Focus:
The site is for managers and executives of new and growing small to medium growth businesses who wish to compete in the increasingly competitive and changing internet web marketplace. Also it is for internal staff liason to web developer designers and webmasters. Focus business stages are seed, development and expansion at mid-level strategic, marketing and operational management. Our time focus is mid to long term efficiencies for overall cost savings and effectiveness .
Our growth company management view emphasizes improved planning and selection of web personnel and services using standards to avoid pitfalls and improve chances of success on the web. We show what's important, where opportunities lie, what to do, when and how to do it, who to choose, and what to avoid.
Emphasis:
Read the importance of high level strategy integration with detailed management of web marketing and operations for low life cycle costs using standards, priorities, how-to checklists and tips to balance strategy and resources versus internet competition and technical factors. Effective web sites exist only as part of marketing strategy within business strategy as dictated by the market, resources and budget. That should be important to our clients to avoid expensive trial and error lessons. Web business is increasingly complicated and competitive. Our information helps select the right staff, services and experts, and shows how they and management must function as a team.
Expertise:
The experts in business management, computing, graphics and internet marketing of Buyers' Group and BG Design div. of Richardson Texas are degreed with experience ranging from programming services since 1975 to data systems design and implementation and technical project and turn around management for large corporations including Beatrice, MCI-SBC-Verizon, Nortel, AT&T, United Technologies, including systems design. BG Design is an established web design and maintenance company emphasizing maintainability of websites and E-commerce and web database systems.
Management Viewpoint:
Articles from a management viewpoint are oriented to effective web site design, implementation, maintenance, operations and web marketing issues specific to web technical and market factors balanced to company resources. The internet has changed. Seat-of-the-pants web marketing no longer works, for reasons shown in our articles.
Standards:
BG Design" and Web-Successtn have formulated WebStandard-tn 2020 to aid serious business managers and executives seeking best practices and standards for web site creation and
management. WebStandards 2020 informs categories, items and standards to manage for best practices, similar to general business best practices but specific to internet marketing, site design and operations.
Selecting Web Services:
Our new "How-to tips, checklists and coming directories of better suppliers of web services can help avoid common mistakes and costs. Choosing reliable expert service providers is a high priority for a successful web site. This developing part of our site includes:
- How To Choose A Hosting Company
- Top Hosting Companies
- How to Choose a Web Designer
- All About Choosing a Domain Name
- Top Domain Registration Companies
- How to Choose a Graphic Designer
Continuous Improvement and Testing:
Web Success requires scheduled improvements and testing of the web site, ad copy, campaigns and promotions, to allow proper planning, implementation and version control aiding copyright protection and appeal testing. Planned improvements should integrate with the business and web strategies based on "feedback" of web market research, 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. But the reality and substance of web competitors is difficult to determine, and more difficult to project what might be coming. Ease of entry on the web creates scores of "wanna be's" who look good but have little depth, substance, experience, reliability or capacity. Marketing principles are more important now than ever before to differentiate and keep top rankings.
Web Credibility Differentiation:
Because low barriers to entry allow web sites to "look good", we emphasize differentiation, credibility, consistency, budgeting and improvement to compete. Our WebStandards 2020 program guides this effort. Companies must find a fine balance between differentiate by unusual look and layouts while making visitors comfortable and interested. Only if a business has mostly repeat visitors and already established customers can very unusual design succeed. You must always aid site navigation and speed. (And no, people don't want to have to sort through your site map).
Primary Decisions:
- Under all important strategy and budgeting, a key choice which is expensive to change but necessary to choose early is whether you will have enough money to use "paid promotion"for years, or
whether you will depend more on "organic ranking" with rich authoritative content and inbound links. Organic ranking is undependable and expensive to maintain constant improvements and voluminous authoritative content and in-links, so in fact the costs are not hugely different. The do-it-yourselfer with free contributors who is expert and tireless, working with a good web developer can compete with medium budgeted competitors, but not likely against strong promotion budgets.
It's a good idea to overlap organic and paid placement site design.
- 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 encourage most of our web standards and encourage your gradual certification, or at least improvements, in each area. This key web service person should intimately know your culture and be 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 adopt these Web-Success pratices and fully help them understand your goals and business, they can serve your goals more economically. The right web developer will often indicate how they are looking out for your long term interests in good faith. If you help and respect their reasoning and promptly pay them, you will find they do many things in your interests that you would never even know to ask for.
More on what Web Success is all about ....
Thesis:
Most web sites and web projects fall short of aspirations and fail to get good prospects, 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 lto market reach, products and uniqueness of selling proposition that general rules don't well apply.
As in all business, after initial concept and testing of product demand, a carefully 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. All consistently successful companies have great strategies based on research and matching of resources and image to the market gaps.
The bywords of strategy are "matching", "balancing" and "positioning" a company's resources, image and strengths to marketplace gaps and geographic areas.
Learning to do strategy well is the best investment a company can make besides "testing", talking to prospects/customers and having great help. Execution of good strategy with iterative adjustments is next most important; critical in web marketing.
What does this have to do with a web site? Everything. Internet strategy must be part of business strategy and marketing strategy, possibly affecting staffing, operations, accounting and finance. It's disaster if internet market goals are not be in line with the business as to territories, image, competitors and potential markets. It may open what appear wider opportunities, but later encounter growing competition on the web in those broader markets, not planned in the main strategy. A higher focus or differentiation capitalizing on strengths and time in business may be a better strategy.
A strategy might find that regional sales reps visiting companies is the most productive use of capital, so the web site may be more for "image" maintenance, inquiry and communication tool for customers, and for sales reps and vendors to coordinate planning, order tracking, scheduling, inventory. Whether competitors can grow sales faster by a web sales effort depends on the business and how well they promote their competitive advantages. A business emphasizing web selling can bump up promotion faster than a new expensive sales force can be trained. Only experience and testing can tell what's best.
Executive(s) of a haphazard, poorly-managed business will skip all this and run by the seat of their pants, with token appearances of planning. They will usually encounter disaster at the first unexpected turn of events, or a strong organized competitor or rough economy.
Web-Success is for those few who want to excel, to win consistently, who will do the study, work, planning and thinking and follow standards for victory in the web marketplace or better non-internet alternatives. The web is a two-edged sword: great opportunity but strong possibility of unanticipated competition in the niche, by other's market penetration and dominance. At Web-Succes, we don't tout the internet as the answer to your problems. It is a complex tool in a business's arsenal, with high potential yet many possible pitfalls.
We urge standards and knowledge for the few who will not be mesmerized by the web, but instead be pragmatic excellent management in every aspect of their business. Management must be visionary, seeing what can happen before it does, learning from others' mistakes, treading the best path through the internet quagmires and computer system risks.
Some concepts to study:
SWOT, Business strategy formulation, marketing strategy,ad appeal, niche, focus, differentiation, competitive advantage, positioning, Boston Matrix, appeal, benefit, targeting, barriers to entry, unique selling
proposition, proprietary offerings, virtual monopoly, image advertising, "cut-throat competition", motivators, site navigation standards, time on site, stickiness, load time, focus group, ad headlines, ad copy testing, offer keys, promotion, web site promotion, site traffic statistics, pay-per click advertising, opt-in email advertising, targeted newsletter advertising, organic ranking, authoritative site,
paid placement, strategy control by budget, search engine spidering, site spider readability , W3C Standards, browser compatibility, Google ranking algorithm (in regard "web
authority" principle),Bing, social networking, web community.
Top Priorities:
Among the above, if you don't get anything else right are:
- Market and web competition research
- Positioning, Differentiation and Focus
- Deciding promotion as paid or mostly organic.
- The business strategy matched to the above and your resources, based on a realistic budget.
- Choosing a good web designer developer-maintenance company within your country.
- Testing appeals, headlines, ad copy and keywords.
You can jump around on this site. The tips and guideline pages are listed in the order they are usually needed. It can be helpful even for executives to glance at issues with which internal web staff must deal, as over-sight and testing of your people in this brave new marketing world.
Warnings and Cautions:
We intend more warnings and cautions, but a few main ones here as to what we would avoid ourselves are:
- 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. See our page on that at left.
- 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.
- 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 s web designer will automatically do a better job because they don't want problems maintaining messy code.
- Do not choose a web designer developer who is not intimately involved and familiar with your own country, cultures, methods, language colloquialisms, etc.. Seemingly conversant persons not raised in the culture often misunderstand important matters at the most inopportune times and are easily offended by questions about misunderstanding, sometimes motivated in ways you may not realize, including jealousy or perhaps helping others use your materials against you. That is, inter-cultural differences, confusion and imbroglios happen. Will you own and control your web site software in a server in your country? You better. Also, be cautious that many prominent names in web design have a "USA front" but use contractors and subcontractors in India, the Phillipines and other countries, which can sometimes create problems.
- Avoid inexperienced web service providers. Be sure they've been in business at least 4 or 5 years and have broad and specialized knowledge, and are authorities in their business with sample clients. Be sure they emphasize designing for efficiencies and the factors under our WebStandards 2020 and this WebSuccess site.
- 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.
- 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 easy-going trustful relationship based on good communications.
- 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 may 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.
- 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.
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