A question so regularly asked and even more regularly answered incorrectly is "who should make the decisions about your company's website?" A common worldwide trend is, passing the responsibility of the website to the most "techy guy" in the entire company (if it's a small company), or to the Network/IT division if it is a larger company.
The idea behind this is "website is a techy thing, and someone with an IT background should handle it".
A vast majority of websites fail to deliver sound business results, simply because of this blatant blunder committed by most well-established companies around the world.
On the other hand, most web design firms around the world, started as freelance businesses by someone with the technical knowledge of setting up a website, or as joint ventures of few such people.
These web design firms largely lack the business sense" when designing the structure of the website.
Websites created by such firms for many clients, fail to deliver any tangible business results for the website owners.
This created a massive frustration among the business owners, about the whole concept of having a website for their business.
I have talked to many such businesspersons, who still believe having a website for their business is a mere waste of money; because of such bad experiences with low quality web design firms.
Even the business community has done it wrong, when they first started setting up a website for their company.
A friend of mine working for a well-established web design company told me, "90% of the time when we go for a client meeting, we are welcomed and hosted by the head of IT department and his team.
Very rarely we are allowed to talk to the business and marketing people".
If you look at the websites of some of the biggest companies around the world, you will see the information on some of those websites have not been updated for last 5 years.
They simply followed the "trend" and put up a website, as yet another "IT department job", and let it stagnating there forever.
When they don't see the expected "business results" from the website, they blame the internet as "a waste of time" and the web design people as "scammers".
Because of these common misconceptions, creating a website for a small business will sounds like rocket science for most small business owners.
However, it is not as much complicated, if the right approach is taken in the process of designing your website.
Web design firms alone cannot be blamed about this sad situation.
If you need business results from your website, let the business people handle the website.
Your company's website must be owned and managed by the marketing division, or (if you don't have a marketing division) by the people who are most close to your customers.
Every decision regarding the user interface of the website needs to be made by the marketing division.
The role of IT is only to decide, what back-end systems to be used when creating the website.
The rest; including the content, color theme, layouts, interface elements, are totally business decisions and must be made with the customer in forefront.
As I mentioned earlier, your website is a tool of communication with the customers.
If it doesn't integrate well with rest of your customer communications, or if it doesn't contain the latest customer communications, then you will see your website is failing to communicate with the customers.
When you run a new advertising campaign on TV, you should synchronize it with your website to reflect more relevant information about the new campaign.
Because, your customers come online to search for more information on what you advertise.
If you fail to give what they want; what you are doing is possibly turning back thousands of potential customers.
Importance of Usability Usability; or the ease of navigating through the site to complete a desired action by a visitor is the most important factor you have to keep in mind when designing a website.
It is known that up to 20% of all Internet users have some form of disability and 10% of males are colorblind.
These factors need to be kept in mind when designing the interface of your website.
A website with poor usability is more likely to be abandoned quickly by its visitors.
By improving some of the basic usability issues, a website can cut the bounce rate (percentage of visitors who view only a one page of the website) dramatically.
Before launching the website for your actual customers, you must test the site for usability among a sample of your target audience.
If this is not possible, you should at least consult someone with both the knowledge of marketing and website usability to evaluate the site and make suggestions for improvements.
The idea behind this is "website is a techy thing, and someone with an IT background should handle it".
A vast majority of websites fail to deliver sound business results, simply because of this blatant blunder committed by most well-established companies around the world.
On the other hand, most web design firms around the world, started as freelance businesses by someone with the technical knowledge of setting up a website, or as joint ventures of few such people.
These web design firms largely lack the business sense" when designing the structure of the website.
Websites created by such firms for many clients, fail to deliver any tangible business results for the website owners.
This created a massive frustration among the business owners, about the whole concept of having a website for their business.
I have talked to many such businesspersons, who still believe having a website for their business is a mere waste of money; because of such bad experiences with low quality web design firms.
Even the business community has done it wrong, when they first started setting up a website for their company.
A friend of mine working for a well-established web design company told me, "90% of the time when we go for a client meeting, we are welcomed and hosted by the head of IT department and his team.
Very rarely we are allowed to talk to the business and marketing people".
If you look at the websites of some of the biggest companies around the world, you will see the information on some of those websites have not been updated for last 5 years.
They simply followed the "trend" and put up a website, as yet another "IT department job", and let it stagnating there forever.
When they don't see the expected "business results" from the website, they blame the internet as "a waste of time" and the web design people as "scammers".
Because of these common misconceptions, creating a website for a small business will sounds like rocket science for most small business owners.
However, it is not as much complicated, if the right approach is taken in the process of designing your website.
Web design firms alone cannot be blamed about this sad situation.
If you need business results from your website, let the business people handle the website.
Your company's website must be owned and managed by the marketing division, or (if you don't have a marketing division) by the people who are most close to your customers.
Every decision regarding the user interface of the website needs to be made by the marketing division.
The role of IT is only to decide, what back-end systems to be used when creating the website.
The rest; including the content, color theme, layouts, interface elements, are totally business decisions and must be made with the customer in forefront.
As I mentioned earlier, your website is a tool of communication with the customers.
If it doesn't integrate well with rest of your customer communications, or if it doesn't contain the latest customer communications, then you will see your website is failing to communicate with the customers.
When you run a new advertising campaign on TV, you should synchronize it with your website to reflect more relevant information about the new campaign.
Because, your customers come online to search for more information on what you advertise.
If you fail to give what they want; what you are doing is possibly turning back thousands of potential customers.
Importance of Usability Usability; or the ease of navigating through the site to complete a desired action by a visitor is the most important factor you have to keep in mind when designing a website.
It is known that up to 20% of all Internet users have some form of disability and 10% of males are colorblind.
These factors need to be kept in mind when designing the interface of your website.
A website with poor usability is more likely to be abandoned quickly by its visitors.
By improving some of the basic usability issues, a website can cut the bounce rate (percentage of visitors who view only a one page of the website) dramatically.
Before launching the website for your actual customers, you must test the site for usability among a sample of your target audience.
If this is not possible, you should at least consult someone with both the knowledge of marketing and website usability to evaluate the site and make suggestions for improvements.
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