Building Build-A-Bearville

Creating a virtual city for animated stuffed animals and their avatar human companions might not seem like a stellar business plan, unless, of course, it happens to be Build-A-Bearville.

"Build-A-Bearville is a strategic effort by the company," says David East, director of network services for Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc. in St. Louis, Mo. Its goal is to keep children (and their parents' credit cards) connected with the furry product after the initial sales.

And it's working. According to the company more than two million, uh, entities call Build-A-Bearville their digital home. But those denizens are also flesh-and-blood customers, the kids and (primarily) their mothers who extend the play roles of their stuffed animals into a virtual community.

It's critical, says East, for the company to assure that its virtual play world is safe and fun for kids, but also performing to ambitious goals. Specifically, every Build-A-Bearville Web page has to load in two seconds or less.

That's no mean feat when you have as many as 250 avatars and up to 30 people all interacting, playing games, exploring, and earning and spending Bear Bills in a given situation. East says it's imperative when a child's avatar walks through the door of a virtual shop, the scene must change instantly. Kids don't have the patience to watch various objects slowly load to fill a page.

To boost performance Build-A-Bearville depends on clusters of high-performance Windows servers, gigabit fiber links and Internet caching servers from Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. To assure performance is up to snuff, the company uses agent-free monitoring tools from Compuware Corp. of Detroit.

East says it was imperative that monitoring technology not be intrusive. Few parents would want to download an agent application to watch what their kids were doing online. But he "needed better information on how the Web site was doing as far as the customer experience was concerned."

Launched in December, Build-A-Bearville is still in beta, and the performance data "feedback from Compuware" has assisted the software team to identify and remove various coding bottlenecks in their graphics and game servers, East says, helping to keep the Web page response time to two seconds or less.

If you've got Web site performance concerns, consider evaluating an Akamai-Compuware combo. Maybe they take Bear Bills.