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By Stoney deGeyter
Online business owners often look at a website as development expense rather than a marketing expense. This is unfortunate and is often the reason why many online businesses under-perform. The Internet is still new and very much in its infancy and our view of how the web should operate, especially in the business realm, is still developing. It's been a slow process, but many business owners' attitudes towards website development and marketing has slowly begun to evolve.
Unfortunately, far too many businesses still don't consider website development as a part of their marketing efforts. They'll pour thousands of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (which often produce significantly less return on the investment dollar) but fail to properly plan and execute their website or invest in effective online marketing strategies.
As you begin to put time, energy and (likely) significant sums of money into your online presence it is important that you consider your website as part of your overall marketing plan. Instead of being viewed as just another IT expense, your website should be considered as a marketing endeavor worthy of being incorporated fully into the marketing budget. Businesses that take this view are setting themselves up to have a long-term presence on the Internet as well as lasting success.
Compiling the Pieces that Build a Full-Service Sales Experience:
With the exception of cloned websites, every website has its own unique characteristics. When building your site there really is no one-size-fits-all pattern to follow. Your site should be built to fulfill your informational and sales needs, while being effective in getting your target audience to take the desired actions. In order to do this there are basic components that almost every website should have in place in order to be effective both with the usability and marketing aspects.
Home Page
Every website has a home page, even if it's just a one-page site. The home page is the single most crucial page of a site because it is the page most likely to be viewed, as well as the page most likely to send people away if they don't like what they see. It doesn't matter what you have beyond the home page if you can't get visitors to click past it and into your products or services.
Your home page must accomplish several things:
Establish Your Brand: Your visitor's need to immediately know where they have landed (who are you), what you do or offer (broad concepts), and you must be able to touch them in such a way that they will be interested enough to click deeper into your site and/or return at a later point.
Show What You’ve Got: Visitors need to quickly be able to find the specific products or services they came looking for in the first place, with a clearly established path to take them to the relevant pages. If you can’t direct them effectively from the home page, you lose them at "Hello."
Generate Interest: If your site is not compelling, all the information in the world won't get them to click any further. Your copy and layout must generate enough interest and give them the desire to keep digging.
Convey Trust: Trust is an important element in the sales process. Your home page is often the first impression your visitors get of you. If your site comes across as a slick salesman selling a used car out of an impound lot, chances are visitors will bolt.
Don't Give Information Overload: Pace yourself. Don't try and give too much information on your home page. We know that every additional click a user has to perform causes visitor loss, however putting too much information on a single page can also confuse them. Sometimes forcing them to click is the surest way to establish active interest.
Contact Us Page
Every site needs to have a designated contact information page. Even if you have your phone number, email address, fax number and snail mail address on every page of your website, it’s still important to have a full page dedicated to this exact same information. Why? Inevitably there will be people that will simply not notice your large and dominantly displayed phone number and start looking for the contact page.
On top of displaying all your contact information, you should consider putting a contact form on this page as well. Different people have different preferences and its best if you can cover as many of those as possible. You can use the request form to gather some information such as name, company, email and phone information, as well as subscribing them to your newsletter, auto responders, or coupon mailing list. Those who don’t want to fill out the information can utilize the other ways of contacting you, but don’t be too intrusive; otherwise you'll lose the contact altogether.
About Us Page
The "About Us" page is one that is used to provide information that instills additional confidence in your business in the hearts and minds of your visitors. The "About Us" page can be used to provide reassuring company information such as how long you've been in business, organizations you belongs to (chamber of commerce, BBB, etc) as well as provide bios of the executive staff. All of these things will help many visitors feel more comfortable when deciding to take the next step in purchasing your products or utilizing your services.
Product & Service Pages
If you sell anything, whether a product or a service, you need a page or sets of pages dedicated to providing details about what it is you offer. Do you have only one item that fits easily on the home page? That shouldn’t matter. Keep the home page information paired down and use product or service pages to expound, giving additional details, testimonials, uses, expected results, frequently asked questions and so on. These pages will allow you to tell anything that anybody might possibly need to know to make an informed purchase decision.
As with the home page, don't overload a single page with too much information about the product or service. It's recommended that you break out information over multiple pages, each highlighting a different set of information. This ensures that each visitor can quickly and easily navigate to the information that helps them make their buying decision.
FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions
If possible, assemble a FAQ page for each product or service you offer, or each grouping of your products or services. This allows a one-stop page where potential buyers can find out just about anything they want. FAQ pages can be as long as they need to be to cover all of the potential questions someone might ask. You can also break long pages up into multiple pages with the main page highlighting each question and linking to its answer.
Site Navigation
Construction of your site navigation can make or break your website's performance. Shoddy and haphazard navigation schemes can easily confuse visitors causing them to make that dreaded click out of your site and onto a competitor. A properly constructed navigation can help visitors easily move from page to page finding everything that they are looking for quickly and easily.
Be Consistent (Placement): However you construct your site navigation scheme it should be consistent from one page to the next. Don't confuse your visitors by changing how the navigation looks or by moving its on-page location to a different area.
There are many different forms of navigational elements: main menus, sub-menus, breadcrumbs, etc. All of them should work together to create a consistent and recognizable flow as the visitor navigates through the site.
It is very important that no matter how big or complex the structure of your site gets, each web page must keep a consistently located and easy to find link back to your home page.
Be Obvious (Breadcrumbs): Being obvious with your navigation prevents your visitors from "getting lost" on the site and not knowing how to navigate back to other important pages that may be in different sections of your site. It's important that your visitors be able to quickly discern what page they are on and figure out where to go from there.
One of the simplest ways to display where a visitor is on your site, regardless of how deep within the site's architecture they are, is to use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are a set of navigational links that show the navigational path from home to the current page.
Most visitors don't actually use the breadcrumb links for navigational purposes, but instead they act as an important visual cue allowing the visitor to see what page, sub-section, and section they are within the site.
Be Helpful (Site Map & Search): Websites with large quantities of pages or products can easily create a navigational nightmare. Even with properly implemented navigation, visitors often find themselves "lost" and don't know how to navigate specifically to the information they are seeking. While it’s important to eliminate these frustrations as best as possible, you also want to provide some navigational "short cuts" for your visitors.
Site Map: Site maps provide a one-stop destination that allows your visitors to always be no more than two clicks away from the product or information they want. This is a helpful feature allowing anybody to quickly see what you offer and where to get it, all from a single page.
Site maps are also useful to search engines allowing them to easily crawl and index every page on your site. Most engines will only index a couple of clicks deep with each visit, often taking weeks or months to dig all the way through your site. Site maps can speed up that process by making every page easily accessible to the search spider.
In the same manner that you have a consistent link to the home page, you also want to have a link to the site map on every page as well.
Site Search: A site search feature isn't required for good navigation, but it can add an extra element of usefulness for your visitors. Allowing your visitors to perform a quick search for the product they are looking for can speed up the conversion process and eliminate site abandonment.
Before implementing a site search feature, consider that most site searches fail to deliver great results. Before making your search feature live, run extensive tests to be sure that results are accurate and relevant. Try using product numbers, brand names, misspellings, etc. If you don’t carry an exact product which may be searched for, be sure to deliver results for the similar or relevant products you do carry. If you can’t make your site search engine perform under all of the above situations then its best not to have a search function at all.
Putting all of these pieces together, much like a puzzle, allows you to present a complete picture of who you are, what you do, and how you can meet the needs of your visitors. While your website can and will function without any one of these pieces, there will always be "something" missing, and that something just might be what some visitors need to push them into that final decision to purchase. A complete website, with all the pieces in place is a much more effective website through and through.
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Stoney deGeyter
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