Both Ken and Barbie are very similar in nature. Each possesses a natural propensity to succeed, have a strong work ethic and want to grow their businesses. In the past, both have worked with and had less than desirable experiences with web designers and developers, so as they look to enter the online environment with their new projects, they are trying to be more efficient.

In any case, they both need:

1. A solid Internet marketing strategy
2. A website that is built around their online strategy
3. to Drive traffic
4. to generate online sales

There is one major difference between Ken & Barbie’s mindsets. Ken thinks that he needs to exercise greater control over his next project because of his experience with less than stellar web designers and developers in the past. With this control, he’ll ensure that the website is built, designed and laid out exactly as he wants it. He understands that conversions and sales will translate to online success – especially if he is intimately involved with each phase.

Ken knows that he can build his new vision on the cheap and is reaching out to ‘find a coder’ type websites and understands that he can easily get in touch with an offshore team via Craigslist to keep his costs way down. After all, his niece is 14 years old and had designed her own website so why not keep costs to the bare minimum?

Barbie on the other hand, believes that she can become successful online but only if she has all the right people in place. She knows that she’ll need a designer and developer to build her website, but that she also needs a team that really understands the online space to make her idea work.

Here’s why Barbie stands a much higher chance of succeeding than Ken though they both possess the same skills sets.

• Barbie is more likely start her questions with, ‘What is the most effective way to…” versus “Here’s what we’re going to do…”
• Barbie doesn’t care if she doesn’t understand terminology or all the latest trends, but she’s determined to learn as much as she can whilst forming a relationship with a good Internet marketing team. (Ken won’t ask questions about what he doesn’t understand. Ken’s the man with the plan, so why would he need outside consulting?)
• Barbie wants to bring in someone who has a thorough understanding of the online space, is willing to take the time to understand her business vision in order to reach deeper into the US market.
• Barbie believes that in order for her online business to succeed she needs an effective blend of creative design, web development, online marketing and analytics. Most importantly, she understands that all must be given equal weight.

1 Year Later

Ken has actually been faster to launch his program. He hired a team in India for $12/hr and got his new site up fairly quickly. He’s already started some pay-per-click efforts and driving some traffic to his new site.

Barbie launches her site a few months later and feels comfortable with the Internet agency she hired. Her site has little traffic but she’s already generating consistent online sales and is about to start her traffic driving campaign once her team shores up various bug fixes and improvements.

18 Months

Ken has double the traffic than Barbie’s site but is getting nervous because he has few online sales. India can’t keep up with Ken’s requests so he fires them and switches back to a local web designer and developer in the U.S. Ken is now re-thinking the entire site and isn’t very happy that he may have to re-do his entire website, content management system and online strategy.

Barbie at 18 months is starting to see significant results. Her team had challenges of their own but were able to come up with solutions on the fly given the increasing number of online sales. Not only is she happy with her web team, she’s turned over much of the consulting and management of the website to them, given their familiarity with her business goals. She’s adding more players to the mix and ramping up additional online marketing spend.

Paying close attention to analytics and cost of conversion, she is able to make accurate spending decisions. Additionally she’s making enough money and realizes that she won’t need a second round of investment. Her customers are starting to spread the word about her products via Social Media and her online business is taking off.

Two Years Later

Ken ends up firing his web team in the U.S. (again) – much to their relief. He spends the next six months trying to assemble another team to manage his current site but no one is willing to do it for the price he wants to pay. Ken is a trooper though and despite difficult lessons learned he realizes that he needs to do more homework and really immerse himself in the online industry.

Ken pushes on but it is becoming evident to him that he’s spent triple the amount he thought he would and that he could have hired a seasoned US team from the start, and for less than he’s already spent.

On a whim, Ken attends and Internet Marketing Conference – where Barbie Roberts is the featured guest speaker. Ken has heard of her online boutique figures it wouldn’t hurt to hear a little more about Barbie’s success story. (not to mention he thinks she is hot after seeing a picture of her in a popular magazine recently)

Meanwhile, Barbie has a full ‘online staff’ and is still using the original team that built her site and constructed their online marketing plan. The business has gained enough traction and is confident with her team so that she’s able to have more time to herself. She dreams of meeting the right guy and settling down one day…

We all know what happens next. Ken and Barbie meet at her web conference and fall madly in love. Barbie gives Ken the contact information for the agency that helped that get her company off the ground. The rest is history. Ken gets the girl, Barbie is no longer lonely and the agency gets a new client.

The moral of the story you ask?

“Just do the damn thing right from the start.”

You’ll save time, resources, money and have a better product.

Years later, now older, wiser…better looking, many now come to me and ask for my team to provide the very services that I explained ad-nauseam for 10+ years on my soap box.

Make no mistake.  I bask in this warm glory.

The evolution of communication, websites, applications and online marketing is staggering, and the pace of this evolution has been unbelievably fast—the understanding of these changes on the other hand has not. Many businesses in the mid- to late 90′s paid mind-boggling amounts of money to have their websites built to good salesmen at web companies mass producing websites.  Those days, like the idea of a brochure-ware website, are finally being laid to rest.

Despite being able to say things today like, “I told you so,” events like these are nothing more than ego-boosters, small victories that simply become personal mementos of countless hours of work. And while everything that I thought would happen (hoped for) has come true – there is something that is nagging me – something that begs my attention.

• What is the future of the corporate website?
• Will it die?
• Will it morph into something else now that businesses are finally on board?

Let me first state that this is not a new topic. Others have written about this and I’m starting to climb aboard this thought process. A website, for many businesses, is still quite critical right now and will continue to be for some time. In fact, most good online marketing strategies still benefit from having the website site at the center of all their marketing efforts.  The landscape that supports this idea however is shifting as I write this.

For the time being, websites will remain incredibly important for businesses, campaigns and selling products and services. What I question is how long this will last.  Here are some factors that may start digging the hole for corporate websites as we know them:

• Facebook (slowly but surely, FB is becoming a juggernaut – and me thinks they will try to replace the Corporate website for small biz)
• Social media (new sites will creep up & some current ones will grow bigger)
• Mobile devices make it easier to get  info while away from the desktop
• Lack of consumer trust in anything ‘corporate’
• Consumer’s increasing reliance on alternate channels (ie. social media)
• Less of a need to sell products from the ‘corporate’ site and more of a need to sell easily via different channels via their social business accounts
• Google Local Business
• Automated or Super-simple website building (ala WordPress or Business Catalyst)
• Did I say Mobile phones or computers?
• Less centralized marketing efforts & the decentralizing nature of the web
• Future entity (FB, Google, other) that reduce reliance on traditional sources of information
• Virtual environments – some  kind of virtual world will catch on in a game-changing way, or has it already?
• Smaller processing and ability to project a screen anywhere, e-paper..etc

One of the bigger forces that stands out to me is the decentralization that is taking place with the Internet.  For the last seven years, the core of a businesses’ online marketing program consisted of the following three pieces:

• a website
• the customer database
• an email marketing program.

This still remains the de-facto plan for many businesses. Yet, this plan is not only waning in the shadow of newer forms of communication, it is quickly becoming an antiquated model of thinking. Why though? Because it still is one-way communication. Businesses that aren’t able to create ‘conversations’ via the Internet will be at a major disadvantage.

Spewing forth mindless marketing and sales babble is just not enough any more.

In the end, a change is taking place and the old model of placing a ton of useless data on a website is coming to an end. The factors that surround this topic is enormous and this blog post is already too long, but an online marketing strategy has become much more important that designing a website. The traditional corporate website is dying – or perhaps in some kind of cocoon that will materialize as something else in just a few short years.

Don’t blink.