Web Strategy

A report from Forrester Research, Inc. released in mid 2004 stated that e-commerce sales will increase at a steady 19 percent year-over-year rate, rising to $229 billion in 2008 from an estimated $95.7 billion in 2003. By 2008, online retail sales will account for 10 percent of total U.S. retail sales, according to Forrester.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, shoppers spent 55 percent more online in Q4 2004 than they did in the same period last year.

A well conceived web strategy is vital to ensuring that your overall marketing strategy is sound. The first step is to define a mission statement for your site detailing its overall role in your marketing arsenal and how it will integrate with other marketing tools.

Key operational issues to tackle are hosting decisions (physical connections; shopping cart, database and application technology allowed; redundancy; security and cost), design strategy consistent with brand; and selecting appropriate software and metric tools.

Know what’s important to measure; don’t get bogged down in all the data … there are tons of it. Pursue linking partnerships and cooperative/reciprocal offers with industry partners. Understand and incorporate best industry practices for web page design, e.g., if a page doesn't load in 8 seconds, you'll lose 1/3 of your visitors.

Contact Us Now to find out how we've partnered with clients to help guide their web strategy to make it a powerful and very effective component of their overall marketing plan.