The answer to this question could determine the failure or success of all your web marketing efforts. That's because ownership of the company's website is often claimed by multiple parties within an organization. Conflicting organizational ownership isn't a good thing; corporate infighting can not only decelerate progress, but also result in ineffective compromises. A whole lot worse is when the incorrect party runs the thing. Imagine if your company's finance department ran your website; no doubt it would be extremely cost-effective, but at the expense of meaningful content or attractive design.
While that's a serious example, similarly inappropriate results will occur if site design and management are surrended to parties who don't have an overt customer focus. In most organizations, website development is a joint effort between the marketing, design, and technology departments. While all three parties have much to contribute, just the marketing department thinks with the customer in mind. Having either the design or technology folks take control could be disastrous.
Take the designers first. If left for them, your website would be bright and hip, or possibly cool and hip, whichever is today's prevailing style. It would be stylish, full of cute little fleur de lis and other totally useless design elements. It would pop and sizzle and crackle, and it wouldn't matter if there were any substance at night style. All eye candy, no real content.
Obviously, it wouldn't be much better when the techie guys ran the project. These people, God bless ‘em, really adore to throw in all of the latest technological doodads, in the form of animations and films and things that peek out here and pop out there.
In fact, a tech-designed website would be so technologically advanced that many, otherwise most visitors wouldn't be able to view it since it would require the latest browsers along with a super-fast broadband connection and who knows what else. Oh, and perhaps there'd be some room for real content in there somewhere, offering you could slip it in between the animations.
What both these approaches have in common is that they're not thinking about your site's visitors. Designers want to put pretty pictures in front of your visitors, without a thought as to what the visitors genuinely wish to see. Techies want to utilize all of the latest technologies, with no thought regarding how those technologies are used or whether they're actually usable.
It's as much as the marketing department, then, to think about what your site's visitors want to think such as the customer. Most customers want something specific, something meaty, something helpful; they want substance, not style, and they want to find what they need quickly and easily. It's about useful content presented in a user-friendly fashion. Technology and design come into play only in the service of those needs.
What this means is that the marketing department truly must research and deliver on these customer needs. You can't just spew forth the latest corporate platitudes and branding guidelines; you need to get beyond what are the corporation and it is executives like and make up a site that focuses exclusively on your current and potential customers.
So you, since the marketing representative, somehow need to consider charge of your website project. You need to work with the design and technology people, incorporating their suggestions without letting them run wild. And you have to manage the higher-ups who have their own ideas about how things need to look, but not necessarily concentrate on driving the site in a customer-focused direction. That shouldn't be too hard, should it?
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03142011
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