Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Getting Started............................................................................................2
Domain Name..........................................................................................3
A Nam e for Your Online Business….................................................3
It’s Never too Late to Change a Bad Nam e......................................3
1
I Want a Faster Horse!.....................................................................18
I Hate Big Pencil................................................................................18
Reward or Penalty?...........................................................................20
Getting Started
Fly Faster............................................................................................20 Either y ou are selling y our products online or creating a Web 2.0
All Subpages are Main Page!...........................................................21 liked platform , both ty pes of online business require a careful
The bigger, The Better!.....................................................................21 planning before y ou start. I don’t believ e in good nam e creates
Problem is Im provement .................................................................22 successful business but they are few things that y ou just shouldn’t
Operation....................................................................................................23 m iss. It is also im portant to discuss about the business model before
Email .......................................................................................................23 y ou get too busy with y our business. Yes, Change is Pain! When your
Love Letter..........................................................................................23 business grows, when y ou hav e less tim e for yourself, when you find
Email is Monotonous........................................................................24 it harder to m eet y our ev er clim bing running cost, it is harder to put
Reducing Enquiries and Support-Related Emails........................25 a brake and change y our direction at that m om ent. You will be
Generic Email for Your Business....................................................26 surprised, the best web dev eloper y ou’v e just engaged can only
Maintenance...........................................................................................27 deliv er a great website but not a successful business for y ou!
Is Your Website Loading Slow?.......................................................27
Website Critics...........................................................................................28
Rev iews...................................................................................................28
Fine-tuning TuneHotels.com ..........................................................28
Maybank2 U 2.0 Sneak Preview: Maybank2 Me............................30
Acmamall.com , More Stones Needed.............................................34
2
What is the v alue of the dom ain nam e ‘Google.com ’ if it returns no
Domain Name accurate search result?
3
or pointing (lay m an term s) of y our dom ain nam e to specific IP
New Domain Name
address.
Do y ou know how to register for a car plate number? Or getting your
first insurance policy without a insurance agent? Well, there are 4 . Renewal. Well, a responsible agents should always remind you
m any things that we believ e it is way too complicated and we usually one m onth before the dom ain nam e expires. If y ou are those last
leav e it to others, and hav e them get it done for us. m inutes person, chances y ou can are safe with those slow registrar
such as My NIC (they allow at least 2 weeks before releasing your
This happens to dom ain nam e as well. Usually, this was done by web dom ain nam e to the public). While those strict one, will put y ou
dev elopers or y our web & em ail hosting service providers. Therefore under retention and y ou m ay need to pay extra to unlock.
few things that y ou need to know for the v ery least!
5. What document s do I need? Well, a .com domain name do not
1 . Domain name ownership. How do y ou know if a domain name need any . Any way , if y ou are registering a country-based domain
was registered under y our nam e? Registration inform ation of a nam e such as .com .m y or .com .sg, y ou need ROC in most case. Well,
dom ain nam e are freely av ailable to the public through WHOIS. For the rules are continuously rev iewed (to a m ore loosen process, for
all .m y dom ain nam e owner, please use My NIC’s WHOIS for most sure). Dom ain nam e is a lucrativ e business for all registrar, they
updated inform ation. For other dom ain name such as .com, you can want y our business :)
try DNS Stuff’s WHOIS. Enter y our dom ain name and search. From
the WHOIS result, m ake sure y ou name or company name are in the
Adm inistrator / Adm in Contact section. You must make sure you can
access to the em ail address listed under the Adm inistrator section Www - With or Without?
too!
Most of the website can be accessed by adding a www to the front of
2 . Cost of regist rat ion. Generally speaking, .com cost around dom ain nam e, and without. For exam ple, y ou can v isit
RM55 a y ear, while .com .m y cost around RM100 a year. Your agent technicalguy .org or www.technicalguy.org to visit the same website.
get com m issions from the Registrar and their price to you should not
exceed the said figures. Technically speaking, website address is used to point to an IP. To
direct v isitors ty ping the URL to the correct web serv er located on
3 . What is DNS address? When register any dom ain name, one different IP. You can v iew both URL as two different address,
need to prov ide the DNS address to com plete the registration. Well, pointing to sam e IP.
it is okey if y ou’re not sure what is DNS, and your agents can handle
this for y ou. This does not affect ownership. It is m ore on resolving
4
In m ost case, y ou should define a m aster one, which I suggest to be Old Marketing Manager
the one with www. Then, point the one without to the main one using
redirect 3 01 , which is m uch friendly for search engines. You are in a book business for 3 0 y ears. Story of Am azon.com
m otiv ates y ou to extend y our business online. You start to build a
website and sell y our books online. Your m arketing manager busy
adopting new m arketing ideas including Blog, email newsletter, pay-
Business Model per-click, etc.
But after a while, y ou start to think why the result was not as
Decide Your Business Model Today! expected. Your cost acquiring new v isitors is high, the Blog is not
activ e, no one seem s to use the tell-a-friend box in y our website…
Think about this:
But, som eone next door - without any experience in selling books,
Group A: Hair sty lists, web dev elopers, lawy ers, doctors,
started an online book store. They hav e some funny story and people
accountants, teacher, contractor, m edia planner, photographer,
are spreading the news for them , their CEO can be reached anytime
graphic designer… by an em ail, the way they reply the custom er support email is fun.
(Group A’s custom ers want a custom ize solution. The solution is St art an online business, nev er ext end it from a conventional one!
unique to each of them . Skill of Group A im proved but limited to the
person who is offering the serv ice. The v alue of that person who offer
the solution increases)
(Group B com e out with their solution first. They customers made
their decision to choose or reject the solution. The solution itself get
im prov ed and the v alues of the solution increases.)
5
spent m ore tim e to recruit m ore sales rep to sell m ore ads than
Classified Companies
focusing in im prov ing their Classified.
3 . There are too m any m edias now. Google will not be as successful if
they start their com pany as one that sell and allow people to
subscribe to their pay per click m odel. See, y ou need a story, a story
that is truly benefiting y our v isitors.
At least there are few things Classified com panies can do to improve
this
I was talking to m y friend who worked in a Classified company. His
com pany is into producing an inche thick printed classified and Colored and box listing are free for those who deserv e it, those with
distributed free to businesses. The rev enue m odel is sim ple, to get lot of good testim onials, those offering responsible customer support
m ore com panies to adv ertise, the better. You can choose from point serv ice. Com panies who adv ertised should som ehow find a way to
form listing to full-page color adv ertisem ent, as long as you can pay prov e their are qualified for a listing of their rank. In fact, all listing
for it. should be free!
We both agreed that this industries won’t last long. My friend Then, how to keep this Classified com pany surv iv e if not selling
estim ating it would last for another 1 0 y ears and will start to go adv ertisem ent? I don’t know actually , it can be many ways. Think
down. Why ? about how to m ake y our product useful to y our customers and the
readers of the Classified. Who knows, one day , the revenue could be
1 . Custom ers are getting sm arter now. See, you can’t pay Google for a
from the selling of the Classified? Subscription fee? Adsense?
clean high listing, but y ou can do it in Classified. Google use several
m ethod to find out the m ost useful and popular website and list them If y ou’re sure what will happen in the 10 years time, why not change
high, in a m ore technical term , PageRank. Yet, Classified companies today ? Afraid of short-term pains?
6
If y ou are Google now, would y ou want to start y our web design
Website Development business?
7
they are asking us to do it for them . It’s like asking the architect to Yes, Blog is free! Free is not good - at least for businesses. That is
find m e a good location for m y next restaurant. why , blogging spread like fire am ong indiv idual users than
businesses. It has becom ing a New Marketing way for m ost
You m ight ask then, what kind of serv ices we provide, since we don’t businesses. Old corporate m anagers do not want to m iss this new
help people build their second eBay ? m arketing opportunity , ended up setting one official corporate
website together with an official Blog.
After Ah Beng realized how a second ebay wouldn’t work as he’d
planned, he then started his own restaurant business in Klang Valley. It was nev er easy to tell m y custom ers that Blog and corporate
Business grew by leaps and bounds. Reserv ations of table through website are the sam e. Fancy design still rem ains as the top-most-
the receptionist becam e a bottleneck with the increment of business wanted feature for m ost of m y custom er. It was designed as like to
v olum e. He then cam e to us again after realizing how an online please just the corporate website owner than people visiting it. Or, it
reserv ation sy stem can help him clear the bottleneck and at the same m ay be the idea of web dev eloper to push for beautiful layout, which
tim e how he can use the online m edium to expand his market reach. in m ost case, the sam e result can be deliv ered by a page simple as
Google m ain page.
After outsourcing his entire online presence to us, Ah Beng can then
continue to concentrate on his restaurant business, where his WordPress has done so well in keeping the design separated from the
expertise lies in. From this experience, Ah Beng realized that a content. It works like the them e in y ou Nokia Phone. You can choose
successful online strategy is v ery m uch like a good restaurant, where to change the look and feel of y our screen without entering all your
the owner m ust him self understand how the restaurant business contact in y our address book again. This sounds simple but challenge
works. is ev ery one has to adapt to a single form at (post title, post slug,
categories) of content, y et work in any page!
We hav e changed the look and feel of our corporate website several
Blog Kills Web Developers tim es, without worry ing about rebuilding the content. But, you will
be surprised with num ber of corporate websites still built with both
WordPress is a free publishing platform . It will turn 5 years soon and content and design com bined and ready to hav e them built from
y ou will be am azing of how m any people are using it now, especially scratch again in their next rev am p.
as Blog. Blog works so well for ev ery one to share personal journal on
the web. You can sign up one for free and start blogging alm ost Bloggers are pav ing the way for the change of corporate website.
instantly ! They take the risk of change, try ing up how the new form at of
8
content definition should work. Bloggers do not have website in the Criteria For Selecting Good Web
past. Creating a Blog is not a rev am p to them , but something new.
Developer
But, for a com pany with already spending so m uch in the past in
their website, it is hard for them to m ake the change. They choose 1 . understand what is the goal of y our website
not to m ake im m ediate decision. They are still on the look-and-see 2 . nev er prom ise y ou a top-m ost ranking in Google
state, but will ev entually follow! 3 . Will not com e out with m ock up during pitching
4 . tells y ou what is conv ersion and v isitors
There are t hree t hings happening now, 5. has their own website with high PageRank
6 . do not charge by num ber of pages
1 . Businesses are starting to understand the importance of the goal of
7 . read Seth Godin’s book
creating a website. A goal m ust be m easurable, it can be number of
8. use WordPress
order, num ber of people downloading y our location map, number of
support em ail receiv ed, except branding :)
9
pages, or tim e spent by y our web designers for its design. Since m ight be looking at 1 ,000 v isitors after the revamp and probably to
website is intangible item s and m ost of us are just too excited with increase the conv ersion rate to 2 0%.
news of m illion-dollar acquisition of dot com companies, it is always
norm that pricing of a website doesn’t include studies, planning, If ev ery thing works (no shortcut, lot of hardwork for sure), you will
m arketing and operations. be getting 2 00 orders a m onth. If each new sales generates RM10
rev enue, that m eans y our m onthly rev enue would be around
Custom er expect m oney paid, in return for a website, not for its RM2 ,000 a m onth.
v alues!
See, it is nev er hard to estim ate a budget. Just m ake sure you are
So, how m uch does it cost to rev am p a website? Whatever you feel clear about the purpose of rev am p, in a MEASURABLE way !
the iPhone worth to y ou, so as a website!
(Using website to reduce y our operation cost is another way to
determ ine y our budget, we will talk about this in m y next post)
2 . Program m ing logics starts before the HTML interface ready. This There is a cost to dev elop a m ockup. Mockup is a result of detail
jum p ov er ev entually sacrifice the user intuitiv eness! study of custom er’s serv ice and products, understand how to present
the website and to m ake it interesting. It is part of the development,
3 . Designer turn y our m ock up into HTML v ersion with what-you- and there is cost associated with it.
see-is-what-y ou-get tools.. chances is that y ou nev er get what you
want :) My personal experience of dealing with customers who wish to have
a m ock up…
To be fair, creating a website is really not an easy task, it is kind of
design work plus technical skill to m ake everything fully integrated 9 9 .9 9 % y ou don’t get the deal, see :)
and right!
11
A Must-Have Feature for Your Website!
Most of the website owners are able to tell us what they want when
Marketing
com e to the design of their websites. Their preferences run wild from It is interesting to know that m ost website or online business owners
font-size to the colors used in the web lay out! care m ore on the background color of their website than the two
m ost im portant m easurem ents- Visitors & Conv ersions. Successful
We started by asking them who and what is the reason for someone business driv es increasing num ber of targetted v isitors to their
to v isit their website. Not everyone, please. Until now, they seem to website and conv ert them into custom ers.
understand pretty well about their v isitors.
The sim ple rule is, starting from som ething sim plier. Do not worry
about what features y our custom ers m ight want to have, because
they are the one who will let y ou know. The site owner, only
represents one of the visitor, not ev ery one!
12
Wait, before we proceed… Visitors
If y ou v isit ht t p://sunbears.wildlifedirect.org now, you will add
one v isitor to Wong’s Sun Bear Project. If y ou choose to donate 5USD Top Search Engine Ranking?
through the website, that would be a m eaningful conv ersion.
My friend asked m e, “how to m ake a website appears on the top of
search engines?”
The v ery first thing I can answer to her is, there is no quick for of
doing this! Well, More than 50% of site v isitors are directed from
search engines.
Passive
Passiv e in a way , this is nothing new but a lot of passion needed, and
often can and m ust be done on y our end. There are unlimited kind of
key words which people used to find y our website. In the sim plest
Save world’s smallest bear, way , key words are used by search engines to match content on your
website. Now, do y ou think using key word ‘石头汤’ can find my Blog,
the Malayan Sun Bear no way ! Sim ply because I don’t hav e the Chinese translation. What
about ‘石头羹’, ‘石頭湯’?
Under the Bornean Sun Bear Conserv ation Program , dev eloped
Act ive
jointly with Sabah Wildlife Departm ent and Sabah Forestry
Google sorts website using their patent-pending-nev er-disclose
Departm ent, a Bornean Sun Bear Conserv ation Centre (BSBCC) will
m ethodology . One of them , the PageRank, rem ain mistery but you
be established at Sepilok, Sabah. It will be used to house Sun Bears
can alway s interprete it to ‘the m ore links pointing to your website,
which hav e been rescued from captiv ity before being released.
the m ore popular y our website is, ev entually y ou deserve a higher
seat’. Question, how to m any m any website pointing to you? This
again, nothing new, not rocket science but a long term effort of
Donate Now (USD5) m aking this to happen.
http://sunbears.wildlifedirect.org
13
This first-class seat is not av ailable for quick booking, you can only
Business Blog
m ake y our way to it!
What is business Blog? Usually , it refers to the second website after
the m ain official website of a business. Perhaps, Iit is a hard decision
to replace official website with a Blog. Therefore, setting the business
Passing Traffic Blog sounds like m ore tolerate and ‘unofficial’ alternativ e.
Just look at Stem life & Stem life Blog or Malay sia Airlines and its
Malay sia Airlines Blog, this growing trend m eans you will see more
business owner adding Blog to their m ain m enu in the website.
Google treat ev ery one as personal. That is why you are not asked to
enter y our com pany inform ation. See, one can work for more than
one com pany , or ev en own a few com panies. How many times you
are asked to answer y our incom e range or y our age or your area of
interest in those drop down form s? It is, in another words of saying -
y our age and incom e will never change. Or, what is the point of
asking?
Well, behind business Blog, I’m sure y ou can find som eone, or a
group of people who is m anaging it. They are real people and the
business Blog is actually personal to them , so as the official website :)
AirAsia -> Snack Attack -> GoInsure -> Xpress Boarding -> AirAsia
X -> AirAsia Gam es -> Tune Money -> Tune Hotels -> ??
14
Instead of presenting few dropdowns for different search options, we
Conversions hav e included arrow button to click for v arious search options. Don’t
ask m e why the arrow is before the text field, why not after? Funny
What’s System Design to do with enough, such im portant details is nev er being discussed in the
Request for Proposal docum ents or quotations. Clients tend to just
Marketing?
want a sy stem done, rather than getting it done the right way !
Behind an online business, backend sy stem works silently, handle
operation issues, custom er support, m aking your online experience a
m ost wonderful one. They are a part of the business! Spending more
tim e in y our operation m eans y ou have less time for your marketing.
It is one of the reason why we are nev er happy about our supporting
sy stem . Apparently , we rev am p our system very often (Yes, complete
rev am p). New interface are tested before actual coding. Our
program m ers are tested in ev ery rev amp to make the interface even
better.
15
this v ery interesting! Bill gates invented the best intuitive interface at
What is the Word?
his tim e, he deserv es what he get today !
Howev er, as with hum an nature, not all counters can solv e each
custom er’s request in the sam e tim e duration.
16
It’s not to be seen as a sy stem to penalize custom ers with errors, but
rather, it’s to reward well-prepared custom ers who gets their
docum ents right and speed up the process for them .
In the end, both the erroneous custom er and the error-free customer
will be happy .
But still, m any websites are designed to giv e y ou the choices of you
don’t want. Do y ou buy Cam bodia and Bahrain travel guide at the
sam e tim e? If not, why shopping cart are provided? Yes, it gives you
the conv enience of shopping around, but it also creates more steps to
com plete a deal.
The tricky part (it is nothing but test & measure), it is how you divert
them to their choice before they m ake a choice! The best is, this is
done indirectly , without their awareness. You won’t be pleased to be
asked for y our shoe size im m ediately when entering a boutique…
17
I Want a Faster Horse! is, better User Experience… and that will cost y ou USD1 only,” said
Stev e.
Stev e Jobs said he nev er listens to people. People would hav e said
they want a faster horse (Henry Ford). Com panies do it m ore as
gestures, m ore than m ining people for their ideas.
Lot of tim e, people don’t know what they want until you have get put
the final product in front of them ! If Akio Morita listen to their
custom ers, we will nev er get the Walkm an today .
Why ? Stev e and Akio Morita doesn’t spend time to study their users,
because they them selv es are already the best user experience expert!
18
becom e successful. If y ou need a m ore solid exam ple, check out Creativ e agencies are in the m arket for many years, long before any
Google. web design com pany . In those day s, TV, Radio and other non-online
m edia are the m ain adv ertising channel. Ov er the years, creative
agencies are m ov ing into the online channel and this directly put
them selv es as the role of web dev elopers, without knowing what and
how website can really help - another exam ple of Meatball Sundae.
It is not that y ou are big and the golden words ’starting since 18xx’..’
that m akes y ou outstanding. It is about change!
19
this out in order to be successful,” said Mr. Ojanpera, who is based in Fly Faster
White Plains. “The question is, are y ou willing to play by the new
rules?” It takes about two hours to fly from Kuala Lum pur to Siem Reap.
Why not one hour or 3 0 m ins? Why are we not writing to AirBus and
giv e a feedback to m ake the plane fly faster?
Reward or Penalty? Understanding how a plane works is no easy task (at least to me), let
alone building one.
Yahoo suspend y our Yahoo Mail account if y ou don’t login for long.
While, Gm ail - reward y ou to stay longer and login more frequent by Sim ilarly , when creating an online sy stem, do not expect your users
counting and increase y our em ail storage while you are logging in! to suggest ‘m ajor changes’. The av erage users can give feedback on
their experience but to get them to tell y ou why y ou should start
im plem enting full-text indexing for y our database is probably way
too far-fetch for them .
20
All Subpages are Main Page! The bigger, The Better!
Visitors use specific key words. Their landing page is no more main Most successful websites are not stingy with space allocated for their
page, in m ost case. For exam ple, if I am looking for an Internship job sign up button. WordPress, as one of the m ost widely used Blog
at a web design com pany , I will use key word ‘internship web design’. platform , firm ly believ e the size of the sign up button has a lot to do
Search engine returns result that direct me to the subpage describing with the conv ersion. And m ost im portantly , conv ersion is the best
the internship program of a com pany , instead of their main page. m easurem ent of how successful a website, rather than fancy flash
anim ation fly ing around in y our website!
What is im portant for a subpage then? Limit number of subpage you
hav e. The less the better. You need to be v ery sure about the goal or
the conv ersion y ou want for each subpage. Conv ert them to your
custom ers.
21
Problem is Improvement
See, ev en the words used in the button has a lot to do with Google.
Im agine if y our Sign up now button is in graphical format, not text
v ersion… What happen if y our fridge is not working? You turn off the power,
rem ov e ev ery thing and send it to repair. You got it back, working
perfectly after two day s.
You will notice one thing, y our fridge is cleaner now, with all rubbish
clear and things are in order! I bet y ou won’t clean it if the fridge
doens’t go wrong.
22
Operation Email
Nev er assum e that an online business will driv e auto-pilot. If you Love Letter
think y our conv entional custom er support is all about picking up a
Lov e let t er I
phone call like what y ou hav e done in the past, read on…
————————————————————-
Darling,
1 . I m iss y ou so m uch!
2 . When can I see y ou again?
3 . Good night
Pin
Lov e let t er II
————————————————————-
Darling,
—< -@
Pin
The way y ou write can m ake a difference. Bullet is for shooting, not
for em ailing :)
23
Email is Monotonous Sorry, I’ll Reply You in 2 Days!
“Em ail is m onotonous,” said m y friend during our discussion today.
Thank y ou for contacting XYZ. We have received your e-mail and our
Em ail deliv ers a m essage in a single tone unlike a conversation. My Custom er Serv ice personnel will respond to y our inquiry soon.
business nature requires m e to answer m any em ails a day .
Generally , we respond within 4 8 hours. If y ou require immediate
attention, please call us and our Custom er Service personnel will be
My em ail reflects m e, it is just another form of conversation, in text.
happy to assist y ou. Our office hours are from 8:3 0pm to 5:30am,
We lov e our work - so I hav e to think of som e ways to reflect this well
EST or 1 :3 0am to 1 0:3 0am , GMT/UTC, Monday s to Friday s.
in m y em ail:
Generally speaking, responding in 2 days to your potential customer
1 . Thanks m eans Thanks, but Thanks :) m eans Thanks and I ’m
shouldn’t be som ething y ou should be proud of. By including this
smiling happily. Will y ou lov e som eone when she is hiding all her
statem ent in ev ery one of y our auto-responders only makes it worse.
feelings from y ou?
Em ail support, one of the m ost im portant elem ent in every online
2 . You hav e m ore than one hundred ways to tell your sender that you store, should and m ust allow online sales to take place even during
are a hum an. This is m e!. non-office hours.
3 . Make y our em ail short. Long em ail is just like your mom nagging Another com m on issue prom inent in m ost websites is this disclaimer
on y ou! Do y ou ask y our lecturer 1 0 questions at a tim e and “My website is best v iewed with 1 02 4 x 7 6 8 resolution.” When
expecting 1 0 answers together? building the website, shouldn’t m ultiple resolutions be taken into
account in the first place? By lim iting y our website to specific
4 . Skip this if y ou are that kind of person who will nev er stop and browsers and screen sizes, what y ou are also doing is lim iting the
offer help to som eone with a broken car beside the road. Don’t just num ber of people who is experiencing a satisfactory shopping
reply for the sake of reply ing. Offer y our help, feedback or any experience on y our online store.
suggestion in y our em ail!
We are not ev en talking about accessibility issues yet, such as how to
5. Though this has som ething to do with the default setting of m ake y our website friendly to blind v isitors!
Outlook Express to m ark m essage read automatically after 5 seconds
- Nev er ignore an em ail. Giv e a precise answer. It is just a Yes or No. Sadly , m any budding website owners still emphasize on nice-to-have
Not hearing from y ou is either not a Yes or No, but being impolite. features like shopping cart and m em bership sy stem s, without a
Im agine y ou are talking to som eone face to face but he ignores you proper understanding of their target audience.
and walk away , this is exactly the sam e feeling.
24
Reducing Enquiries and Support-
Related Emails
Ev en if y ou hav e a FAQ section, y ou are bound to receiv e m any
enquiries or support-related em ails. One possible solution to this can
be shown with the exam ple below:
A list of frequently asked questions extracted from the FAQ page are
listed in this screen. Most questions can be answered in this page.
In the Cam bodia e-Visa website, v isitors will be asked if they have
read the FAQ. If the answer if no, they will be redirected to the FAQ
page, else they will proceed to the next screen.
25
Finally , if all else fails and there were no answers to the v isitor’s Alway s use Aliases for y our general m ailbox. Aliases receive email
questions, v isitors will be redirected to the Contact Us form . A and autom atically redirect to other em ail address that you specify.
v erification code applet was installed to filter Spam enquiries as well. This is usually free and unlim ited from y our em ail hosting service
prov ider. Check with them to find out the number of maximum email
address y ou can specify (both outside dom ains and internals).
Generic Email for Your Business Im agine y ou hav e fiv e sales representativ es. Try to direct all emails
from sales@xxx.com to ev ery one of them at their indiv idual
Most businesses publish a m ore general m ailbox such as m ailboxes. Rem em ber to add sales@xxx.com to the Bcc field when
sales@xxx.com or technical@xxx.com in their website or printed sending out em ails from y our sales representatives. On resignation
m aterials. (if any ), what y ou hav e to do is to update the Aliases and make sure
y ou forward it to the right person.
26
Find out num ber of room s. In this case, it is the dedicated bandwidth
Maintenance assigned to each website, not serv er. Remember, shared basis servers
host not just y our website. It m akes huge differences here. A shared
Is Your Website Loading Slow? 1 Mbps for 1 0 websites m ay be slower than single website with
dedicated 2 56 Kbps bandwidth.
If y our web hosting costs y ou around RM2 00-3 00 a y ear, chances
are that it’s a shared basis. Perhaps I’m wrong. Dividing the yearly Find out num ber of day s one can stay in y our second offer. In this
price to 1 2 m onths, I doubt how an av erage of RM20 monthly web case, check out the ‘Com pute Cy cles’ offered. It measures how much
hosting fee is enough to cov er the cost of serv er hardware, the processing tim e y our application required in a server. 10,000
bandwidth, co-location and ev en the unlim ited m ailbox account com pute cy cles are roughly equiv alent to the monthly capacity of a
offered. That is barely enough for a McD set. serv er with a serv er with 1 .2 GHz m odern processor. For example, a
website with only static pages consum es less compute cycles than a
Where goes wrong t hen? website with shopping cart applications.
Forget about the page-long list of feature of those web hosting plan. Is y our websit e loading slow?
Look for ‘Monthly data transfer’ and ‘No of website per server’. If you
can find them , chances that y ou are in the right direction. Vaguely I see big corporate website pay ing as little as RM20 a month for their
still, both offering tricky m easurem ent which sounds to m e like online infrastructure including em ail & web hosting (som e with
finding a v irgin in a brothel. dom ain as well). I bet this am azing offer answer to the question
abov e.
It would be easier t o put it t his way
2 ) Second offer lim its to X am ount of people who get the offer, but
didn’t m ention about the num ber of days each person will stay in this
one-room hotel - No of website per serv er
28
Most v isitors jum p into the form without spending m uch tim e Howev er, after m y friend finish filling up all the booking details, as
browsing the entire website. Obv iously , the m ain conversion of the he was proceeding to the credit card pay m ent phase, he was
website is online booking, hence creating other pages such as “About annoy ingly greeted with an obstrusive “Member Sign Up” form. This
Us”, “Corporate Inform ation” and v arious hotel guest-unrelated part of the process was not executed as elegantly as Iexpected. As a
inform ation would be counter-productiv e. Instead, content that is rule of thum b, nev er add unnecessary processes in between the
im portant is build alongside the form structure. Notice in this starting point and the goal- alway s use the Shortest Path Algorithm.
exam ple abov e, it would be difficult to explain in text how
com fortable the m attress it. A picture speaks a thousand words. You can alway s include the “Mem ber Sign Up” phase in the
confirm ation e-m ail later, which in m y opinion is m uch m ore
relev ant. And one can’t help but feel that the UIdesigner decided to
take the easy way out by putting 5 equally prominent red bullets for
the “Login”, “Register”, “Em ail m e m y password”, and “Back”. Hard
work doesn’t alway s pay off now, but laziness almost always pay off
instantly . The user could hav e been guided better and faster with a
better lay out design.
29
Maybank2U 2.0 Sneak Preview:
Maybank2Me
A product in its final stage lim its the way users think. The almost-
done May bank2 U website will sure get lot of useful feedbacks, but I
bet not m uch on the fundam ental which is crucial to get the magic
num bers m entioned by Shareza.
This is the current website of May bank2 U. The May bank2U team
done a great work to build this from scracth. It is not easy, especially
when y ou’re dealing with large num ber of users and important data.
The decision to rev am p com e at the right time. If the old website was
built to attract m ore v isitors (during those day s when it was new),
the rev am ped v ersion should hav e focused in the conversion rate or
30
m eeting goals. In short, to increase May bank’s rev enue and to
decrease May bank’s operating cost!
31
Don’t be surprised, m any v isitors can not tell the difference between
the two pictures in quick.
Most often, user experience has a lot to do with the Contact us form.
Im agine, it serv es as the best tim e and place where y ou can turn
som eone’s experience of using y our website better. They can be your
I couldn’t find the login box in the m ain page like what we have in best friend who prom ote the website for y ou, not of fancy technology
Pay pal? A touching personalization can be redundant. Quick math, if but som e little nice experience. A good form receiv es fewer support
y ou will to login 1 00 tim es to May bank2 U in y our lifetim e, that request, sav ing operational cost greatly. Ihave reviewed the Contact
m eans the New User link will appear 9 9 tim es to y ou unused. Not us form of Alliance Bank in the past, check it out. An exam ple of
just that, y ou hav e just forced som eone to m ake 9 9 decisions of not Contact us form in good use.
clicking on that particular link. Don’t m ake a choice.
32
Sign up form - one of the m ost im portant page where v isitors are I would lov e to hav e location m ap if this is not too m uch of work :)
conv erted into May bank2 U users. Yet, too m any options, and I
wonder why the online m ethod should not be giv en priority as like The Fundament al Feedback?
the big button in WordPress. Yet, this is not much different from the
first v ersion. This explains why 1 ,500 pages are way too difficult to My May bank2 Me directs m e to a secure page with big login button.
focus y our bullet (budget and tim e) on. Probably that answer to There is a clear instruction to tell people how to ensure they are
Yowchuan’s question on how m uch is the cost of revamp during the landed in the non-phishing page. I don’t hav e to choose if Iam a new
prev iew launch today . user, the sy stem will do this dirty job for m e. My online sy stem
rem inds m e if there is a recurring pay m ent to m ake such as rental
and the list go on…
The rest of inform ation such as banking, credit card, lifesty les
updates, prom otions, sign up instructions and contact us form are
separated from the online banking sy stem .
Who knows, I could hav e one v ersion for people like m y dad? Lite,
easy to use, and probably they could belong to the last group of users
who will continue ’supporting’ the phy sical banks :)
33
Keep it up, May bank2 U Team !
3 . Make y our site sim pler. The current one is creating too many loops
to discourage conv ersion to take place.
4 . Use perm alinks rather than dy nam ic page. Most of y our pages
does not m aintain PageRank ov er the y ears.
34