Rule 4: The technology is complicated

Offers from the likes of Yahoo with its store-building software may lead you to believe it's rather simple to start an Internet venture. Home-page builders, contribute to the perception. But to build a Web-site that people will come back to, you'll have to maintain-and update it on a daily basis. As a software project, a Web business contains many disparate elements, all of which must vibe seamlessly for customers, employees, partners,  advertisers and warehouse operators.

 

Your site must run not only on your own quirky PC but also on those of people around the world -- cranky Windows machines with 486 processors, zippy i-books, Unix boxes. Chat rooms and discussion areas add living, breathing elements to your business, with your customers actually changing the content of your site. All of this must be scalable -- capable of handling not just 50 or 100 simultaneous viewers to your site but thousands.

 

Supply-side mechanics

 

If your business is a retail venture, the supply-side mechanics are important. The site must process orders, handle customer relations, and connect to inventory-tracking systems. Becoming an online retailer with a snappy server and an online store is not enough. Servicing a diverse set of consumers, within the promised time-frame, requires planning and investment in logistics. It does not help at all if the cost of acquiring customers is very high while per customer revenues are very low.

 

Consider the seemingly simple "buy" button. Engineers work on that button. So do marketers, designers, even people with titles you never knew existed, like "information architects," who determine much of the structure of a site. A buy button needs to retrieve pricing and product information from a database. It needs to interact with an online shopping cart. Perhaps a user was directed to your site from an advertisement offering a discount; the buy button needs to understand that, then apply the discount.

 

Solving problems

People go on-line to solve a problem! Your job is not to annoy them with endless flashing buttons that say ‘‘Buy Now!'' Rarely do people just buy a product without considering how the product or service will solve the problem that initially caused them to start looking in the first place. The larger the perceived risk the greater the need to get answers to their questions. Either answer the questions before they ask them or set up a very easy, fast customer service model.