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How Important Is Your Corporate Web Site?
By Max Lent,
Max Lent Communications
max@maxlent.com
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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 companys
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Magazines, television programs, and radio programs no longer represent primary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
didnt 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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