Assuming everything is hunky-dory between your site and your customer's computer, what about the server itself? There are several places to check its performance.

Pushing Pages

Just getting pages out the door in the morning is a struggle for some sites, and the possible problems are plentiful:

• Too many visitors

• Too many visitors wanting the same page

• Too much non-Web processing on the same machine

• Not enough memory

• Not enough disk storage

• Not enough CPUs to keep up with demand

The problem is usually pretty simple, but there are a lot of potential solutions. Make sure there are people on your team who can run them to ground efficiently.

Larry Bunyard at Tektronix uses site-monitoring tools to keep up on the competition: "I benchmark to make sure I'm beating Agilent. I believe in an information-based world where people are seeking information before they take action; speed is going to differentiate you. And when I took this thing over we were running at about-well, we were five times slower than Agilent's site. Now we are twice their speed."

Getting a single Web page out the door is only a part of the whole picture. When somebody comes to your site, they want more than just one page. That's how the phrase customer experience crept into the Web manager's lexicon.

Clickstream Scenario

The clickstream scenario is the simplest of customer-experience measurements, because it simply puts together a list of pages (a path) that customers are likely to traverse in search of whatever interests them at a particular site. Knowing that a visitor interested in your Malibu Prime Matter water-and-fire sculpture fountain has to go from your home page (www.orrstudio.com) to your selected projects page to /malibu .html is one thing. But measuring how long that takes, given the number of thumbnail graphics on the project page, is another.

BMC Software's (www.bmc.com) SiteAngel allows you to create a clickstream scenario by recording your mouse clicks, your passwords, and even your credit card number for testing an online purchase process from home page to final checkout.

Like Keynote, SiteAngel will test your site as often as you wish for as long as you wish and will email or page you if there are problems. It can verify that specified text was or was not found on the returned page as well as how long it took.

Why does SiteAngel need to know your credit card number? Because it's not just the how fast the server spits out files or how fast those files make it across the Internet that have an effect on your customer's experience, it's also how fast their credit card is processed.

Application Processing

Keynote offers a Custom Perspective service for "inside-the-firewall performance measurements." How fast does your database server perform that search? How fast does your product configuration tool sort out the dependencies between various merchandise combinations? How fast does your personalization server find just the right up-sell and crosssell offering?

The speed with which your server serves becomes even more important when you start adding new features to your site.