Web Sites Should Accomplish 2 Fundamental Goals

1. Interest Attention Desire Action What Makes a Web Site Great? AIDA Model

2. Web Sites Should Accomplish 2 Fundamental Goals • Communicate the message • Foster the development of relationships Webcast: Kellogg's Case Study: Fostering Customer Loyalty and Retailer Relationships Through Websites 

3. The AIDA Model:How to use Web Sites to Reach Communication Goals

4. Attention Challenges in E-Business • Target audience unaware of business facet, existence of an e-business or its Web site, what they do or sell • Audiences are passively exposed to traditional media such as billboards, commercials; it requires an active approach to end up on a certain Web site Opportunity • Gain attention to site by including address or URL in other media • Include Web address in advertising copy and layouts, business cards, banner ads located on other Web sites • Utilize direct email and other directed media • Design site to optimize hits by search engines

5. Interest Challenges in E-Business • Must offer compelling reason to stay the the Web site. • Homepage is first impression, but offers limited space • Site should be constantly upgraded • Length of time to load home page • Visitor should find information easily • Interface should appeal to target audience www.disney.com vs www.cnn.com To prompt audience to take action, communicate unique selling proposition and competitive advantage • Maintain high-involvement visitors by updating information often Opportunity • New technology such as frames, banners, animated GIF files, Java script, sound etc allows for more creativity, but requires more bandwidth. (Goal should be to load home page in 7 sec on 56K) • Homepages can be designed with options such as high or low graphics, high- or low bandwidth sites, non-framed and Flash or Shockwave sites allowing for sound, video, animation etc (www.macromedia.com) Kleindl, p66

6. Desire Challenges in E-Business • In order to have audience take action, must create desire • Average cost of obtaining a new Web customer is $34; incentive to have repeat customers. • Site needs to be one click away from customer’s needs • Could benefit from insights from sales people or the very people who could perceive they are being replaced by a Web site Opportunity • Targeted-email, permission marketing, push technology www.entrypoint.com and personalization strategies (ex. www.dell.com and www.aa.com) , Webcasting, cookies and tailoring web site “on the fly” • Can and should include a means of obtaining feedback from customers (email, comment section) • Tracking software can be used to look at where people go on the site, how long they stay, idea of active and dead areas on the site • Can include FAQ section Kleindl, p. 67

7. Action Challenges in E-Business • Getting people to go to your Website • Holding and enticing viewers to action Opportunity • “Build it and they will come” is a myth- so traditional media and online marketing must be used to drive traffic to your site. • Encourage action by providing strong updated content, quick downloading, easy-to-use site • Online promotional incentives: coupons, frequent-buyer programs, loyalty programs and special offers (ex. www.coolsavings.com offering personalized coupons for more than 130 national retailers to over 6 million registered households)

8. Reasons for Using Favorite Site • Ease of use: 66% • Quick download: 58% • Frequent updates: 54% • Coupons and incentives: 14% • Favorite brands: 13% • Cutting-edge technology: 12% • Games: 12% • Purchasing capabilities: 11% • Customizable: 10% • Chat: 10% Kleindl, p. 70/Forrester Research NUA Internet Surveys

9. How to Get Searched • It is important to have key terms placed into the HTML meta tags indicating the reference heading for a page. • Some search engines such as Yahoo! use human interfaces to place a site into categories, so if a business tries to spam a search engine by submitting multiple listings, it may be kicked to the bottom of a list of 2,000,000 hits and never seen. • Don’t count on the search engines to be found: URL rules determined by search engine management determine criteria for top of search placement. Rules such as number of hits, time spent at site, how often updated, number of hyperlinks, relevant links to your site, or what the whim of the day is etc. • www.Amazon.com uses links on the search engine to present books related to search topic. • Who is Searching Who? (Bruce Clay) Kleindl, p. 62

10. 3 Types of Search Engines: • Search directories: require that Web sites be submitted for cataloging. Often list most relevant and popular sites but have limited listings. www.yahoo.com • Search engines utilizing Web spiders or Web bots: collect information from sites, finding information for narrowly targeted searches but can return a very large number of hits (millions) ex. Google, AOL, MSN, Lycos www.webcrawler.com or www.altavista.com • Metacrawlers: use the databases of multiple major search engines. These are good for power searches, built combining multiple results can lead to repetitive hits. metacrawler Kleindl, p. 62

11. Web Site Design Resource • Communication Arts: Site for identifying design trends and learning what works and what doesn’t on the Internet. www.commarts.com/index.html • Web Pages That Suck: Examples of good and poor Web page design. www.webpagesthatsuck.com • NewMedia Invision Awards: Good examples of Web page and multimedia design and past award winners. www.invisionawards.com Kleindl, p. 66 and Frentzen, PC Week, p. 141

12. Search Engine Optimization Strategies Common Mistakes • Flash and Shock Wave • Because older browsers will not contain the plug in needed, these may hurt sales. • May be good for entertainment sites. • Flash and Shock Wave is very impressive to see on a web site, but cannot be indexed by search engine spiders. • Dynamic pages • Spiders cannot index some content on pages using ASP, CGI or other dynamic languages. • Make sure important pages are built only of HTML - no dynamically generated content. • Frames • Avoid them, older browsers cannot see frame pages. • Search engines do not like them and may not index your information properly. • PDF Files • Do not use them on your important pages like your home page or any other pages you want indexed. • Dedicate a special page just for them, or avoid them all together • Graphics: • Use no more than three images on one page, • Page should load in no more then 7 seconds on a 56k modem, • Use .jpeg or .gif files for images when possible.

13. Search Engine Optimization Strategies Goal: Because of popularity of these sites, strive to be favorably listed by Google, Yahoo and Inktomi…the rest will trickle in. Article: Google is god. Don’t piss her off. Additional  Tips

14. Goals For a Great Web Site: • Keep it simple. • Be consistent. • Provide clear, but unobtrusive navigation • Organize around the customer • Make the shopping experience effective • Minimize unnecessary inputs from the user • Avoid excessive download times • Make the site visually appealing • Design for common screen sizes • Keep the site updated. The above vary in degree of importance and intensity depending on site’s audience. Atler, p. 256-7

15. SEO Success "It is not the job of Search Engine Optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the web site so that it becomes an eagle.“ Bruce Clay