Specification

A key thing to consider when creating any web application is accessibility. Our clients currently use a range of browsers, but the majority use either Internet Explorer or Firefox. As such, any tracking system produced must work on all the major releases of both of these browsers. The system will also be designed to work with Opera and Safari browsers, but this is less important as very few of our clients are currently using these browsers. Depending on which source you look at, these four browser combined account for 95-99% of browser usage. If there were a demand for support for mobile platforms, this could be supported at a later date. This would most likely be a cut down version of the main site giving simple statistics such as current balance/monthly earnings etc…

Javascript allows a much richer experience to be delivered to users who use a browser which supports the client-side scripting language. Although all of the browsers mentioned above do allow Javascript, it is possible for people to disable it. There are a lot of reasons why somebody might chose to do this but the majority of people do it because of security concerns. This is especially true in Internet Explorer which contains a large number of Javascript related security holes which can leave a system vulnerable to attack. Disabling Javascript can also help to prevent websites from abusing its power to launch popups, disable the back button and display annoying intrusive adverts. According to W3Schools, around 5% of people currently have Javascript disabled. This is a high enough figure that the problem cannot just be ignored. As such, the intention is to design the new tracking system to use all of the advantages which can be gained by using Javascript and other technologies, but to make the system degrade gracefully such that all users will be able to access the content, even if it doesn’t look as good.

Another important aspect which needs to be considered later on in the design phase is to do with screen resolutions. Although few people now use very small screen resolution like 800*600, the system shouldn’t be unusable. One option is to produce a scaling solution for large browsers which gets bigger to use the available screen space, but to have a cut down version for smaller screen which contains less information. Once again this is done such that the majority of users get a richer experience using the system without making it unusable to others.

I’ve set this blog up to get as much feedback from the affiliate/search marketing community as possible. I am currently preparing the specification for a relatively long term project to produce an online tool to track unique clicks and facilitate the buying and selling of pay per click traffic. The current features are very much up in the air but my current thoughts are too include the majority of the following:

• Allow site owners to use the system to create external redirect links which mask affiliate URLs and track the number of unique clicks to each link.
• Allow advertisers to sign up and purchase pay per click traffic.
• Allow sales agents to track revenue earned by referring new advertisers.
• Allow site owners to make money from their site by forwarding visitors to advertisers on a pay per click basis.
• Make the production of intermediate forwarding pages offering alternative products as easy as possible.
• Allow advertisers to pay site owners for unique pay per click traffic.
• Provide a slick UI allowing links to be easily grouped into adverts, campaigns etc… in an intuitive and easy to follow way.
• Provide an easy mechanism for site owners to give revenue share to content writers.

This is a very brief overview of the kind of direction the project might go in. The commercial purpose of the system would be to improve our current click tracking software. Beyond this, we would very much like to make the kind of tasks listed above free of charge subject to a fair usage policy to ensure our servers can cope.

If you would be interested in using a system in any way similar to the one outlined above, please use the comment box below to list any features you would be interested in seeing. The project specification is still very vague and can be heavily influenced to change if there are particular features that a large number of people would like to see.