Website maturity model

Some websites are hopeless, some are OK and some are great. How’s yours?

If you google "Maturity Models", you will see that there are many such models. At the top of my result page is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) by Carnegie Mellon University. Further down is Gartner's IT infrastructure and operations maturity model. Not to be outdone by such small organizations, I have come up with my own maturity model for websites.

The CMS trap and how to avoid it

Practically every website built in the last few years includes a CMS (Content Management System). This functionality allows website owners to update themselves the content on their website. It is fantastic because it removes the dependency on the webmaster, the IT guy or the agency.

Mobile and E-Commerce Strategy

The use of smart phones and other mobile devices is increasing rapidly. In view of this general trend, what mobile strategy should you focus on for your e-commerce site? Would it be worth it for you to develop an iPhone app? Would a mobile site be better? Should all your products and services be available on a mobile device or just a few? These are some of the questions we will try to answer here.

Google+ and Organizations

At the end of June 2011, Google launched its own social network, oddly named Google+ but also referred to as G+ and Google Plus. Within a month, 20 million profiles had been created, many by social media experts (yes there are a lot of those).

How should your organization respond to this new social network?

Foursquare and Gowalla will disappear by the end of 2014

In my French blog, I predicted the coming death of Foursquare and Gowalla by the end of 2014. Some of my friends who are experts in social networks disagreed. Of course, those guys have hundreds if not thousands of “friends” in multiple networks. To me, they are not what I call “ordinary” web users. They are geeks with the latest gadgets always on the lookout for new stuff.

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.