The last week of radio silence has been a result of our impending product launch, the excitement is brewing here at Camarès! Our new offering is for small and mid-sized businesses and will address this issue head on:

SMBs whether selling B-to-B or B-to-C find themselves confronting two voracious converging online trends:

1. Intense flattening of our markets: regional enterprises go online to find they are now competing with other regional enterprises around the nation – and the world. Price wars ensue, in a race to the bottom.
2. Ever increasing customer expectations: first it was web 1.0, then web 2.0 filled with engagement mechanisms and video. Mobile is on the horizon, if not already here. With each iteration, SMBs find themselves having to spend more to keep up. Even though programming development costs are going down, the average cost of a full-featured web site has not changed much since 1995 – it costs to stay in the game.

An environment this chaotic is unforgiving. SMBs find themselves in the challenging position of having to out smart the web to succeed. Our new offering will help them do that. Stay Tuned!

Most of businesses don’t have the privilege of being a luxury brand. (And in this economy that may not be such a bad thing.) However, I cannot tell you the countless client meetings I have attended where owners and managers express their desire to “look” like a Mercedes or a Jag.  And I totally get it. Traditionally purveyors of luxury goods have been geniuses at surrounding their products in romance. Whether it be geek romance (tech gadgets) or bodice ripping romance (fashion).

This romance surround is created by implementing the highest production values. Great  imagery, with great lighting, superb sound and simply fabulous, to die for models. When done right, even an Imac is a super model. Images spill across pages of glossy luxe magazines too fabulous to touch, evoking wordless emotion. So it is no wonder that so many businesses hold up luxury goods as aspirational branding examples.

But the Internet has put a “spanner in the works” for luxury brands. The high production values they demand – rich media, flash and just plain sexy sites that are, really really cool but unusable – present a dilemma for those who aspire to higher production values: they are tough for search engine bots to crawl and tougher still for humans to shop.

Frankly, search engine indexing, is less important for a luxury brand, it is already well established. So luxury brands have the luxury of not really needing search. In actuality what they do require is a deftly produced social marketing program that propels their brand forward. Most businesses whose brands are less well known require both indexing and social media.

This presents a tension: how do you remain indexable while also presenting a rich experience? Sites must be developed with both needs front and center. And the best approach is often a hybrid. Enough rich media for sex appeal, just enough well-tagged text and regular updates to increase your importance to bots.  And here is where many non-luxury sites fall short. It is entirely possible to have rich media with great production values without spending a fortune. Its all in the planning and the choice of talent.

For non-luxury brands, social media must be produced to be repurposed across many vibrant platforms where brand influencers come to connect and play, it must engage, it must be relevant and it must be frequent. It must also be authentic. Here is where many smaller businesses can win big. Nothing beats the authentic voice of ownership, even if it is a bit packaged and polished by an agency, it still rings true.

As for shoppabillity, many luxury brands simply ignore any rational web conventions. I suppose they build in their exclusive attitude by being impossible to navigate. Businesses ought not to use them as aspirational shopping examples. However, they should build the most streamlined, elegant shopping cart possible, minimizing clicks and clutter, getting people to the submit button swiftly – now that’s luxury!

What’s better than being a luxury brand? Looking luxury but being elegantly facile to buy from.

We are neck deep here at Camarès in developing a new framework designed to future proof web development investment. Future proofing is becoming mission critical as the web changes at a faster pace daily and the demand for rich media content is becoming ever more voracious.

With the advent of low cost development solutions it is possible to both build a comprehensive web business model AND address future needs simultaneously WITHOUT breaking the bank.

The key is in upfront planning and the way in which you structure your approach to your site design. By design I mean well beyond look and feel, digging deep into site architecture and programming.

Oddly enough, the process is almost a reverse build that examines customer demands for high production value content as well as impending competitive market pressures, before even considering what you want to tell the world and more importantly how you want to engage with it.

Future proofing your web channel demands an intimate understanding of current Internet meta trends. If you think the publishing and music industry has it bad now, that is nothing compared to what retail will be going through as its margins are cut onion skin thick. The Internet has trained even the most value driven consumers never, ever to pay full price for anything. Promo codes abound. For online retail it is a race to the bottom. And that’s just retail, other industries will be on the ropes as well.

Future proofing your web presence most probably means re-examining the relative sustainability of your business model and that, for many in business, takes a very special kind of courage. Future proofing is not for the lily livered, rather for the shrewd among us who have a powerful entrepreneurial heartbeat.