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Why not be exceptional?
A well-designed
Web is important
to your company
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Our e-BZZZ team can produce a business or professional Web presence that will be praised by your peers and customers alike. We will surprise you with the quality and value you will receive.
What really makes up an outstanding Web presence? Four of the most important elements are design, security, performance and usability.
1. Design — Understanding an organization's strategic vision is essential to designing an effective Web presence. A winery's needs differ substantially from a mortgage company's.
A. Strategic Vision — The designer must, in many instances, help a Web client define in concrete terms the future vision of the organization's products and services, users/customers, market / segment / industry, and geographic markets. Each design decision flows from these definitions.
B. Balancing Act — Page design is a balancing act that must take into account not only beauty but performance. Today's visual society requires a degree of beauty, but not at the expense of lengthy page download time. Today's Web browsing public also expects a degree of interactivity. They have a desire to be involved in making something happen, perhaps initiating an online chat with your customer-service representative or causing menues to appear by passing a mouse pointer over an icon.
2. Performance — Since many of your customers or clients are still using dialup accounts and modems, content complexity, such as a dozen or so whiz-bang graphics of significant size, can render a page too slow for a prospective customer. A Web page with even limited complexity may not perform well for customers in another part of the country. Performance also is affected by:
A. Number of Server Hops — Your browser may be only six server hops from your Web host. Someone across the country may have 18. Some of these servers may be slow to respond for a variety of reasons. If viewers can't download your page quickly, they may click and be gone.
B. Server Capacity — Your content may be located on a server with too many other Web sites or with a site with heavy activity. Heavy activity on one or more of these Webs can slow the whole server down.
3. Security — Web surfers and customers are leery about furnishing private information (everything from credit-card numbers to email addresses). If you fail to provide proper security for this information, your business could suffer continuing loss if this information becomes compromised. Publicity of the occurrence can be more damaging than the hacking. Points to understand:
A. SSL Is Not the Exclusive Answer — SSL (secure socket layer) provides a method for encrypting information you send from your browser to a database when you enter personal information. The information may be safe while being sent to your Web's database upon your host's server. But the server must be well protected from hackers who are always trying to break in. Every data-storing component of your site should be protected.
B. Server Security — Changing well-known passwords, disabling directory viewing on older operating systems and using security-scanning products are a few of the methods necessary to ensure customer-data security.
4. Usability — One definition for usability is to provide everything
a potential customer needs in one place where it can be accessed immediately. What are key usability features?
A. Easy Login — Log in with the little effort and retrieve a forgotten password with ease in the same location.
B. Easy Navigation — Travel to any important location on the site, usually with a single click, and return just as simply.
C. Easy Purchase and Checkout — Enter required information without being intimidated or without having to reenter it when you visit the site again. Purchase and check out usually in three clicks.
D. Easy Search and Find — Search the site and find anything with ease.
E. Onsite Help — On-sight help at its best includes live chat, ideally from every page, so customers feel well cared for and that help is always readily at hand.
What makes a truly exceptional Web site? Features that delight and never disappoint, that anticipate visitors' needs and eliminate delays to their achieving their aims. Does this sound like what you would be looking for in a Web site?
We, at e-BZZZ, hope you will ask us to assist you with your quest for a truly outstanding Web presence. |
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