Latest from the HHD web site:
View from the Cockpit
Aug 01, 1999
Have you ever been on a cross-country flight and said to yourself "I bet the view is a lot clearer from the cockpit. At least you can see where you're going." Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We've just experienced some mild turbulence, but radar says clear skies ahead.
Overall Strategy
Our web presence consists of 6 major components, each essentially a site of its own.
Corporate Site
Press releases, bios, locations, etc. (the current public site)
Gift Shop
Items that are for sale to customers who are not active members. Our beta testers saw this one prior to the art work. Discounts are quite good, but are actually just a teaser to get people to join the club, where savings are even better, and our product line is HUGE!
Community System (aka Varsity Shopper)
Site with threaded discussions, member profile area, calendar, auctions, chat, online magazine, etc. (Beta testers were in this one as well.) This site will be at www.varsityshopper.com. Think Raging Bull plus E-bay...
New member Micro-Site
System to promote membership benefits, seasonal incentives, etc., and then sign up members. Online PDFs of member terms, benefits, etc. Tiny e-commerce component that handles membership, which is essentially a subscription engine. (E-commerce portion derived from the gift shop system.)
Portal
The portal, a Yahoo-style guide, has been tested, but turned out to be too slow on our existing hardware. After various refinements, we believe it is sized appropriately for public use. (The system with art work on the site under US/Reflect link - uses dmoz.org database) I think Nefarious Ned snuck his way past the CIA web site and got a sneak preview of this one (based on server logs).
E-commerce engine
This is the system that handles the (currently) 50,000+ items we have in electronic format, and serves as a gateway to our various back-end fulfillment partners. We have our 50k+ products loaded into the database, and they are ordered by category/subcategory/subsubcategory. There are minor logistical issues to be resolved with our fulfillment partner before this piece goes live (real soon now!)
What this all means
Our web sites, 6 total, give us incredible reach. We have threaded discussions for 'stickiness'. We have auctions and e-commerce for $$$$. We have our portal to be useful and to create more site stickiness... Over a short period of time after we bring up the sites, the structure of the components, the ontology so to speak, will be aligned so you can jump seamlessly from site to site, while keeping your current context. There are other features beyond those mentioned here that have been on the bench in the lab for a while (remember, I've been building websites since 1994) that will make there way into the system over the next few months. I don't want to spoil the story, but I believe each added feature will make the site 'cooler' and 'stickier'.
Release Schedule
Portal
Community site
Gift shop
New member microsite
E-commerce engine
This release schedule allows us to have independent services coming up on a timely basis, which can be pre-tested and then the team can move on to the next. As our beta testers know, these are written. I feel comfortable, personally, with releasing these over the next several weeks. Each has independently been tested, so we should be fairly painless at this point.
About our servers
FYI, the systems are running on SGI/Irix 6.2 and Redhat 6.0/Intel, mysql & apache and Oracle 8i and AOL/Navisoft server.
In closing ..
We will continue to work hard to make this project work, and I personally feel confident that we are still on the right path. There is honestly a lot of good news here with relationships, etc, but it's time for results rather than predictions. Thanks again for your support. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask at info@householddirect.com. If it's for me, I'll hear about it :) I'll try to answer via this page so all can share.
Alfred Werner, CTO
householddirect.com |
