Notes on One E-Commerce System

For the small web design shop, getting asked to produce an e-commerce site is often somewhat of a challenge. There are countless ways it can be done, and sometimes just choosing the right shopping cart software, payment gateway and merchant account can be a big job.

For very small shops, I definitely recommend considering PayPal's e-commerce solutions. Once the site owner has a PayPal Business Account, you can literally have an online shop up and running in a matter of hours.

For the larger projects, I have yet to settle on a single solution, but I've been reasonably pleased with a system that was chosen by one of my clients, Web Marketing Magic. I was initially turned off by the "internet hustle" feel to their web site, as well as by the poor design of the pages, but the software itself has always worked well for us. And in the couple of years that we've been using it, it has improved noticeably on both of those counts.

WMM is a hosted product which provides not just a shopping cart, but a range of marketing features, including an email database and autoresponder system. There are several packages providing different feature sets; we've been using the somewhat expensive Pro package because of our need to provide digital delivery of goods.

WMM has generally worked well for us. Because it was not my decision to use it, I have always been tempted to try and convince my client to try a set of other solutions instead: a PayPal shopping cart, Payloadz, and Constant Contact or MailChimp. But my client is convinced that the integration WMM offers between its shopping cart and autoresponder system is crucial to the sales process, and she may turn out to be right.

Is the customer always right?

Among the discussions on the web development business I've been part of, one very common one revolves around a statement like this: "My client wants such-and-such for his web site. I know it's a bad idea, but he's the client, so I have no choice."

In these discussions, some web designers/developers* insist on the old adage "The customer is always right" and believe that carrying out whatever orders the client might give is the highest form of good customer service. They consider themselves to be tools used by clients to create the client's own vision.

Others, myself included, think that an important part of our job is giving good advice about what constitutes an effective, good quality web site.

I don't simply comply with every request. I do consider that to be the default setting; the person writing the checks is, at least in one sense, the boss. But presumably I have been hired in order to take advantage of my knowledge of good web design as well as my simple ability to produce a web site. Ultimately, I consider my job to be to meet the client's actual goals, which typically are to have a web site which works well in the large sense; the site does what it's supposed to do: attracts business, provides information, contributes to the company's good reputation, etc.

So if the client has an idea for his web site which he thinks is really cool, but which I know won't work well for a lot of users, or will be disliked by most of them, I don't just shrug and go about implementing it. Instead, I initiate a conversation with my client in which I explain why I feel that their idea is not going to contribute to the success of their web site. I make sure he understands the potential problems and down-sides to his idea. We discuss it. And then, I let him make the decision.

Often, the client will take my advice, and get a better web site for himself. Sometimes he'll continue to insist on his idea. When it's the latter, it can be frustrating for me. Yes, I'm getting paid, but it's still a bummer to have to produce a web site which is less than good quality when I have the ability to do otherwise. It's just much more satisfying to produce a good site than a mediocre one. In some instances, I've even felt it necessary to remove my credit from the web site over issues like this.

It's not always easy to negotiate these issues, but I stand firm in my belief that a good web developer is not just a box of crayons for the client, but a box of crayons with years of knowledge and experience.

And by the way, "The customer is always right" is, of course, not a universal truth. It doesn't take much experience or imagination to come up with a situation in which a customer is most definitely not right. (How about "I want everything in your store for free"?) The expression has a purpose, but it isn't meant to be taken literally, but rather understood as, "A good business does everything possible to please the customer." Not as catchy, but a lot truer and more useful.

* Re. "Web designer" and "web developer": I continue to use these terms interchangeably to refer to a person whose job it is to plan, design, code, and produce web sites.

QuickBooks Online, get with it!

In the ongoing effort for a "virtual" and "hard-drive-less" web development business office, I've been using QuickBooks Online, as I mentioned in an early post. It's working well for me, and so a client and I looked into setting it up for her "virtual office".

We were 95% sold on using it from the start, and so were very disappointed to find out that they don't support it for any Macintosh browsers! My client is a Mac-only person these days, and though we're aware of the workarounds for installing Windows programs on a Mac, they're much too involved to undertake for only this reason.

So we need to go back to the drawing board and look for different software. What a huge mistake on the part of the makers of QuickBooks Online. From what I know of what it takes to build a web site which works well in all browsers, it wouldn't require much for them to make QuickBooks Online ready for Mac Safari or Firefox.

Have they not yet heard that the whole point of the Web is that it's platform-independent?

The Buena Vista Operating System Club

This week my new Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop arrived, and I've been busily setting it up all week. The laptop is beautiful and works great, but that's not what I wanted to discuss here. Rather, this is my first Windows Vista machine, and I wanted to describe my experience so far.

I was scared of going Vista, having heard plenty of negative stuff. The bad reviews all seemed to center around three complaints:

• "It's hard to get used to Vista because so many things are different from Windows XP."
• "Vista's User Account Control (UAC) is constantly nagging me to allow this or that."
• "None of my peripherals work and there aren't even drivers for them."

Now, I'm no big fan of Windows or anything, but I have to be honest here: I have none of those complaints. Addressing them one by one:

• Yes, things are in different places, but it has never taken me more than a few seconds to figure out where to find something.
  
• Yes, User Account Control does ask my permission to do certain things, but it's definitely not as frequent as the Apple TV commercials make it sound! I'm aware of the importance of the security features, and it just isn't that big a deal.
• Here's how difficult it was to hook my (6-year-old) printer up to my Vista machine: I leaned over and unplugged it from my old machine, plugged it into the Vista machine, Vista found and installed the drivers, and I was able to print. No problem with either of my external hard drives, either.

My most important programs (Adobe Dreamweaver and Fireworks) installed without a single problem.

It doesn't hurt that Vista is visually so much prettier than earlier Windows OSs either.

I'm just 3 days into this, but overall, everything works, most things are easier, and I'm enjoying it.

A "hard-drive-less" office

I've been making a focused effort to make my office not only "paperless", but also, "hard-drive-less". In other words, my goal is to have almost all of my systems and data reside on the Internet rather than on my hard drive. I say "almost all" because I don't think it's quite possible to do this 100%. For example, I have software which has to live on my hard drive; - Dreamweaver and Fireworks are the main culprits. But as long as I own the licenses and have the CDs and/or rights to the programs, I don't even have to depend completely on my hard drive for them. And I still have some paper files, although I've reduced them by about 2/3.

The following are some of the main programs and services which are allowing me to do this. Quite a few of them are Google-provided; whether or not I should be nervous about trusting so much to Google is a question I'm not going to delve into here, although I have to acknowledge that it's a fair question.

1. GMail - by far the smartest, most convenient, easiest, keeps-me-most-organized email program I've ever used. I've used quite a few, and email is important to me. Its nearly flawless spam-filtering system, "tags", and searchability are just a few of the things I love about it. And I was able to access my email on computers all over Mexico in less than 30 seconds.

2. Google Docs. I use it for information, not for documents that have to look perfect - but I have piles of information to keep track of, and the search function makes finding anything almost instantaneous.

3. Google Calendar. I didn't even really believe that I was going to be able to give up my paper calendar, but I actually have. And my paper calendar never emailed me reminders about upcoming appointments and events!

4. Online banking.

5. Highrise by 37 Signals, a wonderful contact manager where I know keep all of my personal and business contact information. Amazingly, for less than 250 contacts, it's free! Although I can see the wisdom of that business model, since after getting familiar with it I've already signed a client up with the paid version.

6. Backpack and Basecamp, also by 37 Signals. I'm still in the process of choosing between these two intranet-like applications for my own business and for a client's business. I really like both.

7. QuickBooks Online. Good old QuickBooks, but resides online and is accessible anywhere. It's not cheap, but bookkeeping is too important to skimp on, in my opinion.

The "nameplate page"

A couple of weeks ago, a client asked me to correspond with the graphic designer he had been working with. When the designer and I talked, he mentioned some information about me that he had obviously gotten by Googling my name. It wasn't anything that I minded him knowing, but it did remind me that anybody who does this will find out various things about me: that I wrote a book, that I have several web design-related web sites, and that I have made lots of posts on certain web design newsgroups, some of them not entirely serious.

So recently, when I read Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani, I paid attention to her section on creating what she calls a "nameplate page". The idea is that you can take charge, at least to some extent, of what Google presents to the world in connection with your name. In addition to being circumspect about what you post under your name online, you might want to post a brief web site at a domain associated specifically with your own name. The goal is to have that page come up first, or at least high, in Google searches for your own name, so that curious searchers will be more likely to be given information and links that you have chosen than to find random sites where your name is posted.

It seemed like a good idea, so I now have a little "digital business card" at www.pattyayers.com. I already owned the domain, so it didn't cost me anything, and only took a few minutes. Whether it helps to maintain my sterling reputation remains to be seen!