Business Online 101- Part 4: Website Back End

Last week, in our Business Online 101 series we discussed the importance of the ‘front end’ of your website.

It’s not just the stuff at the front that is important. The stuff behind the website is important too. Just as a house is constructed by timbers of wood, concrete floors and ceiling insulation, a website has a lot of things behind the pretty design that make it work efficiently. Collectively, this is known as the website’s backend. Try not to laugh too hard.

To understand why this stuff is important you need to have a basic grasp on how the Internet works.

The Internet is basically your computer requesting information from another computer and that computer sending it over temporarily.

Hosting

Remember how we discussed the difference between being ‘online’ and ‘offline’? How often would you say you are ‘online’, that is – connected to the internet? Maybe for an hour a day? Two hours a day? Eight, even?

But how often do people want to access your online store? There may be someone in a different time zone to you who wants to see it or perhaps a customer is just doing some late night shopping. Your website needs to be accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If customers are asking to see your website, and it is stored on your computer, when your computer is turned off they won’t be able to see it. This is why you need a web host. Somewhere to put your website where it is accessible 24/7. Some computers can transfer information faster than others which is why the speed of connection is important when choosing a host.

Content Management System

Websites are built in a language called HTML. It looks like lines of text that don’t make much sense unless you’ve spent a lot of years studying it.

Fortunately, instead of having to edit and change boring lines of text to create or update your website, your website design company will include a software called a Content Management System (CMS). The CMS lets you, and whoever you give access, change things on your website whenever you want to. You can change photos, the number of pages and the words that have been written. Some CMS’s are easier to use than others. It’s important you have an easy to use CMS, otherwise you will have to spend lots of money getting website developers to update even tiny text changes.

Analytics

The major difference between an online store and an offline store is that every move your customer makes is tracked. Information about the customer as well as every click they make is registered by the website and stored. The website stores information like:

• How the customer found your website
• How long the customer stayed on your website
• Which pages the customer clicked on
• What countries they are from
• Which page they were on when they left the website
• Whether they bought any products from you

The collation of all of this information is what’s called Analytics and it is really important. Analytics are the only way to tell if what you’re doing online is actually working. Just as you would count how many customers you have through your shop space every day – even if they don’t buy anything – you want to count how many customers are visiting your website every day and where they are visiting it from. You also want to know what they are doing when they come to your website.

Analysing analytics can tell you what you need to change about your website to make it perform better. There are many special tricks to this and it is best to recruit some website analytics experts.

Now that you’re on top of what a website does, it’s time to understand the difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0.