Moving to the Cloud ? (Part 2)

This is a continuation of my high level discussion about some of the important things to consider when creating a cloud based business. Part 1 noted a few business items that need to be addressed. Part 2 discusses some of the user experience, content, and architecture to think about while you’re in your planning and early startup stages.


Content related –

Does your logo and overall ‘look and feel’ and graphic scheme appear professionally done? Are you relying on free clip art or other public domain sources for your graphics ? That may be ok for a short while, but eventually you’ll need to come up with something unique and memorable with snappy colors, attractive visuals and enough content to entice your first time visitors to stick around a while. How sticky is your site? What's the average length of your visitors stay at the site? Have you tested the UX (really tested it) from an outsider's perspective (and not with a direct hard wired connection to your web server).


How many users can be online to your site at once ? Are the drags on performance? What about your database read/writes ? How scaleable is your architecture as your userbase grows ? Have you planned for additional capacity/throughput and what it would take to ramp up to the next level.


Is your content dependent upon a ‘Web 2.0’ or crowdsourcing philosophy? Do you accept submissions of original content, writings, essays, articles, artwork, photography, etc. from your visitors ?


If so

How are submissions made to your site?
Who reviews/approves submissions for appropriateness?
How often is 'old' content removed ?
Is old content archived and searchable ?
Do contributors retain copyrights to their work or do submissions become your property ?
How easily/quickly can an authorized user edit/add/remove content ? Does the webmaster need to be involved, or is this a simple task for others ? Who *are* the authorized users for things like this ?


Language :

In which language are you presenting your site? Have you given thought to offering a multilingual site? Remember the internet is global, and people will be able to access your site from anywhere in the world. Is sure your baseline code architecture prepared for the possibility of multilingual pages ? Even if you don’t anticipate clients or web visitors from other countries, do you want to make them feel ‘welcome’ by your presentation ?

Finally….

This leads to an entirely different discussion related to banking and accounting issues which I won’t even begin to discuss here.

You may have the one perfect vision and be the expert at making your vision a reality, but if you miss the ball on some of these critical details that need to be in place behind the scenes, you may end up being one of the many thousands of great start ups that failed due to less than perfect execution.