How to make websites make more business sense.

1. Making Websites Business Ready
What ails Indian businesses' websites?
Clearly, a majority of websites of Indian companies are not ready for attracting
business - national or international. Business Ready websites do not necessarily
mean E-Commerce websites; if you are able to generate enquiries from your
website defines the success of your website as well. Consider the following:
• does your website have enough and regularly updated information about
your business and your products & services?
• is the website pleasantly designed with a clear and intuitive navigation?
• do you have customer interaction features such as e-Newsletters, or in
case of more complex business requirements – Customer Relationshsip
Management (CRM) tools integrated?
• Is it well promoted in search engines
Typically, all these basic requirements are missing, in most Indian websites. Most
websites have not been updated in months, if not years; and if they are, often,
lack a Content Strategy in their website, which ideally must be central to the
whole exercise.
We'll address both these issues in this article.
Requirements of Typical websites
Consider a business website, of typically any business - IT, Tourism,
Manufacturing, Exports, Trading, or Services. All these businesses need to do all
or some of the following:
• announce new products/highlight old ones
• talk about latest News and Events
• list all services offered - which may change, as your business grows and
evolves
• post Job openings
• highlight recent Articles or Case Studies
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2. • maintain your contact information (changing phone nos., etc.)
• have a SiteMap (possibly a Google compliant sitemap), which gets
updated easily
• promote this website in Google (website should be Google friendly)
• have human readable URLs which can be individually marketed (unlike
complex URLs that appear in most database driven websites)
• have an Enquiry form or a Feedback form
• send out E-Newsletters (HTML formatted with Images or Plain text -
maybe offer that choice to the customer)
• Allow people to subscribe through the website; and unsubscribe
when they receive an e-newsletter
• Manage job postings frequently, with online applications reaching different
departments within your organisation
Also, features such as Newsletters, would need to be database-driven, and
writing custom software (which unfortunately is a trend with most small Web
Agencies, inspite of several open source options available) for the same is a
risky proposition – you never know whether the company is going to be around in
the next 6 months or no.
Maintenance Costs
The important thing to consider while going for a website is how will you maintain
it in the long term? The options you have are:
• have an in-house Web Master
• outsource the maintenance to the Web Agency who designed your
website
Outsourcing to a professional web agency maybe a good choice. However, the
turn-around time and the efficiency (also the longevity, in some cases) of most
small web agencies is questionable.
Having an in-house Web Master is also not a good idea, as there is normally
huge dependence on such roles within most traditional companies. Also, the
direct costs maybe an issue, apart from the tendency of IT personnel to jump
jobs too often, is a major concern.
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3. User-Centered Design
At this stage, I must briefly introduce the concept of User-Centered design. Who
are your target audience? Which sections of the website are they likely to visit?
What is the information they would be looking for from these sections of the
website. These are very important questions to ask, before designing a website.
Why is this approach important? Well, the primary reason is about the User-
Experience you want your customer to have on your website. Your website is
after all, your face on the Web. You treat a potential customer at your office well,
but do you extend the same experience on your website? If not, you need to start
thinking about it; as this online office, works 24x7x365 and potentially invites
people from world over, which your physical office can never ever achieve.
A very good article on Information Architecture and User-Centered design is
available at:
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/design/site_building/tutorials/tutorial1.h
tml).
As part of the User Centered design, while working on the Bharti TeleVentures'
website, we figured that the most important News Highlights would need to
appear on the Home page, Investor Relations landing page, the About Us page,
and ofcourse, in the Media Centre.
In such a scenario, where the same New Highlights have to be repeated across
several pages, making manual entries in a static HTML driven website, can be an
error-prone activity, leading to broken links, typos, etc. Making updates of same
text in four different places, is a very tedious exercise anyway.
Open Source Content Management Systems
This is where Open Source Content Management Systems come in. The Bharti
Tele-Ventures' website reviewed above, is implemented using the Typo3 open
source Content Management System. Once we update a News item, it gets
reflected in all the various sections, where the placeholder for Recent Highlights
is defined.
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4. Screenshot of the Investor Relations landing page of www.bhartiteleventures.com website
A similar example occurs in Srijan's own website, where there are several pages,
with highlights of the Recent Projects. Managing this section is, with Typo3 CMS,
now as easy as entering some text in a Word Processor, formatting it and saving
it, and it gets reflected in all the pages on-the-fly.
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5. Screenshot of the Projects page in www.srijan.in
Screenshot of the CMS Solutions page in www.srijan.in
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6. Ofcourse, open source CMSs are recommended for reasons you may already be
familiar with – zero license fee, large development community, freedom to modify
source code and add custom software, and a range of benefits that open source
software brings on the table.
In the case of Bharti Tele-Ventures' website we have just made 4-5 templates for
the various sections of the website and defined placeholders for the Recent
Highlights to appear.
Once we make an addition of a News item, through the BackEnd administrative
section of this website and “mark” it as a “Highlight”, the same, appears across
all the different pages automatically, on-the-fly.
The best part about CMSs is that they make you – the end user – independent of
sometimes high-nosed, often inefficient and non-customer-oriented, and
comparatively, expensive, web agencies.
Administering and updating your website, using backend interfaces of CMSs,
including Typo3, becomes fairly simple after a few hours of training.
Here is a “scary looking” and rather “intimidating” screenshot of the Typo3
backend interface. Believe me, it only “looks” intimidating but is quite easy to
administer, after a brief training.
Sample screenshot of the Typo3 CMS backend
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7. There are several open source CMSs available out there:
• Typo3
• Drupal
• Plone/Zope
• eZPublish
• Midgard
• OpenCMS
Typo3 Open Source CMS
Having worked with Typo3 and implemented websites, intranets and written
custom applications (known as Extensions), our experience has been fantastic.
It has over 3000 ready-to-download extensions available in its Extension
Repository, which fulfill most requirements of business websites.
It offers scalability in terms that in case, you'd like to setup a Digital Repository –
such as a Document or Image repository; or that you'd like to setup an online
selling environment, you need to go in for another totally different software –
Typo3 offers core extensions such as Digital Assets Management (DAM) and E-
Commerce Shop, which allow you to scale up, without changing your platform.
A well designed architecture also, ensures that you can basically, write any
custom application using the Typo3 framework.
A huge installation base worldwide with nearly 122,000 estimated installations
made by a large development community of over 20,000 professionals
worldwide, and a fast growing community in India, a steady development
roadmap upto 2007 led by the Typo3 Association, ensure that your investment in
this open source software is safe.
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8. Who is using Typo3?
Social Organisations, Education and Research Organisations, Businesses
(Small-Medium to Large corporations) across industry verticals – tourism, online
retail selling, print and online media houses, manufacturing, large brand chains,
are all using Typo3 across the world to get competitive business advantage for
their business. Some names that may ring a bell with you are listed below:
• Dassault Systems
• Stanford
• DHL
• Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd
• Volkswagen
• 3M
• GE
• T-Mobile
• UNICEF, Germany
• Council for Indian Schools Certificate Examinations
Global Indian Businesses
So, have a fresh look at your website, see what is missing, what features you
would like to see in it, and most importantly, how can you enrich your customers'
experience on your website? Hire a web agency which not only brings on board
good visual design skills, but also helps you build a website which communicates
effectively to your customers, thus generating online enquiries for business.
Reach out! The world awaits Indian businesses.
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The author, Rahul Dewan, is the Managing Director of Srijan Technologies Pvt Ltd, India,
a Web Consulting company working on Open Source Content Management Systems
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Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License Date: 31 January 2006