FREE ESSAY ON ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF A WEB PRESENCE

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF A WEB PRESENCE

Advantages and disadvantages of a Web Presence
The World Wide Web is a World Wide Market. It is a new way of selling. More and more
customers expect to find your product news and specifications on the web. But even on the
Net, you have to advertise your product. 
Using Internet as a media to advertise your product is different from traditional media.
Through Internet companies can be present all over the world. Using the web as an
advertising tool is the cheapest way to be discovered at every time. You can also quickly
change your promotional campaign, in order to gain attention that may lead the consumer
to the product.
Online services become so popular because they provide two major benefits to potential
buyers:
Convenience: Customers can order products 24 hours a day wherever they are. They don't
have to sit in traffic, find a parking space, and walk through countless aisles to find
and examine goods. And they don't have to drive all the way to a store, only to find out
that the desired product is out of stock.
Information: Customers can find reams of comparative information about companies,
products, and competitors without leaving their office or home. They can focus on
objective criteria such as prices, quality, performance, and availability.
Customers can expect the advantage to pull the information, to be drained into detailed
catalog or other information about products and services for sale that they are looking
for. They do not feel forced, they are looking for the information by themselves. 
Nevertheless it seems that Web advertising is much more price than image oriented. Web
advertising does not seem the appropriate way to advert a product. According to BMRB
International (annex 1) 37% of UK Net shoppers are not ready to purchase off-line They
always fear to give their account number to a company they do not know. Today a
well-known brand is a real competitive advantage. BRMB International has shown that 16%
of purchases has done thanks to an implicit trust of established brands. Nevertheless it
does not mean that it will stay an advantage in the future. Moreover the difference with
more traditional media is that customers come to you and not you to the customers. You
cannot retain their attention if they feel that it does not worth it. 
When you wish to expand your market share trough Internet, you have to consider the
specificity of your target audience. At the present time people who buy through Internet
are young, daily users of computers. But there are not only people used to Internet.
Because e-business is growing up (annex 2), we can assume that most people have no
experience in e-business. The audience can be both good Internet users and beginners. 
Dealing with communication interaction
Security
The World Wide Web is the fastest growing part of the Internet. Increasingly, it is also
the part of the Internet that is the most vulnerable to attack.
For users, a secure web server is one that will safeguard any personal information (bank
account number) that is received or collected. It is one that supports their privacy and
will not subvert browser to download viruses or other rogue programs onto their computer
For a company, a secure web server is resistant to a determined attack over the Internet
or from corporate insiders.
In order to increase security, you can use a system for automatically encrypting
information as it is sent over the Internet and decrypting it before it is used. One of
Netscape Communication's early innovations was its SSL.
You can also use firewalls, which is a device that isolates an organization's internal
network from the Internet at large, allowing specific connections to pass and blocking
others.
Marketing / Communication
It is really important to get people inform of the existence of your web site. You will
have to shout it from the roof tops! You can use your letterhead, your cards or your
leaflets to write your web address. You can also through a TV or board advertising
campaign let people know about your site existence. As Jim Sterne says: your web site can
be funny, pretty, useful, crisp and clean, but if you don't promote it, its message won't
be seen.
By the way you can also manage to register different key words on browsers in order to
put make know your web site when people look for information in your business area.
Deliveries and Payment
If you use e-commerce on your website, once the buyer has searched through a catalog and
made his decision to purchase, the order, the payment, the handle fulfillment and other
aspects of order management have to be processed.
The order processing must include the ability to group items together for later purchase;
this capability is called a shopping cart in the case of retail transactions; it usually
includes the ability to modify the contents of the shopping cart at any time. This way
the buyer can discard items, add new ones, change the quantities and so on. 
To the purchase, the buyer will have additional charges such as sales taxes and shipping
costs. The order processing system presents the buyer with an itemized order form
including all the charges so the buyer can pay for the items.
Information effect
With the Internet, it is now possible to obtain accurate and immediate feedback from your
customers (A daemon can count the number of hits). With access to this information, your
business will be able to add the most personalized value to the customer.
Tool such as the World Wide Web helps you to build more of your business decision-making
based on outside information, and find out more about your non-customers and what
non-customers and what they are doing, and why they are not customers.
Fiscal and legal implications
Internet is still largely unregulated. Because Internet is global (no territorial
limits), electronic (no writing) and digital (perfect copies can be made almost
instantaneously and repetitively), it is a source of different problems. The state of
California tries to regulate e-business in California (annex 3). It seems very complex to
set up a world wide regulation and, at the present time nobody knows what to do if
something going wrong in the cyberspace.
Concerning taxation, applying existing tax rules and system to the Internet world is
tempting but does not answer to the needs of this marketplace. One key aspect to
resolving the taxation issue of Internet commerce is to keep tax policies universal,
uniform, and neutral. 
Resources needed to maintain the Site
Obviously, resources need to maintain a web site is going to depend on the size of the
web site. Whatever the size you firstly need to ask you few questions such as:
Will this solution be flexible enough to accommodate change? 
Do we have the technical competencies to support Internet initiatives? 
Is this solution customizable to our needs and our customer needs? 
Do we have the technological infrastructure (network services; hardware, software)
required to develop and scale? 
Do we have sufficient funding for ongoing web site maintenance? 
Do we have operations capabilities to support our Internet strategy?
Web creation
There are two different ways to create a web site. You can do it yourself or ask an
agency to manage the creation of your web site.
If you decide to create yourself your web site, you will need special coding software.
But if you decide to delegate the creation to an agency, it might cost you around $750
for a basic web site (annex 4).
Web maintenance
However you must also take into consideration the maintenance. When you have created your
web site, you must care to make it alive. You need to care about your human resources
skills
According to the Business Marketing Web Consortium the following roles should be filled:
? A Web Editor.Depending on the size of the site, this could be a part-time or a
full-time person. The Web editor is responsible for content for a site.
? A Web Master, responsible for the infrastructure and technology supporting the website.
Making sure that links link, and the site performs
? An Infomaster responsible for timely response to inquiries
? An overall Technology Leader, defining corporate standards and resources required
Poor maintenance can severely damage a company's image
Site Design and Structure
As we have pointed out since the beginning, e-business is a new way of selling. When a
potential customer gets connected to your site, you have not sell anything yet. There are
different ways to attract customers to your product. 
Firstly, you need to care about your web design. It means that you should not forget that
if there are too many pictures or electronic animations, download is going to take a
while. If your site require downloading applications, they should downloaded in twenty
seconds or less. Users of Internet expect fast and functional site (avoid horizontal
scrolling). Web sites must be customers oriented rather than product oriented.
Information value is much more important than glizz. Customers stay loyal because of the
service, not because they like your web site. Simplicity and speed differentiate your
site, making it easy for business customers to order. 
Secondly, Web marketers must ask if their markets are comfortable with English. Global
marketers recommend adding local languages when needed.
Thirdly, in order to maintain interest in your site, you have to make it interactive.
Internet is both a business and communication tool, you must provide to users a page
where you give relevant information on your product but also on your industry area. It is
recommended to let customers express their feelings through email. 
But you do not do it only for the fun, your site must be professional (ie: updated, fast
answers), that is why you have to deal with your e-customers as you are used to do with
your offline customers.
In order to support the design of your future web site, we would like to present this
tree structure.
There will be 7 theoretical pages linked together.