Are websites still important?

When social networks first began to become popular, allot of commentators thought that they would ultimately kill the website. At the time, it seemed possible. After all, if a business could have a functional web presence within a larger pool of interested people and not have to worry about laborious design and development costs, that would be appealing, right? To a large extent, this is what happened for individuals: Many people I know who once maintained a personal website now focus primarily on a social media platform instead. And for businesses, social networks do serve as wonderful outposts for receiving and qualifying users. Once they've done that, though, the user is looking for a level of informational sophistication and specificity that a social network can't deliver as well as a dedicated custom website can. Because of that, it turns out that social media actually ended up having the opposite effect from what was predicted. The more popular social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or MySpace have gotten, the more important it has been for businesses to have a stellar website to refer people to.

Websites are the centre of your communications

While this idea of website centrality is quite obvious for business to consumer ecommerce companies (e.g. Amazon.com, Nike.com, or Apple.com), it's not so obvious for business to business service-based companies. Companies in this space are primarily concerned with using the website as a marketing tool to generate and nurture leads, in addition to serving existing customers. This requires a sophisticated website that can process incoming user data as well as integrate with all kinds of external platforms, ranging from newsletter tools to CRMs to social media tools. So while the website may depend upon outposts to deliver people, it then must be capable of operating as a "central command," synthesizing data from many sources and controlling the flow of information in and out on behalf of the company that maintains it.