What a Website IsAn Information Service...The Web lowers the barriers to providing information to current and potential clients. Unlike traditional media, once you have your website in place, the cost of publishing any piece of information on the Web is (or should be) negligable. If the cost is negligable, the potential returns don't have to be enormous to justify publishing. ...Which Adds Value to the Products/Services Your Organisation ProvidesUnless you're running some kind of scam, it's in your interests to have well-informed clients. Providing your customers with the information necessary to make the best use of your products or services benefits you as much as it benefits them. What a Website Isn'tAn AdvertisementNobody (outside of the advertising industry) actively seeks advertising material. Customers don't generally need to know:
By all means, tell people these things. In marginal cases, all other things being equal, it may mean the difference between a customer choosing you or a competitor. But if that's all you have to say, a potential customer will probably leave your website unsatisfied, usually in a matter of seconds. Customers generally want to know:
"Finished"The only finished website is a dead website. Before you sign on the dotted line with a web developer, find out what you will need to do a few days after your site goes live when you have something new you want to tell your customers. Can you easily update the site yourself? If not, what will be required, and how much will it cost? Is your website going to be held hostage by this one developer? If you can't afford to use your own website to publish information, what impression will your site make when your potential customers find the most recent information on your site is obviously years old? Despite whatever you say about yourself on the site, how "energetic and committed" will you look? What Services Can I Provide Via My Website?Here is a small selection of services that are relatively simple and inexpensive to deliver via your web site. News/Syndication/aggregationDon't hide your achievements, no matter how minor. Not everything you do needs to be highlighted on the front page of your site, but if it only takes a minute or two to write a paragraph about something you've done that you're proud of, why shouldn't that information be available for anyone who may be interested? News feeds can be used to syndicate your news for automatic reuse on other websites, providing your business partners, industry publications, and other services with the ability to spread your news to interested parties at no cost to you. Syndication also goes both ways. You can aggregate the news feeds of related organisations to provide a "one-stop" source of information on what's going on in your industry. Product/Services catalogueOkay, so you're "dynamic", "committed", and you have a "vision". What exactly do you do? And how might it help people? Spare no detail. It's easy for people to skip information that's not immediately relevant to them, but if the information's just not there, you're not helping anyone. Documentation / Training Materials / Case StudiesWhere do your customers go when they've lost the user's manual? Or when they have a new employee who needs to get up to speed on how to use what you provide? Wouldn't it also be nice to show people how others have successfully used your products or services? Where do they get the "recipes" that others have used to turn what you do into their success story? Events CalendarIf you hold promotional events, training courses, etc., can people subscribe to your events calendar with their personal calendaring software? Can other sites/services aggregate your event information into their calendars? Discussion ForumCould your customers help each other to make better use of what you provide? Why not encourage them to do so? Building a self-help support community around your business allows your customers to add value to your products/services at negligable cost to you. NewslettersLet people invite your news to come to them, rather than vice versa. Few of your customers (at the time of writing) will know that they can subscribe to news feeds, never mind how. You can give them the option of subscribing to an emailed newsletter instead. CollaborationUse your site to facilitate communication and collaboration within your organisation. Avoid "data silos" by keeping critical information in one place, accessible anywhere your staff happen to be. What About E-Commerce?Information is cheap and easy to deliver over the Internet. Transferring physical goods or even just money is another matter. Before taking the plunge into e-commerce, ask yourself if the return on investment will be worth it. How much business are you currently doing via mail or phone order? How much new business do you expect an e-commerce system will generate? Rather than investing in an e-commerce system yourself, can you leverage a third party's existing online service to do e-commerce more cheaply and effectively? What Should My Site Look Like?Studies have shown that users make a judgement on how useful and authoritative your site is very quickly, often in less than a second. If in that time they have been asked to "please wait..." while an animated "splash screen" loads, or while a page assembles itself from a jigsaw of image files, they will probably have formed a negative impression before they have read a single word. Aesthetic concerns are important, but must not interfere with the useability of your site. Are you hiring a web developer who can also deliver a visually pleasing design, or a graphic designer who knows next to nothing about developing useable web services? What About All This Jargon?SEOThere are two types of Search Engine Optimisation, "White-hat SEO" and "Black-hat SEO". White-hat SEO is an automatic added bonus if your site has been designed with web standards, usability, and accessibility in mind. Search engines rank results based on criteria such as relevance to the search query and the number of other sites that link to content on your site. If large amounts of content on your site are delivered not as genuine text but (for instance) as text in rendered within image files to satisfy aesthetic demands, this content become inaccessible to the visually disabled, as well as to automated information services such as search engines. A good search engine ranking is largely a consequence of delivering a useful, well-respected service. In contrast, black-hat SEO is, as the name suggests, an ethically questionable set of techniques which proponents claim will fool search engines into treating your site as more popular or authoritative than it really is. If someone claims to be able to do this for you, ask yourself who you think has the greater intellectual resources to draw on, this small web development shop, or Google. FlashMacromedia Flash is a proprietary technology owned by Adobe systems designed for delivering animations and other multimedia and interactive content over the web. Being a technology from a single vendor, the ability of a particular computer hardware platform, operating system, or web browser to display Flash content ultimately depends on whether Adobe is willing to commit the resources to creating and distributing a version of the software for the hardware and/or software you are using. As with delivering textual content as images, content delivered via Flash is also inaccessible to people with certain disabilities, and to search engines. Flash is also notorious for being used to deliver irritating advertising content, and is deliberately disabled, or simply not installed, by many users for this reason. We do not recommend using Flash unless:
DHTMLDynamic HTML was a term in popular use in the late nineties to promote a loosely-defined set of pre-existing technologies for building rich web applications. It is a largely meaningless marketing buzzword. AJAXAJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) can be thought of as the descendant of DHTML, as it is a similar (indeed overlapping) set of technologies to DHTML, and is similarly precribed as a 'silver bullet' solution to designing compelling web services. As with DHTML, treat with suspicion those who boast of using AJAX without saying how they use it, or what they use it for. Both AJAX and DHTML techniques run the risk of rendering your content inaccessible to certain web browsers, including software for people with disabilities, and search engines. For this reason, such techniques should be (but rarely are) used in conjuction with backwards-compatible methods for delivering the same functionality. And What On Earth Is...Domain RegistrationThe Domain Name System (DNS) is used to translate numerical Internet addresses (such as 209.135.157.86) to a name more easily remembered (such as www.almatech.net.au) by human beings. In most cases, the assignment of these names is performed by agencies known as "registrars". These are usually commercial organisations which have the authority to allocate domain names for a limited term to individuals and organisations for a fee. The Domain Name System is ultimately regulated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a US-based non-profit corporation. Nobody (with the possible exception of ICANN) can be said to "own" a particular domain name. HostingHosting is the provision of a computer, or part of the resources of a computer, to actually run your web site. This computer can be physically located anywhere in the world. There are a number of different types of hosting available, depending on the types of services your site delivers, and the amount of traffic it receives. As a rough guideline, if a small-to-medium business is paying more for web hosting than for the rental of a single fixed telephone line, it's probably paying too much. Further Reading |
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