E-commerce and ads:
No book on web page construction would be complete without a section devoted to making money, and MacDonald delivers a pretty good chapter in Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual. I was wishing for a little more breadth on the virtual shopping cart front, but then again, this is not a book about effective storefront creation. It is about web page creation and in that sense, he covers the simplest way to get a functioning shopping cart system in place. Additionally he covers other money-making ideas, which he appropriately refers to as "schemes." I like the wording, I have to say, because there is something inherently sleazy underlying the proliferation of advertisement all over the free web. Now, I am not lamenting the rampant commercialization of society here — there is already a countless quantity of research on the bombardment of advertising in the form of TV, radio, subliminal messages, and billboards. It has been happening forever and I'll save that discussion for another time. The real issue here, is that lurking behind many Internet ads is the possibility of inadvertently enter a phishing site. Not so innocuous.
That said, there is a lot of good, verified advertising out there and MacDonald devotes space in the book to using Google AdSense for both promoting your own business via ads on other people's websites and using AdSense to generate revenue by displaying those ads for others. While I am not interested in actually using AdSense as a revenue generator, what I appreciate about it is the subtlety Google applies to the concept. The text-only ads really do sit quietly on the page and are less of an intrusion than you would expect advertising to be. The targeted nature of that advertising is also key. Not only does it increase the likelihood that a user will click the ad, thus generating revenue for the site owner, you could almost argue that some of the ads actually offer value to the site. If I am reading about hot sauce, for instance, an ad link to a great hot sauce store might actually be just what I want to see. The Amazon Associates program might be just as good here, though, since the link could go right to a particular product and it doesn't scream AD in the same way that even the Google AdSense content does. The tradeoff, I guess, for the sleekness of the Amazon approach is that a user just clicking a link doesn't yield any profit and it is sort of unlikely that all that many people will buy the product in order to generate your commission.
One thing I am not crazy about is the AdSense for Search concept. I think the temptation for visitors to exit your site is that much greater when a Google search box is embedded right there, and that seems counterproductive to me. At least with the sidebar ads, a user has to see something relevant to your site contents to entice clicking. They may actually finish reading your website first or return after viewing the ad. With the search box I feel like you essentially just turned your website into the Google homepage. Even if you limit the Google searches to only your website, I feel it still takes something away from the site. A sleeker search option is to create one that combs your website and fits in with the overall look (as in no Google logo in the search box). Forget generating advertising revenue with the Google search feature; it is just a little too distracting.
Internet storefronts are almost a must for any physical store in this day and age. Users expect to, at the very least, be able to check out a new local store to get a sense of the environmental vibe before they set foot in the building. More significantly, however, many of those users may choose to buy products from the comfort of their homes, including people that could just as easily head down to the physical location. Convenience (or sometimes outright laziness) is key.
MacDonald does a good job of covering the slightly tricky task of adding e-commerce functions to your web site by covering the PayPal shopping cart. I have looked into open source software, and a cart can be added in other ways, but I have to say PayPal does provide a streamlined process since you can do everything from your account, including creating the cart buttons and so forth. I was also rather surprised to read in MacDonald's text that you can customize the colors and use buttons you have created, so you can make the PayPal generated pages fit the look of your website, at least to a point. I was previously under the impression that the pages would look distinctly PayPal and totally unattached to your own site design. Given that, I am going to explore PayPal as an option for the e-commerce portion of the Taste the World website. It might save some serious headaches. And on a technical note, the chargeback protection offered by a huge vendor like PayPal
JavaScript to add a little flair:
I have used scripts to create a form, slideshow, and remote and resident rollovers in my personal website. I will likely use these elements to add a little flair and some needed function to the Taste the World website. Not surprisingly, I grabbed the scripts from free web sources, and am still amazed at the variety of freely available scripts out there. I used DynamicDrive to find my scripts, which is a site MacDonald mentions, but he goes on to provide a list of some huge banks of material. I am definitely going to be perusing the javascript-2.com website; with 9,000 scripts there has to be some amazing stuff out there! I will say, however, for usability purposes DynamicDrive is a great site. Everything is neatly organized into categories that make sense, such as Image Effects: Galleries, Mouseover, Slideshows. You can't beat that kind of structure when you are trying to dig for something very specific.
I am also interested in learning more about the creation of scripts, so at some point I will spend some time checking out his suggested resource, webmonkey.com. For right now, though, I will be content with the premade stuff, which is undoubtedly better than what I could create at this juncture anyway. Obviously, as with everything else, compatibility with multiple browsers is an issue. Fortunately, a lot of the scripts out there list the browsers that they are compatible with. Testing them firsthand is still important, but knowing up front if a script is supposed to be widely compatible can go a long way towards narrowing the field and choosing the correct resource.
To check out the websites mentioned above, visit:
http://javascript-2.com/
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/javascript_tutorial/
By the way, on a humorous note, I love that Blogger, which is owned by Google, is able to catch that I spelled "AdSense" as "Adsense" at one point, but can't deal with the word "premade," which is in the dictionary as a non-hyphenated term. The attention to detail that would catch a proprietary term misspelling is crazy. If they could just add that detail to the rest of the language...
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