Designing Your Company Web Site

By Rita Hess

To grow your business in today's global economy, it isn't enough just to have salespeople showing your slick new catalogue to customers and clients. You also need to promote your products or services online. Why? Selling on the Internet enables you to develop leads for prospective buyers that you might not otherwise ever find. You can then provide product information to those buyers, allow them to order electronically, and follow up with customer service.

Your budget determines whether you will hire a well-known agency to assemble and launch your site or convince your 20-year old nephew to do it. If you are tech-savvy and can devote enough time to the project, you may even do it yourself. In any case, following some basic rules for site design will ensure your customers a pleasant experience and increase the chances that they will become buyers.

Who are you? The top of your "home page" should clearly show your company name, accompanied by a logo or trademark if you have one. Also, insert one or two carefully worded sentences to describe your business. What industry are you in? What category of products do you manufacture and/or sell? For example:

• Welcome to Fish-HuntAmerica.com, a major retailer of fishing and hunting supplies since 1968.
• Spell-Right leads the industry in spell checking software for the medical, pharmaceutical, legal, dental, and scientific and engineering fields.

Should you require a registration? Asking readers to 'logon' each time they visit your site will give you contact information for potential customers, but some viewers will flee to competitor sites where they can access information anonymously. Instead, provide a place on your home page for customers to register voluntarily for a giveaway, free newsletter, or email notifications about new products.

Don't send that customer away yet! It's great to include helpful links to other sites that relate to your product or service. But including them at the top of your home page invites customers to leave your site before they have a chance to explore all that you have to offer. Instead, include a URL toward the bottom of your home page that takes readers to a separate area on your site where you maintain a list of links to other domains.

Does your site pop? Pop-up boxes are those pesky frames that open up when visitors enter or leave a site, asking them to register for something. Don't use them! Most people consider them annoying and intrusive, and will not return to your site.

How does a customer navigate your site? Once you attract potential buyers, make it easy for them to find the information they want by asking yourself, "what do visitors to this site want to know when they arrive?" Use a Site Map or Index on every page, as well as hyperlinks, search engines, and drop-down menus so that a buyer can get to any page from any page.

Are your pages attractive and fast? Don't use images or flashy techno-wizardry that may load slowly. Keep it simple!

• Keep graphics to a minimum and assume viewers will see your page using a 28.8K dial-up modem. Each page should be no more than 50k total.
• Insert enough text on the top half of your page so visitors will have something to read while graphics load.
• Never use white text on a dark background. It isn't reader-friendly and cannot be printed as is. Stick to a white or off-white background and black letters for most text.

Can your readers interact with each other? Active web surfers participate in chat rooms, post notes on message boards, and interact with other people around the world. Passive surfers quietly go from one site to the next, reading what others write, but rarely leaving their own comments. Why not engage your customers in active surfing by including a bulletin board on your site? Keep interest high and encourage visitors to return by responding to comments and posting relevant questions. At the very least, include a Guest Book for visitors to sign. You never know when one of them will become a valuable customer!

Is the content timely, appropriate, and well written? Anyone can write content, the words that grace your pages, but the best way to communicate with your visitors is by hiring a professional writer. Experienced content providers can help match your message with your corporate culture, and present it to readers in an interesting tone that will keep them coming back for more. For example, if you are marketing to hip, young American customers, hire an American writer who 'speaks' like Gen Xers do.

Regardless of whether your content takes the form of an article, a mission statement, or a FAQ section, all content on your site must be:

• Formatted for easy reading on a screen (short paragraphs, plenty of "white space")
• Updated frequently if material is time-sensitive
• Broken up frequently using bullets or numbered lists
• Free of grammatical errors and misspellings

Does your site visually appeal to all viewers? What looks perfect to you may not look so great to people with other types of browsers or monitors. The biggest mistake most site designers make is to assume everyone has a 17" or 19" monitor, so they create pages using an 800x600 resolution. On the contrary, most users view Internet pages on a 14" screen with a monitor set to 640 x 480, meaning they must continually scroll from right to left to see all text.

• A design tool called frames can also look different on other systems and can prevent your search engines from accessing your content. Ask your site designer to avoid them.
• When your site is complete, look at it using both a Macintosh and a standard PC. Does it look the same on both? If possible, view your pages on new and old versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, and AOL to correct every potential problem your visitors may encounter.

Can customers order easily? During the design process or immediately after launch, watch while someone who is new to the Internet finds your site and places an order. Can they quickly and easily figure out how to do it? Take note of any steps that seem confusing or any instructions that aren't clear. If it takes more than three clicks for them to reach an order page, streamline the process!

How can a customer reach you? Encourage customers to contact you by listing your mailing address, email address, telephone, and fax number on most – if not all – of your pages.

Incorporate these tips into your plan before ever launching your site by working closely with whomever is designing your web pages. If your business is already online but not attracting or keeping optimum traffic, get busy making some changes.