Today’s consumers expect a certain degree of satisfaction when they visit a website — they expect to be able to find clear and concise information quickly, and they also expect a meaningful and engaging web browsing experience. To further improve the online experience and customer engagement, many businesses are adding apps and other tools to increase brand awareness and customer retention. That’s why standardizing your web platform, and providing web visitors with a useful, informative, and purposeful website, is vital to future success and maintaining a lead over competitors.
Utilizing web platform standardization in designing and implementing these apps and tools creates a cohesive and connected experience for users, subsequently strengthening your brand and enabling visitors and users to become more engaged with your company.
Standardize your web platform with the help of experts from 3 Media Web. Reach out today to get started.
Defining Your Goals With Web Platform Standardization
So long as you set forth clearly defined goals, you can maximize the potential benefits of a standardized web platform. Consider the following when developing your website, as well as any apps, tools, and other digital properties you plan to utilize to deliver a digital experience to the user:
- How will you meet consumer demands to deliver an efficient and effective platform?
- What do you intend to accomplish with your web platform — are you seeking to drive sales, engage your customer base, or solve the challenges unique to your organization?
- Will you be able to effectively measure the cost and ROI of the various components of your web platform?
- How will the apps you develop serve as an extension of the website, and what will be their primary purpose?
After successfully answering these questions and developing your web platform, you can begin to realize the full benefits of a standardized web platform.
The Benefits of Standardizing Your Web Platform
1. It’s Cost Effective
This benefit is ever more prevalent if you are a large organization where it is typical to have several different web applications, developers, and hosting solutions on varied platforms. Spreading your resources across all these different components, from maintenance to management, often results in unnecessary expense. Transitioning all of it to one standardized web platform increases the potential for savings throughout the organization.
2. Improved Management and Maintenance
As mentioned above, each platform requires management and maintenance, often by people with different skill sets. If one particular platform needs servicing, you must rely on one vendor or team member to handle it. With a standardized web platform, these issues are greatly reduced, as any number of staff can be adequately trained and prepared to handle any issues that may arise.
Additionally, with a full team possessing the required skills and knowledge to administer the web platform, you can much more easily and quickly accomplish related tasks and improve the overall workflow process.
3. It’s Easier to Develop New Apps
With a standardized web platform, you have the base starting point for all new apps and tools. This makes gaining momentum when creating new apps easier and reduces development costs.
4. You Can More Easily Share Information Among Departments
Having different databases and platforms makes it more difficult to share and transfer information among the departments in your organization. One standardized web platform greatly facilitates information exchange, increasing productivity and efficiency. It also makes it easier to run analytical and tracking processes.
5. Improved Security
With all apps and databases on one web-standardized platform, you can more easily apply new security updates to everything at once, instead of tediously applying the update to each component separately. This allows for smoother, more efficient workflow and more advanced security.
6. Only One Vendor is Required
Suppose you utilize a service provider rather than an in-house team to provide service and maintenance to your web platform. In that case, a standardized web platform means you only need one vendor rather than multiple vendors to handle several different platforms. A reputable and skilled agent can help you facilitate many processes and provide consultation on how to improve and advance your web platform.
You can also better customize your web platform to meet the needs of different customers and clients and acquire the services of a specialist who can easily provide top-notch solutions. A single point-of-contact will be more familiar with your web platform as a whole entity and can work more efficiently to coordinate action between your staff, departments, and your web platform development team.
Before deciding on any web platform, take the time to research the capabilities of each and determine if they meet your business’s current and future needs. Do they allow for expansion, and can they be easily updated? These are important considerations, as are security and customization potential.
Overall, the benefits of using one standardized web platform, along with one partner to oversee the platform’s function, service, and maintenance, are more than enough reasons to seek to consolidate, enabling you to reach your business goals better and improve overall efficiency in the organization.
