An important marketing, sales and service channel is the Internet. Through one or more Internet web sites you can establish brand awareness, distribute information, sell products and services, manage partner and customer relationships and more. Each of your major functions can operate through a shared web site and host server, or through dedicated web sites and servers. Monitoring the needs of your prospects and customers and their use of your web services is crucial to the successful growth of your web site and your overall business.

Do you currently have a web presence? Do you know how much your web site(s) is contributing to your overall business? Are you satisfied with its operation and the growth of your organization? If not, we can help you and/or your current web developer be more successful.

Web Site Design & Creation

Key elements in a web site are its theme, visual attributes and interactivity. Unfortunately, it is very easy to design a bad web site, and even more difficult to construct one that successfully satisfies all of your organization's objectives and customers' needs.

Do you know the purpose of your web site? Are there specific metrics that it needs to achieve? If not, it is definitely not satisfying your needs or contributing to your business as it could or should. More and more people are turning to the web each day to find critical information and purchase those easy and hard-to-find products and services. Are you capturing your share?

Who is your target audience? What are their preferences? If your target audience is school age kids, many are computer literate and browser proficient and also don't have a lot patience. You need to capture their interest quickly and interact with them through a variety of short-hands that they've grown accustomed to. On the other, if you are working with older people, your fonts and font sizes need to be large and clear. Many people won't admit when they can't read something. They simply won't do it. Your web pages need to be clear and cleanly laid out, with lots of supporting information describing what to do and when to do it. If you are targeting different groups, you may need several different sections in your web site, one for each targeted group.

Where your web site is hosted is also important. If you are using a third party hosting service, not all functions and services are available. For instance, some major hosting services do not provide SQL database support, which is now typically required for interactive and user personalized web sites. When selecting your hosting location/service, it is important to understand your technology needs for today, as well as in the future as you grow your Internet presence.

Finally, have you looked at your competitor's web sites? Your customers have. What do they have that you and your customers and prospects need/want? What works for them, and what doesn't? How could you improve on what your competitor's offering, thereby further enticing to your prospects?

Web Site Update / Maintenance

Successful web sites are constantly updated with the latest company/group information. Most active web sites undergo major changes at least every 6 months. As your web visitors become more proficient, and expect new services and capabilities on/from your web site, you need to grow to accommodate the market demand. Furthermore, if you don't update your web site, your positioning in the various search engines will decline over time.

If you need assistance in improving your web site(s), we can work with your ones, making any/all of the appropriate changes. Depending on your hosting environment, we can extend your web site to help you build sales and customer satisfaction. And if your hosting environment does not support your evolving needs, we can quickly move your web site to a more appropriate environment.

Web Site Monitoring

Whether you are hosting your web site or using a hosting service, there are limits to the available storage space, host computer performance and overall communication bandwidth. These limitations translate into the maximum number of visitors that your web site can support at any given time. These limitations also affect the total number of transactions that your visitors can perform at any given time. Typically, as demand increases, there is not a noticeable impact on your web site's overall performance, but at some point as demand continues to increase, individual user requests will begin to take longer to complete, followed eventually by a denial of service for any new web site visitors. How many simultaneous visitors and requests can your web site support? Can you streamline some web site's operations and support more simultaneous operations and users, or do you need to divide your web site functionality across several servers? Has your web site been designed to allow for easy functional separation as demand for your site increases?

Unfortunately, there are also many different components that can temporarily or permanently fail, from your web site's host computer through your host's gateway router and telecommunications network. For a mission critical and/or active E-Commerce web site, it is important to minimize any downtime by providing redundant systems and solutions. Do you have sufficient recovery procedures and equipment in place?

Sample Web Sites

The following table contains several different web sites that were created and are currently maintained by MMC AD Systems. The different types of functions and technologies used in each web site are described in the table. The basic web sites were all created using Adobe Web Publishing and Video Products,

Name	Amblit Technologies	getInsights	MMC AD Systems
Description	Multi-Agent Software Technology Showcase	Student Career Coaching	Business and Technical Consulting
Comment	Educational site with some interactive and ECommerce capabilities	Highly interactive web site with supporting ECommerce capability (B2C)	Static web site that promotes services to other business (B2B)
Target Audience	General Public	Student prospects & members	Potential business clients
Type	Static	Static	Static
Flash	No	Some	Some
Movies/Videos	No	Yes	No
Demos	RoboDemo	No	No
Whitepapers	No	No	Adobe PDF's
Platform	Unix, Apache	Unix, Apache	Unix, Apache
Sales Model	Shopping Cart	Membership	None
E-Commerce	Paypal	amember, Rodopi Payment Gateway, CardServices International	No
Database	No	mySQL	No
Interactive Testing	No	Amblit Interviewer™	No
Survey/Poll	No	Amblit Interviewer™	No
Interactive Characters	Amblit Avatar	No	No
Viral Marketing	No	Amblit Tell-a-Friend	No
Miscellaneous	DHTML, Perl	DHTML, PHP	DHTML

Two other web sites that we are also supporting include Keep Sharp and Diablo Symphony Orchestra.