Business Online

This section is dedicated to spreading awareness of using best practices while taking your business online. The write up that follows presents the case for having your business website designed and developed in a well-though-out manner. Your comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

In Pakistan, with the current Internet broadband battles under way, the penetration of the Internet is already being touted as the ‘next big thing’ after Telecom. Positioning of one’s brand or business for the current and the upcoming online fiasco is, by all means, a daunting task.

Designing and developing a website are two different paradigms. Design is subjective and prone to variable reactions, which is the best point and worst point for design. Design is supposed to be ubiquitous, like computers and technology. What does that imply? Well, to start off with, if one is ‘wowing’ the design of your website and not paying attention to what you are trying to say/sell/propose, what use is the design? The design’s job is not to take the attention away, but actually to ‘disperse’ attention in predetermined fashion. This understanding of a ‘design’s job is key to a successful design implementation.

But, all said and done, design is secondary to development.

Development not only includes the programming finesse to make a web application work, but especially for business websites with specified markets, includes the information architecture of the website. Paying attention to information architecture is as important as it is, for two main reasons:

1. Content. Content is king. As time and time again research shows, people will wade through terribly confusing design to get to what they want. The only thing that will stop them from not viewing the content of their choice if they can not find it. As the Internet matures (it still is hardly 15 years old, come to think of it), one sees a steep rise in standardized design, where design variation gives way to real, useful content.
2. Search Engines. Search engines will find the content for the people. Yahoo and Google remain the most visited sites in the world not because they are graphically designed that way, but because they have content (which is not theirs to begin with) and help people find what they are looking for. So paying attention – utmost attention – to search engine makes perfect sense. (By the way, google.com.pk is the most visited site in Pakistan – another insight into the viability of having a geographically-apparent name (DOT PK)).

One ought to put the above two factors to maximum use in not only presenting your brand online, but enhancing it. Enhancing your brand is not some fancy word I am using; by ‘enhancing’ I mean giving your brand more depth by providing more meaningful content to your market. This meaningful content may be in terms of properly setting-up your business website so that in the eyes of your market and the search engines, it stands out from literally hundreds of others that are probably targeted at providing the same service to the market.