Business War and Competition

Posts Tagged ‘World Wide Web’

Four things should occur during the introduction stage:

Mutual introduction. From the moment they hit your Web site, visitors should begin learning about your firm, the products and services you sell, as well as your philosophy of doing business. The benefits you offer should be immediately apparent.
Image. Your Web site should project a unique image, one that is distinct from your competitors as well as appropriate for your philosophy of doing business.
Registration. Visitors must register by submitting, at bare minimum, their e-mail address and, preferably, additional information.
Qualification. Visitors have differing information requirements. Your Web site’s structure should make it easy for visitors to qualify their information needs, which will help them quickly locate desired information and help you fine-tune your dialog with them.

How to Introduce Yourself
Within seconds of visiting your Web site, visitors should be able to learn a lot about you, your business, and the products or services you offer. Your success depends on your ability to immediately engage your Web site visitor in a meaningful dialog while introducing your products and services. It’s important to emphasize the importance of speed. Visitors are in a hurry and will not stick around unless they are presented with meaningful information tailored to their needs.

The biggest mistake most firms make is to create a home page for their Web site that features a big logo and their name, followed by a series of buttons with vapid titles like “About us,” “In the News,” “Our Products,” and “Contact.”

It’s interesting that businesses that have mastered the art of business-to-business or business-to-consumer direct mail fall down with a resounding thud when it comes to creating their home page. Home pages that waste their visitors time and fail to offer meaningful information or engage visitors in a dialog are doomed to failure.

Is your home page effective?
Start by viewing your home page from a visitor’s point of view and ask yourself, “What does the home page teach me?” If you can’t provide a meaningful answer to that question, your home page needs work. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does the Web site load quickly?

2. Does the Web site communicate the firm’s area of expertise?

3. Does the Web site describe the products or services offered?

4. Does the Web site offer news value that I will benefit by learning?

5. Does the Web site communicate how the firm differs from its competition?

6. Does the Web site invite me to participate?

The easiest way to improve most Web sites is to reduce the size of the graphics and choose more appropriate titles for the navigation links. In many cases, reducing the size of the logo—which really does not offer visitors any information or value—creates the space necessary to begin the sales process by focusing on a specific product or service that identifies the firm’s area of expertise. Another advantage of this approach is that reducing the space devoted to your logo makes it possible to add news value to your Web site by frequently changing the product or service featured.

If your Web site’s home page always appears the same, even if the contents are changed, visitors are unlikely to come back because the new content isn’t visible.

Once you have built your site, you need to find a place to host it. Web sites are not located in virtual places. They run on computers. When you visit a Web site on the Internet, your browser software (Netscape Communicator or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) communicates directly with that Web site, which is on a computer(s) running Web server software and a variety of other applications server software products such as database, security, content, and mail servers. In other words, there is a there there.

In choosing a place to host your Web site, you will consider two basic options: host it yourself or pay a company that specializes in Web site hosting to do it. It does not matter where you physically host it, because software is available to set up, configure, and maintain your Web site remotely. So even though your site may make its home off the premises, you can make changes from anywhere! There are benefits to both hosting your Web site locally on your premises as well as having a company host it for you. If you decide to host your site locally, you will need to purchase the hardware and connections required to run a server, plus the server itself, and you should probably hire a full-time employee to upgrade, maintain, and work on the equipment and the Web site. For more on Web servers and technology issues.

One of the big benefits of having a company host your site is that should a problem arise and a crash occur, the hosting company has a battery of staff members to fix the problem and get your site up and running fast. Sometimes they’ll even have it back up before you know there was a problem! Your Web site is your online presence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Your customers expect to be able to find it any time of day or night. If you choose to host your own site and it goes down at 4:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning, who will be there to fix it? It is definitely something to be considered.

In most cases you will want to pay a Web hosting company for this service. First of all, by the time you invest enough money to host your Web site reliably and efficiently, you would need to start your own Web hosting service to recoup the costs. Second, the expertise needed to maintain a high-quality Web server and high-speed connectivity to the Internet is not trivial. It is very, very difficult. In short, in 999 cases out of 1,000 there is no question about the best route to take: hire a Web site hosting company.

There are thousands of companies that will host your site. Their services and prices vary significantly, as does their quality. On the low end there are Web hosting companies that charge as little as $19.95 per month for basic hosting services. This type of hosting usually does not include any kind of interactivity, database services, POP3 e-mail services, or high-end multimedia capabilities like RealAudio or RealVideo.

Types of Web Sites
Let’s start by taking a look at the most common types of Web sites and examine some of the issues involved in creating a Web site that will build a close and ongoing relationship with your prospects and customers. This will provide you with a framework for creating your own Web site, one based on the customer development cycle.

There are four types of Web sites: inner-directed, information-oriented, transaction-driven, and relationship-oriented.

Inner-directed Web sites are created from the business’s point of view. The home page typically features the firm’s logo and accomplishments. Inner-directed Web sites lack a focus on specific products or services. They typically fail to encourage urgency or visitor involvement. These sites typically feature photographs of buildings, lists of accomplishments, and testimonials from satisfied customers.
Information-oriented Web sites provide more information about the firm’s products and services. These sites function like electronic brochures in that they communicate the same types of material as found in brochures. Information-oriented Web sites reflect more of a customer focus but fail to communicate urgency or establish a two-way information exchange with the Web site visitor.
Transaction-oriented Web sites assume that every visitor is ready to buy and, accordingly, place an emphasis upon price product features and benefits and place a premium on urgency; price is used to encourage visitors to order “right now!”. To date, the most successful examples of transaction-oriented Web sites are the numerous Web sites created by airlines, book stores, concert ticket outlets, and computer industry hardware manufacturers and software makers. Although transaction-oriented Web sites are the fastest-growing category of Web sites, transaction sites depend heavily on price incentives and—accordingly—often fail to offer visitors a reason to return until the next time customers are in the market to buy. They, likewise, make no attempt to create long-term customer loyalty.
Relationship-oriented Web sites that attempt to forge long-term bonds with Web site visitors by establishing an ongoing dialog with them, fine-tuning the relationship between buyer and seller, and rewarding previous customers so they’ll not only buy again, but also recommend the firm to their friends. Relationship-oriented Web sites are intended to advance customers along the customer development cycle.

Increased bandwidth and speed
Increased bandwidth—permitting much faster information delivery and the delivery of richer information—is quickly becoming commonplace. Modems are being retired by home users and replaced with technologies like cable modems and digital subscriber lines. The number of service providers clamoring to provide access to the home will assure this trend continues and competition will keep costs low. Web usage in the office is becoming universal and businesses are adding high-speed Internet connectivity to their local area networks.

These fast and convenient Internet connections take much of the frustration out of the Web and make it possible for you to incorporate advanced media to communicate sound and video on your Web site.

The Web is a global phenomenon
The tools of the Web—modems and other types of connections along with Web-ready hardware and software—are in use throughout the world. This removes the geographic boundaries of your business, which is made all the more realistic by the near-universal use of credit cards that automatically compute currency changes from country to country.

The Web browser is the universal platform for business
In the past, many software programs for specific markets, such as legal billing, used proprietary software that was both expensive to acquire and difficult to learn. Databases were accessed through proprietary, custom-made front ends. These applications and many others, from inventory to accounting to point-of-sale, are being reprogrammed to be browser compliant.

The Web eliminates the need for you to purchase or develop custom software. This universal acceptance of Web standards means that your will continue to grow and you can easily customize your Web site for customers without starting from scratch

Technology Trends

Technology is evolving at breakneck speed. The cost of hardware, software, and Internet access continues to drop and the capabilities offered continue to advance. The size of the Web population continues to grow, and it’s demographic mirrors society as a whole. The numbers of places people are when they access the Web is increasing as well.

The ubiquity of the Web
Lower prices for computers and Internet access means that the number of people who can visit your Web site continues to grow. Millions of new users each year join the 60–80 million current Web users. This means that more of your customers and prospects can visit your Web site more frequently. This is in conjunction with several other ongoing trends.

People are also getting more in the habit of going to the Web site for their news. The major newspapers have Web sites that contain updates of their print articles and late breaking news. Instead of being tied to on-the-hour or quarter-hour news broadcasts, you can visit your favorite television station’s Web site for late breaking news. When you want to find out the five day weather forecast in virtually any town throughout the United States, you can locate it on the Web.

The Web is no longer a novelty. For many, it is not even exciting. It is simply a universal communications tool, as accepted as the television or telephone, to help people locate information on demand. The implication is that your customers and prospects are likely to turn to your Web site before calling you on the phone or visiting your place of business. If your Web site does not project an accurate image of your firm’s offerings and attitudes, you will not get a second chance for their business. Soon, Web-based video conferencing will reduce the amount of business travel as people in distant offices will be able to communicate without leaving their home towns—or their homes.