Debunking Web Business Myths

By Eric Hamilton
Expert Author
Article Date: 2003-03-19

This article covers a lot of ground. Its primary audience is the small-business manager who needs to find the best solution for their company website. It highlights some common problems and pitfalls these people might face while examining their various options.

Secondary audiences are web masters, designers, and marketers. The article emphasizes the various skills these people should have, and some commonly abused tactics that should be avoided at all costs.

Myth - My company doesn't do very much business on-line. We don't need a full-time webmaster.

As a general rule, if you're not making money on-line, you could be missing a good opportunity. Many millions of people around the world turn to the web first when they're looking for new products or services.

Your website has a lot of work to do. The most effective websites can save you a lot of money and increase sales.

Good websites:

• Answer Common Questions
  Provide most of the answers your customers need so that they don't have to call your support staff to find information. Don't under-estimate that money-saving potential. Many companies pay employees to answer support calls day in and day out. All that time on the phones costs you money. Have your support staff keep track of every support incident. Hire a good writer to analyze support records and create a quality FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) based on real questions from real customers. I cannot over-emphasize this point.
  


• Are easy to search and navigate
  Web users today generally know exactly what they're looking for. You need to make it as easy as possible to find very specific information on your site. A site-search is one critical element. Others are a good user interface, clear navigation, a good site map, and pages that adapt well to a variety of different browsers.
  


• Are trustworthy
  Your webmaster needs to have some very critical technical skills in order to make your customer's shopping experience a safe one. Don't hire a high-school student to design your shopping cart system. You need somebody experienced that understands the ins-and-outs of SSL (the defacto standard for secure internet transactions), secure web programming techniques, and database design. If the candidate you want to hire doesn't understand the words "secure database tunnel," keep looking. Even if you outsource your shopping cart solution, your webmaster will need to know the right questions to ask in order to make a good choice.
  


• Generate sales
  Your website should have a positive ROI (Return On Investment). There's no better way to do that than to make it pay for itself. Make your offerings easy to find, easy to learn about, and above all, easy to buy!
  

Marketing on the web is very different from traditional marketing. You really need an expert who knows the web, knows the latest web-marketing trends, and understands the behaviors of your web users. They will need to know how to analyze server logs, and interpret complex information like user click-streams in order to optimize your site's sales performance. The results of that research might require tweaks to copy, graphics, architecture, interface, or a lot of other things that only a web-expert can handle.

Myth - Visually impressive site designs created by professional web-designers perform well.

There's a website that is (in)famous in the web-design community. It's called Web Pages That Suck.com. Favorite targets of Web Pages That Suck include sites that have a beautiful visual impact. Unfortunately, there are a lot of trade-offs associated with gloriously wonderful aesthetics:

• Reduced compatibility - it's hard to make a visually stunning design translate well across a wide variety of platforms and browsers.


• Increased loading times - If a page doesn't load immediately, people won't wait around for it. Large images take large periods of time to download. If you can't reach your site in less than one second from your 1.5 MB/sec office connection, your dial-up users might abandon the site before it even appears in their browser.


• Vague or impossible navigation - It should be crystal clear what all your links do before you click and before you move the mouse over them. Web Pages that Suck calls violations to this rule "mystery meat navigation."

A good web designer is more than a good artist. They understand the standards. They know how to make sites that translate across many different browsers. They know how to design a site that is visually clear, gives the user exactly what they're looking for, and allows the user to spend their money easily. In short, a good web designer will make you more money than a good artist who happens to make web-art. Your site isn't a museum piece. You're not trying to win visual impact awards. You're trying to make money.

Myth - I can outsource my web design to a professional web designer, and have a great web site for a few thousand dollars.

Does that expert designer know your products intimately? Good webmasters have a clear understanding of the products and services your business offers. They know your company resources well, and they know how to present them to users.

Does that "pro" know your customers? Really good web designers understand the motivations and buying habits of your customers. They have lunch-breaks with the support reps. They schmooze with the sales dudes. They are in the loop, part of the grape-vine, and they know what needs to be on the web. They know what to emphasize and how to do it, because they know your company like the back of their hand. If you do hire an outside pro, make sure they take the time to get to know you and your company very well, and make sure they will visit often to stay abreast of recent changes. They need to be immersed in your corporate culture in order to present it accurately to website users.

Myth - An "expert" consultant with really impressive credentials can guarantee a top-ten listing in all the major search engines.

SCAM ALERT!

Short answer: This is a popular scam that can actually get your site BLACKLISTED from search engines. You don't want to be associated with these people. Read on to learn how to accomplish your real goals legitimately.

Search engines lure users by offering quality search results. Every major search engine (the only kind worth catering to) uses link popularity and complicated keyword relevance algorithms to rank their search results. Link popularity is gained when other sites link to you, and those sites need to be linked to from many other sites as well. Links tend to have more weight if they come from different servers, domains, and geographical locations. And did I mention, the pages that are linked from have to be considered "relevant" to the same search as well?

In other words, the only way to guarantee a top-ten placement LEGITIMATELY is to guarantee that your website will be linked to by sites that matter, and relate to the search results. The only way to guarantee that is to guarantee that your website will have the top-quality content demanded by users, and that your site is actually a valuable resource on the subject the user is searching. Only after your site becomes a valuable resource will the top-rated sites be willing to exchange links with you. They will need some incentive (usually some quality traffic back to them in exchange).

All of that takes a lot of time, and it is subject to the same rules that apply to every other type of marketing. You still need to know who your customers are, and how your product or service can fill their needs. You still need to pay attention to your target audience, solicit their feedback, and tailor your website offerings to fulfill the customer's actual requirements. You will still have an army of competition that you need to beat, and you will still have a lot of costs associated with doing all of the needed research, developing the right content, and fine-tuning the user experience.

BEFORE you decide to do all of that, you need to figure out what costs are associated with providing that content. Don't forget to factor in:

• Research required to find the search phrases your potential customers actually use (they are not always obvious)


• Research required to find the highly ranked sites you want to exchange links with (remember, this is the only way to really guarantee a top listing)


• Time required to design an effective and attractive site


• Time required to program the website


• Research and effort required to integrate the website with your existing electronic data systems


• Time required to Digitize related content and information

Secrets of the search engine scam artist

"...more than ever Web site owners will have to attract traffic by providing valuable content because users cannot be tricked into visiting their sites."

Geoff Johnston, vice president of product management for StatMarket

Some people who make these outrageous claims can actually get you listed in the top ten, but there's a catch: The tactics they use to game the search engines are constantly being studied by search engineers. Every time a new tactic comes along, the engineers fix their search engine so that it won't work anymore, and then they blacklist all of the sites that used that technique. That means your valuable domain name that everybody knows becomes useless for searching. You'll have to spend more money to maintain another domain name, just to have that one eventually blacklisted and so on... All the while your efforts to develop branding and good-will are wasted.

Users are getting smart. They can spot a trick, and they will avoid companies that use tricks like the plague. You wouldn't give your money to an obvious con artist, and neither will your customers. You don't even want to be associated with these people.

Conclusions

If you have more than a couple dozen employees or customers, chances are you need to hire somebody full-time to manage your website. There is a lot more to the title "webmaster" than meets the eye. Your webmaster or web-team needs to know:

• Everything they can about your business, clients, and web audiences


• Good design


• Good writing styles for the web


• Good grammar and punctuation


• Internet security


• Possibly several different programming languages (XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, PHP, SQL...)


• How to get the best hosting value


• How to analyze and interpret web server logs


• How to calculate and manipulate important metrics like conversion rates, ROI (Return On Investment), CPC (Cost Per Click), EPC (Earnings Per hundred Clicks), CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions), CPA (Cost Per Action), CPS (Cost Per Sale), CTR (Clickthrough rate), etc...

Quality information like clear forms and a good FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) can save a lot of money.
Reduced customer support inquiries saved Southern Gas Company an estimated $252,000 annually in support staff wages after they simplified their billing statements.

(Source: Karen A. Schriver, "Quality in Document Design: Issues and Controversy," Technical Communication 40, no. 2 (1993):250-51

A good webmaster is worth every penny you pay them. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, it will cost you somewhere in the range of sixty to eighty thousand dollars a year to hire a qualified webmaster. If you get a lot of support calls, returns, grievances, and lawsuits, you could save that much money just by providing quality information on-line. Consider also the potential sales increase when your website starts to actually perform and become a significant part of your net sales. Many companies are reporting 20% or more net sales generated from the web users. Top performing electronic retailers had close to 25% year-over-year gains in the 2001-2002 fiscal year, while similar traditional retailers lost customers. (Source: Industry association reports for electronic equipment and music retailers)

There is no question that people are doing a lot of business on-line. You need to have a strong presence there. Chances are, your competition already does.

About the Author:
Visit the author's Web site at http://www.minutejs.com.