I want a website or 5 steps of knowledge of Tao

"You know that Chinese live in China, and even the emperor himself is Chinese." So, I remember, began the famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen "The Nightingale." In imitation of Andersen, we decided to tell a typical Chinese parable about a certain man and his path to enlightenment.



“A fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it,” said another storyteller. Our story describes a series of classic mistakes made by the customer of the site, stumbling on each of the 5 steps, leading to profit.
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Step One. "I want a site."

In the province of Sichuan there lived a man named Liao. Liao sold jeans and knew nothing about the Internet, methods of promotion, optimization, blogs, social networks and other virtual charms. The only thing he longed for was making money.

This continued until his companion, Xiao, told him that a computer connected to the Internet could be used not only as a box for accounting. In addition, Xiao showed Liao the site of his main rival, Mr. Hu, who successfully sells jeans all over the world.

- I want a website! - Liao immediately declared and asked Xiao, who owned computer skills and read a web programming tutorial, to make him a website. Xiao sighed, but, not wanting to contradict his comrade, took up the job.

Moral: in the modern world, success without a company site, denying the usefulness of the Internet, is much more difficult than if this site were.

Step Two. "I want a beautiful site."

However, not even half a year passed, as it turned out that the site made by Xiao does not cause anything but aesthetic irritation among ordinary Chinese jeans consumers. Moreover, the program code of the site revealed holes through which hackers hired by Mr. Hu had climbed. After long and painful deliberation, Liao understood that he needed to turn to professionals.

- Ha ha ha! - laughed Tao-freelancer who called Liao. - For the first time in my life I see such an indigestible site, made not according to Feng Shui.

- I want a beautiful site! - declared Liao. - Can you make me like that?

“Of course,” said the Taoist freelancer. - For a certain amount of yuan, of course.

Liao sighed and, not wanting to seem greedy, reached into his wallet.

Moral: when creating a web site, one can not ignore the usability factor (design, ease of navigation for the user). You can not make a good site for free.

Step Three. "I want an optimized website."

Taoist-freelancer made an excellent design that meets all the norms of Feng Shui. At the forum attached to the site, ordinary Chinese consumers of jeans wrote what they like, how the site looks now. However, traffic visits remained the same. Few people knew about Liao jeans, everyone still bought Mr. Hu’s jeans.

“What's the matter?” Liao puzzled. (Taoist-freelancer shrugged his shoulders to all questions, said “50 to 50, maybe it will work, or maybe it won't work,” and as a result, one fine day he hitchhiked to Tibet to visit his shaman friends).

So Liao would have suffered if one day hadn’t talked in a roadside eatery with a wise Confucian in the service of a large corporation.

- Ha ha ha! The wise Confucian laughed. - Never listen to these Taoists! They have no clear recipe, magic-magic alone ...

- Do you know the recipe? - asked Liao.

“Of course,” he answered. - You need to optimize the site. You see what's the matter. All ordinary Chinese consumers of jeans think about equally. Statistics show that 70% of them recruit 2 characters: the character "jeans" and the character "cheap." All search engines: both American Google and our national Chinese search engine, Baidu, will first show the users Mr. Hu’s website, and your website will only be shown at the very end, because you don’t have these two characters, not to mention any special tags .

- I want an optimized website! - declared Liao. - Who can do this work?

“Fortunately,” the wise Confucian replied, “I am just working in a corporation that deals with such things.”

Liao sighed and reached into his wallet.

Moral: it is absolutely pointless in the modern world to have a site that is not optimized for the requirements of search engines - no one will notice it.

Step Four. "I want a site that would be an effective sales tool."

Confucian did not deceive. A year and a half has passed, and the Liao website has taken a firm place on the first page of search queries, next to the site of Mr. Hu. More and more ordinary Chinese jeans consumers have visited the Liao website. However, Liao soon turned his attention to a strange paradox: there were visitors on the site, and the number of jeans in the warehouse did not decrease, but, on the contrary, increased.

Realizing that he could not do without good advice, Liao went to meet the wisest man, as they said, in China, the abbot of the Shaolin Buddhist monastery.

- Teacher! - turned to him Liao. - I donated one million yuan to your monastery. Could you please enlighten why my jeans are not for sale?

- Because you are a fool! - shouted the abbot of the monastery (he was a very sharp and straightforward man). - You think you made a website, invested a lot of money in it - and that's it, can we wait for them to flow back the golden river? The site is just a car, it alone does not sell anything! People sell, and they are completely illiterate! They cannot even distinctly reply to an email. I tried to buy jeans on your site, but I didn’t even find a phone number to call in our province! Either train old ones, or find new employees!

Liao sighed and donated another one million yuan to Shaolin Monastery and several dozen pairs of jeans for the superior.

Moral: never forget the "human factor". A website can be an effective sales tool only if user feedback is organized.

Step Five. "I want an effective business."

Liao retrained staff. Employees are constantly taking applications. Everyone wanted to buy cheap Chinese jeans.

However, it soon became clear that the company Liao simply does not have the opportunity to sell jeans to everyone. Orders came from different countries, but Liao often did not have the opportunity to send the purchased goods to another Chinese province. In other words, the structure of the company was not ready for such an influx of customers via the Internet.

I had to take additional loans, increase salaries to employees, increase the cost of goods. As a result, cheap Chinese jeans are no longer cheap.

Liao went broke. Leaving everything, he went to the Qinlin Mountains and began to meditate. Soon he knew Tao.

Moral: before you start website promotion, you need a serious marketing audit of the customer’s company, its position in the market, competitiveness, ability to scale.

Epilogue

The peculiarity of human nature is that everything is always done backwards. And it is clear, in principle, that we had to start from the end, with a marketing audit. Then go to the managerial training, optimize the site and only then “finish” the design. But passion blinds our minds and leads to wrong decisions.

We do not offer to meditate. We suggest thinking.