-SUBJECT-
Functionality in a website

-SIDE NOTES-
1) I want to say I’m a French person, so I apologize for my English
writing..
2) Please do not rush to answer only because the price tag is
interesting. Answer only if you already have made research on this
subject or in the domain. NO SPECULATION, i'm looking for fact.

-NEEDS-
Fuel strategy discussion on SOAP and the web service industry

-RESEARCH GOAL-
Find out what are the 'common' functionality in a WebSite and how they
have been develop.

-KEY QUESTION-
1) What % of a web budget dedicate to the IT. (I talk about common
functionality of a website)
2) What are the usual functionality found in a WebSite. (CMS, CRM,
Profiling, Shopping Cart, Message Board, Search Engine...)
3) What is the ratio of custom or proprietary development vs the use
of generic solutions for the functionality. (Like the use of home made
CRM vs Seibel or N-Compass) *harder one*

-OUTPUT NEEDS-
I want to produce a summary withe paper on the subject

Hi! Thanks for this very challenging question. I would discuss them
one by one per question.

1.) Web Budget Allocations:

According to Intel, the annual percentage of IT related costs for web
or e-commerce sites run from 50% to 100%. The 100% figure maybe true
for websites whose budgets for marketing are very limited. 34 % of
non-IT related annual spending goes to promotion costs.

IT related costs go to hardware, software, IT staff salary, fees paid
to the ISP and the other complex network requirements by a particular
company. Non-IT related costs meanwhile, could vary but typical of
these are marketing expenses, banking costs for its online
transactions, taxes, legal and foreign currency exchange fluctuations
if they deliver products or services overseas.

You can find the information about IT spending three-fourths (3/4)
down the web page of this link and under the section (Some Additional
Tips).

Calculating return on investment associated with e-commerce
http://www.intel.com/eBusiness/business/plan/2/hi16001.htm 

The typical IT Related costs for launching a web or e-commerce site
are as follows:

http://www.setel.com.au/sbc/pathways/eccosts.htm 

The following web page shows a typical budget allocation for an
ordinary e-commerce or B2B website:
http://www.adx.com/downloads/files/2/eMarketer_Report_E-Commerce_Trade_March_2002.pdf

Supporting Web Sites:

Budget concerns for web sites
http://www.edesignz.co.nz/cmp-ftp/Ecommerce_Development_Checklist.doc

You could launch an e-commerce site for $10,000 according to this
site:
http://www.iebusiness.com.au/aboutecom.html 

Valuable information of a study from the Visual Basic Programmer’s
Journal about the percentage of software types and products used,
applications being developed and job background of their subscribers:
http://www.fawcette.com/mediakit/magazines/vsm/VBPJReadership.pdf 

2.) E-Commerce Backgrounder sites:
Almost all of these IT related and still some non-IT costs goes into
the following website functionalities that we find today. The list is
according to Dr. Ralph F. Wilson of Wilson Web.
a.	The Product or information navigation abilities of your site.
b.	Shopping carts for your electronic store fronts
c.	Calculation abilities whenever they plan to purchase so as to
determine additional costs such as shipping.
d.	A secured ordering or transactions page
e.	The back office capabilities of web merchant.
f.	The ability to track your shoppers via
a.	Cookies
b.	Temporary IP number
c.	A cart number to identify the online shopper.
g.	An integration for order pick-up and accounting
h.	An ability to make fast and easy product additions and changes.
a.	Database Upload
b.	Browser-Based Maintenance
i.	Product Promotional abilities
j.	Product Graphic loading abilities
k.	Inventory and Fulfillment Management 
l.	The ability to update the online store.

To view the list with full explanations please visit:
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct1/971215storesoftware.htm

Other typical but crucial website features such as searching
capabilities and interactivity can be found here:

What Makes a Great Web Site?
http://webreference.com/greatsite.html 

The Basic steps in building e-commerce sites are the subjects of this
link.                   
http://www.ecommercetoday.com.au/guides/10steps.pdf

A very good introduction to the intricacies of e-commerce from the
critically acclaimed “How Stuff Works” Website is the content of this
link.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/ecommerce.htm 

Migrating to E-Commerce By Benoît Marchal
http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/marchal_ecom.html 

E-Commerce FAQ from About.com
http://ecommerce.about.com/library/weekly/aa021502a.htm?PM=ss11_ecommerce

USABILITY IS NOT GRAPHIC DESIGN By Jon Meads
http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/meads_usb.htm 

A usual functionality for an e-business web site to survive is for it
to be able to take orders. This website walks us through the necessary
steps.
http://www.web-sights.co.uk/ecommerce.htm   

A detailed assessment of necessary e-commerce concepts follows here:

Measuring Electronic Business: 
Definitions, Underlying Concepts, and Measurement Plans Thomas L.
Mesenbourg
http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/ebusines.htm

An emerging feature in e-business websites is CRM and shall be
discussed in detail in the next section.

3.) CRM or Customer Relationship Management is one of the most used
terms in business today specially in the IT industry. CRM IT products
are developed either by buying an out of the boxed complete product
and install it into your system or buy a CRM product and then
configure or program it according to your unique needs.

According to a Gartner report, 75% develop or use best of breed CRM
technologies in their websites while only 25% use out of the box
technologies.
However of these best of breed technologies Siebel Systems have 50% of
the market and is projected to do so until 2004.
The report also says the CRM suites or out of the box products will be
defined as impractical up to 2006. The full report can be read here
(http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:oFSNH9Ss9XcC:www.vt.edu/GartnerGroup/research/103600/103631/103631.html+crm+self+development+vs+suite&hl=en)

According to this article most companies develop their own CRM by
integrating out of the box products into their own systems. Small
businesses though are better off buying packaged products since their
needs are still limited.

The Real Cost of CRM by Erika Morphy
http://www.crmdaily.com/perl/story/14447.html 

The following additional CRM articles will be of help for your study.

What's in a 'CRM' Suite? By Erika Morphy
http://www.crmdaily.com/perl/story/17800.html 

CRM Takes Priority Among IT Investments By Michael Pastore
http://www.ecrmguide.com/columns/article/0,3376,10383_980141,00.html

For a general overview of CRM and its uses please click on this link:
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/apps/story/0,10801,41519,00.html
----------------
Finally a very valuable resource in this research can be found in an
online course for e-commerce. This is a great website since it updates
links to new web statistics. So the website and the course are dynamic
and change according to new developments.
http://digitalenterprise.org/ 

Search Terms used:
Typical website features 
E-commerce IT cost budget
CRM basics

I hope this research would be of help. Thanks for visiting us at
Google Answers.

Regards,
Easterangel-ga

---

Request for Answer Clarification by anashel-ga on 19 May 2002 10:53 PDT

Wow, great job Easterangel.
I think you will agree with me if I say the 2 most commons platforme
in a WebSite is a CRM and a CMS. You made a good cover of the CRM
issue and economic, I will give your answer 5 Stars if you can add me
some similar information for the CMS issue.
Thank you again!

---

Clarification of Answer by easterangel-ga on 19 May 2002 17:43 PDT

Hi again and thanks for the praise. 

CMS or Content Management Systems are implemented by an organization
in their website so as to ease the burden of adding content to their
website but at the same time making it sure it maintains its
mainstream design.

Unlike CRM, homegrown CMS accounts for 34.8% of the market while 26.7
opted for packaged commercial products. The rest can be inferred as
not having CMS at all. Jupiter Media Metrix however advises companies
to use best of breed products like the evolution of CRM rather than
homegrown CMS code.

http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:1Qx-kAicSz0C:benchmark.tridion.com/Report_Secure/benchmarkreport.pdf+homegrown+%22content+management+systems%22+percentage&hl=en
(HTML version)

http://benchmark.tridion.com/Report_Secure/benchmarkreport.pdf (PDF
version)

We can see that homegrown CMS is still being used to a greater extent
but as a website grows larger, products are eventually called to
manage the content. So the movement from homegrown to out-of-the-box
products for CMS is more of an evolutionary nature. This website
discusses the nature of that change and its realities.
Enterprise Systems: Get Your Content Under Control! By Clara Parkes
Enterprise Systems
http://www.101com.com/solutions/dataintelligence/article.asp?articleid=4892

An example of a company implementing CMS is described here:
Battling The Game Of 'International Telephone' Jan. 10, 2002
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020110S0017 

------------------------------
The realities and difficulties of CMS are presented in the following
articles:

Pros and Cons of Do-It-Yourself (does not recommend homegrown CMS
because it is too difficult)
Interviewed by Tony Byrne with Chad Dickerson
http://www.cmswatch.com/Features/PeopleWatch/FeaturedPeople/?feature_id=40

The following quote from Jim Howard of CMS Watch illustrates the
difficulty of implementing CMS as a whole. “Organizations should be
spending 75 percent of their content-related budgets on content
creation and 25 percent on content management -- instead of the
reverse, which is often the case today.”

The article even goes as far as saying that it is difficult and even
maybe impossible to determine Returns on CMS investments.

Finding the ROI in Content Management by Jim Howard
http://www.cmswatch.com/Features/TopicWatch/FeaturedTopic/?feature_id=67

For a better understanding of CMS this web page will be of help

CMS and the Single Web Designer
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/cms1/ 

Hope this would assist you in your paper. Thanks again for visiting
us.

Dear easterangel-ga,

The quality of your answer and your professionalism is well beyond
what I was expecting. Thank you again for your help!
- Anashel

While I have not personally conducted said research, I have doubts you
will find anyone on this board (or anywhere) who has personally
researched this. Much of this would have to be discovered in a study.

This being said; I am a web site developer, and I'd be happy to help
you out with  1 and 2. 3 is really something I don't think anyone has
appropriate numbers for. Please drop me an email (dave@dl-design.com)
if you'd like me to post an answer.

Greeting Dstreever,

Thank you for your comment.

This information may look hard to find for some people, but I consider
its basic information available for any professor or student of a MBA
course on the Internet Economy.

I must agree question number 3 is hard. Answer might be only found in
a white paper from Forrester or Gartner. The person who wishes to make
the research may look at Yahoo Small Business and that entire ‘white
paper’ directory. I’m sure if Industrial Standard still existed, I had
found everything there…

I thank you for your proposal but I will look for someone who already
researches the subject. I guess it will be better for everyone.

I hope you won’t be obfuscated.

Have a nice day !
- Anashel