Develop Your Small Business’s Technology Plan
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Here's a checklist for deciding what your site should be able to do—its functionality. All of the items on this checklist require a fair degree of consideration, but you can drill down on any of them to find the information you need to make decisions. You don't have to complete all of these items but you should consider them all, regardless of the scope of your Web plan. Even if you plan to do it all yourself after work from your home office and your garage, you should still review the entire checklist.

The benefits you get from a little up-front technology planning include:
· Lower programming costs
· Less development time
· More control over your information systems
· Stronger model for integrating online sales with your other business systems.

Completing this list will yield a complete list of the hardware, software and services you need to launch your web site. Within each checklist item prioritize the capabilities you want. Your priority list will help you make compromises later on in the development process. It will also help you develop a multi-phased roll-out of your Web site's capabilities that will allow you to test key systems individually and add incremental improvements to your site.
Of course, everything you "decide" here will likely change once you get into actual site construction but after this process, you'll know exactly what your compromises mean.

Define the Optimal Visitor. ExperienceMarket research will help you identify the common browsers, modem speeds and other restraints in the computing power of your target market. This helps you avoid developing site technology that your customers don't have the capabilities to use. For example, knowing 40 percent of your prospective customers still connect via 14.4 kbps modems will definitely impact the number and size of graphics you use on a given page, as well as your use of Java, JavaScript and other programming tools and techniques.

Evaluate the Technology. Required to Deliver Your ContentContent is a combination of text and graphics that showcases, merchandises and sells your product or service. Different kinds of content require different kinds of technology to serve to customers. Your designated site producer should be involved at this level, to define the customer experience as an integral part of defining the site requirements. There are two parts to this discussion: content serving and content retrieval.

Plan to Track Prospects and Customers through. Your SiteTracking your customer through your site is the equivalent of watching a customer evaluate your merchandise and interact with your sales force. Most ISPs and hosts provide some minor enhancements that let you analyze traffic trends on your site. As you get more sophisticated in marketing to your customers, you may want to add tools that can track unique users through your site in real-time, presenting targeted offers or advertising. This requires additional site tracking technologies and incurs higher technology costs.

Define Your Order-Processing Needs. Your e-commerce software will be responsible for taking your customer's order and transmitting it to you. You'll have to decide whether you'll accept credit cards online and a host of related decisions that will impact your technology investments. For example, the decisions you make will also impact the integration of your e-commerce software with your back-end systems. Throughout the site development process—and on into your improvement cycles, once you're up and running—you'll be making decisions on order processing software and services that trade-off cost, features and development time.

Specify Your Site Maintenance Requirements.Your site maintenance requirements will vary depending upon the volumes of visitors or customers you expect to attract. For example, a highly trafficked site conducting time-sensitive transactions, such as a securities trader, will require fast access anytime of the day or night. This is called 24 x 7 site availability. To ensure the best performance per user, the owner of the securities trading site might also require that additional servers become available when too many people try to access the site at the same time (server load balancing at peak times). Most sites won't be as demanding, but you should know what it will take to keep your site running and consider these requirements when shopping for your hosting service.

Outline Your Web Site Security. Once you place a site on the Internet, security becomes an issue. You must protect three significant areas of your information systems:
· the transaction between you and your customer
· any information stored on your Web server, such as customer names, authorizations, or credit card account numbers
· any computer networks connected to your Web server, such as your internal business networks

Define Localization Requirements.If you think your product or service has international appeal, you can save lots of money by following simple guidelines for creating international-friendly content. You'll need to consider not only language differences but cultural and—most important—currency differences, as well.
Prioritize Community-Building Options Communication among visitors to your site-often called "community"—is one of the main reasons customers revisit a site. A number of technologies are specifically devoted to making this communication possible. For example, these include chat, bulletin boards, ICQ and discussion lists. You may want to implement some or all of these.

Decide on Your Advertising. Display StrategyOver time, as you begin to occupy your market share, you become attractive to others who want to advertise on your site. Even if you have no intentions of selling advertising space to others, you might want to use banner advertising technologies on your site to communicate with your customers. Identify now where and how you will accommodate advertising. If advertising is a primary component of your revenue or content model, you'll want to incorporate ad management technologies early in your site development plan.