Business managers realize the importance of understanding the potential of the Internet and are analysing its impact on their industry and company; reviewing company processes; and developing Internet strategies and implementation plans to meet their business objectives and gain a competitive advantage.

The challenge is to create a strategy that works for your business. Understanding how to develop it is half the challenge. A strategy building approach that enables you to carry out the analysis in a structured way will alleviate the challenge and put you on the right path.

Step One: Define your Site’s Purpose
Why have you gone online? What do you want your site to accomplish? Do you want to be an informational site? Do you want to sell products or services? Do you want to provide a source of entertainment?

Defining your site’s purpose is the foundation to developing your Internet strategy. Writing down the purpose of your site will keep you focused and enable you to develop a concise plan.

Step Two: Determine your Online Objectives
What is it you want your online business to accomplish over the next six months or year? Effective objectives are measurable and provide time lines for delivery. Your online objectives should support your overall business objectives.

For example, if you want to increase revenues, your online objective may be to increase online product revenues by 30 percent this time next year.

Step Three: Identify Tools and Technologies
Some businesses make the mistake of implementing online technologies and tools without long-term planning, quickly losing sight of their business objectives in the process. The organization becomes technology-driven rather than business-driven, often resulting in lack of support from within the organization and inefficient budget spending.

Consequently, once you have developed your online objectives, it is necessary to identify what technologies and tools can be implemented to reach them. For example, if you want to increase your online product revenues by a particular percentage, what do you need to do to achieve this end result? On a basic level you need people to buy your products. To do this, the first step is to attract people to your site. Second, you need to entice them to stay on you site and browse your products. Third, you must encourage visitors to engage in a particular action – in this case, to buy an item. Finally, you want them to visit again in the future.

Step Four: Determine Project Readiness
In the case of increasing your online product revenues, each step and potential technology or tool requires a different skills set, budget amount and time. It is important to balance out the requirements you need to implement each technology or tool, with your available resources.

If you want to develop an online tour to entice people to browse through your products, you will need to identify who in your company will develop the tool, and keep the tour up-to-date as you add new products or pages to your site.

If you are considering a newsletter to build relationships with customers, you will need to determine who will write it, how often you want to send it out and how much time it takes to develop one.

Step Five: Design/Develop/Deploy
Once you have identified the steps, technologies and tools, and resource requirements, you should have a good idea of what is involved in the design, development and deployment phases.

The most important consideration is to allow flexibility to enable new ideas and concepts to flow. At the same time, minimum quality standards should be maintained. Also ensure you develop back-up processes in case your resources need to be utilized in other areas.

Step Six: Monitor/Evaluate
The monitoring and evaluation step requires that you measure how well your online technologies and tools have enabled you to meet your online objectives. To determine their effectiveness, collect feedback from your customers and consider investing in measurement software to provide you with valuable customer data. For example: Are your customers finding it easy to navigate the site? How do customers find your site? Are customers happy with your products and services?

Your customers drive the business process and every move they make online can be recorded and analysed, which will enable you to develop effective technologies and tools to reach your online objectives.