eStrategy

The World Wide Web has provided savvy small and medium-sized businesses with new opportunities and tools that enable them to compete effectively with major corporations. The challenge is to look like a major player without spending your entire revenue stream on site development. Keys to success in planning include:

• Assessing the competition


• Determining your long and short term goals for the web site
  
• Understanding what impact taking different functions of your company to the web will have on your employees and their work environment


• Establishing what you consider an acceptable return on investment and a realistic schedule to achieve it

eStrategy is the ability to assess your existing site, confer with company personnel, detail the current situation, and recommend options for meeting your web-based goals. The web is a complex place and simply hiring a webmaster does not guarantee success.

Understanding who comes to your web site, from where, and what they do when they get there are instrumental in understanding whether your web projects are attaining your goals.

Requirements Analysis

Develop your web-based projects by consulting with your personnel, clients, and vendors to assist you in defining your entire long-term Internet strategy or simply an individual project within your existing plan.

Requirements analysis usually consists of a client dealing with a business challenge and attempting to solve this challenge through web-based technologies. Since this is not usually the company's area of expertise nor their business focus, it is recommended to bring in an independent firm such as JHeydecker Design Systems to perform two tasks:

• Act as an independent agent with no political agenda to
  gather as much information from internal and external sources
  and report this data in a meaningful manner.


• Report on the options available capable of solving the
  business challenge.

Information gathering can be very complex, and bringing in an independent agent facilitates a freer flow of quality information. Depending on the challenges faced by the company, some of the strategies used include:

• Internal focus groups revolving around company processes,
  such as Customer Support, Sales, or R&D.


• External focus groups such as consumers, vendors, existing
  customers, or media.


• Telephone interviews with your top ten clients.


• End of transaction surveys.


• Typical purchaser profiles.


• Vendor evaluations.


• Product evaluations.


• Paradigm shift impact analysis.

Once the data has been collected, in-depth analysis is required to organize the information in a meaningful format in order for the company to understand the weight of the business challenge and the existing solutions available at the time. Companies performing due diligence before throwing money at a project will save money and produce a better solution more quickly.

Product Specifications

When developing product specifications that take into account all aspects of the development cycle, users, vendors, marketing, and technology to produce robust, scalable and user-friendly products that are capable of being developed in a realistic time-frame.

As part of a product specification, you should cover:

• Management Issues


• Management Requirements


• Product Objectives
  
  
  • Business
  
  
  • Strategy
  
  
  • Technology


• Marketing
  
  
  
  • User Profiles & Characteristics
  
  
  • User Requirements
  
  
  • Competitive Analysis


• Product Risks & Contingencies


• Development Phases


• Product Requirements
  
  
  • Architecture
  
  
  • User Interface
  
  
  • Performance
  
  
  • Time-to-Market
  
  
  • Service and Maintenance
  
  
  • Internationalization
  
  
  • Licensing


• Product Launch Plan
  
  
  • Marketing Communication Schedules
  
  
  • Sales Tools Schedules
  
  
  • Training Schedules


• Business Partner Impact


• Proposed Web Site Architecture


• Proposed User Interface Diagrams

Producing a detailed product specification enables your company to request proposals from any web development company and receive comparable quotations based on exactly the same software product.

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Jeanne-Elise M. Heydecker is founder of JHeydecker Design Systems (http://www.jheydecker.com), an Internet company that specializes in designing, developing and executing web-based and traditional sales, marketing, and management solutions. Ms. Heydecker brings over 20 years of experience in traditional and internet marketing programs for the business-to-business and consumer markets. She can be reached at: jheydecker@jheydecker.com.

Is Your Web Site Hurting Your Business?

Dress for Success

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself this question: If I dressed like my Website, would I ever close a deal? Your appearance is your visual identity. Successful salespeople craft their clothing to optimize the sale. They understand that their visual identity affects how their message is received. The same rule applies to your website.

The company’s web design directly impacts the business. The website can be used as an effective marketing tool- getting your message across and persuading customers to take immediate action. A visitor’s impression of your site, their ease of navigation and ability to search for what they want effortlessly and efficiently inevitably translates to a set of impressions that shape how the rest of your business is perceived by the online world.

Ways Design Directly Impacts Your Business:

• Strong design excites and compels
• Generic design condemns you to anonymity
• Off-target design sends the wrong message
• Cheap design is a turnoff
• Bottom line: Design can make or break the sale

Bad Web Design is a World Wide Epidemic

Fortunately, this epidemic of cheap, off-target, generic web design does have an antidote. It’s called accountability. Apply it across your organization, and start treating design as a serious business component.

Your business strategy is only as strong as its execution. Give design a high priority and you will strengthen and realize that strategy. Your website exists to drive your target market toward a measurable action. Evaluate design by how well it educates, engages and motivates your customers. A website does not live in isolation, it must be integrated into the rest of your branding.

Is the Medium Maximizing the Company Message?

Take the time to investigate your web design firm. Many web development firms have followed assumptions and trends that do not serve their clients or their client’s customers. They gave way to artistic temptations and “cool” tools that sidetracked the company’s primary agenda. Educate your web professionals and keep them involved, so they thoroughly understand your brand and message. Effective professional design does not highlight the capabilities of the medium but uses the medium to highlight the clients’ capabilities. Design, animation, illustration, video and sound only have value when they translate into actualizing strategic business goals.

Hard Questions Need to be Asked:

• What is the value, or liability, of special effect-driven animated intros?
• Are you losing prospects during bandwidth delays?
• If the value proposition isn't articulated within two clicks, will the customer abandon interest? You bet they will!
• Did that video, for all the visitors that couldn't see it, enhance the message? Would choosing a strong illustration have instead been smarter alternative?
• Does the web experience make a statement on the credibility, usefulness and value of your of a product?
• Does a product interface make a statement on the credibility and value of your brand?
• Are your customers easily and efficiently finding what they came for?

Rx for Corporate Virtual Identities

How do we do it right? You begin by laying two critical foundations:

1. Your chosen web design firm must thoroughly understand the company’s products, the competitive landscape, the customer's psyche, the company's current position, the market the company wants to target and the key communication agendas. This knowledge forms a strategic plan that informs and guides all design decisions.
2. Your web design firm must know how to intelligently apply technology. They must comprehend the issues and techniques involved in making the medium perform for you: ergonomics, utility, timing, platform, browser and display variations, bandwidth cost and user tolerance so their creative capacity remains nimble and delivers on the strategic plan.

Measuring the Value of Your Website

The value of this creativity must always be measured against and adjusted to satisfy some basic criteria. During the design process, always ask and objectively answer the following questions:

• Is the site so visually powerful that it will rise above the mass of market noise?
• Does the site’s visual personality resonate with your target market?
• Do the visuals complement and reinforce the product's core messaging?
• Does every pixel lead the prospect one step closer to becoming (or remaining) a customer?
• Do you spare the user a thousand words where one picture would have sufficed?
• Have you made it easy to get the critical facts?
• Does the navigation separate your markets and lead them to more refined, targeted messages?
• If the customer only makes it to the home page, will they know what you offer?
• Are they enticed to stay, to make one more click and learn more about what you have to offer?
• Will the prospective customer grasp what makes you competitive?
• Keep your eye on the bottom line. Does the website incite the customer to take action — make a phone call, volunteer demographic and contact information, forward a URL, set a bookmark?

These questions and processes outline the first steps toward evolving web design integration with quality dimensions of integrity, rigor and maturity. If you can’t answer “yes” to all of these questions, you need to rethink your site before the launch. Web designers are not decorators; they are a key part of the business team. When everybody owns this truth, companies will increase their visibility and profitability

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Jeanne-Elise M. Heydecker is founder of JHeydecker Design Systems (http://www.jheydecker.com/), an Internet company that specializes in designing, developing and executing web-based and traditional sales, marketing, and management solutions. Ms. Heydecker brings over 20 years of experience in traditional and internet marketing programs for the business-to-business and consumer markets. She can be reached at: jheydecker@jheydecker.com.

Scoping a Web Project

It is important to write down precisely what the scope is of any web project. Getting your client or superiors to agree with it is even more important, because whenever a request is made, changing the scope of your project, you can refer to it and can suspend all requests that are not included. A typical example is provided:

[you or your company/department] will provide web design and development services to design a complete web site. This service will meet immediate requirements while developing an architecture to launch additional subwebs containing individual program and/or department content in the future. Once approved for launch, the prototype will migrate to a new, live server for public launch. [you or your company/department] will provide design, graphics, and necessary authoring of the working navigation shell and pages. An easy-to-use navigation method will be developed with top-level navigation accessible throughout the site to allow viewers to quickly jump to major topics of interest. The completed web site will serve as an innovative, economical, and efficient method of delivering school and program information.

Once the initial launch has been accomplished, templates will be developed for individual programs and departments. These templates will provide a professional design and user interface that will immediately identify all programs and departments as part of [you or your company/department] and will provide links to main web pages as well. Each program/product suite/department will have a unique template that personifies the individual qualities of that program/product suite/department , mutually approved by the department and the executive level [a/k/a/ Web Services]. Web Managers will be focused on providing the content and filling that content into the template. These files will reside on the development server until approved for launch by the department. The department will then contact Web Services for launch approval. Web Services will review for appropriateness: compliance to format, typos, etc., and then migrates approved content to the live server, which should occur within 24 hours (emergencies excepted). This process will provide a professional web site that can be maintained internally by the individual Web Managers and Web Services staff.

Second year plans are to implement a more complex web product that includes dynamic database-enabled components for streamlining processes while maintaining quality control and adherence to graphic standards. Individuals will be able to add events, news items, upload documents, etc. through a simple web interface instead of bothering with HTML or even FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.. All database records will be shown at the district level; individual departments will filter only those records on their web sites that are entered for their department. This will further enable the personnel to manage their content with an easier, more simplified approach.

Dynamic database-enabled projects include the following:

• Events
• Documents
• Press Releases
• Biographies
• Job Openings
• Staff Directory

Implementation will be done in phases, with testing and measurement done concurrently. New products will be developed first as an email form sent to Web Services. Databases will initially be implemented as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Access databases. Once initial testing and measurement has been performed and traffic warrants expansion, phase two will be design and implementation of individual tables within a SQL Server database.

EXAMPLE:
Events Phase 1: Individuals will list all of their planned events in an Excel Spreadsheet provided by Web Services. For new events, personnel would go to an HTML form on the intranet that would email Web Services to update the database. The new records would be added by hand by Web Services to the database.

Phase 2: a Maintenance Section will be added to the web site that enables school personnel to add, edit, or delete existing events through an HTML interface accessing a live Access database.

Phase 3: If traffic or performance is warranted, the backend database will be ported up to SQL Server 2000. There would be no changes visible to the site visitor or personnel making updates, except for the experience of enhanced performance.

Also occurring in the second year is the possibility of enabling affiliate programs with on-line vendors such as amazon.com or bn.com whereby recommended reading lists could be linked directly to the vendor. Through the affiliate partnership, a percentage of the purchase price would be returned to the department. At no time would the company register an on-line merchant account due to the liabilities in place for fraud management. Currently, there is no protection to the independent on-line merchant to guard against credit card fraud. (On-line merchants do not physically access the actual credit card like a brick and mortar store, which is called a face-to-face transaction by the credit card company. In the case of a face-to-face transaction, the merchant that follows established rules - checking the signature, verifying codes on the card - is typically not liable. The issuing bank that approved the transaction is saddled with the chargeback. On-line merchants suffer under the same lack of guarantee that merchants accepting charges by telephone or mail order experience. Credit card issuers provide little or no assistance to on-line merchants and can doubly penalize a merchant with significant chargeback fees.) Use of external e-commerce facilitation vendors such as PayPal, BillPay, or Yahoo Stores would be considered the more desirable option for closed loop e-commerce transaction processing.

Provided by Web Services:

• Secured on-line build area for viewing during the development process
• Web graphics design and development
• Home page design and development
• Top-level categories pages, if applicable
• Quality assurance and acceptance testing of shell on selected browsers
• Initial content fill and format, based on existing web sites

Provided by Web Managers:

• Direction and feedback for web design customization of individual template
• Electronic versions of logos and artwork to be used [.jpg or .gif formats]
• Samples of existing collateral
• Final text for each page [.doc, .rtf or .txt formats]

The content, format, and depth of information contained within the final product will be finalized through in-depth meetings between Web Services, Web Managers, Department heads, etc.. Only then will all copy and content be considered final and ready for launch. The products residing on the development server will be used for soliciting member and staff feedback, along with further defining the scope of the project so that subsequent development costs can be minimized through effective project scope definition.

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Jeanne-Elise M. Heydecker is founder of JHeydecker Design Systems (http://www.jheydecker.com/), an Internet company that specializes in designing, developing and executing web-based and traditional sales, marketing, and management solutions. Ms. Heydecker brings over 20 years of experience in traditional and internet marketing programs for the business-to-business and consumer markets. She can be reached at: jheydecker@jheydecker.com.