Archive for the ‘Website 1.0 & 2.0’ Category

Corporate Website 1.0 is dead. Long Live Corporate Website 2.0

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

The title is borrowed from the traditional proclamation – ‘The King is dead. Long Live the King’. What is basically meant (and I am taking this from Wikipedia) is that in certain monarchies of France and England, the transfer of sovereignty occurred instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch. In this blog post, I am using it to highlight that how a stand alone non interactive website (basically 1.0) is dead and without fail, its time for websites powered by social media (Websites 2.0) to take over!!

It is very common to see companies scrambling to get their website up. In few cases, some basic essentials of website are missing, but in most the marketers have no clear agenda on why they are building one. It’s not too surprising to see websites being made because it is a standard launch activity to do. It is more like a job in the task list at the time of product launch. The brand manager gets it executed because it was expected out of him or her.

Few service sectors like airlines or banking are using sites to either generate more business or cut the customer servicing costs. So if nothing else, they are at least generating some value. But by using social media tools, they could heighten the positive customer experience on their site. Because there is absence of social media tools, the hits quickly dry out and then money get pumped into traditional media to boost website hits. Not only is this model financially viable in the long run but also it kills the basic principles on having a website.

The point here really is ‘Whether a website is creating value for the company more than just providing a digital presence.’

Let’s dwell a little deeper and attempt answering this question below.

Q) Why does anyone come to a corporate website?

1.    To know more about the company – People would rather go to Wikipedia more often to either know more or check credibility of the company

2.    To watch its advertisements – Wouldn’t they go to You Tube for that

3.    How about buying its products – Really? How many Indian websites have secured e-commerce transaction facilities. At most, I have heard of few companies tying up with common third party e-commerce portals to sell their products online

4.    To read product reviews – It’s independent sites like mouthshut or reviewstream where one will heads to if one wants product reviews

5.    To learn how to use a product – Then one would visit sites like WikiHow, Wiki Answers and Yahoo Answers that get visited. And anyway, not many company websites have provided ‘How To Use’ section.

6.    To know the price – There are price comparison sites that provide you a feature to compare similar products or services and offer you cheaper options

7.    To get recent news about the company – A reader would rather head to a company’s blog as it would be more up to date and also personal in nature

8.    Because you just love their brands – Then you would rather become a fan – a feature so widely available on social networks like Facebook.

So again, really why would anyone visit a company’s website?

People aren’t visiting corporate websites because:

1.    Companies make their websites as if they were brochures online. Standard stale information with pretty images or faces. Or more like hoardings or billboards which is completely one way and non interactive medium. Websites are Just meant as an announcement board.

2.    Most corporate websites have stock images of nicely dressed young men and women either shaking hands or walking out of conference room. Honestly, hasn’t a picture of this already flashed in your mind by now. Yeah, they all appear the same – no unique identity

3.    The websites are screaming with brand messages staring in your face about just how good the brand is in delivering its promise. As a potential customer, why would I believe any reviews about that brand on its own site

4.    There is no place for people to create community or forum to interact and share their experiences about the product or service. There must be a platform where positive and negative views both are allowed and a potential customer is free to make that choice.

5.    Every corporate wants to build a rosy picture rather than a correct picture. So the websites end up with images of men and women, people of different skin colours etc basically anything that connotes that you are an equal opportunity complier and believe in fair trade. This would be an ideal thing to do if actions of that company collaborated with the images.

So what can be done about it?

1.    Host a blog: Gives user more recent news about the company and its products. Allows the user to comment and interact with the company

2.    Build Communities: This will create value. Companies can build brand specific ocmmunities so that people who have bought that product can come and discuss more about it. Also companies can share tips and suggestions on its features or maintenance or anything of value to the consumer

3.    Share positive and negative reviews: This will build up the credibility immensely for that brand. It won’t be surprising to find people calling it a honest brand buying it as they appreciate that brand value.

4.    No authoritative tone: The voice and manner of communication needs to be informative, thought provoking, appealing and inviting to consumers.

5.    Hire Windchimes Communications as consultant on social media strategy. You could start by reading more about social media and their services on their website

There are several social media platforms that can be integrated with the website. It’s important to be clear with the objective before build a website. Till then save those precious advertising rupees – coz an economic slowdown could be right down the corner!!

Essentials of a website – Part 4

Friday, October 24th, 2008

This is the concluding post of the series on essentials of a website. Do read the first, second and third segments of it.

We continue with our learnings:

1. Analytics for your website

Analytics is HTML code that you enter in your website scripts that records the number of visitors on your site. Along with that it gives out other data points like amount of time they spent on the site, which pages did they visit, the bounce rate, how many of them were unique visitors etc.

There are expensive tracking tools available that you could use or do with free ones like google analytics. This is completely dependent on your need. We felt that google analytics did the job pretty well.

2. Website Maintenance

You can sign off an annual maintenance contract with your website designer or learn to manage it yourself especially if you have regular updates. Either ways, ensure that your website is bug free and regularly updated. There should be new news during regular intervals.

3. Know when to stop

I guess this is as important as some of the other points we had mentioned. You must know when to stop adding more tools or information and get your website up. Keep a tab of features or information that you would like to add and do that after a period of 6 months. As otherwise there can be no end to updating website as there are new features and tools being churned out every day.

Lastly learn to keep an open mind, listen to suggestions, develop some patience and keep your sense of humour intact. Trust me.. you will need it

This marks the end to our third and final post of essentials of a website. Do make it a point to read the first, second and third part of the series. Also read out essentials of a blog series.

Essentials of a website – Part 3

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

This third blog post on the essentials of a website continues to share with you our learnings of developing our website. Do read the first and second post

1.    Website Designers

We are assuming here that while you will provide the content, you will ultimately hire a designer to put all that up for you. Do a profile check before getting any designer on board. Luckily in this case the work of the designer would be up already as part of somebody else’s website. Understand who will be working on your site. You could also share the sitemap with them and tell them that you are looking at them to pitch for your website. This works best if you are corporate client.

Before signing, understand and record the terms and conditions. Ensure that you have written down all that is part of the package as you will surprised how your costs have escalated from where you had started. It would be a good idea to surf several your work related sites. That will give you idea on what different features are available as part of HTML language. You could also give out reference screen shots for specific features that you have liked.

2.    Incorporating a Blog

It is common for corporate to have blogs for themselves. Blogs help in sharing recent news and quicker updates. There are two options available in linking the blog with the site. The company can create a blog and provide a link to it – which means that the user will go away from the site once he or she clicks on that link

The other option is to host the blog as part of your website. So technically when the user clicks on the blog link from the website, he or she can still access the links of the website. We have gone ahead with the second option as we would like the user to spend maximum time on our site.

3.    Cost of the website

The costs of the site depend on the number of pages you create. Typically, there is a standard rate for a limited number of pages and then on per page basis after that. Your sitemap will help you in figuring out the number of pages you will have. Remember to account for pages like sitemap, copyrights, disclaimer etc among your other business pages.

If you would like to use online images, you would have to pay for it. Normally companies like Getty Images have sections of free images provided you give them credit for it. Otherwise you would have to buy from them or get them shot yourself. This is where a good designer can come handy. Most of them have good collection of stock images that they could use for you thereby helping you reduce costs.

4.    Testing your site

After your site is ready, do a test run on it to ensure it works beautifully across platforms. First such test you must conduct is on the various browsers. The most used ones are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome among others. There are times when certain special characters don’t appear in the same manner on certain browsers. While IE stills retains highest market share in Indian market, the other browsers are catching up

Check your site also for different resolutions and different screen sizes. That will show the amount of scrolling the guy with smallest size screen will have to do. It is also important to test your site on different platforms like Windows, Macintoch, Linux etc. You can do all the tests at this site CrossBrowserTesting or leave it for your designer to do it.

Share your website with few close friends and take their point of view. We gained immensely by doing this. This is classic case of power of many. Just when you think you have got it all under control, someone gives in a valuable input that missed your mind.

With this, we end the third part of the series. Do continue reading our last and concluding part of the essentials of a website

Essentials of a website – Part 2

Monday, October 20th, 2008

This is the second in series post on essential of a website. We have learnt several lessons while creating ours and are sharing it here. Do read our first post.

1.  Content of your website

Having got your sitemap in place, the next step is to pen down content for all your pages. In terms of time, we would place this as the most time consuming activity. It is essential that one person or a particular set of people only write the content as the tone and manner has to be consistent.

The language of the content has to be in line with the subject matter. After you have finished writing everything, keep it aside for 2 days before re-reading it again. Get it read by a third person neutral to your business to check if he or she is able to understand it completely.

It is a good idea to keep the text in simple language in small paragraphs. Not many people like to read long scrolls on what you do for a living.

2.  Add visuals or videos

Content is not restricted by text alone. It is good idea to include pictures, photos, caricatures, videos etc to make the site more appealing and compelling. People prefer reading photo essays to long texts. With broadband, it is possible to insert videos – however, do not make them heavy or too long.

3.  Landing Page

The reason why we are keeping this as a separate bullet point is because it is first page that the visitor sees. Chances are that most of them will leave from here itself if the page is not optimally designed. Ensure that you have not loaded a heavy file, mostly a flash, to load. Besides your close friends and family, nobody waits for it to load. They will leave thereby increasing your bounce rate

A lot of people prefer having their entire front page as a flash. While this may look good as flash allows basic animation, your site will lose out from being SEO-ed. Search Engine crawlers don’t consider flash while crawling thereby completely missing your front page unless you do deep linking to the site. As a result, the chance of your webpage appearing in the search engine reduces dramatically.

It is not a bad idea to come straight to the point. If yours is a business site, then people have reached there with a specific objective. Make sure that your services section is easy to locate on the landing page. We personally believe that simplicity is in. Trying to put down everything your company does on the main page only puts off people.

4.  Legal clearances & Copyrights:

Needless to say but all the text that you put up on your website should be clearly legally especially if you have put up claims for your product or service. Any text put up on the website is treated as official information coming from the company. Hence it is important that all data has been verified.

At the same time, if you are putting up anything of yours that is trademarked or patented, ensure that you mention it. Also all content can be copyrighted so that no one can lift anything from your site without permission. You can view a sample of a copyright

Continue to third post with this series of blog posts on essential of our website. Do read our previous post here

The Backpacking Ninja a.k.a. our photographer!

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

There are many people who have played the role of guardian angels in our journey towards turning entrepreneurs and starting Windchimes. One person especially stands out – Aparna!

A self confessed coffeholic, travel addict and cinema lover, Aparna was our colleague, best buddy and coffee mate from our previous organization. We all quit at the same time, Nimesh and I to pursue our startup dreams, Aparna to pursue her travel dreams and travel to Latin America for six months.

Aparna, though she might not admit it, is as entrepreuneurial as they come. How else does  a woman use all her marketing guile and get her sleeping bag, her backpack, her shoes and her laptop? Oh there is a bunch of other stuff but you can read more about that on her blog. And would recommend following her blog to know about her fascinating journey through Latin America.

Btw.. did we mention that Aparna is also a ace photographer and all those lovely shots of us on our website our courtesy her?

Essentials of a Website – Part 1

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

We are starting a series of write ups on what has become one of the most important manifestation’s of a company’s identity – its website. In today’s virtual world, your website has become your visiting card that is up for view 24X7.

Many prospective clients and investors are forming their first impressions about you and your company by that. Just as you would like to look good before meeting anyone, the same applies for your website. We decided to put down our learnings from creating our website and we hope this will help you when you get down to making yours.

1.  Hosting your site

Hosting basically means parking your site on a server. So whenever someone types your site address, that person is taken to that place. So, as the term suggests, your first step would be to buy hosting space for your website.

There are several Indian (Ours was Webwerks) and International vendors available from where you can buy out space. But we have noticed that buying from American vendors directly turns out to be far cheaper. The disadvantage being that you may not get the prompt service levels that your neighbourhood vendor would be able to provide.

There are also several packages available depending upon the amount and duration for which the space is required. It would be safe option to initially go for one year option and if satisfied with the vendor services, you could then extend it for whatever period of like. Know what you would want to put on site first as that will allow you to estimate the amount of space you will require for it. Accordingly, you can select a package from the vendor.

The most critical aspect is to understand the terms and conditions of all the packages of the vendors. Do not rush into this.

2.    Domain registration of website

If you are a startup, then don’t be surprised if the name of your firm is dictated by what domain names are available for registration. Your hosting vendor will tell you whether the name you require is available or not. Thankfully there are alternate domain name extensions available besides ‘.com’ – you also have ‘.net’ or you are from India then ‘.co.in’ or ‘.in’

Registration costs of ‘.com’ are marginally higher than ‘.co.in’ or ‘.in’ Buy your domain name for longer period irrespective of whether you continue to use the same hosting vendor.

3.    Email Ids

Once you have registered your domain name, you can start creating your email IDs. Your email ids will read like ‘yourname@yourcompanyname.com’ There can be restrictions on the number of IDs that a vendor might provide depending on the package you select. Again, estimate your requirement before signing the deal.

4.  Website SiteMap

Sitemap is the most critical document of a website. It’s the blue print which highlights to the search engine about the pages that are available for crawling on your site. It is more like a tree – you start off with root which is the landing page and then move on to the branches which would be other pages that you direct your users to. Prepare a sitemap yourself as you would best have an idea of what you would like to host on your site.

Don’t be surprised if you have make several revisions. We made 6 drafts before we eventually zeroed on the current structure. After you have listed out everything, go through it with your website designer – as that person will definitely be able to value add from a technical perspective.

Hope you are with us till this stage. Move on the next part of Essentials of a Website. Remember website development is very different from that of a blog!!