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Getting the most from your Internet Presence (realistic expectations and how to achieve them - Last updated 6/14/2000) |
| What can an
Internet Presence do for you? What to expect from your Website eCommerce and Security demystified How to maximize your effectiveness on the Internet |
| Improve Customer Support | We have a manufacturing client that has improved their position in the
market place with increased sales while reducing their cost of doing business, mostly as a
result of their Internet presence which was designed primarily to offer customers a ready
source of information for installing and maintaining their product. The client
started out by building an FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) section based on the questions
that their Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) were fielding through their toll free
phone lines along with up to the minute detailed instructions and drawings. By including
their web site address on their product, packaging and literature, this organization
encouraged customers to use the resources provided on-line as their first line of help. The client continues to improve its on-line support through an ever expanding "knowledge base" including the use of on-line "streaming" video clips from their installation and training video tapes. As a result this client has been able to offer better customer support while at the same time significantly reducing his CSR expense. Electronic Commerce (eCommerce) as detailed elsewhere in this document provides a means for you to allow your customers to on their "own time" remotely and securely place an order or check on its status, view documents and/or a images of a custom project you are working on for them, or just about anything else you want to offer that adds value to your services. |
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Copyright © 1998 by Ashton Integrated Technologies Corp.,
Dandridge, Tennessee, USA - all rights reserved
| How Many Hits? | Everyone wants to know what activity they have had at their website.
Hits as they are usually discussed in conjunction with the Internet refer to the
number of files requested from a site by the web browsers of visitors to
the site. A single "page" on a website may contain tens or hundreds of
files. For example anything that is not pure text, like a picture, logo, icon,
button, Java applet, and even at times words can be a file. If your cursor changes from
the normal I-beam as you move it over the page to an arrow, hand or some other shape a
file containing that item was loaded into the page by the Web server. Actually to be
completely correct even pure text in a page may come from another file that was included
in the original document file. The point is this, if you go to a single file page that has
nine images on it, you have registered 10 hits into the Server's log - one for the page
file itself, and 9 for the image files that were loaded with the page. Come back to
that page two more times and you have registered 30 hits not counting anywhere else you
have been on the site - so claims of "millions of hits" are actually pretty
meaningless. One of the "value adds" that Ashton ITC offers our clients is a highly detailed report which we call "Webstats". The report details among other things not only how many hits you have had but more importantly how many unique visitors came to your site during the period as well as where they just came from before linking to your site. Also, you will be able to see how many times each page was visited, when and from where - now there's information you can use. Below we will talk about what is a "normal" level of activity. Remember this, an entertainment site dedicated to the latest block buster movie may indeed get millions of visitors, but unless your site is of a similar nature don't expect to see those kinds of numbers. |
| Businesses that provide products and services to other
businesses represent the fastest growing segment of the Internet especially when eCommerce
is considered. Yet few of these businesses get what you might consider "a lot
of hits". Software companies and those selling computer related products do
extremely well as you might expect with hundreds or thousands of visitors or leads each
month. But what about other companies or businesses like yours. Many deal with
a very narrow vertical market and a limited base of prospects. So what kind of
activity should you expect? It is "normal" for a business in this category to
get anywhere from 5 to 100 visitors a week to their site. Most are thrilled with
these numbers, because the majority of visitors made an effort to find them... In
other words a Qualified Lead! A client of ours that I would say is typical (i.e. he provides specialized industrial coating products used in manufacturing processes) gets about 80 to 90 visitors a week and on average one inquiry/feedback form submitted from his website each day requesting additional information or contact from a sales person. Like most business men in his position, he is delighted with that. When you measure the cost of sales using traditional methods he is doing very well especially when you consider that the sales lead was initiated by the prospect. Also, picking up just one new client will more often than not more than pay for an entire year's presence on the Internet. He is successful on the net primarily because he works at it. He answers e-mail from prospects and submissions from his inquiry form within hours. In addition, we post to his site for him a short paragraph that he e-mails to us monthly with a tip on how people that use his products can benefit from them. This keeps prospects and existing clients coming back. |
| There are success stories like the famous TV ad showing the
pair of young ladies sitting on the rear deck of their yacht purchased with the proceeds
from their millions in sales over the Web, but not many. Are we trying to be
negative, no just realistic. As in other direct sales channels, your products and services can have a significant bearing on your Internet sales experience. Companies selling unique products, high technology products, information products, tourism, and real estate for example do well on the Web. Manufacturers that use the Web to forge a direct link with customers also seem to do pretty well in general. The going gets tougher if you are a retail outlet selling basic commodity items like food and clothing, home furnishings, appliances and similar products. If you're the national "price leader", have an exclusive line, or offer some consumer service that others do not then your chances of succeeding are much greater. Also gift shops and specialty stores, especially those located in high tourist areas can benefit from a presence on the Internet. Where it gets tough especially if you operate a store in a local community is that now you are competing with some titans. Ask yourself "what can I offer my customers over the web in terms of products or service that will prompt someone who buys from a Lands End or L.L. Bean to buy from me". If you can't come up with a strategy to compete with these companies, don't give up - just do what you have always done and concentrate on your local market where you have the advantage. If your community as a whole is on-line then it may be worth the effort. You can do things like inform customers electronically of sales and let people see your new store window display from the comfort of their homes. You can offer the convenience of 24 hour a day shopping, etc. What kind of numbers can you expect if you're selling retail products to consumers. It depends not only on your products but also how much you are willing to invest in time and money. A website like amazon.com, a very successful Internet book seller takes a tremendous amount of time, talent and money to maintain. In fact nearly all of the "famous" sites are what you would call "high maintenance". Usually a crew of programmers, network engineers, graphics artists, copy writers, animators, etc. are working around the clock at businesses like this. In other words, you don't just build a website forget about it and have orders continuously roll in. The Websites generating a lot of sales are also in most cases selling a product or service that people are comfortable in buying through a direct sales channel - although technology like intelligent software sales agents are beginning to change that. Direct marketers who already have experience in the direct sales channel with direct mail, catalogs and telemarketing do quite well on the Web. It's a business model they understand and have mastered already, the technology is just a little different. We have business to consumer clients that average anywhere from a handful of visitors to their site each week to those that have as many as six thousand visitors a week. Why the difference. Well part of it no doubt is the appeal of their product to the market, but given similar products or market potential the overwhelming difference is in how much effort they put into their Internet presence. By effort we are not necessarily talking about spending time and money on the latest animated graphics, whiz-bang programming or how to "trick" the search engines. We cover the things you can do (or hire us to do for you) that will help you to succeed in this document. And we will also honestly tell you if we think that given your particular business that your Internet Presence will net you little or no return on your investment. |
| Non profit organizations and associations make great use of
the Internet. The net provides an excellent medium for individuals to communicate
within these organizations, and it's a great way for them to "get the word out"
to non members as well. A county chamber of commerce website developed and maintained by Ashton ITC gets anywhere from 500 to 1500 visitors each month. Most of these visitors are from outside the area and come to the site because they are thinking of either re-locating to the county or vacationing here and are looking for land to purchase, things to do, places to stay, etc. We have also developed websites for chamber members and linked them to the Chamber's site. The result is a tremendous surge in growth for the community and area business. Is it all from the website - hardly! But it has had a significant impact. An animal rescue association gets about 200 visitors a month that take the time to look through a gallery of pets that need a home. Some animals have found a home through the gallery and members keep up with news, upcoming events and meetings through the site. We developed a website for a group of Lake Users concerned with lake levels and water quality to showcase correspondence between members and government agencies. It uses graphics to show the association's alternate draw down plan and document the impact to the local economy of the lake's hydroelectric dam. It's a site primarily designed as a resource for members and to attract local residents to become members. Does it work? Well the organization grew from zero to over 400 members in a little over four months. |
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Copyright © 1998 by Ashton Integrated Technologies Corp.,
Dandridge, Tennessee, USA - all rights reserved
| eCommerce | Okay, so what does that mean exactly? Prior to eCommerce, commercial
use of the Web was pretty much a marketing and sales tool, a way to provide information.
Businesses in particular used the Web mostly as a way to deliver an electronic version of
their brochures, specification sheets, product literature and other documents. A lot of
organizations still use the Web primarily for this purpose. The simplest form of eCommerce
and one that will apply to many businesses for years to come is the ability to accept
orders for goods and services over the net. If you have an order form on your website then
you are practicing eCommerce. More sophisticated approaches include the ability to "back-end" into your company's database. For example, if a visitor places an order at your website and we implement a system for you that immediately checks your electronic records to see if the items are in stock, communicates with the visitor's bank for credit card authorization, transfers the funds, marks the item as sold, generates an invoice, and perhaps creates a pick ticket, computes shipping and tax costs and presents the visitor with an immediate on-screen invoice that's a horse of a different color. Ashton ITC in conjunction with our business partner, Miva Corporation, provides eCommerce enabled virtual servers with MivaMerchant virtual storefront software pre-installed. This software is complete with shopping cart and real-time credit card transactions that our clients can easily setup and maintain using a simple web browser. You can add or delete products, offer specials, change prices, etc. from your home or office without having to learn HTML or any other computer language. The Ashton ITC Client Support section of this website offers complete details on what is needed to needed to sell on the Internet including links to apply for an Internet Credit Card Merchant account and secure digital certificates. |
| Security | So now you're accepting orders over the Internet. Can a visitor to your
site feel secure about the transaction? Yes they can, in fact people in the know feel much
more comfortable passing their credit card number over the net than they do handing the
card to a waiter or waitress or giving the number over the telephone. For our hosting clients Ashton ITC offers SSL (Secure Sockets Layer - the Internet standard used by virtually all secure websites) encryption as an option on our independent and eCommerce enabled virtual servers. We are also an agent for VeriSign the most trusted name in digital Server ID Certificates. You can learn more about Digital Certificates and apply for a VeriSign certificate using our on-line order form. Contact support@ashtonitc.com if you would like us to add eCommerce and security capabilities to your website. |
- Table Of Contents -
Copyright © 1998 by Ashton Integrated Technologies Corp.,
Dandridge, Tennessee, USA - all rights reserved
| Site Design | Website are Us - It's true, your website will
probably be the most visible reflection of your company. Your site needs to reflect your
organization's personality, and convey the message you want told. Thousands of books
have been written on this subject and this document is in no way intended to give more
than the broadest overview of this subject. First, if you don't have experience in the area of corporate image, public relations, designing a logo, graphics arts, topography, image editing, photography, etc. you should really consider hiring professionals. There are corporate marketing communications companies that have the know how and staff to assist you. We work with them all the time and believe that unless our client has these capabilities in-house that they should consider this very strongly. If you need assistance in this area, Ashton ITC can provide these services through a business partner with years of experience. Of course if you are an established company and have already developed these materials Ashton ITC and most other competent Web developers will be able to migrate your look to the web. Second, think about your target audience. An entertainment site geared to twenty somethings should look entirely different than a business-to-business site for a financial securities company. In both cases we are dealing with a visual medium and information, but the way we present it will be completely different. There is a truism in this industry which states that a website must be under constant change if you want visitors to come back. Changes should include new and updated information, new images, perhaps a newsletter, new product announcement, introduction of a new staff member, a new customer service, etc. But before we get off the subject of "your look", beware of a mistake that many webmasters make. They completely change the look and feel of the site. Remember that Website are Us and it needs to offer the same consistent message over time. Even things like site navigation should remain pretty constant. Also keep in mind that your website is like a computer application to your visitors. New applications are sometimes ignored because people are more comfortable using an application they know. What your logo, color scheme, backgrounds, typography, images do for the "look" of your site, navigation does for the "feel". According to our own research from millions of lines of code from the Server logs we analyze and compile into Webstats for our clients, those websites with frame navigation or menu bars at the top and bottom of the page generate more pages being accessed within a site than navigation links that are buried in text or scattered through images. There is really no reason that you can't use both techniques and many sites do. While we are on the subject of navigation, consider adding a "search engine" to your site so that visitors can do a key word search within your pages. Ashton ITC can add this feature to your site if you need assistance. Speed is an important consideration in site development. If a page loads too slowly people will lose patience and click on the stop button, never seeing what you have to offer. If a page must contain elements that cause it to load slowly, inform your visitor of this before they select the link. If you explain why the information is worth waiting for most people will hang in there. Remember that a great looking website will be of no practical value if it can't be found. Unless you incorporate searchable content into your pages (especially home pages and frame containers), keywords in your page titles, and meta description / keyword tags into the html code of your pages, your site will be like a billboard in the middle of the forest. The Search Engine section of this document below details how to avoid this common pitfall. Finally on the design subject consider the example of trying to sell a honeymoon package in the mountains. What do you think will move the prospect to order your package (1) a lone paragraph of text describing the package or (2) a picture of an attractive couple sitting in a hot tub on the deck of a cabin with snow capped mountains in the background to go along with the text. It's a no brainer isn't it... we all tend to put ourselves into the picture and the chances that we will click on the order button in the second example is a zillion to one over option 1. The lesson, contrary to this overly wordy document... this is really a visual medium - use images to your advantage. |
| Search Engines | Talk about a dynamic subject. The rules governing how search engines index
your website change on almost a daily basis. Let's face it, unless a prospect is looking
for you specifically on the web and you are fortunate enough to have a domain name that is
the same as the company's or you are smart enough to include your URL on everything you
print, the chances of finding you without a reasonable position (within the first three
pages - but much better on the first page) in a search engine's database are next to none.
At Ashton ITC we spend a great deal of time keeping up with search engine technology and
in ensuring that our clients' URLs are seeded to the best of our abilities. How important is a good position in the search engines? Let me give you just one simple example that should answer this question. A company that had a website on-line for over a year with another web hosting provider came to us because although they were booking sales over the net it wasn't as much as they expected. In a nutshell, we took a site (without any changes to the look of the site itself), hosted it on our Servers and used our knowledge of search engines and web positioning to dramatically increase sales. In the first full month with Ashton ITC this company went from average on-line monthly sales of $5,500 to over $45,000 - that's an 800% increase! We get over a hundred (we are listed as webmaster for lots of organizations) unsolicited e-mail messages a week telling us that some new company has the secrets and for just $59.00 they will ensure that our listing rises to the top of the index in the well over 300 directories on the web. They will even tweak our pages for us to ensure that it works. Sure! First off, over 95% of all searches happen on just 10 search engines. Many of these so called other directories are just links to these 10 search engines. Second, put on your thinking cap for a minute... let's say we are in the business of providing a tool on the Internet that allows people to type in key words and search for websites that match. Wow, we have the most valuable resource on the whole Internet. Are we going to let every Tom, Dick and Mary that wants to manipulate things negate our service. Of course not, and that is what is happening. There is a silent war going on as you read this. Yes, there are (mostly were) things you could do to a web page to cause it to rise to the top - we used to do some of them so we know. You see most of these search engines (not Yahoo which by the way is the most used) index a website by electronically going to a URL you submit, grab the text, hyperlinks, meta tags (more about these in a minute) and store the data in their vast database. When you go to a search engine and type in your key words, the search engine checks these against its data and presents a list of sites that match your search criteria. Some search engines look for information that your webmaster provided in "meta tags" that let you define the description and keywords that you would like to be associated with your site. One search engine, Excite, absolutely positively ignores these meta tags as a policy at this time. Some automatically index every page that you don't specifically exclude at your site and some only index each URL that you submit. Most constantly visit all sites on the web and continuously update their indexes. Okay, so how do you end up near the top or bottom of the list if you and 400,000 other companies are listed under "clothing". Well it depends on a lot of things like when the site was submitted, what is the Title of your page (this one is very important and often overlooked), meta tags and last but probably most important what does your page say. If your page (like our home page) is mostly graphics then your meta tags better reflect what you want - but when Excite visits your page it sees nothing, nada. One "trick" used to get around this dilemma - let's say your page background is pure white, we could put several paragraphs of relevant text about what we do in white text. No human viewer would see this, but these dumb search engine programs would read the text (well maybe some of them aren't so dumb anymore). One thing all of these search engines do when you use them to search on keywords is among other things, look at the frequency the words are used within a document to decide relevancy and thus position in the displayed list. Aha you say, if that's the case then let's just repeat the word "clothing" hundreds of times in the same color as the background below our actual pretty graphic welcoming image and we'll be at the top of the list. That used to work - but now put on your thinking cap again at Search Engines are Us. We can't let this happen, what good would our service which we are now selling advertising on and making a handsome profit be if every website could manipulate our index - hey let's add code to our program that looks for unnatural word repetition and just to teach those guys a lesson, let's not even add that page to our index. In fact the placement of keywords in your pages has considerable affect on how they are weighed. The war escalates. In a nutshell, anyone that guarantees they can put you at the top of a search is skating on pretty thin ice these days. They may indeed be able to get you there today with a new trick, but tomorrow you just may not show up at all because the guys over at Search Engines are Us just added a line of new code. So what can you do to improve your visibility in a search?
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| Winning Strategies | From the beginning of this discussion we promised that we
would avoid the hype that so often accompanies discussions about the Internet and the Web.
If you have been reading along you know that we have been shooting from the hip and
relating to you the experiences of real organizations like yours. So when we say that this
medium is one of the most significant developments in recent history and that it will
forever change the way we communicate and do business please take us at our word. We are often asked "how do I succeed on the Internet?" Our answer is always... "the same way you succeed at anything else in life. You work at it." Disk drives on Servers connected to the Internet all over the world are full of Websites that rarely if ever get accessed and were created under the misconception, much of it based on hype that the world had finally discovered a painless way to get rich. Just build it and they will come. Our most successful clients are the ones who after we initially developed a turn-key Internet solution for them asked us to train their staff or recommend people that could take over the duties of Webmaster. Even though they wanted us to maintain their server and stay in the loop as a consultant, they recognize and we encourage that it takes a hands on daily commitment from an organization to realize the full potential from their website. An Internet strategy should not only include attention to the website itself. There are lots of other things you can do to make your site more effective. Some of them are:
Our mission at Ashton ITC is to see that our clients earn a return on investment from their website. Contact us at any time if you want to discuss ways that we can help you to realize the maximum return. |
Copyright © 1998 by Ashton Integrated Technologies Corp., Dandridge, Tennessee, USA - all rights reserved
