David Bowen commentaries
In his regular columns for the Financial Times and ft.com, senior consultant David Bowen has pursued themes ranged from customer relationship management and career marketing to ‘ethical’ retailing and royal family sites. His collected Financial Times and ft.com columns from January 2001 onward are indexed by theme and available for viewing on this site.
You can access articles directly by selecting a link below.
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Why directories make finding the best information easier
Perversely, the more developed the commercial web becomes, the more difficult it is for site owners to ensure that their visitors will find what they want them to find there. Improved data classification provides one realisable solution.
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Why it's worth cracking the Da Vinci code
Until recently few people seemed to have registered that the web is the obvious medium with which to defend your reputation. Now some are, and any company, government or organisation with a reputational problem can learn a lot from Opus Dei’s current ef
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Where the best-laid travel plans are taking us
In the course of pioneering new ways to use the web, clever journey planners are treading paths that all sorts of site owners will be able to follow in the future.
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What Remembrance sites tell about the reality of the web
The growth of publicly-accessible and highly structured databases is one of the largely unreported stories of the web. Last week’s Remembrance/Veterans’ Day ceremonies were a reminder that vast, specialist repositories are quietly being built and laun
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Where fashionable brands trip up in their transfer to the web
Luxury brands and the web go together like strawberries and gravy, but that does not stop the great brand-owners from pouring money into sites. The results are mixed, to say the least.
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Why recruiters need to think of themselves as job sellers
Although human resources people were quick to see the potential of the web a lot of company recruitment sites and careers sections are still no more than notice boards aimed at graduates. The best treat jobs as products to be ‘sold’ and marketed onlin
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When large helpings of information can be good for your image
Two years ago, snack food companies were in denial about any connection between their products and the general fattening of the population. Now some well-known names are toning up their online features to get their reputations back in shape.
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Why flouting convention can lead to radical loss of control
Like the organisations that spawn them, large websites reach a point at which the sum of their parts overwhelms the coherence of the whole. A close look at the site of international campaign group Greenpeace shows how and where the gaps begin to appear.
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Why web workers struggle to break the ice at parties
As the web has grown over the past 10 years it has come to provide employment for tens of thousands of people. But it has yet to come up with a professional identity for them to match that of workers in other fields.
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Why the potential of online reports may finally be within reach
In the mid-1990s corporate investor relations teams saw the chance to save costs and improve quality by putting the annual report on the company web site. Almost a decade later the formatting technology now exists to deliver the benefits.