ELEKTRONIKPRAXIS column: Part 002: The website is your valuable sales assistant

The Internet is playing an increasingly important role, especially in the B2B sector. The website has a leading role to play. The website acts as the most valuable sales employee, available to your customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

How much does it cost you to hire a new sales employee who enjoys working day and night and is always happy and satisfied with your company? Many entrepreneurs quote me figures of between €5,000 and €10,000 per month. When I then ask who really looks after the sales employee, it's either the boss himself, his right-hand man or even a specially appointed sales manager.

Nobody would think of handing over a valuable sales employee to an intern or someone from their family for better or worse. So why do many B2B entrepreneurs still do this with one of their most important sales employees: their company website? She's cheaper, easier to deal with and would be happy to work for you 24 hours a day.

The Internet is playing an increasingly important role, especially in the B2B sector, because more and more companies are looking for potential suppliers and business partners - and look at the website before making initial contact. Is it meaningful, intelligent and attractive or just boring and uninteresting?

Rules apply to the programming of a website

Imagine your sales representative saying the following to a customer: "I work for company xy. You want to become a customer?" Would your customer like it? What impression would your website make? Why do so many companies still do this with their website, the most important sales employee? Just as the German language is subject to certain rules, the programming of a website is also bound by rules.

These rules are laid down by the W3C Consortium (comparable to the "Duden" for the German language). A good programmer (and a good author) adheres to these rules, because search engines (one of your most important referrers) like websites that are programmed without errors. Unfortunately, most designers do not adhere to these rules, resulting in websites that are increasingly ignored by search engines for this reason.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has its own test at http://validator.w3.org, but only in English. In future, make sure that your web designer adheres to the international standards or not. It will help determine your success on the Internet!