Taking Your Website to the Next Level

Posted by TJ Downes at 8:23 AM
0 comments - Categories: Technical Articles

The Internet, as a business platform, has spread faster than any other medium. The ability to reach a global or targeted audience has become relatively inexpensive (compared to traditional methods of marketing) and easy. Just about every company can benefit in some way from having an Internet presence.

You have your website. It's really well designed and you receive glowing comments on how nice it looks.  It has the typical contact information, some information about your organization's services/mission and maybe news about your organization. But really, is your website working for you?

When we collaborate with clients on building a new website a focus is not just how well the site looks, but also on how well the site serves your organization. Think about your current business processes, how you work with your clients, members or vendors. What processes do you do manually that can be done automatically over the Internet? What type of communications do you have with your clients, and how much time do these communications consume? Is there a way to streamline these processes that will free up valuable staff time for something else?

Often our experience is that streamlining processes such as event registrations, data collection or report generation can alleviate some of the tediousness of a staff member's daily duties, giving them more time to focus on the part of their job they like to do. In turn, this can lead to enhanced employee productivity. The end result offers considerable benefits:

• Tedious tasks normally handled by humans are now completely automated
• Removes the element of human error from the process
• Interactions with members, clients and vendors happen faster, providing a sense of better service
• Faster and more efficient collection of data
• Reports and metrics are more easily generated
• Attracting new clients or members based upon tools or features available to them
• Increased productivity

With such a high number of benefits it is easy to understand how building these applications quickly pay off.

So how do you start?

We generally recommend that you have an idea of all those business processes that you perform in your day-to-day business which involve interaction with your members, clients, vendors or even remote offices. Also take a note of existing processes which happen via your website but require a significant amount of manual intervention to complete. Once you have documented these things talk to an application development consultant about what could be automated, or better automated. Generally, a good web application developer can identify aspects of your business processes which can be enhanced with a web application.

One last thing to note is that developing a long-term relationship with your consultant is important. The more they know and understand about your business and industry the more recommendations they can make which will improve your business.