IHM Services

Business websites that don’t cost the earth

You've got a website - but does it work?

Even a basic website should be capable of performing the following five tasks:

• Clearly describe what you do
• Give visitors a reason to contact you
• Complement other marketing activities
• Built for easy search engine submission
• Provide visitor statistics to help improve your website

A basic website should include an attractive homepage that summarises what the company does and lays out the rest of the site in an intuitive way with general information about the business, brief details on products and services, up-to-date contact details
including e-mail addresses, a map and directions if appropriate. And it can cost
as little as £250.

Any website, however modest, should be structured so that visitors can navigate through it simply and quickly. Basic sites often use frames as a way of simplifying navigation, but this makes them virtually invisible to the major search engines.

Take www.asionline.co.uk as an example. This is a simple website, containing nine sections.

Visitors are given the opportunity to make enquiries from every page and there’s an e-presentation to introduce the subject matter. Company information and client testimonials are also included.

Don't confuse your website with a) your domain name or b) you web space. Many companies waste money by paying an all inclusive monthly fee for website hosting and domain name registration. In most cases you should pay a maximum of £200 per year for business web-hosting. This fee should include the facility for up to about 20 e-mail addresses, as well as access to visitor statistics as and when you want them, at no extra charge.

Advanced websites that really work

Advanced websites utilise technology to improve customer relationships, automate time-consuming tasks and update content.

Organisations that need a website for more than just the basics should carefully plan their advanced website before the costs start to kick-in!

There's now so much clever software available that there's a real danger of using the technology simply because it's there.

We're now looking at animation, audio, video, panorama photography, flash, pdf, e-presentations, e-flyers, e-cards, automated response forms, bulletin boards, chatrooms, password protection, secure ordering and payment, stock management, data collection and storage, back office - to name but a few!

So let's start at the start...

• What do we want our advanced website to do?
• How will it increase sales or reduce costs?
• How will it work with other marketing activities?
• How will we build and manage the page content?
• How will we measure its success?

Many advanced sites contain integrated online e-mail address databases. Forms on the site, such as subscribe, or recommend this site to a friend automatically populate the e-mail database. If someone unsubscribes to regular updates this too is done automatically. More advanced databases categorise visitors and manage page content.

For example, take a recruitment site like www.camcoscientific.co.uk with two separate audiences, clients and candidates. If users are registered then the database can tell whether they are a client or candidate and display specific content - client-based information can be shown to clients, which would be neither relevant or interesting to candidates.

A back office can also be used to keep track of specific usage elements within a site. Your ISP should be able to provide some general statistics, but if you structure an advanced website properly you can use a back office to report specifically on which parts of the sites are being used and how often. You can even trace registered user pathways through the site and identify which content is working well, which is being ignored.

Advanced websites tend to contain more pages, making them more attractive to search engines and should be designed without frames in order to maximise their exposure. Search engine placement is an important consideration for advanced sites – it’s no longer a matter of throwing in some keywords and hoping for the best, indeed most of the major search engines now completely disregard keywords. Consider using a paid service for search engine placement.

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