Before we discuss Web 2.0 best practices, we need to look at the basic rules that apply to maintaining a website.
Rule 1 - Your site must be found by your intended audience.
Rule 2 - You must provide intuitive access to relevant information.
Rule 3 - You must figure out how to keep the website profitable.
That’s it: Get people in, give them what they want, and find a way to pay for it.
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In making a plan for accomplishing the three basic rules, you will benefit if you understand the importance and advantages of social networking. Fortunately, you don’t have to develop social networking applications or widgets—there are plenty out there—but you will need to develop best practices that will aid you in brand positioning, understanding your users, lead generation, and product/services deployment in order to have success with your website.
Many advances in web technologies, design disciplines and audience adoption make web 2.0 possible. In my next few blogs I will share with you the “best practices” that make a site successful and help position brands.
In making a plan for accomplishing the three basic rules, you will benefit if you understand the importance and advantages of social networking. Fortunately, you don’t have to develop social networking applications or widgets—there are plenty out there—but you will need to develop best practices that will aid you in brand positioning, understanding your users, lead generation, and product/services deployment in order to have success with your website.
Many advances in web technologies, design disciplines and audience adoption make web 2.0 possible. In my next few blogs I will share with you the “best practices” that make a site successful and help position brands.
Let’s start with Security and Governance.
To ensure that you meet the needs of the site contributors, as well as those who consume the content, I recommend the following practices:
Present control and security information up front
Have all content contributors register with a valid email address, provide the contributors with a personal page, encourage them to add a brief bio, add a link on all postings back to the contributor’s personal page (with a photo, if possible), and establish a feedback process for comments and connections.
Identify yourself and your intentions
Clearly identify yourself, your employees and their titles. Don’t interact with people behind a mask because it ticks them off and negates any trust that you may have. Tell the people why you are on the site and why you are contributing to the postings.
Post and respond to both negative and positive postings
Establish areas on your site that are not as heavily promoted to facilitate postings that are not as heavily filtered. Keep in mind that, if all of the postings are positive, your site will be viewed as a marketing site and NOT as a resource.
Provide a comfortable environment
Establish site rules and behaviors, implement processes for monitoring and reporting infractions of the rules, and provide a link to your privacy policy and terms of use on all pages.
I hope that you find this information helpful and that you will contribute some feedback.
Many advances in web technologies, design disciplines and audience adoption make web 2.0 possible. In my next few blogs I will share with you the “best practices” that make a site successful and help position brands.
In making a plan for accomplishing the three basic rules, you will benefit if you understand the importance and advantages of social networking. Fortunately, you don’t have to develop social networking applications or widgets—there are plenty out there—but you will need to develop best practices that will aid you in brand positioning, understanding your users, lead generation, and product/services deployment in order to have success with your website.
Many advances in web technologies, design disciplines and audience adoption make web 2.0 possible. In my next few blogs I will share with you the “best practices” that make a site successful and help position brands.
Let’s start with Security and Governance.To ensure that you meet the needs of the site contributors, as well as those who consume the content, I recommend the following practices:
Present control and security information up front
Have all content contributors register with a valid email address, provide the contributors with a personal page, encourage them to add a brief bio, add a link on all postings back to the contributor’s personal page (with a photo, if possible), and establish a feedback process for comments and connections.
Identify yourself and your intentions
Clearly identify yourself, your employees and their titles. Don’t interact with people behind a mask because it ticks them off and negates any trust that you may have. Tell the people why you are on the site and why you are contributing to the postings.
Post and respond to both negative and positive postings
Establish areas on your site that are not as heavily promoted to facilitate postings that are not as heavily filtered. Keep in mind that, if all of the postings are positive, your site will be viewed as a marketing site and NOT as a resource.
Provide a comfortable environment
Establish site rules and behaviors, implement processes for monitoring and reporting infractions of the rules, and provide a link to your privacy policy and terms of use on all pages.
I hope that you find this information helpful and that you will contribute some feedback.
