Interview With Chang Anderson - Part 1 - 14/2/2007
Chang Anderson has created Ecommerce websites for companies ranging from football clubs to jewellery merchants and he knows how to build an effective online store. We find out what makes his shopping carts tick.
What were the major mistakes that online firms were making when the dotcom bubble burst?
I think that the business models were so experimental and so wacky it was bound to happen. For example, we heard of a company that built an ecommerce site to sell Coffee to traders in the city at their desk, by bringing the coffee in by bicycle. We also saw the vast majority of the venture capital being spent on advertising rather than infrastructure, because the VC companies often got their money back on the moment the company floated. So they didn't stay around afterwards to see if the business concept worked.
What key elements should a designer consider when putting together an ecommerce site?
The most important aspect is to have a simple, easy-to-use user interface. We have built a lot of sports sites - including Premiership football and rugby clubs, and unlike visitors to a commercial Web site, they give immediate feedback if they are able to use or find something quickly. This feedback has helped us in our commercial site development where customers can often simply give up and leave if they face a confusing array of choices.
How do you ensure that the site attracts as many customers as possible through search engines?
We build the sites with as many graphics as possible alt-tagged and store them in folder names that reflect the key search phrase. We also use the search phrase to name the '.ess' files and the '.js' files to increase keyword density. We also use 'robots.txt' files, and make extensive use of meta tags.
What software do you favour when creating an online store and why do you like it?
We manually code everything in ASCII text editors. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I can see no real benefits in speed terms in using WYSIWYG Web software if we are trying to build bespoke sites. We host our own servers locally on Win2000/2003, Linux, Unix and even Mac. We also have done website design in a number of middleware and database packages, including PHR ASR ColdFusion, and Lasso.
Do you prefer to build your own shopping cart or integrate a pre-built solution?
We always build our own. We have used off-the-shelf solutions for clients who insisted upon it, but we will custom-build shops and shop management systems when they work the way the client wants it to and the client doesn't have to adapt their products.
Interview With Chang Anderson - Part Two
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