Think of it as your new “store front.” Your web site is how prospects first encounter your company and how, in many cases, your valued customers continue to do business with you. Better make sure your web site is organized in a way that is easy to navigate, and that it conveys exactly the image you’re trying to project, no matter what page is being viewed.
Start with the roadmap. If you were your customer trying to do business with your company, what would be the first thing you would need to know? Markets served? Products available? Stock price?
What’s the second thing? And so on. In other words, how does your customer think? Is he or she intuitive, or do they need to see introductory information before drilling into detail?
What’s your marketing strategy? Will the site be used to locate products from a large selection of off-the-shelf offerings, or does the customer need to interface first with an applications engineer to spec out a custom or semi-custom product solution?
Carefully outline the logic of your site with your customer’s requirements in mind. Remember that your customer will want to access a given page from several locations on your site. For instance, a customer might look for a specific product from the “Products” button on the home page, or may first go to “Markets Served,” and then look for products that apply. Keep your site flexible, and don’t create any dead ends.
Be visual. Educate your customers with strong images of your company, its products, and the markets you serve. On your home page, convey an immediate feeling for your company culture, your technical expertise, and your products. Keep in mind that your home page competes with thousands of portals, from banking to food shopping to sports scores. You have a split second to convey who you are and what you do, and make your customers want to stay.
Design a clean and colorful navigation bar that can be repeated on second- and third-level pages. Make the navigation buttons as simple as possible, and as few as possible, using a minimum of words.
Carry a portion of the home page design to subsequent pages. Use second level pages as landing pages for summary information, and third level pages for primary site information. Very detailed information should be contained in .pdf’s that can be accessed from second- and third-level pages.
Be brief. Restrict content of second- and third-level pages to one full frame, and avoid scrolling where possible. Where web site pages are concerned, brevity is next to Godliness. Save the deep dive for white papers. Carry product sheets, application notes, and other detailed information as downloadable .pdf’s, and locate research papers in a readily available “library” on the site. Web site writing should be succinct and friendly. Make it easy for customers to learn about you and how you can help them. The harder you make it, the more likely it is that the visitor will give up and move on, usually to a competitor’s site.
Be helpful. Make your site a place where customers can learn about their technology and stay informed about their industry. Follow up on inquiries quickly and completely. Invite customers to share their ideas and make suggestions.
Keep it “sticky.” Have useful downloads, current schedules, recent specifications, industry standards, charts, summary tables, data, data, data.
Keep it active. Drive prospects to your site through a series of e-direct “blasts". Some can be news flashes, some product announcements, some newsletters. Create hyperlinks to pages deep within your site, to the content viewers are looking for. Track the effectiveness of these blasts in terms of how many were delivered, how many were opened, and how many resulted in visits to your site. Task you Internet Service Provider (ISP) with telling you which pages were visited as a result of your “outbound” marketing. And be sure to list your web site address on all printed marketing materials.
Be current. Update calendar, news, and events section weekly if possible, but at least monthly. This maintains good dialog with your site visitors, and improves your positioning on search engines. Be sure your site is programmed as a “content-managed system,” in which you, the owner, can access certain areas of the site to update information as often as you wish.
Get Optimized. It’s quite another to get customers on it and using it. There are many things you can do, both active and passive, to improve the positioning of your site with search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others. Stay tuned for valuable information in future e-mails.
