Our firm is retained as lawyers and consultants for five websites currently under development. Having done this work since the mid-1990s, our collaborators and I know how to keep it simple, economical and effective.
With a client’s permission I’m sharing below a recent email from a long-term client about her company’s experience in seeking results from online presence. I’ve removed identifying information.
Some background as you read the email:
- Its author has an accounting role in her company
- Her company is a long-established apparel retailer with a chain of outlets
- She attended our Smart Use of the Web luncheon in August 2005
- For her company she has long sought an improved presence online
“It’s been a long time since we last communicated!! Just thought I would drop you an email about your article on online retailing [Lawyers for Online Retailing in Australia].
It was very useful to me. Thanks for the “shopping list”.
I’m a bit nervous about the legal side. [LAW FIRM] are looking after this for me but it’s good to have a second reference point.
As you know we sold the [NAME] business more than a year ago. We are about to launch our new [BRAND NAME] website soon. The existing one gave us a presence online, but was not up to scratch and was not doing our brand any favours
Anyway, I was given the project manager role for the new one and it has been an interesting process. It was not so easy to find out how to approach it – the amount of information out there was not “organized” into nice little text books that I’m so use to referring to. I found a good source on the web and resorted to basic business planning which was really the key to it all. The rest fell in place once I realized that online development was just another business strategy and required the same sort of due diligence.
I must say that most people who want to start an online business think it is some sort of magical technological software that will make them millions. So their approach starts off wrong and the result is therefore wrong (like our first site).
It really belongs under the marketing umbrella for us. Although we are going to sell online, it’s really just another brand building exercise. We also found a good developer who has the same approach to website design and development. We are using [WEB DEVELOPER NAME]. It has a great team and we are all working very well together.”
For improving her company’s online presence, a key insight for the email’s author was to think of web development as online business planning. It can be many other things, but the business planning perspective is useful for business websites.
Another valuable takeaway from this email testimonial is that just having a website is not good enough.
It has taken years, but the author’s company has finally worked it out for itself in building a site that finally ACTUALLY WORKS FOR ITS BUSINESS.
Call us to discuss the opportunity you see for your retailing (ad)venture online.
Photo credit: Henrik Michaelian,
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