Websites for Tiny Businesses

1
Websites for Tiny Businesses

• ACM Open Discussion meeting
• Wed 13 July, City University, London
• Hosts introduction
• David Dodson
• Department of Computing

2
Tiny Businesses

• EU SME categories (effective 1/1/2005)
• Medium headcountlt250, turnover not over 50M
  Euro
• (or balance sheet
  total not over 43M)
• Small headcountlt50, turnover or balance not
  over 10M Euro
• Micro headcountlt10, turnover or balance not
  over 2M Euro
• Extrapolating
• Tiny headcountlt3, turnover or balance not
  over 0.4M Euro
• (roughly
  0.25M pounds)

3
Importance of tiny businesses

• tiny businesses outnumber larger ones?
• many big business ideas gain from tiny starts
• 'home inventions' increasingly spawn firms
• start-ups are getting smaller Henery 2005
• venture capitalists like frugal managements

4
Importance of tiny business websites

• most tiny businesses need to advertise
• websites can economise on advertising
• - unique new offerings gain from global
  exposure
• - buyers increasingly use web even to find value
  locally

5
Website costs

• IT notorious for overspend, overruns,
  under-delivery
• 'professional' websites complex, hard to manage,
  costly
• Pandora's box of complex tools, frequent change
• low-cost or free tools and hosting are expensive
  to use and lock clients in

6
Common problems

• your website seems OK from your browser, but...
• cookie problems, session timeouts, etc
• bad visual design (issues poorly understood)
• pages that don't print out well
• pages that take ages
• not meeting disability access requirements
• platform upgrades stop things working
• coding too complex for troubleshooting
• ...?

7
Outsourcing

• "If you rely too much on people in other
  countries and other companies... you are
  outsourcing your brain"
• Bill Gates 2005
• But most tiny businesses can't afford their own
  IT specialist

8
End-user web development

• Needs substantial IT support or training
• Lots of room for simplification for easy use by
  tiny businesses

9
Tinybiz websites - some key requirements

• product catalogue with prices
• persuasive material (hype through to tech data)
• order form with terms of business
• clear, accurate language web searches can find
• appropriate product images (digicam jpeg/mpeg)
• thumbnail jpegs clickable for more resolution
• basic company, legal and customer support info

10
Tinybiz website non-requirements

• unnecessary graphics
• complex page layouts
• choice of font or font size or page layout
• advanced / new technology
• system complexity waiting to go awry
• unintelligible coding by authoring tools
• clever CRM facilities (logging, adaptation)
• electronic contract formation (in most cases)
• customer database online (costly security risks)

11
Tinybiz website - ideals

• shopping cart (if multi-item orders needed)
• customer feedback / market research

12
Shopping Cart

• use to let customer print clear order form
• why not let customers recommend purchases by
  passing on your URL identifying shopping cart
  content?

13
Customer feedback / market research

• MR vital to business planning but costly
• try to collect MR from purchase decisions so that
  it can pay for itself
• people don't fill in questionnaires for no reason
• offer discount status to questionnaire fillers?

14
Questions

• What are the important requirements?
• What do current options cost and risk?
• Are better options feasible, if so how?
• What should tiny businesses avoid?
• Is open source needed, is so what else?

15
References

• Henery M 2005. "Small is beautiful again for
  investors The Times, 4 July 2005, p9.
• Gates B 2005. "Quote of the Day" The Times, 30
  June 2005, p47.