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Building a new website is sort of like building a new house. You start with a plan, talk with an architect, create drawings, hire a builder, and so on. When you build a house, or a website, it’s a good idea to plan ahead.
When building a new house, it would be a good idea to plan for your future needs. Maybe you don’t have kids, but one day you want one or two ankle-biters. It would be wise to tell your architect, “I would like to have two extra bedrooms.”
Now let’s imagine you are building a start-up website based on skateboarding. The main purpose of the website is to provide training videos and articles about the topic. It would be wise to concentrate on developing the content management system necessary to allow you to control the content on the website and easily add new content. Then you can focus on the content, and driving interested users to your website.
Here’s the twist.
You have a great basic concept for the website, it’s all based around a topic that’s popular and you plan on having a lot of content for users to read/watch. But the next thing that comes out of your mouth throws us for a loop; “I also want it to have a MySpace-like profile for each user, a YouTube-esque method for users to share videos, oh and one of those instant messaging thingamajigs like AOL has!”
Back to the analogy of the house, the last statement is sort of like telling your interior decorator to design the two extra bedrooms for one boy who likes Transformers and a little girl who loves Winnie the Pooh. So many detail for kids you haven’t even had yet.
Now my anology of the house and the unborn-yet-already-defined children may be a little extreme, but look at it from your user’s perspective. Are you really 100% sure that your idea is that great, and that you can really steal your user’s attention away from MySpace? Why build something that you think might work, when you can build the basics, then ask your users what they want. If you can’t handle that, and you think your website needs everything else to be great, then maybe your “great idea” really isn’t so great afterall.
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Marketing budgets are one of the first things business owners and CEOs consider cutting when the economy starts to get rocky. The rationale is legitimate, it is more important to pay employees than play the radio commercial this month. It’s a balancing act, leveraging resources to cover the basic necessities while continuing to try to grow the business. If not careful however, owners and directors will see a bad situation get worse. It is important to not only maintain advertising spend during the economic downturn, but to also explore new ways to market the company brand and ways in which the situation can be used to the advantage of the company.
Now is a great time to shift some of your company’s advertising budget from print, TV and radio to online mediums. Regardless of the fact that online advertising is typically less expensive than other forms, it is also easily targeted to the market you choose, can be used to interact with your potential customers, allows in depth analysis of consumer behavior and trends, and promotes quick reaction to changes in this behavior. You only have to pay for the advertising that people see and you can make sure that only people that care about your product category are seeing your ad. When they do see your ad you have the opportunity to engage them in ways that are not possible with the other forms. In two clicks you can sell them your product or teach them more about your service.
You may see your competitors cutting back on their advertising and wonder if you should do the same. The “save for a rainy day” mentality will most likely help your company come out of these times unscathed, but is that really good enough? It’s time to realize that it’s raining today and it’s time to go out and buy an umbrella. Basic supply and demand comes in to play: if everyone is staying inside, no one is buying umbrellas and they’re cheap. You’ll find that you may be able to buy ad space on a site or publication you couldn’t afford before. Expand your marketing efforts while others cut back and enjoy a greater percentage of the medium and hopefully an increase in market share.
Although fuel prices are on the way back down to reasonable levels it’s safe to assume that more people will look to the internet for their Christmas shopping to save a few dollars on fuel than in years past. Even if the economy shapes up soon and gas prices fall back to $1.05/gallon you can expect that the percentage of shopping being done online will continue to increase. Whether purchasing a new pair of shoes or gathering the initial information for buying a home, there is an ever increasing number of people using the internet to make purchases and to guide their buying decisions. So why not focus your advertising dollars to a medium that reaches these millions of shoppers where they are spending their time? They’re already looking for your product/service anyway. Why not help them find it?
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Pick up a copy of the November issue of Practical Web Design (or .net if you are in the UK) and turn to page 90. Thanks to Practical Web Design for asking us to be a part of their mag!