Whilst containing some sound advice and useful pointers, this entry combines aspects of 'stating the obvious' and 'a utopian outlook' that previous entries on this subject have had.

Take, for example, the scenario of a service provider whose web presence consists of multiple hand-built websites covering multiple domains which have different, but still valid lifecycles, and who has to pay a designer whenever they need the sites updated - a process that takes up budget and time - anything up to 2 weeks. Add into this, the fact that the service provider has a significant monthly expenditure on pay-per-click to pull in prospects and virtually no presence in the free search returns of any major search engine.

The first step is to remove the bottlenecks and create a dynamic (CMS supported) web presence that can be created and managed primarily by non-technical people - no small step in itself. The next step is to 'try, tune and repeat' this based on tangible metrics (as you have mentioned in previous posts) focusing first on the number of leads you are generating and the conversion ratios versus the historic data you have on this.

At the same time and, where possible, you should be using recognised optimisation techniques (not the stuff that will get you blacklisted) to improve 'long tail' search presence alongside pay-per-click so that you can reduce your reliance and expenditure on, primarily, Adwords - otherwise you will just be continuing to make Google even richer and more powerful.

Once you have the basics in place you can push forward with the customer focused personalisation and process/technical integration pieces you mention but often having to recognise that there will be legacy stuff (ie; established provisioning, billing and support systems) to deal with. It is more than likely that this won't be customer friendly, cheap or quick to fix!

As in many web development initiatives, there is a need to 'fix the basics' before you can 'build the future'. Experience shows that first part is often harder than the second.

Good points Andrew. As they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I’m sure there are different, but equally valid viewpoints, on microsite/landing page creation and brand fragmentation and how you can create and manage websites in the most efficient and cost effective way.

For an organisation that advocates ‘try, tune, repeat’ as core to web presence developments then I’m sure you would support the view that you wouldn’t want to be paying a web designer every time you wanted to change some basic text on a website and therefore support my fundamental point about CMS implementation.

I take your point about keeping things simple but, as I’m sure you know, the underlying essence of any CMS is the separation of content from presentation. Therefore, it is perfectly viable to vary templates and stylesheets for presentation without creating multiple silos of disconnected content, which become an increasing headache to synchronise manually over time and increasingly undermine your brand image.

Clearly there are many tools and approaches to choose from to empower non-technical people to publish to the web but I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of a ‘standards based’ system, particularly if ranking well in the search engines is an important goal. After all, creating an accessible website for users will help, not hinder, making it accessible and easier to rank for search engine crawlers.

You also skirt over the issue (generally on this site) of how to achieve and maintain that all important search engine presence, beyond potentially enormous expenditure on pay-per-click. You probably know from your own forays into things like Adwords how quickly those monthly bills can ramp up and impact your cost of sale. However well you manage and track that environment I’m sure you still get those nagging doubts over just how effective PPC really is and even how many of your existing customers and partners are simply clicking on your ad as the quickest route to your site and therefore costing you money each time?

It seems to me that the most valuable thing a service provider can do in the current climate of increasing commoditisation and consolidation is build differentiation on how well they deliver services (a view expressed frequently on this site). If you’ve invested an enormous amount of time, energy and cost in gaining all important accreditations in ISO quality and security standards and you believe these are fundamental to reassuring customers that SaaS is for them, then I would personally avoid fragmenting the company brand in a confusing array of sub-brands and separate websites and put all energies in building that core ‘trusted’ brand and the search engine presence of that core brand above all else.