A Basic Primer on Websites
The main function of most websites is to generate a personal contact with a potential client. You’ll have a sale half made if your website can:
- Inform customers about your product or service
- Lead them through the purchase process a
- To phone you or to leave you with their contact information
The rest is up to you.
How do you go about making a good looking, user friendly, useful website? It's certainly not rocket science but on the other hand, there are a few tricks and questions that need some careful consideration before jumping into creation mode.
At this point in the Internet time line, most businesses are not making many, if any, sales directly from the web. Unless you are a player in a national or global industry, or an Internet only venture, the majority of websites are out there are for one or more of these reasons:
- As fancy brochure for your product or service
- A place for potential customers to go to contact you and find out more information
- A place to educate your customers and lead them through the sales process
- Because if you're not on the Internet, you're not keeping up with the times and what does that say about your business
At this time, most of your customers probably come in your door where your sales people will interact with them, asking questions trying to determine what the customer is really looking for and leading them to make a purchase. A website can provide some of these functions, but usually not all. You need to provide enough information to your customer to justify why they should do business with you.
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There are really just two: pictures and text. Sure, you can include sound, video, an eye catching Introduction “Flash” presentation…and yes, they are kind of neat the first time a person sees them, but they quickly become very annoying with repeated visits. The best websites combine the text information with useful graphics to provide the customer with the information they require to quickly make a purchase decision or an assessment about your company and products. However, there’s nothing wrong with a few well placed “bells and whistles” as long as it doesn’t interfere with the overall functionality of your site.
Graphics
Graphics or pictures are the first important half part of your website. Depending on your business you may need simple graphics including your logo and pictures of your product or service, or possibly a fully animated homepage. There are tradeoffs between minimal graphics and full animation and a discussion with your web designer will determine what level of graphics are best for you.
Text
Text is the other important half of your website. Text usually creates most of the links to your individual pages as well as linking your site to other external sites, if desired. Text explains the pictures/graphics, educates your customers and answers their questions. Most people don't like to read too much text so it's important to get the main ideas across without putting in masses of information. If you have that much information that needs to be available, then sub-pages should be used to keep the site clean and easy to use.
Site Interaction
The other decision you need to make is how you want both you and your customer to interact with your site. Some points to consider are:
- Do you want to be able to maintain your own website (uploads of new pictures, price changes, etc.)
- Do you need to “capture” information about your customers in a database.
- Do you want your customers to be able to maintain andview their profiles or account information
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Let's take the case of a fairly simple business… it has a number of separate product lines, each with specific information and decisions that customers needs to make in order to make a purchase decision. A sign shop would provide a good sample company. It has different types of signs for different purposes, made of different materials with different prices. We'll use outdoor advertising signs and magnetic signs as two sample products.
Each website has a starting point called a "homepage". This is usually the main page that people would see first. It usually has some basic information about what is on the website, what the website is for and an index of any other pages that may be attached to the site. A very simple website may consist of just this page. A very detailed and information intensive website could consist of hundreds or even thousands of pages.
Usually, a good website design would have a separate page for each different type of product or service and most pages won't be much bigger than one screen in height or width. For our sign company example there would be three pages; the homepage or index page which links to a page for the outdoor signs, and a page for the magnetic signs. There may also be a page included for the information about the company, contact information, or where you request information from the client like contact name, phone numbers and email address. If a specific product or service has different components or categories, there may be one other page, a product line page, which serves as a homepage for that specific product line. But let's not worry about that right now.
The page for the outdoor and magnetic signs would be very similar in layout and would include pictures and text to inform a customer about that signs characteristics, abilities, performance and potential uses. It would tell the customer what information is required from them to make the signs for them and it may provide possible prices. Lastly it would ask them to contact you for more information and to provide their phone and email contact information.
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Homepage
This is the first page people will see and should contain information about your company and a brief description of your products and services. It should also contain a list of all your products and services that will serve as a menu or links to the specific product pages such as:
- Company Name
- Complete list of products and services that you provide
- Brief description of the products and services that you provide and where they're used
- Information about warrantees, guarantees, after sales service
- Full contact information - Name, address, phone, fax, email. Maybe a map of your location if you're hard to find
- Graphics would include your logo and probably small generic pictures of your products
Product Line Pages
These pages detail general information about a specific category of your product line. It may turn out that this page is similar to a homepage where you have a listing or index of the different products within this line. For instance, if your sign company handled a number of different types of outdoor signs like billboards, wall murals, canvas or vinyl hanging signs etc. In this case you may have separate product pages for each of these types of outdoor signs.
Product & Service Pages
These pages contain specific information about each product or service. The following is some suggested information that could be included:
- The Product
- material options
- available sizes
- prices
- Services
- what’s included with the product
- consulting on appropriate material and designs
- delivery information
- installation
- time span
- after sales service, warrantees, guarantees
- Testimonials
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