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.

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.