LOSING THE ELECTRICITY for two weeks after Hurricane Fran hit turned out to be the least of the problems for the Queensboro Shirt Co. when it tried to create its Web site.
It all started in August 1998 when the firm set the “lofty goal” of capturing 20% of all orders via the Web by the end of 1999, said Steven Little, the company’s former president, during a session at MeritDirect’s co-op conference last month.
The $123,000 budget had to cover many things: site creation by Cephas, a Kansas City, MO-based Web development company; a designer; an in-house HTML programmer; and a public relations firm. The PR firm generated 50 articles in the last two years that brought in a ” significant” amount of business, Little noted.
The plan was to go live by Nov. 1, 1998 – “just in time for the Christmas rush,” Little said. But a number of problems arose. For one, getting internal design approval was much more difficult than anticipated and prevented some of the goals from being met. “Everyone had an interest in the design and no one could agree,” Little said.
Then Hurricane Fran blew through, shutting down the firm for two weeks. This led to rising tensions and lots of finger pointing. “The honeymoon was over,” Little commented.
Then the doldrums set in. Little said he lost the support of key senior management that began to think the Web site would not make money.
The result? The site went live Jan. 15, 1999. “We missed the holiday season completely,” Little said. But the project had stayed on budget, and within 10 weeks of the launch the site was capturing 30% of orders. Little credited some of the success to waiving the company’s policy of a fixed shipping and handling charge of $25 per order for the first year on all online orders.
But just as things seemed to be running along smoothly, what Little refers to as “the fiasco” occurred. With no warning, he said, the banks pulled the plug on Cephas, the company that had built and was hosting the site. The site was gone. With the help of Web Emporium in Phoenix, and after six “long” days, the site was back up.
The lesson learned? Consider “mirroring,” Little said. “You should have a Web site running simultaneously someplace else at a cost of about $500 a month. It’s worth it.” And work out the maintenance contract early. “Do it,” he suggested, “before the honeymoon ends.”
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