Beginner Tip:
Beyond The Home Page

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

	April 2002 (Part 2) Vol. 5, No. 8  • Promotion Tip  • Design Tip  • Beginner Tip

Once you've incorporated our five tips for a better home page, it's time to start working on the rest of your site. These five pages help you inform visitors and make them feel comfortable buying your products or services.

Visitor comfort is important for business or non-profit organization sites. Personal sites that aren't selling anything are free to include as much - or as little - as they want. But if you're expecting visitors to trust you with their credit card numbers, then you need to reassure them that you're running a legitimate organization.

Talk About Yourself

Use your "About Us" page to briefly discuss your company's history, mission statement, and market focus. This is your opportunity to really sell your company's expertise and tout your stature in the industry. Use the page to present your credentials.

Some sites make the mistake of cluttering up their home page with this stuff. Instead, you should use the valuable space on your home page to convince visitors to purchase your products or services. Use the home page to interest visitors in your particular product or service. Then, they can visit the "About Us" page to make sure they want to buy it from you and not a competitor.

2. Describe What You're Selling

Introduce your product on the home page, and then expand that description on your "Products" page. Give visitors as much information as possible. Then they're more likely to stay and order instead of seeking out other sites to get more information.

At a minimum, visitors want to know the following up front:

Customers hate to get all the way through the check out process and then get bad news: the product is a special order or it's out of stock, or shipping and handling charges cost more than the item! Give them the information they need to make a decision before you ask them to input their personal information.

3. Include A Privacy Policy

Speaking of personal information... Do you have a formal privacy policy?

Most sites overlook this critical page, even though hardly a day passes without some news story about credit card fraud, identity theft, security holes in browsers, or Web sites that go bankrupt and sell their customers' personal data to spammers. Consumers are wary about parting with any personal data online.

Learn more about online privacy and privacy policies at these sites:

Make sure that your privacy policy is clearly worded and easy to understand. Avoid legalese - people associate it with slippery lawyers who can twist words to mean anything. If you promise never to sell or share email addresses, then say so outright - and put it in bold!

Here's NetMechanic's privacy policy.

4. Let Visitors Contact You

Include a link to a "Contact Us" page on every page in your site and give visitors different ways to contact you. While some people are addicted to email, others - particularly those new to the Web - might feel more comfortable calling you.

Contact form. This is a good way to have visitors submit routine inquiries and questions. It also works for customer support if, and only if, you respond quickly. If a customer has a problem and can't get a response within 24 hours or less, they're likely to order from someone else next time. Email address. Careful about how you format the email addresses on your site or email spiders could send you more spam than legitimate messages. Phone number. Many online consumers are reluctant to deal with a company that doesn't provide a contact phone number. Even if they never call you, they like knowing they could speak to a live person if needed. Street address. Yet another layer of respectability! It helps you with visitors and online directories like Yahoo love to see address information - particularly on business sites.

A comprehensive contact page that gives visitors several different options shows that you're committed to being helpful and responsive to comments and questions.

5. Create A Good FAQ Page

After our February 2002 newsletter article about Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages, we got a lot of mail from frustrated webmasters who swear that no visitor or customer ever reads the FAQ or customer support page before firing off questions.

Yes, it's pretty annoying to spend hours (or days) working up a comprehensive set of user instructions only to have visitors ignore them completely. Encourage visitors to actually look at them by including a link on each page. Make the link especially prominent on the contact form and gently suggest a visit there before the visitor fills out the form.

Once you've put together a great site full of valuable information, you need to promote it. Most people find sites through search engines, so it's important to be at the top of the ranking. NetMechanic's Search Engine Power Pack tool can help you select keywords, write META tags, and give you tips targeted to specific search engines. Use it to boost your site to the top of the rankings and keep it there.

A top rank draws in new visitors and once they arrive at your site, these five pages will help make your case. They'll calm uneasy visitors who are worried about online scams, identity theft, and email spam. If you've done your job well, those visitors may eventually become repeat customers.