DotCom Consulting

One of the first decisions to make will be what technology to use to build your application. That is choice that might well be dictated by the kind of site you are looking to build, whether or not the use of a framework makes sense. Its quite possible that what you will end up with is a mix of technologies to serve various purposes.

We can advise you on your choice of technologies, we do not believe in one specific choice over another each situation might determine a different recommendation. In general though we will usually recommend open source solutions over more proprietary ones.

If you have engineering resource in mind, great. If not we can arrange development in a number of locations depending on your budget and/or other requirements.

The process to get from design and build to launch can be quite complex and have many pitfalls along the way. A crucial element is making sure the process is managed as effeciantely as possible from start to finish. With many successful projects under our belt, launched on–time and within budget we can help ensure your launch exceeds your expectations.

The choice of where to host your site at first can seem bewildering. The number of hosting companies available now is huge, especially if you are willing to consider hosting outside the UK, in places like the US for instance.

This can be another very important decision, hosting contracts will often lock you into a minimum one year deal, and remember its not JUST about the cost. The quality of the hardware and the service may all be something you should take a close look at.

We have experience of negotiating and reviewing the small print of these contracts and also advising on the hardware choices.

Ok so you’ve built and launched your site and now the community is growing rapidly and your server(s) are having trouble dealing with your new found success. In many ways this will be one of your most critical points. If new users can’t reach your site they might start to lose interest just as critical momentum is building.

Dealing with load is not an exact science. There can be many reasons why a site experiences slowdowns, it can vary with the time of day or day of week. The problem can be application specific or database design problem. Either way we can help analyse your site and prepare a report of recommendations for changes. Some typical areas might include:

• Database optimization
• Database replication, mirroring or sharding
• Caching and cache services
• Moving functionality to dedicated services
• Load balancing
• CDN’s
• Use of cloud services

Popularity can bring problems that are harder to deal with and in some ways riskier to your ultimate success. Online gangs have been known to extort money from successful startups either as a way to stop them performing Distributed Denial of Service attacks on your site, or because they have (or claim to have) hacked your site data and will reveal it.

We can advise on security best practices, perform audits on your application and server infrastructure and even advise on the best course of action should you be in the unfortunate position of being hacked.

One area that tends to get little or attention (certainly in the beginning) is planning for handling support issues on your site. Very often this is an afterthought, but again its a critical area. If you do not respond quickly enough to user issues your site will very soon gain a reputation for non–service and it might die before it even gets a chance to get off the ground.

We can help you setup the processes and procedures necessary for your customer service and support process so that you present a helpful face to your new members.

While the days of funding a site entirely on ad–revenue are almost certainly over for the majority of new sites, ad–revenue can still make up a significant portion of a sites income. In this case the choice is then between incorporating a service such as Google Ads or attempting to sell your own advertising space or a mixture of both. We can advise you on what options are available and if you decide to sell your own ads can help you craft an advertising deck to attract potential advertisers.

The other income streams available are many and varied, from selling products through a shop on your site, to affiliate marketing and subscription payments. There are now quite a few payment services available each with their own pricing and advantages/disadvantages. There is also the emerging area of micro–payments.

Another key component to the success of the site is measuring the usage of your site. Which pages or content are the most popular? Why isn’t a particular feature being used? Analytics can give you detailed and essential information about what you users are doing. Integrating applications such as Google Analytics is fairly straightforward, what is harder though is understanding the myriad of graphs and reports that are produced. There are also now a number of other players on the analytics block which might be more suitable.