How To Design An E-Market Site

_______________

Copyright 1999 Lightbulb Press. All rights reserved.This tutorial is excerpted from a presentation made at the Xplor International Marketspace '99 conference.

For those who actually design Web sites, many day-to-day considerations have to be thought through and worked out. In general, business strategy and purpose are what drives a Web site. Everything you see on a screen--the architecture, the navigation, the functionality, the design, the brand, the content--must be planned and orchestrated.

We've evolved from thinking that just having a presence on the Web was a strategy, to thinking of Web sites as an extension of our business--an alternate channel to the customer. It has become a medium that is expected to produce income for the company. So there has been a shift from the kinds of sites that aimed to be all things to all people to those that are focused or dedicated to one particular area of interest. And this presents a bit of a conundrum.

Think of the sites you access for a transaction, to get discount tickets or to buy something. The fact is that there are other people who are coming to the site, not to do the work of the site, but to learn about the company. Maybe they're thinking of investing or of doing business with the company. So sites have not really lost their multi-dimensionality. It's important that they serve a number of audiences. One of the challenges is: As you have a site that's dedicated to a specific function, how do you address all the audiences who will go there?

Another big issue in the strategy and development of a site is maintenance and practicality. If you leave this to people who are very excited about technology and say, "Just build me the greatest, most exciting site in the world," what you might end up with is something that is visually overwhelming with dancing images and flashing lights. The question becomes: How practical is that? At what expense are you doing it? And how do you maintain a site like that? Remember, as people keep coming back for more information and you create something that, every time you have to reinvent it, you need designers and programmers, you've just created a financial nightmare. So you have to ask yourself. Is it doable? Is it practical and can you maintain it? And at what cost?

This is a customer-controlled, customer-oriented medium. If you want to get attention, you want to get visits, you want to get business, then you have to give something. This is a very sharing medium. One of the things you should look at when you look at different Web strategies is, "What are people really giving away to get something back?" This exchange becomes part of the strategy. There is also the issue of the Web site as a window to the company.

When you go into a Web site, you're really looking from the outside in. What a company has done, to a certain extent, is open a window into its back end--into legacy systems, into programs that previously only people in the back room or employees in the company had access to. The Federal Express Web site, for example, actually takes you to the system. You're doing everything there that an employee at FedX can do.

What happens is that you take the back room to the living room by opening this window into your company. And when you do, you'd better have your ducks in a row. When you have people visiting you behind the firewall, you want to make sure you make sense. This is where we get into the whole issue of what someone called (and I hate this phrase but it is kind of funny) "antidisintermediation." In other words, now that you've gotten rid of the middleman and you've got people coming directly to the company, somebody has to package and mediate the information so people can deal with it.

The next thing to look at is the elements of the strategy. The first is content, content, content. One designer I know hit the nail on the head when he said, "Focus on food, not on the presentation." That's what people want. They want substance. They want quality. They want quantity. Sites are often starving for content. Good content keeps people coming back.

The word, sticky often applies here. Sticky used to mean the sort of feeling you got if you took your kids to the circus, sat in a seat where Cracker Jacks, Coca-Cola and bubblegum had somehow amassed and you were wearing crepe-soled shoes and you tried to get up. Sticky on a Web site is where you have a draw. You have something that keeps people coming back for more. One of the things that is driving Web site development today is that question: "Can I come up with something novel? Can I come up with something different? Can I come up with something innovative that will have people come to my site?"

Along with content, there is the issue of functionality. If there's one thing the Web is all about, it's about functionality. It's about doing--as opposed to learning or even searching. This takes us back to that Quid pro quo. It's a little give and it's a little get. Functionality works on a page level, not on a site level. We tend to think of site navigation--how you get from point to point--but think about it. When you click and link and you end up on a different page, it's almost like opening a different world. So the functionality really has to exist on each page, as well as on the site. Finally, the focus is on doing. There should be no setup, no learning. Have you ever purchased tickets online? There's no learning. What you do is book a flight or purchase a car. People love it. They don't want to waste time. And I think this sort of brute functionality, for want of a better term, is what drives so much of what is important and powerful on the Web today.

Let's talk a bit about architecture. People like a certain kind of order. They need to get oriented. So you need information that is categorized, or you need things that people can recognize and identify with. Cisco Systems Inc.'s site is a wonderful example. What Cisco has done is taken a complicated business and structured it in such a way that you can find exactly what you are looking for.

It has done this from a customer's perspective--if you're looking for solutions, or if you're looking for equipment or to get in touch with someone. It's also done this according to who you are: Are you a small company, a big company, a technology company, a user company? You scan it. You find your niche on that site and then you hit that button and the world kind of opens up to you.

--------------------------

This tutorial is excerpted from a session given at the Xplor Marketspace '99 conference and exhibition, sponsored by by Xplor International in Atlanta earlier this year. The Marketspace conference focuses on the management of documents that support the transactions of business, primarily the generation and collection of money in cyberspace.

Xplor International is a worldwide, not-for-profit professional association representing 2,900 organizations that develop and use the technology of the U.S. $124-billion document systems industry. For more information, please visit the Xplor International web site by clicking on this link or call (310) 791-9521.