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.

  • How to keep in touch with the People on your terms The web gives national leaders an opportunity to open a dialogue with their citizens on an unprecedented scale. But diversion rather than democracy seems to be the preferred policy of most.
  • Where to check out best practice in the art of the possible The more possibilities the web opens up as a medium, the greater the complexities it presents in managing a website’s effectiveness. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the financial services sector, where over the past two years banks have been
  • How brand builders burn their budgets on valueless sites If half the money spent on advertising is famously wasted, the cash burned on brandbuilding websites makes it look like focused investment in comparison. Failure to recognise the unique character of the web is usually to blame. Rather than ask what the me
  • How the Olympic contenders put their credentials online Nine major cities have just made very public competitive tenders for one of the most prized contracts in the world: host for the summer Olympic games of 2012. All bar one have gone online to promote their cause – and one is running rings round the other
  • Who was fit to be ranked among the best in 2003 What is the best website? Impossible question. It depends what it is best for. But throughout the year I come across sites that are superb at what they do – that are most fit for purpose. Here are some from 2003, with a few turkeys thrown in for Christm
  • What the Church can teach us about the spirit of a website Just as the eyes are the gateway to the soul, so gazing into an organisation’s website reveals a lot about its true state. No more so at the moment than in the way the Christian churches’ turbulent priests are baring their inner selves in the online p
  • How to put together a corporate site without it falling apart Companies use their websites for a range of objectives from selling to reputation management. Deciding what goals to pursue should command serious attention from the policymakers. But putting even the basic elements in place quickly becomes a complex affa
  • How to get on message with the medium The web’s characteristic strengths of interactivity and storability have presented more of a problem than a promise to political parties. Most were more comfortable prescribing the internet for their national economies than harnessing it to their partis
  • How schools are failing to learn from one another The intriguing thing about school sites is that they are not picking best practice from one another. As we have found before, there is still excellence – with one school standing out on its own – but also much mediocrity.
  • Why decentralisation is a prescription for inconsistency Public information health sites in the UK reflect the country’s famed National Health Service: a mixture of the good, the bad and the indifferent. But the complaint seems to be a universal one – due most likely to a generic lack of coordinated managem

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