 Are
you communicating effectively?
In essence the Internet supports 4 types of
communication: messages, commerce, information and entertainment. The first step in
creating an "internet presence" is to decide which of these broad categories apply to
you. Then you should list your objectives in order of priority. Although almost
anyone could visit you online, you need to know who
your target audience is and where they are. You should include some sort of benefit for your
visitors (for example useful 'free' information as offered on this page). You
also need to include effective communication (forms, telephone numbers. email
addresses) and ensure that responses are fast. Crucially, you need to audit your
website regularly to know who is looking and what they are looking at. This
information should be used to target your online advertising and promotion more
effectively. Web marketing can be powerful and relatively low cost but is ,
unfortunately, not "fit and forget". The
thinking behind an online presence
The style and layout of web pages (also called documents)
draws heavily upon the far older publishing world of newspapers and magazines.
This is unsurprising, since we are all now so familiar with printed matter that
we have a "feel" for how a page of text and pictures should look and
where different items of information are likely to be found. So, like most
publications, websites carry an index or menu and cross-reference
themselves or other documents. Computers used to display web
pages can present a wide variety of different media (animations, movies, music
and so on). Hence the pressure was immediately intense to have the world wide web support
audio-visual presentations. At the same time there was a demand to support all
kinds of interactivity including information searches and financial
transactions. Today's web can do all these things and as a result there are more
than 2 billion online documents the web browser can access. There is no
shortage of quantity, but the same cannot be said of quality...... If
you are going to communicate effectively in this vast "cyberspace" you
need to think very carefully about key questions:
-
What are your aims and objectives in having an online
presence?
-
Can you rank these in order of priority?
-
Who is your target audience in terms of interests and
abilities, needs and regional location?
-
What types of communication activity do you need (messaging,
informing, trading, entertaining)?
-
How are you going to manage / maintain your online presence?
-
How are you going to stage it / phase it / pay for it?
Only when you have fully considered all the above issues should
you approach the issue of Web design (or even to make a decision whether you or the Internet is
ready for your type of communication!).
Web design
Whatever form your online presence takes, you should aim to make
it a creative communication (in the sense of creating a benefit for you as well as your
visitors). This means it should always include some form of feedback which tells
you the number and nature of your visitors and their degree of interest or
approval in your site. If you aren't actually selling something directly using
your site you should aim for some other form of transaction to be possible. Try
to arrange your site so that visitors can react to your content to provide you
with valuable information and allow them to leave your "presence"
wiser than they were before!
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