Virtuality today
An international statistic about internet usage. Where does Australia stand?
This internet site provides interesting statistics regarding internet usage, penetration, and growth. 70.2% of Australia's population or in other words 16,926,015 people are connected to the internet. This penetration rate is similar to that of North America (69.7%). However, it is interesting to note that North America's growth rate is below that of Australia. Between 2000 and 2007 in Australia we observed a growth rate of 156.5%. Moreover, it is worthwhile to mention that Oceania covers 1.7% of the world's internet users! Source: Internet World Stats.
"What does virtuality mean for my business?"
It seems the use of the information highway has changed a lot of processes in our lives. It opens up great possibilities for businesses to sell their products and services online, assist customers in forums, faq, live chats or by email. On the other side it saves a lot of time for the customer. Customers do not have to call expensive and time consuming hotlines to book flights, hotels, train tickets. They can virtually organize most of their daily duties including paying bills, or even grocery shopping and have them delivered to their home address.
Nowadays it is very important for businesses in all industries to have a 'virtual identity'' because a high percentage of the internet users (70.2% of all Australians) spider the web looking for goods and services. More than 50% of all online sales are purchased by women by the way ... Might be worth considering this in regards of choosing 'the' design.
"I'm online but don't get any visits"
It will not give you enough exposure and fame if you run a 'nice' website. The website needs to have 'user value', a well structured and interesting content, all your products, services and company information. It also has to be nicely layed out design-wise. Users spend their free time on the computers, so make it a pleasure to read.
Further it is important to let the customer feel the corporate identity, make content accesible and userfriendly. The customer should find the requested information intuitive. Who is your client?
‘Who is your client?’ If you know this then you are in a position to target them accordingly by constructing your website so they can locate information easily and actually like being in it. If you are aware of who your client is then you can market your products and services specifically for them without them even knowing it. Similar to food adverts on television at dinner time or large car adverts using a family seated perfectly within the vehicle.
Very important: the website needs to be found in search engines! For that you need a web designer who is familiar with SEO (search engine optimization) and the content should be chosen wisely since every title, description of image, text, downloadable brochure, simply everything will be spidered, ranked and given out by search engines. Therefore it is important to think about planning 'matches' in the websites' content and write descriptions especially for the search egnines.
Virtuality - what are the benefits?
Besides finding information people are making financial transactions, buying and booking all kinds of goods and services, keeping in touch with friends, families and the rest of the world through social platforms, chat, video and voice messaging as well as email ... and all this right at your fingertips?
It opened a door to the future. I personally could never have imagined within just 20 years that we would be able to make video conferences from home or even be able to sit in front of a computer and have access to an information platform. Today we all can have it at a fingertip!
We can have all sorts of 'buddies' who are available when we have the time. If we'd prefer to spend our time on something else, we just make ourselves 'invisible' and nobody bothers us anymore.
From the business prespective - we can use our website as a free advertising platform, can tell everybody about running promotions, specials, sales, news and all details about the products and services.
... isn't that good enough?
get VIRTUAL, you are just a few steps away ...
