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Online succes secrects
Have you realized yet that putting up a Web site and counting on your customers, investors, and employees Web browsers to do the walking just doesnt keep you ahead of the competitive curve any more? Heavy duty Web site management is becoming mandatory just to stay in the game. Companies leading in their industries know the secret to online success.
They must effectively manage four basic elements with products and solutions that complement each other. Managing large web assets - yes Web sites are truly assets - can seem daunting, somewhat like a circus juggler with too many balls in the air at one time. But it becomes manageable when boiled down to its essential elements: network performance, content management, traffic analysis, and site structure analysis. For companies struggling with a vast aggregation of sites that have proliferated over time, covering these basics is key to controlling costs and aligning web assets to business goals.
Network performance Server and network speed and reliability is vital to corporate Web sites. But the most reliable network in the world wont help a company whose customers cant navigate the site and come away thinking the company is doing a poor job of managing it. Network performance measures the network "pipes" and hardware such as server uptime and network congestion. Market participants in this space include Keynote, Mercury Interactive and NetIQ. Content Management Site content is the fuel that feeds the Web fire. Some companies have purchased and implemented systems from content management services (CMS) vendors.
Some have elected to build their own. Regardless of the method, adopting a content management strategy gets information to readers faster and spreads publishing rights throughout the organization. Distributed authoring - a centerpiece of content management - introduces its own unique challenges for ensuring adherence to corporate publishing guidelines, policies and requirements. Its a mistake to believe that implementing content management is the same as effectively managing Web assets.
A content management solution does not control external sites to which you link, or third- party providers with which a company has alliances. It also doesnt impact content in the departments, divisions and subsidiaries that have not yet adopted content management. Its not uncommon to hear someone say, "We just installed a new content management system, so we have that site management thing under control now." When the honeymoon period ends, the realization sets in.
Content management facilitates creating, storing, sharing, updating and approving content, but does not address the issues that arise after information is published. Unless a company manages all its Web-enabled content, including Internets, extranets and intranets, with one publishing system, a patchwork of methods will still exist. Content management does not have a direct link to a companýs responsibilities for privacy; it does not monitor third party links; and it cannot be programmed to manage content that has not been brought under its umbrella. The content management space has experienced significant consolidation in the past year, with major players either buying or building functionality for collaboration and digital asset management to extend their reach.
Market participants in this space include pure-play vendors like Vignette, Broadvision, Interwoven and Documentum, and solutions from the multi-tentacled Microsoft and IBM. Traffic Analysis Traffic reporting and analysis sheds light on customer behavior by looking at demographics, personalized tracking, dropout rates, conversion rates, the results of marketing campaigns and other traffic-related outcomes. Its a complex topic, and very important to gaining an understanding of how visitors use the site. But the study of traffic alone does not solve the site usability mystery.
The recent fascination with search phrases is a twist on traffic analysis. Instead of looking at click-streams - or what path people actually take to get to the site - the issue has turned to which specific words they entered into the search engine that brought them to this site.
Search engines such as Google are increasingly providing traffic pathing information to their advertisers to track the success of their paid ad placements. Fascination with "whós looking at me" began immediately after the first Web page was created. The first traffic analysis incarnation was logging hits and the second was tracking click-streams. Now traffic analysis is seeing its third incarnation, which concentrates on user behavior. Business-to-customer (B2C) sites are now focused on tracking every move while attempting to bridge these moves to off-site behavior. This is a battle that will be fought on the privacy front.
Many people do not want to give up this amount of information about their activities and are fearful of how the information will be used. Personalization is also a current theme for traffic analysis. According to a September 2003 study "Beyond the Personalization Myth" by Jupiter Research, operating a personalized Web site may cost upwards of four times the operating cost of a comparable dynamic site.
Costs come from development and change management as well as the less technical - but often more specialized - labor needed for campaign and rules management, measurement and optimization. The report also says that site operators should focus on flexible navigation and improved search functions to help visitors become their own personalization engines. The Jupiter study recognized the importance of understanding the site itself.
Site owners can understand navigation paths only by having a complete knowledge of the site structure. Traffic analysis market participants include log file analysis companies Webtrends, NetTracker and Maxamine and third-party page tagging companies WebSideStory, Coremetrics and Omniture.
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