1 - The Web is Great: Get on with It

There's been a great deal of hullabaloo over the Web, simply because it's something new and different. Motivated by greed or fear, companies leapt upon it, and most hadn't a clue about what they were doing. Some even did themselves more harm than good, and billions of dollars were wasted in the process - and it all came crashing down when they failed to answer a very simple question: where's the money?

And since they could not answer that simple question, they scrambled to find some way of measuring what they were accomplishing, in hopes that they could come up with some numbers that would satisfy those who demanded them. Since it's a computerized medium, there are plenty of numbers you can measure. But most of what is measured was meaningless or subjective.

From an accounting perspective, there are few measures that matter. Does your Web site generate revenue or save costs? That is one way to measure a site's success.

The author, however, does suggest that there are other measures worth considering, largely of a marketing nature:

• Does the site raise awareness of your company or products?
• Does the site educate and persuade to positively influence the customer's perception?
• Does the site provide information that leads a potential customer to purchase?
• Does the site support existing customers, making them more likely to be satisfied with the product, and to rebuy?

This book is primarily for those involved in operating a Web site, which includes a broad array of character, all of whom have a common need: to measure whether their efforts are effective.