Webonomics: Nine Essential Principles for Growing
Your Business on the World Wide Web
by Evan I. Schwartz
© 1997 by Broadway Books
"Schwartz's book is very valuable as a general introduction to establishing goals and creating content for web sites. The lack of specifics and the lack of emphasis on ease of use are the main problems."
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@ the reviewer |
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Roger Tilson is a User Involvement Specialist for IBM in Austin, Texas. |
Webonomics provides general guidance to entrepreneurs, business executives, and web developers who need to establish or rethink their goals for their web sites. The book discusses numerous companies that use the web to create revenue and improve customer satisfaction. With these examples, author Evan Schwartz communicates the web's enormous business value and assists readers in the process of brainstorming ideas for alluring web content.
Schwartz's advice remains general throughout the book. He does not venture into the difficult specifics. For instance, the book does not offer any detailed way for companies to measure their progress developing effective web sites. In one chapter Schwartz contends that "Marketers Shouldn't Be on the Web for Exposure, but for Results," yet in a following chapter he notes, "The precise return of Jack Daniel's modest investment on the Web is difficult to measure." I think many people now agree that their sites need to provide results. For them, the question is precisely how do organizations measure the return on investment and monitor their progress. Because Schwartz says so little about measuring returns, he leaves me wondering whether some of his "successful" sites are indeed successful.
Because Schwartz's advice remains general, his principles may be difficult to implement. He leaves implementation completely up to the site designers. He is also very much product oriented rather than process oriented. Instead of suggesting procedures that have been used to create successful sites, he focuses on final products and offers advice based on what content appears to work and appears not to work. The means, rather than the ends, might be more helpful to designers trying to learn from past successes.
Finally, Schwartz neglects the issue of usability all together, and in so doing, sanctions others to neglect it also. Since many sites on the web offer the same or similar information, goods, and services, ease of use is a very important consideration. Sites that are easy to use will have a significant competitive edge, but Webonomics never makes this point.
Despite these many shortcomings, Schwartz's book is very valuable as a general introduction to establishing goals and creating content for web sites. The lack of specifics and the lack of emphasis on ease of use are the main problems. On a different level, I thoroughly enjoyed the book's wealth of anecdotes. Sometimes the stories of different companies' histories on the web are more interesting than Schwartz's conclusions. In fact, this book may be valued more in the future as a chronicle of the early history of online business than as helpful instruction for developing e-business web sites.
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