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Customer-Effective Web Sites
- By Julia Dalgleish
- Published May 17, 2000
Book
- Sorry, this book is no longer in print.
About
Features
The best e-Commerce sites are the ones that enable customers to accomplish their goals better, faster, and more easily. In this book, leading Gartner Group consultant Jodie Dalgleish draws upon two years of exclusive Web customer research, showing you exactly how to build sites like that -- every step of the way.KEY TOPICS:Customer-Effective Web Sites covers every element of e-Commerce site success: functionality, content, navigation, information architecture, visual design, technology, and more. Jodie Dalgleish identifies 17 key customer directives that every e-Commerce site should follow; then demonstrates exactly how to implement them on your site. Discover how and why current sites fall short; and identify real-world blunders that frustrate and infuriate customers. Learn better ways to identify your customer's true needs and requirements, and design sites that reflect them. Discover more effective site development processes -- and learn to communicate your goals to web development professionals so you'll actually get the site your customers are demanding.MARKET:For all Web professionals and business managers concerned with creating more effective, profitable e-Business sites.
Description
- Copyright 2000
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-13-087827-8
- ISBN-13: 978-0-13-087827-4
What your e-commerce customers really want-and how to give it to them! Tomorrow's e-commerce winners will be the sites that help customers accomplish their goals better, faster, and more easily. Now, top Web consultant Jodie Dalgleish shows you exactly how to build sites like that-every step of the way. Drawing upon two years of exclusive research on Web customers, Dalgleish addresses every component of e-commerce success: content, navigation, applications, information architecture, visual design, technology, and more. Customer-Effective Web Sites presents 17 rock-solid rules every site must follow to attract profitable customers-and keep them. Discover how to:
Whether you're a dot.com executive, marketer, Web developer, or consultant, you're under the gun to deliver e-commerce results--now. Get the book that comes straight from the e-commerce battlefield, combining new, customer-centered insight with Web management techniques that work: Customer-Effective Web Sites, by Jodie Dalgleish.
Sample Content
Downloadable Sample Chapter
Click here for a sample chapter for this book: 0130878278.pdf
Table of Contents
1. Being Customer-Effective.
Things Have Changed. Good Versus Customer-Effective Web Sites. Why Is It So Hard to Create Customer-Effective Web Sites Who Is Involved Putting It All Together.
2. What Customers Want.
Seventeen Customer Directives. Customers and Organizations.
3. Customer-Effective Testing.
Why Bother Testing Types of Testing. Testing Techniques. Another Contextual Test Methodology Putting It All Together. Ten Success Factors.
4. E-Service Requirement Definition.
Eleven Best-Practice Fundamentals. Key Decisions You Will Have to Make. The Requirement Definition Process. The Brief.
5. E-Service Development and Implementation.
Setting Up the Project. Product Specification. The Content Challenge. Process Improvement. Troubleshooting.
6. A Customer-Effective Design Approach and Process.
A Customer-Effective Design Approach. Eleven Design Tips. A Customer-Effective Design Process.
7. Customer-Effective Design Practices.
Create Utility. Metaphor. Provide Dialogue. Navigation. Theming-Putting It All Together.
8. The Opportunity.
The Quick and the Valued. Endeavors. A Closing Word.
Netography.
Bibliography.
Index.
Preface
Preface
Two potential book titles came to me while I was writing this book. One was Internet Services for Real People and the other was The Internet Service Revolution. Neither title was quite right, as pointed out by my editor, but each encapsulates my underlying motivation for writing this book.
In a nutshell, I want to see "real people" better served on the Internet. Real people need to do everyday things to run their hectic lives, and the Web can help them do that. I want to see the Internet come of age as a service medium because it has the potential, if harnessed correctly, to emancipate customers rather than frustrate and restrain them.
Over a period of two years I was actively involved in many forms of customer and internal testing of e-service concepts and Web sites, across a number of industries and in relation to many different e-service offerings and e-customers (for a comprehensive description of testing techniques see Chapter 3).
In doing this testing, a theme kept recurring: Give customers something useful because if you ignore what they're trying to do by visiting your Web site, your Web site will only be irrelevant to them and frustrate them. It was customers' frustration that first made me think about writing this book.
I feel that, if I encourage all parties involved in Internet development to ask their customers and themselves the right questions, for the right reasons, we will all be a lot better off. And this needs to be an integrated effort, within and between businesses and their development partners. I feel frustrated, however, because I observe many people with motivations fueled by the search for the "quick buck," rather than the search for lasting customer value.
For years, marketers have talked about the market-of-one phenomenon as the linchpin for creating lasting customer value. We now have a medium that allows us to market to individuals more effectively than we ever have before. And yet, people carry over their old, constrained, and ineffectual, so-called customer-relationship strategies to the Web.
Despite this, I feel encouraged because things are starting to change. I salute those people who realize that the Web needs to be a part of peoples' everyday lives, and are creating useful Web sites that address real customer needs.
That's important because we're on the verge of what I call the "e-service revolution"—a revolution than can be created equally by service providers and their customers. E-service providers need to take the initiative to talk to customers and do things differently as a result. There's nothing new in talking to customers; we just have a better chance of getting results with the Web in the mix, and we have a lot more to lose, a lot more quickly, if we don't find out what we need to know and change the way we do things.
And so, in the interests of helping e-service providers, and their development partners, harness the opportunity to do right by their e-customers, and create lasting value, I have made the effort to describe the necessary Web site development process from beginning to end. In doing so, I have addressed what it takes to create not just "Web sites," but Web-based e-service systems or applications that are integrated with an e-service provider's business.
It takes discipline to create a good Web site. Part of that discipline is talking to customers and effectively translating their needs, attitudes, and behaviors into the requisite Web site experience. And I hope what I have written helps you translate customer needs into strategies and practices at every step in your development process.
That doesn't mean that this book will give you a list of shrink-wrapped instructions you can tick off as you go. If that's what you're expecting, you're reading the wrong book. However, if you're prepared to be challenged to think about things differently, and to take concepts and ideas and develop them further in the context of your own e-customers and what they're trying to do, this book is perfect for you. And I hope you'll get a lot out of reading it.
To get the most out of this book, bear in mind that the pictures are an integral part of the story. If you skip the pictures, you'll miss a lot of the new ideas and concepts that make this story different. If you take the time to inspect and understand the pictures, you'll be rewarded with new ideas and insights, because I've put some things together in new ways.
In fact, exploration is a key tenet of this book. I see us exploring, together, how the e-service revolution can be brought about. And I'm thankful to those who have come before, because I've borrowed from their ideas to explore how they can be aggregated and applied to the Web.
I wish you well in your endeavors to provide lasting value to real people and in creating the e-service revolution. And I believe that you are an important part of our collective learning process, and would like to hear from you as you have insights and create new ideas.
Jodie Dalgleish
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