|
|
Are Your Meetings MINM or JAM?
When people come to your meetings, do they say "this is a meeting I never miss" ( MINM) or do they say "this is just another meeting." (JAM) Unproductive meetings gobble up an estimated 20% of corporate payrolls, throwing away $420 billion a year....
Creating Great Business Correspondence
Obtaining the skills for writing good business correpondence is important; a job seeker needs to send customised job application letters. A secretary needs to send out an official invitation letter. A purchasing assistant may need to prepare an...
How To Hire A Voice Over Talent
It's not just commercials on television and radio that need
actors to read information off-camera. There are a myriad of
ways to use voice to educate, inform, guide, entertain, and, of
course, sell. Places where you can use voice over talent...
Monday Morning Mindfulness
Learn more about these topics by subscribing to "Monday Morning Mindfulness" at http://www.schrift.com/monday.htm Sandra's ezine 'Monday Morning Mindfulness' Sandra Schrift will help you grow and enlighten your soul with her bi-weekly ezine...
Overcoming Work Addiction
Why are you so busy? Do you really have too much work? Is work so important to you that you'll sacrifice just about anything in your life to get the job done? Even if it's at the expense of your health and your relationships?
If you find...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
How to Build a Business Website
A recent report done by Yankee Group, a Boston-based market research company, states that at the end of 2004 around 34 percent of small and medium sized businesses in North America are selling goods and services on the Internet and another 25 percent is planning to do so within next 12 months. Online sales in the United States represented 8.4 percent of the countrys Gross Domestic Product in 2004. This figure is increasingly rising. This means, if your company is not paying serious attention to this vital channel of sales and marketing, you are simply missing the boat.
In its basic form a website is a bundle of pages full of texts, graphics and other electronic files published on the Internet for people to view. How you organize your website depends totally on your online goals. Websites are built for various purposes. You can use a website as a sales point, a marketing channel, a corporate image building tool, a branding channel, an information center, a CRM center, a product launching center, and for number of other reasons. When you plan to build a website, you should base your online strategy keeping in mind two things: your online objectives and your potential audience.
SOME OF THE MOST COMMON TYPES OF CORPORATE WEBSITES ARE:
Information providing sites
Most of todays sites fall in this category. The simplest of them are actually mere reflection of offline corporate brochures.
Promoting company The idea behind some of information-driven sites is to give maximum information related to the company. A holding company, for example, may prefer to have a site like this. These sites usually include: company history, company related news, mission statement, profiles of key executives, a good FAQ section, etc. Graphics are used in these sites only to accentuate the text information. However, the sites may include video and FLASH presentation as well.
Promoting products or services A pharmaceutical company to promote its recently launched medicine may develop a website surrounding the product. The sole purpose of this type of sites is to create awareness of specific products or services.
Creating brand awareness A manufacturing company that sells its products exclusively through distributing channel may develop a website to provide ultimate information on the products and create brand. These sites complement companys offline promotional efforts and always built in consistence with other commercials.
E-commerce
Online sales are done through the e-commerce sites. Main characteristics of an e-commerce site include:
1. Detail products or services information with pictures and sometimes with multimedia presentations, drawings, charts, etc. 2. Shopping cart so that the buyer can select one or several items to purchase. 3. Payment gateway so that the buyer can make payments for the products or services purchased.
Corporate portals
A Website that offers a broad range of resources and services such as email, forums, company pertinent news & articles, members only area, etc. is generally called a portal. Portals are intended to be the gateway for their respective audience.
B2B exchange
Business to Business Exchange is an online platform where buyers and sellers come to communicate, collaborate and make business transactions. The main objective of a B2B Exchange is to create a venue, filled with features that allow members to efficiently conduct business processes through the Internet. A private B2B exchange is a corporate portal with a marketplace. It is designed to provide services to the companys own buyers, sellers and workforce.
WEBSITE
PLANNING
Before starting to build your website you should first develop a plan in line with your online objectives, target audience and resources. You can write your plan thoroughly as a storyboard. A storyboard is something similar to a flowchart of all the website components you deem necessary. Once you have a clear picture of what you are going to build, sit with your developers and create a technical scope of the project. This is absolutely necessary! In most of the cases your entrepreneurial vision will differ drastically with the way a programmer look into your requirement.
While working on your scope or even after publishing your website bear in mind the following crucial aspects of effective websites:
Page loading time In the euphoria of having a great slick website, often, we use images that make the pages too heavy. A page which takes just one second to load with T1 speed will need full 55 seconds to load with a 28.8 modem. Web surfers are impatient bunch of click-happy people; they dont like to wait too long! Make sure you optimize each and every page of your website before launching the site! Otherwise, you will loose a large portion of your would-be visitors for nothing!
- Look at your pages from a visitors prospective. - Eliminate all images that are not so important to deliver your messages. Optimize the remaining images with available tools. - FLASH images are may be cool, dont use them just because they are cool. Use them wisely. Host your website in a server with a good bandwidth.
Navigation Your websites links should be well-defined, persistent, and easily visible. If the site is large with many pages, you must have a site map page. Remember that not all visitors will land to your homepage, in order to keep them browsing through your site make navigation from your main landing pages as easy as possible. Try giving them compelling reasons to do so by using catchy links. Also, make sure that all your links work correctly and take a visitor to right place.
Webpage consistency All your web pages should have one consistent look. This will give your website a professional appearance, and visitors while browsing through your site will always know that they are still on your website.
Content is the king If you want your visitors to return back to your site, regularly add fresh, relevant and quality content to your website. Internet users are information hungry people, feed them with fresh information on a regular basis and you will have good number of loyal visitors to your website.
If you already have a website make sure you optimize your website from users point of view. According to Gartner, a market research company, even a minor investment in improving the usability of a company website will yield an annual return of 10 to 20 per cent. It increases brand awareness, leads to higher user adoption rates and possibly more transactions per user. Average order size starts to rise and the site generates more return visits from customers.
RESOURCES
Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze
Check your web pages for bad links: http://www.siteowner.com/badlinks.cfm
Webmaster resources: http://bignosebird.com
About the Author
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com http://ezine.rusbiz.com
|
|
|
|
|
Oral Presentation Advice |
Your presentation should not replace your paper, but rather whet the ... Below I consider goals for academic interview talks and class presentations. ... |
www.cs.wisc.edu |
  |
Presentation Skills |
This site contains annotated links to resources concerned with presentation and communication skills. |
lorien.ncl.ac.uk |
  |
Presentation Helper - Free PowerPoint templates, help, advice and ... |
Resources on how to make effective presentations. Includes tips on PowerPoint and topic ideas. |
www.presentationhelper.co.uk |
  |
Neurobehavioral Systems, Inc. |
Neuroscience stimulus delivery software can be used for cognitive psychology, fMRI, erp and single unit research (Windows). |
nbs.neuro-bs.com |
  |
Why tables for layout is stupid: problems defined, solutions offered |
Why tables for layout is stupid:. problems defined, solutions offered. Tables existed in HTML for one reason: To display tabular data. ... |
www.hotdesign.com |
  |
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation |
This presentation prepared with the help of Microsoft Powerpoint Autocontent Wizard. ... Permission is granted to use this presentation in any course or ... |
norvig.com |
  |
Presentation Zen |
I love the clear presentation of the ideas in the book and the fact that the ... In the context of presentations, moving info away can help you and the ... |
www.presentationzen.com |
  |
Presentation Tips for Public Speaking |
Better Public Speaking & Presentation - Ensure Your Words Are Always ... On the Job: Public Speaking Tips - Twelve Steps to Great Presentations by Elise ... |
www.aresearchguide.com |
  |
Presentation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
Presentation is the process of presenting the content of a topic to an ... You should plan to rehearse your presentation out loud at least four times. ... |
en.wikipedia.org |
  |
OSCON 2005 Keynote - Identity 2.0 |
A barn-burner of a presentation. I loved this. - Cory Doctorow. I watched it twice, and greatly enjoyed it both times. - Jon Udell ... |
www.identity20.com |
  |
Presentations - Effective Communication - Public Speaking |
Tips and tools for creating and delivering presentations: text, techniques and technology. |
www.presentations.com |
  |
Presentation Information Resources - Presentation Technology News ... |
Presentation Information Resources - Comprehensive presenter's resource providing instant access to up-to-date information on technology and techniques for ... |
199.249.170.231 |
  |
Effective Presentations homepage |
In addition, the skills needed to prepare an oral presentation can be used ... A spiffy presentation discussing Effective Teaching with Powerpoint from the ... |
www.kumc.edu |
  |
Impress |
Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, ... Slide show Animation and Effects bring your presentation to life. ... |
www.openoffice.org |
  |
PRESENTATIONPRO - experts for Microsoft PowerPoint |
A series of products and services to help enhance PowerPoint presentations with templates and backgrounds. |
www.presentationpro.com |
  |
Leadership - Presentation Skills |
Presentation, PowerPoint, and Leadership. ... Presentations and reports are ways of communicating ideas and information to a group. But unlike a report, ... |
www.skagit.com |
  |
Presentation: See what people are saying right now on Technorati |
See all blog posts tagged with presentation on Technorati. |
www.technorati.com |
  |
Secretary of State Addresses the U.N. Security Council |
My friends, this has been a long and a detailed presentation. And I thank you for your patience. But there is one more subject that I would like to touch on ... |
www.whitehouse.gov |
  |
Rubric |
Organization, Audience cannot understand presentation because there is no sequence of information. Audience has difficulty following presentation because ... |
www.ncsu.edu |
  |
Presentation Skills |
Presentations are one of the first managerial skills which a junior engineer ... This article looks at the basics of Presentation Skills as they might apply ... |
www.see.ed.ac.uk |
  |
|