Content preparation and management for e-commerce Web sites
Robert W. Proctor, Kim‐Phuong L. Vu, Lawrence J. Najjar, Misha Walker Vaughan, Gavriel Salvendy · Communications of the ACM · 2003
One of many opportunities afforded by the Internet is that of e-commerce, which includes transactions between businesses and customers, as well as within and between businesses. For companies to take full advantage of the potential offered by the Web, it is essential that their sites be prepared and organized in a highly usable manner. This often is not the case, as shown, for example, by the finding that users looking for an item on e-commerce Web sites cannot find it 36 % of the time [6]. Companies that are able to organize and structure information in a way that promotes efficient and effective retrieval will save time and money, promote customer satisfaction and continued business, and gain an advantage over their competitors. Consequently, effective content design is crucial to the success of e-commerce sites. To help ensure that users ’ interactions with these sites are successful, the primary goals of content preparation should be to determine: • What information is needed and how to elicit it • How to structure and organize this information • Which methods are best for retrieving the information, and • How the information should be presented to the user.