Internet marketing - Web development - Websites

Websites

A website comes in many forms, from a single page to a vast catalogue, but the key question is always the same. What sort of site is right for you?

Your website must fulfill your needs. Until you understand what your website is supposed to do, there is little point in doing more that the minimum.

What can a website do for you?

A website is the key tool in virtually all online marketing activity. It has a role to play at each stage of the customer lifecycle and it can be an effective delivery channel. There is no other channel to market that can offer as much as the web and a website is at its centre.

Acquisition

How do you acquire new customers online? Whilst you will use a variety of means and media to generate interest, undoubtedly you will drive users to your website to become customers. (How you define "customer" is another question!) The site may only be one part of the process (eg. generating leads for follow up offline), or it may be where the acquisition takes place. Either way, it is essential to understand how the web fits into your acquisition process.

Client / relationship management

Your customers are the key to your future success; they represent your existing value and your potential. Ignore your existing customer base at your peril. You need to have an effective way of maintaining a dialogue with your customers, to ensure that they continue to remain customers and to generate value from them. Email is likely to be the key push medium, but you will be trying to get them back to your site. In order to persuade them to come back to your site, you must deliver some percieved benefit, some value. This exchange of value (the value you off, for the value that your customers provide to your business) is the key to relationship management.

Fulfilment

The most obvious end of fulfillment is eCommerce. You can’t read the papers without being made aware of the impact that the web is having on the high street, but it also has a huge impact on many other commercial relationships. The amount of B2B transactions online are enormous; consider invitations to tender, order placement and management systems. Then there’s online delivery, whether by email or extranet. Check out the Microsoft website, it’s all about sharing and collaborating and the Internet (if not the www) is at the centre of everything they are doing.

Defining your website

A website can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Before you start to develop it, you need to understand what it is supposed to do for you.

How you go about setting the parameters will depend on how you like to work – do you cross the t’s and dot the i’s, or do you prefer to refine your approach through test-learn-test?

Whatever your approach, you will always needs to be able to answer these questions :

Where am I now?
Where do I want to be?
How do I get there?

These questions, which sit behind any strategy, are very simple; the answers often aren’t! For more on developing online marketing strategies, go to Internet marketing.

Process

Creating an effective website requires careful planning, attention to detail and a diverse set of skills and usually involves five basic stages:

Strategy
Planning
Content development
Graphic design
Build
Maintenance

What we can do for you

If you'd like to speak to us about developing a website, please contact us on 0845 838 2328 and ask for Tom or email info@barnesgraham.com.