How Important Is Your Corporate Web Site? By Max Lent, Max Lent Communications max@maxlent.com

“The Web becomes the default way to do business, whether business-to-business or how consumers shop. I think the Web will become like electricity: an integrated part of your life which you use all the time without even thinking much about it.” said Jacob Nielson, in a 1999 Washington Post interview. Nielsen was right, when your customers need information or help with your product or service, they are likely to use the Web to interact with your company. Increasingly, your company’s first contact with a customer will occur through the Web.

Need proof? Just look around. Nearly all advertising directs potential customers to Web sites. Whether it is billboards, television commercials, magazine ads, radio commercials, or even pre-movie slides in theaters, all of them end with a call to action where the action requested is to visit a Web site.

Magazines, television programs, and radio programs no longer represent primary content. They are just pointers to the core primary content that exists on the Web. If you listen to an interview on National Public Radio, you will likely hear the radio announcer say that the full interview is available online at http://www.npr.org. That means that what you heard on the radio program was just an excerpt of the full online interview.

Customers are being driven to the Web for “more information” before and after the sale. That infers that all other sources offer less information or just teasers directing consumers to the full body of information that the advertisement or program just summarized.

The phenomenon of the Web becoming the definitive source of all commercial and non-commercial information is now a fact of life. With this as a given, one wonders why so many companies pay so little attention to having a Web presence or to their corporate Web sites. If companies know about the Web, know that customers use the Web for everything, and know the importance of the Web to their success, why do they have such badly conceived Web sites?

The number of reasons for poorly conceived corporate Web sites are many and overlap. The most fundamental reason is that Web publishing is relatively new, especially to corporations. This newness and the fact that Web publishing was once a highly technical activity forced companies into adopting policies and strategies that were initially correct, but are no longer valid.

Someone from the information technology (IT) group usually created the first corporate Web sites. This person was called a Webmaster, now an archaic term, and was responsible for the computer hardware, computer software, programming, design, and content. There was no other way to publish a corporate Web site. In the beginning, graphic designers knew little about computer technology, writers didn’t know how to encode their words in HTML, marketing departments dismissed the Web, advertising departments were ignorant of the possibilities of the Web, and executives were simply unaware. Unfortunately, many of these problems still exist today.

Today, most corporate Web sites are managed by the wrong people who are working without an executive vision. Could you imagine marketing departments hiring IT workers to write their brochures? Could you imagine a graphic design department hiring IT workers to create graphic designs? Could you imagine an IT department hiring a graphic designer to construct a Web server? Yet near equivalencies exist throughout the corporate world. All too often companies still have their human resources, IT, marketing, or public relations organizations managing their Web sites. This is wrong and I will explain why.

Web publishing is no longer rocket science. In my workshops, I routinely demonstrate how I can create a Web page in less than a minute and a fully functional forty page Web site with graphics in less than five minutes. The IT aspect of Web publishing has been commoditized. This fact is demonstrated by Web hosting services like 1and1.com advertising combined domain name registration and Web hosting services for as less than five dollars a month. The process of Web publishing has matured beyond technology. Web publishing is now about content.

If the old Web publishing system is no longer valid, how should corporations handle Web publishing?

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