The powerful WebSphere Commerce platform is a great place to run your online store, but a platform with this much potential requires adhering to best practices in order to fully meet its potential. The IBM Knowledge Center contains plenty of information to help you leverage your WCS site, including a list of ways to ensure a successful deployment.
While the IBM list includes 19 informative tips, a few stuck out as particularly helpful. Read on below, and check out the full list at the IBM Knowledge Center.
Tip 1: Ensure that the business and technical teams are involved from the beginning and that they communicate throughout the process
Just as it is important that the client and development team be in tune at the beginning of a project, so must the business and technical teams. This allows the technical team to understand the business goals and the business team to grasp the technical challenges.
Tip 2: Do not use technology just for its own sake
The Knowledge Center makes this point pretty clear: “Technology is a means to an end. Use only the technologies that match your needs.” You can have all of the flashy technology you want, but if it doesn’t help the customer get to their end goal, or, even worse, hinders them from reaching that goal, it will not be good for business.
Tip 3: When you design the site, storyboard and mock up the business flows
A picture is worth a thousand words, and when you consider how much those words can be misunderstood, it’s worth even more. With so many different people involved in the planning and development of a site, having your design team create comprehensive mock ups helps clarify the vision for everyone.
Tip 4: Understand expected peak performance characteristics and ensure that the system can meet them
This should be a no-brainer, but a site encountering unexpected downtime due to traffic and demand happens all the time and can wreak havoc on business. Load testing and optimizing for site speed will help prevent those sorts of situations from occurring. Along those same lines: Do not reduce testing to contain the project launch date.
If you need help, ask for it
From IBM service teams to IBM business partners and certified developers, there are plenty of resources at your disposal to help solve your trickiest WCS issues.
