What is Web Marketing ?

When people ask me what I do, I say web marketing. To most people, this does not mean much. So friends, family and customers, here is my attempt to explain what I do in life, assuming that spending so much time in front of a computer can be considered a life ;-D

I use the expression “Web Marketing” to describe the use of the web for the promotion of products and services. The mission of Web marketing is to increase revenue by acquiring additional customers and by increasing sales to existing ones. It is done by the careful selection of investments in the components of the web marketing mix.

Web skills required to develop a great website

In the golden days of programming, life was relatively easy. The development of applications was for mainframes or mini-computers and required a limited set of skills. Those days are over. Today's web environment, although very rich in terms of capabilities, is extremely complex and required a very long list of skills.

This means that you cannot expect to have a great website if it is built by a couple of guys who do everything.

Is your website fast enough?

It is very hard to determine the response time of a website. If you measure it, the result will depend on the computer from which the measure is performed, on the page being accessed, on the hosting environment of the website and on a number of additional factors.

Why should you care? First of all, response time is important because web users are notoriously impatient. When a website is slow, they just go to the competition that is a click away. If you are paying ads and banners to bring traffic to your website, you are throwing money out the windows with your slow website. Secondly, since April 2010, the website response time is a factor in Google’s search result rankings.

Please Do Not Build My Website Like I Ask You

Are You Disappointed With Your Website?

Your website is not meeting your objectives. Your surveys say that customers do not like it. Your employees feel the same. Yet, it was redesigned at great expense just last year. Your web committee produced a three page report listing all your requirements. You sent a request for proposal (RFP) to four agencies and awarded the contract to a very respectable one. You did all that and nevertheless, your website is not a success. Why? Could it be that your agency developed your website exactly like you asked?

Website Promotion 101

Some organizations have websites that are almost invisible. If you search for their names in Google, you will find them but you will not see their website address printed anywhere. Sometimes, the reason is valid: their website is so bad that they hope no one will see it. If that is not the case, why not let the world know that you have a website. There are numerous options to publicize a website and many hardly cost anything. This is what this post is about.

Web Governance, Crucial to the Success of a Website

I read in the papers about the “Quebec Electronic Health Record” (EHR) project and I just cannot believe the cost and the time it takes to implement. In 2007, the Quebec provincial government spoke of an initial investment of 547 million dollars to computerize, by 2010, the entire Quebec health care network. I do not know how much has been invested so far but we're not even close to implementing this system.

The problem is surely not the technology which is well understood. The database required for the main functions is not particularly complex. The features are simple (input or data import and display). So why is it not already in place? I spoke with a former colleague who worked on the project and he told me that the problem is mostly in leadership. The project governance is simply unable to impose the changes required to implement the system.

This example made me think about the importance of governance in web investments.

Recipe for Killing your e-Business

Desjardins, the largest financial institution in the province of Quebec, has a division selling Internet payment solutions. They just started a blog and asked me to contribute. The list of my posts will be at my profile page.

My first post there is the real story of an online entrepreneur who took a number of bad decisions that reduced drastically his chances to succeed. Read on for "The Recipe for Killing Your e-Business" and make sure you do not repeat the same mistakes.

Merry Holidays and have a profitable 2011.

3 Actions to Take When Launching your Redesigned Website

When a website is redesigned, the page addresses (URLs) usually change. This causes a lot of “Page not found” errors, also known as 404 errors. It also causes a lot of frustration amongst those attempting to reach your website.

To recover these visitors and keep a smile on their faces, 3 simple actions should be taken. Most web agencies know them. The best agencies implement them. Do you know in which group your agency belongs?