It seems that people are waking up to the potential in their under-used and under-valued Web sites as one cost effective means of surviving the harsh economic climate by generating new business and getting more out of existing customers.

Purely frivolous Web sites will become harder to justify, but this could be a good thing as new creative energy gets channeled into more productive and results-driven Internet activities.

I expect SEO, eMarketing and Usability to finally rise up the agenda as businesses look to achieve measurable results. All aspects of the design and development process need to work in harmony, right from the business case, creative concept, through design, build and usability to content development and marketing. It ALL has to be right.

Developers will also need to be more agile, designing maintainable future-proof Web sites, while cutting development time by making more use of open source, pre-written and proven code, development frameworks, CMS products and online services.

Every year brings plenty of change and 2009 will focus attention not only on new ideas and technological advancements, but also on hard business and genuine Web site effectiveness.

New Web sites, particularly newly registered Internet domain names, can take many months, sometimes 6 to 12 months to become fully visible on search engines. Get something out there early, even if you are not ready for a full-on Web site.

Some businesses are in the fortunate position of not needing a Web site to help them generate business. Indeed, there is something very cool about being so good, you just don’t need a Web site.

Other businesses may have plans for a new Web site, but need to delay for budgeting reasons, or have a large project in the pipeline which could take many months to complete.

In all these cases, the new Web site could take a long time to show up in search results, particularly on Google which sandboxes new Web sites. Google considers established Web sites to be more credible and trustworthy, which directly affects how highly that site will rank in search results.

Here’s a good tip: even if you don’t need a Web site, or have plans to launch one in the future, get at least one search friendly Web page out there as soon as possible. This helps to get you established with the search engines and will pay dividends when the real Web site comes along, helping you to generate traffic sooner and achieve results quicker.

Make sure your holding page is search friendly and contains some content relevant to the business you are in. Don’t just sling up a ‘coming soon’ or ‘under construction’ page. Create something useful and relevant even if it doesn’t reveal the true identity or purpose of the site which will replace it.

In many cases, marketers are spending a proportion (probably too small) of their budget on creating a Web site, but not actually marketing it. There is still a misconception that customers find Web sites automatically and traffic grows without any further effort.

This is a bit like getting a fantastic brochure designed and printed at considerable expense, but leaving most of the print run in a skip outside the printers, hoping the right people come along and find it.

Good Web development and e-marketing agencies will be fully up to speed with how things should be done, but if you need to know what kind of measures need to be taken for correctly building and successfully marketing a Web site, this is a good place to start.

The two biggest enemies of deep linking are frames and sites that operate from one container page, which is very common with Flash only sites.

This causes quite serious problems because all inbound links, including search result links, dump you in at the front door. This forces visitors to navigate through to find the information they are looking for, something which impatient users are reluctant to do.

With most well designed Web sites, search links and other deep links take you straight to (or near to) the information you want.

Not being able to link to a suitable landing page, also hinders online marketing initiatives such as email marketing and paid advertising.

The problems:

1. Search engine visibility is poor due to lack of indexable content.
2. Users cannot bookmark individual pages.
3. You cannot link to a specific page in a blog post or from a referral link on another site. Visitors must enter at the front door and hunt around for the information they are looking for.
4. It’s not possible to email links to particular pages. Again, you have to start at the home page and work it out.
5. Email marketing campaigns cannot deep-link to relevant parts of the site. Again, visitors get dumped at the front door.
6. PPC and paid advertising cannot link to a suitable landing page which can adversely affect their performance.
7. With frames, pages can get indexed on search engines but remain orphaned from the rest of the site when viewed without the containing frameset.

Don’t believe that forcing visitors to start at the home page is a good thing. In most cases, this is an added frustration which will cause users to bail out when they don’t find the page they expected after clicking on a link.

Without deep linking, sites experience poor visibility on search engines and lose out on a wide range of other traffic generating sources. This means fewer visitors, less traffic, restricted e-marketing opportunities and ultimately, reduced levels of business.

There is no reason to use frames these days. The many alternative methods include: back-end scripting, templating engines, frameworks, server side includes and even template-capable source code editing tools for smaller static sites.

Flash sites can also be designed to allow at least partial deep linking, so there’s no reason why lavish Flash sites can’t support deep linking where it’s needed.

So, deep linking is an essential enabler for driving traffic to a Web site. Incorporate this into your design and build process, but if the mistake has already been made, it is possible to deep-link enable existing framed or Flash sites without resorting to a total re-build.