You’ve either got a business web site or you haven’t. If you haven’t, please think very hard about the future and how your customers will want to deal with your organisation in our new millennium.

If you have – congratulations. Clearly you have realised that the Internet is the long-term future for business. You probably decided your business needed one in order to:

Raise market awareness

Conduct business

Increase sales

Beat the competition

Improve customer communications

Create the right image and attract high calibre job applicants

Develop new markets

Reduce costs

Provide 24 hour shopping

Keep up with your competitors who have their own web site

... or any combination of these reasons.

Here are some hard and sharp questions about the performance of your web site:

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, possibly or even not sure, then you and your web site need further help and support to make sure that it delivers the required results. But beware, because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Never was this more true than in the case of web sites. As in all markets there are those with a little knowledge who will design a web site for you that looks terrific but just doesn’t work.

So if you have a web site up and running, ask yourself honestly how it performs. Is it a high performance Ferrari or a sluggish MOT failure? Because an effective web site is just like a Ferrari. You may be able to afford to buy one, but can you afford the time and money to run it on a long-term basis? Sadly you cannot realistically set up a web site, dust yourself off, feel smug and assume that the orders will then roll in continuously. They might for a while but not for long.

Simple really – maintenance and running costs. Even first class web sites need regular monitoring, fine tuning and tweaking just like Ferraris do in order to keep them at peak performance delivery.

Your web site needs to be cost effectively audited, marketed and promoted in its own right. If it is not then people who need and want to find it will not be able to and potential business will go elsewhere to easy to find, better maintained and more navigable sites.

The skill and art of web site management is full of strange jargon such as keywords, traffic analysis, tracking, linking, hyperlinks, meta tags and search engines. Even if this terminology is familiar to you, you may not understand its true significance.