Going on the Web?
by Andrew Shedden
If you're considering taking the plunge onto the World Wide Web and dragging your company kicking and screaming into the 21st century a little forethought will go along way. By now, as you know, the Internet is not a new technology. However when you see the quality of some of the web sites that are out there taking up bandwidth, it would sure make you wonder.
Whenever you see anyone on the Internet in a movie, or on TV, they call up a site and ZAP it's on the screen instantaneously. While that may be the way the Internet works in Hollywood, it certainly doesn't work that way in reality. Although you would never know what by the depictions in the media most Internet users aren't benefiting from any form of fast access. That's right, no cable, no ISDN, no turbo x7, no satellite, and no giant laser. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Web users are still using dial-up accounts. They are connected to the Internet by the lowly phone cable. What this means in layman's terms is that web sites will be loading painfully slowly.
Most North Americans are still on slow 56 K. modems, this is verrrrry slooooow. When you're considering having your web site designed make sure that you keep this in mind. In terms of access to the Internet, design for the lowest common denominator. Have your designer make a solemn promise to try to keep your web pages from 35-45k each.
Under no circumstances should you ever let your web site designer try to talk you into creating a work of art for your web site. This includes large Flash animations, sound, and video. These "Artistic Statement" sites tend to be very feature rich, and very slow to load. This is not what you need, or what your customer wants. Most Internet users will wait a MAXIMUM of 15-20 seconds for your first page to load. If you have ever left a site in impatient disgust waiting for an intricate Flash animation to load you will know what we mean. Give the "creatives" some control of the design process, but don't let them run wild, because given the chance many of them will. Your customers will be wildly running from your site.
It is hopefully safe to assume that your business card doesn't have lime green lettering on pink paper. Then why would your web site look like that? If you spend any time surfing the web you'll see more than your fair share of horror stories for company sites. You still see sites in that lovely shade of cyan with huge, chunky, jagged HTML text. You'll see sites that have upcoming events dated in 1998. You'll see broken links, missing pages, sometimes whole sites are missing. With the relative ease of using new web authoring software, these types of sites are inexcusable. Your web site is a direct reflection of your company. If you can't keep your links working than why would a potential customer think that you are up for any other job? If you have worked hard promoting that your company stands for quality goods or services, then your site must represent quality as well.
Navigation is another major aspect of making a visit to your web site a pleasurable one. Make sure that you encourage any web designer to design your site in such a way that there is no more than one click to your home page from any page on your site. Believe it or not, people do get lost on web sites, then they get annoyed, and then they don't come back.
There is a tendency in many web sites that you see for the entire content to be nothing but massive advertising blurb about the company in question. While you have to decide what percentage of "advertorial" you'd like to see on your site you also need to have useful information for your prospects and customers on your site. How to do things, frequently asked questions, short online web site tutorials courses, and even e-mail courses, all of these are ways of drawing customers back to your web site again and again and creating what is referred to as stickiness. In the web world stickiness is a good thing.
Another very good practice on your web site is to be sure that you have lots of content, and it changes regularly. This is another way of guaranteeing that you'll have prospects visiting, and re-visiting your site. There are many different ways of offering changing content, some of these are: e-mail newsletters, a what's new section on your web site, or changing promotions such as weekly or monthly specials.
The final consideration for you to ponder is the manner in which you are going to promote your site. Don't have your site designed and wait for it to show up as number one (or even number 100) on the search engines cause it ain't gonna happen. You will need to actively promote your web site to be seen amongst the millions of other pages out there in cyberspace. Having a web site and not promoting it is like having a sign in your basement. If you expect any results from your web site investment you must make sure that you have allotted a budget for promotion.
Spending a little time planning before doing will pay big dividends. Your web site is something that will be looking at for a very long time, as will your customers. Plan wisely and reap the benefits.
