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B2C Sites

Building a successful B2C (business to consumer) Web site can be a lengthy and expensive proposition. There are multiple options for entering this potentially lucrative market, and some are more appealing than others. Not too long ago, you had three choices when contemplating such an undertaking. Doing the development work in-house from scratch was the first option, but few enterprises have the resources for this. Now just two choices make sense: outsourcing the project or building a solution on top of an e-business framework. In many cases, outsourcing is the only viable option from both a staffing and a financial perspective.

You must ask -- and answer -- many questions before engaging in an outsourcing relationship. Security, vendor viability and content management are all critical issues that must be hashed out in triplicate before you sign your B2C site over to an outsourcing partner. And that's just the beginning. Management, monitoring, infrastructure and staffing are as instrumental to a successful outsourcing venture as bandwidth, reliability and development efforts are. Development can be measured in months; maintenance and management are measured in years.

We start off this package with a look at the "must-have" criteria -- those items to check off when you're considering an outsourcing partner. In our RFI, we evaluate the ability of three outsourcing vendors -- Digitas, LoudCloud and NaviSite -- to meet the needs of Mountain Doozy Donuts (MDD), our fictional doughnut maker. In our RFI scenario, MDD seeks a single-vendor solution to provide development, hosting and management of a B2C site. After examining the responses, we gave LoudCloud our Editor's Choice award. The company offers a comprehensive solution with detailed methodologies encompassing security procedures, postdeployment monitoring and content management.