information in All of B2B Knowledge Base & Discussion Board

Original Post  - Nov 01, 2007

As a case study of what makes a good website, let’s take a look at a B2C site that is aesthetically pleasing, but fails to be customer-centric.

Apple is known for the design of their products and their website certainly is pleasing to the eye. If you happen to be looking for information regarding purchasing a product, you will be escorted through beautiful images, rich information, and links to their online store. However, if you are searching for specific information about fixing a problem, how a product should work, or even making an appointment with tech support, good luck. This information is buried on their website and doesn’t even always come up in a search.

Original Post  - Oct 30, 2007

You’ve seen those flashy (pun intended) sites covered in animation and sound. Sure they seem slick and sophisticated, but do those really work in the B2B environment? Let’s take a look at some of the issues:

• According to Adobe (the maker of Flash), 99% of Internet viewers have Flash installed.
• Flash content is not accessible by search engine crawlers, making it invisible to search engines (doesn’t help SEO).

Original Post  - Oct 18, 2007

Having a website is supposed to increase your sales (if done properly). How do you know who is looking at your site and who is interested in your products?

One popular way is to put some type of login/registration requirement in place in order for people to see some type of information or content that they are looking for. This seems like an excellent idea from a sales or marketing standpoint, except now you’re dropping all pretenses of having a customer-centric website. Remember to think about what your customer wants. If they are searching for some information on your website (or came from a search engine) and have to register or login before they can get it, how many of them will just leave your site entirely (with a bad taste in their mouth) instead of giving you that information?

Original Post  - Mar 20, 2008

If you want to get a nice snapshot of what search engines really feel about your competitors, SEOQuake will probably give you more information than you can handle. SEOQuake is a free web browser extension for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. Once installed you can see information on any page you browse to either up in the toolbar or as an overlay at the top of the website in question.