The Working Web
I’m going to do a series on leveraging web technologies to compliment your marketing strategies, promote your products and services, and communicate with your clients.
It all starts with your website – which for some is merely a billboard or worse yet, a business card – those days are far behind us now. Today your website is a huge part of your branding effort and is the center of your marketing universe. Many people claim to be web designers, but many of them have precious little understanding of branding, worse yet, some may not have a good understanding of web foundations like HTML, CSS, server-side scripting, browser support and security. I cannot stress enough the importance of getting good people to design or update your site. A template-based site slapped together on some WYSIWYG editor will get you on the ‘Net quickly, but cheap is obvious, even to the layman and that is not the first impression you want to be giving your visitors.
There is no question, that in this industry a website is a necessity – and any business website needs both aesthetics and function. If you do not have a site, it’s time to analyze the business need for one and if you have a site, review it and determine if it is doing everything you want it to be doing.
As for the mechanics and technology – you can host the site internally if you have the infrastructure to support it, or you can choose to use the multitude of external hosting options out there. I would recommend using a quality hosting company, but that could be a local ISP or a large outfit like 1&1.
A couple recommendations – if you don’t know where to start:
Carve Design – a studio specializing in brand development
Kelly King Design – Kelly specializes in launching working brands
In Part 2 – I will be talking about some free tools every website should consider deploying.
I hope you will have time to address how independent insurance agencies can actually measure the benefit of a web site. We don’t have on line rating, our agency management software cannot interface with the web, sure our website is open 24/7, but what can we deliver besides cookie cutter, purchased elsewhere, advise about taking care of your plumbing before going on vacation, remembering to add holiday jewelry to the schedule etc.?
Thanks for chiming in Hans – this looks to be a six part series and we will be covering traffic analysis, getting to know your visitors, keeping things interesting and other aspects of running a website.
I have been thinking about a website, but my feeling is that having no website at all is better than having a poor website. I would like to have some kind of “owners manual” for the different policy types that would describe different coverage options, safety and loss control issues, etc… I was thinking of writing them in Adobe and just having them available for download to customers. I would like to have them login with their customer number or some other simple code, and have a record of what files they downloaded and maybe their IP address or something to prove that they were there if need be. I think that this would be a useful tool for them, and also provide a little bit of documentation for our agency to show what they have downloaded. Is this kind of thing possible? Or, is their a better way to accomplish this?
Jeff – I agree 100% that when it comes to business websites – do it right or don’t do it at all. I’m also a firm believer of the branding concept – establishing an identity for your business and promoting that identity through all available vectors – letterhead, business cards, logos, signage, advertisements, your website etc.
The rather dynamic and interactive site that you have proposed is possible, but would require a web developer coding either php or asp pages and integrating with a database. Once you have people logging in, and data being stored, security becomes paramount.
Making documents available over the web is definitely doable in a variety of ways though.