Use of Websites, Portals, Search Engines, Newsgroups, Bulletin Boards

Use of Websites

• Tell your story. Your business has a unique story that needs to be told, and your website is a great place to tell it. What you do, how long you've been doing it, why you are good at what you do, how you started doing it, and more about you and your business. Prospects want to know all they can about who they are considering doing business with. When making a buying decision, they like to know something about the business and the people they will be talking to as well as the products they will be using. Tell them your story through your website.

• Answer questions for you. A website can answer frequently asked questions of your potential customers. Everyone hates to answer the same simple questions over and over. This becomes an annoyance after a while for you and your employees and keeps you from the really important stuff of your business. Answering these simple questions with your website saves both you and your customers time. "What times are you open?" "How long have you been in business?" "What are your credentials?" "What forms of payment do you accept?" All these questions can be easily answered on your website.

• Add to your list. Your business is all about your contacts. Grow your contact list with your website. A website can take names and addresses 24 hours a day. Provide an incentive for your website visitors to leave their email or address(or both) and provide a list for your salespeople and marketers to work from. Start growing your customer base with your website.

• Give directions to your place of business. This is a must for someone trying to locate you. Customers coming in from out of town, people finding you on the web and then wondering how to get to your office or showroom - your website is perfect for providing this information. This info should be easy to find on your website, and be clear and easy to print out for future reference.

• Provide clear contact information. Your telephone number should be on each page and your contact information should be easily available from anywhere in your website. Your website visitors' question, "how do I contact these people?" should be easily answered with easy to find and clear contact information. That is really what you want from your visitors isn't it? For them to pick up the phone and call you about ordering your product? Make it easy. Save a phone call for your employees to answer - "What's your fax number?" Your visitors should also be able to easily find your fax number on your website.

• Build credibility for your business. Your website visitors are forming an impression of your business from your website. If they see a professional site, they will be thinking "this is a professional business!" Everyone wants to know if they are dealing with a reputable business, so provide information about your business partnerships on your website as well, such as displaying your BBB membership symbol on your site.

• Qualify your prospects. A website should pre-qualify your prospects for you. From your website, visitors can decide if what you are offering might be a good "fit" for them. This will save time for your salespeople, weeding out the prospects that do not have a use for your product or services. This will allow your staff to focus on genuine sales leads.

• Make a good first impression. A website is many times the first place people will come in contact with your business. You want this first visit to make a good impression. Also, back in the "brick and mortar " world, when you first meet someone, if you have a website to refer them to, this will add to the first impression you make there as well. Many times prospects will check your card to see if you have a website. If you hand them a card and they see one listed there, this will help with that first impression of your company.

• Bring in customers that you would most likely have not reached without having a website. With proper search engine optimization, a website can get your business in front of potential customers you might never have been able to reach, except through your presence on the web. This extends your reach. The better job you do at the search engine optimization of your website, the further your reach into the vast potential of the internet.

• Make you money: The bottom line is - a website should make you money. Providing an easy way to order needed parts or services is a given. But doing e-commerce can be a whole other ballgame. However, even if you aren't taking orders online, if your website is doing all of the above, it is making you money.

Use of Portals

The following are the uses of an ideal portal:

• Search and navigation
• Personalization
• Notification
• Task management and workflow
• Collaboration and groupware

Although most of the functionality is not new, what is new is the idea that the business value of the whole is considerably more than the sum of its parts. Thus, a successful portal does not only consist of either a good collaboration support or a good integration of the information sources. Rather it consists of - just like a successful cooking recipe - a well-integrated mixture of the basic portal functionalities.

• Search and Navigation

This functionality forms the basis for most of the successful public web portals meaning that a successful portal should support its users in an efficient search for contents.

A portal should:

• automatically present its users with the information appropriate to the user’s role
• suggest additional information to the user, and/or allow the user to voluntarily personalize the information presented by the portal
• allow the user to search for information that was not previously known to be relevant to the user’s role, but which may be available through the portal.

• Provide Personalization

Personalization is vital to the delivery of appropriate information to portal users: each user gets only the information which is specifically tailored to his/her needs. Personalization should be based on user roles, as well as user preferences.

There are several types of personalization:

• Personalization of navigation: e.g. shortcuts to specific information, mostly known as bookmarks or favorites

• Personalization of data/content: e.g. which stocks do I want to see in my stock ticker

• Personalization of layout: e.g. what information appears where on the screen, in which format, color or size.

An important high-level distinction exists between:

• Design personalization: The initial appearance of the portal, which may be pre-personalized’ according to the user’s role.

• Voluntary personalization: Where the user is offered a menu of personalization options to choose from.

• Involuntary personalization: Where the system itself unilaterally makes decisions for the user according to guesses’ about user preferences.

On a Web site, personalization is the process of tailoring pages to individual users' characteristics or preferences. Commonly used to enhance customer service or e-commerce sales, personalization is sometimes referred to as one-to-one marketing; because the enterprise’s Web page is tailored to specifically target each individual consumer. Personalization is a means of meeting the customer’s needs more effectively and efficiently, making interactions faster and easier and, consequently, increasing customer satisfaction and the likelihood of repeat visits.

• Provide Notification

Notification (push technology) is referred to as a system in which a user receives information automatically from a network server. Push technologies are designed to send information and software directly to a user’s desktop without the user actively requesting it. Thus, the user has the opportunity to subscribe to active information sources (such as news feeds and periodically updated reports) and ask to be alerted when documents are updated.

• Provide Task Management and Workflow

Portals providing task management services can help users take part in and/or manage formally defined business processes.

The workflow functionality allows the automation of business processes. Thus, as part of a workflow-automated business process, a portal should be able to prompt its users when they have tasks to perform.

E.g. Digite Application.

• Provide Collaboration and Groupware

Knowledge management and groupware ensure that the required information is stored in the right place and in the right mode. By this means the right persons are brought together with the right information. Groupware software assists in less formal collaboration than workflow tools. As with workflow automation, groupware increases the value delivered by many types of specialized portals; for example, it:

• increases the attractiveness of business-to-consumer e-commerce portals
• enables informal communication between suppliers and customers in business-to-business e-commerce portals.

Supply chain portals are also dependent on collaboration support in order to help suppliers and their customers manage their relationships. Moreover, collaboration support is a key requirement for knowledge portals.

Use of Search Engines

Online research has become an essential skill for writers. What typically took place in libraries, by phone calls or visits to experts in the field is being changed because of the Internet. Experts can sometimes be contacted by email and information, whether it is addresses, phone numbers, or detailed specifics on a certain subject, can be accessed on the World Wide Web. Search Engines have become the most important tools in locating this information, so it is important to know how to use them effectively. Search skills can be developed through practice in using the search engines and by reading the help pages provided by the search engines themselves. Over time, you will learn which search engine is good for pulling up what kind of information. This article will provide a general overview of the various search engines and some of their advanced search features which will help you with your online research.

To get a better handle on search engine optimization, it's important to understand why people use search engines, at all. Generally, people use search engines for one of three things: research, shopping, or entertainment. Someone may be doing research for restoring their classic car. Or looking for a place that sells parts for classic cars. Or just looking to kill time with video that shows custom cars racing.

• Using search engines for research

Most people who are using a search engine are doing it for research purposes. They are generally looking for answers or at least to data with which to make a decision. They're looking to find a site to fulfill a specific purpose. Someone doing a term paper on classic cars for their Automotive History 101 class would use it to find statistics on the number of cars sold in the United States, instructions for restoring and customizing old cars, and possibly communities of classic car fanatics out there. Companies would use it in order to find where their clients are, and who their competition is.

Search engines are naturally drawn to research-oriented sites and usually consider them more relevant than shopping-oriented sites, which is why, a lot of the time, the highest listing for the average query is a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is an open-source online reference site that has a lot of searchable information, tightly cross-linked with millions of backlinks. Wikipedia is practically guaranteed to have a high listing on the strength of its site architecture alone. Wikipedia is an open-source project, this information should be taken with a grain of salt as there is no guarantee of accuracy. This brings you to an important lesson of search engines — they base "authority" on perceived expertise. Accuracy of information is not one of their criteria: Notability is.

• Using search engines to shop

A smaller percentage of people, but still very many, use a search engine in order to shop. After the research cycle is over, search queries change to terms that reflect a buying mindset. Terms like "best price" and "free shipping" signal a searcher in need of a point of purchase. Optimizing a page to meet the needs of that type of visitor results in higher conversions for your site. Global search engines such as Google tend to reward research oriented sites, so your pages have to strike a balance between sales-oriented terms and research-oriented terms.

This is where specialized engines come into the picture. Although you can use a regular search engine to find what it is you’re shopping for, some people find it more efficient to use a search engine geared directly towards buying products. Some Web sites out there are actually search engines just for shopping. Amazon, eBay, and Shopping.com are all examples of shopping-only engines. The mainstream engines have their own shopping products such as Google Product Search (formerly called Froogle) and Yahoo! Shopping, where you type in the search term for the particular item you are looking for and the engines return the actual item listed in the results instead of the Web site where the item is sold. For example, say you’re buying a book on Amazon.com. You type the title into the search bar, and it returns a page of results. Now, you also have the option of either buying it directly from Amazon, or, if you’re on a budget, you can click over to the used book section. Booksellers provide Amazon.com with a list of their used stock and Amazon handles all of the purchasing, shipping, and ordering info. The same is true of Yahoo! Shopping and Google Product Search. And like all things with the Internet, odds are that somebody, somewhere, has exactly what you’re looking for. The following figure displays a results page from Google Product Search.

• Using search engines to find entertainment

Research and shopping aren't the only reasons to visit a search engine. The Internet is a vast, addictive, reliable resource for consuming your entire afternoon, and there are users out there who use the search engines as a means of entertaining themselves. They look up things like videos, movie trailers, games, and social networking sites. Technically, it’s also research, but it’s research used strictly for entertainment purposes. A child of the 80s might want to download an old-school version of the Oregon Trail video game onto her computer so she can recall the heady days of third grade. It's a quest made easy with a quick search on Google. Or if you want to find out what those wacky young Hollywood starlets are up to, you can turn to a search engine to bring you what you need.

If you’re looking for a video, odds are it’s going to be something from YouTube, much like your research results are going to come up with a Wikipedia page. YouTube is another excellent example that achieves a high listing on results pages. They’re an immensely popular video-sharing Website where anyone with a camera and a working e-mail address can upload videos of themselves doing just about anything from talking about their day to shaving their cats. But the videos themselves have keyword-rich listings in order to be easily located, plus they have an option that also displays other videos. Many major companies have jumped on the YouTube bandwagon, creating their own channels (a YouTube channel is a specific account). Record companies use channels to promote bands, and production companies use them to unleash the official trailer for their upcoming movie.

Use of Newsgroups

Newsgroups are online discussion groups or forums delivered to members via Usenet.com. Members can read posts from other users and chime in with their own input, sometimes under the direction of a moderator. Newsgroups can be read using news client software programs such as Windows Live Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird. Each newsgroup has a focus topic. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of newsgroups to which you can subscribe, meaning there is definitely something for everyone.

Newsgroups are really discussion groups. They work much like e-mail, except that the messages are sent to a central location where they are accessible to be read by anyone who’s interested instead of only to individuals.

Newsgroups are organized by subject, and they have names like alt.agriculture and humanities.language.sanskrit. To read messages posted to a particular newsgroup, you must first subscribe to the newsgroup. Subscribing to a newsgroup costs nothing, and you don’t have to register with anyone.

Newsgroups are an excellent way to share information, to get answers, and to give your opinion on a myriad of subjects, ranging from scones to dreams, and from cars to botany. There are thousands of newsgroups, and people from all over the world participate in them.

Use of Bulletin Boards

A bulletin board (pinboard, pin board, noticeboard, or notice board in British English) is a surface intended for the posting of public messages, for example, to advertise items wanted or for sale, announce events, or provide information. Bulletin boards are often made of a material such as cork to facilitate addition and removal of messages, or they can be placed on computer networks so people can leave and erase messages for other people to read and see.

Bulletin boards are particularly prevalent at universities. They are used by many sports groups and extracurricular groups and anything from local shops to official notices. Dormitory corridors, well-trafficked hallways, lobbies, and freestanding kiosks often have cork boards attached to facilitate the posting of notices. At some universities, lampposts, bollards, trees, and walls often become impromptu posting sites in areas where official boards are sparse in number.

Internet forums are becoming a global replacement for traditional bulletin boards. Online bulletin boards are sometimes referred to as message boards. The terms bulletin board, message board and even Internet forum are interchangeable, although often one bulletin board or message board can contain a number of Internet forums or discussion groups. An online board can serve the same purpose as a physical bulletin board.

Magnet boards, or magnetic bulletin boards, are a popular substitute for cork boards because they lack the problem of board deterioration from the insertion and removal of pins over time.