Website as a tool
One of the most common questions asked (or should be asked) by a web design company on the first meeting is: Why do you need a website? In most of the cases the client replies: we need a site as a marketing tool. In a way it’s the same as going and buying a drill in a hardware store (just in case, every household should have a drill, etc)
Further investigating this example we come to a conclusion that by buying a drill you are actually buying holes that can be made with this drill. In order for those holes to appear you have to know how to operate the drill, outline future holes placement, have a plan how to use them. In a mean while the drill itself (just like a website itself) is just a tool that will not work unless you use it right.
Knowing that creating a website is not usually cheap let’s see what we can do to make the tool work for us. Declaring our website a tool we need to understand what kind of holes we want to get.
Let’s assume we are a manufacturing company and we produce and sell some merchandise. The target group of the website consist of two: consumers and dealers. Both groups are crucially important for the company: if the consumers don’t want our merchandise the dealers will not order it and if the dealers won’t order the merchandise then our consumers will not be able to buy it no matter how much they want it. On our website we are going to try to satisfy both groups.
Step one is always forecasting the steps of the visitor starting form the moment we get a visitor and the steps he has to take to get to the needed information.
Let’s see another example: Macy’s. Even if you have never seen their site before would you assume they sell clothing online. Obviously they know that by not selling clothing online they will loose market share. So it’s actually worse for Macy’s not to have online store then not to have a website at all.
Alright, let’s go back to our dealers and consumers. All what the dealers want is to be able to contact you at any time: phone, email, contact form on every page or at least visible link from every page.
