on Oct 10th, 2006
A Website is a Tool, not an Ad
Business owners often think about new technology in terms they are familiar with. They think a website is like a brochure in their customers’ living room. A website is not a brochure! A website is capable of so much more. That is like treating your Blackberry like a simple calculator. Of course, a business should provide basic information about their company and products, but they shouldn’t stop there. A website is a tool that can do many things others cannot incuding:
- establish a dialogue with customers
- provide extensive amounts of information
- calculate and perform complex tasks (applications)
- build a community
- provide a customized experience for individual users
- gather valuable market data
A website is a versatile tool that can solve many kinds of problems, but most people think of the web in very narrow terms. Many business owners consider their websites to be an "Internet store" or an "Internet ad". A person who thinks like this will never consider the web as a tool that could help solve problems unrelated to sales and marketing (eg. employee collaboration).
When you begin to think about a website as a general tool, you will see that the possibilities are endless. Anytime I need to do something in my personal or business life, I always ask myself, "How can a website help me solve this problem?" I have found that a website can usually help me solve most problems. For instance, my uncle recently performed a couple songs on a local radio station. Several relatives requested a CD of the session. Rather than sending CDs via snail mail, I posted the mp3s on my website and e-mailed everybody the URL.
I used the web when I needed to get rid of some stuff before I moved out of my apartment. Living in a small community, Craigslist wasn’t an option. My only options were a garage sale or classified ads. I didn’t have time for a garage sale and you can only fit so many items in the 4 lines of a classified ad. Instead, I put pictures of everything on my website and plastered the community with posters advertising my "E-garage Sale". People checked out my site and gave me a call if they were interested. It was effective, cheap, and didn’t require too much effort.
What do you need to do today? I bet you can use the web to do it better.