| A recent report done by Yankee Group, a Boston-based
market research company, states that at the end of 2004 around
34 percent of small and medium sized businesses in North America
are selling goods and services on the Internet and another 25
percent is planning to do so within next 12 months. Online sales
in the United States represented 8.4 percent of the countrys
Gross Domestic Product in 2004. This figure is increasingly rising.
This means, if your company is not paying serious attention to
this vital channel of sales and marketing, you are simply missing
the boat.
In its basic form a website is a bundle of pages full of texts,
graphics and other electronic files published on the Internet
for people to view. How you organize your website depends totally
on your online goals. Websites are built for various purposes.
You can use a website as a sales point, a marketing channel,
a corporate image building tool, a branding channel, an information
center, a CRM center, a product launching center, and for number
of other reasons. When you plan to build a website, you should
base your online strategy keeping in mind two things: your
online objectives and your potential audience.
SOME OF THE MOST COMMON TYPES OF CORPORATE
WEBSITES ARE:
Information providing sites
Most of todays sites fall in this category. The simplest of
them are actually mere reflection of offline corporate brochures.
Promoting company
The idea behind some of information-driven sites is to give
maximum information related to the company. A holding company,
for example, may prefer to have a site like this. These sites
usually include: company history, company related news, mission
statement, profiles of key executives, a good FAQ section,
etc. Graphics are used in these sites only to accentuate the
text information. However, the sites may include video and
FLASH presentation as well.
Promoting products or services
A pharmaceutical company to promote its recently launched
medicine may develop a website surrounding the product. The
sole purpose of this type of sites is to create awareness of
specific products or services.
Creating brand awareness
A manufacturing company that sells its products exclusively
through distributing channel may develop a website to provide
ultimate information on the products and create brand. These
sites complement companys offline promotional efforts and always
built in consistence with other commercials.
E-commerce
Online sales are done through the e-commerce sites. Main characteristics
of an e-commerce site include:
1. Detail products or services information with pictures and
sometimes with multimedia presentations, drawings, charts,
etc.
2. Shopping cart so that the buyer can select one or several
items to purchase.
3. Payment gateway so that the buyer can make payments for
the products or services purchased.
Corporate portals
A Website that offers a broad range of resources and services
such as email, forums, company pertinent news & articles,
members only area, etc. is generally called a portal. Portals
are intended to be the gateway for their respective audience.
B2B exchange
Business to Business Exchange is an online platform where
buyers and sellers come to communicate, collaborate and make
business transactions. The main objective of a B2B Exchange
is to create a venue, filled with features that allow members
to efficiently conduct business processes through the Internet.
A private B2B exchange is a corporate portal with a marketplace.
It is designed to provide services to the companys own buyers,
sellers and workforce.
WEBSITE PLANNING
Before starting to build your website you should first develop
a plan in line with your online objectives, target audience
and resources. You can write your plan thoroughly as a storyboard.
A storyboard is something similar to a flowchart of all the
website components you deem necessary. Once you have a clear
picture of what you are going to build, sit with your developers
and create a technical scope of the project. This is absolutely
necessary! In most of the cases your entrepreneurial vision
will differ drastically with the way a programmer look into
your requirement.
While working on your scope or even after publishing your
website bear in mind the following crucial aspects of effective
websites:
Page loading time In the euphoria of having a great slick
website, often, we use images that make the pages too heavy.
A page which takes just one second to load with T1 speed will
need full 55 seconds to load with a 28.8 modem. Web surfers
are impatient bunch of click-happy people; they dont like to
wait too long! Make sure you optimize each and every page of
your website before launching the site! Otherwise, you will
loose a large portion of your would-be visitors for nothing!
- Look at your pages from a visitors prospective.
- Eliminate all images that are not so important to deliver
your messages. Optimize the remaining images with available
tools.
- FLASH images are may be cool, dont use them just because
they are cool. Use them wisely.
- Host your website in a server with a good bandwidth.
Navigation
Your websites links should be well-defined, persistent, and
easily visible. If the site is large with many pages, you must
have a site map page. Remember that not all visitors will land
to your homepage, in order to keep them browsing through your
site make navigation from your main landing pages as easy as
possible. Try giving them compelling reasons to do so by using
catchy links. Also, make sure that all your links work correctly
and take a visitor to right place.
Webpage consistency
All your web pages should have one consistent look. This will
give your website a professional appearance, and visitors while
browsing through your site will always know that they are still
on your website.
Content is the king
If you want your visitors to return back to your site, regularly
add fresh, relevant and quality content to your website. Internet
users are information hungry people, feed them with fresh information
on a regular basis and you will have good number of loyal visitors
to your website.
If you already have a website make sure you optimize your
website from users point of view. According to Gartner, a market
research company, even a minor investment in improving the
usability of a company website will yield an annual return
of 10 to 20 per cent. It increases brand awareness, leads to
higher user adoption rates and possibly more transactions per
user. Average order size starts to rise and the site generates
more return visits from customers.
About the Author
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present
CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he
has wide experience in Business Consulting, International
Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace
with solutions to start and run online business. You can
contact him at http://ezine.rusbiz.com
©Copyright 2006 SaffronWeb
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Design is an award winning web design
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