Web Design

Web design is getting easier by the day but that does not mean that your Web site will become a front-runner - or contribute to your promotional strategy.  Web site design needs planning, thought and effort and must be integrated with your overall marketing and promotional strategies.

Is a Web site essential? What can it deliver and how can it be measured?  What are the most appropriate on-line techniques or technologies to use to ensure Internet ‘visibility’ and provide a means for customer feedback?  What about in-house ‘ownership’ of the technologies and administrative and training issues? 

This site was created using Microsoft's 'Front Page' (purists, please don't laugh) which is a great piece of fully-featured software that lets you create 'template' Web sites with as many bells and whistles as you could ask for.  Now right click on this page and 'view source' - you will see a lot of unnecessary code that clogs up the system and slows the Internet down.  It's the price of 'progress'.

Unlike Business to Consumer Web sites, Business-to-business (B2B) Web sites usually need to deliver significant content as fast as possible.  This means that a minimalistic approach is always the best for B2B sites.  If you expect your B2B Web site to be seen, leave out as many 'bells and whistles' as possible, and, unless the site is small, use a Web designer that will design your site using a minimum of code.

Bear in mind too, that if any of your customers work in a sensitive area - such as defence, they will have rigorous firewalls in place that will block much of the animation, cookies and 'flash' technologies that are now becoming prevalent in the B2C sector.

The only purpose for building the Web site is for it to be seen.  This means that it must have features that will assist this - and be placed on a Web server that will provide the right quality of Web logs and statistics for the performance of the Web site to be assessed daily, weekly or monthly.  Some of the features that you will need are:

• As much content as possible  - with as many embedded industry-related keywords as you can think of.  Provide as much added-value as you can without charge.  For example; offer expertise in your particular field; provide your technical datasheets - downloadable on-line in PDF format or database-driven;  provide an on-line technical calculator or some other piece of useful downloadable software.

• A Web site that is carefully structured with regard to its sub-divisions and hyperlinks - all these have a great bearing on 'visibility'.

• A Web site that has hidden Meta Tags meeting the criteria of the Search engines you are targeting.

• Thought-through hidden page title and description fields that will appear in the search engine results page.

• Languages.  While visitors to your site can instantly get the gist of what you are offering by using one of the free 'instant-translation' services, this does not help them to find your site in the first place.  You need embedded languages in one form or another - depending on your market.

Last modified: April 29, 2005