So You Have A Website, Now What?

Someone came to you and showed you how affordable it was to get a presence on some newfangled computerized telephone system, and then promised fame and fortune would be granted you by millions of people you have never met from all over the world. Sound familiar?.

By now you are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Well here it is. Regardless of how much money your company has spent to date on its website, whether you are doing all of it internally or outsourcing various parts of the process, the greatest variable affecting the success of the site is your company's commitment to actively use, improve and promote tbe site itself.

This is a communications paradigm shift, not some new marketing fad. It is necessary that you participate actively in the process if you expect others to do the same. If everyone in your organization is not in some way actively participating in the use, improvement and promotion of your site, that site will not only not reap the much promised pot of gold, it could actually harm your business.

There are however several steps you can take to maximize your business' opportunities on the Internet, and perhaps just as important, to minimize the risk of becoming notorious.

1) Commit to quality.

Now that the whole world is coming to dinner what kind of an impression are you going to make? Because the Internet is a global, multicultural, multilingual, multi-use environment it naturally selects for quality. If your organization does not naturally select for quality, it will show on your website and people will comment on it. Conversely if your website reflects the required commitment of forethought, time and resources necessary to provide quality information and interaction with your audience, it will be singled out by groups and individuals all over the Internet for frequent visitation. In short quality shows and it pays. If your business is not ready to make a real commitment to quality product and customer service, you are not ready for the Internet.

2) Reevaluate your existing Web presence.

You have just been rushed onto the web and are probably somewhat exhausted by the process. Take a breather (a short one) and then reevaluate. Do you have the right type of site for your business at this point? Are you satisfied with the customer service of your Web developer? Did you pay a fair price? How easy is it to find your site? How easy is it to navigate you r site. How does it look compared to sites developed for your competitors? Are you developing contacts from your site? How are the server statistics? What do these statistics mean anyway? Are you able to quickly respond to all inquiries produced by the site? Do you understand enough about this medium to adequately make these judgments, and if not, how are you going to remedy that situation? At this point take stock in what you have and compare it to your plan for how to improve your site's performance. Reevaluation is an ongoing process on the Web. When you ask the world to evaluate you, they expect you to reevaluate yourself and then doing something about it.

3) Educate yourself about the Internet.

This is an emerging technology. Nobody has forty years in this business and so it is no crime to be ignorant regarding all the implications of this whirlwind of information technology. It is however a crime to note that ignorance and then do nothing to correct it. Many Internet service providers and World Wide Web developers offer seminars on site for their clients. Internet business classes are also offered by independent consultants and by small business organizations. Make the time to surf the Web yourself and get comfortable in the various software environments and to learn your way around the search engines. Money and time spent on consulting and learning to effectively use this medium can save your company a fortune in costly mistakes. To restate the obvious, this technology, like your site, is constantly evolving and therefore the education process never ends.

4) Think about your World Wide Web site.

With all the things going on in your business it may seem like the last thing you need is one more thing to think about. In fact if you are like most companies that have recently emerged onto the web, you were probably looking forward to getting back to the more mundane problems of just day to day survival. The key to addressing many of the daily challenges faced by your business lies in the Internet. When confronting any task or situation that you encounter during the day, ask yourself if you could use the Internet to handle that matter more expeditiously. You will be surprised at how often you will discover a better method. Simply put, most human behavior is habitual. This technology requires you to break old habits and form new ones, and that requires commitment and attention.

5) Use the Internet.

	Whether for business or pleasure get used to doing things on the Internet. If you need a piece of technical data, look for it first on the Internet. If baby needs a new pair of shoes, shop for them on the Web. If you just got someone's answering machine, send them email. If you think about a new product or campaign, think of how your Web site could be exploited to its benefit. If you are looking for personnel, use your Web, site to solicit resumes for specific openings and route the replies to their appropriate destination. If you were going to tax someone a long document, send it by email or refer that person to further information on your Web site. If you want feedback from your customers, ask them for it on your Web site. If you have a printed catalogue of your products put it up on your Web site.
	If your sales personnel are giving presentations in the field, provide them with notebook computers so they can refer to the in depth information provided about your company at it's Web site. (This is a particularly good use for Web and a significant portion of your site should be dedicated to these types of materials.) When doing sales in the office, sometimes it is necessary to leave the client alone for brief periods of time. This a dangerous period in the transaction and a Web terminal sitting in front of the client in your absence, providing them further information at their discretion, can be the difference between a closed sale and an alienated potential customer. Allow your clients to use your site to book service appointments.
	There is always some type of information your clients need to know to make their businesses more efficient and more profitable, use your site to provide it to them and they will return the favor ten times over. Your site should educate your clients on how to do their business and how to better do it with you. This tool has a virtually infinite number of uses, and you must make the commitment to find them and apply them.

6) Strive for greater interactivity.

The primary function of the Internet is to facilitate human interaction. Yet the most common and frustrating flaw of most Web sites is the lack of ample interactivity. This is a two-way communication tool, not an advertisement. Seek out your customer's input as often as possible. Use demographic forms on your site to identify your audience. Ask them what they tike about your company and its Web site, but more importantly ask them what they dislike or want to see more of from your organization. Use automated devices like search engines, chat rooms, animations, sound, video clips and games within your site that encourage visitors to use your site's ample information facilities. Find out what other interests your visitors have and provide links to related topics. The flip side to interactivity is that if you ask for people's opinions, be ready to meet their expectations. Once someone knows that you know what they want, they now expect you to provide it.

7) Distribute power.

The Internet is based on the principle of distributed risk through distributed power. This is not only the technical model of distributive computing, it is the basis for management of every aspect of your business in an information economy. An understanding of the importance of this concept is fundamental to success in any endeavor that requires the cooperation of groups of people in a highly dynamic environment. Your Web project may have been initiated by your MIS officer, your telecommunications executive, your graphic arts department, your advertising agency, your public relations firm, your Internet service provider, or by the geek in the basement, but it is not their baby. It takes a village to raise a child, and the same is true of a multimedia communications system. Training and education are necessary for people in all echelons of your organization. Your Web site must address the needs of not only your sales staff but your personnel office, your public relations department, your service department, your vendors, your purchasing agents, your clients, your colleagues and your community. The Internet requires unprecedented cooperation, and people are more easily engaged when they are empowered.

8) Mine information in your business.

	Your Web site is a media monster and it must be fed regularly or it will develop a nasty disposition. Just as frustrating as lack of interactivity, is stale information. Stale information is indicative of your own lack of interactivity with your own site. Indeed, if it is not important enough for you to interact with, why should the visitor? If you don't already publish a newsletter for your clients, or for internal consumption within your organization it is time to start.
	Inside every organization there is a ton of information yet most of them spend fortunes trying to bury it rather than looking for new ways to collate and exploit it. In the process of doing your business you have amassed volumes of information and experience that is potentially valuable to your audience. You must find ways to mine this information from the experience of your personnel, as well as from your filling cabinets, and make it available to people through your Website.
	In fact you can use the Internet to find that information and "pre-surf" and "pre-collate" it to suite the needs of your visitors. Ask visitors to your site to contribute information they feel is relevant to your site (you might be pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm of their response). Perhaps the most effective way to guarantee return traffic to your site, is to provide valuable, easily accessible, and most importantly, current information to your audience.

9) Commit the Personnel.

	While the Internet will allow you to do much of what you are already doing, but do it more efficiently, it also raises the bar for expectations from your organization, and it is going to take a commitment of personnel to cope with the impact that the Internet is going to make on your business. If your Web site actually performs up to its potential, somebody is going to have to respond to hundreds perhaps thousands of pieces of email. Somebody is going to have to author the newsletters. Somebody has to expedite the process of getting all the materials to the development team in appropriate formats. The list of "somebodies" goes on. The length of that list will vary depending upon the scale and/or the success rate of your site.
	It is important to keep track of the growth rate of the demands that your Web site is making on your organization. It is not uncommon for a new site to gradually improve it's traffic over a few months and then suddenly see a hundred, or for that matter a thousand fold, growth rate over a very short period of time. When this happens you must be prepared to respond quickly to meet the increased demands of your Web audience, or you will become notorious just as fast as you became famous, and once this has happened, it is very difficult to turn around.

10) Promote your Web site.

	With all the inescapable hype about the Information Superhighway, it might be hard to believe that people have to be reminded to promote their Web sites, but they do. Any place your phone number or address appears, your email address and URL should appear also. This includes business cards, brochures, letterhead, koozies, baseball caps and on the side of company vehicles. If you run a television, radio or traditional print ad, use it to publicize your URL. If you buy a billboard, put that URL up there for all the world to see. All other traditional media have time and space limitations that do not apply to the Web. Use your traditional media to promote your new one.
	You must also promote your site on the Internet itself. When you and your staff use the Internet, tell people about your Website, ask them to visit it. When surfing be aware of sites where you think it would be advantageous to have a link built to your presence, and then immediately request one from the webmaster of that site. This process works better if you can offer to return the favor with an appropriate link from your content to theirs. Even if you are paying someone for a link marketing service, you must supplement their effort every opportunity you get, if you really want to see that traffic rate skyrocket.
	If you have the technical and "infrastructural" supports in place, you should consider purchasing links or banner ads from other high traffic sites like Netscape or Yahoo. These links are sometimes very expensive (up to $20,000/month) but they produce extraordinary, and if you are not ready, catastrophic results. In one example, after purchasing a banner link at Yahoo, a small computer company's site went from a rate of 6000 hits per day to 6,000,000 hits per day literally overnight. When this happens that technical and support infrastructure better be there, or you will now he disappointing more people per day than you have ever had the opportunity to do before. Conversely, if you have the voluntary attention of more than 60,000,000 visitors per month, and still can not persuade them to part with enough cash to pay for the banner link at Yahoo, then you are not being very creative.

11) Practice Netiquette

Ethical behavior on the Internet is not just desirable, it is essential to your survival in Cyberspace. If you offend someone on the Internet they have recourse. They don't call a cybercop, they round up a posse. The nature of the Internet is that it empowers individuals by giving them the ability to instantly communicate with vast numbers of people in a way that formally was only available to the rich and powerful. Offending even a small number of resourceful people can do virtually immeasurable damage to your organization's reputation on the Internet. I cite you the proliferation of "Why AOL Sux" homepages on the Web. For this reason it is essential to always make the interests of the visitors to your site the highest priority when determining your activity on the Internet.

Essentially you learned Netiquette in kindergarten. Be polite. Say "please" and "thank you." Do not type in all capital letters, it is considered yelling. Netiquette includes promptly responding to email requests. Do not junk email people that have not specifically requested your information. It includes going to the extra effort to answer people's questions even when there isn't clearly a dime in it this time around. If someone requires information in a foreign language (they will) provide it to them. It is important to remember that the Internet is not America's newest giant retail outlet, it is a global environment that at this point, is populated by highly educated, usually enlightened individuals in search of high quality people to interact with, as well as usable information.

12) Integrate and automate communications with your Web development team.

	After just having gone through this confusing and time consuming process of creating a website, all this talk about constantly recreating, expanding and responding to your existing site must seem at best daunting. Before you decide to chuck this whole Internet thing and return to business as usual, realize that there are steps you can take to expedite and simplify the process so that it can be not only sustainable but profitable.
	First examine the process you have just completed and determine the causes of the bottlenecks in the system. Second, make a plan of how your site is going to evolve over a specific period of time. Set goals and deadlines. The biggest challenge is getting the material in usable electronic formats from the people who generate it to the development staff who must convert it to Web content. Streamline this process by eliminating the middleman whenever possible. If someone is creating text that is ultimately going to appear on the Web, they should know where on the Web that information is going to appear before they even compose it. They should know how to save it in a usable format for the programmers and then they should send it electronically to the person who is actually going to have to write the code for that page of text. Of course this applies equally to the people in charge of producing sound, video and graphic content as well. After your site begins to reach significant mass, many of the reoccurring processes involved in updating your site can be automated. Essentially more communication is better. The more everyone involved in your Web project clearly understand what is expected of them and the more they understand how their role impacts everyone else in the project, the more painless and profitable your website will be.
	As important as streamlining communications, is remembering to be patient with your Web developers. They don't have vast years of experience in this technology either. In fact in most cases they have only been doing this for about a year or two and at most four to five years. As often as not they are young and are trying to learn business as fast as they can learn information technology. If you think all of this is moving too fast for you, imagine what it is like for them to be in the center of the vortex of the fastest growing segment of the economy. You should not have to tolerate incompetence or dishonesty, but if problems arise try to sort them out before you give up on some overwhelmed young genius in distress.

13) Consider an Intranet.

Now that you have all these people searching and collating electronically creating and sending graphic, sound and text files; and now that all these Web visitors are requiring instantaneous communication, your current internal network system is probably under stress that can be relieved by setting up an internal Web or Intranet. Surveys show that more than 80 percent of Web application development is occurring within organizations on internal networks.

Web Intranets confound and amaze traditional information professionals. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a simpler graphical interface to program than previous programming languages. It is also an impressive tool for integrating information systems and database applications across platforms from Windows PC's and Macintoshes to Unix workstations. For years companies have been spending fortunes trying to get people sitting at different types of machines to be able to easily share the same data. HTML on a client server based system solves this problem elegantly and economically.

14) Use the Internet to contribute to your community.

Goodwill is the most precious commodity your organization can have on the Internet. Now that your website is up and running help some nonprofit organization in your community get their information up as well. There are many worthy organizations in your area that are even more poorly prepared to come onto the Web than you were. They deserve your support, if you can afford it, sponsor an entire nonprofit site, if you sponsor a nonprofit site, challenge your competition to do the same. If that is too much, provide links to them off your hotlinks page, or better yet build a "community" section to your own site where you can point to a variety of these organizations. If your company gives money or time to help in the community, mention it in this section of your site and encourage your colleagues and competitors to do the same. Many of these organizations will have a "sponsors" section on their website that will provide live links back to your content.

If you have cable left over from a recent network installation, donate it to a local school system that is trying to bring Internet into the classroom. If you have extra hardware lying around, don't just keep inventorying it, give it to an organization in your area that recycles computers back into the community. Now that you know how to send email and surf the Web, go down to your local senior citizens center and teach someone else what you have learned. This technology can improve the quality of life of everyone in the community you live in if you are willing to make the commitment to empower them as well. Since you have a website, you have a vested interest in everyone everywhere having access to the Internet, not just the affluent. Remember community conscious companies love the Internet, and it loves them back.