Selecting good internet services provider(s)

One of the most difficult challenges facing SMEs is to select suppliers of internet services - not because they are hard to find but because there are so many of them.

Checklists and Tips

This section of our website provides checklists and suggested selection criteria depending on what type of service you need. You may decide that not all of the criteria are relevant to your particular situation, but it is far to have items listed which aren't required rather than overlook something which subsequently proves to have been vital.

This is a new section of our website and has been launched when still at the concept stage. Entries for individual services will be added throughout 2009 - the menu on the left of this page provides links to the current advice. We would be interested to be guided by your needs in our work prioritisation and also to include guidance learnt from your own experience - so please do contact us with requests and information that we can include for everyone's benefit.

The Migration Challenge

Website design in particular is over-run with companies who were advertising / marketing agencies, printers, graphic designers, IT support companies in the days when offline promotion dominated business: Many of these have very limited expertise when it comes to developing internet based solutions which efficiently attract prospects online and deliver online 'conversion' (whether that be registrations, enquiries or actual sales).

Realisation that search ranking (e.g. SEO) and internet advertising (e.g. PPC) is now important, these companies are now invading that space along with the website designers (programmers). The challenge is that many of these deliver ranking which don't deliver website visitors, advertising that delivers the wrong visitors and technology for its own sake rather than customer need - result wasted costs and low return on investment.

In the past year, we have seen the glimmering of a new migration into analytics - the danger here being that what is provided will be a regular mass of statistics that do not provide business relevant insight. A good analytics service should provide useful analysis of the analytics information and stimulate the intiation of changes that result in business improvement - not just supply a multi-page standard monthly report that is viewed once and then filed.