Module 7 | Initiation of the Website Project

Module Description:
This module will discuss and help students in the creation of an e-commerce website.
Purpose of the Module:
To help students in the creation of an e-commerce website.
Module Outcomes:
At the end of the course, students must have created an e-commerce website.

Lesson 1 | Domain Name Selection and Registration

Note
This lesson is retrieved from Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and
Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

Domain Name Selection and Registration

If a project or campaign involves new site rather than an upgrade, it will be necessary to register a new domain name,
more usually referred to as a ‘web address’ or ‘uniform (or universal) resource locator’ (URL).
Choosing a domain name is a relatively simple decision, since there is some basic terminology that marketers need to be
aware of. Companies typically have many digital services located on different address domains, particularly for companies
with different domains for different countries. The domain name refers to the address of the web server and is usually
selected to be the same as the name of the company, and the extension will indicate its type.
The extension is commonly known as the generic top-level domain (gTLD). Common gTLDs are:
I.            .com represents an international or American company, such as www.travelocity.com.
II.            .org are not-for-profit organization (e.g. www.greenpeace.org).
III.            .mobi – introduced in 2006 for sites configured for mobile phones.
IV.            .net is a network provider such as www.demon.net
There are also specific country-code top-level domains (CCTLDs)L
V.            .co.uk represent a company based in the UK, such as www.thomascook.co.uk.
VI.            .au, .ca, .de, .es, .if, .fr, .it, .nl, etc. represent other countries (the co.uk syntax is an anomaly!).
VII.            .ac.uk is UK-based university or other higher education institution (e.g. www.crafield.ac.uk).
VIII.            .org.uk is for an organization focusing on a single country (e.g. www.mencap.org.uk)
The ‘filename.html’ part of the web address refers to an individual web page – for example ‘products.html’ for a web page
summarizing a company’s products.
It is important that companies defined a URL strategy which will help customers or partners find relevant parts of the site
containing references to specific products or campaigns when printed in offline communications such as adverts or
brochures.

Lesson 2 | Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)

Note
This lesson is retrieved from Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and
Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)

The technical name for web address is uniform (or universal) resource locator (URL). URLs can be thought of as a
standard method of addressing, similar to postcodes, that make it straightforward to find the name of a domain or a
document on the domain.
In larger business, particularly those many sites, it’s important to develop a URL strategy so that there is a consistency way
of labelling online services and resources.
There is further terminology associated with a URL which will often be required when discussing site implementation or
digital marketing or digital campaigns.
Domain names are registered using a hosting company or domain broker using a domain name service, such as:
·         InterNIC  (www.internic.net). Registration for the .com, .org and .net domains.
·         Nominet (www.nominet.org.uk). Registration for the .co.uk domain. All country-specific domains, such as .fr (France) or
.de (Germany), have their own domain registration authority.
The following guidelines should be borne in mind when registering domain names:
1.      Campaign microsite may hinder findability and give maintenance problems. If a new site is created specifically for a
campaign this can cause problems since although Google’s robots will crawl it rapidly, it will probably not rank highly
without backlinks from other sites, so it will have poor visibility. For this reason it is often better to redirect visitors typing in
the domain name to a campaign subfolder on an existing site.
2.      Organizations should register multiple ccTLDs to protect their reputation. ‘Domaineers’ may seek to purchase domain
extensions or ccTLDs which would rightly belong to the brand such as .org.uk or their equivalent in other countries.
3.      New startup companies should consider whether the company and domain name can assist in SEO. While existing brands
will use their main company or brand name for site, new companies may benefit if the domain name contains a key phrase
that searchers will seek. Company may pay a lot to register a domain such as cruises.com for this reason.
Managers or agencies responsible for websites need to check that domain names are automatically renewed by the hosting
company (as more are today). For example, the .co.uk domain must be renewed every two years. Companies that don’t
manage this process potentially risk losing their domain name since another company could potentially register it if the
domain name lapsed.

Lesson 3 | Selecting a Hosting Provider

Note
This lesson is retrieved from Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and
Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

Selecting a Hosting Provider

Selecting the right partner to host a website is an important decision since the quality of service provided will directly impact
on the quality of service delivered to a company’s customers. The partner that hosts the content will usually be a specialist
hosting provider such as Rackspace (www.rackspace.com) for the majority of small and medium-sized companies, but for
larger companies the web server used to host the content may be inside the company and managed by the company’s IT
department.
The quality of service of hosted content is essentially dependent on two factors: the performance of the website and its
availability.

Lesson 4 | Website Performance Optimization

Note
This lesson is retrieved from Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and
Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

Website Performance Optimization

It is important for site owners to recognize that page download performance is essential to the success of a site even when
many users have broadband connections and sites are hosted to Internet with high bandwidth. Research by Strangeloop
(2011) showed that the average user perception of acceptable download time is three seconds, while for the average Fortune
500 site is even seconds.
Research by Trilibis (2014) of over 150 prominent mobile responsive sites showed that only 21 per cent of these modern
websites were loading in less than four seconds on a smartphone, and that 32 per cent of the sites required between 8 and
48 seconds to load.
Trilibis investigated the reason for this sluggish page-load time of responsive sites and found that image size was the
primary cause. By analyzing page composition, they determined that the mean home page weight of the sites in the sample
was 1.7MB, with a median weight of 1.2MB.
The Strangeloop (2011) research also reveals that these larger sites often have poor performance despite use of content
distribution networks (CDNs) like Akamani and Cloudfare, indicating underlying technical issues in delivering content from
the server.
Google clearly takes this area of website management seriously; it wants users to access relevant content quickly as part of
the service and has stated that if a site particularly slow its ranking will be affected. To help site owners, Google has made
available tools to show the relevant performance, so marketers should ask their agency to assess their performance.
The length of time is dependent on a number of factors, some of which cannot be controlled, but primarily depends on the
bandwidth of the hosting company’s connection to the Internet and performance of the web server hardware and content
management platform. It also depends on the ‘page weight’ of the site’s pages measured in kilobytes (which is dependent
on the number and complexity of images and animations).
Another factor for a company to consider when choosing a hosting provider is whether the server is dedicated to one
company or whether content from several companies is located on the same server. A dedicated server is best, but it will
attract a premium price.

Endnote
To see the actual references in this lesson, please check the book:  Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing:
Strategy, Implementation and Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

Lesson 5 | The Availability of the Website

Note
This lesson is retrieved from Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and
Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

The Availability of the Website

The availability of a website is an indication of how easy it is for a user to connect to it. In theory, this figure should be 100
per cent but sometimes, for technical reasons such as failures in the server hardware or upgrades to software, the figure can
drop substantially below this.
SciVisum, a web-testing specialist, found that three-quarters of Internet marketing campaigns are impacted by website
failures, with 14 per cent of failures so sever that they prevented the campaign meeting its objectives. The company surveyed
marketing professional from 100 UK-based organization across the retail, financial, travel and online gaming sectors. More
than a third of failures were rated as ‘serious to severe’, with many customers complaining or being unable to complete web
transaction. These are often seen by marketers as technology issues which are owned by others in the business, but
marketers need to ask the right questions. The SciVisum (2005) research showed that nearly two-thirds of marketing
professionals did not know how many users making transactions their websites could support, despite an average transact
value of £50 to £100, so they were not able to factor this into campaign plans. Thirty-seven per cent could not put a
monetary value on losses caused by customers abandoning web transactions. A quarter of organizations experienced
website overloads and crashes as a direct result of a lack of communication between the two departments.
SciVisum recommends that companies do the following:
·         Define the peak visitor throughout requirements for each customer journey on the site. For example, the site should be
able to support at the same time: approximately ten checkout journeys per second, 30 add-to-basket journeys per second,
five registration journeys per second, two check-my-order-status journeys per second.
·         Service-level agreement – more detailed technical time and server uptime are insufficient detailed.
·         Set up a monitoring programme that measures and reports on the agreed journeys 24/7.

Endnote
To see the actual references in this lesson, please check the book:  Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing:
Strategy, Implementation and Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.
Suggested Reading:
What is Web Hosting? (2021). Retrieved from website.com: https://www.website.com/beginnerguide/webhosting/6/1/what-
is-web-hosting?.ws&source=SC
Source:
Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice (6th ed.). United Kingdom:
Pearson Education Limited.