Critical skills required to build a business generating web site

To build a web site that generates business, members or clients, you need expertise in content, design, usability, marketing, search engines and electronic commerce.

A good web site will have:

• compelling content that adds real value to real people and gives them a good reason to interact and transact

• a design that embodies the values of the brand the organisation represents

• an architecture and layout that is intuitive and easy to find information on

• compelling marketing campaigns that draw in new site visitors

Hence if you are hiring a professional team to build your site, make sure the team has an expert in each of those areas. All these areas require very different professional skill sets, so be cautious of an “expert” who claims to know it all. Instead ask them a few question to see how much they appear to know about these areas.

Here are some question you might want to ask of them.

Ask the content guru:

What experience in content creation and editing does this person have?

Ideally you want someone who is grounded in making sure content meets the need of the reader. So try to find someone who has strong journalism background, such as writing or sub-editing. Other individuals who would be good are those who have built scripts for call centers.

Is this person seasoned in advertising content, public relations (PR) or a journalist? This person should have experience in writing copy that people want to read. Please note that in our experience marketing and PR content tends to be very corporate oriented that most external stakeholders tend to either browse over or ignore. So get a journalist to write your copy.

The benefit of getting a journalist is that these are people who have written articles that people pay money to read. This means they tend to know how to write in a manner that engages readers and adds real value to them

Also, get a good copy-writer to write your headlines, because most great pieces of content never get read unless there is a compelling headline that attracts potential readers to the content.

On our team, the content expert is Neshan. He was a newspaper journalist for about a decade prior to being an online editor in chief for a huge global company. He also has experience working as a sub-editor.

Ask the designer:

What experience does this person have in putting together designs that are grounded in a corporation's values and live the corporate brand?
Ideally you want a seasoned graphic artist who has worked in the corporate world, designing campaigns and collateral for the marketing department. Why?

Simply because this person knows the boundaries between designing for the sake of design versus ensuring the design lives the brand. You want a true professional who understands how to incorporate a corporation's values and brand into the design.

A good design will not only make your target audience comfortable and confident they are dealing with a reputable organisation, but will also ensure they get the same brand experience on the web as they do in the offline world.

Also make sure this designer has worked in the web area for a while because there are a few intricacies of designing for the web that don't work on other media such as print, etc.

Our chief designer is Byron has a degree in design. Having worked on web designs since 1992, he also has hard copy and multimedia animation design experience. Most importantly he has worked as a chief designer for the entire Asia Pacific region for a multinational company, hence he understands where to draw the line between good design and over the top design.

Ask the usability guru:

What experience does the usability guru have in designing web sites that get a huge number of visitors daily?

Ideally this person would have experience on a team that was behind the redesign of the site architecture of a major web site. Often times the content guru will have usability experience.

Good usability ensures site visitors find what they are looking for easily and leave having a good experience. A smartly designed site will also guide site visitors into the areas you want to drive them and should result in them taking the action you would like them to take.

Our usability guru, Neshan was part of the usability team of a huge multinational web site. This web site consisted of tens of thousands of pages and was designed around the sales cycle of the products being sold by this company. Hence all content was made easy to find based on where the customer was likely to be in the sales cycle.

Ask the marketing guru:

What traditional world marketing experience do they have and what online marketing experience do they have.

Ideally this person will be someone who came from the traditional marketing world and has had a few years experience in electronic marketing.

They need to be able to identify how reach the target customer and audience using both cost-effective traditional and online marketing strategies. Make sure they are good at giving you highly targetted and measurable marketing campaigns.

Our marketing expert is Sirinuch who has worked as a marketing manager in a number of businesses. She then completed a master's degree in electronic marketing and has gained experience in the online marketing world since 1999.

Ask the search engine expert:

What expertise does this person have in getting pages to list higher on search engines?

Make sure this person has a strategy that can be explained easily to drive up your site’s search engine listings. This usually involves tweaking pages and having an understanding of how search engines work.

Our search engine expert is Charuka who is a software design engineer and has been working on web projects since 1997. He has built a number of sophisticated electronic commerce sites and been responsible for driving traffic to them through search engines.

Ask the electronic commerce guru:

What knowledge does this person have of payment gateways and database driven sites?

Ideally your ecommerce expert will have built sophisticated systems that accept and manage money via the web. These transaction processes need to be secure, simple and automated, which means being integrated into your business processes.

Our eCommerce expert Charuka has developed payment systems used by a number of banks including one of the biggest banks in Australia. He has also built a number of smaller electronic commerce sites that have fully automated payment gathering and processing systems.