We've mentioned the three "spheres of influence" that should be present in any e-commerce implementation. While it is possible that the same person may fulfill more than one of these roles, it's more common to have each sphere administered by the person who is most qualified to administer it. We've designed the software so that everyone gets to do what they do best.

The first person involved in any e-commerce system is the technical implementor. This is a guy that designs and implements the technological framework for your system. He asks questions like:

• What sort of database do we need?
• What sort of traffic are we expecting?
• What kind of CPU power are we going to need?
• What will our bandwidth requirements be?
• How are we going to integrate our web system with our call center?

Then he goes ahead and answers them, and sets it all up. He's probably going to be your system administrator as well. He'll have a continuing role in the maintenance and scaling of the system. But this guy doesn't know anything about site design. He doesn't want to worry about the graphics or the HTML that the site is using. And he doesn't care about which products are in season, or which are on sale. In some systems, every time a site designer needs to make a change to the look and feel of a site, he has to talk to the technical implementor. We think that is ludicrous.

The next person to step in is the site designer. This is your graphic artist and HTML designer. (You may even want to split design and HTML work into two jobs.) This person decides on a look and feel for the site. She may ask:

• What are the graphics going to look like?
• How is the site going to flow?
• What kind of image are we projecting?
• How is our web site going to correlate with other advertising initiatives?

She needs to know HTML and killer graphic design. But she doesn't need to know anything about databases or servers. She doesn't want to have to hand her design over to a techie to be implemented. She wants to do it herself, and get instant feedback on what works and what doesn't. She wants to create the new site, load it into the system, and then sit back and marvel at her creation. Similarly, she doesn't want to be bothered every time someone needs to add aproduct or fix a typo. She wants them to be able to do it themselves, but she doesn't want them fiddling with her design.

Then there's the store administrator. This is the guy that's going to be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the site. He's the man that's going to add new products, change prices, update the shipping policies page, and manage the incoming orders. He asks:

• When should something go on sale?
• When has a product been discontinued?
• When is an item out of stock?
• Where is this customer's order?
• What are our return policies?
  

He doesn't want to have to wake up the site designer every time he needs to change a content page. He doesn't want to have to talk to the tech guys to remove a product from the system. He wants to have control over the site's data, and doesn't want to have to get involved if the site design changes, and doesn't care if a disk drive is filling up.