The second step in evaluating your e-business is to identify how to evaluate all of its various aspects. Consider these strategies:  

Focus groups: Conduct focus groups consisting of your target users - eg customers, suppliers, distributors - and ask them to comment on the website's look and feel, ease of use and content.   Here is a sample questionnaire that you might like to adopt for your focus groups. Double-click on the link to download this document into your word processor:  e-businessguide Template - Sample Usability Questionnaire (89 kb)

Interviews: Interview staff and ask them about various aspects of the organisation's e-business in order to obtain frank feedback on internal issues.  For example: Is it easy to update the website? Do you feel that you are using the Internet effectively in your day-to-day work? If not, what is wrong and how could it be improved?  

Interview external users (eg suppliers) and ask them about their impression of, or experience in, dealing with the organisation via the Internet. Is it a good experience? How could it be improved? How would they like to interact with the organisation online?  

One-off reality checks: Ask visitors to your business, colleagues or friends to look at your website or read your e-newsletter and comment on aspects appropriate to the user.  

Surveys and polls: Create a survey or quick poll and put it online or on paper to gain customers' views on aspects of your e-business. It might be a survey on whether they would be interested in receiving an e-newsletter, purchasing products or entering into a business-to-business online relationship.   

Feedback from the website: Create an area in your website that invites users to provide feedback on your products and services, what they would like to see or be able to do on the site, and feedback on the website itself.  

Benchmarking: This measures your e-business performance against the e-business performance of one or more similar organisations. For example, you might  compare your volume of online sales with those of your benchmarking partner.

Benchmarking is best done with an organisation that is similar to yours, in terms of industry sector, size, products and services, target markets and aims. Identify an organisation that fits the criteria and contact them to see if they are willing to join a benchmarking exercise.

It involves sharing information about your respective businesses and use of the Internet, communicating regularly, using similar analytical tools and methods and openly sharing evaluation data and feedback.

Sometimes organisations find the process more appropriate and the results more reliable if they benchmark against a number of organisations.  

Website usage statistics: Usage levels and patterns of usage of your website are important statistics to gather and look at because they can inform you as to who is using your site and when, what is working, what is popular and where the "dead" areas are that require rejuvenation or cutting. There are various measurements used to express the usage of websites. Unfortunately, they are all unreliable to some extent for a range of technical reasons. The most common statistics that are captured:

• Hit rate: Recording one hit means that one image on a page, such as your organisation's logo, has been downloaded onto the user's computer screen. So a Web page comprising fifteen images or sections, which is not unusual for a home page, would notch up 15 hits on the counter. But remember, that does not equate to fifteen people viewing your site.
• Unique visitors and user sessions: The unique visitor count refers to how many different people access your website in any given period. This is measured by the company that hosts your website. Their web server records every time a request comes from a new computer address (called an IP address) to view the site in a given period. But because a unique visitor may re-visit the site four times in a day, it is also important to count the number of user sessions for each unique visitor.

Depending on the aims of your website you may need to track all, or some of the following:

• the pattern of access over one day, one week, each month
• trends in visitor numbers and how many repeat visitors
• what areas of the site are visited the most
• what areas of the site are visited the least
• what routes users take through the site
• how long they stay in the site
• at what point they exit from the site
• the country of origin of the users
• what functions visitors use the most - e-commerce, online forms
• what documents are downloaded and how often.

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