Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:23:10 +0100
The initial findings of research commissioned by the North's longest establish web firm reveal what businesses really expect to get from going online.Darlington based Geo-net set out to establish what the expectations were of businesses investing in websites and, crucially, if these were being met by current web development service providers. The firm also wanted to test their perception that their customers' expectations had dramatically shifted over the last decade from a website merely as ‘vanity publishing' to a really mission-critical business tool.
"A website can now offer many benefits to different types of organization from brand-awareness right through to transactions and covering all points in-between. If fact, almost any aspects of the traditional business process can now be moved online, often with huge cost and efficiency gains" commented Geo-net Sales Director, Antony Lewis. "We also needed to know what the actual priorities of business leaders are today when making decisions about graphic design, customer experience, search engine effectiveness and compliance with legislation."
The Internet has only been widely used as a tool by UK businesses during the last ten years but by 2005 70% of those businesses had a website. For most, that would have been their first and only purchase of web services, meaning that they had little, if any, knowledge on which to base any expectations. Also, there were no widely understood quality standards, or trade bodies by which buyers could benchmark suppliers and no market-leading brand name has so far emerged. A decade on, buyers have a clearer vision of what they want from a website and are better able to express this in terms of feature requirements.
Students at Teesside University Business School carried out the research interviewing business owners/managers with past experience of procuring websites and related services.
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