A recent report done by Yankee Group, a Boston-based market

research company, states that at the end of 2004 around 34

percent of small and medium sized businesses in North America

are selling goods and services on the Internet and another 25

percent is planning to do so within next 12 months. Online sales

in the United States represented 8.4 percent of the country’s

Gross Domestic Product in 2004. This figure is increasingly

rising. This means, if your company is not paying serious

attention to this vital channel of sales and marketing, you are

simply missing the boat.

In its basic form a website is a bundle of pages full of texts,

graphics and other electronic files published on the Internet

for people to view. How you organize your website depends

totally on your online goals. Websites are built for various

purposes. You can use a website as a sales point, a marketing

channel, a corporate image building tool, a branding channel,

an information center, a CRM center, a product launching center,

and for number of other reasons. When you plan to build a

website, you should base your online strategy keeping in mind

two things: your online objectives and your potential audience.

SOME OF THE MOST COMMON TYPES OF CORPORATE WEBSITES ARE:

Information providing sites

Most of today’s sites fall in this category. The simplest of them

are actually mere reflection of offline corporate brochures.

Promoting company

The idea behind some of information-driven sites is to give

maximum information related to the company. A holding company,

for example, may prefer to have a site like this. These sites

usually include: company history, company related news, mission

statement, profiles of key executives, a good FAQ section, etc.

Graphics are used in these sites only to accentuate the text

information. However, the sites may include video and FLASH

presentation as well.

Promoting products or services

A pharmaceutical company to promote its recently launched

medicine may develop a website surrounding the product. The

sole purpose of this type of sites is to create awareness of

specific products or services.

Creating brand awareness

A manufacturing company that sells its products exclusively

through distributing channel may develop a website to provide

ultimate information on the products and create brand. These

sites complement company’s offline promotional efforts and

always built in consistence with other commercials.

E-commerce

Online sales are done through the e-commerce sites. Main

characteristics of an e-commerce site include:

1. Detail products or services information with pictures and

sometimes with multimedia presentations, drawings, charts,

etc.

2. Shopping cart – so that the buyer can select one or several

items to purchase.

3. Payment gateway – so that the buyer can make payments for the

products or services purchased.

Corporate portals

A Website that offers a broad range of resources and services

such as email, forums, company pertinent news & articles, members

only area, etc. is generally called a portal. Portals are

intended to be the gateway for their respective audience.

B2B exchange

Business to Business Exchange is an online platform where buyers

and sellers come to communicate, collaborate and make business

transactions. The main objective of a B2B Exchange is to create

a venue, filled with features that allow members to efficiently

conduct business processes through the Internet. A private B2B

exchange is a corporate portal with a marketplace. It is designed

to provide services to the company’s own buyers, sellers and

workforce.

WEBSITE PLANNING

Before starting to build your website you should first develop a

plan in line with your online objectives, target audience and

resources. You can write your plan thoroughly as a storyboard.

A storyboard is something similar to a flowchart of all the

website components you deem necessary. Once you have a clear

picture of what you are going to build, sit with your developers

and create a technical scope of the project. This is absolutely

necessary! In most of the cases your entrepreneurial vision will

differ drastically with the way a programmer look into your

requirement.

While working on your scope or even after publishing your website

bear in mind the following crucial aspects of effective websites:

Page loading time

In the euphoria of having a great slick website, often, we use

images that make the pages too heavy. A page which takes just

one second to load with T1 speed will need full 55 seconds to

load with a 28.8 modem. Web surfers are impatient bunch of

click-happy people; they don’t like to wait too long! Make sure

you optimize each and every page of your website before launching

the site! Otherwise, you will loose a large portion of your

would-be visitors for nothing!

- Look at your pages from a visitor’s prospective.

- Eliminate all images that are not so important to deliver

your messages. Optimize the remaining images with available tools.

- FLASH images are may be cool, don’t use them just because they

are cool. Use them wisely. Host your website in a server with

a good bandwidth.

Navigation

Your website’s links should be well-defined, persistent, and

easily visible. If the site is large with many pages, you must

have a site map page. Remember that not all visitors will land

to your homepage, in order to keep them browsing through your

site make navigation from your main landing pages as easy as

possible. Try giving them compelling reasons to do so by using

catchy links. Also, make sure that all your links work correctly

and take a visitor to right place.

Webpage consistency

All your web pages should have one consistent look. This will

give your website a professional appearance, and visitors while

browsing through your site will always know that they are still

on your website.

Content is the king

If you want your visitors to return back to your site, regularly

add fresh, relevant and quality content to your website. Internet

users are information hungry people, feed them with fresh

information on a regular basis and you will have good number of

loyal visitors to your website.

If you already have a website make sure you optimize your website

from user’s point of view. According to Gartner, a market

research company, even a minor investment in improving the

usability of a company website will yield an annual return of

10 to 20 per cent. It increases brand awareness, leads to higher

user adoption rates and possibly more transactions per user.

Average order size starts to rise and the site generates more

return visits from customers.

RESOURCES

Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis:

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze

Check your web pages for bad links:

http://www.siteowner.com/badlinks.cfm

Webmaster resources:

http://bignosebird.com

About the Author

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present

CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he

has wide experience in Business Consulting, International

Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace

with solutions to start and run online business.

You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com

http://ezine.rusbiz.com