E-Commerce and LAN Solutions

One of my favorite topics in web site design is information architecture. That’s a fancy term that basically corresponds to how you organize the content and navigation for your site. In other words, the method by which you put your content into groups or categories, and thereby build the site’s navigation structure. It’s a question you can consider at any time in your web site’s life, but it really pays to figure it out up front. Having to change the structure of a site that’s already running presents a number of challenges that are best avoided. I’ll start by introducing the concepts, then in my next article I will walk you through the process.

An Overview

When it’s time to organize or reorganize your site’s content, what should be kept in mind? The short answer is a lot. If you don’t want to do a good deal of research to fully understand the concepts, I would suggest hiring a consultant to help you out. I’ll try to cover as much as I can.

Theme Pyramids

The basic structure of almost every site out there is hierarchical – you start with one home page, then move to a number of top level categories. Each of these can have items (like articles or individual products) or other categories. The structure can be drawn like a pyramid or organization chart. The basic idea is to make your home page about your broadest topic – whatever your site as a whole is about. You then break that concept up into logical categories. There is a terrific introduction to the idea of theme pyramids at Search Engine World.

Here are some caveats to keep in mind while creating a theme pyramid:

• Usability studies have shown that too many choices = no choice at all. Most users won’t take the time to read long lists. I like to limit the top level categories to between 4 and 7.
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So what are canonical URLs? Due to a number of factors, it’s possible to display the exact same page on some sitse with a bunch of different URLs – this situation causes its own host of problems that search engines have to deal with. They attempt to solve it by figuring out what the canonical, or master URL for a page is. This way they can filter out all the other pages that have exactly (or nearly) the same content, and provide better results for their users. There is an excellent write up by Google web guy Matt Cutts on his web site
An example:
All of these URLs have the same content, but would be considered unique pages to a search engine without extra work:

• http://domain.com/


• http://www.domain.com/


• http://www.domain.com/index.html


• http://www.domain.com

So why do I care?

Right about now you might be thinking, ‘well this is a problem for the search engine, not me’. Well not really – their problems are often the webmaster’s problem when they affect the traffic the search engine drives to your site.

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One reality that every computer user has to face is the need for a good anti-virus client for their machine. Almost everyone gets online or shares files with someone, and that opens the door for viruses. It used to be that virues would rewrite your motherboard’s BIOS or delete data, but nowadays the vast majority of viruses just want to replicate themselves and install adware. So the good news is many viruses won’t really hurt your computer much. The bad news is that they are very good at propogating around the ‘net, and you can expect to come across virus-infected files in email and on web sites quite regularly, especially once you’ve got on a few spam lists.

In the 16 years I’ve been using PCs, I’ve used a lot of AV clients. The bottom line is that any major AV client will work fine at detecting viruses. No program will catch them all, but they all catch most of them. The real difference between them comes down to features, interface, performance, and cost.

What about a firewall?

Chances are, you don’t need a firewall at all. Not only do they cause all kinds of weird networking problems by blocking safe traffic, but they have a big tendency to give false positives, making you think they are doing something. Basically a firewall is for blocking access to your machine from someone else who initiates the request. 99% of the pcs out there are either behind some kind of NAT already, so no one can access your machine to begin with. If you have a router, chances are you are behind a NAT. NAT stands for network address translation – it allows pcs with a private address to access other networks. To test if you are behind a NAT, go to start > run and type cmd, then enter. At the dos prompt, type ipconfig and hit enter. It will display your ip address. Then go to whatismyip.com. It will tell you what your Internet address is. If they aren’t the same number, you don’t need a firewall.

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One of the great features of Netsuite is that they provide custom tags to include in the HTML code of the customizations to their site templates. It’s pretty flexible for the most part, but they often generate ugly HTML and an inflexible visual appearance. One good example of this is the <%=getGlobalSearchHtml()%> tag.

Problems with getGlobalSearchHtml

• It forces the search results to be returned as a subset of the Tab the user is currently on. This usually isn’t a problem, except it’s silly to expect the user to understand how the designer set up the tabs or that they are trying to search within one particular tab. The results returned are global, so why keep them in a tab? My guess is they didn’t think about it much. A related bug is that any tag replacements you have set up will be lost if a user clicks a search result that lives in another tab.


• Netsuite doesn’t support placing the tag in the Logo & Tabs area of the page. That’s right, for some reason Netsuite thinks the only area a site designer would place a search box is at the top of the left column below the header, even though a quick search for web usability guidelines disagrees. Regardless, there is no reason for Netsuite to arbitrarily dictate placement of any site element, and certainly no technical reason for it. Why they would bother making a custom tag they only allow to be used in exactly the same place the search box would be generated without the custom tag is beyond me. I tried the tag out in the Logo & Tabs anyway and of course it worked.
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One of the weaknesses of ASP hosted E-Commerce system Netsuite is that there’s no way to access statistics on users who are searching on your site (note this is different than a user searching in a search engine and landing on your site). They will eventually implement it, which is good for the following reasons:

• Hard to find product. Search logs give you insight into what is for many the last chance to find something on your site. Chances are the most frequently searched for terms are hard to find on your site (or you don’t carry them). This is a great way to find additional content/products/etc to add to your site. You want your least popular/profitable products to be the most commonly searched for terms, definitely not anything you are pushing.


• Check the results. A user searching on your site is not always an indication of a navigation failure – some users simply prefer it and try it first. Check the most searched terms to make sure the results are helpful and bring up the correct categories, product or information items (Netsuite doesn’t currently index knowledge bases, even if they are published). If you aren’t getting the search results you want, I have some tips at the end of this post on how to tweak them.


• Search percentage. Look at the percentage of people searching – total number of searches for a time period divided by the number of unique visitors. You have to know something about your visitors to draw conclusions from this, but I would say unless your site is just huge and broad, you want this to be a low number. A retailer client of mine has a ratio of .036.


• Identify navigation problems. Your search logs shouldn’t have any terms that are very popular – optimally you want a lot of terms searched for seldomly. If you have any terms (or a few)that are significantly more than the top 10 or 15, it’s a good indication that you aren’t giving the user the proper cues to find the content, or are landing them (through natural listings or PPC) on the wrong page.

Great, so how do I get this data now?

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