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Well,
since you made it here, read on.
The
web is many things to many people, but there are a few things that
it isn’t – it’s not the second coming, it’s not the
saviour of business and it’s not going to cure humanities ills
– but there is no other medium in the world that allows for such
swift, timely and effective communication.
How else could someone in Australia even know that your
business, here in the UK, even exists?
The speed and ease with which new information can be pushed
out is staggering – want to let your customer base know that
you’ve got a sale on – one email shot to your client database
does it for you (no cumbersome tree killing mail-shots for a start
– and have you tried licking 10,000 envelopes?).
You hear scare stories of people’s credit card details
running lose, people stalking through chat rooms, unwanted junk
emails, viruses – if you believed half of it you’d be running
for the hills to a small secure log cabin, a bunker full of tinned
goods with a selection of automatic weapons and not reading this,
so at least we’re off to a good start.
Remember
though, the web is just a way of relaying your information – you
can’t close your eyes, hit a few buttons and then hope it’ll
work.
There’s nothing more annoying than your target customer
getting bombarded with the wrong products, or trying to struggle
through a site that sends them round in circles whilst trying to
find the most basic information – and most people are paying to
be online, so sitting there watching the phone bill go up when
they’re getting no benefit from your site is a no no.
If a site is slow to load or cumbersome to navigate, people
don’t go back.
Most of the time you get one shot to be added to their list
of favourites – first impressions count.
Even big multi-nationals have committed the sin of assuming
that everyone has a fast internet connection – and nothing else
to do with their lives other than watch their computer overload as
it tries to download some inept artistic vision with no relevance
to the company’s message whatsoever.
The
wealth of conflicting and confusing information out there is
enough to put off even the stout of heart – the jargon is
alienating, (SSL, frames, back engine databases, SQL Servers
anyone?) and then you have the popular perception of IT and Web
people painting us as Red Bull drinking, pizza eating maniacs who
spend half their life with their heads in the clouds speaking in
acronyms in between playing games, watching dodgy late night
satellite programmes and listening to very loud music (err,
actually…forget I started that).
So, we’re unconventional, that’s ok, the WWW doesn’t
have any conventions yet.
And we’re definitely upstarts (look, I used “and” at
the beginning of the sentence! – I personally am overflowing
with wackiness…) but we’re professional upstarts who know how
it all works and fits in together.
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