Paradise Books -- Maintenance

Security and Protection
The Paradise Books website is currently hosted on a university web server. The account where the website is maintained is accessed by a password.

Currently, there is no firm backup schedule. A backup schedule needs to be prepared and carried out by the systems administrator(s). Firewall protection should be installed as soon as possible so that anyone with evil intentions will have great difficulty in hacking the site. Credit card encryption needs to be investigated, so that our shoppers will feel more secure about sharing their credit card numbers with us.

Maintenance and Updating
Paradise Books currently has a team of 4 Webmistresses overseeing the web site. This is the team who will be called on to maintain, support, and enhance the Paradise Books website. All pages should be revisited periodically: once a week for Paradise Books internal content and once a month for external content. This group should also gather and respond to inquiries to the central email contact and monitor the discussion board and guestbook.

Maintenance should go hand in hand with services available from our ISP. For example, the ISP can offer us detailed tracking statistics that can tell us who visits our site, where they go and how long they stay on each page. These details can be aggregated monthly and used to plan promotional efforts as well as improve our page design.

Promotion
Online
Paradise Books should investigate as many appropriate methods of promotion as possible. One logical place to start would be with search engines. There are services that submit URLs to literally hundreds of search engines at once (for a fee). If these services are to be used, we should investigate what search engines are covered -- some may be obsolete or inappropriate for our needs. Submitting to search engines one at a time is certainly possible as well.

Banner exchanges are a popular way to place rotating advertising on a site. Many of these facilities are free (e.g. WebRings) and offer click-through statistics. Some banner services want to know how much traffic we have, so we should gather information using techniques described under Traffic Analysis below before considering many banner ads.

It would be very useful to consider advertising on websites and in return offer those sites' URLs as the featured link in our database to a particular book. For example, suppose that a movie were being made featuring the character Harry Potter. Paradise Books could advertise on the production company's website in exchange for the movie's URL being the Related Link beside one or more Harry Potter books in our database.

Offline
Although Paradise Books operates without a physical location, there needs to be a way to reach current and potential customers offline. Not everyone wishes to be wired to the Internet 24 hours a day.

We can study the buying patterns of our customers and discover what topics are most popular. We can survey our registered customers and determine what types of magazines and newspapers they like to read, or what types of traditional media (e.g. radio, television) they use, and place advertising in these outlets that includes our URL. If Paradise Books exhibits at a trade show or consumer show, we can set up a computer or two that link directly to our website and demonstrate the features of our site. Any printed matter that is distributed (business cards, brochures, etc.) should display our Web address prominently.

Traffic Analysis
A variety of tools are available to study our traffic. The type of statistics to gather and track depends on what we are looking to discover about our visitors. We have currently implemented a counter from BeSeen which if clicked offers instant page visit statistics for the previous 12 months. If we were interested to know where these visitors are coming from, we can also track the originating address of the station that accessed any web page in the site. One ISP that provides this service on a daily basis is NetAxis. This is one way to find out if certain pages are more popular than others -- these popular pages could be targeted for special promotions, while the less popular pages could be examined and remodeled or deleted from the site.

Care must be taken that we do not become so zealous in tracking our visitors that they are afraid to come to our site. We do not want to present a "Big Brother" atmosphere. To that end, a privacy statement will need to be crafted and added to the site, explaining the type of data we do collect and for what purpose we shall use it.

Improvements
Our website should not become static -- to encourage repeat visits, there should always be something new and exciting to offer. All of our enhancements should be with the view of enhancing the customer experience and lead ultimately to additional book purchases.

Customer Profile
Currently, the Paradise Books database does not have much customer information in it. We value very much our customers and would like to be able to offer them a one-to-one marketing experience at our website. To this end, we would like to develop a method to gather customer information using enhanced registration screens that would allow the shopper to specify what type of books he/she would like to read.

Opt-In Newsletter
Using the email addresses from the registration screens, we can prepare a periodic newsletter that would be emailed to our preferred clients. This would entail extending our registration format to allow clients to turn off this feature if they get inundated with email.

Online Surveys
Paradise Books is always open to suggestions and feedback from the public. Sometimes we need to gather information in a more structured way. We can prepare some questions and add a page to gather that info, or include it as part of our (planned) opt-in newsletter.