According to Jim Daniels, editor of the Bizweb
E-Gazette, new Internet sites have been popping up at the rate of
one per minute. As it expands at this pace, it's clear that the Internet’s
entanglement of words, pictures, sound, and motion is becoming more than
just the most important new communication medium since television.
Many of the businesses now piling onto the Internet may totally
misunderstand this new medium. They may end up losing millions of dollars
and eventually decide it’s not living up to its hype. Other businesses may
totally ignore the Internet. Their competitors, meanwhile, will use it as a
tool to literally steal their customers away.
As business communication medium, a web site has the capacity to
encompass the functions of marketing, advertising, research and providing
corporate information. Initially, a business should focus on one or two of
these key areas to determine how to establish its presence on the Internet.
For successful communication on the Internet, businesspeople should have
customers come to them; customers come back to them; and an information
exchange that leads to increased revenue. The Information Age has created
new trends including 24-hour business days and economical access to
businesses in over 130 countries populated by 20-30 million people. And,
that market is growing at a rate of 30 percent per quarter for commercial
use and at a rate of 25 percent a year for individual use. As a result of
new technology, employees, customers and suppliers are beginning to expect
improvements in quality, convenience, timeliness, variety and customization.
The first thing an entrepreneur should do to be successful on the
Internet is target who will buy his product. He needs to find where these
people go when they’re online? What do they do? What do they read? Can he
reach them regularly and at a low cost?
There’s no point in trying to sell to a particular market if an
entrepreneur can't easily identify them and reaching them is a costly
endeavor. If his market is so specific that in order to reach just one
customer he has to advertise to thousands of people who would never buy what
he’s selling, then the Internet may not be the way to go.
But for those who do want to use the Internet, they must not forget who
their audience is or what they’re seeking when building their web site.
Give them what they want and more. Add value and linkage to other useful
information on the Web. And by all means, never offend potential customers
by giving them only what they need, as opposed to what they want.
One of the most successful uses of the Web is to give away information
before competitors do. This use strengthens any presence on the Internet and
will help attract new clients. Adding value to a web site with information
that provides a broader understanding of the business, and is over and above
what customers expect, endears them to the site and eventually to that
business. And, it encourages them to come back.
Creating and mounting a professional-looking site takes some doing.
Experience has shown that the design of a web site isn’t as important as
the words used. After all, it's the words, not the graphics that sell
products! The words download almost instantly, while graphics take longer.
The entire home page should be on a customer’s computer screen in less
than 20 seconds.
The key to using the Internet successfully is attracting people. If a
site isn’t user friendly, people won’t visit it, despite all the
high-tech software used to design it. A successful web site should be capable of being updated immediately
while incurring marginal costs, have a multimedia combination of
presentation technologies; and encourage and promote cross marketing.
The Internet use of "hyper-text"–a direct link to another web
site–encourages formalizing cross marketing opportunities and strategic
alliances. The Internet's technology encourages businesses to become linked
electronically. By linking with other web sites, businesses gain access to
even more people who are on-line.
It also allows and demands interaction between people and business.
Interactivity, at some level, is essential to the success of a business web
site. A business must solicit and respond to those potential customers who
are looking for interactive communication. At a minimum, a web site should
provide E-mail for customers and others to contact it. Guest books, monthly
surveys, registration for free items, request for more information about the
business and its products, requests for samples, files transfers of
documents, and accepting orders are other ways interaction may be
accomplished.
A web site must not become stale, or people won’t want to keep
visiting. People will return to a site if they know they’ll receive fresh
information.
The technology of the Internet and the need for fresh information
encourage development of an open system and design for a web site. The first
screen should load quickly and provide a concise guide to the functional
areas of the site. Use of an open architecture allows additions, deletions
and changes to be made without extensive rewriting and reprogramming.
Above all, a business should avoid a print mentality and not simply post
its printed material on its web site. If it offers no more than what
customers can obtain in print, its site will fail.
Lastly, a business’ domain name can be as important as its business
name. The name should be easy to remember so customers can go directly to
its web site. If a company conducts business using a registered trademark,
it should be able to obtain that name for use as a domain name, although
there are no guarantees that it’s not already in use by a different type
of business.
There has never been a better time
to launch a business web site than right now. The Internet is exploding, as
more people have begun to use it regularly.