News & Media

Most companies with websites don’t realise their competitors are winning the race – coming up higher in the search engines, getting more traffic, converting more visitors into buyers and generating a better return on their investment.

A Wellington-based organisation doesn’t get its website’s traffic statistics from its web vendor until it asks for them. An Auckland company can’t wrestle its website’s source code from its vendor, which subsequently goes under. Another Auckland company is billed over $10,000 for a fairly generic website redesign specification, which contains a costing with a $60,000 margin of error. These sorts of names-withheld horror stories start innocently enough …

You know your Web site needs an overhaul and you know you don’t want to do the work in-house. It’s time to write a Request For Proposal, or RFP, which you will then send out to prospective Web design firms for
bids. Be sure to also visit my article How to Write a Killer RFP (Request for Proposal) for Hiring An SEO Firm for more information.

E-mail is one of the most important and effective tools in an Internet marketing campaign, but it will only work if it’s done right. And doing it right isn’t easy–e-mail marketing can yield spectacular successes, but companies must be extremely careful about how they do it.

A website is no different from any other project: It must be thoroughly planned and managed throughout. Anything less than 100 percent effort in building a website is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Objectives must be defined, briefs written, milestones set, and tasks assigned.

The Internet’s top engines and directories account for more than 95 percent of all search traffic. Yahoo! alone commands more than half the market, and a Compaq study found that 68 percent of 500 million users only looked at the first page of results. For a top 10 search results position, the focus must clearly be on the big players. A company should start with its existing website.