Your corporate website is a complex beast, subject to the whims of management, marketing, your own design tastes, and customer feedback. When building or redesigning your site, it is critical to keep the company’s primary objectives in the forefront of design activity, and let the form follow the function.

In the twenty-first century, issues that face marketers as they struggle to shape up to challenges include:

Pan company marketing - for many of the roles we shall discuss it is increasingly necessary for marketers at all levels to engage all internal shareholders, to “buy-in” to activity, and recognise there is a marketing element in all departments’ roles,

Measurement metrics - how marketers should track and measure performance

E-commerce - understanding the language of the IT team to develop Websites and e-CRM

Knowledge management - what to, and how, to store information, who has access

Integrated Supply Chain Management - the Web marketer

Customer Relationship Management the web marketer

Multi-channel activity in the connected economy message and media selection.

The popularity of Google grew out of the fact that they developed an entirely new approach to search. Before Google, it was essential to locate any site whose content was related or contained a given search term. To this end, search engine builders constructed indexes of Web pages and often simply stored the respective URLs. As an answer to a query, a user would get back a list of URLs which he or she then had to work through. Google cofounder Larry Page came up with the idea that not all search results could be equally relevant to a given query, but unlike the information broker, who can exploit his or her expertise on a particular fi eld, an automated search engine needs additional ways to evaluate results. What Page suggested was to rank search results, and he developed a particular algorithm for doing so; the result of that algorithm applied to a given page is the PageRank, named after the inventor.

Since its inception in the early 1990s, the Web has revolutionized our lives and world more than many other technological developments in recent history. In this fi rst chapter, we tour the history of the Web, during which we will identify three major streams of development and impact

Architecture and web design are close cousins. Both vocations require focus in creatively designing tangible experiences and environments that facilitate movement. A good architect will study how people move from room to room and craft a layout that makes this as easy as possible. A good web designer will research how people navigate a website, where their eyes travel, and what visual cues they look for to get the information they need as easily as possible.

Old paradigm: the phone book. New paradigm: search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN have supplanted the slabs of dead trees thrown on our doorstep every six months, and their information is a hundred-fold deeper and updated every second of every day.
There is one critical differentiator between these models. Search engines are more than directories of names and addresses. They index every word of your website, offering a richer representation of your business, and then attach that data to a geographic location if one exists. Today, users can search by physical location or keywords.

Worldwide business is changing every day. Globalization is reaching full steam. The world’s economy is flattening, and the old economy giants of brand-name business are faltering beneath the growing power of the long tail. In just over a decade, the rulebook for marketing economics has been tossed aside. The Web has leveled the playing field, and any company can serve any customer with an Internet connection, at any time of day, and from any part of the world.

Few people agree on how to plan projects. Often, much of the time spent during planning is getting people to agree on how the planning should be done. I think people obsess about planning because it's the point of contact for many different roles in any organization. When major decisions are at stake that will affect people for months or years, everyone has the motivation to get involved. There is excitement and new energy but also the fear that if action isn't taken, opportunities will be lost. This combination makes it all too easy for people to assume that their own view of the world is the most useful. Or worse, that it is the only view of the world worth considering and using in the project-planning process.

No matter how the corporate website is built, the company will need to procure hosting services. Some companies have their own data centers, which might or might not include a web server. For small companies, hosting is best acquired through a third party.

When it comes to a corporate website, there are many vested interests, and one person’s top priority is another person’s afterthought. Web developers often find themselves mediators between divided parties. Take advantage of your secondary objectives list to appease disgruntled marketing folk, because these objectives should receive attention during the redesign process, and are likely to be implemented.