I read an article a while ago from Forrester Research about moving your business to a design-centric business. This article was concerned about justifying web spend and getting the whole business focused on web design for success. The article proposed that in a design-centric business news of successes in the website are spread across the whole business. It really hit home to me the other day when I was talking firstly with Bruce Thurlow the Online Manager at Adventure Tours and Oz Experience and then the CEO Ken Hart.

I have been working with Bruce for awhile now on their web strategy and recently there has been a host of real successes in the project. For example, following our keyword research we choose to focus on a keyword phrase that took in the terms “holiday package”. Not terms that you would associate with either of these companies, but terms that we discovered are researched a plenty on the Internet. Anyway, since a bit of on-site optimisation and a wait for Google to index the relevant pages, sales of packages have gone up considerably.

It is not the rise in package sales that has surprised me so much, but the lack of realisation by Ken that this increased revenue was a direct result of the effort by Bruce and his team. Most people in an organisation of any size don’t understand the website, or the mechanics of the eCommerce. As such this example bought back the aforementioned article to me that within a web project all successes no matter what size should be promoted by the team responsible throughout the company. Evangalise you successes, tell your company stakeholders, and at the end of the day justify your existence - no one else in the company will.

Tags: Adventure Tours, keywords

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 4:48 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.