The following are my top five reasons why your Web site will ultimately be unsucessful and be useless stagnant bits and bytes on the Internet.
5. The IS department is in charge of design and content creation/publishing.
The IS department does not know your content better than you, the content contributor. Unless you have a very specific workflow that facilitates the content creation process and how it interacts with your IS dept. for publishing, it will never work.
4. Your content is "brochure-ware", static and stale.
Have you ever heard this in your office?
"Hey Bob, let's just put our brochure up as content on our web site. It is the same marketing copy we would use anyway, so why re-invent the wheel."
This conversation should never happen. If it does, please..PLEASE say "no" and make sure your content for your web site is written for the Web (yes, there is a difference) and it is reviewed on a regular basis if not changes on a regular basis.
3. The majority of your senior managers and middle managers don't "get it" when it comes to the web.
Your management sees the Web site as a something that you "had" to do to keep up with the Jones', but never saw the value in it and will not put more resources to improving it.
2. You have decentralized content creation without standards and rules.
Can you say Silence of the Lambs? Wild, rabid kids without any supervision will fend for themselves which gives you a fractured, inconsistent mess for your visitors to wade through to find the content they are really looking for. Without explicit standards and business rules, decentralized content control and creation can become unruley and very difficult to manage globally.
1. You don't understand your audience and how they interact wit your brand and company.
Rule number 1: Know thy audience and thy will strive. If you don't know who you are providing content/services to how can you build something they will use or come to?
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