Your Site’s Most Basic Needs

What do you need on your web site? Your first site should start with the basics. Use it to learn more about what your customers and clients need and want from your site, then let your site grow. Here's where to start.

Ideally, your Web site should make it easy for anyone with very little time to find what they’re looking for fast, while at the same time, offering additional details and information for those who want to leisurely browse. But a Web site is a huge project, so it’s best to begin with a basic site for Phase One, then add on to it as you learn more about what your customers and clients need and want from your site.

The Five Basic Pages Every Web Site Should Have:

Home Page: The goal of your Home page is to give an overview of what’s available and possible on your Web site, all the information someone would need to decide whether or not to click any further.
About Us: Call it what you want Profile, About Us, Biographical Information, or Who We Are it is essential that you provide information about yourself and your company. In order to trust you, your visitors need to know about the people behind your Web site. In fact, many people refuse to do business with a company that doesn’t make this information available.
Examples of your services or products: Whether a portfolio of your work, or pictures of product samples, your visitors will want to see something concrete. So give them a lot to look at, and organize it in a simple way.
Client List: To lend credibility, include a list of your customers and clients. You don’t have to name them some people fear that by doing so, they’re offering the competition an opportunity to infiltrate but it is important to give examples of the kinds of people who buy your products and services. In fact, providing this information in the form of testimonials will lend even more credibility.
Contact Info: It may seem obvious, but many people neglect to provide comprehensive contact information. You must make it really easy for anyone with the slightest interest to reach out to you. Give them as many options as you can: phone (toll-free too!), fax, email, snail mail and be sure to make that information accessible from every page of your site.
If You’re Selling Products on Your Web Site
Elena’s Wildflower Jewelry sells handmade jewelry with real miniature wildflowers set in sterling silver. Elena Montgomery and her husband, Larry, launched their Web site to sell jewelry in the spring of 1999 and, on average, get one order per day.

Their site has only five pages:

Home Page
The Catalog
Our Products
Elena's Jewelry
Contact Page
Overall, it’s an excellent site. The Home page welcomes visitors to the site in a very friendly way, offers a large, close-up photograph of the jewelry, plus gives an overview of what visitors will find on the site. This is important because sometimes people don’t have time to peruse an entire Web site, even if it only consists of five pages. If, on your home page, you tell them what they’ll find there, they can decide whether to click further, bookmark the site for a closer look later, or click away.

The page entitled Our Products offers more details about the jewelry, with descriptions of the work, and announcements of their special offers. And Elena’s Jewelry is like a personal letter from Elena, describing the day she discovered these flowers in Mexico and going into detail about how the work is made. The flowers are first dried then sealed forever in the jewelry. All flowers are hand picked by the artist. All this page needs is a photograph of Elena in her studio, to convey an even stronger sense of the person behind the Web site.

The online Catalog, complete with shopping cart, features a partial listing of Elena’s products, with lots of photos that show each piece clearly, with easy-to-read descriptions of each one.

In fact, the only thing missing from Elena’s Web site is information about Elena’s customers, perhaps in the form of testimonials, which would add more credibility to the site.

But Elena is definitely doing something right, because her Web site comes up #10 of 3,943 (that’s on the first page!) in a search on Yahoo! using the keyword, jewelry. Elena’s husband, Larry, insists they did nothing more than fill out the form, so his guess is that the Yahoo! surfer who evaluated the site may have been a woman who liked the jewelry and decided to give the site a high ranking. This could be true, since they are one of the search engines that have humans evaluating the sites submitted.

Thanks to Elena’s unique product (and in part, to the incredibly high search engine ranking), Elena’s Jewelry is starting to get inquiries about wholesale prices from crafts stores and garden stores. So the next phase of the Web site may include a page specifically for wholesale buyers.

All in all, Elena’s Wildflower Jewelry is an excellent model to follow if you’re building a simple Web site to sell your products. Just remember that in addition to your products, visitors want to know about you the people behind the Web site because, according to Web Usability Guru, Jakob Nielsen, Biographies and photographs help make the Web a less impersonal place and increase trust. And it’s not until they trust you that anyone will put their money into your online shopping cart.

About the Author

Ilise Benun is the publisher of the Web site for The Art of Self Promotion, a quarterly (print) newsletter of manageable marketing ideas, and the author of Self Promotion Online, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in learning effective strategies to promote oneself via the internet.(201) 653-0783 To contact see details below.


http://www.artofselfpromotion.com
http://www.selfpromotiononline.com