When most business owners think about website design, they do not think about business software and applications. They think about online marketing. That is not the case today. We see companies like Google, Apple and Windows all developing online/web-based applications. Actually business software solutions are basing most of the new applications on client-server architecture.
The next phase is browser-based applications for business, and you take that to the next level, with your smart web design. Your website is the place where your staff work with you, and the place where your customers do business with you. Smart sites and smart business applications based on the web, and obviously, your website, can reduce a lot of workload your business.
Application integration.
Have you thought about how your company can integrate different departments through your website? You can integrate applications and reduce your workload. For example, payment systems inbuilt in your site can align sales and accounting departments in your company automatically. You minimise workloads because you smart site and smart applications inside your site are doing the work for you
Provide application solutions
By your site being the location of doing business with you, you can remove a lot of IT needs and discussion of those needs with clients and suppliers. Let’s say you have a new supplier and they need access to your IBM mainframe. You can build-in the necessary Windows terminal emulator applications if you have a database on a large IBM mainframe computer. By providing solutions on our smart site, we reduce a lot of communications and setup requirements, for both clients and suppliers. You have the solution for them to do business with you, because they just get online, and go to your URL.
Data management and control
With this kind of fully developed smart site design we can take our operations to the next level of control and safety. Everything that anyone does with your business is controlled, monitored, flagged, and recorded. Extremely high levels of security are available, and you can even have VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) built in to make your global network truly secure. VPNs are often more secured than physical networks depending on your location.
Information gathering
We have just talked about how we can control, manage and monitor the activity on our site and applications. There is a whole lot more that we can do. Let’s say you are a traditional English language school supplementing your business with an online English school, and you have students in a particular region of the world logging on to your site. You can be collecting all of this information and this might be the data behind a profitable move to open a school in that region. Your site is not only another way to earn income, it helps you do further market research automatically.
There are more traditional business owners that could be benefiting from extremely progressive and smart websites than is thought. Are your competitors getting the edge over you because they are employing this kind of technology?