I firmly hope and believe that 2008 will see a significant shake up in the web design and development sector. More and more business owners are coming to the realisation that their web sites are not delivering the prospects, leads and orders they had hoped for, whilst a small minority of their competitors are cleaning up on their markets because their web sites among the few that are built and run successfully.
To succeed a web site needs to be found in search engines by significant numbers of people who could buy the products or services on offer. When they get to the web site they need to feel that the company represented by the site are credible and someone they could confidently consider doing business with. And they need to see clearly how they could take that first step towards having a business relationship with the site owner.
The emphasis will differ according to the market sector, i.e. a local provider of services will have slightly different priorities to a national supplier of products that can be purchased online but the principles are always much the same.
To build a successful web site three core skills are mandatory. Technical skills will ensure the site is built how search engines can most readily access its content; graphic design skills will create interest, impact and credibility; marketing skills will ensure the right message is delivered in the right way. I don’t believe any one human being ever has more than one and a bit of those skills so the large number of sites still being knocked out by “one man band” web design outfits are doomed to continue failing.
But even the “proper” companies producing web sites usually come from a print design background lacking technical skills or an IT background without graphic flair and so are no more effective. They either build elaborate graphical wonders, invisible to search engines, worried more about their design portfolio than the client’s profits, or they build dry, elegantly technical solutions, wonderfully efficient but jaw achingly dull.
So the change I hope for is the continuing emergence of expert web design and web marketing companies, knowledgeable about the web and its unique secrets of success. Not chancers looking to scrape a living from the web, happy to be a one-eyed king in the land of the blind!
Tony Burt
NetSecrets Ltd
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