An Endless Learning Process

It doesn't matter whether you are a home-based entrepreneur or a Global 1000 corporate executive, and it doesn't matter whether you are getting ready to launch your first Web site or have been working online for 10 years. You still have a lot to learn about using the Internet as a business tool. We all do.

The commercially-available Internet has been around only since 1994, and widespread use didn't start until 1997 or so. During this short time, advances in the Internet itself and in the computer and software we use to connect to it have been startling. Now we seem to have hit a bit of a plateau, during which some of the original "Golly! Gee whiz!" technologies are maturing and having the bugs whacked out of them. We have had some time to see what works and what doesn't, and more importantly, to see what Internet users want and what they don't want.

Remember "push" technology? We were all going to send endless streams of content to signed-up users' desktops at our convenience, and they were going to access what we sent them whenever they wanted, instantly, without waiting for each page to download. Nothing came of this idea because hardly any Internet users signed up for it. The only "push" technology that has stayed with us is email, and it is being misused so badly as a promotional medium right now that legitimate businesses need to be extra-careful how they use it so that they don't get lumped in with the spam artists who fill our email inboxes with pitches for everything from multilevel marketing scams to "free porn" offers that, somehow, never turn out to be free.

Keeping Your Site Up to Date

When you saw this subtitle, your first thought was probably about technology. Groovy new Web tricks seem to come out almost every week. But I am not talking about technology here. Remember all those people with old browsers? They can't use the new technology anyway. Let others pioneer the leading edge. You can always jump on the latest whatever after it's had a few years not only to prove itself and get the kinks worked out, but also to spread widely enough that most of your readers or customers are familiar with it and, if some sort of program on their computer is needed to make use of it, they already have it installed.

What you need to worry about is keeping the information on your site up to date. If Ezra K. Gillicoody leaves the company, his contact information should be removed from your site immediately. When your office in Jakarta gets a new fax number, your site should list the new one right away. A Web site with obsolete information on it reflects badly on your company, and it is a lot easier, faster, and cheaper to change information on a Web site than to change letterheads or business cards.

Prices are critical. In some countries, advertising a price lower than your actual selling price is illegal. Legality aside, customers tend to get irritated when you call or email them and say, "Oh, the price on the Web site is wrong. It's supposed to be $384 higher than that."

This is not a hypothetical situation. It happened to me with a purchase from one of the world's largest computer vendors several years ago. I immediately canceled the order (for a midrange laptop) and swore to myself that I would never deal with that company again. Wouldn't you have done the same? And don't you think this is what plenty of your customers will do to you if you publish a price on your Web site, then tell them it was too low?

There is no legitimate excuse for an incorrect price on a Web site. You can't claim, "The price change came after we sent it to the printer," as can legitimately happen with paper catalogs and fliers. You must make sure that every bit of information on your site is current at every single moment.

Operating a profitable Web site is an ongoing process, not a one-time project. It is not something you "do this week," then move on. It is a long-term commitment. I have watched many sites start with big plans and high hopes only to slowly go downhill once the people who put them up realize that they need to keep them up not just this week and next week, but next year and the year after that.

When most people talk about "futureproofing" a Web site, they are talking about technology. But real futureproofing is a matter of attitude; it is knowing all the way down into your bones that instead of starting your Web site off with a big splash, you should begin humbly, not bite off more than you can chew, and gradually improve over the years as you gain experience.

Streaming video was going to be huge, but turned out to be so expensive to produce and deliver compared to what advertisers were prepared to pay to sponsor it that some of the major news Web sites have decided to charge subscription fees to those who want to watch their video clips online. But at the same time, movie studios have found that placing previews or "trailers," as they are called on the Internet is an effective promotional technique. Right now the most popular format for movie trailers is Quicktime, a format developed by Apple, not the Windows Media Player which Microsoft has pushed like mad and now includes in every copy of Windows.

Flash, once considered a "way out there" method of delivering animated content over the Internet, has become a staple of Web advertisers, and is rapidly turning into a medium for online artistic expression by cartoonists and graphics designers. Flash still doesn't belong on your Web site's front page, but it may help you to tell a sales story somewhere on your site if you use it wisely and sparingly.

Companies that produce movies, music, books, software, and other intellectual property are fighting the basic "information sharing" ethos of the Internet's early years. They will win some of their battles and lose others. Sooner or later they will learn new ways of marketing their products online instead of fighting against digital copying, which isn't going to go away no matter how many laws are made that prohibit it. The movie industry reacted with horror to broadcast television but managed to adjust and survive, and later acted the same way toward videocassette sales and soon after that toward the video rental business but in the end moviemakers always seem to come up with a way to profit from every new technology they claim will put them out of business once they stop crying on legislators' shoulders and get down to the business of exploiting that technology for profit.

Microsoft is currently king of the computer desktop, and today AOL Time Warner is the world's largest producer and deliverer of content to computer desktops. Each one would like to move into the other's turf. This battle between behemoths is likely to shape much of the Internet's development over the next few years, but the Internet and computer businesses are evolving so rapidly that it is doubtful that either of these companies will ever totally dominate the Internet and all the devices connected to it. And while Microsoft and AOL Time Warner executives and executives from Sun Microsystems, Oracle, IBM, and other industry giants take public potshots at one another, the best thing the rest of us can do is lie low. We should pick the best bits of technology from each player in the field and incorporate them into our own businesses while avoiding lockins with any one company by using as much Open Source software as we can, and building our Web sites and other "core" online activities around open, industry-wide standards.

In the middle of all this turbulence, those of us who use the Internet intelligently as a business tool, instead of treating it as an end in and of itself, have a chance to create little online islands of sanity for our readers and customers. We may not get rich overnight, but that's okay. We will build our profits steadily, rationally, and with minimal risk. We will study the consequences of each online move we make before we make it. We will, in other words, be prudent business people who adhere to the basic tenet, "To earn a profit, you must take in more money than you spend," that has served our predecessors well since the idea of "business" was first invented, long before historical records were kept.