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Put your business plan in plain site
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Having a good, informative, easily navigable website is key to any company's success in the current chaotic economic climate. How can you improve yours? Adrian Weckler reports.

It's very simple: your company needs a good website. One that gives every available piece of information about your services. One that is clear and easy to navigate.

And, most importantly, one that allows a trading transaction if applicable. And your company needs this right now. Why? Because with the economy turning ugly, much of the cost of doing business offline just won't be affordable any more: the lunches, the site visits, the personal time that your clients demand.

According to Forrester, only 10 per cent of Irish companies use their websites as an active part of their business activities. That's less than half the western European average, and under a third of the American and Canadian figure. The reasons that British and American companies give for having an integrated web strategy are: a more efficient business channel (41per cent), lower costs (38 per cent) and customer or partner satisfaction (29 per cent). In these countries, the fax machine is dead, and phones are used by those who are reporting in sick for the day.

Quite simply, the last decade's economic boom has allowed Irish firms to get away with not having a good online operation. The coming five years will change this radically. So here's what to do.

Make crucial information easily available

On Superquinn.ie, you have to delve deep into the corporate section to find out the opening times of different branches. Yet this is surely one of the main items of information any visitor might look for.

Use tried-and-tested familiar website formats

If you're running a car sales website, don't experiment with a radically different design to cbg.ie or carzone.ie. That's what people know, so anything that deviates strongly runs the risk of wasting unfamiliar customers' time.

Make your site usable with all main browsers

While Internet Explorer still dominates the web, Mozilla Firefox now holds almost 15 per cent of the browser market, so make sure that your site works f lawlessly with it. Don't ignore other systems, either - amazingly, Bank of Ireland only configured its online banking site to work with Apple's Safari browser this summer, losing years of possible custom.

Make navigation clear and simple

"Ultimately, visitors know within seconds whether this is a hit or a miss and, shortly afterwards, they decide whether they are in the right place to find what they are looking for," said Colin Meagle, managing director of Continuum.

Michele Neylon of Blacknight, a Carlow-based hosting and domains company, said: "In most business websites, the navigation is forced - you're expected to go from point A to point B to point C."

Give details of who runs the company

In a culture such as ours, this gives the visitor a degree of confidence in the site: if you're willing to put your name, picture and contact details up, you're a little bit more accountable.

Don't use fancy Flash-based intros

"Intros are a waste of time, visual masturbation," said Neylon." Just get to the point."

Don't get carried away with search-engine optimisation costs

Gartner estimates that 90 per cent of Google searches are abandoned after the second results page. Even if you invest in optimisation with one of the many decent firms out there, you have no guarantee of a first-page Google ranking, unless your area is extremely niche. So invest a little, but not a lot.

Don't use web forms as a primary means of contact

People hate web forms. They have little confidence that they will be responded to promptly, and they suspect they will be put on some e-mail marketing list.

Don't use tiny font to emphasise the pictures

Why do so many websites use tiny fonts? It's not clever or trendy. It's just obstructive.

How to get ahead in online race

How much should a company spend on a website?

"Recently, what we have experienced is that the scope of the project has been reigned in by a company executive," said Stephen Murphy, of web design firm Web factory." This is a natural reaction, as they feel that spends of €50,000 or more on a website are unwarranted. But there is a definite business case for an online investment which clearly shows the payback within a certain period.

"[One of our clients] Bord Gais Energy Supply has migrated a significant amount of business processes online and its site is now handling a variety of payments online. The user now comes to the site to pay a bill, submit a meter read and so on."

It's a ruthless world and first impressions count. What is the most important online element - design or functionality?

"Your customers often need many things from a single website and the final design is often a compromise,’' said Colin Meagle, managing director of Continuum, a web development company. "For example, customers need to be assured that your company is professional in your area. They also need to be informed on your products and services, sometimes in a highly detailed way.

"They need to be reassured that your site - and firm - is trustworthy for online purchasing. They also need to be comfortable and confident navigating through your site architecture, need to see that your site is current and need to be responded to instantly when they click anything."

Sectors waiting for online innovation

Construction: according to the Construction Industry Federation, fax machines and telephones are still the primary method of communicating orders and other important business details." A lot of people higher up in the bigger suppliers and contractors would be in their 50s and older, and are still more comfortable with the older ways of doing things," said one official. "Their sons and younger managers are different, but they tend to go with the work practices laid down by senior management."

Health: although hospitals have begun rolling out digital terminals for doctors to input patient information, there is still high resistance among the medical profession to bringing systems online. "It's not just doctors and unions who have a problem with it, it's patients," one Phibsboro-based general practitioner said. "With the rash of laptops being stolen and data being leaked online, they wouldn't stand for an online system." Fine, blame the patients. But with all that paper floating around, administrative costs will continue to soar.

Retail: despite more online Irish shops, several large offline retail chains still refuse to move any business online. Heavyweight retailers such as Dunnes Stores, Currys and Marks & Spencer simply aren't using the internet to sell their goods. In the technology arena, major chains such as Currys and Harvey Norman have yet to follow their counterparts in Peats, in establishing online channels to compete with Elara, Komplett and the growing number of online specialists.

When big companies get it wrong

Dunnes Stores (www.dunnesstores.ie)

Dunnes' website is clean, has great information on almost everything it sells and is easy to navigate - but you can't buy anything on it. This is the equivalent of showing a six-year-old girl the Christmas range of High School Musical accessories and then telling her to wait until the January sales to get them. It doesn't make any sense at all: surely Dunnes, the great Irish retail trader, has higher ambitions than this?

Marks & Spencer (www.marksandspencer.ie)

Unfortunately, Marks & Spencer is one of the large multiples that commits the ultimate ‘up yours' to Irish shoppers: it doesn't acknowledge Ireland. Instead, typing in its dot.ie address simply redirects the user to its British site, where everything is in sterling and it refers to its ten Irish outlets as being part of the ‘UK' (while still not delivering here from its useful online shop).

CRH (www.crh.ie)

Although its design is clear and accurate, CRH's website is not without its irritations. Because the multibillion euro Irish firm has so many subsidiaries, it relies on links to those websites for business to them. But some of these subsidiary web links are either bad links (such as its US concrete firm Oldcastle) or are not given (such as Clare-based Clogrennane Lime), no help to potential new customers.

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