I. Before you read, answer the question:

• What are the different possible uses of a commercial website?

II. Reading

Read this article and fulfill the tasks below.

WEBSITES NEED TO HAVE BOTH HARD TOOLS AND SOFT TOUCHES

1 Is your website used for marketing, customer service, processing job appbcations, talking to journalists? Or is it used for brand-building, making your organisation seem like a nice place to work, emphasising its cuddly social side? Both, all and more, you reply. There can be very few large groups (commercial or otherwise) that do not now use their sites in many different ways. The great strength of a website is, after all, that it can do many things at the same time. But if is useful to distinguish between the sets of attributes listed in the first two sentences. They are fundamentally different and represent what I call ‘hard web’ and ‘soft web’.

2 Hard web is the website as a tool. Consumers can buy products or check accounts. B2B customers can place orders. Journalists can find how much money your CEO earned last year. Investors can see how much money they have made out of you. They are all doing something that helps them in their lives or jobs. Soft web is using a site to nudge, to impress, to massage. ‘Brochure-ware’, where a website reproduces marketing literature created for print, is soft web. So are the look, feel and ‘voice’ of a site, which transmit messages about the organisation’s culture and brand. And the great bulk of corporate social responsibility (CSH) material is soft.

3 Leaving e-commerce aside, the business web has been broadly soft for the last decade. Early elements of hardness came from the HR department, which realised that sites could be used to process applications, and also from investor relations providing reports online is a hard process, because it saves money. More recently, some companies have been hardening their sites by using them as sales and customer support tools. A good example is the Swedish tools company Sandvik, which uses its site (www.sandvik.com) to replace any number of human beings. Then there are the US companies that are turning their attention to completely new groups of user – Boeing’s outplacement areas for redundant employees at www.boeing.com is my current favourite.

4 Does this mean that hard is good, soft is bad? Not at all. One of the best uses for a site is to transmit complex CSR messages. The overall look and feel give off important messages to people who might want to work for you, invest in you or buy from you. The tone of language (‘voice’) is critical for the same reason. But hard does have one huge advantage over soft. People will make the effort to use hard features, because they save them time, money or whatever. They will not seek out soft features hi the same way. Social responsibility material may be admirable and engaging, but apart from that strange new beast - the CSR professional - who will click on a link to find it?

5 Students looking at companies will visit sites to find out facts, and perhaps apply. They will not go there to absorb its look, feel and subtle messages but having arrived, that is exactly what they will do. The trick is to use hard and soft web in harness. Create as many hard features as you can to get people to your site. At the basic level, make it an essential stopping point for investors, journalists and jobseekers. Think what you can offer customers, B2B or private - interactive calculators to help them choose products, a service reminder perhaps? Back this up with search-engine optimisation, and you will have the right people flowing to your site and staying there. This is when you can bombard them with the soft stuff.

6 The homo-page design is critical, but given the likelihood that many people will arrive mid-site from Google, standards must be kept up throughout. Take care to get the ‘voice’ right, too - companies are increasingly hiring professional writers to produce copy for their sites. The ability to write engaging headlines is a particularly rare and useful skill - and if they can do that, they can write killer labels for links, too. Put those links down the right-hand side of pages. This is where people expect to find routes to related material, and it is the way to get them to content they would otherwise never see -social responsibility material is the obvious example. Siemens (www.siemens.com.) scatters links to CSR material throughout its site – it wants everyone to know how virtuous it is, not just those who choose to click the Citizenship or Environment buttons.

7 That’s it really draw people in with what they want (hard), then feed them what you want (soft). Yes, I know it's obvious; so why don't more companies do it?