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• Make sure you have stated the benefits of working with your company.  A list of features is not the same as the benefits.   You must answer the visitors’ question, “What’s in it for me?”
  

  Engineers and programmers have a tendency to list all the great stuff they’ve worked so hard to develop, but such a list is not the same as the benefits for your clients.

• Ask for an action – some examples: Pick up the phone today!  Send us an email.  Fill out this request form.

• Provide information about your company’s expertise so that your visitor becomes a prospect and acts on your request.

• Provide targeted resources for your prospects so they’ll come back to use your website as a reference.  This would include items such as general worksheets, relevant links for your industry, reviews of products, or success stories from your clients.  This makes your site "sticky."

Topic #2: If you are using your website for e-commerce you must give it as much attention as another branch store for your business.  This is accomplished on several fronts:

• Make sure your clients can easily find what they need. If you have many products, organize them by category and include a search engine.  People’s attention spans are short: if it’s too hard to find what they need, they’ll go somewhere else.

• Provide secure pages for accepting payment–this part should probably be outsourced to another site for a small business.

• Include photos of the products with enough description so that people know what they are getting.  The benefits and features of each product should also be included in the text.

• Keep track of the sales and clients through a Point-of-Sale and database solution.  It should be flexible enough to expand with your business and produce the timely information to keep your inventory stocked and updated.  Make sure you can also use it for one-on-one marketing to your clients–but that’s another column.

Topic #3: If you wish to keep clients coming back to your site, your clients should probably have their own pass-worded section. This special section should contain resources they need to keep up with what’s happening with your business and how it affects them. 

Everyone likes to feel special, so providing the exclusivity provides this.  When new prospects scan your site they might wonder what they are missing.  

It's important to keep this section updated with new information.  Keep in mind that the focus of your website may expand as your clients begin to use your site as a resource. You must assign someone to pay attention.

There are many sources of information on web design, but one of my favorites is www.fixingyourwebsite.com, an off-beat look at what makes a great website.  You don’t have to be a professional web designer to learn how to focus your site.

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Ginny Stibolt has a mission to help small businesses maximize their web presence through practical design and good marketing and PR.  She's been known to contact perfect strangers ideas for their webpages.  www.sky-bolt.com

This is the second of a series of articles on web content for Digital Harbor On-line.

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