Use of the web ‘on the go’ is increasing.  The launch of the iPhone certainly had a lot to do with this and amounts to almost 2/3rds of mobile browsing.  Viewing typical websites on screens a few inches tall became much easier but still not quite right.

But not everyone on a mobile device is seeing the same thing.  Clever people behind the web can make different users see different things depending on the device in use.  And I don’t just mean pretty colours or fewer graphic. 

A mobile version of a website can be an entirely different site in its own right with tuned functionality and special design. 

Take yellow pages as an example for a moment (and let’s pretend that we’re not all using Google instead).  Yellow’s website had a fairly complicated set of input boxes that relied heavily on type to drive it. 

Well that’s too hard in a mobile environment – even with the iPhone it was clunky. 

A mobile version of Yellow’s website is available instead and it’s got just two input boxes – that’s all – and the design is as simple and clean as possible.

This stuff has been happening quietly without most of you realising. 

We built a mobile version of Petrusma Property years ago.  If you’re on a compatible device it will automatically show you a different website. 

But why have a different mobile site?

Well, how many intricate search panels are customary in real estate websites?  Heaps!  When you’ve got a full keyboard in front of you and a big screen you’re relatively happy to be very descriptive about what you want.  But on a mobile device, forget it, it’s too hard! 

Creating the Petrusma Property mobile site wasn’t just about simpler functionality either.  The audience is different on a mobile device.  The user has different needs and exhibits different behaviour. 

We cut huge amounts of content and tuned the site down to the critical items that were relevant.  We had to think like someone standing outside a property with a mobile device in their hand prepared to invest maybe 20-30 seconds of time.

So do you need a mobile version of your site?

That’s a tricky question as it depends on what sort of content you’re delivering and whether or not it’s hard to interact with ‘on the go’. 

With the rise of iPhone-like devices it’s becoming increasingly easier to view normal websites with relative effectiveness so you may be just fine with one site. 

But if your business depends on ease of use in terms of delivering content that is critical to your users you’re going to have to build tuned websites for each platform your customers use. 

This is a bigger problem than you may realise.  With the Internet becoming more of a fabric between the community it’s not just PC’s anymore.  It is fridges, TV sets, phones, games consoles, cars and trains. 

I’d place bets that even a toilet will be connected one day!  Hooray I could flush remotely… or use the web with one hand.

My point is that whilst the range of devices accessing the web increases we need to consider the different environments in which our customers and users will interact with each other.

Users will have different needs and perhaps even different ways of physically interacting with devices – take touch screen technology as an example.

It stands to reason that any organisation on the web needs to think more broadly than just showing one web design on one device.

Take the visionary steam power of what America is doing by opening up as many government services as possible via the web ( for the greater benefit of the community) and combine that with Australia’s National Broadband Network buzz and ‘Gov 2.0’ is our national problem.  Oops… I mean opportunity.

Please excuse my optimism slurs.  I’m from the private sector.

Vision.  That’s what Barack Obama seems to have.  Issues.  That’s what we Aussies see, and particularly Tasmanians, if the recent Hobart chapter of the round tables was anything to go by.

In front of us right now is a massive opportunity to be a smarter, kinder, more connected community from government down.  Words and promises I’ve heard from many politicians in the last 2 years.

According to the gov2.net.au website its taskforce work falls into two streams.

The first relates to:

“increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information.”

The second stream:

“is concerned with encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.”

Great!  This is the stuff of dreams and is music to the ears of every web professional in the country.  But why are Tasmanians struggling with this?  Why did the round table focus so much on the issues and dangers of opening up data rather than looking for value creation?

I’ve been spruiking the benefits of opening up data systems in previous editorials and hopefully you remember views I’ve shared from visionary web leaders about the value that can be realised from mashing up data from various sources and extracting value for the community. 

Let’s solve health problems, predict trends in viral movements, gain intelligence in financial decision making, improve access to services… don’t laugh, but the classic example is the issue of Google not knowing where our public toilets are in our country!

Why can’t we get this data out? 

Commercial concerns about owning data sets and ‘they’re mine – you can’t have them unless you pay me’ stack up against internal issues resulting in organisations being too politically hamstrung to work out how to even open the door.  Add to these two hurdles what I’m calling a ‘cultural cringe to an open and connected world’. 

Where is this cringe the worst?  At the risk of invoking a covert operation to assassinate yours truly I’ll put my hand up and say ‘at the heart of state government’.  It’s often all too hard and not within mandate or budget to have such a vision.

Thankfully the national taskforce has been led by visionary people and their function is not just to provide a report but to ‘fund initiatives and incentives which may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish government 2.0 objectives.’

Unfortunately I guess our pessimistic Tasmanian stance in front of the taskforce means there won’t be many good pitches for concept projects and Tasmania may miss out on showing off our shiny new NBN roll out before the rest of the country stands up and capitalises on it.

Where are our Tasmanian internet thought leaders?

Who will drive the culture shift needed to embrace open data sets and create value in our new web future?

Anybody want to join me in a gov2.0 project pitch?

“I can get someone to make me a website for $120 a month”, says the builder working on my kitchen.  “Good for you”, I thought.

Isn’t it great that the web industry has progressed to the point where traditional tradesmen are now thinking about the web as an important part of business?  More to the point, accepting ‘pay for use’ licensing rather than ‘build from scratch’.

What’s interesting is the level of sophistication you now get from pre-packaged web deals all over the place.

Every man and his dog, or should I say every willing designer working from home, can now offer pretty comprehensive solutions almost turn-key.  Others out in web-land are ready to take care of your hosting, your content management structure, support, and even customer relations issues.  Wow!

So what is this doing to the web market?  As richer core functionality becomes expected rather than a bonus it’s logical that the baseline has changed for web development.  What once was written from scratch is becoming modular and a commodity.  As we’ve adopted the internet, and value it so much, we expect a lot more from it.

Package sites have put real pressure on the price point of custom solutions.  Custom work is now vastly more expensive and the customer benefits aren’t as clear anymore.

So is a package template website going to work for you?  Well maybe.  Think of it this way – is your business unique?  Do you believe you have a unique offering that has to be communicated in a unique way?  If not, then a package is just fine for you. 

If you don’t want to be forced into a mould then you’re going to have to think smarter.  I know most marketing people worth their salt will be standing up right now and saying that they want their client to have a unique offering. 

So it stands to reason that if you’re really serious about the web then you need a custom built site.  Right?  Well maybe not.  Find a supplier that has a strong base of technology at an affordable price yet also focuses on identifying your ‘real’ needs and then customising to suit.  That’s a smart compromise.

I fear that as the web industry matures all prospective website owners will fall into the trap of judging solutions on features. 

It’s not unusual for this to happen.  Look at Plasma and LCD TV’s.  A few years ago you’d be stoked just to have one – but now, how many HDMI inputs, what res., what refresh rate, contrast ratio…. etc. etc. 

The market for those goods has matured and hence consumers think they need to know all this techno-stuff.  They’re buying on features under the guise that this equals quality.  That’s just not so in my opinion. 

It’s also like the crazy remodelling of cheap sound systems back in the late 90’s.  Gosh!  They started making them look like something out of Aliens, sticking lights and blinking garbage all over them, and to top it off ghastly numbers to tell you how POWERFUL they were.  None of this made them sound any better.  The more discerning customers turned away and went back to proper component HIFI with as few knobs and whistles as possible.  And why?  Because those items did exactly what they wanted and exceptionally well.  Nothing more, nothing less.

So when it comes to effective web design, less ‘is’ more.  But there’s a disclaimer around that.  Doing less has to be done better (which is harder) and that means proper strategic architecture to suit users and not the confines of some package.  Buying for features at the back end doesn’t equal a better user experience even if it costs less.

So you’re bound to get a great package website now if you look carefully.  My advice is to focus on what your users need.  This will pay dividends early.

I’m reminded of a dilemma that one of our clients faces now.  A six figure investment in a custom solution that plays to the hearts and minds of his target audience as effectively as it can.  Or, one quarter of the cost for an out-of-the-box solution that ticks all the features he wants.

I ask, if it doesn’t look the part and isn’t tuned to users specific issues, how much damage will it do?  What long-term value should you place on the reputation of your brand?

Nobody’s actually asked me that in the last 6 months but this issue has stopped almost every commercial social networking project in its tracks.  I’ve lost count of how many businesses have come to me with dubious enthusiasm to push their product or service and gone home sour after picking apart the fundamentals.  Now hopefully this isn’t a reflection of my character and more so a reflection of the relatively intangible value and uncertain path to leveraging social networking for commercial outcomes rather than individual benefits.

So what’s the problem? 

I think the need for fundamental mindset shifts are coupled with marketing challenges to form two significant barriers.  That and of course the wad of cash needed to build something like a Facebook application.

When people group together to derive value from one another online I think there’s a point where a critical mass must be realised.  There’s a point where the return is clear and self sustaining – I call it social momentum.  Facebook has done it, but just because there are lots of users doesn’t mean they want anything to do with your business.

I’m concerned about how we get through this phase of web interaction from a commercial standpoint.

There’s a broad spectrum of ways of taking advantage of this movement. 

• Some people want to build Facebook-style functionality into their sites to hold richer member or customer profiles and let them do status updates, blogs, comments, and ratings… but do people really want this?  It can look great for you i.e. ‘you care’ and want to give ‘freedom of speech’ to your members or customers – but – how many of us users really want to have accounts across tens or hundreds of sites in order to contribute?  I don’t!  And so I wonder what business value is there in simulating functionality that exists all over the place anyway?
• Another example would be a brave commercial entity devoting effort to setting up a simple forum – knowing very well that this could be a political and media nightmare that damages them.  Well is that where the customer is going to put a complaint (or maybe praise) or will they vent it through rating a Google search result or some other highly visible and highly trafficked area?  In this case the brave organisation may end up with a disused forum that has moderation staff allocated to it…  It is tough to know where you’ll get the value from.
• If you were a real estate company you could build a Facebook application that let prospective home buyers display and rate properties they were considering from you.  But I don’t think these things work for commercial entities because the data is so limited and consumers don’t work in such narrow channels – they’d want to list properties from multiple agencies.  So if you were a real estate company you’d be better off investing in building a universal application that showed your competitors too.

So we hit on a nerve here. 

To do something successful you may have to shift your thinking and be open to abuse, criticism, supporting your competitors, sharing secrets and so on… and maybe give benefit to someone other than yourself.  But that’s kind of the essence isn’t it?  If you’re doing something in the social sphere then you need to play to the need of the masses and not that of your organisation.

Will the brave be the ones that are rewarded for their risks in this open new world?  I think so. 

If I could give you advice on this problem it would be to play to your own strengths as an organisation and not fear competitors working alongside you.  Use your brand credibility to build something interesting and of social value and the seemingly intangible return will be channelled via increased exposure and association with something hopefully cherished by your customers.  But what that is exactly will need great consideration and advice.

Considering that blogs, forums, and feedback tools are cheap functions to buy then it has to be worth a punt at face value.  Just don’t expect it to work without a serious marketing push, a well seeded base from which to operate, and some ongoing investment.

Great!  But who uses it, and how?

The number of times we come across poorly functioning websites that don’t meet user expectations is far too common.  There are some real shockers but some can get away with it. 

If you’re selling a Widget online and it’s red or yellow, and does ‘stuff’, then you promote how ‘cool’ those colours are, explain ‘stuff’ and ask for the cash.  Easy right?

But what if you sell a ‘Widget’ and then an unrelated ‘Service’ alongside it?  Well your delivery is unclear.  Your users wonder what you’re really on about.  Do they trust you?  Will the Widget sell as much as it would in a dedicated site?  Probably not.

And, what if you have 10 different Services from different business units and each of these has a range of Widgets they also need to push?  How effective will that be?  There’s an overarching issue in having lots of users with contrasting needs and behaviour patterns.

We end up in a game of ‘steering chances’ as we’re not solving one problem, but many.  

We can only aim to serve a balance and try and appeal to the triggers of each group of users.  We have to find a balance otherwise we’d be building 10-20 sites instead of one; creating a whole host of other problems.

So how do we try to do this?  We have to profile users, match products and services to their needs, understand how they want to interact and what they expect.  On top of this we need to understand if we can stick it all in one bucket without overly compromising on the delivery.  If we mess this up the whole site will be poor at delivering everything.  Oops!

Consider a commercial organisation with a range of business units.  These are sometimes well marketed and understood by the user even before they press enter.  So maybe consumers know your offering – in most cases, they have some brand association, some recognition in the back of their mind – if it’s a great brand it will be front of mind… Organisations that are well known offline have a much easier time dealing with their users online.

But sometimes a brand is not well known. 

Take a large government department as an example.  They are often delivering multiple business units that sit together for ministerial reasons rather than consumer reasons.  What does a user expect of those sites?  They provide so many different services and products.  Consumers just won’t get it. 

Government department sites commonly aren’t marketed clearly to the consumer in offline media either.  The user expectation isn’t set.  When the user lands on these sites they need the story to be told, there’s a message to deliver, they will be faced with so many different business units and initiatives all fighting for attention, and worse, there’s usually a bunch of policy and stale information that the government is obliged to push to them.  How on Earth can sites like that be effective? 

The only way to get a result with a large and broadly complex site is to architect it from the ground up to meet user needs and behaviour, not those of the organisation or how it functions.

These large and cumbersome sites have often become so hard to manage and so distant from user needs that the only path forward to is take a lot of steps backward first.

Start with usability analysis, scope business needs and user needs, profile the users, develop a plan to service their needs and have a rationale in place to test EVERYTHING against it all the time.  When you’ve built it – go and test it – and then get ready to go back through it all over again whenever something changes in your organisation.

Better than 2 new front teeth?  Well maybe, I don’t know, as it depends on your smile agenda but what I do know is that with the advent of yearly financials, budget forecasts, staff reviews and accounting preparations there is a critical series of reports which are gaining increasing attention at senior management levels, home based businesses and even not for profits across the world.

 Put the pin in the right targets with Google’s Web Analytics.

Your website reporting is soon to take on a more proactive role within your business and if you or your business has not stopped to understand your web visitor’s behaviour then perhaps the resolution needing most work for the 09/10 financial year should be to take on the power of Web Analytics.

What you do with the reporting can make or break your online aspirations – no point in collecting pages and pages of data, pretty graphs and countless statistics if you fail to understand and indeed act on the findings.

Ploughing through your web analytics can be time consuming, draining as well as frustrating especially if you haven’t quite worked out what all the facts and figures mean…let alone plan to improve user visitation behaviour and usage patterns.

At Future Medium we use 5 key analytics ‘must do’s and these form the backbone of our client analytics training.

• TIP 1: LANDING PAGES

Often what we see on our sites tends to excite us, our staff and our friends but what behaviours are the site visitors exhibiting?  If you install Google’s free Analytics into the code of your website you can see at the click of a button how effective your pages are to everyone outside of your peer group – the group of people that really affect your websites ROI.

If poor percentages are showing then consider the effect of the page’s message, the call to action, even the effectiveness of a recent AdWords campaign.  It’s not all doom and gloom though – if the bounce rates are disconcerting don’t despair – use it as a catalyst for change…or at the very least a reason to visit Google’s free Website Optimizer – this tool is invaluable and can really improve website visitation and conversion.

• TIP 2: GOAL SETTING

Not the 5 kilos to be lost before the summer swimsuit season – but the goal setting function found in your Google Analytics account.

From our experience most of the websites we work with have more than one goal, the idea is for you to identify all the goals then go about and measure them.  Need a hand?  Consider customer behaviours that assist your business; online loyalty, offline sales, online sales, contact us, newsletter signups page – think hard and make the necessary changes to your goals.

The summation is simple; whilst you cannot set a goal to create visitor loyalty you should create a more solidified aim – ‘our website will see 50% of visitors return more than once in any given month’

It’s easy to look at your analytics data and know you are bringing in the business but how good would it be to use industry benchmarks to set some goals and grow your online presence?  By enabling benchmarking in Google Analytics, you can view metrics for similar sites within your category such as real estate sales.  These benchmarks enable you to identify areas of opportunity relative to the performance of your competitors.

• Tip 3: BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking, the word either excites you or frazzles you.  How is your website stacking up against similar industry organisations, well with the tooling available through Google you can easily gain external context to your online performance.

It’s easy to look at your analytics data and know you are bringing in the business but how good would it be to use industry benchmarks to set some goals and grow your online presence.

By enabling benchmarking in Google Analytics, you can view metrics for similar sites within your category such as real estate sales.  These benchmarks enable you to identify areas of opportunity relative to the performance of your competitors.

Did you know benchmarks are available for bounce rates, actual visitors, page views, average visit time, page views per visit and even a percentage of new visits both locally as well as from abroad?

• Tip 4: UNDERSTAND WHAT PEOPLE SEARCH FOR

How do people find your site?  What keywords do they regularly use to get there?  The trick here is realising that these keywords aren’t necessarily what they wanted to use – more so the ones that were actually effective.  Consider if you sell used cars -  but your site is not optimised for the keyword ‘used’ but you are well optimised for ‘car sales’ – the analytics will show great search traffic for ‘car sales’ but not ‘used car sales’.  This doesn’t mean your users are only searching for car sales!  Whilst useful in understanding some of your user behaviour you really need to know your customer well to know what they want.

• Tip 5: UNDERSTAND AND TRACK WHERE YOUR VISITORS GO

Analysing paths through site content is very important.  Whilst page popularity is essential as a metric it’s more useful to know how the users move about.  Take a contact or enquiry page as an example.  What’s the most common page that was viewed prior to landing on a contact/enquiry page?  Hopefully it’s a product view or a services description that inspires them.  If it were commonly a page about FAQ’s or service faults then maybe it tells you that users aren’t finding what they need.

Are your customer relationships a critical success factor in your business?  If so, read on… 

Customers are evolving and their comfort with the web is changing daily.  Right now they expect added value functionality online, to be empowered to publish content, and to communicate with other like-minded individuals through online communities.  They demand personalisation and networking which in turn unleashes the amazing power of ‘collective intelligence’ whereby groups of users share, learn, and improve their capabilities together.

The web should be an essential part of your ‘customer engagement’ strategy.  Properly embraced, it will allow you to create a fantastic brand experience for all customer segments.  It will become an integral role in operations and strategy, in particular: customer service, marketing, market research and product development. 

Where are things going in the next few years?

Let’s look at the history of the web so far:

• ‘Web 1.0’ is now understood much as The Document Web. 
• ‘Web 2.0’ was agreed to have brought us richer functionality and user driven control of their experiences. 
• ‘Web 3.0’ is the DATA web – and it’s time to mash it up!

Web 3.0 carries the vision that all data will be consumable and open for use across numerous applications in mash-up’s.  The term ‘mash-up’ describes the merger of various data sources and web functionality scavenged from various sites to create ultimately powerful tools and useful experiences for users. 

Consider that you have a range of data available to you right now: financial transactions, investments, personal calendar, travel details, etc.  Plus you have access to various news media such as current events and natural disasters, weather, ASX announcements and currency market shifts.  Your health records are with your doctor but what if you could source them electronically.  You may even be on Facebook and have access to information about your friend’s … the list goes on. 

Imagine all these data sources being open and able to be reused in multiple ways in your own and other applications; mashed-up.

Imagine pivoting around a point of data such as a day or a bank transaction and observing what you were doing on that day… or where you might have been when you wrote a cheque.  You might see photographs of that location – they might be tagged to say who’s in them… or you might want to use Google Street View to have a look around…  You might see info about the companies nearby, their logos, and summaries of their services or their contact details.  Maybe this is useful in disputing a fraudulent transaction.

Imagine contributing your health data to doctors so they could track the emergence and movement of viruses and compare these to weather patterns, air travel patterns and demographics of the population.

The future of the web holds many possibilities and is very exciting.  In a Web 3.0 world your company’s services and data streams need to be available for customer consumption.

The challenge now of putting data on the web is that it needs to be available for all kinds of things – to all kinds of applications…  Users will come to expect this of you and your competitors.

Have you worked out how to improve customer stickiness and customer acquisition through the web?

Future Medium thinks BIG on the web – but maybe Kevin Rudd thinks even bigger!

What does the National Broadband Network proposal mean to consumers and suppliers of internet content and services?  Well,  when it all comes down to it, as providers of website and web applications we’re essentially concerned with two things:

1. content delivery, and
2. service provision.

The web as we know it is subtly changing every day. I like to think of it as an organic creature that grows and evolves to consume available resources in new and interesting ways (and yes I hear Terminator noises and picture Skynet as I write this . )

What does this evolution mean to us?

• To the consumer it’s an ever changing way of communicating or accessing services.
• To the business it’s new opportunities to access customers – be it enhanced service functionality or simply new business methods becoming viable.

We’re not looking at an overnight change here though.

Right now there isn’t much rich content available – unless downloading illegal movies is your hobby – so we’re looking at an investment that probably won’t see revolutionary differences to consumers in the first few years if at all; think of it as an essential evolutionary step instead.

The National Broadband Network has the potential to be the backbone to a far more effective way of communicating and doing business.

What’s of interest to us is the relative haste with which internet content has improved in line with available bandwidth over the years.

Go back only a few years and recall the relatively simplistic content available on the web – and compare that to the richness we have now.  Take YouTube as an example, a short while ago such an application would have been far less interesting given the time it would have taken to access content.

With super fast broadband our clients can put their hand on their heart and say “yes let’s go ahead and build a more interactive experience” knowing that 90% of the country can access it properly. That’s really exciting!

Take the tourism industry as an example.  Imagine tourists being able to have convenient access to uploading high definition videos of their own experiences in our state.  We would gain access to immediately relevant content that could be virally shared – ala YouTube – to promote our tourism industry.  Similarly, our tourism operators could deliver rich multimedia experiences that reduce barriers to purchasing/booking. Reducing barriers to rich content sharing – in this case – can offer great economic returns. The National Broadband Network can make this a reality.

Whether or not the business case is there for this being a financially sound investment in the long term vs. wireless technologies is certainly another discussion.  I’m not going to get too wound up in that sort of debate.  Instead, I’ll look at this as a major step in the right direction and work with our clients to find ways to leverage this new power.

I’m reminded of Tim the TOOLMAN Taylor in this and recall his “ugh ugh hmmmph – powerrrrr” sort of outbursts.  I wonder what Jeremy Clarkson would make of this pursuit that he’d probably call “the quest for more internet’s”. (Plural intended).

It seems that the process of “getting a website” has apparently altered dramatically in the last 8-10 years.

Expectations have increased from “Can we have it tomorrow?” to “I wanted it yesterday…”, before they even take the time to let you know what business they actually work with, or what scope was including in this apparently completed project.

A simple analogy; building a website is like building a house; if the foundations are lousy (in this case, some seriously smart strategic planning and considerations of target audiences) then good luck selling it in the future (or living in for that matter!).

Admittedly, the development of advanced technologies including open source platforms (content management systems included) and the ability to “piggyback” off other already developed rich media (YouTube, Facebook etc) significantly reduces the development scope as opposed to recreating the wheel.

The most important issue I feel needs to be highlighted here is ongoing maintenance (and importantly budgetary considerations). Finally reaching that launch date (a true celebration in our office) and setting the beast into the wild does not mean that everyone can turn their backs on your beautiful looking web presence. you spent months planning and designing. Think Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, news updates, campaign materials… the list goes on!

I myself once significantly underestimated the input required to manage a fleeting web presence (it only had three pages…), and only ended up with disappointed users, hosting bills that did not surmount to a decent ROI and a truck load of abusive emails!

So today’s tip?

If you are going to setup a web presence;

• Be prepared to invest some serious time and money into it, because otherwise, you’ll end up with a burden, some unhappy customers and an endless financial black hole.

Continuing on from last week’s article we’re going to help you with selection criteria for future proofing your online presence. Wikipedia eloquently states

“The phrase future proofing describes the elusive process of trying to anticipate future developments, so that action can be taken to minimize possible negative consequences, and to seize opportunities.”

The web and web technologies are ever changing; always evolving. Amusingly for those of us in the industry it seems as if the only constant is change. Consumer behaviour changes in part as a response to emerging technologies. We adopt new ways of doing everyday things. What may once have been a geek’s playground indeed tends to become a common tool or product that even your granny knows about. Take YouTube and Facebook for example.

Evolutionary trends and fads aside, your investment must generate return. You should expect a clear and tangible gain in efficiency, improvement in service, or measured exposure of your brand or initiative on an ongoing basis. Old hat measures of site traffic are not much more than a pat on the back telling you something is happening…. but what? Did you plan clear and measurable goals to deliver return on investment? Do you report on these at regular intervals and plan actions to tweak or change the course of your digital strategy accordingly? Were you encouraged to seek out integration points in your traditional business when you built your web asset? Did you integrate knowledge of your current user behaviour and determine how to keep an eye on shifting needs?

Diagram of various web criteria

Why have I raised these issues now you ask? This is a selection criteria piece, not crystal ball gazing or a rant about performance. But is it? If we look at the obvious criteria such as your supplier having: a rapport with your industry needs, a commercially sensitive design team, and a flexible but robust development approach – what are we left with? Quite a lot actually!

Considering the above issues, you’re going to need access to a proven methodology for planning success, an intuitive approach to user needs analysis, ongoing support by someone who ‘gets it’, proactive encouragement to understand emerging technologies, targeted digital marketing assistance, performance monitoring, and auditing of site structure and content strategies. On top of this you’re going to need to work with someone that not only ‘looks forward’ but ‘leans forward’.

Consider innovation in the context of the ever changing landscape of the online world – it’s hard work. Innovation in our view should be a part of the supplier’s culture. Innovation should be something ingrained in their every move; planning for the future whilst also creating it.

Do you now think differently about the selection criteria of your new project or existing web asset? I hope so. Don’t forget your budget will need to be reflective of the ongoing nature of the investment too.