Oh Gateway, what are you thinking?
[Just picked this up over at Tightwad Technica]
Gateway, in a never-ending quest to work their way backwards is going to shutdown their online store. Or, as they like to say, shift to a 100% indirect sales model. Sales will only be through “retail partners.”
Seriously? I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a business wizard, but this just seems counter-intuitive to me.
I think retail partners sounds like a great idea — but why shutdown your own online store? Granted, this is the same company that sunk tons of money into opening (and subsequently closing) all those Gateway Stores a decade or so ago. Right before they laid off a huge percentage of the company if I remember correctly (and hey, one was my brother!).
Honestly though, not sure how much I’d really care except for the fact that I ordered a developer’s machine online just last week! Just couldn’t beat the price for a very nicely configured quad-core. If I want anymore just like it I guess I’ll have to try those retail partners.
But you know what? I bet those partners won’t be as cheap as the one I bought online. And that’s the pity.
Creative Redesign
Alan Houser has decided that he needs to redesign his site (sites?) and has opted to do it in a very open fashion. He’s started a new blog and expects to fully document the process along the way — while seeking input and feedback.
Why? To quote Alan:
The web is full of how-to articles, but I haven’t seen many designers pull-back the curtain to show every detail of a web redesign. And more — aside from client projects, this is ALL that will be on my mind.
The little heathen is leaving WordPress for ExpressionEngine, but it should be an interesting process to follow in spite of that… (he and I first met through the WordPress support forums). Hopefully I’ll learn a bit about EE along his journey.
I’m curious to see how he goes about getting eyeballs on the blog to get involved with the process. How would you get attention? It could be an interesting marketing experiment to follow as well…
Landing Pages and Analytics
I was visiting with our marketing person earlier this week and she mentioned that she was going to be doing a few print campaigns -- and needed a way to track the hits that each campaign generated.
Doesn't seem that difficult, does it? I already have a Google Analytics account going for that site so want to be sure that I can track these things there.
At the time, I didn't see a way around having an extension tacked onto the landing page -- we're currently on a 3rd party IIS host (I'll be changing that next month) so I don't have much control of the web server. I had her create urls for the ads that look like http://mycompany.com/nextstep.htm.
Hindsight!
What I should have done was just created a nextstep directory on the site and dropped in a default page to land on, thus the url would be a somewhat cleaner http://mycompany.com/nextstep (no .htm) which would then load the index.html in that directory.
Live and learn.
Moving on
But wait, regardless of the approach, what should the landing page actually do? After brief discussion, we agreed it should simply redirect the person to our main index page. We really just want to see that someone came to us via the ad, we don't have any specific content for them (at this time...).
Keeping in mind that I don't have access to the IIS configuration, I decided I'd go with a "meta refresh" approach. My nextstep.htm looked like:
It worked, but I forgot to add my analtyics code. I added the analytics code between the <body> tags, tested a few times and it seemed to work.
However, the page hits never showed up in my analytics reports. Bummer. Not sure why -- I see the "One moment please..." message, but that javascript stuff never seems to fire. Granted, I could pull those hits out of the actual server logs, but the intent is to have this easily tracked by our marketing folks along with all the other nifty stuff from Google Analytics.
I could go with a bit of javascript instead. Maybe something like this?
Alas, this approach seems like it would work, however when tested it generated an HTTP 405 error. Since I can't configure IIS, the approach is no good.
Are there better ways to go about this? Am I making it too hard? I just want to capture the page hit and then shuttle 'em over to the site's home page.
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