow up the site’s meters. Maybe because their business became a complete success; maybe because they don’t. Follow up a website requires to control their site traffic, studying what your visitor did while they get into the web pages, knowing their preferences and the most popular information, as any other important information that help you take decisions about your business.

5. Very heavy pages
I already write about websites created 100% in Flash; another problem represent those websites that each page last to many time for loading; perhaps because their images; perhaps because the hosting service; the result is also an invitation to your visitor to exit your page. I recommend you to frequently check the average time that your page loads.

6. Rely on a static website
If your visitors found the same page each time they enter to your site, you have many chances to loose them as frequent users. You should renew your content in order to renew your website. Those websites that don’t add new content frequently are mainly classified as static pages; others are dynamic pages. A page with dynamic content invites the visitors to return more frequently and so helps your website to obtain more traffic and profits.

7. Don’t think on an easy way to manage your content
Once you go live with your webpage you’ll probably face the problem of how to update from now on, their content. You pay for a designer or programmer and they put your website online, but didn’t think an easy way for create or modify the site contents. That’s a common mistake that happen lot of time. Don’t having a content administrator will force you to ask again your designers and programmers to do this job for you, and results in lot of money spent for this simple task.