This Site is About:
Web Success using our helpful Priorities, Checklists, Guides, How-to articles, Web services Ratings and Rankings, Warnings, Selecting and managing web services and helpful information links to authoritative information for building a successful web presence, managing and maintaining competitive web sites for business and non-profits.

Focus:
The focus audience is executives and top management of new and growing small to medium growth businesses who wish to compete in the rapidly changing competitive internet web marketplace. It is also for their web developer designers. Focus business stages are concept, seed, development, expansion. Focus level is high to mid-level strategic, marketing and operational management. Our time focus is mid to long term efficiencies and effectiveness.

Emphasis:
The emphasis of the site is from high level strategy to low level detailed management of web marketing, web business integration and efficiencies at lowest long-term life cycle costs. We also emphasize standards, prioritization, strategy and how to checklists and tips. We emphasize balancing of competing factors of business strategy and resources versus internet marketplace vs. technical factors. We also emphasize Web Resource selection, finding and choosing the right standards, services and expert assistance.

Expertise:
This site is sponsored and owned by experts highly experienced in business management, computing, graphics and internet, associated with BG Design, div. of Buyers Group of Richardson Texas. Principles' experience ranges from small contracting and sales to data systems and projects management for large corporations including Beatrice, MCI-SBC-Verizon, Nortel, AT&T, United Technologies, in technical management, programming and systems design. BGdesign is a leading web design and maintenance company with emphasis on maintainability of commercial websites and ecommerce and database systems.

Management Viewpoint:
Articles and checklists are oriented to web site design, implementation and efficient maintenance and web marketing from a management viewpoint toward mid to long term goals, providing management with nuances and issues specific to the internet marketplace and important technical factors which must be balanced depending on the company's resources and budget.

Standards:
BG design and WebSuccess div's of Buyers Group have formulated WebStandard-tn 2010 to aid serious business managers and executives in the main aspects of web site creation and management. WebStandards inform of the material categories and items which must be considered and managed for best results. These are similar to "best practices " in regular business, but applied to internet marketing and operations.

Selecting Web Services:
Our "How to choose" tips, checklists and directories to rankings of top supplier lists on selecting web services can help avoid serious problems and costs in the mid to long term. Choosing reliable knowledgeable service providers is one of the highest priorities for a successful web site. This part of our site is newly created and being developed.

Continuous Improvement and Testing:
A requirement for Web Success is scheduled improvements and continuous testing of the web site, ad copy and promotions. Scheduled improvements allow proper planning and cyclical implementation with "version control", which aids copyright protection. Planned improvements should integrate with the business and web strategies based on "feedback" of web market research and testing of ads and promotions.

Web Market Research:
Market research is easy in some ways, but not in others. It's easy to search up lists of competitors by categories and keywords. Unfortunately beyond that the reality and substance of web competitors is difficult to determine, and more difficult to project what might be coming. The "ease of entry" on the web creates scores of "wanna be's" who look good but have little depth, substance, experience, reliability or capacity. The principle of "barriers to entry" is more important now than ever before.

Web Credibility Differentiation:
Because of such low barriers to entry for web sites to "look good", among our emphasis on differentiation is a special requirement toward longer term competitiveness, proving credibility as a means of differentiation, and continuous web site improvement.. Our WebStandards 2010 guides this effort. But, a company may have to fight the desire to differentiate by an unusual layout and look, which tends to confuse visitors. Probably only if business is mostly repeat visitors and established customers might that be a good idea. Otherwise special emphasis would have to be placed on prominent accepted cues to aid site navigation. (And no, people don't want to have to sort through your site map).

Primary Decisions:

1. Under strategy and budgeting, a key choice which is expensive to change, but necessary to choose early is whether you will always have enough money to liberally use "paid promotion", or whether you will try to depend more on "organic ranking". Organic is undependable and expensive to maintain the constant improvements and voluminous authoritative content and in-links, so in fact the costs are not hugely different. The do-it-yourselfer who is expert and tireless who works with a good web developer can compete with medium budgeted competitors, but not likely with those with strong promotion budgets.
   
   Its a good idea to overlap a little as to organic and paid placement site design.
   
   
2. At the center of your web success is your web site designer-developer-maintainer, who may also be your "WebMaster". Choose this person wisely based on our criteria and warnings. They should agree with and encourage most of our web standards and encourage your gradual certification, or at least improvements, in each area. As in our cautions, this person should intimately know your culture and be highly experienced in business as well as web site programming. You don't have to always take the advice of your good web designer, but you should at least listen carefully as to why they suggest what they do. If you fully help them understand your goals and business, they can better serve your goals more economically. The right web developer will often say things that reflect they are looking out for your long term interests in good faith. If you help and respect them and promptly pay them, you will find they do many things in your interests that you would never know to ask for.

More on what Web Success is all about ....

Thesis:
Most web sites and web projects fall short of aspirations, except for a very few well- designed, positioned and improved marketed sites who happen upon a major niche and demand. Businesses are so varied as local, regional, national, and as to uniqueness of their selling proposition that general rules may not apply well to each.

That is why, as in all business, after initial concept and testing of offerings, and a careful well-researched business strategy is a key to web success. All kinds of companies fail at this, from small to very large. Proper strategy development is as close as business ever comes to being science. Almost all truely successful companies have great strategies based on heavy research and correlation of resources to the market.

The bywords of strategy are "matching", "balancing" and "positioning" a company's resources and strengths to the market niche and geographic area.

Learning to do strategy well is the best investment a company can make besides "testing" and talking to prospects/customers. Execution of good strategy with iterative adjustments is next most important.

What does this have to do with a web site? Everything. Internet strategy must be part of business strategy, as a big part of marketing strategy and possibly affecting operations, accounting and finance. The company's internet market goals may not be in line with the actual physical business as to territories, competitors and potential markets. It may open what at first appears wider great opportunities, but later reveal growing competition on the web in those broader markets which was not planned in the main strategy. A focus or higher differentiation may have been a better strategy, or necessary one along with its internet presence.

A strategy might determine that a regional group of sales reps visiting companies is their most productive use of capital, so the web site may be more for "image" maintenance and a tool for customers, sales persons and vendors to coordinate Orders and production planning. Whether competitors can grow sales faster by mostly a web sales effort depends on the business and how well they promote their competitive and product advantages. The mostly web business can bump up promotion probably faster than a new expensive sales force can be trained. Only experience and testing can tell.

Executive(s) of the typical haphazardly, poorly-managed business will never consider all this and run by the seat of their pants, with token appearances of planning. The long term result is usually disaster at the first unexpected turn of events, strong organized competitor or rough economy.

Basically WebSuccess is for those few who want to excel, to win consistently, who will do the hard work and thinking and follow standards that will bring them victory in the web marketplace and/or by their other methods. The web is a two-edged sword: great opportunity and strong possibility of unanticipated disturbances in niche or market penetration and dominance. At WebSucces, we don't tout the internet as the answer to your problems. It is a potential, but complex tool in a business's arsenal, and it is filled with possible pitfalls.

Our goal is to promote the standards and knowledge for the few who will not be mesmerized by the web, but be hard-nosed, pragmatic and mostly excellent management in every aspect of their business. But always, management must be visionary, seeing what can happen before it does, learning from others' mistakes, treading the best path through the internet jungle and its very real quagmires and risks.

Some concepts to study:
SWOT, Business strategy formulation, sub-strategies, niche, focus, differentiation, positioning, Boston Matrix, appeal, benefit, targeting, barriers to entry, competitive advantage, unique selling proposition, proprietary offerings, virtual monopoly, image advertising, "cut throat competition", motivators, site navigation standards, loading time standards, focus group, ad headlines and copy testing, offer keys, promotion, web site promotion, site traffic statistics analysis, pay-per click advertising, opt-in email advertising, targeted newsletter advertising, organic ranking, paid placement or position, strategy control via budgeting, search engine spidering, site spider readability , W3C, browser compatibility, Google ranking algorithm (in regard "web authority" principle),

Warnings and Cautions:
We intend more warnings and cautions, but a few main ones we suggest as what we would avoid ourselves are:

1. Never use a WYSIWYG web page editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver on an existing site or one you intend for commercial duty business. The generated and proprietary code makes for a web developer's nightmare of clean up, and it can really mess up a site that was properly designed and written by an expert programmer.
   
   
2. Never use a Hosting company's "site generator" or proprietary template system unless you enjoy being locked in and unable to ever move your website if the host has problems like losing your latest versions. Offline backups also may not be available.
   
   
3. Never choose a web designer developer who is not also known for strong "web maintenance", because a site should be written and designed for easy maintainability, which such a web developer will automatically do better because they don't want problems maintaining messy code.
   
   
4. Be cautious in choosing a web designer developer who is not intimately involved and familiar with your own country, cultures, methods and language colloquialisms, etc. Seemingly conversant persons who were not raised in the culture have a tendency to misunderstand important matters at the most inopportune times and are easily slighted or offended by questions about such happening, or even sometimes motivated in ways you may not realize, including jealousy or perhaps helping others use your materials against you. That is, cultural imbroglios happen.
   
   
5. Avoid inexperienced web service providers. Be sure they have at least 4 or 5 years in business and many years business experience with both broad and specialized knowledge, and are an authority in their business with sample clients. Be sure they emphasize designing for efficiencies and the factors under our WebStandards 2010 and this WebSuccess site.
   
   
6. Avoid most "SEO" companies who promise to improve your search ranking. Most are scams, especially those promising top billing on their own or certain sites or search engines which are not the big names. Who cares if you get top billing for 5 minutes a day on some fly by night search engine nobody uses or mostly some gambling sites ? More important, don't let the SEO company touch your web site. All changes and improvements should go through one point of contact, your web designer.
   
   
7. Although you should ask question some bills, understand that a web developer's time spent trying layouts, searching for and resizing images, attempting creative graphics and "looks", waiting for hours on hold for hosting tech support, or searching for better scripts or how to change code does not always produce results. Expect to pay for the time they work regardless, or they will shift their work for those companys who understand this fact of web business life. The creative talent and skills working for you are creative intellectual professionals who perform in good faith and work harder with praise. Don't insult them and delay payments when they bill your for time worked. Usually they don't bill you all the time they really spend anyway. If their final results are not generally very good, then select another. It is important to develop a strong and easygoing trustful relationship based on good communications.
   
   
8. If you go "in house" on most of some of your web work, be sure they work well with and respect the web developer you also use for special projects. Expect most of an "in house" person's time to be spent on the web site management and research and web site work Avoid not having someone like an outside web designer on tap with frequent projects so they can fill in when your in house person leaves.
   
   
9. Know web hosting specifications and check out your hosting choices carefully, because tech support, email limits, control panels, security and payments systems and utilities are highly dependent on the quality of the web host. Be sure your web site designer prefers to work with them.

© Copyright 2009 R J Sandlin. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy or distribute for any reason without express written permission. Unauthorized use of this page is your agreement to pay $50,000 for each such occurrence. (We prosecute violations of our copyright).