Corporate mission and strategy must be kept in mind when developing a web site

• A web site should be designed from the internet customer’s perspective
• A web site should mature and evolve with age
• A web site homepage should primarily be a navigation tool with some sales.
• The design of a web site should be intuitive

The development of a web site must be done with the corporate mission and strategy in mind.

• Management has probably already defined the mission and strategy of the corporation. If it is important to communicate that information to the customer, do it in such a way that is clear, concise and self-evident.  The customer should not have to understand internal corporate “lingo” to realize whether the web site (and the corporation) may be of some use to them.

Web sites should be designed from the customer’s perspective from the bottom-up using “Consumer Oriented Design” techniques.

• Understand what your customer is looking for when they enter the web site and make sure that information can be easily accessed. The probability is high that the customer will arrive at a web site via a search engine or a link from another site because of something that caught their eye. This means that the customer generally knows what they are looking for before the get to the web site.  Make sure they can find it.
• The Customer Makes the Web site Successful.  Not the product.  Not the company.  Not the web designer.  If no one visits, or no one stays because they can’t find what they are looking for, the web site has failed.  Design the web site from the customer’s perspective.

Web sites should mature and evolve with age.

• No one makes a perfect web page the first time.  Determine which areas of the site are working and which are not using the statistical and tracking tools available.  These tools can show where the customer traffic is coming from and where it goes once it reaches the web site
• Keep up with the trends of the Internet. E*TRADE and Amazon.com do not have the same web site today as the one they started with.  The visual and navigation experience of popular sites must change in order to continue to look “fresh” and because customer’s show the way they like to use the web site. Make it easier for the customer to use the web site
• The marketing strategy should evolve using the statistical and tracking information available. Try different techniques and different phrases to guide customers to areas of personal interest and to new areas they might not have necessarily had in mind, but that are related to what they are interested in.  Keep what works and discard what does not.

Depending on the size and scope of a web site, the web site home-page can be a navigation instrument (e.g., Yahoo or Microsoft) or a sales tool.

• A good web site should have a small amount of sales on the home-page to peak the interest of the customer, but should primarily be a navigation tool so the customer can find what they are looking for. Internet trends show that the right column of the home-page is becoming the advertising column for the web site or the place to access additional, related information within the web site.  This design concept gives the corporation a chance to add color and a chance for the customer to venture into other areas of the site they did not expect to go upon entering.
• Internet trends also show that larger companies with an on-line presence are putting less and less on their home-page, using it more as a navigation page (e.g., Sony, Lucent, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard) than a sales tool.  Many of these companies used to have very busy home-pages that tried to sell everything they offered. Microsoft has tens of thousands of pages that make up their current web site and the home-page is small enough that scrolling is unnecessary. The home-page highlights 4 or 5 key items of interest. That’s all.
• Recently, Microsoft, IBM and AMWAY joined up and created the largest shopping mall on the net. The web site is littered with small pages (over 1500 opening day) linked together, eventually ending on a larger page that does something useful (sells something). Without clear navigation, a web site like this would be impossible to use. The site is www.quixtar.com

The design of the web site should be intuitive.  The basics of a good web site design include the following:

• A concise phrase of what this site and business is about.
• Links to destinations on your site accompanied by either a short descriptions or hook sentences to help guide the user to their destination. (this helps in placement of search engines)
• A menu bar that is located in the same place on every page that allows the customer to get back to the home-page and all other places of key importance.
• A menu bar at the bottom of the page so that the customer doesn’t have to go back to the top of the page to navigate through the web site
• A separate, dynamic menu bar that changes depending what path the user takes.
• Key words placed throughout the page so that the marketing efforts will achieve optimum results.