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patbob wrote: Companies were producing good products long before websites, or even the Internet, existed.
Of course they were. Back then, they took out ads in magazines, handed out brochures, answered phones...
It really doesn't matter if i'm calling you for information on your product, or visiting your web site - if i can't get the answers i need, i'm probably not going to buy your product. When a web site offers me details / demos / pricing only via email, and then takes three days to respond... it's every bit as bad as putting me on hold for an hour. If there's an alternative with a friendlier response, i'm gonna go that way.
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- C hris L osinger, Online Poker Players?
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: "We care about our product and our customers; we just don't give a flip about our website."
I'm not sure if I understand it truly but if you mean website is not important when you pay attention to your customers, I shall say this is nonsense.
As a customer of many products, I need a good online support, or the vendor actually don't care about me. For instance consider X company produces GDI boards, I bought one two years ago, before Vista release, then I move to vista. Meanwhile the company that cares about it's customers, produces a driver for Vista. Now without a good website, How can they support me? Can they say: "We care about our product and our customers" and produced the driver, now customers should respect us and travel here to get the new driver?!
Several times, I've been asked to repair a computer that the owner doesn't know where drivers are. I love good companies with good products that put their drivers on their websites, so before reinstalling the OS, I can get latest drivers. Same is true with softwares that has online update or support available.
// "In the end it's a little boy expressing himself." Yanni
while (I'm_alive)
{
cout<<"I love programming.";
}
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I also think that a good website is important for deciding if I am going to buy a product. If I went into a store, and it was all run down, I probably am not going to buy anything there, unless it is in its theme (like an antique store). I think that if you aren't willing to put out the effort to present your product in the best possible manner, then you must not think it is worth it. If you don't, then I don't, and I won't buy it. That holds true for me about 99% of the time.
This is an interesting topic to me.
Ben
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The Website quality depends on the company. If it is an online shop selling general products i.e. amazon etc then the price is probably more important than how good the web site is. If it is a company selling a service then information about that services would be more important then the WoW factor of there site. In my experience finding the information you require quickly or getting a response back quickly to a question. BAD WEBSITE != BAD PRODUCT. But GOOD WEBSITE doesn't mean that the product is any good at all. It just means there is :-
1) Loads of money.
2) Hiding a bad product/service.
3) A web designer with vision.
4) A Good Company and a good product/service.
A good website should always give you a contact that will respond to your question quickly and accurately. From this contact you can then make better judgements.
Ben
Why is it when you are busy everyone whats it yesterday, But when your not no-one has any work for you?
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Too many companies have "brochureware" Web sites, geared for the non-technical executive. I guess that is OK to make a first impression, but sooner or later the executive is going to ask a technical person to take a look at the product. If I'm that person, and the site can't answer the most basic questions I have, how can I give a good recommendation to the executive?
And sometimes the executive type will identify a need we have and ask me to research possible solutions. I do not have time to make a bunch of phone calls and email back and forth to get details. Give me enough information up front and if the product seems like what we need, then I will follow up with my questions.
But of course, the biggest issue is pricing. Even if their pricing has a lot of variables (size of your organization, number of seats, whatever) they should at least be able to give me a ballpark figure. ("Less than $10k?" "More than $100k?")
Or course, I'm sure the lack of detail on many sites is by design. They want to keep you thinking "This might work" as long as possible and get your contact info into their sales lead db. I don't want them bugging me if the product is completely wrong for our purposes.
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couv dude wrote: Too many companies have "brochureware" Web sites, geared for the non-technical executive. I guess that is OK to make a first impression, but sooner or later the executive is going to ask a technical person to take a look at the product. If I'm that person, and the site can't answer the most basic questions I have, how can I give a good recommendation to the executive?
Unfortunately, that rarely matters. If the exec likes the product you'll end up with it anyway. 
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The quickest way to lose me as a customer is to NOT post the price of the products online and then tell me I have to contact their sales weasels. That just smacks of high pressure sales tactics ala used car salesmen. It is so easy to set up a web page to display the price of a product I find it inexcusable to not do so. Why make me wait hours/days for some sales idiot to call and tell me the product is too expensive, and then hound me for weeks after even though I have told em I was not interested.
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Exactly, we've always had our pricing up front and clearly spelled out on our website, the ironic thing being that we still get an email at least once a week from someone asking what our price is after having looked at our web site. It's the second link in our menu "Pricing"!
In our type of software a lot of our competitors pull the "call for pricing" tactic and their software is often 10 times more than hours with expensive yearly subscriptions and other crap which amounts to extortion more than anything else. We've done *very* well with clear pricing spelled out up front and no ongoing costs of any kind.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
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Cant agree more, it really pisses me off
Smile: A curve that can set a lot of things straight!
(\ /)
(O.o)
(><)
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It's somewhat important to me...
I don't care how flashy or cool or whatever it is... Nor how "new" or "old school", none of that claptrap...
However, web sites that have errors (broken links, incorrect or outdated information, empty pages, 404's, etc), or stale or outdated information, a lack of meaninful contact information, etc, OR that gloss over the product(s) or company, scare me off straight away...
Another way to put it is that I don't respond well to claptrap, sales mumbo-jumbo, or bells and whistles on web site. However, I do expect the producer to make information and themselves (in some form or another) available...
For example, nothing turns me away quicker than a few screen shots, a lot of jabbering about how awesome the product, and then teasers about contacting a sales associate to learn of their exciting package offers... Yeh, right... If it's so exciting and such a great deal, just publish the price and be done with it...
What that usually means is "Yes, our products are ridiculously expensive... But hey, someone has to pay for all our expensive cars and houses and trips overseas... So give us your contact information so we can put you into our contact tracking software, tag team you with sales calls and so on, and try to wear you down and get you to part with lots of money..."
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A bad site and a good site depends on what you expect of it.
So when we build a site we must dig what customers expect of it.
These days the company's web site is it's show room so it must provide full and accurate information of what the company have to offer.
The navigation must be intuitive and a way to contact the support or sales department must by accessible on every page.
After defining this then we stick to the presentation and find out what kind of UI best fits the users expectations. Some businesses may look good on fancy graphics and fancy animations but some don't... some may look good on fancy text colors but most don't...
So, your web site may not reflect your products quality but it will most certainly show how do you handle the commercial branch of your business and that will have its consequences on sales.
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For me, it mainly depends on the availibilty of information. It's important to have at least the following items availible on the web site. If it doesn't have the info I need I move on.
- User Manual/Product specification
- Contact infomation for purchasing ans product support (at least they give the illusion of support).
- Priceing is a plus but if you can get that from a sales person, that's ok.
- Availibilty and lead time would be a huge plus but not a lot of sites have that.
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Joe Q wrote: availibilty of information
And also it stipulates that the information posted is up-to-date and accurate.
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Good point! There's nothing like looking at price information and then seeing it was from 2003. (Been-there-done-that)
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The website and the online manual is pretty important as the product itself. Two succinct examples of this:
1) Printer-Friendly Manual of PHP from http://www.php.net/[^]
2) Anytime Anywhere documentation without installing the fatty bulk MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/[^]
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Vasudevan Deepak Kumar wrote: 1) Printer-Friendly Manual of PHP
Someday, MSDN will be like the PHP manual. They're getting closer - you can now leave comments on MSDN topics. Another decade, and MSDN may well reach the level of quality that php.net had back in 2000... 
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- C hris L osinger, Online Poker Players?
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To be honest, if the product is amazing then the website wouldn't matter - but only if I already knew the product. If I was scouting for software and the website was really really bad, then I wouldn't even bother trialing the software. I guess the reasoning is if they can't be bothered maintaining their website (which isn't exactly hard if its just for a sales pitch), then what hope have they of maintaining any sort of support for a product.
Obviously you can't say that for everything, I know some bad software with great websites, and some great software with crap websites... but generally speaking its how I think things work.
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Agreed, I would not consider purchasing any software (that I did not know) if the web site was poor. I remember several times dismissing a product for this very reason.
John
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I'm totally agree too. When I'm in a mall, I never go into a new store if the shop window doesn't shows me something interesting and well done, I prefer my usual store.
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I think the website is of vital importance to the company.
It is after all - the online salesperson for the company. The first representative that a web user is going to meet, and often the return point for many enquiries.
If I was to walk upto a company and be greeted by disinterested employee's, rude receptionists, and a workplace that shows lack of pride and neatness - would I want to part with my money. Should I put my trust, and the trust of my clients (for who I am developing applications) to a company that show no enthusiam in presenting themselves.
Consider. You are a manager who is about to employ a new person. Of the 2 candidates one is neat, tidy , and well presented and the other well. is disorganised and untidy. Who gives the BEST first impression. Regardless of the skills the first impression is alway the best.
Just my views..
Dave
Coding Coding Coding...
Keep those keyboards coding..
RAW CODE!!
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I agree,
Presentation is king and nothing more so than a web site. I am now a full-time developer however I was previously moon lighting as a deisgner stroke web developer.
To me having a well constructing (not necessarily flashy) web site that presents the companies idea's is key in this day and age, one of the very first things I ask any client is "do you have a web site?".
The web site is no different to a business card, regardless of how good your product is if the market cannot gain visibility of you as a company your product will not sell. When I was working as a web design consultant my company web site promoted me, I feel at least, very well in that many customers assumed they were dealing with a much larger company - hence I was able to win over the more lucrative contracts.
It's unfortunate however we live in a web age, if I was presented with an ill concieved web site I would not consider the company or their products. Saying a web site is not required is no different to the nay sayers who believed the internet was a fad.
Adios,
Fz
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I know many good products that do not have good websites.
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Gautam Jain wrote: I know many good products that do not have good websites.
...even many more that do not have websites at all.
Developer Fantasies
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Depends on the type of product of coarse.
If it's a web design tool and the home page has 200 animated gifs and uses 25 point bright pink font, you may not take their product too seriously
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I wonder what their potential might be if they had a site (or one that was well done) that reflected how good you see you the product/company to be?
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