internet marketing
Most problems and classic mistakes of Web
design and Internet Marketing come
from not understanding elements involved with running a successfully web
site online.
Also a luck of management structure to adapt to new medium and thoughts"I
already have a web site, it is a waste
of money" or "I don't need to optimize the web site, I already
have enough customers". The Usability of a web site is more a function
of how it is managed than of how good its designers are.
- Not Knowing Purpose of Web Site
Don't make a web site / web design / search
engine optimization without knowing it's purpose. Today there are
suprisily many sites developed without goals in mind and a real purpose.
These kinds of sites don't usually attract"targeted audiences"
and DON'T MAKE MONEY.
A web site without a purpose is usually
the number one problem bad sites have. When making your site have the
purpose and goals of your site in mind.. what are you trying to achieve?
Give users benefits from spending time on your site, allow them to do
business with you, and their money will follow.
- Designing for Your Boss
Design the site for your customers, not your boss. The customers could
care less about pictures of companies CEOs on the home page. They care
about what services you can offer and your products. Don't make a site
just to impress your boss. Make a site for your consumer.
We can always help with this.
-
Org chart and the Site Structure
Don't make a site which represents the structure of your companies departments.
(Unless your site is made for the employees and management of your company).
The companies web site should be made with customer needs in mind. Basically
the web site shouldn't just be made for the people in the company itself.
The site should be user friendly.
- Multiple Developers
One often repeated problem that many companies make is hiring more then
one development team to make a web site. This leads to different pages
of a site to look drastically different from one another ( these kinds
of sites are confusing to customers.)
Every development team has a different style. This leads to different
pages of a site to have different design. A web site should follow the
same style / theme throughout the entire site. This is achieved by one
trusted development team.
- Forgetting to Maintenance
The annual maintenance budget for a web site should be at least the same
as the initial cost of developing the site.
If you simply spend the money to build a good web site but do not keep
it up to date, your investment will very rapidly turn out to be wasted.
The Web currently changes so rapidly that a major redesign is needed at
least once per year simply to avoid a completely outdated look and to
accommodate changing user expectations. Additional maintenance is needed
throughout the year to bring more customers trough search
engine optimization. If you have established design you will need
to meinten your SEO tactics especially because keywords and rules on
search encgines change so rapidly and if you didn't plan a budget for
maintenance you will outsource it and a different company will start to
rebuild search engine optimization from the beginning which is more expensive
then maintenance.
|
content management
- The Web as a Secondary Medium
The Web is a new medium. It's different from television, printed newspapers,
brochures, so you cannot create a good web
site / web design out of content optimized
for any of this older media.
The only way to get great Web content is to have your staff develop the
content for the Web site themselves first. Then,
if you still have a need for printed collateral, transfer the text and
images to a desktop publishing application and massage it into a form
that is suited for print.
Content creators have been trained to develop linear content for traditional
media: they have spent their entire careers doing so.
Unless you force your content developers to produce their material
specifically for the Web, you will end up with substandard Web content.
- Wasting Linking Opportunities
The Web is a linking medium: the hypertext links are what ties it together
and allow users to discover new and useful sites. Most companies have
recognized this phenomenon to the extent that they always include their
URLs in all advertising, TV commercials, press releases, and even in the
products themselves.
Do not link to your home page in your ads. If a potential customer gets
interested in a new product or a special offer, you should not force them
to learn how to navigate the site from the home page to the product page.
Link directly to the product page from the ad.
- Market Research and Internet Marketing
.A Web site is an interactive product, developing new methods are necessary
to study what happens during the user's interaction with the site. The
Cheapest method is to have web stats to know how many visitors visit your
site, what are the most visited pages, how often and where your traffic
is coming from. Also internet marketing campaigns should be based on these
facts so that you can exactly know your user group. This will result in
facts and data that will help you develop your future internet marketing
plan.
Users are not designers: they cannot tell you how to design your navigation.
They will help you for getting information about users, concerns and areas
where they would like improvement, but they will rarely teach you how
to reinvent the fundamental way you do business. Listening carefully to
customers will often reveal frustrations that can turn into opportunities
for improvement. But once you have an idea for an improvement, you can
create a prototype design and try it out with users to test to see if
it works for them.
You may commission a traditional market research firm to question thousands
of customers to measure data important to your web site and your competition.
Once you know what the users are thinking about your web site, you will
have a long list of changes that will improve your design.
|
Home
theme
B2B
small business
software
project management
Web Design
web site design
internet marketing
custom web design
web design quote
FAQ
SEO
keywords
ranking
SEO Quote
SEO Glossary
XML
wireless internet
XML Glossary
Contact us
Site Map
testimonials
Links
terms & conditions
Privacy
Suggestions
Underestimating web
- The Strategic Impact of the Web
It is a huge mistake to treat the Web as if it were an online brochure.
The Web should be considered one of the most important determinants for
the way you will do business in the future.
If they don't have any thoughts, they had better start thinking now -
before it's too late.
The Web enables completely new ways of doing business such as true globalization
(for example, "work-around-the-clock", where projects are passed
on to teams as the globe turns). If you don't grasp these new business
opportunities you will be toast in a few years.
The two classic errors in predicting the future of a technology shift
are to over-estimate its short-term impact and under-estimate its long-term
impact. The Web has been hyped to such an extent that people overestimate
what it can do the next year or two: most web sites are not going to turn
a profit any time soon. But please don't underestimate what will happen
once we reach the goal of everyone, everywhere; connected. The impact
of networks grows by at least the square of the number of connections,
and the true value of the Web will be only be seen after extensive business
process reengineering.
|